I Don't Want It
I have a 650 square foot apartment in a condo building downtown in Austin, TX. It’s a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom with a long hallway and two windows on the same wall.
It’s a far cry from the last place I lived — a posh, 1500 square foot apartment with 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, plus a huge living room, dining room, and a bunch of other little carefully architected nooks in the same extremely open floor plan with two walls of wonderful windows. The place was fantastic for entertaining, and I did so often.
Now, though, I’m embarrassed to invite people over. It’s the boxes and shelves of crap lining the 25ft hallway you step into directly from the front door; the 2 computers, scanner, laser printer, photo printer and documents begging for attention scattered about a modern dinner table hidden in plain sight in the living room; the haphazardly arranged furniture — a giant beanbag, molded plywood chair, modern sofa, minimalist end table — interwoven with boxes, contents overflowing and sometimes balanced precariously. I feel like a hoarder.
after a twitter-conversation tonight, i posted a new blog.
“on internet hatred: please inquire within.”
you can find it at http://bit.ly/blog010513 - but i’d also like for you to comment. please give it a read, and share it wherever you like to share.
love.
I think this blog, and the amazing comments that follow it are real and important and eye-opening. BUT warning: it contains bullying and suicides and very real trigger issues.
Really, read this. And read this comment (currently first) by Shannon Eck.
“ Texts are secrets. They’re little mementos of inclusion and excitement you can read over and over. They’re letters, journal entries, notes passed in class. Because we like to hold onto words that mean something to us. We like re-read and remember and re-live that moment when he said, “I miss you,” or even just “Merry Christmas” because you know they mean the same thing…And when I text my best friend, “He texted me! ” and she replies, “Yay!”, we’re not a generation lost staring at screens. We’re in corsets being handed scrolls sealed with his coat-of-arms. We’re in sundresses waiting for the postman to drop his letter. We’re on swing sets hoping to circle ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We’re a million starry eyes still staring at the same starry skies with fingers crossed and hopes high.”
“ But I don’t want comfort. I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.”
(via breathofdawn)
Dicks and Assholes
Seriously, I really don’t care about what’s cool, or well-liked, or popular.
I don’t mind you raving on and on about mustaches, and I don’t think less of you for listening to Justin Bieber or shooting photos of yourself in a mirror from above with an iPad, and processing them with 3 filters in Instagram (adjacent to your last 3 meals in a collage in the stream).
And do you want to know a secret? Nobody else really fucking cares either. There are just a bunch of elitist hipster twat-hungry schmucks that rely on hating whatever you’re doing to define who they are that they just point and laugh at the silly shit everybody loves.
I don’t listen to Justin Bieber, or watch The Walking Dead, or shoot photos with an iPad, or rave on about mustaches (despite having one), but if that’s fun to you right now, fucking do it. There’s nothing wrong with any of it, and it wouldn’t wind up gracing the hateful bantering of Cord Jefferson in Gawker if it wasn’t popular. If anything, you’re probably more in-tune with what’s happening that that son-of-a-self-hating-bitch.
Do whatever you’re going to do. Seriously. Wear your underwear on your head, have copious amounts of casual sex, tell your family you’re not gay but still like sucking dick, go to church and pray, shoot animals for sport, shave your head, run away, sell all of your shit, get a job on as a stripper…whatever it is you feel like doing that you really identify with and think is good to do for you and the people you really care about. You’re going to get pointed out, and shot down, and have people make fun of you for wearing something that cost $3, or $3,000, all because they’re a bunch of pansies just looking for permission to throw this bullshit hyper civilized but totally inhumane existence down the drain and jump on the train.
And next time someone wants to doubt you or down you or make a shallow and wholly uninformed judgement about who you are as a person based on a single characteristic or action that doesn’t actually paint you as a total asshole (like that time I cheated on my girlfriend a week after her grandfather died, for which she still, somewhat fairly, kind of resents me), make sure that person knows you don’t mind. Don’t be an asshole to them, just explain yourself and encourage them to be themselves too. It’s the only way any of us are going to be happy in life, and I bet you if we all loosen up just a little, we’ll all be able to loosen up a lot.
But don’t be an asshole. People are fucking awesome, and if you think they’re all unidimensional dick fingers, you’re wrong. Just give them a chance. I’m sure even an asshole like Cord Jefferson has redeeming qualities, he just needs to quit writing for Gawker to find them.
Little Shitheads
It’s terrifying how shitty teenagers tend to be.
You start life all innocent, have some fun for a while, climb up on Mt Ego and reign terror for a bit, and then sometime in your twenties you start coming back down the mountain and becoming a decent person.
Still though, seeing how shitty people are when they’re 19, 20, 21…it makes you start panicking…are they going to come off it or not? I’m going to take that we don’t just jail them all and run away as evidence that we still have hope…or we’re goddamned good at denial…and I’m still not ready to accept the latter. ;)
“ Some lose all mind and become soul, insane.”
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted.
Build the Future
I’m a republican because I believe in being given a chance to live life on your own terms, to decide for yourself what is right and wrong, and to a minimally invasive body governing and enforcing these principles. But I’m a democrat because I feel like that’s just the base, and more important than all of that is the pursuit of a greater humanity…the eternal yearning to be more. I believe there is more to this life than succeeding within it, and far more than can be fathomed by any individual hell bent on controlling any other. In the absurd case that I were given an opportunity to moderate a debate between two presidential candidates, I would ask about the future, not as it pertains within the next four years, but the next four decades. I would do this to ascertain what sort of a future each of these individuals hopes to craft, and to really challenge them to think beyond themselves. I know not what answers we might hear, but I sincerely hope that they would both be capable of offering me a taste of grandiose visions with the confidence that they possess the knowledge and patience to produce them, even without holding the office of president. Were I ever to live this dream, our world would truly be on the right track.
Dear future love
(My remix of this post by Marianna Paige:)
Dear future love,
I hope our love is the kind that keeps me up at night wondering if I’m completely mad. I hope it envelopes us in a delusional chaos wherein our interactions with the outside world paint us as psychopaths. I hope it is such that we are so unhealthily obsessed with the other that we might shed all selfishness as we pour all of our care into the other. I want to be terrified when I realize we might not die together, but be so consumed by giddiness and euphoria that the terror of losing you fades away before it has an opportunity to manifest itself as fear. There’s no way things will last forever, as it is not in their nature, but I am sure that the short time we spend together will be as meaningful as the eternity we spend apart.
Infatuation, when regarded as “love”, is one helluva drug.
Roarie Yum: “Nudity and Sex aren’t the same thing.”
I’ve said something about this before but wanted to make my very own post. I guess I’m still just amazed at how far behind we are as a culture that we can’t accept nudity for what it is with out associating it with sex. European culture equates nudity as beauty and something to be celebrated. Though we as Americans are still stuck in the thinking that nudity is shameful and should be hidden. We’ve made such great advancements in our culture but this is still a subject we are very closed minded about. There are so many beautiful works of art containing nudity, yet only those ‘of age’ can view them. It saddens me that the legal age of consent is lower than the age deemed appropriate for viewing nudity. Though advertisements are flooded with sexualized half clothed images and those are perfectly fine for all age viewers. We all have the same body parts, I don’t see what we are trying to hide from each other. With the suppression of nudity we’ve created a culture obsessed with sex and the mystery of what our clothing is covering up. This leads to higher teen pregnancy rates in the US versus European countries which are more open minded with nudity.
My personal belief is that nudity isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s something to celebrate about at all ages. Nudity isn’t always sexual and even when it is it isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s natural. I hope that one day I will be able to show my work publicly with out being shamed or judged for choosing to be nude.
Life is Stories
Life is the beautiful story of billions of stories, written, woven and lived together, never to be read and only to be experienced by the characters themselves. It’s the story of stories, billions in number, and how they all relate and combine in a beautiful real-time melting pot of love, frustration, hope and regret, happiness, and sadness. It’s the human condition.
Maybe innately we know this and we’re all out there fighting to keep our story alive, relevant, part of the story of life. We’re also all struggling to take our story private, to find someone to live a story with, to feel safe. We’re all struggling to make our happy ending as quickly as possible. That’s okay, but we can sometimes forget that the story is told before the end, not after it. We have to live a story that — were there someone watching — the protagonist would be willed to have a happy ending. Something about karma is present in all this. The bad-guy doesn’t win the happy ending. We don’t have happy endings guaranteed. There are lots of dead end stories in this story, but we, ultimately, have control of whether we let our own story be one of them.
“”I no longer need you to fuck me as hard
as I hate myself.Make love to me
like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this
but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping.
I have realizedthat the moon did not have to be full for us to love it.
We are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it.
(via youngfolksociety)
