I Refuse

I refuse to let it break me down. What's the point? I refuse to waste emotions on something that is not worth my time. I'm learning...

Salvaging the Wreck

Today was a bit of a struggle for me. I was irritable, moody, and in pain for part of the day at work, and it was a little stressful in the morning. Regardless, I made it through and now I am back at home. The more and more I stay at my job, the more and more I realize that I'm not just satisfied with a bachelor's degree. I need to go back to school. I really do. And part of me has this funny feeling that once I go back, I will stay in academia for a long, long time. I yearn to be challenged again in a way that pushes my brain to its limits. I yearn to be victorious when I work my ass off. I miss the feeling of just "getting it," when "getting it" means grasping a multitude of concepts and applying them to achieve an even higher understanding of something. It's almost like a religion, this education is. For me, academia is very spiritual in that you struggle through something very difficult, such as a text or a concept, and once you are able to grasp it, you reach this nadir where you suddenly see things as they are. I recall as an English major, grasping concepts from obscure deceased philosophers as I pored over the texts and realizing that this was truly a spiritual and knowledge-based awakening in the truest sense. I miss that.

This picture is of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. I thought it was a fitting picture for this post. This is a marvelous place to go if you want to educate yourself (or re-educate yourself) about the solar system, how seasons work, how tides ebb and flow. Although the details are very scientific, I found it to be very poetic in a way. The galaxy as well as the universe is too large for the human mind to fathom. Time is calculated in light-years. We went on a beautiful Sunday morning and I found it to be very peaceful up on top of the hills.

Chronicling My Life

Inspired by a blogger I know, I've realized that I haven't really taken many pictures of the last few years of my life. I've done so much, yet haven't documented much of it and I do want to remember all of the best years of my life. While I realize this period of my life is quite painful at times, I know that ten, twenty years down the line, I'm going to look back and remember this as the best time of my life. It's a gut feeling I have. So I've made it a priority now to document the beautiful, ugly, unique, stark elements of my life that make it truly my own. Instead of using this blog to mull over the unpleasantries of my my life, I am going to try to turn it into something beautiful. A way to remember that even through the darkest rain, there is at least one element that makes my life beautiful.

I've always had a thing for candles. There's something about the incandescent glow, the way I can stare into the tiny, flickering flame forever. There's something eternally beautiful about a flame. It moves as though it is alive, and even when the flame is still, it still breathes a fiery life of its own. Candles have a soothing affect on my nerves and I remember fondly in high school I would light one up and read for hours on my bed.

In a world where everything is in transit, there is a lovely permanence associated with candles.

Jonesing for Something Else

Today, my three favorite coworkers and I stepped out for lunch like we do everyday in order to get out of the office and get some fresh air. We went to the Thai place we frequent, right down the street on Wilshire Blvd. and sat down in the tiny, familiar quarter where we already knew what each of us was going to order. The chatter consisted of each of us taking our turn, bitching about the insignificant and meaningless battles we fight every day. Then it became silent. I gazed into my coworkers' faces, all of them, defeated. I realized that was what I looked like every day to them during lunch. I believe that we have all reached the point that even lunch isn't enough solace in order to muster our strength to get through the rest of the day. The pregnant pause between the morning and the afternoon no longer provides us with that skip in our step it once did, when we would saunter up to our building and ride all 25 floors up, jubilant and energized, ready to face the afternoon and the rest of the week.

There was a blank, slack-jawed expression in all of my intelligent and charismatic coworkers and it pulled my spirits down immensely. They don't deserve to feel like this, day in and day out. I can't help but wonder when it will all change for us.

Black Mood

I like black hair. I like black clothing. I like black shoes. But I do not like black moods, which is unfortunately what I'm in right now. There has to be more to life than just going through the motions. How many times have I read that sentence in every post-adolescent novel/coming-of-age story? It sounds so ridiculously cliche, and nowadays, everything I think seems to be so unfortunately cliche but I find myself wondering what the meaning of my life is every single day. It has be to something more than what I'm doing right now. I feel as though I'm capable of more, but I'm not sure of what. I then ponder if I've just overestimated my abilities for the past 23 years of my life and that maybe this is it. It can't be. If this was it, I would not be this dissatisfied. I can't seem to find a permanent solace from my mental turmoil in anything. It's almost like dealing with the aftermath of a failed relationship. It's always on your mind, following you wherever you go. You can try to drown out the pain and the depression with copious amounts of alcohol, your friends, family, etc. but when you are alone in the silence of your thoughts, sometimes the stark truth of your own shortcomings and failures are just too much to handle.