hunger

I'm always hungry. It's not always I'm-starving and it's not like I can't go without food during my cravings. Sometimes it's just a slight hollow that shifts to different areas of my stomach and mind, making me think I'd like something sweet one moment, salty the next, ooh maybe sweet and salty.

Today I told Albert that I think I'm leptin-deficient with a super metabolism (kidding, but this is a scientific possibility no?). Leptin is related to satiety; without it you feel hungry even after eating and this can lead to obesity. He said that in this case I should be grateful for my deficiency because without it my super metabolism would kill me. I hadn't considered that. My abnormalities, a lack of one thing and an excess of another, balance each other. The fetal heart comes to mind again, how sometimes when you have multiple defects, one abnormality keeps you alive in the presence of another. Science is an endless source of unoriginal analogies and I've been studying all day, somewhat to catch up and mostly to be alone.

Also today I told D that he's peculiar, not so much because his individual qualities are peculiar but because the combination of them is. All this got me thinking about qualities in general, how they communicate and interact within a person.

People always say that when you arrive to a new place, you can reinvent yourself, offer whatever representation of yourself that you'd like. But we also know that even if you attempt that, you inevitably fall back into yourself. I've been lucky to grow up appreciating what I can offer and also knowing full well the wide expanse for improvement, and being comfortable with both.

But with each new place, there is still that inner desire to transition from quiet to loud. I use these terms not to necessarily describe literal volume, but more as a way to classify people whose selves come across with ease (loud), versus people whose selves are below the surface (quiet). And this doesn't correlate to superficial versus deep. There are people who are deep that immediately come across that way, and I'd classify them as loud.

The process of knowing yourself and other people here has been interesting, because it's a dynamic I haven't encountered before. A hundred of us, with the same schedule and routine of work and play, half of us living and eating in the same space, the other half barely dispersed in a two-mile radius from the rest. There's only so much room for difference in what we do, and maybe because of that, there's also a lot of space to draw upon individual characters and qualities. You see yourself being unravelled and digested by other people in the same way that people have unravelled and digested you before. There are the few more invested encounters that have their unique nuances but where you place among the larger population often follows a similar pattern.

Here I'm one of many because I'm from California and went to Harvard. Here I'm distinct for being an English major and the only Vietnamese girl. Most everyone knows these superficial details, and while they're superficial, it's nice that we know them about each other. It's nice to have a baseline, so that certain things come across despite quietness. And though I feel the time may have passed to get past baseline with some because friends have formed and niches carved, there are many opportunities for those things beyond baseline to come across.

Even with the potential, there sometimes feels like something is missing, something I can't quite share because of my quietness. Because of the stillness that arises from fierce deficiencies and stormy excesses. Maybe it's not solely me. Maybe the quiet of connection is the result of not just my own quietness but of a serendipitous balance between the quirks of interaction. One means of communication working in high gear masks the inability of another to function, leaving a neutral line of understanding. Maybe the intricate compromise struck between abnormalities and oddities within a single person is also characteristic of interaction among people, lying in the space in between. The only way you can tell if this is true is if you feel that slight hollow that's fed and then needs to be fed again.