swallowing stars

We laid on the grass and
spoke about stars
Musing, wondering, hypothesizing

And then we ate them
Because stars are too difficult to dissect

We act like we don't care
but later we'll taste the vomit
as it burns back up our throats
and laughs at us for not understanding
but still caring

A resolution

I usually avoid writing posts which are primarily about me, but I'm going to right now. I need to express this before I lose my momentum, optimism and selfishness.

Fifteen minutes ago, I was walking to the bookstore, listening to "Do It For Me Now" by Angels and Airwaves.

Some songs grant you power. This one, for example, spouts fiercely vulnerable lyrics. However, I have never associated this song with weakness. It's so empowering because it's so honest. And it moves forward with such an unyielding cadence. Here, the artist admits his weakness and vulnerability, but expressly refuses to remain a victim of his circumstances. This song empowers me, and makes me feel selfish, for better or for worse.

But I digress.

As I walked, I reflected. This semester will likely be my busiest ever.

This is the point where I should probably resolve to give up something big. Like good grades, sleep, or spending time with friends.

However, I refuse.

I resolve to have it all this semester: academic success, delicious deep sleep, and an active social life. No boyfriend though. Ain't nobody got time for that.

YOU'VE CHANGED

I love street art. I love street art that is both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually meaningful.

The other day when I was walking to campus I stumbled upon the street art pictured in this photo. I stopped and stared. When a piece of art arrests my attention to the point that I stop and stare, I consider it good art. If the work of art causes me to keep thinking about it after I've left it, I consider it great art. This was great art.

"YOU'VE CHANGED." When I saw these words spray-painted on the sidewalk, I had no choice but to enter self-reflection mode. The bold and anonymous assertion cut me to the core. YOU'VE CHANGED. The negative ways that I've changed flooded my mind. My filters of rationalization became temporarily disabled, and I saw my whole self. Not just a leg or an ear or an arm, but everything that I am. I've changed. I can't deny it.

But then my mind turned to the leaps and bounds I have made. I have consciously changed destructive aspects of who I am, and every day I work actively to maintain those improvements.

I have changed for the better.

I don't know what the ratios are for how much I've changed for the worse vs. better, but I can confidently say that I have changed for the better. And it felt good to acknowledge that.

It's OK to admit to yourself that you are making progress. Self-reflection need not just be a rebuking and punishing of self. It is essential to admit to yourself where you have changed for the better so you can maintain that progress.

I loved the physical placement of this message "YOU'VE CHANGED." It lies on the sidewalk that people tread every day, a path they travel mindlessly on their way somewhere else. I find it fascinating that the demand for introspection lay on a travelling path, rather than at a destination. 

I think we often choose to have our most significant self-reflecting moments when we reach a destination. Destinations can be expected or unexpected. When we graduate school. When someone close to us dies. When we are somewhere beautiful. When a relationship ends. When huge opportunities fall in our lap. It's times like these that we sit ourselves down and make assessments.

However, it is so important to look inwardly and make small necessary changes as we go. While we're on our way to our destinations. If we do not make assessments of how we've changed as we go, then we will often come to harsh realizations when we reach landmarks. We will see our leg and our ear and our arm for what they are, and we may not be pleased with what we see. So think about it now. YOU'VE CHANGED. How have you changed?

What if you died tomorrow?

What if you died tomorrow?
What if your most recent exchange with that person was your last interaction with them ever?
Did you act according to what you stand for?
It's not too late to fix things today.
Tomorrow's the deadline.

The Social Chameleon/Bubblewrap Phenomenon

Social chameleons scare the crap out of me.
Who are they really? Is there any substance in their cells?

By nature, they're reactive. Having conversations with them is validating because their responsiveness makes you feel heard. But what do they think? What's going on in their mind? Something meaningful, or just a series of reactions leading to adjustments in behavior?

Social chameleons are like bubblewrap. Everybody loves bubblewrap. Bubblewrap is a thrill; it responds to your touch, and interactions with it often leave you feeling satisfied for the moment. I think we can all agree that bubblewrap is a dang good time.

But when it comes down to it, bubblewrap is only filled with air.
And you reach a point where you realize that interactions with bubblewrap aren't an exchange.
You can give, but all that will come of it is a few stocatto pops and then, the tiniest little poof of useless air discharges into the wide expanse of the world.

Happy Birthday Kurt Cobain

Happy Birthday Kurt Cobain.

So I wanted to write something about Kurt Cobain in honor of what would have been his 46th birthday.  But I can't really wrap words around what he was.

So I'm just going to tell you why I like his music, share some words that came out of his mouth, and show you a video. Rest in peace, Kurt Cobain. You're a legend.

I love Kurt Cobain's song-writing. Melody was his top priority. He always reminded his band mates that it was melody first, lyrics second. He liked creating simple melodies that had a childlike accessibility. Yes, a lot of his works have a catchy pop-rock element, but they're ultimately so gritty and raw. I love how one moment Kurt will whisper an enticing throaty melody with Dave Grohl keeping a trusty straight beat, and the next moment, the world pauses for Kurt to scream a beautiful haunting refrain as Grohl comes back in with a thunderous drum fill, propelling the music forward from there on, full throttle. Oh, and feedback. Their glorious feedback.

I love music of Cobain's that explores controversial social themes. He doesn't necessarily offer answers, but he explores. One example is his song "Polly," which is reminiscent of a newspaper article Cobain read about a 14-year-old girl who used her wits to escape the man who abducted, tortured and raped her. Cobain wrote this song from the point of view of the torturer. It's disconcerting and fascinating. 

I love that Cobain's music embodies who he was and what he stood for. I'm not saying that I worship him or that I agree with everything he stood for. I just love that his music is reflective of himself, society and what he thought about it all. 

It can be argued that the way that Cobain wrote his music was more reflective of his worldview than his actual lyrics were.

Cobain wrote the lyrics to many of his songs only minutes before recording them. As a result, a good amount of his lyrics were nonsensical with fragmented messages nestled within. He was unapologetic about songs written in this way.  However, some songs, such as those found on In Utero were "more focused" and "almost based on themes," as Cobain explained it. 

Cobain commented on his lyric-writing in general: "I'm such a nihilistic jerk half the time and other times I'm so vulnerable and sincere. [The songs are] like a mixture of both of them. That's how most people my age are."

Dissonance is a constant in real life. I just love that Cobain noticed dissonance in his own life and in the world, bottled some of it up, and poured it into his music.


"Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster's terms, 'nirvana' means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of punk rock."

“There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fu**ing sad.” 

“Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art.” 

------------------------------------------------------
If you want a glimpse into Kurt Cobain's soul, see the look in his eyes at 4:15. But watch the whole thing.

The Unhealthy Music Addiction: INDIE

INDIE

Do it yourself. Be independent, be diverse, be an outsider.
Explore. Explore a universe, explore a foreign perspective, explore endless tunnels of sound.
Simplify. Be an understated wire of melody woven with texture and understanding.
Evolve. Expand, innovate, integrate, refine.
Be sensitivity and introspection today; be silliness and satire tomorrow.
Be a social commentary on consumer culture, gender roles, short-lived romances, the theatrical nature of 'realism' today. Be a social commentary on social commentary.
Step on a piece of trash, sculpt an elephant out of it. Spend 3 days straight discovering a band. Write an extensive narrative about how subtle his smirk is in blind company. Embrace irony. Re-live a single memory one thousand times. Scribble on used notebook pages to the rhythm of a favorite song. Go outside just to let your skin and mind breathe. Paint abstractions on paper bags. Paint your body. Paint your mind. 
Transcend the world. Create a niche. Create a world.
Be music for the sake of being music.


Some favorites:


Indie Rock: The Smiths, Kings of Leon, The Strokes, Tegan and Sarah, AWOLNATION, Guster, Gotye, The White Stripes, Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beast, Jet, Muse,Vampire Weekend, Dinosaur Jr, Imagine Dragons,The Velvet Underground, Benjamin Gibbard, The Black Keys, Cage the Elephant, Spoon, Beck, Ryan Adams, Of Monsters and Men, The Heavy, The Temper Trap, The Connells, The Killers, The Kooks, Fun, The Format, Flight of the Concords, The Gorillaz, The Shins, Shiny Toy Guns, Eels, Wilco, The Raconteurs, Metric, Lana Del Ray, Foster the People, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, Duffy, Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple, Cowboy Mouth, Paper Tongues, Carolina Liar, Jack White, Rooney, Phantom Planet, Thriving Ivory, Dios Malos, Sondre Lerche, Jack's Mannequin, Hot Hot Heat, Walk off the Earth, The Devil Whale, The Hush Sound, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes

Indie Pop: Passion Pit, Lady Danville, Of Montreal, Sufjan Stevens, Peter Bjorn and John, Dillon, Kimbra, Regina Spektor, The Black Ghosts, Crystal Castles, The New Pornographers, Coconut Records, Mika, Florence and the Machine, Kate Nash, Lily Allen, Imogen Heap, Roison Murphy, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Santigold, Matt and Kim, Lennon and Maisy, Feist, MGMT, Yael Naim, La Roux, Lenka, Lissie, Bloc Party, The Submarines, Charlotte Sometimes, A Fine Frenzy, Postal Service, Operator Please, The Ting Tings, Mates of State, Empire of the Sun, M.I.A., Death Cab for Cutie,Ingrid Michaelson, The Kills


Indie Folk: Bon Iver, Nickel Creek, Modest Mouse, Indigo Girls, Mumford & Sons, Ani DiFranco, Peter Paul & Mary, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes, Alison Krauss, The Open Sea, The Cranberries, The Lovin' Spoonful, Jeff Buckley, Carbon Leaf, Good Old War, Paolo Nutini, Damien Rice, Iron & Wine, Jakob Dylan, Brett Dennen, Matt Costa

White Oleander

White Oleander is a universe-expanding, skin-thickening book. It is rough and empowering. It grants readers a connection to people, both ordinary and extraordinary, with all their frailties, their flaws, their beauty, their games, their will. It is poetically realistic.  Some of my favorite quotes from it:

• Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you and allows your soul room to grow.
•  That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of the words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones.
•  I realized I was exactly where she wanted me, safely unhappy…a prisoner…brewing into an artist, someone she might want to know someday. When all I wanted was for her to see me now.
• This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions.
• That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.
•             Life should always be like this…Like lingering over a good meal. Unfortunately, most people have no talent for it…As soon as they start one thing, they want it to be over with, so they can start on the next.
• The mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don’t know whether you’re going to jump.
•  His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution.
•  A man I wanted like falling.
• Feel the music, Astrid. Don't look at me. Close your eyes and be inside it.
• How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
• The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
• The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.
• I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm church as a monument to loss. Nobody forgot anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.
• We were the wild children with all the talent.

Midnight thoughts at eleven

-The world is hanging-- a thin, fine balance.
  Note how you treat every living thing;
  You have no idea what dark secrets hang behind any carefully crafted smile.
  Someone's world could be on the verge of falling apart, or coming together,
    and the simplest thing you do or say could unravel it all.

-It's painful. It's emotionally draining.
 Knowing how many different sides to a story there are
 Knowing that each pair of eyes sees a completely different world
 Knowing how, as each side of the story is kept to itself, hidden,
   suppressed, silenced, stifled,
   just how much more ugly that makes the reality.
 The reality of the thing changes as time passes,
   while individual interpretations mold each person's thoughts, perceptions,
   actions.
 And those actions affect everyone else in an individual way,
   while their own realities remain suppressed, stifled.
 How it all ripples and ripples and ripples.
 The reality of the thing takes on an ugly shape, a fearsome thing to behold,
   and hope is just a tiny flickering light, far.

HEY MICKEY

OH MICKEY YOU'RE SO FINE, YOU'RE SO FINE, YOU BLOW MY MIND, HEY MICKEY.

Her little legs, rainbow striped leggings and all, move her swiftly around the living room. Everything is happening right now. Why wait to live? She twirls and twirls and twirls. She dances around and around on the huge rugged oval blue carpet, to which she is tiny in comparison.

This rug is her stage; the world is her audience.

The warm light gleaming through the fingerprint-smudged door,
the sound of dishes clattering in the kitchen,
the excitingly abrasive feel of her tiny soft feet meeting the rough carpet for fractions of a second at a time;
it's all part of her performance.

Everything is her audience, everything is part of her act.

OH MICKEY, YOU'RE SO PRETTY, CAN'T YOU UNDERSTAND? IT'S GUYS LIKE YOU MICKEY! OH WHAT YOU DO MICKEY, DO MICKEY. DON'T BREAK MY HEART MICKEY.

This song is the anthem of her existence. It moves her, breathes life into her, charges her with some unknown and previously unchanneled energy.

Who cares what the words mean? Right now, she struggles to write even her name on a piece of paper without writing the "a" backwards. Words don't need to mean too much yet. She'll have plenty of time to get caught up in those later.

Right now, she lives. Alive in the music, she lives fully, completely, unapologetically.

OH MICKEY WHAT A PITY, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. YOU TAKE ME BY THE HEART WHEN YOU TAKE ME BY THE HAND.

Her mother, relentlessly scrubbing a casserole dish in the kitchen, takes a break and smiles at the living room scene as she takes it in. She looks at her daughter. Her blonde, stringy hair is wild as it suspends in the air. She moves deliberately, with no self-awareness at all. She dances fearlessly, unconscious of her audience. Nothing is held back. Perhaps she knows her mom is there watching, perhaps she doesn't. It does not matter to her either way. She is alive.

Be a Filter, Not a Sponge

Hello, world.

So blogging is one of those things I swore I would never do. Along with joining Pinterest, talking to my parents about my love life, and befriending people who like things like Justin Bieber and Jersey Shore. But I've done all those things now, so I figured I could give blogging a try.

My main reason for starting this blog is to organize my thoughts. I LOVE WRITING. I always have. It's therapeutic. I have come to realize that it is the most thorough and productive way for me to sift through my thoughts and discover little golden nuggets of truth. I love it.

For my first post, I thought I'd share one of my favorite quotes ever. It's from the book "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Here it is:

"Be a filter, not a sponge."

In this book, the main character is named Charlie. This quote is advice given to Charlie from a phenomenal teacher. The teacher specifically intends for Charlie to utilize this advice when reading books. I firmly believe that this advice applies to books we read, along with everything else we're exposed to; this including opinions of human beings we respect.

It is so important to develop a way to sense what actually resonates with you, as opposed to instances when something simply shocks you into thinking you believe it.

Authors of novels are such interesting and insightful people. I love reading books and gleaning pieces of wisdom that the authors have nestled within the pages. I always write down quotes as I go, and I try to apply  those things which resonate most with me to my daily life. However, there have definitely been instances when I have read something, been floored by its peculiarity, and taken it for life doctrine simply because the idea was so original and captivating. Just because something shocks you and alters your perspective doesn't mean that it is truth.

In regards to written stimuli, the main point is that I've learned I cannot simply soak up everything I read and let it all affect me equally. I'm all for being exposed to as many aspects of life as I possibly can and letting everything I do in life influence me and shape who I am; however, letting something shape who you are doesn't necessarily equate to including it in your worldview. Letting something shape who you are often means that you're exposed to something, it shocks you, and you decide to reject it and move on.

I believe this also applies to the opinions of people you interact with. Often, a conflict of interest arises when someone I have a lot of respect for forwards an opinion with which I blatantly disagree. I'm not saying I'm more right, or they're more right; that's not the point. The point is that people possess opinions, and just because you revere someone as a person doesn't mean you need to mirror their views of what is truth and what is not. Don't passively let people change you. Be a filter, not a sponge.

Picture a water filter. I'm obsessed with those things.
The unfiltered water is everything you're exposed to. The filtered water is the things that you let affect and change you. The filter is the important part. Here you choose what you let change you. It might seem tedious to refine your filter, because it often takes a lifetime to fully develop. However, I believe it's something worth working on. Realize what things resonate with you, and what things don't. Life is so much more fulfilling when you realize how in control you are of who you become. So do it! Be a filter, not a sponge.