Tag: libra

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth

I can’t stop thinking about the butterfly thing, where he really said I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth. And it doesn’t make me feel how it did at all any more, but it is so easy to remember how it used to make me feel. Like I’m watching myself act it out in a little movie.

I remember how much I reread that text over and over and over and over and I could have survived off of just knowing that someone felt that way about anyone. I only need three hours of sleep and a daydream when I feel like that.

Where you keep starting to do something and just forget right in the middle of it because he said he got butterflies from thinking about you so you drop everything and lay on the floor to ground yourself before you go flying into the Milky Way. And every time you pass by a mirror you go !!!! She Knows Something I’m Afraid To Think and you give yourself that little smile and can’t even let your own eyes meet or you’ll lose your grip on gravity yet again.

How strange it is that we can even get to that point. Where all you feel is !!!! and the butterflies in your tummy fly up to your heart and out of your throat and out of your mouth right in the middle of the airport and everyone’s wondering how did a monarch butterfly land right here in Terminal 3? But you hardly even notice because of all the butterflies still trying to make your feet lift right off of the ground so you swallow a thousand times until you feel about 60% certain that everybody can’t tell you’re in Big L.

He sent it from the airport. We weren’t texting before and I didn’t know how to reply. I probably read it a hundred times before I even thought about how to answer and the funny thing is I can’t remember how I answered at all. Some memories are like that. I remember exactly how I felt and how I pictured him sending the message and how it made me feel for the longest time, but I don’t know what I said back. Probably something mediocre because how can you beat a lyricist at the word game and in general I never know what to say just that I feel too much of it.

The picture is from Jude Guench, from a short story called The Butterfly Eater. I feel it is much more appropriate to how I feel now and in a way I feel like our stories parallel each other’s.

unbalanced

My posture must be so bad because I’m in a perpetual state of picking myself back up and dusting myself off.

I am so reckless in every aspect of my life, I don’t know how to focus on anything because I’m focusing on everything. I worked so hard at my job that in the process I forgot to decorate my apartment for a year.

I’m skeptical of the validity of zodiac signs because technically I’m a Libra, the sign of the scales, and yet I’m so awfully unbalanced at everything I do.

I love so hard or not at all. I either feel amazing and happy or worried and anxious. I will not trust you for a long while and then I will trust you so completely. I fall head over heels in love in an instant and I will daydream about someone for hours, until halfway through the day I’m really, really over it.

One half of the day I’m thinking of the delicate angle of his jaw, analyzing why his left middle finger doesn’t straighten all the way (probably a gym injury? we’ve known eachother for a week and I know he loves the gym, and I know him with my heart), thinking about the different colors in his eyes. The next half I’m thinking about how annoying it is to feel anything and how disappointing it is to know that I will most likely be disappointed because I build people up too highly in my mind and it never ends well so I have just let it go.

I crash and I burn and I get embarrassed so often. My posture must be so bad because I’m in a perpetual state of picking myself back up and dusting myself off.

I can’t read books in chapters, I have to read them in their entirety in one sitting or I won’t retain anything.

I was asked what kind of music I listen to recently and I didn’t know how to explain that at this point in time I am solely focused on listening to female rock artists and that even though I don’t love every song on Hayley Williams’ new solo album just give me time and I will grow to love each one.

I will do my makeup and hair, put on a nice dress, color coordinate it with a purse, and not do my dishes except for my favorite mug for a week.

I love movies because they’re perfect for two hours and they stay perfect (the same goes for music and books).

I think if I really made a good effort I could ruin every single relationship I have with people in two hours tops. Sometimes I’m tempted to, just to see what would happen.

I’m destructive to myself but I am also so protective of my heart. I have learned to take potential love slowly because in my mind it has already gone so fast. Sometimes I get the two confused and I end up doubting whether a connection really exists and I decide it’s safer to let it go, stay alone.

I want to take sexy pictures, flirt devilishly and not care, but I have to feel safe first. How can you be risky and safe at the same time?

I’m so either/or and never both but I feel like I’m always trying to be.