Tell Me I’m Gonna Be Fine

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distance

“Are you going to be okay?”
“You doing alright?”
“I’m here if you wanna talk.”

It’s great to have friends who will be there for you in your darkest hour.

Funny… since when was this my darkest hour? FALSE ALARM, people.

I know I can get really insecure about my best friend leaving for college for months at a time, but I’m sure it’ll be okay. This is the second time he has had to leave for five months… and this time it’s different.

This time, I can rest assured knowing that he’ll come back to me… and still be perfectly happy in my arms.

…oh, did I mention I’m hopelessly in love with my best friend?

He’s my boyfriend of three years, the best friend of a lifetime, and my eternal soulmate.

Eh…What’s a few months? 🙂

Suffocating

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In just one word, I can aptly describe my month of December:  Suffocating.

There are just some days where you feel the world closing in around you… As if you looked up one day and the blue sky was absent.

Picture this:  You found yourself in an enclosed space.

This space that you–and ONLY YOU–are trapped in… Tell me about it.  Describe it for me.  Give me a visual.

Is it brick?  Metal encasing?  Fur?  Wood?  Netting?

Regardless of material… You’re trapped.  So, how do you get out?

How do you escape when your heart hurts so much it hurts to breathe?

You better hurry up.  The space is getting smaller and smaller by the second…  And no one wants to see you get squeezed into a pulp, because it’s messy to clean brains off the floor.

(…Just something to think about)

Bring on the Unexpected

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You hear it all the time–life throws unexpected things at you, all the time.

Like, the other day the only thing I had planned was to laze around my house and play various Legend of Zelda games. Then I realized my senior year of high shool was beginning in about eight days, and I hadn’t touched the summer work.

Great start on all my APs, huh?

But really. This is my last marching band season.. For me, and all the fellow band geeks out there, this is a helluva realization.

I’ve always cherished being good at music. But I’ve never liked solo stuff that much–being a part of a group, voicing my part in a sea of fellow marchers, makes me feel at home. Being a Low Brass section leader has forced me to see how basic you start out as in Freshman year. How important it is to start on the right foot (ha… literally. No? Anyone?). I really can’t wait to come back to school next year and see how much these boys have improved. 🙂

You know what, though? …back to the unexpected stuff.

My whole entire life changed–for the better, of course–when some idiot upperclassman kept bumping into me my Freshman year. I didn’t want to be the annoying Freshman pest who corrected an upperclassman, so I just brushed myself off, apologized, and continued on with my business. But after the second, third, fourth collision, I finally told him off.

“We’re in set #14, which is a rotatin diamond. You’re rehearsing set #15, which is backwards marching 4 steps at an 8 to 5.”

He looked up, slightly annoyed, as if I had startled him out of a dreamstate or something.

I pulled out my drill and showed him. I could tell he really didn’t care that much, but he thanked me anyway, and did it correctly the next time. I brushed it off, and approached my section leader later that day. I asked who the upperclassman was–pretty sure I referred to him as “that idiot”–and my section leader told me his name and to ignore him, I had been right.

Now, three years later, that idiot is my best friend and boyfriend of two and a half years…. and still going strong.

Keep it coming, life. Bring it on.

Cause the “unexpected” can be damn good news.

Knowledge–Even in the Summer!

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It’s summer, and I’m working off my tail feathers to get better grades once September rolls around again.

Throughout this process of book after book, I try to tell myself there’s a worthy goal awaiting at the finish line.

I just hope that I’ll continue to be true to myself throughout this race.

 

I’ve seen so many young teens my age and slightly older lose themselves to “getting ahead”.  When we first put our noses into books, it was for a worthy cause—to get that A and a gold sticker to boot.  But now?  Now some only care enough to boast and brag their SAT score or spout off some pretentious vocabulary they only learned to spite people in their classes.

 

I consider myself a healthy pursuer of knowledge.  (Yeah, I’ve never really studied this hard before, with so many trials and hoops to jump through with college admissions –AHHHHHHHHHHH– this summer..)

And I hope to stay true to myself and the knowledge I pursue.  Because KNOWLEDGE IS FUN.

Knowing HOW the universe works, WHY it works that way, and WHAT we as humans can do to positively impact the world is so incredibly fascinating, my average vocabulary is rendered speechless. 🙂

 

I DON’T CLAIM TO BE SMART!  AT ALL! 😀  But I’m happy where I am and where I’m headed.

 

And I know, in my pursuit of knowledge, that:

There are always going to be people in this world who are better at things than me.

There are always going to be people in this world who are taller than me.

There are always going to be people in this world who are more fortunate than me.

There are always going to be people in this world who are the opposition to everything I stand for.

There are always going to be people in this world who are ignorant of everything around them.

There are always going to be people in this world who are just downright pitiful.

 

But I ALSO know:

There are always going to be people in this world who are worse at things than me.

There are always going to be people in this world who are shorter than me.

There are always going to be people in this world who are less fortunate than me.

There are always going to be people in this world who are advocating on the same side as me.

There are always going to be people in this world who are acutely aware of everything around them.

There are always going to be people in this world who are just downright amazing.

 

With my average vocab?  I’d say our world is a pretty freaking sweet place to be.

 

Image

Soundtrack ambiance for today:

Harry Potter and the Philospoher’s (Sorcerer’s) Stone, film score

Performed by: Prague Philharmonic Orchestra

http://grooveshark.com/s/Harry+Potter+And+The+Philosopher+s+Sorcerer+s+Stone+Film+Score+Harry/4htGGO?src=5

&

Suddenly I See

Performed by: KT Tunstall

http://grooveshark.com/s/Suddenly+I+See/4yAaaO?src=5

Rekindling a Passion…

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The saddest part? The saddest part is that I didn’t even notice I had stopped doing something I love so very much…

I guess it doesn’t occur to someone as that. Unless you’re Emily Dickinson or Mozart, there’s really nothing to track your small habits, your tenderness towards a field of study, your rich passion for a path of idealogy.

Until today, I had forgotten how much I enjoy reading.

Perhaps…No, definitely… This love was clearly stifled and slowly choked out of practice when my studies hit me like a bucket of freaking cold water. I was drowning in so much non-fiction and badly chosen classic literature. In AP Language & Composition, it was pulling goddamn teeth to get through books… So what they say about ruining the classics is a bit true. I don’t mind analytically tearing the works apart piece by piece–it interest me, quite frankly–but the works themselves were dry and uninteresting.

The Great Gatsby had one chapter of thrilling climax….Yes, you know the one I mean–the one where the characters FINALLY address the elephant in the room!!!)…. Aaaaaand that was it.

The Scarlet Letter was dry as Hell. Though I loved Pearl and Chillingsworth, Dimmesdale was a bastardly coward that didn’t at all deserve what he got in the end–acceptance into Heaven. What a load… I mean, what did he do RIGHT?

Macbeth was awesome but short and drawn out… Certainly not my favorite or least favorite Shakespeare play. Ethan Frome was just downright sad and hormone-stifling.

…But ‘lo and behold–SUMMER.

I grabbed Thinner by Stephen King off the shelves and consumed it (ironically) ravenously. I then snatched The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger off the shelves and finished it in a matter of hours. With my bookmark stuck a quarter of the way through Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation eeeeep) and another bookmark holding up my place in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, I looked at the clock and saw that barely any time has passed since my library binge!

How could I have forgotten my absolute love and passion for the written word?

Snipping at the Tether

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And then I realized–it’s not grounding me to Earth at all! It has it’s own secret anchoring place, far below what we know is ground.

Today I’ve gotta suck it up.

Okay, to make that sound more polite–today I must humble myself. I must make do with what I have been given.

I laugh hollowly, forcing myself to swallow my pride and imagine instead the glory of what lies in the future. I try to imagine myself, many years in the future, laughing at the trifle insignificant problems of my present life.

It will be laughable. How small my problems must seem to future me; yet, in the face of uncertainties in the future, they are all I–the me of the present–have to cling to. My problems are the anchor upon which I tether myself to the Earth with.

But as I inhale each new breath, I see the growing necessity of exhaling my pride and insecurities to rid myself of the tether. For, which each new breath I inhale, I realize the single truth of my false belief.

My problems are not what tethers me to Earth. Like any other human, I suspected that my problems are what made me imperfect. I suspected my problems humbled me in a way that was intrinsically human. But I was wrong. The more I grasp this tether, the more I realize where it anchors me to…

….My own inner Hell.

So it’s about time I grab the hunting knife, pair of scissors, sharp stone–whatever’s strong enough–and break my way free. It doesn’t mean I have to change anything about myself. No, I must only look to change my perspective of the problems around me. Suck it up, humble myself, make do with what I’ve got.

“Get busy living, or get busy dying.” — Andy Dufresne, “Shawshank Redemption (1994)”

The Reward

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We all strive towards a common goal.  Promotion and Upgrades… Acceptance to College… More Money… Hottest Partner… Higher Social Status…  We all strive towards the goal of bettering ourselves in any way necessary.

The constant potato-sack race of life.  The constant competitive force that drives all meanings towards a common end.

Salvation in the spotlight of your dreams.  Just reaching for the carrot at the end of the line, crawling along to our destinations.  Reaching, every aching steep, towards that reward that makes you salivate.  Reach–reach–strain–reach more–just a bit more–goddammit, REACH!

We want what we can’t have.  One foot in front of the other…GODDAMMIT…One foot in front of the other…Left, Right, Left… …Yet we still try as hard as hell to obtain higher glories. “One foot…in front…of the…other.”

In the end, the reward is bittersweet.  It makes you wonder, after all the struggle, was the reward really something to reach for in the first place?  Or could you have reached even further?

Humans like to set limits on imagination; limits on gain by social status; limits on goal setting; overall…. We set limits on “obtainable” rewards.

((Rant inspired by “The Long Walk” by Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King))