Tag: blog

pink incense

I am still learning how to find a balance in everything I do and love. I gave myself a schedule and am working towards discipline instead of the free fall that I seem to always be in.

I want to read, write, work, laugh, exercise, eat healthy, kiss, sleep well, prepare myself to apply for grad school and take on more responsibility at work, laugh more, kiss more, talk, listen, get stronger, and take care of myself.

I have been writing so much lately, about everything. The spin classes I found on YouTube with the instructor who plays Taylor Swift. The way I relate to Patroclus now. The pink incense I bought that smells like roses and something I can’t identify.

I have had the same bed frame since before I was born. I am finally ready for a new one. And couches.

I also need to save money for my master’s degree.

I find myself daydreaming often about small love-filled comforts like laying next to someone and reading a book with our shoulders touching. Going grocery shopping and splitting up to cover the store; knowing smiles when we spot each other across an aisle. Little little little things that seem so out of my reach currently.

Tomorrow is a full moon in Libra. I’m a Libra. I wonder what that means for me? I like to pick and choose what symbols affect me, and I want this one to mean something in the same way that sunflowers and the rain do.

Maybe something good will happen. I feel like it has to. I have been so good lately, to others and myself. I hope there is something that will come out of that, for me and for others.

‘Experience’ by Ludovico Einaudi type of shit

I can remember so much about the people I care(d) about and yet so little about myself. I think my favorite color is red, but my brain is more worried with trying to retain all of the favorite colors of all of the best friends I’ve ever had.

I am so selfish sometimes and I don’t know why I feel entitled to know everything about someone else while giving up barely anything about me.

At the same time I want someone to know me the way I know them. I want someone to just completely and totally understand me yet I actively push against it. The times I do share I feel like I’m saying too too too much and maybe I am afraid that if the someone I wanted to, really knew me, they wouldn’t find me that great.

I am named after a flower. I think I take too long to bloom and who wants to wait to see that when there are other much brighter and prettier flowers unfurling their petals faster?

But I hope one day I will bloom and there will be someone who is patient enough to catch the slow unraveling of each of my anxious petals and believe the final result was worth the wait.

the sentence.

If you were to write a book, what would be the sentence used to tell the reader that your character had fallen in love?

After she was sure he had gone, she took the pillow he had lain on and held it to her face, feeling the warmth of his lingering presence and smelling the remnants of his scent.

It isn’t so much falling in love as it is realizing that you had existed within it as a state of being for so long now that you can’t name the exact moment it occurred and you have no memory of falling at all, no bruises and no pain. Just patience.

on being tired but for good reasons

I’m too tired to make a great big entry to this post but I have a list of good reasons to be tired that make you feel good:

  • Working for over 12 hours and getting great work done that you’re proud of and going to bed without any more things you have to do
  • Staying up too late talking to your favorite person even though your eyelids can’t possibly be open for much longer, you keep them open just to hear them talk
  • Figuring out how to play a song that isn’t tabbed anywhere and even though you won’t play it for anyone because they wouldn’t know it, you remembered all the words and got all the notes right just for you
  • Finishing the last season of the best show ever and taking time to figure it all out
  • Thinking a little too much about someone and wondering what they meant when they said that thing that made you smile so big that you felt it all day and all night
  • Not moving from your spot on the couch because your little animal is asleep and you just can’t bear to wake it up because it’s just so cute and you’re so happy that your pet is your small house guardian
  • Reading a really good book and not realizing that you’d spent hours and hours reading but it was so worth it for the ending and the story and you get to take part of that story with you into your own
  • Going on an epic Wikipedia or YouTube dive and learning a bunch of new things that you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t happened upon them
  • Still taking off your makeup and putting your hair in a ponytail so it doesn’t get messed up with you sleep even though you could dive under the blankets now, but you prevented the messed up hair and the zit that always pops up when you don’t wash your face
  • Looking forward to something so much that you can’t sleep like you’re a kid going to Disneyland for the first time ever but you’re not a kid so you have to relish these moments because they’re so few and far between

And that’s it, a lot of run on sentences later. I’m happy and happy to be happy for many many reasons but these are a few good ones.

genius only comes along in storms of fabled foreign tongues

It feels like taking melatonin and getting slowly sleepier and sleepier except I don’t feel like going to sleep I just feel comfort and like I am testing my own patience like a rubber band.

In my head I am sending you waves of pink and red and white and in person I am snapping the invisible rubber band against my wrist again to literally snap out of it.

Talking to you feels like lighting a candle and feeling the warmth and smelling something clean and strong like fresh laundry, but from someone else’s house so I can’t pinpoint the exact brand.

You are not soft but constant and bold. I have always hidden my softness and hidden my strength and I worry that you still can’t, will never see either.

don’t you ever feel like you’ve been destined for something bigger than your skin?

This week I saw a friend from college who has worked harder to make a life for herself than anyone I know. She has no parents and no family support and yet she still loves to cook for her friends and has the guts to move to London from Long Beach to chase after her masters degree and dreams.

I saw SnackPack and we slow danced to M83 under a disco ball that doesn’t spin properly and I felt happier than I have in a while. He doesn’t look like it, but his kisses are so sweet.

I saw Johnny Bravo and he taught me how to smoke a cigar, even though I didn’t get the hang of it. I wonder if we’ll be friends for a long time or if it’s just another side effect of the coronavirus. I know I’ll miss him when he’s gone this time and I’ll miss him when he’s gone the next time for much longer.

I work in a antiques store on Fridays now and I love that the little old ladies play Elvis Presley and make their own furniture and surround themselves with pretty things that people buy and put in their homes.

I had a good weekend, there was not a single bad thing that happened and it feels nice. I am going to bring the happiness over to the week and put in as much effort at work as I can, and do my best because I feel good when I’m truly doing my best.

I hope you have a good week too, and if your weekend sucked then I hope you find a reason before Monday to make the next five days better. Every weekend is a fresh start.

I can’t wait to meet you! But I totally can

I was talking to my friend about finding love and they’re impatient about how long it’s going to take them.

I’m off the dating app thing, and I know I won’t go back to them. I hate feeling like people are so easily replaced, and texting back in forth before ever meeting has always ruined things for me. People are never who you build them up to be in your head, and it just becomes a waste of time. It all feels so forced and it just hasn’t worked for me.

I’m so excited for when I get to meet the person I will fall in love with, but I can wait. There’s something comforting about knowing that while I’m making myself into the best person I can be, someone is out there making themself into the best person they can be for me too.

I hope I’ll know when I meet someone special, and I hope I’ll be ready for it. Until then, I’m excited to see what happens during the in-between. I want to travel and write and get to know myself better. There are a lot of things I’d like to accomplish before that, and I will have so many stories to tell my person.

I am excited! I can’t wait to love you with everything I’ve got, but I can also definitely wait. It won’t be wasted time. You’ll be worth the wait.

block ‘em, block ‘em all!!!!

The holidays scare away all the boys who only want to come over after 10:36 p.m. They don’t return until after the yucky cuffing and cuddling season is over, until the fireworks are in the air and it’s a new year so the coast is clear!!! The Women Are Over Their Need To Have A Fulfilling Relationship. We Are Safe Until October.

They’ll be the first to wish you happy new year and the first to swipe up on your selfies and reply on Snapchat. They’ll even send you a DM of your own Instagram picture and tell you how delicious you look (because you do!) but they won’t comment publicly. Of course not.

One will tell you how much he missed you and how busy he was, and you’ll think Really? Busy in the middle of this pandemic, even? Wow gosh gee whiz. How surprising! Except for the part where it isn’t surprising because it never is. This would be the third chance you’ve given him to suddenly fall in love with you and not just use you like a blowup doll. Do you think the third time’s a charm?

One will say he just used this time to really focus on work, and you’ll ask Oh well have you become very successful then? Have you lived up to your big talk about how much money you can make? And he will say this new year looks very promising, very lucrative, and can you send a picture?

One will say he shut everybody out, it’s not just you. He barely talked to his friends, even. He’s so sorry about that. So so sorry, it wasn’t cool. So can he come over? He can’t stop thinking about your body.

What about a personal favorite of mine, he has really grown so much this past year. He’s so thankful for everything, and hopes you are too. He hopes you want to hear about how much he has bettered himself. He knows his path, but he forgot your address, can you send it so he can come in 30 minutes to just hang out and catch up? In bed?

Getting a cute little Snapchat when you’re drinking a glass of wine alone watching a movie that says “ha ha ha ha ha get drunker and send cleavage pics“ should make you throw up in your mouth and hit block. Do it, I dare you. I double dog dare you.

Then hold up your wine tumbler that keeps the rosé cold and cheers to how great your cleavage will look in the face of the actual man who loves you, when that happens. SPOILER ALERT: it will happen, and it will happen so good. Cheers to the dirty dirty dirty sex you’ll have with a man you didn’t give it up to until you were exclusive. And fucking cheers to saying goodbye to these losers and waiting for a little thing called true love, baby!

dominoes and Dostoevsky

My god, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?

Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

I feel like I spent the past year setting up dominoes for hours and hours (read: months and months) and now it’s finally time to knock the first domino over and watch everything that I so carefully planned fall into place.

Some things aren’t an explosive firework result, but more like a steady match. Maybe most things. A slow and steady burn yields better results than a wild blaze.

It’s easy to come up with dreams and live them out in your head. But how revolutionary it is to bring them to fruition and see them manifest.

Now, after waiting and plowing and sowing and watering, I feel like I’m seeing the sprouts grow. The foundation was laid, the work is done.

I think I’m going to let myself be excited. Let myself get my hopes up because I worked for it, goddamnit. I worked so hard for so many months and then I got to rest for a bit and now we’re back with new challenges but I’m excited to face them because I know I can. (read: I KNOW I CAN.)

I just finished my to-do list and it’s time to make a new one.

warming my hands on bridges I’ve burnt, and why that’s okay according to Aristotle

I lost a couple friends this past year and I didn’t give a shit.

And I thought,
Am I sad enough about this?

I thought,
Did I really care about those friendships or did I waste my time on people who I shouldn’t have for too long?

I thought,
Am I being heartless?

I thought,
Will people think I’m a bad friend for being honest about not caring that much?

Then I remembered one of my favorite philosophy classes from college about relationships, and how different philosophers have defined them.

Aristotle said there are three types of friendships: one based on utility, one based on pleasure, and one on mutual appreciation of each other’s values.

A friendship based on utility is basically a relationship that lasts as long as you’re both getting something out of it. Like a transaction. Sort of like a coworker who you’re only work friends with for as long as you’re at that job. Once you leave, you don’t see them again and they don’t see you again but you mutually benefitted from being positive to each other while you were at work. Aristotle said this is popular with older people.

A friendship based on pleasure is more emotional and supposed to usually be the shortest relationship. You stay friends for as long as you both enjoy the same thing, and you break up as soon as one person doesn’t.

Aristotle said the pleasure friendship is more common between younger people because as we grow we tend to change our interests and values, so we grow out of pleasure friendships quicker than the other types.

The third type of friendship is based on virtues, and it has the strongest connections and lasts the longest. The best friendships should be based on appreciation of character — not on a transactional (utility or pleasure) value — and shape our lives for the better.

I think this really explains why I wasn’t sad about the friends that I lost this year.

One was a girl who I went out drinking with and talked about guys we were dating. We would meet up and both hop on dating apps and squeal about who we had matched with, who we’d met, and who we were dating for a while, but once I stopped caring about those things we ended up really not having anything else in common. We didn’t even like the same music or shows. Our friendship was a pleasure transaction, and as soon as I stopped using dating apps we stopped being friends.

I ended up not missing her at all as soon as we stopped being friends because she didn’t really add anything else to my life. Our values weren’t the same at all: we couldn’t relate about our jobs, our education level was different, and we had different political views. The death of our friendship was short-lived and unmourned. I actually felt better knowing I didn’t have to talk to her again, because I didn’t want to talk about the same things we used to.

Aristotle said that when you have a friendship based on appreciating each other’s values, the other two types of friendship naturally combine into it, too. Thing of your diehard BFFs that you’ll drive to the airport, invite over to watch 90 Day Fiancé, and help out during a hard time. They’re beneficial and pleasurable, and you also respect and care for them.

I’m extremely thankful for all of my top tier friends and I’m cool with warming my hands on the bridges I’ve burned with my limited time only buddies.