"Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own." Up until about 3 weeks ago, this was one of those lines in a great song that I just glazed over. I just didn't think about it. But now that I do, this is the most relevant, most important line I have read in a long time. I'm an artist in this world and the landscape around me is the canvas. In other news, I want to reach to goals that I have for myself, but I'm too afraid I'll plunge in, then come back and everyone I knew and loved will be gone. I'm afraid I'll reach a dead end, want to turn around, but the road of love which I built for myself on the way out will be gone. I love someone more than I can ever know, but I wish I could know what they were thinking. It seems like we feel the same way, but doubt each other. How could we love each other this much?

“Would you like to know why you’re depressed?
Hmm?
well, I’ll tell you.
It’s really very simple.
the answer might ever surprise you.
The reason you’re depressed is because:
Your Life Sucks.
It’s true.
Your life is unrecognizable.
It’s nothing like you thought it would be,
and the level of disappointment that you feel is unbearable.
Perhaps the wort part
is that you feel copletely powerless to change anything about it.
So you wait.
Day in
day out
waiting
hoping for something to change.
and all the while
the problems of your life
grow in number
and complexity
and nothing changes.
We become desperate
for something,
anything,
that will make us feel better.
we become pleasure junkies.
Food.
to feel less empty
Sex.
to feel connected
Drugs.
to feel nothing
Spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need.
Booze.
to forget
We watch infomercials.
because we don’t sleep.
and we remain unhappy.
with even more problems than before.
because pleasure
and happiness
aren’t the same thing
Clearly,
waiting for things to change
isn’t the answer
so what is?
We have to change.
really change.
Nothing will change until you do.
Start with one thing
that you hate about yourself
and change it.
The truth is,
the longer you wait to change these things
the worse they become
Haven’t you been the victim of your life long enough?
Stop waiting to be motivated.
Stop waiting for magic.
make some.”

Is it not fair to say that the people with money must spend it?

I was running the other day in the streets of a small city in Maine. I saw a group of three 20-30 year-olds walking on the sidewalk so, instead of trying to squeeze by them, I ran in the street to pass them. Suddenly, before I realized it, they were screaming obscenities at me like "You fat bitch" "Go to hell" "Yeah, keep running". My first reaction was to look back and yell, "well, look who's running, idiots", but I held back. I kept running, angry about the whole situation for the rest of my run. Why would people lash out at a random stranger? Not just a random stranger, actually-a stranger who was trying to be NICE to them?

One suspicion I had was that they could tell that I was a college student. They were frustrated with the economic and social class difference between me and them and they decided to take it out on me.

Another possible factor that made them so bitter was the anonymity of the situation. Just like another car in a line of traffic, it is ok to hold your horn down in frustration. It's not like you will ever see the person who you're beeping at ever again. If the car in front of you isn't solving the problem, then they are part of the problem.

In reality, I feel as if this problem is one of the key problems in our world. The only people who we are willing to be nice to in this world is people that we can understand and connect to and understand. Anybody else, whether they are strangers on the street or people across the world suffering, are too disassociated from our lives to deserve our respect and love.

If you can not associate with hunger and poverty, then it would be just as impossible to say "I want to feed people going hungry" or "I want to donate to those less fortunate than I" as "I want to put a large rock at the bottom of the ocean". Random examples aside, we cannot be motivated to do something that we cannot associate with.

Instead, we should try to find similarities in things that seem utterly foreign to us. Instead of hating utter strangers who see life differently, we must see the humanity in us all. This is what connects us and what allows every single person to be connected.

Most everyone has a hatred and an aversion towards strangers. I spent 14 years of my life avoiding conversation with strangers just because that is what I was taught. It is socially acceptable to not love and not respect people who don't know you. And, as soon as you don't love and don't respect strangers, they don't love nor respect you either.

It is as if all of humanity is a large, hollow sphere. The atoms of the sphere are human lives and empty space is hatred. We love those close to us, our neighbors next to us on the sphere, however we pool our hatred for those distanced from us. We pool this space in the middle of the sphere, so that there is a large space between us and the other side of the sphere. As the other side looks in towards us, all they can see is the vast space of bitterness and hatred between us and them.

We need to stop feeling as if people all around us aren't people, just like us. We need to understand that it is ok to talk to, ok to respect, and ok to love perfect strangers. Instead of hurling obscenities at people running past you, look them in the eye and smile. If they don't smile back, don't feel anger towards them, just know that the more hatred and anger you absorb without repercussion, the less hatred and anger there will be in the world.

Go Forth

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank
submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the
darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you
chances.
know them, take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death
in life,
sometimes.
and the more often you
learn to do it,
the more light there will
be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have
it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in
you.

Sometimes I wonder
Do goodbyes exist?
If only I had known.

I wish I knew everything and everyone. I wish I was connected with the closest of my comrades. I wish I knew exactly what they are thinking. Why can't voices be heard? Do people not know what they are thinking, or are they too afraid to admit it. Sometimes even when they do admit it, you can't even hear them.

Sometimes you have to wake up and get out of bed. It's tough, but then you can enjoy the day. I just woke up. Is it really worth it?

Yesterday I didn't feel it but today, man, it hurts.

That was a year well spent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgORGvC1dTg&feature=fvwrel

"We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us."

http://xkcd.com/137/

What would you tell me
if I told you I lived in a tilted world.

Make it through
Don’t ever stop being who you are
Because your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship you will ever have in your life.

Also, imagine this:
our universe IS expanding. We can see it through the greater redshift of further away galaxies, etc. It's not expanding around anything-you can imagine the universe as a sheet of rubber being stretched in all directions. Doesn't this mean the space around us is expanding too? Everything everywhere is expanding?

This obviously has an effect in the scale of the universe, but will it have any effect on a smaller scale? Would we even be able to tell if everything was expanding, including matter? What if this were true? Would we see a redshift in light?

I plan to tackle this at some point in my college career.

for a minute, you could see right through me. I'll never let that happen again.

Everyone that reads this should listen to Cloud Cult.

I love life and I love everyone more than they will ever know.

Why hate when you can love?

Is it even possible to love everyone in this world? Love is not a feeling you have toward someone but rather a commitment. I wish I could say I were committed to the entire world.

What if I said our explanation of our world makes sense. But it only makes sense in our minds, where we can break the world up into discrete pieces that interact with each other. Experimental physics can agree with theoretical physics in some situations, such as relatively simple, coherent systems under times that are much less than infinite and initial conditions that have finite, distinct variations.

However, the universe is not this easy. Here, we are dealing with systems which have an infinite amount of initial conditions and very large times. One small difference in initial conditions permanently alters the slope of our future line; one small difference in our starting conditions changes the outcome completely. Physics requires us to be able to measure initial conditions accurately in order to obtain an accurate result. Physics as we know it is impossible to use in a chaotic system-impossible to use in the universe we live in.

Sometimes you just have to let go.

I wish I could understand every single aspect of my life, including the ones I have never lived without.

I wish I could describe perfectly who I am and what I want to be and understand where I am going.

I wish we could look into matter infinitely so and prove that our fate is set.

I wish I could understand what religion's motives are. I can't understand God's will by listening to my pastor. That's my pastor's interpretation of God's will. I can only understand god through prayer. And how do I know that what I am "understanding" is not really my own thoughts reflecting back into my consciousness?

I wish I could talk with even the most hostile and allow us to share views peacefully.

I wish I knew if time exists everywhere. If time exists forever, then our lifetime is an infinitely small flash. With the same argument, if you step out of time, you will exist for all eternity. In a similar way, if space exists forever, then, compared to the whole, any amount of matter that we can think of is infinitely-impossibly small.

To search for any meaning here would mean answering some of these questions.

Any ideas?

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
- Mark Twain

I love this world more than I could ever explain.

What is missing someone? What is distance? It is space between you and me, but when we’re sitting next to each other, there is space, too. Communication, touching, feeling may decrease this space, but our souls are always separate. I just see it as more space when I’m alone on a mountain top on the other side of the world. I breathe, and I know you’re breathing through 12,000 miles (or more) of molten rock. I am just as connected with all my family and all my friends, and the entire world. Space separates us now, but space always separates us, sometimes more than others. Maybe love is just missing someone who is sitting next to you? Maybe love is longing to be reunited with the person sitting next to you?

I reached the top of a mountain the other day. It was snowy, and I was alone, but I thought of this. I’m thousands of miles away from anyone I may know, but I continue longing for life to reunite me with all whom I love.

What is gone is not lost. All the world is simply what we see and think. What's so important? What's the difference between memories created and memories remembered? The silhouette of you will always echo through my mind and my dreams. This way, you will always live on in my life. You may be gone, but you are not lost.

The first sentence is from a short story by a Kiwi, but the rest was my thinking when I was trapped in a 10x10 room for 36 hours by the weather. (literally...I could not go outside)

The sun never sleeps in.

Who am I to live my life the way I've been living.

I need to slow down and make less friends.

I don't think you know
what I think.
Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. That's what separates me from you. 3,173 miles.

But with that distance, I realize how much I want someone to know me. Is it you? Is that you? Or is my mind creating this person? I wish I knew.

The warmth of summer is so nice.