It's just a blog, it's just a blog.

I'd like to go back to the beginning. The beginning being an indescribable spot, a fluctuation between multiple memories with the precise hopes of revealing it all. The beginning is the same as the middle, not to be confused with the whole. The beginning is what formed you, but also has very little to do with where you might end up. These are things I have taken for granted, masked behind the screams of feminist outrages. These are the topics no one is paying attention to because it is a time when the cries of hungry children and divided families are silent against the weight of the greed for gold and silver. I agree, the representation of a typical fantasy princess is as different from the head-strong, decision-making king as could possibly be. Polar opposites, as some might call it. The idea that a woman is much more than a great cook, master sewer or even multi-talented house-keeper is firstly not a knock to women who choose to do so. Someone has to do these things, obviously. The more kudos to you who have the stability of income with which only one working parent may be hands-on twenty-four hours a day, most days. However, this is to say that some women prefer to do other chores. I myself must be a current day, transgendered being because while my female nature knows the mystery required to do the dishes and scrub toilets another part of me wants to write a book and share some of my ideas with the big boys. I have been educated enough and seen a decent amount of the world to know that the dilemma and tragedy of undedicated and lost women and young-girls is, indeed, an epidemic. I wanted to know why and my only hope is that this piece will make it beneath your eyes, into your mind and out again of your very mouth. Spread the word(s), please. Let all the young people of this generation, male or female, know that they have been misled. Housecare and parenting does not a bad person make. Those are honorable and necessary in order for our society to continue developing with respectful and patriotic citizens. On another offense, please tell them that a good alternative to a failing economy is to turn on the image that the media has so recently and completely honored; sleaze-balls. Yes, sleaze-balls. People who have no other objective in life than to enjoy every second, without a thought or pretense as to how others may or may not be affected. In addition, in order to turn ourselves off to this image, through a tried and true method, I humbly suggest turning your eyes from the representations, if not only for the moment to look at whoever is around you and ask how you might help them, love them and in turn enrich your own soul that we each one of us most assuredly has residing in us. 

The problem with the argument I am presenting is that the tangents I could take are endless, so I will try to stay on the main road while taking side streets when only completely necessary or slightly beneficial. I think young people are lost. They are floundering and adults are too busy, too preoccupied, too angry, too hurt to take the time to correct what seems to me to be mortally wrong with our nation. Like, Stephen Kieman said in his book, Authentic Patriotism, I know problems exist all over the world, but if we cannott help our own people than we should seriously be considering the appropriateness of "helping" others, especially when half of our citizens and most others from around the world don't consider what we do as help. If, however, you are reading this and anything I say applies to your country and you feel you could be influential to people I only dream of meeting, than by all means, please help your young people too! I don't presume to know the state of youths around the world, much less throughout the United States. I only have my experience, a California born and raised youth to adult who spends her time tutoring kids who can't tell me a dream they have beyond the weekend. No dreamers, no politicians waiting for their age to match up with their ability and no awareness of themselves or others. It is truly a sad situation. I want to yell at the parents for bringing children into the world who only fear the night or to slap the school system for not inspiring more in a child than adequate behavior for lining up properly or for sitting quietly, mostly. Above it all though I want to plead and beg with the people who have become so disconnected from each other that seeing a child with no shoes sparks the comment, "I wonder if his family is even legal" rather than "that poor child, what could five dollars do for him?" What I'm wanting is compassion. Compassion because we cannot understand every situation, all we can do is take care of the here and now and I know that as a kid compassion and sincere love from an adult is what got me to where I am today.

That is just the beginning. I am not, as has been critiqued in the past, some hippie-flower person claiming that love will bring about peace and end all travesties. Instead, I'm admitting that I lost my way and had forgotten at age twenty-two how to try. If you don't understand what I mean, try making someone else's day and see how it alters your own. It may not feel like magic and fireworks the very first time, but trust me when it clicks, when you smile at a kid because they are looking at you and you don't know what else to do and then they smile back it feels like the day just got that much brighter. I loved Kieman's book, but I wanted to add this section if I could. Not everyone can come up with a sincere, life-bettering hospital system and I know that isn't the point of his book, so I just wanted to add this little piece. Start small. Start as small as you want to and I can't tell you much more because I'm beginning there myself. I do know that you will surprise yourself at how quickly your habits can change and how the good deed-doer will just ooze from your own mind and sneakily catch you off your own guard. Perhaps you could start with your own kid or even your family if you need to. Maybe you already show all the love to your family that can possibly be squeezed out of you? Than move on to showing the globe some love. For me, I imagine every trash I return to it's rightful spot, the garbage can, has benefited someone else's day. Maybe I am stretching my imagination, living in a daily fantasy where my neighbors appreciate my effort, but I'm not running back to reality. I like it here and I like to think that others started before me, so I'm not as lonely. You should join me, after all, it would be no fun to go on a journey completely alone.

Quitting

I realized this morning that my entire life, all 23 years, has been about quitting. I am, of course, the girl who learns through doing. Does it hurt to bang your head into the wall? Well, yes, it hurts him and her, but would it really do the same to me? *Five seconds later*, "indeed!" It does inflict pain. So, then I know. At least down this route I usually have first-hand accounts of circumstances that others bring up as topic fillers or gossip-bits.
Anyways, I wouldn't say that I am a quitter, just that I was seeing the world in that light and have only, just now, realized this. Instead of perceiving the transitions in my life as just that, as moments when change takes place in order to move me up or along even, I saw it as a step-back. I guess I'm thinking of life more as a yin-yang type existence now where the items of the paradox, whatever they may be, co-exist rather than pull in completely opposite directions.
The best example I have is my struggle to find a sustainable life-style here, when the home I've known is there. The schism between the two felt like a huge void that I was running from. In one plane I was the young girl, family-oriented and people-pleasing and confident in that role and in the other I was self-reliant,  education-grounded and free, in more than a few ways. In my mind, these two were black and white and I could not see that gray was an option. Most likely because when I went there I heard all the negatives of here and so I began to believe that my life-style choice had a hierarchy, one that I knew intuitively was "wrong" while the other just wasn't "right."
It took this year, a most unpleasant 10 months to be honest, to give me a new beginning. See, the old me would have said, "Time to start over. I'm done with blah, blah, blah." I'm trying something new now. I am building, rather than casting the entire model aside. In reality, that isn't how life works and, if it is, there are only so many times we can start from the beginning, which are actually ruins before we give up and hopelessness sets in.
The first step in my perspective-changed being is to acknowledge that I like the way my ground floor was built. (I'm speaking/thinking entirely metaphorically here.) Once I was able to admit that or to see that, once again, I started to see that it eliminates fear as to what I'll create next. That first level will always be there, so the more comfortable I am with it, the easier it will be for me to try new things and not worry so much about making the "right" decision or even about having the appropriate response.
One of the struggles I'm having with this new outlook is how to react when certain characteristics I have bring me down every once in awhile or make me feel guilty in a situation that another individual might never think twice about, but I guess I'm still learning.
I still won't regret any of the choices I've made, but I will remember my "growing-pains" and pray to God that I remember the lessons I've learned. The hard way, of course.

Duplexity

Why is it that your noise drives me to the edge of a cliff?
That the only noise I long to hear is the birds calling to each other in the air?

Why is it that enough is really never enough?
That what I have or have been given leaves me longing for I don't know what?

Why is it at times that I crave solitude?
That one second I find joy and the next finds me in the most opposite mood?

I have never been in the situation where I tried to identify this uncomfortable uniformity
because what I have to compare it to is nothing but ordinary.

One fact in me I keep returning to is that this modern life is quite boring.
I hate the way we wear our clothes, premeditated, stressed over and painfully gained.
The weight of what I'm doing never allows me to commit.
Do I want to wear what you do and have each hair most perfectly aligned?
At times.

Do I stop for a minute and try to realize that what I tell myself every day is the most complicated of lies?
I do.

I sabotage my happiness because I feel I don't deserve it
I look for you for guidance as if I've never heard it
In reality, I'm waiting for some kind of change.
Either one in me that makes me strong enough to be who I want to be
or a change in the world that finally makes me.
I'm sick of all the things I do not know
and all the things behind me
Maybe it would be better to look ahead now
and make the changes that I would like to see
I'm scared of what they might bring though
and fear is unusual for me.
Since I was a little girl I went anywhere alone
never fearing what lay in wait for me
never waiting to examine the possibilities
I did it naively, or do you call it bravery?

I can't read a book when I don't know the language.
I can't write a story that just isn't in me.
I can't live this life, day to day,
I can't see the future, any way.

I can't understand people
I can't quit being absurd
the more I think of things I can't do
the more I realize there's one I can. complain.

If I could, I would. trust that.

She just wanted to be alone. As awful as she knew it sounded, it was true. When she lay there thoughtfully, the same idea played again and again. She lay in bed, wondering about the meaning of life and about all the opportunities that lay within her reach and she knew, she was fulfilled. Had she possibly had the greatest love of her life and more memories than she could truthfully ever need or was it a sad case of lost hopefulness in which she felt like Alice through the hole; a young, lost girl in the midst of finding the meaning of life, but was she choosing to stay in her life, a life as made-up as the importance of the science of dinosaurs which she validly claimed was a waste of a subject in school? As were most, for that matter. What was she living for? Over and over without ever reaching a conclusion, but not feeling desperation in those moments, instead she was sedated with a strong sense of calm in which she tried to ignore any outside influences that so abrasively conflicted with the serenity of thinking about everything and also absolutely nothing. 

The roundness of her thoughts might have indeed been causing more anxiety than she cared to acknowledge, however she doubted it. She knew that in civilization, in hers at least, the ability to be a "team-player or a "socialite" was extremely important, but how could one participate in a culture where one felt no more connected to the activities than one did while witnessing two complete strangers embrace? Not only was she heavily conflicted with her own realization of separateness and her own aloneness, but she also had the awful weight of humiliation that one might experience when being observed while being the observer in such an intimate moment as mentioned above. 

She knew it was all about perspective, perhaps yet another reason for the inner-struggle she housed while dealing with these years of silence. What would happen, she wondered, if she pulled herself out of the reach of those who have claimed to care and those who she knew truly did? She had come close to something similar before. Not quite suicidal in her thoughts, perhaps close, but not being one for absolutes it was not likely that she would ever pull the triigger or tie the rope and pull the knot. She wasn't suicidal, just a great relier on quiet, peace and thoughtfulnees, things which never came easily with the obtrusion of people, those from the ones who claimed to love her most.

Maybe, she wondered, the problem is not who loved her, but who she chose to love. Something similar had been said years before but she ignored the advice. She felt devastated by the cruel words too much to acknowledge their validity. In fairness, no one likes to admit their faults, specifically when it is one that happens sub-consciously. It is vastly different to being told that you chew too loudly and to know that a small alteration of jaw strength or saliva intake could be modified and therefore cure your annoying habit than to be told that the way you love is faulty; that something as innate and internal as your beating organ could also be the thing plaguing you and ostracizing you from the whole of society and all that it's members may have to offer you.

What then? What can one hope for in a case as desolate as that? In fact, she had appeased herself with any number of scenarios.

A Combination, really.

How does it sound when you're heart is the only thing to speak?

Not your mind or your desires?

I hear the sound each day and it sounds like rambling.

Not the kind that relaxes you, 

Not the running of a stream, just a little bit off beat.

So today I listened to myself. 

To what my heart had to say 

and then I listened to the phrasing,

why did my mouth put it out that way?

I didn't mean to hurt you and I never wanted to mislead.

While you think that I misled you and you think that I'm confusing,

I sit back in agreement because who knows what really happening?

I said some things I thought I meant

but looking back I see,

I represented a part of me that I wanted you to see,

but in that portrayal I left off another piece.

So you see I wasn't lying,

I just wasn't giving you all of me. 

My thoughts now are to change that, but I'll keep that to myself.

The truth, well people claim is, 

there is no real changing anyway.

So I'm stuck being me and deceiving those I meet.

It looks a lonely road ahead of me, 

until my heart and mouth and mind can finally agree. 

What would I change?

No more false words that appease you,

no more rambling for fun. 

No more thoughtless remarks that hurt you

all those niceties are done.

I spend my time trying to be sweet and calm and smart and funny.

The truth is, I feel those things, they somewhere reside in me.

However when I push them out, they lack genuinity.

They show the face of a card that perhaps one expects to see. 

As in a deck of cards, I'll show what a player likes, usually. 

But if I never show my weaker pair, a 2 or 3 of spades,

how will the winner ever win if he already holds the aces?

What are the reasons you are living for?

What is the thought that wakes with you at the start of the day?
The thing at the morning that pulls you through even when there is so much else going on?
How do you face the day when more than everything is going less than even a little bit your way?

How do you feel when there is nothing to hold on to, take that one thing away.
Look at your life without a point, no center you are absolutely drawn to.
how does it feel to be so lost, yet free, in this way?

We go where we please because there is no way to tell how off or on we might be.
We look for correction, suggestions, learning a right way or not,
but most of all we are looking for what others of you have seem to already got.