Happiness project Commandment #12- Get out of your head.

            Greetings from the most boring Discernment & Discourse class of all eternity. My professor is currently sitting in the front of the room lecturing about this ridiculous book about Vietnam and telling these incredibly graphic stories about how people shot themselves to get out of the war. In the meanwhile, I just drank an entire soymilk cappuccino and I’m feeling great even though I slept for five hours. Feeling like a winner.  Today’s inspiration comes from one of the author’s of my Discernment reading, Herman Melville. He writes,  “I try all things, I achieve what I can.” There is no shame in attempting a feat and learning that it is something you cannot follow through. We aren’t built to be perfectly capable of accomplishing everything. Some things are also out of your realm of control. Accept that, and be at peace. I feel like a broken record sometimes, but I find myself repeating constantly in my head, Rome was not built in a day. If one of the finest cities ever constructed on Earth took years to build, then my little universe is going to take some time to fall into place.

This was the most peaceful picture I could find. I love to walk back from class and watch the way the light flitters in from the oak trees. 

Flying Playlist

Flying west into an everlasting sunset... Magical. 

I've been flying a fair amount this year and while I have not perfected my "hot mess minus the mess" look that I tend to sport in the airports, I must say my flying playlist is flawless. Nothing is quite like cold coffee,  music, and baggy sweaters as you stare out into the endless sky. Or the reality where you listen to your iPod to drown out the screaming children. God bless their little hearts.

1) Cold Coffee-Ed Sheeran
2) Stay Young, Go Dancing- Death Cab for Cutie
3) Never Gonna Leave this Bed {Acoustic}-Maroon 5
4) Tightrope {Acoustic}- Walk the Moon
5) Summertime Sadness- Lana del Ray
6) I've Got this Friend- The Civil Wars
7) Everything Has Changed- Taylor Swift & Ed Sheeran
8) Little Bird- Imogene Heap
9) 12 Fingers- Young the Giant
10) Next Year RAC remix- Two Door Cinema Club
11) Stay- MNDR
12) We Are in Love- Cider Sky
13) Strings Reprise- Young the Giant
14) Love Lost- The Temper Trap
15) Drops of Jupiter live- Taylor Swift
16) Step- Vampire Weekend
17) Sleeps Alone- Two Door Cinema Club
18) Dark Paradise- Lana Del Rey

19. Team- Lorde

20. Heart Out- The 1975

21. Changing of the Seasons- Two Door Cinema Club

It's A Funny Thing Coming Home

"It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what's changed is you."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Last October....

Life moves pretty fast, and if you don't stop and look around you might miss it. One of the main reasons I love my journal is that I love going back to this date a year ago in history and laughing at myself and my life problems. Or at least the ridiculous schemes I was plotting. I would like it to be known that every singe one of these issues has now been resolved, and I am still alive and breathing to tell the story of how I dropped my iPhone 4 in a concrete parking lot. So whenever you feel you can't go on, just remember- I wore a slutty cheetah costume for Halloween last year and got asked if I was wearing lingerie five times, and here I am living to see another October. (And to dress as a slutty cat for another year!)

Dear Me of the future and whoever else reads all of this,

My life and hard times or my life in the time of making the single most critical decisions I have ever been asked to make my whole life long. No one ever as sat down with me so many times and just asked me “What do you want?” “ Where do you want to be?” Maybe the truth is I couldn’t really tell you because it is all just one big giant mind block to me. I don’t know what I want and that’s about all I do know. I’ve never found an area of my life that brings me enough joy for me to have a revelation that it was exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It could happen, but it hasn’t, and that leaves me in the awkward position of trying to force a fit for myself when it just flat out doesn’t. The part of college life that excites me is the part about living in a new place with new smells and new opinions and new faces that want to know me. I like the idea of libraries when it’s raining and the idea of decorating a dorm room in a cozy manner and having a roommate who is my best friend. I just like a lot of the finer details of college living minus the idea of not being to handle my classes or hating it or everyone there. It makes no sense to me that I’m being forced to move out of my house. I just feel like I’m way too small to be out in the real world alone. Not to mention I lack most essential skills necessary to function out in the real world, like the ability to cook, or do laundry, or balance a balance sheet. (I got a 53% on that quiz in business class.)

I also broke my phone this week, even though it’s not totally broken, I mean it still functions.... just not one of the two buttons on the phone, the lock button, meaning the phone is permanently in the "on" position. Could be an extended metaphor for the position of my brain. 

What else has been going on? The new Taylor Swift album came out, so I’ve been listening to that a lot. Then the IB Halloween party is this evening and I plan on attending that in a slutty cheetah costume…. It’s always part of a scheme I assure you. 

All that Glitters is Not Gold

 I’m beginning to realize that Kenny Chesney as a wiser man than any of us could have ever known. I say this because I find myself singing his lyrics repeatedly in my mind- “The more things change, the more they stay the same, don’t matter how old you are…” I always thought that college was just this drastic break from your life where everything in the past became entirely irrelevant. I don’t think it’s so much like that now. I think that like Kenny sings, you can’t just drop the people in the past. You can wish that it no longer mattered, and you can try your hardest to pretend this is your new beginning, but no matter how many thousands miles separate you from high school, you can never get far enough away. Maybe reality isn’t even the right word. You can never get far enough to escape the truth. You can lie every day for ten years, but finally one day, the inconceivable truth reveals itself like an underground blackhead breaking free to the surface. Then the ugly is exposed to us all.

            My point is that perception is deceptive in nature. You can think something for years, and then with one single sentence there is that paradigm shift that shows you that everything was a lie. So don’t base your life values on what you believe to be true, base your values on what you know to be certain. Often enough we judge because we feel we know the whole story. As someone told me last night, the more we find out, the less we really know.   J.R.R Tolkien was able to put what I’m saying more eloquently in words.

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

So It's Over

And when you say you won't forget me, I can tell you that's untrue. Because every day since I've left you I've thought less and less of you. And I've worn out all the reasons to keep on knocking at your door, could be the changing of the seasons but I don't love you anymore.

Someday you'll be looking back on your life, at the memories, this is gonna be one of those nights.

Arizona, dancing across the desert. In my heart I will always see you everywhere. 

You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes, it brought me back to life.

As long as I live, whatever I do-As great as it is, you know what's a bummer, I'm never gonna beat this summer with you.

And nothing seems as strange as when the leaves begin to change, how we thought those days would never end. Sometimes I hear that song and I start to sing along...

A poem I'd like to entitle "Goodnight Shmoo"

In El Dominio there was a fridge full of half eaten queso containers and a picture of my roommate meeting Justin Bieber while he was high. 

There was an illegally hung white floofy dangling from the ceiling and a little baby cactus named Ferdinand perched precariously on the window frame. Up in their lofted beds two girls with the name Maddie lay exhausted. Goodnight floofy. Goodnight Ferdie. Goodnight homeless lady who sleeps on the steps of McElvaney until someone kicks her out. Goodnight Homebar. Goodnight Makrazy. Goodnight Fiji House. Goodnight taxi row. Goodnight Texas boys. Goodnight communal bathroom stall #4. Goodnight Shmoo.