Anonymous asked: What are your short term goals?
Not die on my way home. Eat a good meal. Have a good day.
You never know what’s going to greet you when something knocks on your door.
Sometimes, it’s opportunity. A FedEx package, maybe. Or a friend you weren’t expecting. Abandonment? The future.
People cry for a lot of reasons - for something they’ve lost, something they miss, or something they will never have again. But we never cry for the things we will never have, or need, or know. And ironically, that’s the greatest tragedy of all.
I think cooking is an amazing thing. It’s different than anything else you can gift to someone. When you cook, you put your creativity, your passion, your soul into your food. And when someone consumes your food, you add to their livelihood and their health. Literally, your creativity is nourishing them and sustaining them. My passion is literally nourishing their body and mind. And that’s why I cook.
It’s all about putting things together. Mixing a bowl of dry ingredients, bonding with your best friends (and the ones you don’t care for, but will always miss their smile when they’re gone), melting butter and sugar on the stovetop while giggling to your friend’s Thanksgiving anecdote.
They always say don’t cry for what you’ve lost, smile because it happened at all. But they’re all liars.
Cry for what you once had, but smile because knowing something is lost makes you treasure it more.
Cooking, friendships, missed opportunities. Crying, laughing. Whatever.
Today: Blackberry pancakes, Stand By Me, and Limbo.
I guess everything in your day kind of fits together when you want it to. Something old, something new, and something kind of in the middle. Try to bridge those connections and you can make it work. You usually can.
I spend a lot of days on my own now, and it gets me to think if I ever belonged anywhere in the first place. You know that straggler in every friend group? The one that drifts, and nobody minds, but the one that’s never the “best friend” or the one you HAVE to have there, because what kind of party would it be without them? I guess I’ve always had that insecurity. That feeling that maybe that person was me.
And now I think I’m pretty sure of the situation, one way or the other. Pretty sure.
Listening to “The A Team” on repeat because you just realized what it meant.
Crying when “Stand by me” came on at the right time.
Sometimes your days don’t come together though. Not like puzzle pieces. Songs you can’t remember the name of, forgetting to wash your dishes, and thanksgiving leftovers. Discordant and unrelated. Unconnected. Just there.
But I’m convinced there’ll always be a couple of people that will have my back. They say sometimes the straw breaks the camel’s back, but sometimes it’s all that’s holding it together.
Sumeet Bhade made me feel bad for not blogging, when I said I would do it EVERY DAY, so I suppose I should start.
Everyone’s looking for a problem. Something to fix that will fix the rest of their lives. “What’s your problem?” “The problem with people nowadays…” It’s neverending, and problems tend to compound on each other. There’s no cure. Just stop trying to solve a problem and start trying to find a solution. Unless that’s the same thing. In which case, you can go suck it.
A friend once told me he was bad with tears, that he didn’t know how to react when somebody started crying. He said he just tried to crack jokes until they stop crying. Awkward? A little, but it depends what I’m crying about. Easiest way? Just ask. If they want to tell you they will. And if they don’t, they probably just want their space.
It’s amazing how much one person can make such a big influence on other people’s lives. One email, one letter, one thing can change the course of hundreds of peoples’ lives. It can ruin someone’s reputation, it can destroy someone’s future, and it can scar them for life.
It kind of makes me think about the power of individuals. How much we can do right now. Sometimes I think…if that guy really wanted to, he could walk over and probably kill me right now. Any of us could. And there’s nothing really stopping us from doing it at a particular moment except fear for the future. Or of failure.
And so it all comes back. When someone’s crying, we have so much power to change the course of their future. But we’re too scared to.
The Stark Knight Rises. Mashup of two of my favorite things. I hope you guys enjoy and reblog if you liked it!
Watch it on HD on Vimeo!
Do things ever really end?
Because it never does at the last episode for me. Or the last page, for that matter. Credits mean nothing. “The End” means even less. Add a question mark? And its just that much more inconclusive.
But that’s not always true. I’m just trying to be deep. Things end all the time. Relationships, conversations, meals, road trips. Friendships.
I guess nobody ever wants to think about it. That in a few years we won’t be talking to half the people we talk to regularly now. (Just look back a few years, if you disagree.) Do we even care? Do we even really miss those people? I don’t think I’m worse off than I was 5 years ago when I had those people around. Hell, I think I’m probably better off. Friendships end all the time. And sadly, I hardly ever notice.
Cruel? I don’t think I’m cruel. Cruel is when I threw that baby kitten into the river because I was too scared to take care of it. Cruel is when I told on my friend for texting in class when I knew it was because his mom was in the hospital. Cruel is when I molested my cousin. On accident. Of course.
Did I really do those things? Who the hell cares. Now you think I do. And that’s all that really matters, doesn’t it? Your perceptions. When the words get out, you can’t just stuff them back in. Now they’re out there. And now you’ll wonder. Maybe forever.
Let’s face it. You won’t wonder forever. You’ll forget about this blog post, in a few minutes. Hours maybe. Days at most. And then you’ll never wonder again. Just like friendships. If it lasts Days, hours, weeks, years. What does it matter? We established that, didn’t we?
Life ends. Friendships end. Thoughts end. Certainly, blog posts end. But:
Life is funny. And I don’t mean that to say it in the cliche sense that everyone else does, to point out the strange, out-of-body experience you get sometimes when you see that girl on the street corner that looks an awful lot like your girlfriend from middle school and when you look closer she even has the same way of checking her nails when she’s bored even has that same purse from that time you went to the mall when things were still weird but not weird enough for you not to be friends but really when you look closer her hair color is a little too brown and that nose is just a bit too flat and when you really look at her under the pretense of asking where the nearest Starbucks is it isn’t really her at all but someone else and you were just imagining things. But she still smiles at you. No, not like that at all.
I mean it in the sense that life is funny. Like your friends, it laughs at you when you want them to do it the least. When this happens, I sometimes pretend that it is super personal and make them feel bad about it. Just to fuck with them.
So I laugh at life. As if it will make a difference in the end, but it really doesn’t. It doesn’t make my situation better. It definitely doesn’t seem to change my experiences at all, and yet I do it anyways. Because what else can you do when you’ve lost your wallet for the fourth time in a month and your keychain broke this morning so your ID card got dropped in the mud, you dropped a bowl of soup on your kitchen floor and had to wipe it up while your food got cold and you ripped that brand new sweater you just bought and wanted to show off at that party on Saturday. So sometimes you just laugh. When you add “lol” to every text to dissolve the tension and “ROFL” when you want to pretend what happened was really funny but really you’re just doing it to humor him. But like I said it doesn’t make a difference.
Because life can’t hear. It can’t see.
Funny llustrations by Mike Mitchell | Tumblr.
My friends and I started waxing philosophical on our way back from SF last night. Bellies full of delicious SF burgers and truffle cheese fries, it was bliss.
How do we know our consciousness existed 5 seconds ago? I guess we don’t. All we know is we exist right now. Right this moment. Now. Now. Then…now.
But will we exist in 3 seconds? I don’t know. And that’s a scary thought. And sometimes I don’t know what I can and can’t believe because I’m too scared to think anything differently. Because if some things are true, life just can’t make sense anymore.
Have you ever tried to be someone you weren’t? I feel like I’ve been doing that lately. Acting differently, doing different things, talking to different people. And why? Maybe because I don’t remember who I am anymore. Some people don’t believe that we are the same person we used to be, but that our consciousness becomes a completely different entity. That the person we were doesn’t exist anymore. And maybe they never did. This is another one of those scary thoughts.
Maybe that’s part of my problem. I’m too scared to believe in something that might be true.
Too scared to accept that my friendship might be ending. Too scared to think that I’m heading down a path that will destroy me. Too scared to realize that the person I am is not who I used to be. Or ever will be. So I don’t think about it.
