Friday Night Poetry Club

If... 
by Rudyard Kipling


If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The Implications of a Liberal Education on One's (Private) Ruminations

Although the intensity of the darkness is a rather compelling argument, wallowing in my own self pity seems too great, too daunting a task to take heed of the darkness and fall asleep. I apologize in untimely advance because I am talking in flowers and am likely to do so for the rest of this post.
I wonder why.
Who am I writing for at this time of...time--for a lack of better word seeing as how I wading in a pool of dangerously murky waters, in which night literally melts into day, and twilight into morning. Who am I writing for? In this tone of voice? It's far from objective. Objective, maybe in the sense that it lacks visible partialness for one side or another (the sides are undefined as I do not know how to define them). And yet, this post is entirely subjective since this is actually a journal entry that belongs to me. And I am choosing to employ a distinct tone of voice that may be only strictly mine. "Strictly" is such a condescending word in this sense, isn't it? Who am I to contend that everything I write here tonight is original? I am  no stranger to the fruitful practice of finding great ideas and then to take, paste, cut, copy, and delete until fringes of ideas become (the framework for?) my own, or at least what I like to think of as my own--but judging by the number of the personal pronoun "I", "my", and "me" this is a highly biased opinion that should be checked for credibility.
Regardless of the background and credibility of the author (yours truly, in case you dear reader has forgotten), this really isn't a journal entry. Not tonight. I traded my douchey hipster Moleskine for my douchey hipster blog. Does that make it different? Clearly. Infinitely. But judging by my past experience, my private journal-journal entries can be just as douchey and flowery as this blog post that's open to the public. In fact sometimes more so. Usually I don't take the time to publish this shit because, again it raises my douche level by a power of infinity. Thus it pains me to admit that even if it were that every thought I choose to publish is somehow entirely original and of my own, tonight this isn't really just for me. I'm also sharing my private thoughts with anyone who can access the internet (aka. the world excluding some of the elderly or skill-less or isolated or resourceless--a statistic without a number that was acquired from the BBC).
I don't know. It's unclear who I'm writing for. But as long as I choose to publish, it is no longer just for me. Hello there Barthes, you're successfully killing me, you dirty motherfucker.
Anyway. Tangents at 5 in the morning are no better received than tangents at any other given time (ie. 6 in the morning, or perhaps 6:30).
Journalling is something that's supposed to help me sort through my life, decompress, de-confound, de-life. Objectify (or perhaps subjectify) but either way to coalesce into physical existence of a word as compared to a thought of theory (a theory  of thought?). Visible objects that exist in the semi-real-digital world seem more digestible than the non-existent entities that are spun entirely in my mind which is guided by a network of synapses and various chemicals.
My mind. My thoughts. The mind. That is why I'm here tonight. Me--the girl who is constantly trying to psychoanalyze herself so that she can create the strongest defenses and justifications against all slander and libel and other true shortcomings. But this isn't just a defense mechanism--these three words facilitates reconstruction in its highest form, reconstruction of self. Mind over matter. Mind over matter. I've willed myself out of anorexia. Obsessive compulsive disorder. Depression. Addiction. Selfishness. Selflessness. I tell myself that I don't have problems and suddenly I don't. It's magic. Signifier and signified. What comes first? Well, in this case the signified. I wish I thought of this two weeks ago, this could've been a kick-ass paper for Media Aesthetics. Once words are written down, do they assume the position of truthfulness regardless of what they actually embody?
If you ask me about my problems in real life, I'll never admit to them. This is the reason why I journal, why I blog. It's confession. To relax all falsifications of existence. In real life, I live to pretend to be so that you, whoever you are, will never see me vulnerable. But in reality, these are the kind of thoughts that go on in my head all day (the kinds that are destined to prove futile for thinking in the first place).
The difference between pretending and being.
Slim to none if I do say so myself.
Mind over matter.
Mind over matter.
What happens when mental capabilities are reached and matter is greater than mind even if it is temporarily?
That produces an unbelievably noticeable bout of inconsistency.
Interesting how inconsistency is my greatest flaw.
Mind over matter, so long as the mind is stronger than the matter.
Currently, the matter is greater than the mind.
"What is the matter?"
"Nothing. I'm fine."
What is the matter?
To say everything is either diplomatic in the sense that it is non-discriminating or immature in the sense that it is melodramatic (the entire world is leaning towards...well you tell me, the entire world).
But to exclude anything, seems like far too dangerous a risk.
After all, if a word can have such great spin, what about an action? An action out of context must be more dangerous than a missplaced word. Maybe. Maybe not.
...
The unbearable lightness of being.
The unbearable weight of pretending.
Mind over matter.
What if there is no matter left?
What is the matter?
Nothing.
...
I'm slightly distressed.

Sharing is a Virtue.

All of our lives we've been told by our parents to to share--sharing is caring, whatever, whatever, bullshit bullshit bullshit. Before I go on any further, let it be known that this has nothing to do with the Occupy protests, and that I am not a socialist.

But I just read this article about how the author of which deletes his Facebook, and afterwards he realizes that having a Facebook never made his life more fulfilling; in fact, since he deleted it, his life has been more fulfilling. I'm seriously considering taking heed, going the extra mile, and finally deleting my own because of it. I think about doing it once a month if not more. I deactivate it for months at a time. I've been on this track for awhile. But I haven't gotten there. Yet. But I'm setting the date. Dec. 31st, 2011. My personal New Year's resolution--one that is permanently achievable.
But at the same time, I'm reading this article and I think it's funny. It's funny that he still had the notion to share what he did, to publicize that he deactivated his Facebook through a different social medium. I've written about this before, but I never made it to a conclusion. Our generation has an obsession with sharing. But is it so much sharing or are we looking for some sense of validation in the form of recognition. Are we hunting for people who agree, to approve of our statuses, relationships, jobs, education, our friends, our appearances?  If it's not Facebook, it's Twitter, it's Tumblr, it's something else. Look at what I'm dong right now. What is the difference between what I choose to publish on my blog and what I choose to write in my journal?
What is the difference between the thoughts that I want to keep private and those I want to broadcast? Nine times out of ten it's for my own sense of ego--the cynical motive behind most everything--arguably everything--that we do. The thoughts I keep private are kept private for my own benefit--to avoid a bad representation of myself--to save face. And the thoughts I choose to share, I convinced myself might be of some social value, entertainment, or just thoughts that I can't fathom on my own, that need collaborative feedback.
As I'm thinking about it, I actually don't think this obsession with sharing is limited to our generation, we've just been the best at it so far. Before the Internet, there was broadcast television, before the news, there were newspapers, before newspapers, there was gossip. People want to be in the know. And people who are in the know want everyone else to know they're in the know...
I can never finish my thoughts on this. Gotta run.

"Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one, always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you."

-Elizabet Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

The Black Hole of Possibility

“To describe this process of getting acquainted with people, with a culture different from our own is to recognize the experience as liberalizing. We are all limited in our understanding of our own conduct and that of our neighbors because we see everything by the preconceptions offered by our own culture. It is a task of education to provide a viewpoint from which the educated person may free himself from the limitations of these preconceptions.We are all islanders to begin with. An acquaintance with another culture, a real and deep acquaintance, is a release of the mind and the spirit from that isolation. It is to learn a universal language.”

-Robert Redfield, Chicago anthropologist

I can do whatever I want to do--be whoever I want to be. So what happens if I don't know what I want?

The possibilities are endless.

Well, don't you think that's just a little bit exorbitant?

There are so many options that I feel limited...

trapped inside my own.

ImaginaAAAaaaation.

"I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!"
— A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams


Have you ever wondered what would happen if everything you ever imagined as a child were real?
Because it would be awesome. It would rain apple juice. Sofas would be made out of gummy bears. Dirt would be made out of crushed oreos. 
And people wonder why I was fat as a kid. 
I never really believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy--although I did applaud their practice of rewarding children-- but even without them, my fabled world of adolescence was straight up magical (and delicious).
At the same time, it was horrible--terrifying--scary.
I mean, it would really suck if every time I flushed the toilet a monster would grab me and take me with him (or her) into a world of smelly darkness. It would really suck if every time I closed my eyes in the shower a demon that resembled Paige's former love interest (Charmed reference) would take me with him into some undetectable cave in the underworld. It would really really suck if at the stroke of midnight the clothes in my closet would come alive and try to strangle me. And although it might be kinda cool if dinosaurs really were my best friends or if street lights really did have feelings, what happens when my dino pal tries to eat me? Or when I realize I don't care about what streetlights have to say?
I guess if things went sour, I could always revert back to the if-I-can't-see-you-you-can't-see-me trick or take cover under my blanket that doubles as an invisibility cloak and invincible fortress.
Fast forward thirteen years...who am I kidding, I believed in the Toilet Monster well into the fifth grade...minor detail. Fast forward roughly thirteen years and now I have to face real problems (ie. Acne and student loans). It's no longer cute to be fat. It's no longer acceptable to sing while you use a public bathroom (and then run away after flushing). And no matter how long I hide under my blanket, all of my monsters will still be there waiting for an opportune moment to kidnap something bigger than me--my future. 
Now I'm eighteen and I'm finally starting to understand that until now, all of my battles have been fought for me. A monster never got close enough to eat me because I had an older sister, a mommy, a daddy, grandparents, and comfort food to protect me from harm's way. I've never really been alone. And even if I was alone, I never really felt alone.
Well.
In two months, I'm going to college.
College.
Is that real life? Or is that some kind of pre-packaged cookie?
I wish it were a cookie because then I'd know what to do with it (eat it, le duh). Unfortunately it's real life and I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea what I'm going to do without my wonderful hometown that I love even more than processed food. And I'm afraid that when I turn off the lights, I won't be scared, I'll be lonely.
But these anticipations are just possibilities entangled in something much bigger--because college isn't a cookie, it's magic. Sure I'm scared shitless, but everything that I ever wanted to accomplish, anything that I ever wanted be real can become tangible through secondary education. I'm glad I'm not a kid anymore. Because now I know that I'm psyching myself out. Monsters aren't real. I made them up. And although I don't want to leave my hometown, my friends, my memories behind, I can't wait until these two months are up and college transforms from magic to reality.

If the world were smaller...

I am completely obsessed.
Addicted.
Strung out.
I love to travel.
I want to see the world.
There's so much world to see.
How will I possibly have enough time?
And yet if the world were any smaller it would lose infinite amounts of appeal.
The fact that the unknown can be known, found, touched, tasted, experienced is incredibly tantalizing.
What in the world am I going to do with myself?
There's so much world to see.
Where should I go first?