It
has been just three and a half weeks since I came back to San Diego and already
it feels like I have been here for months.
Many of the things I do seem routine already despite the fact that I
have been doing them for maybe two weeks.
Senior year, is not turning out the way I had imagined. No parties, kickbacks, binge drinking or even
much irresponsibility to speak of. It
seems everyone has shifted their focus from having fun to “what the hell do I
need to do for the future.” Not to mention
many of the people who used to invite me to drink were all loose connections
which have faded since I spent a year in Shanghai.
My
life right now can be broken down into four pieces:
1. Work
I
have been pretty thankful that Wednesdays decided to keep me on board. Looking for a new job in San Diego would have
been a huge headache and the chance that the new job would have been mindless
and unfulfilling was pretty high. The first
two weeks back in San Diego, I was worried about my work performance. It was really hard to concentrate and I felt
very detached from my work. However, as
the second conference call with the founders rolled around, I found my
rhythm. On the second call, I was asking
the right questions and found my drive again.
Once again I am excited about the developments happening at the
company.
2. Train
Within
the first week of arriving in San Diego, I signed up for a 1 day trial at the
Arena, a mixed martial arts gym. Had the
owner not called me, I would have probably pushed back my first day at the gym
another week. After my one day trial, I
was hooked and signed the contract.
Since the start of school, I have been experimenting with different
classes ranging from muay thai, MMA, jiu jitsu and wrestling. I am significantly better than half the muay
thai students, teeing off at will against them without any fear of getting
hit. However, once I go over to jiu
jitsu things change dramatically and I get submitted four times in four minutes
by someone who had been doing it for a month.
In addition to having a general lack of grappling skills, I am one of
the smallest people in the class, which means I get out muscled a lot. The jiu jitsu class has got me rethinking how
good I ever was and how weak my fundamentals are.
The
class that I have settled on so far is called Cyborg muay thai and Cyborg MMA
because it is taught by Evangelista Cyborg, a professional MMA fighter in the
Strikeforce promotion. It is quite cool
to be taught by someone you watched fight on TV and it is even cooler when
Evangelista’s wife, Cris Cyborg comes in and does the class with us. Cris Cyborg is the current women’s Strikeforce
champion and was the headliner at the first MMA event I attended. Training with people like that is what makes the
Arena so exciting for me.
3. Academics
Whatever
enthusiasm I had about school quickly died when I got rejected from the honors
thesis class. The rejection was doubly
annoying since I had been accepted into the class the year before but was
unable to attend due to studying abroad and being a junior, also I was assured
by the academic advisor that my invitation could be postponed till I came
back. Adding further insult to injury,
my mother likes to point out I have a low GPA whenever the rejection comes up. However, getting rejected might have been a
blessing in disguise as I heard the class requires a lot of time and
effort.
I
am currently a part time student, meaning I am taking just two classes and even
then I cannot be bothered to attend them all.
I have missed about a quarter of my classes, which even resulted in me
missing one assignment. My goal is to do
the bare minimum necessary for graduation and as a result I officially dropped
my economics major and put to rest any ideas of taking classes that do not
fulfill my requirements.
and everything
else
My
roommate, Kevin and I are back to our old ways, namely doing stupid things just
because we can. I tore the hem of my
jeans the other day climbing fences across multiple apartment complexes in
search of a short cut to Tapioca Express.
And by shortcut, I mean saving maybe five minutes. Also wrestling has made resurgence, but
things have changed a lot. Kevin has
gotten much stronger since he got a personal trainer over the summer and this
has made it much harder to get him to the ground. I still win, but not nearly as much as
sophomore year.
In
the past I used to talk to an excessive amount of people. However, upon returning to San Diego I have
been avoiding old acquaintances.
Whenever, I pass them around campus I hope really hard that they do not
recognize me so that I do not have to get dragged into a meaningless and
awkward conversation.
Interestingly,
a new good friend has come out of one of these acquaintances I was trying to
avoid. While in line at Panda Express, I
spotted Ashley L. and quickly averted eye contact. Ashley was a girl I knew from sophomore year,
who used to come over to the apartment because she had a thing with one of my
apartment mates. Ashley and I had a
falling out that year from a blog post I wrote about the apartment mate. Fortunately, Ashley never got the memo that
we stopped being friends and confronted me at Panda Express. Feeling a bit guilty about ignoring her and
not wanting to eat alone, I invited her to sit with me for dinner. I ended up having a lot of fun at dinner and
for the past three weeks I have been spending an extraordinary amount of time
with her. Things have a funny way of
working out sometimes.
