I know something you don't know!

Someday, when I have more time (or any time for that matter), I will elaborate on my position as "Switzerland" within my family. But for now, just know that my family is really badat communicating things.

I today I got wind of something that I really, really should not know. And, at first, I thought about how I wish I didn't know at all. I thought if the problem was not present to me than it would not be present at all. Ignorance is bliss, right?

But, just because I didn't know this thing yesterday doesn't mean it wasn't happening. And just because my father and his wife still don't know this thing does not mean that it won't still impact them all the same. Maybe I should be glad that I know. Maybe there is something helpful I can do now that I couldn't have done had I not been listening.

Ignorance is only bliss temporarily. In order to have permanence in our own happiness, we should just stop fucking everything over.




I really need to stop being so vague in these posts. If this was my business to tell, and if I wouldn't be hurting others by being more specific, it would make that easier. (#switzerlandproblems)

An unfinished description of why I love live music

I really love live music.

I love standing among a group of strangers who, regardless of their background, their upbringing, their beliefs, are all experiencing the same thing as me at that moment. I love getting to know the people standing around me; I love watching them become drunk in a melody (or in a literal sense), their faces when they hear their favorite song. I love seeing a shy young musician smile when a fan screams her name, still unused to the attention. I love the quirks that make a band fun to watch, the shoeless pianist, the jam-like encores, and the mountain-men beards.

But really, what I love most, is that when you are watching live music, there is no room for anything else. A show can last four hours but when you leave, you know no difference in the world outside of the venue. For as much that has happened outside, all you will remember about those four hours is music. So, while your friends are at football games and your parents are working on whatever it is they do and someone somewhere is dying and another someone is being born, you leave the show unaware of any of that. Sure, those things may impact you someday, but they haven't yet. We all left our troubles at the door, we can pick them up when we leave if we so choose. For four hours, it is just music. And that is good. That is enough.

Yesterday, my friend and I were front row at a show for a band we love. That meant that the only thing we had to look at for the duration of the concert was the band itself. There were no back-of-the-head angles to avoid and no reason to find a distraction anywhere else. And, although the show was sold out, the 200 other people there didn't matter at all because we couldn't see them or hear them over the energy on stage. They were there, but they meant nothing to me (and I to them). All that mattered us, individually, was how the current chord progression made us feel. And that is great. That is plenty.

Bliss to go numb

It must be bliss to go numb
To feel nothing more
To know that you're living
But not fear what for

It must be bliss to slow down
To watch but not care
Maybe you're moving
But who know's? And to where?

It must be bliss to be less
To count little, to few
Then no one's expecting
A thing out of you


But then what is bliss?
For the numb do not feel
And if you feel nothing
Are you even still real?

It is bliss be living
Though it feels not ideal
If you are feeling bliss-less
At least you can feel

An ode to influence: part two

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the influence people have over who I am when I am with them. As strongly as I believe everything that I said, I left out one very important point for the sake of time. So here, my friends, is the sequel.

As much as others influence me, I have to have the same impact on them. Who people make me is important to defining my integrity, but to define my CHARACTER, I need to know how I influence those same people. Do I make you a nicer person? A happier person? An angry person? Do I make you feel uncomfortable? Awkward? Do I make you laugh? Or at least smile? Do you like who you are when you're with me?

There is really no way to know because wherever I am, so too is the you I make you. And that is such a weird thought. It's like, the only shade of you I will ever know is the one that I partially molded. (I could go on a long tangent here about how it should be impossible for us to hate anyone, then, because everyone we know is partly our creation. But I'm not going to do that).

I think the influence you have on others is more important than any intrinsic characteristic when it comes to defining someone as a human being. So, no. Being outgoing or goofy or dedicated or passionate or smart or confident or kind is not what makes you a good person. A good person is someone who can make others all of those things, or at least make them want to be those things. We should be measured by who we make others, what we inspire them to do.

I'd like to hope that I make people the best version of themselves, although that is probably not true. But, as my main boy Jeff Tweedy once said, where would we be without wishful thinking?






Also, the clouds rocked my worlds today

Neigh!

You know those horse buggies in the city, how the horses always have lenses on that keep them from looking away? That's how I'm feeling right about now.

For a while now, I have been obsessing over the idea of something happening that, when I am alone, I realize is absolutely outrageous. My friends can tell me over and over again to stay optimistic about it, but I know how unrealistic the dream situation is.

As if that isn't disappointing enough, I have become so focused on this one thing that I have missed out on so many opportunities. Like those horses in the city, I have been trained to keep my stare in one direction. I have passed by so many things because, distracted as I was, I just didn't realize they were there.

I'm ready to take off my blinders. I want to see the whole picture, not just that one thing that has consumed me. But, at the same time, I wouldn't even know how to start. You can remove the blinders but the horse is still going to look ahead.

That's me, guys! I'm just a blinded horse trying to regain her vision.

Scheduled O' Clock

The thing about clocks is that they are an absolute lie. Time is a product of the human need to schedule. It tells us when we have to be at that meeting and for how long we have to stay at an awkward family dinner. Time, as I see it, is a restriction. When we are always watching the clock, we lose so much of that which it is counting.

We are so caged into deadlines and dates and meetings with their start and end times, that we have no room for individual thought. We end when the cookie timer tells us to end and sleep when we are six hours until our alarm clock will tell us it is time to wake up. Time has tricked us into believing that we need to plan ahead and thus has created a culture of "one day"'s instead of "today"'s- a culture that waits until a schedule tells them what to do instead of doing what feels right. Time gives us moments, but encourages us not to live in them.

But what if we, instead of keeping time, just kept? What if we did things as they were happening for however long they lasted and felt no need to plan ahead. Because a day doesn't have to end after 24 hours. (this is where my earth science teacher would interject, but for rhetoric's sake, we are not referring to earths rotation on its tilted axis, but rather when we feel like we can move on to tomorrow). How are we supposed to believe that time, a man-made unit of counting, trumps human intuition in deciding when to move on.

You don't have time. You make time. You make time for the things you want to fill your life with. Someone once made "time" itself and told us that it would give our life order. Instead, it gave us a limit.

When you live in a world of clocks, oh how time flies.

Rules I don't follow when no one's watching

Silence is golden

Make your bed

Don't drink from the carton

Trix are for kids

White girls can't rap

Don't play with your food

Wear pants

Look both ways

Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot

Don't wear your pajamas in public

No elbows on the table

No socks with sandals

Pasta doesn't taste good with everything

Gauchos are out of style

Close the windows

Stop for 3 seconds at a stop sign

Breakfast before dinner

Chairs are for sitting

Hair: who needs it?

Mine is blonde
And growing longer
Yours is brown
And newly razed
But that doesn't mean
That mine is stronger
In fact, it's yours
That should be praised

For my hair grows
Without restrictions
It sprouts new lengths
With thoughtless ease
But yours, it fights
Through sad predictions
That baldness comes
With the disease

But hair is hair
is hair is hair
I see no harm
If it's not there
And bald is bald
Is bald is brave
I'd trade my locks
For yours to save

Another sappy post referring to how much I like my friends

The toes in this photo are not mine. They belong to a passionate, mature, selfless, and intelligent girl who I am lucky to call a close friend.

When she first sent me this picture, I flared with jealousy. I mean, just look at the picture! She is laying in the back of a blue pick-up truck enjoying the summer sun with a, judging by the shoes, decently attractive boy. I can tell she was smiling when she took this picture and wanted to be where she was. Wouldn't you?

The more I looked at her toes in that blue pick-up truck, the more it became obvious that these were not my toes. More than that, I began to think about my other friends and all the places their toes have been. My friends have been to cities I cannot pronounce, they have changed the lives of people I do not know, they have been indoor sky diving, built houses, won trophies, delivered speeches, flown planes, climbed mountains, ridden wild animals, swam miles, discovered fossils, and set foot on land walked by thousands of people who have also had great experiences. Honestly, my friends are so cultured, and that makes them incredibly interesting.

Sure, my toes are well traveled, but they in no way compare to the places my friends' toes have stepped. And although I would be lying if I said I wasn't still jealous of the experiences my friends have had, I am happy knowing that the people I love have gotten to do the things I would love to do. I may never get to run a marathon, but that is okay because my friend (the one in the blue pick-up truck) is about to do so. I think I would rather have the amazing people I surround myself with do amazing things than hoard those experiences for myself. Not to say that I do not aim to be adventurous in my life, because god knows I do, but hearing the joy in a friend's voice when she tells me about where she has been and where she is going, in my opinion, is greater than having those things for myself. As much as I wish these were my toes in this picture, in that blue pick-up truck, knowing my friend was smiling when she took it equals everything out.

So, to my friends, keep on doing the things that make you all so interesting! I cannot wait to see where your toes will be next. You all deserve to be, and I know you all will be, somewhere beautiful.

Life in the fast lane

There are so many things I have to say right now, so many thoughts written down in my red leather journal. I have stories to tell, questions to ask, and rants to drag on. But rather than put any of what I am thinking to words, I am taking this blog post to talk about why I suddenly have so many things to say.

Finally, I feel like I have reached a point where life is moving. Rather than sitting around waiting for things to happen, I feel like the world is waiting for me. I am busy as a bee and have no time for half of the things I am involved in, but I love knowing I always have somewhere to go next. Sure, it would be nice to enjoy a moment before moving onto the next one (some call that smelling the roses), but for now, I am really loving my life in motion.

But it's not like the earth suddenly started turning faster. Rather, this new speed of living was sparked by a cliche that I stopped listening to and finally HEARD what was being said. This life-advice used to be just words to me, an inspirational quote that teachers would hang on posters in the class rooms. It was a cute saying, and I thought I understood what it meant, but I never put those words to action.

Seize the day.

There are so many things I have wanted to do and have put off thinking I would always have time, but some recent medical affairs in my family have reminded me that this might not be the case. I am so lucky to have today and twice as lucky if I get a tomorrow. Why would I wait for the day after that to do anything? Saving something for later is an insult to the current moment. In this unpredictable life, there are not always take-home doggy bags, so why save the left overs? Just finish what is in front of you RIGHT NOW. Carpe the fuck out of every diem.

When you are moving at a memory per minute, you won't have time to stop for gas.

Words about words about words

Today in my Honors Seminar in Writing class, we spent some time discussing words. The point my teacher and the editor of our summer reading book made was that we both enter and leave our lives as words. Before we are born, we are a whispered rumor, words formed of a life that has not yet happened. After we die, we are a memory, remembered through stories, words a life that once was.

And so, I beg to wonder, do actions really speak louder than words? I understand where the expression came from, but if you take the time to think about it, it feels less and less inspirational.

If, as my teacher suggested, we leave this world in words, than those words become our legacy. Once we are gone and can no longer act for ourselves, we become whatever it is that people say about us. This legacy, this accumulation of words, will exist for a duration time (hopefully) longer than that in which we lived. So, how could the actions you made on earth be more prominent than the things people will say about those actions? True, we must do loud things to have loud words said about us, but ultimately it is those words, not those actions, that will face a slower silence.

Why we live

Bare with me, readers, as I am about to embark on a slightly depressing but unavoidably true tangent that crossed my mind this morning.

So this thing we're all doing right now, life. It's a pretty odd occurrence. How strange is it that we are anything at all? But, more than that, how strange is it that we put effort into being anything else? The fact that we are something should be enough. Why do we all feel the need to prove ourselves as something else?

But really, what I want to say, is that we spend our whole life living and then, sometime hopefully not too soon, it will all end. We will die. And everything we ever lived for, every memory we ever had, every thought we never spoke, will die too.

Think about when you plan a birthday party. You spend so much time sending out invitations, ordering decorations, picking out the perfect outfit. And then, eventually, the date listed on those fancy invitations will come and it will go and everything you planned for will be over. The party was your final product and when the last guest leaves it is no longer part of your worries.

How weird is it that, in life, the one thing you live for is to die? Your final product, what all of this living is leading up to, your birthday party, is the moment you take your last breath and leave everything else behind. We live, truly, to die.

And once we are dead, that's it. We will not worry about if the birthday party went well, if all of our guests had a good time and enjoyed their fancy invitations. Those people will know that they were invited into our birthday party which is life but we will never know if they came, if the cake was too dry, if people enjoyed their time with us. We will be gone, and although it may be sad for the party goers we left behind, we will have completed our life's goal because we will have died.
And they should not be sad if they realize we finished the only thing we were put on this earth to do: die.

Happiness: as sold for $2.00

Something I wrote for HSW and felt the need to blog. Does that make me lazy to reuse the same composition? At least this one's not graded.

I have an utmost appreciation for dining. On vacations, my biggest concern is not seeing this historical monument or lying on that beach, but rather where we are getting our next meal. From what people eat, we can infer so much; the biggest difference between cultures can be found in the spiciness of their food, the saltiness of their sauces, the importance of each meal. I remember trips in flavors and I remember home in one particular taste: Denny’s white chocolate chip strawberry pancakes. Maybe that strips some of my epicure status, but I would be lying if I claimed that my mother’s homemade soup or my stepbrother’s raspberry gelato were more memorable to me than my solitary trips to America’s favorite breakfast chain diner.

In the most predictable way possible, I like to eat my feelings. It doesn’t matter which emotion I find myself in; if I am feeling something, so too am I feeling hungry. When I am upset or confused or delighted or guilty or greedy or stressed out or just plain bored, the only food I crave is white chocolate chip strawberry pancakes. The times I am most successful in making coherent thoughts out of abstract emotions is when creamy white chocolate and sugar coated fruit is melded together in my mouth to form a boldly uniform taste.

It’s true. Denny’s has gotten me through some of the experiences I naively called tough at the time. Although I know any of my overbearingly altruistic friends would open their homes to me if need be, there is no four walls I would rather surround a distraught version of myself with than those of the slightly chipped, burnt orange paint at Denny’s Pancake House. So, usually, I sit in a single booth eating my pancakes without talking anyone other than Angie, the middle-aged waitress who pours my frequently emptied water.

More than the deliciously fruity flavor I so often crave, physically being at Denny’s cheers me up. As alone as I may seem in my corner-hugging booth, the company I am with is among the most reassuring I have known. From the elderly couple whose years together have occupied every conversation worth having and sits silently, avoiding each other’s gaze, to the single mother of four, who still wears her nurse’s scrubs during what the children refer to as their “family fun night”, to the ageing businessman whose distracted eyes glance constantly at his watch, dreading the moment he has to return to wherever he calls home, I am surrounded with an oddly familiar company.

Who am I - a well-educated, well-provided for teenager- to be lamenting over anything when these people are experiencing nearly my lifetime’s worth of troubles in a single day? Watching a family rejoice over a full meal, watching a pair of time-worn companions more interested in a fork than in each other makes whatever it was I came here to think about suddenly seems laughable. My meal, if not my life, is so carefree compared to the people who surround me in this 24-hour dining establishment, as far as a meal’s worth of time can tell me. And yet, they all seem pretty happy. Denny’s is their big night out or a part of their drudging routine. Denny’s is my greatest reality check.

So, for every bight of pleasure I get out of fine dining, there is no restaurant I would more strongly recommend then the one impudently advertised off of Kingery Highway. Because, until I can find someone who can meld two parts white chocolate with three parts strawberries to create one part heaven, until I can find someone who can follow it up with an aftertaste of “cheer up, your life is pretty good,” I will continue to rely on Denny’s to be my 24 hour heart attack inducer and seven days a week heartbreak cure.