What I should have done

It has been ten long days since I have hit publish, ten long days since I have made any words public. In the first two or three of those days, I was writing a lot down but hated it all. Eventually, on a plane ride to Florida, I gave myself time to address my discontent for what I had written. Reading over my catscratch and tangents, I decided that writing made me feel selfish

Writing - writing anything - is not a form of creating something new. Writing means taking thoughts that have been influenced and molded by other people and claiming them as your own. Writing claims that I know enough about something to form words to describe it. Even if what is being written is filled with uncertainty, it tries to defend that uncertainty as true and mine. I don't deserve to try to make sense of things because I don't know anything.

So, lying on the beach the past weekend, I decided to read instead of write. Reading felt selfless because it required me to look into the thoughts of someone else and take them for what they were. Reading meant acknowledging that someone else , the author, knew a lot more than I did about whatever I was reading and it meant that I was small enough to need someone else to tell me things. Reading was fun because it made feeling selfless easy.

But, as my trip came to an end and my friends and I walked onto the beach for one last time, I wished I had never read at all. The beach was too windy for us and, for the fifteen seconds that I tried to bare it, whipping sand blinded me from looking at it. I longed to be back on that beach ad when I tried to picture it in my head, all I could see was the backdrop it created behind my book. Reading may be less selfish than writing, but doing anything on a beach besides looking at it is vain and wrong.

I should have put my book down and used those hands to feel the coarseness of sand. I should have lifted my eyes from the page and let them try to find an end of the horizon. I should have taken my headphones out and listened for the winds end. I should have uncrossed my legs and explored every inch of what was around me. I spent four days on the beach, I should know its colors and smells and textures. Instead, I know 129 pages of what Ernest Hemingway told me.

Being on a beach - frankly being anywhere - is amazing and humbling. Choosing any distraction, be it writing, reading, playing music, talking to friends, praying, sleeping, texting, or playing papi, is insulting and embarrassing. A location should never be a backdrop, not even to thoughts that we think are important. Nothing is as awe-inducing as where we are at any given moment and nothing deserves to be the center of our unbiased thoughts more than wherever it is we find ourselves. I wish I would have felt this way at the beginning of my trip.

The dance

Would you know a lie if you saw one,
if it danced from off my lips?
If it leaped between our distances,
and swayed you by the hips?

Would you know a lie it it grabbed you,
by your pure and giving hands,
intertwined your honest fingers
and asked you there to dance?

Would you bow and greet your partner?
Would you sashay down the floor?
And when the first of songs was over,
Would you politely ask "one more?"

And kindly would you twirl her,
as she whispered in your ear?
Would her darkened ways seduce you?
Would her grace surmount your fear?

And from there, would you go forth,
entranced by what you learned,
to grab another partner?
And would she too be turned?

Thoughts as Pi Day comes to an end

Today, my friends, is Pi Day and, because I love math and learning, I decided to make a way bigger deal out of it than justifiable.

My interest in pi was first sparked earlier this year when I read a literary journalism by Richard Peterson, "Mountains of Pi." The piece profiles two brothers and their all-encompassing obsession with the number. In its entirety, "Mountains of Pi" is one of the better things I have read but what really grabbed my attention was a passage that described that, if every letter of the alphabet corresponded with a sequence of numbers, your name and address and the lyrics to your favorite album would be spelled out in succession for an uncountable amount of times within pi. The lack of pattern that exists within pi creates an unpredictable spontaneity and, therefore, pi includes every combination of numbers possible multiple times in repetition. That, I think, is pretty sweet.

But, that spontaneity only becomes awe-striking when we take into account the fact that pi is endless. There are some people in my grade who know close to a hundred digits of pi. There are some mathematicians who have gone mad searching for the first ten million. I know seven. And still, on the grand scheme of pi, what the mathematicians know and what I know is relatively the same. Nothing. An end to pi does not exist and, therefor, where ever our knowledge of pi ceases, we must assume is practically nothing.

I think it is this endlessness that gets me the most. Like pi, life too is unpredictable. It is tangible that there is no pattern to the digits of pi because we never know what will happen tomorrow or the next day. Uncertainty is familiar.

But, unlike pi, everything we know comes to an end. I know it because, even when math class drags on, a bell will always cut my teacher off mid-sentence. I know it because my mom has marked and circled the date of my high school graduation on our family calendar. I know because tonight I listened to my favorite artist strum perfect cadences and bid farewell to a begging crowd. I know because I had to toss my favorite pair of shoes earlier and because my train pulled into the station and because I have watched a night become a morning with the tick of a clock.

And, more than anything, I know because today I looked into my friend's red and blurry eyes as she told me that our neighbor had passed. I know because two wonderful people, friends I grew up with, will live the rest of their lives without a father. I know because, if a heart as strong and as pure and as courageous as his could stop beating, than the same must be true of everything I know.

Except for pi. Pi mocks us with its inability to cease. While I sit here watching things I know and care about come to an end, pi is still going, adding digit after digit to a degree I cannot comprehend.

Worshiping pi has given me a false hope that, if this very small number (just a tad over 3), can go on forever, than other things can too. But I am wrong. Pi is some magic exception that taunts my mortality and the mortality of everything I know and am a part of.

Maybe this is why so many mathematicians sacrifice their sanity to dig further into pi: to know something infinite.

Sharing joy

I am trying very hard to always leave a person happier than I found him, a heart fuller than before I knew it. This, unfortunately, is a very hard thing to do. Sometimes, I don't know how to cheer someone up and I wonder why I ever thought I could. What do I know about being happy? I am happy a lot of the time, but I have no idea why; I think I'm just lucky.

But, what good is my happiness if I don't know how to let it rub off on other people? (As my boy Chris McCandless pointed out, happiness is only real when shared).

I don't know how to cheer people up and, as a result, I am hogging the happiness, I am greedy with joy.

The fact that I shouldn't be writing this proves that I probably should

Last week I was feeling pretty sick. I stayed home from school and called my doctor. When my friends asked me what was up I told them I wasn't feeling to great and they wished me better. I was sick and it was sucky but totally normal.

When it comes to physical illnesses - the flu, diabetes, cancer - it is really easy to seek help. Even when a doctor has prescribed you something, chances are that friends will offer to bring by soup of embrace you in a caring hug. People who are sick become the center of conversations as we all talk about their absence and pray for their health.

Why, then, is it so different of the illness is one of the mind and not the body? I have watched victims of anxiety, nervous in the dark hours of the night, still their tremors when the sun come up. I have heard the whispers of friends suffering from depression begging me not to tell anyone. I have sat beside friends suffering from eating disorders as they cried and tried to convince both of us they were fine. I have seen the stress and misery of keeping their illness a secret swallow people I care about, forcing them deeper down the throat of their own sickness. And, I have watched family members comforted by hugs and flowers and baked goods when cancer struck, cracked lips form a smile at the sight of a note from an old but concerned friend.

Mental illnesses, like their physical counterparts, are not the fault of the patient. They are flaws in chemistry, not character and yet we are still terrified to admit that we might be suffering.
It is understandable, really, that we all do this. Those who suffer from depression, eating disorders, anxiety, obsessive compulsive, ect are ostracized in our society. Any girl with cuts on her wrists is written off as "moody" and told to "grow up and get over it." Suicide is considered selfish and those who only eat the right side of potato chips are laughed at or accused of seeking attention. So, we hide our discontent and our insecurity and go to terrifyingly great risks to keep out scars and our protruding rib bones a secret.The mentally ill are silenced, told that what they are feeling is not okay.

But the truth is that being sick is a normal human response to living. Just as some are more prone to certain types of cancers or allergies, mental disorders can be genetic and unavoidable. Sometimes, like a common cold, we just catch it. Many mental disorders are a response to the environment the patient resides in. Insecurity, sadness, fear, and sickness are completely natural and have existed for as long as happiness or bliss or any of the "good" emotions.

So, why is it still so hard for us to admit that we might be mentally ill? Why can't we just accept the fact and seek the treatment that any sick person deserves? Why can't do we, when we see a suffering friend, turn the other cheek and cower from being the one to speak up for them?There is nothing wrong with being sick. But there is something very wrong and very dangerous with pretending like we are not.

I am not suggesting that those who suffer from mental disorders should completely content with their state. Obviously every human being deserves to live a happy and healthy life and there are ways for even the saddest minds to get there. Just as a cancer patient would, he must first accept the status of where he stands and not be afraid to share that place with others. Being sick is nothing to be embarrassed about but is something to work to combat.

If you don't believe me on this, please consider that that I was too scared to include any names in this post. Consider the vagueness of every example given. Consider that I am really terrified to what my friends will think of me once they read this. Consider that, originally, I thought I would expand this thought into a criticism for my Honors Seminar in Writing class, but a disclaimer attached to all of our rubrics states that if any written content suggests that any student may be harming himself or someone else, the teacher is required to notify child services. The fact that I cannot even express this opinion without fear of being ostracized or questioned for it proves that it is valid. And that sucks, yo. It really makes me hate the man.