Reasons why I love you and Why you drive me crazy

1. I have to remind you to breath
   1. I love this because the old as time saying “You take my breath away” is real for us. As cheesy as that is, I’m happy about it. But it gets a little weird when I’m laying on your chest and it stops moving for a little while and I look at you and say “Breath” and you let out the bits of air you were holding and start to inhale slowly.
2.  You hate waking up.
   1. I do too, but lately, when I wake up I can’t drift back to where I was and I’m so frustrated by it so I just want you to be awake too.
3. You make me food.
   1. I hate when people do things for me that inconvenience them or make them annoyed but because you love to cook and I love your cooking, everything is copasetic.
4. We barely need alone time.
   1. I mean, occasionally both of us need to go and recuperate but I love being alone with you most.
5. You are as curious as a 3 year old in a thrift shop.
   1. I watch you pick things up and touch them and feel how they work and it’s so entertaining watching you be fascinated so easily by random objects you find. Sometimes I’ll catch you playing with an assortment of weird metal bits and I’ll ask “Where do you find those?” and you’ll look up at me grinning and laughing like a kid and say “I don’t know!” and shrug your shoulders defensively.  It makes me smile now just thinking about it.
   2. But at the same time, you make messes because you find things and never put them away or organize them. You go from one discovery to the next with no interludes or productivity, simply letting your brain lead you places physically without you consciously understanding that I can walk in your room and find the weirdest and most disgusting assorted piles of items.
6. You are a rolly polly baby.
   1. When you are stretching, frustrated, tired, concentrating, or simply laying down at all, you roll around in your bed on your stomach and become the cutest bundle I have ever laid eyes on.
   2. This also means your covers are always a mess and your hair. But I love it.
7. You are a furnace.
   1. I need this. Chronically cold feet and hands because of my health issues is a curse, but you are my savior with your very hot skin.
8. You like to sing in the stairwell
   1. Going along with your hilarious curiosity, you discovered that the echoey noises your voice makes in the stairwell is really pleasing and you go in there to sing just for fun.
   2. I don’t know a single person who would do this just purely on their whim.

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Being

As I sit here crying because I’ve just rewatched my favorite film “Cloud Atlas”, I am reminded of change and dreams.

For a long while now, maybe a year, I’ve been in a slump. I’ve been thinking over and over about how my life is a “drop of water in an endless sea”. Pondering over how tiny I am, how mortality is so finite how could any of us bare the idea of immortality? How I will die inevitably and everything in our waking world is a distraction away from this death, it’s a monolithic movement toward a fake idea of eternal life. It doesn’t come from the Christians, although they now propagate this idea, and it was before the Greeks, before the Babylonians (pre-Judaism), and it was before writing. Humans lie. We lie to ourselves about our fate.We try to block it out, pretend death isn’t lurking under every rock, waiting to trip us up and break us, we shout “DANGER” so quietly.

I’m trying to be honest to myself. Telling myself of my death, that whatever I do, I will die. I’ve been giving up hope, I’ve let all my dreams go. In my depression and in my turmoil I have said “It’s impossible, I’m 1 and 8 billion+ and I am nothing.” I am nothing because I choose to be, but not because I am.

In Cloud Atlas Sonmi said “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”(David Mitchell, author). When she said this, she is staring at a room full of fighting. Everything knows death is inevitable but they are fighting for a better life. Dying for a better life for the other.

My eternal best friend Savannah said to me: “You aren’t great because you are great, but because I say you are great so you have to be, because I want you to be.” Now this sounds very backwards, but I knew exactly what she meant. She meant that even though I don’t think I’m great, or have purpose, or meaning, I am great because she knows so. Then she said “You may think you don’t have a purpose, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give yourself one. Make one up!!”

A few hours later a woman came out of an Irish bar on to the sidewalk where Savannah and I were standing, I gave her a light and she said to me “I want to be your mothah!” and then “Go do something amazing, change the world.”

More than all the religious and socio-political philosophical truths, I know that humans are only human with other humans. And we can only change when we step into the view of the other. The moment we see the point of view of someone unlike ourselves who is apart from us can we begin to understand we aren’t so different. The only way we can learn or affect the world is by changing ourselves.

I heard once that you don’t have to change the whole world to be marvelous, you only have to change one tiny world of someone else’s to make an impact.  I hope to change a few, even if those worlds are just my immediate friends and family, I can be ok with that.

I won’t give up though, I’m revisiting my dreams of being a writer, a musician, an archaeology, a teacher, a lifelong learner. I am finding another path and I don’t walk alone, but I am connected with those I find, everyone’s whose path touches mine.

Those who are great most of the time never knew they were. They died, maybe for a cause to fight for the other and are remembered as great because they changed one tiny world, that created a wave to affect many.  They weren’t great because they thought they were great, they are great we because we think they are. We think. Present active Indicative plural. We are plurality and individuality and we are being.

So be.

haha ^^

 

A work in progress

05/30(or the 31 since you are in Japan right now.)/2016

How we met: well it wasn’t quite meeting at first, really. You stared at me (checked me out) from two rows back on the other side of the class room of our Econ 111 class in Xavier room 150. I knew your name and who you were, and I ran into you often with The-Girl-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. She was something else (and a whole other story) and you and she seemed to be best friends from my point of you. Until I began to pester you.

I thought you were (OMG kill me now for saying this) the cutest kid I had ever seen in my life, and I was down for the chase.

I made a mistake first hand though by the telling your “Best friend” what I thought of you. She had a bit of a fit and she said: “You got, Tomas, and Kiya, you can’t can’t canttttt by any means have him.” And I told her I would respect her wishes, but there was a big piece of me that said: “ignore her” which of course made my reply to her be: “Oh, of course, he is your best friend, I would never!!!”

And here we are. You are my man.

You ask me to make lists.

I love this. (but you know I love making lists so it isn’t exactly work to me. )

What we should do:

1. Travel the world
2. Go to every San Pellegrino 50 best restaurants in the world.
3. Go to Japan – like everywhere
4. Take a bath – not too long of one, I hate being pruny
5. Go to an owl cafe
6. Go to a cat (neko ねこ　猫)  cafe 😀
7. Feed each other Nutella
8. Stay at a ritzy hotel and splurge on room service
9. Keep each other motivated
10. Keep each other healthy
11. Couples Message
12. Take a train overnight somewhere, hopefully, Europe
13. Swing Dance
14. Shop for undies in Tokyo
15. Ice skate in Rockefeller center in NYC
16. Build an igloo in Alaska
17. Pray at a temple in Japan (Nara)
18. Bake

 

 

 

And many of these things came true.

 

Anecdotes: #1 Strawberries

As per request from wonderful friends, I will write my stories and little notes I’ve taken from my experiences.

In highschool, I –for some strange reason– became the Guru of anything pertaining to romance and sex for couples and friends. One of my closest friends, Minecrafter of Aphrodite (we will call him MoA for short) asked me to teach him to kiss since he had just started dating his first girlfriend. It was his sophomore year of highschool and my Junior year, so I took his request. I thought for a while about a way to verbally teach him and came to the conclusion that strawberries would be the best analogy.

See, giving someone step-by-step directions going through how to move their lips, tongue, and cheeks would be a disaster and I’d end up just making a bunch of weird faces at him. I didn’t find this an attractive way to teach or a useful way for him to learn how to handle another person.

I ended up telling him this:

“Imagine you are holding a succulent, juicy, strawberry. You don’t take the strawberry and rip into it with your mouth like an animal, nor do you lick it all over with your tongue and rub its juices all over your face. No, you gingerly press it to your lips and then take it slightly into your mouth between your lips and put pressure down on it. Don’t get complex or you won’t be savoring the taste. Start slow and then if you find out the strawberry isn’t reluctant, move forward. Silent communication.”

Now strawberries are not essentially sexual (like a banana) or romantic (like chocolate), but I think they are perfect for this situation since kissing can be either very emotional or apathic. Kissing is what you make it and what you put into it. It’s a way of communicating your intentions and feelings, or the lack thereof.

 

 

 

Belittling

Every stage of my life has been belittled and the next oncoming stage glorified. Why? I think it may have to do with the idea of constantly chasing the carrot held out in front of us. It’s a terrible way of forcing us to progress because we feel small and worthless.

In each era, you are told you will soon meet the “real world” as if you aren’t experiencing it yet. What really is the “real world”? Is it the constant grind of sleep, eat, work, pay bills? Because I don’t think that means “real world” that just means capitalism. The “real world” is never the same for any singular person. Everyone has a different experience and according to the laws of philosophy: no one is ever wrong. Reality is relative to your experience, upbringing, culture, and beliefs.  My “real world” is totally opposite to the “real world” of someone living in Mexico City, Berlin, London, Beijing, or Dubai. My “real world” consists of hobbies, family, friends, activities, personal art, and adventure. Yes I work, yes I go to school, yes I pay for things, yes I eat and sleep. But these things do not make a “real world” these things are characteristics of living in our western culture.

So who came up with this stupid idea that telling kids while they are trying to develop themselves that they aren’t even close to being in the “real world” yet? They weren’t born yesterday, they’ve experienced what it’s like to be hurt and be happy, to see pain and heal. Just because someone is younger than you or experiencing something that you’ve already experienced doesn’t make them lesser to you.

I’m 19, to most people I’m a fetus. Meaning, my development as an adult is so small and insignificant I mustn’t be capable of understanding things without a guide. I’m not a fetus, I know how to walk by myself.

I say all this because every step I take, I am told is not enough. “You’re not there yet! You don’t know what the real world is like!” Sure I dont have a full time job, my permanent residence is listed as my parents house, and my bills are paid. But why do these things make me less of a human? Why do I appear to others as if I’m useless or purposeless?

Let me ask you this: What is so special about your life that makes it worth more than mine? What makes your “real world” experience better and more “real” than mine?

Nothing.

When Our Thoughts And Prayers Are Not Enough: School Shootings In America + How we all Miss the Point

Kovi Biokolo brings a really good question to the front of the new page: “Why do we continue to do violent things when there are so many positive philosophies with in religion, culture, and politics? why do we continue to self destruct? Why do we keep giving sorrow to each other over and over again?”  Its a conundrum people have been trying to answer since the beginning of time.

Culturally, and by human nature, all of us tend to shove thoughts away that are hard to understand to save them for a better time, a more suitable mindset, because its hard to think about difficult things. Our brains and souls are made uncomfortable by big questions such as “who is god?”, “What is love?”, and “Why do bad things happen?”. Some people take the route of letting religion explain everything for them, and by religion I mean interpretations of holy manuscripts in ways that reassure us that we are doing the right thing. Not questioning information helps us feel more comfortable, acceptance is peaceful, settling. Coming face to face with blatant fiery red violence and  a clash of morals and the questions come up again, “Who is god?” “Why do bad things happen?”…. Maybe you think you know.

Mark Manson’s post on school shootings in America was very edifying:

“Then there are those who are simply ignored. Dylan Klebold was suicidally depressed for over two years. He fantasized and wrote about killing himself liberally. Despite getting into trouble with the law, turning in school assignments that glorified murder and suicide and failing most of his classes senior year, his parents and friends claimed that they had no idea something was amiss. George Sodini, a middle-aged Pennsylvania man who shot up an aerobics class full of women, wrote in his journal that since he spent the past 20 years of his life alone and miserable, there was no reason to think that the next 20 wouldn’t be lonely and miserable as well. His mother had been emotionally abusive. His father hadn’t had a meaningful conversation with him in over 30 years. Simply put: he had nothing to live for. So why not take some revenge on your way out?

Gun control gets the headlines. Mental health care gets the headlines. Violence and video games and misogyny and internet forums and atheism — the list is endless at this point.

Here’s what doesn’t get the headlines: Empathy. Listening to those around you. Even if you don’t like them very much. We have come to live in a culture where it’s taboo or unacceptable to simply check in with people emotionally and offer some empathy and understanding. I’m not saying this would magically fix all gun violence. I’m just saying that all of these things — the lack of gun laws, the lack of health care, the inability to have basic conversations with friends and neighbors about what’s going on with them, these are all extensions of a callous and self-absorbed culture that lacks any real empathy.”

(http://markmanson.net/school-shootings and http://markmanson.net/terrorism)

Some food for thought today.

If you are really listening: an ode to silence

We communicate with our bodies: open stances or closed stances, fiddling and looking away, shifting glances, wild gestures or uncomfortable arm crossing. The saying “Actions speak louder than words” is true. Seeing how a person responds physically can communicate their insecurities and their confidences, the things they like and dislike, and also whether they are extremely selfish or are relaxed and loving. Someone who really listens can see right through people.

Then sometimes silence (or the lack of action) speaks louder than words. Whether that inaction is someone saying one thing and doing another or being completely passive and not communicating at all.

That’s why I wrote a song called “Silence is death”

I wrote this because the lack of communication is a huge scream in itself. Crying silently, suffering in silence, sighing silently. It’s all a way of showing a burden, communicating pain or indifference. Especially indifference. “The silent treatment” is a way to communicate my pain that doesn’t need words to describe it. Everyone knows what it is. Everyone understands why. It’s because sometimes the amount of weight I’m carrying inside me is boiling under my skin and its turning my eyes red and soggy, its breaking me so much I can’t even speak. Sometimes the silence is necessary because I’m screaming so loud on the inside I can’t bear to speak anymore. Or maybe its the opposite, maybe it’s because the world and people around me are so loud I can’t handle the noise anymore so I stopped trying and shut down. Maybe I’m too tired of this sick mess to speak anymore. Words fall short of the things I want to say.

This is why people say things like this:

“If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.”
― Andrew Harvey

Sometimes its really hard to be bursting at the seems like this always. I take a chill pill and reseed into a happy numbness, which sometimes solves the problems and I start to see that I don’t have to hate and hurt from all the noise around me and inside me. I can let it out and in and breathe and be one with it or separate myself from it. Nothing is permanent.

There’s a difference between serenity and being numb.

anonymous

Communicating like this isn’t all there is though.  Sometimes small talk and social interaction in the trivial pursuits can be a fueling ground for socialites or a draining all-consuming pit of terror. Sometimes I love to gossip and joke with my friends, and other times it tears me apart inside to hear idiotic and pointless words. I get so upset I give a silent tantrum and stop speaking to people.

 

‘Cause I’ve seen more spine on jellyfish
I’ve seen more guts in eleven year old kids

Have another drink and drive yourself home
I hope there’s ice on all the roads
And you can think of me when you forget your seatbelt
And again when your head goes through the windshield

Is that what you call tact?
You’re as subtle as a brick
In the small of my back
So let’s end this call and end this conversation

Read more: Brand New – Seventy Times 7 Lyrics | MetroLyrics

A Stream of Consciousness List

Inspired by Barbara Ann Kiper’s book “14,000 Things To Be Happy About”.

1. That thought niggling in the back of your head for weeks about that one thing you wish you could avoid

2. Unavoidable situations

3. The inevitability of confrontation and circumstance

4. Both the calm and the rage

5. Emotions that are tangled together like the ball of yarn in the back of your grandma’s closet from 1958.

6. The moldy bread that disappoints to the point of anger

7. Hatred for hatred

8. The inevitability of them finding out

9. Resolving to repent

10. Relentless self doubt

11. Self hatred

12. Self harm

13. Verbal inner abuse

14. The torture of guilt

15. The relief of a pent up word.

16. Anxiety

17. The realization that every human being is living a life just as complicated as your own

18. Sonder

19. Understanding humans are almost unjudgeable. Morals, ethics, and human rights are all a concepts of our cultural consensus and collective attitude in an individualistic universe striving against itself in its hypocritical ways.

20. Chaos and Order aren’t quite as dissimilar as they seem.

21. Love and Hate are not opposites, but simply one is the softer version of the other and the harsher version of itself

22. The feeling of flying after breathing slowly

23. Doubting if anything ever said is truly unique

24. Doubting if “unique” actually exists.

25. Jazz recordings from 1938

26. Discrepancies.

27. “Ubiquitous” is still one of my favorite words, unfortunately, it is not ubiquitous. (hehe)

28. Pressing the repeat button to listen to my soul song of the night.

29. Him. Who is always on my mind.

30. Him. Who is often on my mind.

31. Him. Who is sometimes on my mind

32. Him. Who I would like to pleasantly vacate.

33. Him. Who should really blow this taco stand.

34. Him. Who needs to kindly fuck off.

35. Her.

36. Telekinesis

37. Telepathy.

38. Best friends

39. Know-it-alls

40. Synonyms.

41. Ecce. ego sum mortem.

42. How uncool people are

43. The idea of “cool” being such a vague term I wish I could forgo ever using it in a colloquial sentence ever again in my existence.

44. Extensive vocabulary.

45. Mother fucking scholars

46. Anticipation

47. Mother Fucking Stupid Ass Bitches

48. Uncultured tongues with a plethora of explicit content.

49. Not having to explain what that sentence means to someone

50. Carpal tunnel

51. Bad conditions for creativity.

52. Comfortability

53. Affordability.

54. The reason I am writing this

55. “Goal setting”

56. Careers are for losers who don’t play instruments

57. “I’m a writer, I need my fucking space.”

58. Hidden genius’.

59. Fucking diseases of the soul

60. Humans are an infection upon the earth

61. Mother nature

62. I WISH I DIDN’T LOOK LIKE THIS

63. I write poems because I’m sad.

64. I’m sad because I write poems

65. I write songs because I can hear them in my head

66. And they wont shut up until I sing them

67. I write lists because they write themselves on the insides of my skull

68. And they only way to wash them off is to get them out through my fingers.

69. This is why I have carpal tunnel.

70. This is why I stay up all night

71. This is why I think too much

72. This is why I hate myself.

73 This is why I can’t believe you.

74. I thought I was good at this

75. A list longer than 612 pages.

76. Numbers can’t write themselves

77. But I wish math could solve its own problems.

78. Girls who are too innocent to understand they are innocent.

79. Sexaul repression.

80. Parental sheltering

81. Misunderstandings.

82. Compound words ^^

83. Antecedents

84. Vague pronoun use

85. Nathaniel Hawthorne

86. Song lyrics quoted on social media no one understands

87. Likes.

88. Dislike button

89. Disaster

90. Fucking it all up.

91. Cheating the system

92. Realizing the system was made up

93. Making up your own rules

94. Pointless laughter

95. References too advanced for your knowledge of history, philosophy, and literature.

96. Books written in 430 B.C.

97. Hieroglyphics

98. Happiness

99. Nerds

100. A list that will hopefully last forever.

A Personal Post

This is my problem. It leads to me never believing that others can love me because I’m simply not worthy of it.

It isn’t women that I don’t believe though, I mostly trust girls. But I can’t trust guys, (sorry if this sounds sexist but… it has been my overarching experience through my life).

I’ve never been good enough for my dad, never strong enough to chop wood or athletic enough to draw the attention of my Dad’s dad, (my grandad). I was never good enough for a lot of guys I liked or dated in the past. There was always something about me that needed to change for them to be pleased. Mostly my body. I was never enough for a lot of other people because they wanted me to be there constantly, and well, I have a life I need to live too.

I’ve never felt good enough to love someone else because of this. As if I wasn’t worth enough to give someone else adoration. But then at the same time, I’m too worthless not too, because everyone else must be more deserving than I to receive love. I’ve felt so unworthy in the past that I just summed it up to being incapable of loving others. Incapable of commitment and loyalty because I’m not good enough anyway.

“A Bed Full of Safety”

Even though I have no reason to really think I’m not enough right now. I know I’m talented, intelligent, strong, and mature, I can’t shake the feeling of never being good enough. I can’t help but remember that I couldn’t love, and I couldn’t truly be loved by others, I can’t stop feeling helpless in the fact that I’m just starting to live, just learning how to be.

But being isn’t easy.

I know I shouldn’t believe that I am not enough, but it’s hard to not believe it when I’ve disappointed so many people.

I’m exhausted.

Being Apart and Retrouvailles

Retrouvailles [French]

The Happiness of meeting again after a long time

There are lots of ways that people can be separated. Whether “separate” meaning ending of a relationship, friendship, or bond; or meaning separated by distance and time rather than breaking off that relationship, being apart is painful.

I’ve had friends all over the world, some which I’ve been able to see yearly or more and others that I have never seen.

I have friends I’ve grown up with that became the closest and most important people in my life graduate high school and go far away for college. It hurt to be apart from them. It hurt to lose the physical connection we had and to lose the fulfilling meetings we used to have regularly. But we had retrouvailles when we were finally able to get together during summer, winter, and spring breaks.

Separation changes relationships and changes people. Communication and visiting become more special, but also more difficult. Talking to one another can become a chore, or become monotonous because the same questions are always being asked. “How was your day?” “What did you do?” “How is everyone back home?” “How is school?” “What are your classes like?”‘How was work?”. After a while it feels like there is nothing more to say over the phone or via text.

It feels like the distance between the two of you is prying a wedge between you even more than you thought it would.

It’s costly on everyone in many ways. Seeing friends means gas money, spending money for activities, and food. Seeing friends means a plane ticket home or to them, expenses of travel and the like.

Being apart from friends means you might make new friends and lose those friends, or the flux of new friends is whittled down to the ones that you actually like talking to you, rather than the ones which are just convenient to converse with. The difference between a study buddy and a real pal. It costs time and effort to be happy, to stay happy, and to preserve the happiness that you have with those you love most in the world.

The hardest part about these expenses, is making sure they are worth it, and remain worth it.

Something being worth your time is far from something which is just convenient. Although, convenience does assist in keeping things that are worth your time.

Convenience is having a neighbor that you can barrow things from politely and they have the same relationship with you, but you wouldn’t invite them over for a heart-to-heart about your dying uncle and the struggles of cancer in your family.

The kind of person you invite over for that serious conversation who thinks you are worth their time is the friend that maybe it isn’t all that convenient for them to see you. That’s why it is special when you see each other, because when you do, both of you have planned that chat, that cup of tea or coffee, that special meeting spot, or the favorite seats in your living room. The date’s been on your calendar and it has been something the two of you texted about for weeks. Making sure both could be there around the same time, prepared and with lots to say.

But also with this best friend, you don’t always need something to talk about. Silence can convey what you need it to as well. Because sometimes all you can say is “I’m so glad you are here,” with me because I need you and you are worth it and I love being with you because I love you. 

And you know they are thinking the same thing and don’t need to say it.

Harmony in the those moments of retrouvailles.