Midnight Ramblings.

 I Really, Really Hate...

Society. Martyrdom. Being caged. Being a teenager. Expectations. Reality. Living in America. Consumerism. High School. Being forced to do things I don’t want to do. Nostalgia. Arbitrary requirements. Feeling useless. The constant push for “progress.” Insomnia. Building for the sake of building. The impulse to destroy and not preserve. The fact that money is the main contributor to our well-being. Having to constantly compete. Absurd gas prices. Greed. Hypocrisy. Power-hungry politicians. Cars that don’t have cassette players. The illusion of freedom. Television. The concept of time. Riding the bus. Getting older. Growing up. Social networking. Vindictive people. Capitalism. Tax breaks for the rich. The fact that I’m not seven years old and playing spies in the front yard with Matthew and Sophie. Responsibility. Feeling incompetent. Shopping. Fox News. Intolerance. Bullying. Being stuck in one place. Losing innocence. Being told that your opinions matter, and then being looked down upon for voicing your opinions. Losing friends. Forgetting. Planning ahead. People that judge others based on their musical taste. Racism. Homophobia. The fact that people change. Yearbooks, and being asked to sign them. Human nature. Celebrity hype. Tabloids. Kindle. MLA Format. Group projects. Society’s inability to value beauty. The way we define success. Monotony.
                  
                         Practicality.

Maybe I have dreams that extend beyond the conventional, that transcend expectations and sensibility and what’s plausible. Maybe I want to graduate high school early and be an exchange student in Australia for three months. Maybe I want to go to Oxford after high school and study History and Modern Languages and complete my fourth year in Italy and move back to the US to go to law school at Stanford so I can move to San Fransisco and work at the NRDC so I can save the planet and sue the hell out of the bastards that destroy it with their recklessness, or push for changes in environmental protection laws. Maybe I just want to take a year off from everything and travel and live as far away from here as possible so I can understand who I am and and actually know what it means to be alive.

                                    But I forgot.

That’s unrealistic. All of it. Because we don’t have the money, because going to Oxford is too complicated and unrealistic and besides, living in England for three years is too far fetched, and History and Modern Languages is a pointless degree that you can’t possibly do anything with. Because there’s no time to study abroad, because the only way to be successful in this screwed up society is to finish high school, go to college, get a degree in something useful regardless of whether or not you actually enjoy it, get a job, make money, start a family, keep making money, pay your bills, and repeat the cycle.

Because in a world where money seems to determine our degree of happiness and well-being, where the overall goal in life is to make money and be successful in order to get by, in a world that is driven by greed and selfishness and power-hungry elites who are pushing for constant “progress,” there’s not enough room to do what you love. There’s no way to break the cycle of work/eat/work/sleep/work.
God forbid I want to live for myself and do what I want and love and feel passionate about. God forbid I want to know what freedom tastes like.

Maybe that’s why we always want to be children again when we start to get older. Because the only time you can feel absolutely free is when you have no idea that freedom even exists, that it’s something tangible and fragile and precariously malleable. It’s easier to feel happy when you don’t understand things, when the answers to everything are given to you and you just accept them without thought, without question; when the idea that such a care-free existence can be taken away from you never even begins to cross your mind. Because when you’re that young, it’s okay to be ignorant.

I think the only time we are truly free is when we’re little kids; like everything else, it fades with age. I don’t think I’ve ever felt happiness so pure as when I was in that front yard, playing spies with Matthew or running around the neighborhood with Sophie and not caring, not worrying, just innocent and small and simple and untainted by the world, by age, by problems, by anything. Just living.

I hate that society takes that away from us.

This Doomsday Stuff is Getting Old.

forget tomorrow.

i just want december 21, 2012 to get here already. so i can laugh when everyone in the world breaks into chaos about something that’s not even happening and was never going to happen. or watch in amazement and rapture as the world crumbles into dust around me; the christmas tree would topple over, every window in the house would shatter. it’d be like one huge earthquake, except this time the whole world will go down.

an entire planet obliterated, a civilization wiped out. our whole existence vanished, just like that.

basically, i just want 2012 to get here so 1) people will stop talking about it, and 2) so i can see if it actually happens or not. because honestly, i don’t know if it’s real or not, but if it is, would it really be such a tragedy?

it’s not like the apocalypse is anything new, and i don’t mean that in the sense that it’s been so over-dramatized and over-used in the media. what i mean is, it happens every day. every hour somebody dies; a life ends, their everything comes to a close. to them, a world has ended. probably every second, someone kills a spider with their shoe or a broomstick or a piece of tissue paper. my point is, the apocalypse is more of a personal thing than anything else, and the world itself doesn’t necessarily have to be thought of in a physical way. it’ll all happen to us at some point, so why freak out about it? if we’re going to die, we might as well do it in some epic, monumental, cataclysmic way.

wouldn’t it be ironic if people died due to mass panic and nothing even happened? how silly; you can’t run from the world.

people worry about earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and tsunamis, but these are naturally occurring things. the only thing we as human beings can do is accept it and let nature take its course, because we don’t own this planet, this planet owns us. we’re just visitors here, and we should enjoy and appreciate the time we have here instead of wasting it in fear.

what’s interesting to me is how much the mayans knew about space and time and astronomy; how they were able to predict so much of history. and here we are, thousands of years later, sitting around trying to figure it all out. sitting here, trying to learn it all over again. if that’s not proof that society is, in fact, deteriorating in intelligence, then i don’t know what is; the fact that we are moving so far ahead technologically, but can’t wrap our heads around discoveries and lifestyles from thousands of years ago is staggering. technological advancement shows for nothing other than our astounding ability to single-handedly destroy the planet we live on.

if god brought people onto this earth, he’s obviously an idiot, because the world just wasn’t made for human inhabitance. if god brought us onto the world, he must have wanted it to explode.

no, i don’t believe in all this apocalyptic nonsense, but you never know. i guess it’s one of those things where we have to wait to find out.

and in the meantime, stop making history channel documentaries about it. they exist for no other purpose but to scare people into getting them ratings, and they are the most absurd things in the world.

With Water Like Silver.

when at first the eye is caught,
i am perfect.
not yet tainted with the hate of society, i am what i look;
pure, humble, unmarked by the tangled, complex web of
humanity.
everyone i meet, everyone i know, everyone i’ve seen,
those who came before;
to them i am blind, and i don’t need any of it.
i am whole, and i am
beautiful.

toss a stone, and watch the ripples change shape.
disrupt the illusion.
transformation.

glancing back, i am
fragmented;
hundreds of pieces upon pieces upon pieces,
all mismatched and scattered,
bruised by the notion that any of it mattered,
if you could see beyond the reflection, through this face once mistaken for
perfection,
into the contours of my mind, you would no longer have
any reason to admire.

but you can’t.
for this is merely an image;
hollow and empty;
but nonetheless we still
watch.
we still worship,
still stare until our eyes forget to look elsewhere.

we will not drown in our self-love;
and we will fail to take notice
until we waste away and there is not even a
shadow left to look
back at.

“It is very sad to me that some people are so intent on leaving their mark on the world that they don’t care if that mark is a scar.”

I wrote this a year ago for an English assignment, but I find it to be especially relevant after the tragedy that just happened in Arizona.

                                           ***

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen" - Winston Churchill.

I love this quote, because I think it has a lot of parallels with our society today, and really just life in general. People tend to think of courage as having the guts to "take a bullet for someone," or go skydiving, or give a speech in front of thousands of people. Courage has always been mistaken for action, because that's what people are  exposed to the most; every day we watch television and hear stories about the soldiers in Afghanistan or the dude who climbed to the top of Mount Everest and think, "Wow man, that guy must be so brave." But there are so many other aspects of courage that are often overlooked, and the ability to "stand up and speak" isn't necessarily the most powerful of them all.

There are two forms of cowardice that are prominent in American society; apathy and ignorance. People who are afraid to stand up and fight for what they believe in are apathetic; maybe they just couldn't care less about what's going on in the world, but usually it's the mindset of "well, it's not like anything I do is going to make a difference," that stops them. That's fear; fear of failure, of not being heard.

Ignorance is just the opposite; it's having the ability to shout out your own opinion but then failing to sit down and listen to what the other side of the discussion has to say. People hate what they fear and what they don't understand, so they push it away and ignore it. Because maybe, just maybe, if you listen to what everyone else has to say, your opinion might change, and that scares people too. It's a fear of being wrong, and a lot of people can't accept that.

When looked at closely, it's all just layers, and you have to keep peeling and peeling to find what's really underneath. These are just masks people wear to cover up their insecurities. All the extremist, right wing "teabaggers" waving around picket signs and screaming about the evils of Obama's Presidency, and making a crosshairs map targeting people who support something they don't agree with (which, SHOCKER, can actually lead to violence), think they're so courageous by exercising their freedom of speech, but they're not, because they can't find the strength in them to sit down, shut up, and listen to what the rest of the world has to say. I think ignorance is the most lethal thing any society can fall into, because when people stop listening to each other, it becomes a continuous cycle of arguments and nothing ever gets solved. And falling into that cycle is what I'm afraid of every day.