I had a really great time growing up. My life has always been filled with love- my parents' love, my friends' love, and even an estranged love for myself (it's there, buried beneath the perfectionism and the self-doubting).
Recently, however, I've been forced to endure a few of life's crueler lessons.
It's an imperceptible shift in the delicate balance of things. All of a sudden, I woke up to discover that nothing was the way it was yesterday, or a week ago. The people who I called my friends weren't really there anymore. The love I had for someone wasn't enough to keep the whole of things equalized. The balance wasn't just tipping anymore; it had tipped, and all of the comforts I amassed were gone.
It isn't sad. Not anymore, not really. It's just strange. I hate referencing old addages, but I never really considered what I had until it wasn't there anymore.
Didn't I, though? I remember waking up to the comfortable life thinking 'Man. I'm really lucky to have these people' virtually every day. I've had tons of conversations with other self-doubters and Negative Nancies before the shift, trying desperately to get them to see through my rose-colored glasses for a change. Then something took them.
Bitterness. Cynicism.
I called this shift a life lesson, and it is. I learned that nothing is ever truly stable. I also learned that happiness, like other emotions, can come and go, fleetingly. I also learned that friends, no matter what they say, will betray you (how much fun IS the house without me, guys?).
It's an unattractive lesson, and it's not really all that fun to write this, but it needed to be writ. For my own sake, I suppose.
Bitterness and cynicism. They're prevalent lately, despite what I may have written in previous blogs. Every time I see him smile, some malevolent hammer chips another piece of me away, and whenever the rest of them laugh together, I swear I can hear my own voice laughing with them. Distantly, though.
Maybe bitterness and cynicism are just precursors to... I don't know. Serenity and understanding? Growth? Sure. I'll go with that.
I'm just over tired, I guess. Good night.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Clever shorts
Sometimes I can't really say what I'm trying to say with long-winded posts. I also tend to think in complicated metaphors. The result of these two conflicting literary elements are clever little Facebook statuses. Here's a short list of some of my favorites, in no particular order:
Sometimes, all we can do is laugh. It's a joyous thing, laughter, and peels of it soak into our surroundings, generating mirth when it starts to rot, like all well-intentioned compost.
Hot chocolate is best when it's served without expectations. Our machines are broken, so let's just wait; not expecting, but hoping for the best.
I want to sleep a sleep so deep that the red woods are envious. Until my leaves, long and colorful, unfold, absorbing the sweetness of the heavens.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Romanticism ruined by anti-mainstream ideals?
Consider a movie with a really cheesy, romantic dialogue. The dreamboat male lead says something completely heart-tearing (thanks, Alanis, for that gem) to the female lead, and we hear her full-throated, slightly cautious response right before they throw caution to the wind and kiss.
Our reactions to this cliche scene aren't what I'm analyzing. Our reactions don't really matter; we can laugh because we're cynical, we can cry because we're emotional, we can have no response for a variety of reasons, et cetera. What matters in this analysis is how we perceive this kind of movie-made scenario outside of the theater.
How many times have your peers accused you of living your life like a movie? How many times have you accused people of living their lives like a movie? If we forget movies and move onto other avenues of popular media, we can stretch these questions to include the spectrum of popular TV show genres, and my point -- my rhetorical analysis of the situation -- remains the same:
What is wrong with "living life like a movie?"
Now, before you stick dynamite in my argument, let me plug up a few visible holes. For this analysis to work, we need to stick to the logical, entirely-possible genres of film or television; types of media that producers try to make as life-like as possible. Romance films, romantic comedies, realistic dramas- pretty much anything that COULD happen. Feel free to discount The Grudge and any of the Bourne movies and anything directed by Tim Burton.
I'm not advocating that we "throw caution to the wind," to quote my example, for every film-like situation that happens by. I'm suggesting that, because films are so enmeshed within our American lives, and because there is a palpable stigma against the "mainstream," we are losing the ability to recognize when some of these cheesy moments are entirely normal -- and not just imprints on our imaginations, courtesy of Hollywood.
Generations ago, when our ancestors lived on farms on other continents and when castles weren't just crumbling monuments tourists wandered through, moments from my example were entirely plausible. No one stopped themselves from enjoying a real life moment to giggle because it reminded them of The Notebook when the two lovebirds were caught making out in the rain.
Pull out a novel by Emily Bronte or William Makepeace Thackeray. Hell, even Marcell Proust had a few touch-and-go moments between his characters that would make cheesy romance directors think, "That'd be perfect for my love story!" These writers weren't influenced by a mainstream idea of what love is, and they weren't immediately accosted by their peers for writing about love cliches (Bronte may or may not have been a good example... but my point still stands).
Anyway. I could write an essay using popular magazines and newspaper clippings that snipe at romance for its cliche and Hollywood-made accoutrements, but instead, I'll wrap things up by hoping, praying, even, that if you're ever faced with a moment where your significant other leans in to tell you he loves you, or worse still, if your friends judge you for some of the "Julia Roberts-esque" things you do, that you go for it. Throw caution to the wind (cliche alert- this is, what? three times in one piece?) and let your life go where it will, movie similarity or no movie similarity.
It isn't our fault that Hollywood capitalized on real human emotion. We shouldn't let it marginalize what we're allowed to feel.
Our reactions to this cliche scene aren't what I'm analyzing. Our reactions don't really matter; we can laugh because we're cynical, we can cry because we're emotional, we can have no response for a variety of reasons, et cetera. What matters in this analysis is how we perceive this kind of movie-made scenario outside of the theater.
How many times have your peers accused you of living your life like a movie? How many times have you accused people of living their lives like a movie? If we forget movies and move onto other avenues of popular media, we can stretch these questions to include the spectrum of popular TV show genres, and my point -- my rhetorical analysis of the situation -- remains the same:
What is wrong with "living life like a movie?"
Now, before you stick dynamite in my argument, let me plug up a few visible holes. For this analysis to work, we need to stick to the logical, entirely-possible genres of film or television; types of media that producers try to make as life-like as possible. Romance films, romantic comedies, realistic dramas- pretty much anything that COULD happen. Feel free to discount The Grudge and any of the Bourne movies and anything directed by Tim Burton.
I'm not advocating that we "throw caution to the wind," to quote my example, for every film-like situation that happens by. I'm suggesting that, because films are so enmeshed within our American lives, and because there is a palpable stigma against the "mainstream," we are losing the ability to recognize when some of these cheesy moments are entirely normal -- and not just imprints on our imaginations, courtesy of Hollywood.
Generations ago, when our ancestors lived on farms on other continents and when castles weren't just crumbling monuments tourists wandered through, moments from my example were entirely plausible. No one stopped themselves from enjoying a real life moment to giggle because it reminded them of The Notebook when the two lovebirds were caught making out in the rain.
Pull out a novel by Emily Bronte or William Makepeace Thackeray. Hell, even Marcell Proust had a few touch-and-go moments between his characters that would make cheesy romance directors think, "That'd be perfect for my love story!" These writers weren't influenced by a mainstream idea of what love is, and they weren't immediately accosted by their peers for writing about love cliches (Bronte may or may not have been a good example... but my point still stands).
Anyway. I could write an essay using popular magazines and newspaper clippings that snipe at romance for its cliche and Hollywood-made accoutrements, but instead, I'll wrap things up by hoping, praying, even, that if you're ever faced with a moment where your significant other leans in to tell you he loves you, or worse still, if your friends judge you for some of the "Julia Roberts-esque" things you do, that you go for it. Throw caution to the wind (cliche alert- this is, what? three times in one piece?) and let your life go where it will, movie similarity or no movie similarity.
It isn't our fault that Hollywood capitalized on real human emotion. We shouldn't let it marginalize what we're allowed to feel.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
"Oh. It's going to be a quiet, slow-burning seethe. Disappointment."
(yes, I hunted through the 6th season to find that exact quote for this particular entry)
There are so few things on this planet that inspire this kind of feeling in me. Labor camps, pestilence, incurable diseases and like-sounding boy bands are low on the scale for the feeling I'm talking about.
It's that eruption of choked passion that bubbles to the surface despite days (months, even) of desperately holding it back. It's like a backfiring gun, causing a horrible backlash with all of its potential energy finally releasing without the wielder's input.
The initial invasion is an acidic one that slowly eats away at the hapless victim's insides until there's nothing left- just a congealed mass of once-working innards, weighing down on the lower extremities.
Just when the acid has had its fill, and you think there's nothing left of the anguish and the tyrannical pain, another wave of nausea sets in. Though unwelcome, we can't fault the nausea because it is our psyche's only coagulant. It is trying to stop the fountain of proverbial blood that just happens to be trickling merrily from our every proverbial orifice.
When it all finally stops, it's because we've gone to bed. We let our nightmares reset the torment so that the next morning is brighter and healthier than what can only be referred to as "The Moment;" the trigger that caused the gun to backfire; the Trojan Horse that allowed the horrors to invade our tranquility and shit all over it.
I guess that's one thing our nightmares are good for. They force us to stop holding things back, even while we sleep. They're the cold machines that drill holes in beaver dams for the shiny, plastic shopping malls that we all become when we're destroyed by culprits like love. Security. Infatuation. Happiness.
In keeping with my melodramatic analogies that poke fun at the industrial world, I'll part ways with my keyboard by saying this:
Sometimes I wish I could just let my nightmares terrorize me until mankind figures out how to remove silly, inefficient emotions like the ones I listed above. I would much rather be made of steel.
There are so few things on this planet that inspire this kind of feeling in me. Labor camps, pestilence, incurable diseases and like-sounding boy bands are low on the scale for the feeling I'm talking about.
It's that eruption of choked passion that bubbles to the surface despite days (months, even) of desperately holding it back. It's like a backfiring gun, causing a horrible backlash with all of its potential energy finally releasing without the wielder's input.
The initial invasion is an acidic one that slowly eats away at the hapless victim's insides until there's nothing left- just a congealed mass of once-working innards, weighing down on the lower extremities.
Just when the acid has had its fill, and you think there's nothing left of the anguish and the tyrannical pain, another wave of nausea sets in. Though unwelcome, we can't fault the nausea because it is our psyche's only coagulant. It is trying to stop the fountain of proverbial blood that just happens to be trickling merrily from our every proverbial orifice.
When it all finally stops, it's because we've gone to bed. We let our nightmares reset the torment so that the next morning is brighter and healthier than what can only be referred to as "The Moment;" the trigger that caused the gun to backfire; the Trojan Horse that allowed the horrors to invade our tranquility and shit all over it.
I guess that's one thing our nightmares are good for. They force us to stop holding things back, even while we sleep. They're the cold machines that drill holes in beaver dams for the shiny, plastic shopping malls that we all become when we're destroyed by culprits like love. Security. Infatuation. Happiness.
In keeping with my melodramatic analogies that poke fun at the industrial world, I'll part ways with my keyboard by saying this:
Sometimes I wish I could just let my nightmares terrorize me until mankind figures out how to remove silly, inefficient emotions like the ones I listed above. I would much rather be made of steel.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Serendipity
Serendipitously; the only way to look at life.
Each footfall we make is the result of a decision we've made. I could... wake up tomorrow and go to the store; clean my room; finally make up my mind about grad school. If you believe the maxim that, as privileged Americans, our only inhibitions are our own weaknesses, the world truly is wide open and waiting for any and all of our possible decisions. Something I have to remind myself daily is exactly that: my failures are my fault, and my missed chances can only be blamed on my lack of motivation.
But I digress.
Every decision we make has a positive or negative impact on our lives. Nothing we do is ever truly neutral in the schematics of fate. For instance, I could decide to make my journey to the store and find the perfect someone in the produce section, or I could plow through someone's yard and dismember a few garden gnomes. Simpler still, I could successfully buy the items I needed for whatever recipe I'm working on and accomplish some spectacular culinary feast... or, I could buy the items I needed and produce naught but baked sludge.
The series I just suggested is, of course, all speculation and isn't based upon fact (I would never produce baked sludge). However, it's all connected to the same decision, which is: wake up and go to the store.
Serendipity is defined as "the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way" by Mac Dictionary.
Negative outcomes are serendipitous. If our every decision yielded perfection, or something close to it, we would never learn anything. Referring back to my negative potential outcome (the gnome massacre), my decision to go to the store mixed with the mysteries of fate to produce a very unfortunate decision outcome. Having to pay for the damages, and the inevitable blow to my driver's ego, would not inspire happiness in me, but it's certainly beneficial. I would have learned how to contact the owners of the gnomes to repay them. I would have learned something new about my driving skills so that next time I make the decision to drive anywhere, gnomes across the globe will safer for my previous failure.
All of this is my playful way of saying that privileged Americans (there's that phrase again...) and people in general are always faced with the pitfalls of their decision-making. Even notably poor decisions are serendipitous for their learning value. One of my current mentors, Dr. Jennifer Richardson, constantly says, "It's a teaching-learning moment." She's on to something.
We are all suffering from something. Right now, while you're reading this, you're thinking about a decision you've made that didn't produce the results you hoped for. You're regretting something, despite how many of us repeat the mantra "there are no regrets" ad nauseum. And that's alright! Don't push the things you regret, or the decisions you've made that aren't perfect, aside. Don't actively force yourself to suffer more by dealing with them until they're "finished." They'll never be finished. They are part of you now.
Instead, I invite everyone to consider their decisions serendipitous (not a typo!). The good decisions are easy to understand because they provide our lives with positivity.
The "bad" decisions are going to be harder to understand, but that's just fine.
Each footfall we make is the result of a decision we've made. I could... wake up tomorrow and go to the store; clean my room; finally make up my mind about grad school. If you believe the maxim that, as privileged Americans, our only inhibitions are our own weaknesses, the world truly is wide open and waiting for any and all of our possible decisions. Something I have to remind myself daily is exactly that: my failures are my fault, and my missed chances can only be blamed on my lack of motivation.
But I digress.
Every decision we make has a positive or negative impact on our lives. Nothing we do is ever truly neutral in the schematics of fate. For instance, I could decide to make my journey to the store and find the perfect someone in the produce section, or I could plow through someone's yard and dismember a few garden gnomes. Simpler still, I could successfully buy the items I needed for whatever recipe I'm working on and accomplish some spectacular culinary feast... or, I could buy the items I needed and produce naught but baked sludge.
The series I just suggested is, of course, all speculation and isn't based upon fact (I would never produce baked sludge). However, it's all connected to the same decision, which is: wake up and go to the store.
Serendipity is defined as "the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way" by Mac Dictionary.
Negative outcomes are serendipitous. If our every decision yielded perfection, or something close to it, we would never learn anything. Referring back to my negative potential outcome (the gnome massacre), my decision to go to the store mixed with the mysteries of fate to produce a very unfortunate decision outcome. Having to pay for the damages, and the inevitable blow to my driver's ego, would not inspire happiness in me, but it's certainly beneficial. I would have learned how to contact the owners of the gnomes to repay them. I would have learned something new about my driving skills so that next time I make the decision to drive anywhere, gnomes across the globe will safer for my previous failure.
All of this is my playful way of saying that privileged Americans (there's that phrase again...) and people in general are always faced with the pitfalls of their decision-making. Even notably poor decisions are serendipitous for their learning value. One of my current mentors, Dr. Jennifer Richardson, constantly says, "It's a teaching-learning moment." She's on to something.
We are all suffering from something. Right now, while you're reading this, you're thinking about a decision you've made that didn't produce the results you hoped for. You're regretting something, despite how many of us repeat the mantra "there are no regrets" ad nauseum. And that's alright! Don't push the things you regret, or the decisions you've made that aren't perfect, aside. Don't actively force yourself to suffer more by dealing with them until they're "finished." They'll never be finished. They are part of you now.
Instead, I invite everyone to consider their decisions serendipitous (not a typo!). The good decisions are easy to understand because they provide our lives with positivity.
The "bad" decisions are going to be harder to understand, but that's just fine.
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