Why so SERioUs?

I was too serious. took everything serious b/c if u pay attention, people will tell you exactly what they are going to do in the future before they do it, via patterns in speech + behavior. You can predict it with a gratifying sense of acuracy before they even know what they are going to do or say. I've spent too much time memorizing those patterns, catagorizing their actions, recording the outcomes. I have committed to memory the stats on every person I have ever come across. Every person who I have ever shared a meal. They are not even people anymore. No longer free because I manipulate there very thoughts with my own. I create our enviornment.

Weather or not you choose to belive the likelihood of this person living up to your stats is another thing entirely. You spent all your time predicting the oputcome only to to be scared to death of the what may happen. You end up paralyzed, a victim before your a victim. Standing... gawking...awaiting...  anticipating in horror what you think, is about to happen. And when it does, you're riddled with dissapointment, not in the person in Man. I mean Mankind. You see its so much deeper when you turn people in to things. Then they all become the same. They all become weapons. Instruments of torture and now, instead of studing them, you run from them.

The unknown is very uncomfortable for me. Failure lurks in the dark cob-webbed corners of the unknown. Assesing the present and predicting the future so I would be prep'ed for whats to come and feel like I knew what was going to happen stole something from me. Being ready for tomorrow, steals your today. jaja thats beyond serious huh?

Gone But Not Lost

I saw this man at the pharmacy today. He was sleeping there in the corner for 20 minutes. I thought he was waiting on a prescription but he suddenly got up  and did his groceries, a huge cart and only a bag of tortillas and box of Pepsi inside. I wondered to myself If he was a sad lonley man or just sleepy and descided to catch some Zzz's in a quite corner before shopping? I cant take on his pain too, I have my own. I choose to believe he's living the good life, retired and a little drowsy, maybe from a late night of shuffleboard complete with loose women.

I dont have that confidant to talk to.That person who has a deep understanding of the breath that lives between the pronunciation of my words. The person who almost sees me in slow motion recognizing the thoughts that fly across my face, that remain unspoken, and hear them screamming and sighing alltogether at once.  I feel like a sigh, feeling neither good nor bad. Just hanging on somewhere in between waiting to see what emotion I should feel next. Do I yern? Am I sorrowful or am I weary? Maybe I am all of them. Maybe Im none of them. I feel like an ache, dull and abstract. I am lonesome, but Im also tetering on the verge of Happiness. I keep winding up in this strange place where solitary reflectiveness meets lonliness. The same internal dialouge has been playing in my head for years.  Like a child, I keep insisting, "I am not lonely!" But indeed I am. "But Im alot other things too!", I remind myself. And those things are the things I labor to keep in mind. Mostly I feel forgotten. Forgotten by long time friends, siblings, and everyone else in between. And Im angry. Im angry theyve left me and I miss them. I spend moments thinking to myself about them and what they are doing. I wonder if they ever think about me and I feel angry that they dont seem to miss me at all. Every kind of relationship I have had has completly degraded into something almost unregonizable, if not completly dissapeared, dispite all my efforts. I hold on to everyone, and Ive come to realize no one is holding on to me. Its both good and bad. Im not trying to maintain friendships with friends, family or a lover in vain, but I am also left companionless.

      Peace and Pain are entwined in my emotions and I have givin up tring to unravel them. They are my friends now, and they stay so close. They visit with me everyday and they always know how I am feeling. They comfort and coddle me. With them I am more myself, then with those who I can share a loving embrace. What is it about being around the people we love so much that pulls us further and further away from who we really are?

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."— Elie Wiesel

I came, I saw, I lost

         I am student and it took me so long to get here. A long time ago, when I was a monster, I worked for a large corporation, an analyst and I was broken. Maybe I didn’t realize it at the time but when I took the job I was trying to find myself and somehow I ended up loosing everything.


           I lost myself, who I was almost completely disappeared, and I was a stranger in my own life. Sitting here looking back at that time I remember that person and I realize how taking on something larger than life means giving up a piece of your self or at the very least suppressing it for a time. Not just your hopes and dreams but who you are as a person, who you spent your whole life cultivating, editing and revising. I realize how dangerous that is because you can end up lost forever in this new person that you have become. I am surprised at how during those years I felt aware of what was going on around me and yet I wasn’t. I didn’t really know to what depth I had abandoned myself and become involved in something too monstrous to describe until I came out of it and joined the world once again as a civilian. As I saw this change happening to others, I felt angry about how they gave in and became monsters. I remember feeling a small tremor in my soul when they rejoiced everytime our orginization prevailed and our "enemy" did not. Sometimes you can want something so bad you create it. During those years fantasizing about my life as a civilian and what it could be, was almost intoxicating.
     
             Regret and anger plague me.  These years of my life tortured me and continue to follow me everywhere I go. These are my memories and they exist. They hide in the shadows of my footsteps and in the crease of my elbow. They lurk in the spaces between my fingers and when you shake my hand you are shaking hands with death, dreams, despair and determination. I know that they are forever a part of me and they are not going anywhere but I can use them to remind myself of who I was then, who I am now and who I want to become. It will remind me of the time I came so close to losing myself, the only thing we really have that’s ours. Those times and the times that followed, helped mold the person belonging to the fingers typing this essay.
             I long to understand myself and people better, to gain knowledge about the parts of people that seem so small and meaningless to others and seem gargantuan to me. I long to know more about those threads of our personality that make up who we are and guide our decision making. I have a need to understand how good and evil exists in the same person and how we come to except it, even love it, because it exists in all of us.

             I may not know exactly who I want to be, but I have an idea and I certainly have more than a few examples of who I don’t want to be. I lived a whole life in six years and there’s so much more to be had and I have to make it good not only for my self but for others. I have to bring sympathy, compassion, honor and dignity to the world and personally deliver it to anyone that is dying inside from a lack of those things. I would very much like to give people second chances to live their lives. I would take great relief in helping to mend peoples minds, hearts and bodies. Until I can become that person, I take rest in the knowledge that I am a student. It took me a long time to get here and I’ll spend every second striving to become something better than yesterday.

 "The way to Love anything is to realize it might be lost." - G.K. Chesterton

people are my hurdels

i actually found an old diary. Hmph. How strange. It only had ten or so pages written during that time when i left. Left everyone behind. Left evrything behind.  Left "J" as i used to call him behind and Amanda and everyone in my cell phone's phonebook behind. I Ran to a beach on the other end of the country and i lived alone for ten days. I had no poessions. I had no aquaintences.  I was alone and board. Ah. I like board. I can just live when I'm board. Live. Live Life. Such a simple concept. I was inspired and bold. Letting go of everything was exhilerating. Letting go of everyone was intoxicating. I watched people fish on the beach. I watched children play. I spoke to a few people. I ate. I rested. I breathed. I was so free. I was anyone. I was no one. And I was me.

That was some time ago. Years in fact. So many many years ago.
Now I am here. I know everyone. Everything is familiar. Nothing is comforting. Everyone knows me and everyone does not. Here I watch the seasons change while driving from place to place, always late and always racing the clock. Here I watch the people go by only when paused for a moment at a school crossing. Here I never see people fish and I never find myself on the beach. I speak to few. I am known but I remain unknown.I am loved but I remain unloved. I definately eat. I never rest. Im suffocating. I am not free. Here I have everything and I have nothing. I am truely alone. How did this happen?  How can you be where you belong and not fit?

"One should count each day a seperate life." - seneca

The thing is. .. ...

Well, there are things I would do differently and things I would do the same. There are places I wish I never went and places that I hate. And of those places some, I find myself longing to go back to. There are people I thought I hated and of those people, some I miss. There are people that I keep close, and of those people, some of them I secretly hate. There are things I wish I never said and of that list of very long things, a part of me cheered for being so brave. Brave enough to say them at all. There are things about me that I hate and yet have very little motivation to change them. There are things about me that I love but they are few and far between. There are desires in me to do more to increase those things and there are things, just things, that make me quit before I start. There are just so many things.





"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."— Anne Lamott

Croissants, Poets and Sesame Street

Last Sunday I watched a movie while doing some work. This movie plays endlessly on satallite T.V. and features some classic poetry read aloud by one of the characters. Immediately I felt compelled to get to know Walt Whitman. Before throwing myself in, bed I pledged to get to Boarders the very next day.  Ahhhh. So quiet and condusive to deep thought. Why is it that if caught by some random fellow and made to recite the alphabet because the fate of the world releys on it I can perform abnormally well, but I always have trouble at video rental stores and at bookstores? After five minutes I choose a copy of his controversial work Leaves of Grass, and looked it over. Interrupted by my incessant thoughts of various types of pastries, I made my purchase and left.

Walt, nice to know ya. ... ..

Happy Reading .. . ..

Never keep up with the Joneses.  Drag them down to your level.

- Quentin Crisp

Dear Miz Manners,

Why does is seem so clear to you just exactly what you should, ever so politely say, no matter how intrusive or offensive the situation? It always seems to make perfect sense. Reading it, I almost want to write it down and stow it away for later. But I'll never remember to use it in the heat of the moment. I have started many a quote book meant to provoke my mind precisely when I need it the most. Meant to Inspire me in my most dire of moments and stir the proper emotions at the most appropriate of times. Meant to heighten life. Meant to soften the blow of reality. Meant to push it away. But I always forget to read it. Forget to review it. Forget to bring it along when I get swept away into a conversation about how technology is taking me further away from my real life. Or how I struggle to accept parts of my culture. Or how the people I love bring me down the most. Or how sad it can be to try and communicate the most desperate part of you to another only to see it never go below the surface. To know that very desperation will never be shared. Where are you then Miss Manners??

Yours Truely,
Waiting for some Grace




"I felt Bad for a man without shoes, till I met a man without feet." - Indian Proverb








Book I just read: Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia