J9

If your wall looks empty after cutting one person out of your life, I hope you have learned your lesson.

The night is cold and you probably wouldn’t be if you were with

Anybody but her.

Everyone around is all arms, arms and hands.

Hands on his waist, hands on her back

Arms around the body, arms linking other arms

But you’re arms are flailing about as if you were drowning.

Hands on her face and a kiss on her lips

That’s more than hands and arms, but

It’s mostly hands and arms and smiles and warmth

And even though the wind is blowing

And it’s actually cold, everyone seems to be content.

Except you.

It seems as if you are the only one feeling this bitter coldness

You’re beginning to resent her

And she isn’t too fond of you either.

But you play the game that you are told to play and hope that the other

Isn’t really in this.

You’re not a heart

Breaker, per-se

At least, not recreationally

Or professionally for that matter.

But you do what you can to get by.

Everybody is so happy

So you do what you can to get by.

You seem so happy.

But you’re doing what you can

And hardly getting by.

The next time you are driving on 275 between Tropicana Field and the Howard Franklin bridge, take notice to the very random and very beautiful trees with purple flowers. It seems like nature’s way of reminding us that no matter how immersed in the industralized lifestyle we may get, she’s still there.

What do I do now?
With as much advice as we are given, as many road maps as we have at our disposal, and as cleared a path as we are given, you’d think that this question would come up considerably less often. It doesn’t. It comes across our minds on a daily basis, from as trivial a question as ‘what do I do today?’ to a level of importance that is, ‘what do I do with the rest of my life?’ Hardly ever do we have an answer when we need it the most, or at the very least an answer that is what we want to hear. It seems that more often than not that this question is more rhetorical than anything and actually more of a statement than a question.

To be honest, I don’t know what to tell you to do. Hell, I hardly know what to tell myself to do. It seems that many of my recent decisions have been poor ones and that, like all else, the repercussions of these decisions are impossible to take back. All we have to do is keep on. Keep on doing whatever it is that makes us happy. Keep on going with blind faith that in the end we will all end up okay. I believe that you will end up okay and no matter how much crap you do behind my back, I will ensure that you will end up okay. I’ll sit there and let you cry on my shoulder, I’ll tell you that everything will be okay.

What do I do now? I think the best advice I can give you is to close your eyes and just go. Just do whatever you want to… for yourself, not anybody else. Avoid swaying your decision because of me, or her, and especially because of him. Do what you feel will make you happy and I guess, just keep on going.

It is advised not to let the harsh words of others affect you, but on this particulary pathetic Tuesday I let that exact thing happen. As I walked away tears filled my eyes, nose and eventually streamed down my face and there was nothing I could do, on so many levels. So I sat. I sat and allowed love bugs swarm my body. I allowed these bugs, that represent the exact thing I am judged unfairly for, to cover me like a harsh label. After all, that is all I am anyway.

How is it that I can feel so trapped when I have made all of the decisions to place me where I am today? How can I feel so enclosed with so many options in front of me? I am well aware that my life is exactly what I make of it. This is what I choose to do with it. As strong and empowering as that may be, it is intimidating at the same time. I constantly feel this urgency to get out, escape, and flee from whatever it is that is holding me back. Before I do anything I always seem to come to the realization that there is nothing holding me back. I think that American culture holds young people in childhood for altogether too long. We spend on average two full decades being treated like children by our parents, when we are fully capable to go out on our own and be adults. Hell, in Roman times we would be considered closer to death than childhood, but in modern times we are still sheltered from so much that the world has to offer.

When talking things over with my advisor, she told me that I will be 20-years-old when I graduate college. At first, I felt gypped, cheated out of a year or two more of parties, sleeping past noon and overall irresponsible behavior. I cursed all of the work I did in high school that put me a year ahead of my peers in college. I cursed the fact that I was already younger than most of my peers on my same academic level. I cursed taxes, bills, insurance, and anything else that equated to real life past college. While I initially was upset because I would be starting “real life” earlier than most of my friends, I am now realizing that it’s not so much of a bad thing. On top of all of that, I am slowly becoming aware that I am not starting “real life” early, but rather significantly too late.

There are a lot of things I need to do in life. I have places to go and things to accomplish. Perhaps the most frustrating of all barriers separates me from my goals. Time. There is nothing I can do about it, no way of changing it, making it go faster, slowing it down; against time I am powerless. I fear that which I may now call a barrier I may someday see as the reason I did not do the things that I need to. I have to overcome this barrier. I will not let this barrier be the thing that keeps me from my dreams or lets them fade away. There are a lot of places I still need to go to before the thing I see as a barrier will run out. It will no longer be so much of a barrier, but rather a resource that I am lacking.

Time is pretty tricky like that. All my life I’ve been battling the time between my birth and where I am today. Every since I can remember I’ve wanted to be older. My friends are older than I am, hell, I am older than I am. The age old question of “If not now, when?” haunts me and makes me fear a future of regret and render me helpless. While I am told to enjoy the time I have now, I am more and more aware of the extent to which I hate how often I look into the future. I am thoroughly enjoying what I am doing now, but when I go to bed at night my dreams of the future haunt me. They haunt me because of the fear that they may never be fulfilled.

They have to be fulfilled; that’s all there is to it.

Life is happening everywhere, really fast and I’m just trying to keep up.
Everyone inspires me. Positive ways, negative ways- you all are impacting. This usually makes me seem like a total creep because I always want to talk to strangers for more than accepted lengths of time. I go out of my way to make new friends and the friends that I’ve had for a while think me to be very strange for this. I make really bad first impressions, but once you get to know me you’ll fall in love. It’s inevitable (let’s just be honest here). Overall, I am really happy and attribute this to various elements of life. I think it is a bad sign, very foreboding and overall unhealthy when a lot of eye lashes fall out. Somewhere along the same lines, I think that real life should be broken up in semesters and that years are altogether too long. We feel more capable of starting our lives over when the New Year comes, but if the year were to be broken up into three semesters we can have many more opportunities to start over. Screw science, support semesters.
Life is happening everywhere, really fast and I’m just trying get ahead.
Fresh starts are important. It somehow gives us a feeling of hope and optimism. We all need a bigger dosage of hope and optimism. I can’t tell if I am just getting older and more aware, or if things are more fucked up these days than ever before. Abandon all hope, this isn’t an allegory. This is real life, which reminds me that I was more of an abstract thinker when I was eight years old than I am now. The most annoying part of that is that I’m incapable of being abstract enough to describe what I mean by this. On top of that, even if I could explain it, very few (if any) of those reading this would be abstract enough that what I would describe would impact them. I’ve been trying to describe it for about a month now and somewhere in the million word documents that I have that intangible switch is there. This makes no sense. I know, because nothing makes sense. The majority of the things most people do have no method or meaning behind them. We do things to make ourselves feel better. I have to get up early only to go back to the same place I just came from and my mind is everywhere.
Life is happening everywhere, really fast and every once in a while it is nice to put things on pause.

stop.
breathe.

and absorb the beauty in the world around me.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you are too young to understand love.

It is odd to me how much we encourage and support hiding our thoughts and feelings. People are seen as strong and admired when they cover their feelings and hold in their thoughts. I was so proud of myself the other night. I felt like such an adult, put together and hiding my feelings. There was something on my mind and I wanted to talk about significantly more so than I did, but knew that it was my job to hide what I was thinking and thus I did exactly that. I just kept thinking of this guy I know. I have looked up to him since the day we met and he is always hiding his feelings. The other night I couldn’t help but think how much I was acting like him. I was thinking about this person over and over all night long. Our relationship is exactly where I’ve wanted it to be for a long time now and I had actual physical proof of it- but I tried my best not to talk about it.

I didn’t talk about it until I settled down into bed and found myself unable to sleep. As I listened to the disgustingly congested breathing of my friend who happened to be sleeping in the same room, I started to wonder why it is, exactly, that we feel this need to cover our feelings. It seems to me that we are taught by those ahead of us, that mature, powerful adults never let children know their true feelings. After all, “real men don’t cry” and apparently that is the ideal in our society. So after deciding that hiding my feelings is equivalent to being dishonest, I took a few steps towards a more straightforward view.

I propose we stop hiding our feelings. I think the innocent and childish, although sometimes offensive, honesty is not common enough. If you are aware of a situation, but walk gingerly around it, I’d say kick in the door and stop peaking in the window. We are told that the truth hurts and while that may be true, I still think the sting of an honest comment is worth it.

Isn’t it odd how we can admire people, only to later find out that they are not at all as they seem? First appearances are so impacting, but yet so meaningless. As we sit here and idolize celebrities and rockstars, we actually know nothing about them and are looking up to little more than an image. We copy them and try to obtain that same image with hopes that eventually we can be just like them. Personally, I would never think of admiring a celebrity but I all too commonly admire every day people. It was not until very recently that I realized that nobody is worth the admiration that I give them. While there may be certain qualities in people that are to be thought highly of, we most certainly should not marvel at a person as a whole. We all have flaws and it is the recognition of those flaws that allows for us to avoid them.
I feel as though we should not idolize anybody, but we should respect everybody.