Sunday, April 13, 2014

People.

In movies and books and sometimes general conversation, people tend to create two groups of the "type of people in the world". Hopeless romantics versus realists, push overs versus the pushers, the leaders versus the followers, the loved versus the lovers. There are a million different ways to categorize human beings, and none of them are spot on. Because there are people in between the categories and people beyond. There are too many dynamics in the human soul for all of us to be categorized in two single groups.
However, what I have noticed is how one does the categorizing in their own head about the people around them. It is not sectioning like the ones previously listed though. It's different. For me, I have people put into categories of who i would tell secrets to, who i would hang out with beyond the classroom, who is small talk, who is vast in conversation. But then i realized all of these factors of sectioning I have in my head play into a much larger picture: who will I keep in my life after high school versus who I will let go and not care.
It's absurd how quickly humans can replace one another. I saw a couple of three years break up about two weeks ago. They both already have significant others. Whether it is rebound or a result of hidden feelings, we are able to find a replacement for the affection we are falling short of. And it makes me sad.
This time in two years I will be more than half way through my freshmen year of college and the chances of me keeping in touch with half of the people i care about right now is slim to none. And it's not mainly because I don't care about them enough, there is just a lack of odds being in favor of our friendship. I may have different best friends, a different boyfriend and different people that I hate.
In a snap things change. People change. The categories will reset and I will have new people to section off.
People are strange. The way we function and our needs are strange. It astounds me how much we crave each other. How much we thrive off one another. Teenagers my age now a days Tweet about how much they hate people, but there they are tweeting their thoughts for the retweets and approval of all the people they so call "hate". If you hate everyone, then lock yourself in your room, delete your social media and become lonely. You just don't hate everyone. You go to school, you socialize. There are some kids that when they say it, I believe them because they are that kid that doesn't speak and barely pays attention to the bullshit around them, But here's the thing, they don't have a Twitter and they aren't complaining to anyone. The girls I see tweeting about how they hate people are the popular cheerleaders or the girls in class who do not shut up.
I don't hate people, I hate teenagers. And I'm not afraid to get rid of a majority of them in my life.
I do not know what the direction of this post was.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Poetry For the Avoiding Homework Soul #3

School has begun again and I am avoiding the thought of it at all costs. Bear with me on my sappy poetry. 


The world has started spinning again
For so long it felt as if time was frozen
I wanted so bad to lay with you forever
To not have to get up
And deal with the burdens
the matches that want to set us on fire
The world has started spinning
For so long it felt that I was sane again
That I wasn't beating on my insides
and my brain wasn't racking
I wanted so bad to freeze time
Just to savor the feeling of being solid
The world has started spinning
But I'm scared it will lose control
And the wheel will shake and stir
I want so bad to be the one you hang on to
Because your world might keep spinning
But mine will freeze
 

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Poetry for the Soul #2

Just Time. 

You told me to write, so I’m writing for you
But it seems I haven’t felt your words
For centuries; it seems you haven’t thrown them at me
In years. It seems we have not been the same
In months; it seems we’re wearing thinner
By the day. It seems we are running down to our
Last hour.
Minute by minute; the last few seconds,
They might save us, but
They will destroy us for trying.
You told me to write, so I’m writing for you
Every second.
Each minute, by the hour.
Everyday for the years to pass.
Until a century has wounded
Our long lasting efforts. 
You told me to write, so I’m writing for you
But where are you
When the centuries are in the books
The years are in the photographs
The days are passing slowly
The hours are slurring, and the seconds are the minutes
And the minutes feel like a century.
You told me to write, so I’m writing for you
But now you’re gone
And everything is just time.    

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Firsts.

A good friend of mine has yet to receive her first kiss. She insists on it being absolutely perfect, dream like, and practically impossible expectations of a first kiss. There are so many firsts in our individual lifetimes and we have so many expectations of these firsts. Unfortunately most of them are completely ignored.
When I was little i used to practice kissing on my pillow. I don't know why, I just did. I wanted to be good for when the love of my life came along and swept me off my feet with his perfect kisses. I pictured the whole cliche mess: a sunset, giggling, talking about the deepest darkest parts of our souls, and just being happy. They were perfectly acceptable expectations. The reality was my first kiss was with a random boy named Anthony who thought it would be funny to ask out the nerdiest sixth grader. He kissed me behind a dumpster and then left to giggle about it with his friends. We never really talked after that. I moved to a different city and we never talked again. Just like that, a milestone in my life was taken from me at the snap of his fingers.
I look at my friend and how she has yet to experience this and I am almost jealous at her capability to remain a hopeless romantic. I'm not saying I'm unhappy with how my life has turned out so far at all, there's just a little piece inside of me that wishes my first kiss was a little more sentimental. She has so much hope and so much expectation. Then again, the only way to see through the glass clearly is to have a little smack of reality. With the onset of failed expectations comes the clarity of life. You realize that things can be to shit, but that just means you see things for what they are. With this ability, you are able to avoid the down sides of being a hopeless romantic. The heartbreaks become less often and you expectations are no longer put on something that you would not expect to fulfill them. Expectations do not always have to be a disappointment, as log as you put those expectations in the right person.
There are a billion more firsts I could talk about. All teenagers know them. First time having sex. First time smoking a blunt. First time you get your heart broken. That's just to name a few. Then there's that occasional first time of having to make an insanely important decision. My boyfriend of almost two years is having to make a drastic decision that will affect the rest of his life. A first for him because things have always been smooth sailing. He always knew exactly what to do, exactly what his point of view was. He was never torn. But for the first time, he finds himself on two sides of a decision and suddenly he has no expectations, just full set reality.
That's just what first time experiences do to you. They take you for a ride and spit you out somewhere. This random place varies in all shapes and sizes of regret, disappointment, fear, and, surprisingly, relief. They have the affect of changing the course of your life and the content of your character. People toss them around so lightly. Like a helium filled balloon. Eventually it will pop, and the apparent lightness of it will disappear. Good news is that the sudden POP only lasts a few moments. It hits you unexpectedly and you sit there wondering "What the fuck just happened?". But once it settles and your mind wraps around the idea, everything continues. But there's that slight change, the shift in attitude towards things. You're a lot more careful with the next balloon. You didn't like that feeling of when the last one POPPED. It's a cycle. A weird one and certainly more effective than we realize.
I wouldn't go back and change how my first kiss went. In sixth grade I was an ass kissing push over. Once this kid screwed me over, I grew a pair of lady balls and finally disregarded all the bullshit people through at me. My skin thickened and I turned into someone who valued their firsts a lot more. This goes for everything else in my life. I have no regrets with the way my firsts went. The memories are far too precious to me to regret, good or bad. They are sculptors to who we are, why would you want to change that? No matter how damaged or how sheltered, there is beauty in all of over imperfections. Firsts help with this beauty. Why change them?

**Of course I realize that there are a lot worse ways firsts can go about, this post is merely from my own experience**

Monday, March 31, 2014

Strange.

Sometimes things are just strange. In the way they function or their existence. They just have that strange vibe to them. I think it's strange how incredibly slow time moves by when you are alone in your room savoring the moment of little to now other being around you, but then how quickly the hours float when you are in the company of the people you can tolerate. The minutes always seem unbearable when you are waiting for THAT text message; the one that will give you the answer to exactly what they wanted to talk about. It's strange and peculiar how we have taken time and secretly made it maneuverable. It does not seem so now because we function according to the clocks on our phones and the watches on our wrists, but we were able to take the concept of the sun disappearing for twelve hours and maneuvering it in a way that benefits us; creating our own manipulation of time. Now it is not so because it is the norm to have a set time. To be on a schedule. Even beyond this, the feeling of time moving slowly or rushing by is our own manipulation. Everything is still sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, so on and so forth. Time just seems so much more now a days because we made it into that.
All of this sounds completely bizarre and like I have been smoking a blunt, which for the fact I have not. I m just sitting here thinking bout how strange and completely different my day would have been if I hadn't got out of the house. I would have sat around feeling abandoned because my dear didn't text me. But because I escaped my solitude, I barely thought about the missing text message. He was probably out doing his own thing too. There are seven billion people in this world "doing there own thing" at the exact same time I am doing my own thing; right now as I type this stupid blog post, a million different things are happening simultaneously. It just continues to be strangely mind blowing to me.
I think it's strange that our brains are intensely complex, but sometimes I can't remember what I did yesterday. IT's strange that I have lived through seventeen years of life and i only remember like eleven years. No one remembers their childhood distinctly. The memories are there, right inside your head but they are no conscious memories. Their existence is plausible, but you can't pull them up like a saved file on your hard drive. It's just no a thing.
I have one particular memory. The memory of me first realizing "I am alive". The first memory of me being incredibly sad by the thought. I was standing on my booster stool because I was too short to reachh the sink of my bathroom. I squeezed the Crest spearmint tooth paste onto my purple and white toothbrush and began to move it across my teeth. I intently stared into the mirror and thought "One day I will not be ble to do this. One day my brain will stop thinking and my heart will stop thumping. One day I will die because right now I am completely alive, but time is not on anyone's side."
Fuck man, I was like eight years old. Looking back on it now, I have only come close to the depth of sadness I felt right in that moment looking at my reflection. I wanted to burst into tears and more importantly, freeze time. Freeze the strange arrangement we manipulated to make death seem further away. But here I am, seventeen years of my life flashed by like it was a mere two minutes in the bathroom brushing my teeth. I can't even imagine how it's going to feel when I look back twenty years from now, forty years from now, and then from my death bed.
I remember distinctly thinking "time is not on anyone's side". It really does seem like it is on our side. That's why we developed this whole system. The breaking up of education and even something as simple as days. Man, we haev 24 hours in a day. That is a LONG TIME. But in reality, when you wake up in the morning, those 24 hours are going in  blink of an eye. Last time I checked, I was still a freshmen in high school simply researching colleges. Now I am actually having to plan what college I am going to go to, what I am going to major in, and what the hell I want to do with my life. There is so little time to enjoy the time we are given. Our life span is huge in comparison to other animals. Man, some of us live to be one hundred years old! A bee can last up to a couple of hours! It's just so strange that we are given so much time, so many years, but we waste them with this manipulation. Our life span, in a realistic way of looking at it is unimaginably stretched, but then again, looking at it from the other side, we have no time what so ever.
We go to school for eighteen years of our life. Mandatory school that is. To us, eighteen years is not that much. Meh, it's nothing in comparison to the whole picture. But in actuality, it's freaking EIGHTEEN YEARS! 6,570 DAYS! 157,60 HOURS! IT'S ABSOLUTELY INSANE! But we just put it right away. Like we just snapped our fingers.
Then we go to another set of school years, completely optional. However, the idea of  putting a meaning to the unbearably stretched amount of time we have in this short time period has become a Siamese twin to college education. "Sure, you don't have to go to college, but you probably won't be as fulfilled as those who do." Then we spend sometimes up to ten more years in a classroom.
Just like that we hev to decide what it is we want to put another decade of our lives into. We have to decide what path we think is more likely to be bright and favorable to what we have in mind.
After eighteen years in a classroom, we are supposed to know our spot in society. We are suppose to know what we want to spend our energy on to compensate for the eternally short amount of time we have in this world.
There is a system. Make people believe. Believe in themselves. Believe in an idea that time is infinite. Time will alwys be here, but our individual time in not infinite. It is completely limited. We will end, and this idea of time being dominant. The idea that our time is short yet so far fetched will continue, long past your Master's Degree in Psychology ass is in the ground. The matter is if we will regret the way we dreaded over things that became so irrelevant. That became so far fetched because they never came up in our future time line.
It's just so strange that we think we have manipulated time, but it has us wrapped around it's finger.

We will end, but time will keep swallowing things up.
It's all just so strange.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Poetry for the Soul #1

Before I write novels, I'm going to post my poetry. It's nothing special. It's just a collection of words in lines that were separated for no apparent reason. Here we go. 

Erasing You. 
It does not make sense to me
the feeling of needing someone
it's worse than being alone
because once you know what it's like,
the company of another, 
the air you breathe is bitter
your bed is an entire country
the space between your fingers is made of galaxies
I'd rather never have known
the tempo of your heartbeat,
the smell of your skin,
or the length of your eyelashes
because then I would never know
the true feeling of being alone

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Research

I am validly aware that I have not posted to this blog in quite some time. I don't even know the time frame in which my last post falls into. Of course, I could look since it is provided right next to the title. But there is no time for such things. I have research to do and research to tell. The only reason I am paying any attention to this blog is because I need somewhere beyond my personal journals. Somewhere beyond the "My Memoir" application on my laptop. Someone needs to see my writing besides my own biased eyes.
Someone I love and respect dearly told me to write. "Just write, just let things spew out of you". He even quoted Mark Twain, the bastard. " 'Dance like no one is watching, sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth' but I"m also telling you to write like you've never been stuck, write without knowing where it will take you. Just write, simply write" And I took his advice in the lovely journal he gave me. But it turned into a diary. A spot to write down my deepest feelings, not translating them into literature. I would rather not have such personal thoughts published, let alone on an online blog. But then it hit me. The research I had to do wasn't that of looking for literary magazine to publish my poetry, it's for me to find my voice. Somewhere to start, a place in my head that can take my journal thoughts and turn them into a true piece of classical literature.
I want to be an architectural writer. NO, not one that literally writes about architecture. But n architecture meaning creating dimensions to a character. Starting with a foundation and building upon. I looked at the way authors begin their novels. J. D. Salinger opens The Catcher in the Rye with commentary from his main character Holden Caulfield. But it is also a fact that Holden is a translated piece of Salinger's mind. Yes, granted Salinger was a little twisted in the head, but a genius nonetheless. Chuck Palahniuk wrote Invisible Monsters with everything outside of the box. His characters are filled with such mystery, I still cannot understand how he came up with them.
The goal is beyond cliche. No one wants to see the same story line over and over with just a different writing style. I need a character that is unlike anything in literary history. Fitzgerald created Daisy and Gatsby out of the events from the 1920's. With this time period, let's face it, all there is to write about is the detrimental affects of technology. And I'm pretty sure Bradbury already covered that with Fahrenheit 451.
It's all about originality. But what's original anymore? It feels like everything has been done. A friend of mine read The Fault in Our Stars and claimed the ending to be "predictable", she also called the ending to Looking for Alaska. Maybe she's inclined with the gift to guess endings, incredibly stuck up, or she symbolizes a much needed slap in the face for modern writers. That everything we write, every ending we think is clever, and every complex character we create, will be predictable to someone. It will be heard of before because there is bound to be a book or story with some what similar features.
So how deep is the concept of being original? Because every once in a while, we stumble upon a book that blows us away with a concept that no one has seen before. The Hunger Games is twisted, but there is also familiarity: strong female lead, love story, evil antagonist. So that's the key. A perfect mixture of originality and familiarity.
The formula is here, but it's a matter of how well I don't follow it.