swell

I went to Cafe TLJ today to get some work done so I can study in peace at home without attempting to do my homework and then getting distracted, hence resulting in getting no studying done. When I was there, I saw a group of 3 Japanese mothers chatting while they held their little several-month-old babies, and another pair of Japanese mothers with their twelfth+-month-old babies chatting at another table. The littlest ones were cooing and being loud and obnoxious as babies usually do so I didn't really care about them. I mean, they were cute, but they're so fat and chubby and so clueless that I was just meh about them. The older little ones, though, were cute. They didn't cry or suddenly exclaim out a babble and just played by themselves. Although.. I do admit: it was so interesting when one of the little baby started to cry, another baby that were looking at that baby started to cry also. So funny and cute. But that's beside the point.

So when I was glancing over at one of the older little babies, I observed that she looked pretty skinny compared to the other one she was playing with, who was still chubbyish with his baby fat. She looked kind of like my grandma (well, of course, not completely like her), but she reminded me of my grandma because my grandma's frail, and I thought about how old, bitter grandpas and grandmas of the world, those who yell at kids to "Get off the lawn!", have once been little babies who were adorable and innocent and full of cluelessness, too.

It's sad what the world does to us.

I mean, it's not like we can always stay innocent and so ignorant of our surroundings, but there are people who grow up to become criminals, corrupt businessmen, spoiled brats, heartless creatures. It's like that one scene in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" when Benjamin narrates that if this hadn't happened, and that hadn't happened, and this hadn't happened, and that hadn't happened, and so on and so forth, Daisy would not have been hit by the car and shattered her legs so that she couldn't dance anymore. If things in the life of a bad, bad, bad person hadn't happened, he or she might have not turned into such a bad person. Life is so sad for some people, I don't know how to deal with it.

Maybe my hormones are unbalanced right now, but whenever I think of even the tiniest sad thought-- seniors aren't taken seriously and with respect these days; I wonder how my aunt and grandma are doing; there are so many people who are in need of much help, but aren't receiving any help; AIDS is such a horrible disease; shoot, I can't believe people treated people with AIDS in the 80s so horribly back then; people who have rare illnesses may not be cured because people only care about the 'big' diseases-- my heart swells and I feel like I want to do something to help, but I just can't. In the instances when I think of sad things and my heart just swells, it's a sad kind of swelling: like it's filling with regret and guilt and tears and sympathy.

But then there's the happy swelling feeling I also get when I think of things I truly love, but I can't do anything about it. Such example: beautiful photography that captures a moment or an object with such truth that I just stare at it for a couple minutes, admiring it like there's no tomorrow. Some things make me so happy that I can try to explain, but I will never be able to. It's the oddest thing.

I'm too sympathetic. I may sound like I don't give a crap at times, but I think I really do deep inside. But I don't want to. it makes me feel weird.