Shoes
I’d like to one day step out of the shoes of insecurity. There are days when I wander and ponder meaninglessly, squandering time and the opportunities it entails, treading across the circles I’ve already crossed.
Where I look and envy those who run with the shoes I wish I wore. And carelessly leave my own laces untied on as I stutter and trip like any airhead.
Through the simplest of paths where even little rocks are scarce. I’d like to run as fast as those around me; I’d like to be the winner of the infinite race.
Where when all the paths I see are plain in sight the path I take myself is none. And I imagine the journeys that I cannot see, the journeys I do not run with the different shoes I do not wear.
The light of the sun is shining on a summer’s day. I hide in the shadow and tie my shoes, contemplating their worth.
I’d like to one day make use of the shoes I have and run the distances I would imagine I could.
And step into a new pair of the same shoes, knowing what I knew before.
May 12, 2010 at 7:18 pm | Reflections | No comments
The Truth
I am a very emotional person yet I often try to pretend I’m not.
I do things that don’t make sense yet I often try to make sense out of them.
I am afraid of everything yet I often pretend I’m fine.
I can play it all out in my head yet I always make excuses.
March 6, 2010 at 12:07 pm | Reflections | No comments
Lines Like Ink
I remember drawing in pen. Doodling, scribbling, mindlessly tearing away at the surface of paper.
I throw away the paper and start again. I get a new paper; I am ready to create a fresh, new drawing.
I draw a line.
I fail a line.
The paper is young, and I tear it apart, ready to try again.
My strokes are inelegant and frustrated, and I waste many sheets.
But when I look at life, I realize I cannot throw out the imperfect me’s and start anew.
But it’s the curse of the perfectionist who judges all things from their beginning creation
because every mark, in pencil or pen, will always leave lines like ink.
January 19, 2010 at 6:45 pm | Reflections | No comments
Exhaustion
Life sure is tiring….
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Isn’t it?
January 19, 2010 at 6:34 pm | Reflections | No comments
There is Only Me
This is the time when I contemplate the past and worry of the future. In looking around me, I reach for the world, and I want to ask, “Why did you make me the way I am, World?”
Then, I realize there was only ever me, and the World surrounded me, but I was the one who created myself.
I look inside, and think of all the things I do. I look around to the World, and I wonder to myself. “Why do you make me the way I am when the World is that way, Me?”
I know how there was only ever me, and in knowing full well the truth, I start to ask myself, “Why am I the way I am?”
I grow bitter. Cold. And start to hate. There’s nothing in the world for me. There’s nowhere left for me to go. There’s nothing left for me to. And only me to wonder of me.
Then, I realize, there was only ever me.
Then, I realize, there is only me, only me who can open the door. The door which leads to the world.
And only I, only me, do stare at my own door, afraid to turn the key.
January 3, 2010 at 12:51 pm | Reflections | 2 comments
The Shy Person Who Thought
Each day, I pass by many people. They are all walking somewhere too as I walk to my own destinations. These people are alone and comfortable on their own tracks. I greet one, and in a few instants we become the best of friends. This is possible because there are so few before me who have laid footsteps for me to follow.
Because the rarity of my actions brings value to my actions. I understand this. These people have tireless thoughts to relay. The places they are walking towards. The places they’ve walked to before. The destinations, having changed by time. The numerous roads not taken.
I know my worth. I do not bother; I offer relief. This is how little events create friendships. Intimate friendships of a lifetime.
A shy person imagines many things. This shy person, in any parallel world, may have imagined these same things through the same day. This shy person, in any parallel world, may have seen the same people walk by and bothered only but one of them.
And as it played out, in this alternate world, the world of a daydreamer, new best friends were made.
But, today, a shy person passes by many people and greets not one of them for all are strangers.
In a world of shy people.
October 27, 2009 at 6:38 pm | Reflections | No comments
Refocus
I kept opening the doors and finding dead ends. That’s how I played it all out in my head. I realize now I never opened any doors, for I had kept them all shut.
A blurry camera does not take good pictures. But, we don’t call cameras blurry; we call pictures blurry.
I was always the one who made the work, but the work was itself.
I wrote a word on the wall. I wrote another word on the wall. In a few moments, I had my sentence. “I am about to open this door,” said the sentence. Paradoxically, I stared at the sentence I had created.
The sentence was not a lie. So long as it was constantly reread, the about-to-ness was renewed, and so I could reread forever that sentence which I had writ.
That sentence was not blurry. It was crisp to the edges and fully legible.
October 18, 2009 at 8:59 pm | Reflections | No comments
The Confessions of an Aspiring Artist
Beauty can be found in the simplest things in life. Art can be made of the most trivial little details of the world. Art can be made from life. The making of art gives meaning to all these things.
Or at least that’s what I’d like to say, being an artist. Everyone wants to feel important, like the things they do–or create–have significance
I constantly am in notice of small details. I remember the simple things in life. I eat a dinner and slowly chew. I stare in awe at the little black shadows formed where grains of white rice overlap. I am inspired to a pattern; there is an incredible balance in the rounded ellipses of the white rice and the concave deltas of the black shadows. They create patterns which are logical. They create patterns which are meaningless. They create the food of my thoughts for the next hour.
It’s always so easy to imagine yourself doing something which you never do. You never even try to do that thing you imagined. I imagined my self sketching the rice, savoring that moment when it was arranged on my plate in a way it would never be arranged in again. But, the thought was too absurd. I had been calmly eating dinner for an hour. I was supposed to be eating dinner, not staring at rice, not observing rice, not admiring rice.
Being an artist, it is in my nature to observe. Inspiration comes from the most unexpected places, they say. I walk around in a random small-town parking lot, the kind that isn’t very paved. I am always looking down, looking up, and looking around me when I walk. Sometimes I become self-conscious of my observation; no one else I see seems to move their head around as much when they walk. But I must take full use of my own eyes.
It is this way in this parking lot. I feel the bumps of the little rocks below me, and suddenly I am drawn to their attention more than the sparse cars, more than the placid sky, more than the little rustic castaway furniture store. I see these rocks are variegated in shades of gray. There are many grays. But, every few rocks there is a perfectly brown-orange one. I am in awe of the way these rocks are arranged. In an instant, I stare. In an instant, I think.
I look at the rocks around. The whole parking lot has these same rocks scattered about, but in a cursory scan, I feel that no other patch of this lot is arranged nearly to the perfection of the one I stand on. There are too-numerous brown-orange rocks clumped together. There are too-vast expanses of gray rocks. This chance deeply humbles me, and I muse my gratitude for the small things in life.
I have played through such scenes in their entirety, continually. I am never truly bored because I am always occupied. People around me see me standing frozen looking down at the ground. People around see me with a faraway gaze. Perhaps I waste my time. I am looking for something which is not there; a meaning to it all.
But I live for the novelty of seeing more rocks, and I am constantly creating the nature of my mind. I create the structure of my thoughts. I observe, and I remember. Anything that can make a mark can sketch. Life is a tool to draw a portrait of existence. And the making of art gives meaning to these things.
Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe, being an artist.
October 11, 2009 at 12:16 pm | Lifepost, Reflections | No comments
Backspace
Internet chatting is not the same as face to face conversation.
This is a truth which all newbies, to either world(though help come to those for whom internet chatting is the first), learn quickly.
Backspace is a convenient key.
Those who strive to guard themselves from regret learn quickly that passiveness is its truest precedent.
I had typed more words in this article, but I backspaced them out.
Now, empty, I ponder and wonder.
If those lost words were truly worth the extra keystrokes.
September 7, 2009 at 8:12 pm | Reflections | No comments
Physics Homework
A time when I was traversing down the truly, most definitely clear road of a teenage high school student who is most certainly NOT experiencing the identification stage of life(See Erik Erikson, the man with an awesome name), I realized that I had forgotten the preposition starting the first sentence of an article I was forming in my head to be written at a future time.
Disorganized was for the word my thoughts. Disarrayed was the word my thoughts for. Disastrous spelt it all.
Thinking, then, I remembered I was working on my physics homework. For the past few moments, a random passerby would have caught me with my eyes glazed over had not they been blockaded by the computer screen. Yes, computer-assigned homework is truly a marvel in its eye blockading abilities(to random passersby even!), but the content of the homework would, by all modus operandi, hold true to its mind-arresting aptitude.
Yes, I, for a moment, was blank-minded, suspended in the endless suspension of dumbfounded-ness at a single physics problem. I, with my eyes glazed over, ceased to continue any but that single physics problem. I, who ignored my own approach.
I, in a time before the writing of this article, thought. And, I, in an instant, learned the virtue of patience.
A computer accomplishes more than hide the eyes of its user from the view of someone staring upon the machine’s back. Despite my most reliably cited popular belief, the computer is more than a mere black or white or gray or beige or rainbow box obscuring the world. It is a call to convenience.
And at that moment, as I mused on computers, a thing(calculations) which eluded my difficulties in the past, was the impetus to my absentmindedness. I lost all focus. I lost it the minute I sat in that chair–No, the minute I turned on that power button the minute before I sat in that chair.
I remembered a past life of lesser laziness when calculators and notebook paper were instinct. And here I was, seeing an assignment on the computer, predisposed to venture the mental crunching of numbers in my mind. My finitely reserving mind! It was scarce a wonder that the solution eludes those who forget the value of circumspection!
And so I pretended to undust my pencil as if the time between now and the end of school, when I had last writ with that gratifying lead, were a lifetime of neglect. So quickly had I forgotten the treasure of written aid.
In a few short moments, I scribed that which was to be scribed so fancifully and cheerfully as I would choose to scribe the word scribe rather I write the word write. In a few short moments more, all became clear for the discord and chaos that was the disarray, disaster, and disorganization of my determinate critical thinking capacity was now bound and formed upon the indeterminate bulk of all the world’s paper.
In a few short moments later, I finished my physics homework.
September 7, 2009 at 7:05 pm | Lifepost, Reflections | No comments