Idle Musing Number Two

Don't worry, I actually have an idea for an essay. One of these days I might write something again! I'm about half-way through, and it'll be up-loaded soonish.

Anyways, consider this: Has every single idea been made yet? It's an old saying that there are no original thoughts, but is that true? On one side, there have been literally trillions of minds on our world alone, all firing their neurons in similar ways, and often thinking about the same things. On the other hand, times have changed. Would the ancient Greek and the modern American think the same thoughts?

Let's puzzle it out!

Essay Four- Flying

Okay, it’s about time I let the cat out of the bag. I, dear reader, am a pilot. Contain your excitement though! A ton of people are! Hell, you should be! It is the greatest thing in the world, let me tell you. I may only be learning, but I’ve already gathered that there is nothing like it in the world.

Now first off, what does flying entail? For me, it’s about 10 minutes of pre-flight (making sure everything’s alright and that only the pilot can screw everything up mid-flight), another five to make sure the plane is responding as it should, and then take off.

And then, dear reader, the miracle happens.

As you may have guessed from reading “Love, Loss, and Pets”, I’m shy as hell. I get a little bit shaky talking to really cute girls, in fact. It’s, it’s pretty shameful, actually. But in the skies, it’s all better. I still shake, but none of it matters. I become dust in the wind, just like any person. You float above the farms, above the roads, above the cities, and once again get reminded that yes, you are just dust in the wind. Dust that can soar! You breeze above mountains, plow through clouds, and it’s gorgeous.

One of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen was when I was flying. I emerged from a cloud bank, to find a sea of white, rolling like waves upon the sea; a mountain of mist rising into the blue sapphire sky to the point of hurting your neck to gaze on it’s majesty; with the background of Mt. Pilchuck making it all suddenly become real to me. No words can do it justice. I imagine that for an astronaut floating above our fair Earth, the view must be even more mind-blowing. It would be magnificent.

It makes you realize that life is the second happiest miracle of all, and that intelligence is the first. For truly, how can it be known there is beauty without a mind to awe at it?

Needless to say, I’m really passionate about flying. I haven’t even soloed yet! I’m still on the basics! But still, knowing that I can fly like my wildest dreams imagined makes everything brighter.

I just thought that I should tell you, reader, so you get a bit more insight into my mind.

Essay Three- The Complications of Life

            I’m just going to touch on three major issues: love, boundaries, and friends. Each of them deserves more than just a body paragraph or two, but they’ll get that later. I think I’ll have five or six separate essays on love by the time I’m done, 50K words (NaNoWriMo's goal) or not!

            But love is definitely the miracle of life, but it’s definitely the biggest complication in it except for us lucky few who were blessed with finding their loves early. For the rest of us, love is a complexity the likes of which no poet could capture. It floats and it flutters, it plays with our heads and toys with our hearts, and it yo-yos like a small child with a very, very, VERY severe seizure (but he’s fine and gets ice-cream in the end, to content you faint-hearted folk). But think about love; does it matter whom you feel it towards, or how you feel it towards them? I openly love my best friend Tristan, but as a brother. But really, what does that mean? It’s like there’s this zone that physical attraction has nothing to do with, and when somebody hits there, you love them like a sibling. But here’s my question: what if they fell out of the impartial love zone, and suddenly became attractive? I mean physically. Your feelings would have to change, right? Or would they? The base of this is; if Tristan woke up tomorrow a gorgeous woman, could I help falling madly in love? Or would it be same old same old, Rock Band-ing in his room and chatting about everything from particle physics to the true beauty of the bear? (Inside joke, by the way. Watch Avatar The Last Airbender, and you might get it.) I truly have no idea about it. But I do know that while I consider one of my girl pals just a friend, whenever she doesn’t have her make-up on at school, I always seem to think about her much more.

Like a lot of women, she tries to cover up her natural beauty with glop.

But on those days, I can see myself falling for her again. It’s very peculiar how the heart distinguishes love from not-love, but some other element separates love-love from brotherly love.

And another thing I wanted to rant about was boundaries. Everybody has them! Maybe yours is raw food, or maybe escargot (which is delicious, by the by), but you’ve got one. Hell, you’ve probably got dozens, just like anybody else on this globe! But when can they be crossed?

I keep chatting (maybe prattling would be a better word, my dear reader) about love. Where do boundaries come in on that? A lot of people nowadays will say that, yes, a man may love a man and a woman may love a woman. A lot of people don’t, too.

Then again, some people actually love-love their cars.

Anyways!  People love people. If there were any one thing which I believed you must take away from this, it's that little, innocuous, all-powerful statement. I don’t know, really. I just think that it isn’t fair, and people should be able to love whomever the hell they want. Not whatever, autophiliacs, whomever. But that’s just one boundary, one thing that limits humanity as a whole. Imagine if we were to tear nearly all of them down! It might be a beautiful, short lived, glittering utopia. But then again, the complication of boundaries is whether they should stay up or not. Just like laws, but if you break a boundary society punishes you, not the cops.

And now for the last subject of this essay that many of you have likely skipped over: friends. They’re one of the greatest things you can have! After all, you can spend money, happiness can get rained on, a love can break your heart, but friends always try to help and be there for you. Actually, they’re kinda like pets, but usually they feed themselves! Haha, very funny stupid. Friends are complications, though, because of human nature. My pal JD is one of my closest, but I nearly never talk to him.

When we do though, we can spend hours laughing! It’s very strange how I know that I can come into contact with him essentially any second I wish, but I nearly never do. Likewise, with another friend, we support each other and keep each other standing when a single pair of legs would crumple. But that’s when we’re hanging out only us two. The second we add a third to the mix, no matter who, we start tearing each other apart like lifelong rivals, bound only by our hatred.

It’s so weird!

So why does that happen? Our characteristics can change completely depending on what friend we’re with, almost as though we were a crystal and different friends are lights shining upon us in different ways. I’ve noticed it, I know many of my friends have, and odds are the few readers who are still somehow combing through my thoughts have too, or are at least puzzling it out in their heads. It seems completely random, actually. But my question (and it’s always a question, nearly never an answer; Socrates was a genius, after all) is this: why do we change around different friends?

It seems nearly like it takes away that little chunk of advice that everyone’s parents told them when they were young: be yourself. But aren’t you yourself when you’re with friends? It seems like it, right? Once again, I’ll return to the crystal analogy. Different lights will pass through it in different ways. I kind of think of it as a reverse prism. All of the different shades of colors will shoot through the anti-prism, and combine to make a blinding white light, the true you.

You see, what my hastily contrived analogy is trying to convey is that each friend will bring out a different aspect of you that has always been there. But that’s just a foray into the darkness of unknowing, one that probably stumbled across nothing. Hey, why don’t some of you more motivated readers tell me your thoughts? It’d be interesting, at least, and seeing how I’m still composing my 50K words you might just get a little mention here or there, or maybe even an essay apologizing and correcting for when you prove me wrong (as if)!

             But those, in my opinion, are the more hard to categorize complications of life. Friends and why we act the ways we do around them, boundaries and when to cross them, and loves and when we have them, and what they are. There are still all the minor complications of life, but those added up don’t equal anywhere near the amount of these three.

Idle Musing Number One

Note to the imaginary readers I pretend read this site: these aren't essays. They're mere glimmers of thought, ones that I find interesting. I put them up here just for kicks!

What if mankind had evolved on a base eight number system? (instead of 1, 2, 3... 10, 11... something completely different) What would the number ten be like?

Just some random crap like that, that's an Idle Musing. Maybe insightful, maybe not, but I figure it's worth a look at.

Essay Two- The Red Zone

            No, this isn’t some commentary on republicans. No, it isn’t some dumb-assed thing on how much I hate red. I actually think it’s pretty awesome! Green’s better, though.

            This essay is actually going to be on one of the subjects I fear the most: myself. Everyone has witnessed their inner monster, and mine scares the living shit out of me. Mine only comes out rarely, but when it does I, if you can understand what I mean, seem to fade away, to be replaced by a beast of hate and fear.

It really, really sucks.

Have you ever had this happen to you, reader? Just suddenly, without warning, lash out at the world? I bet you’ve done it at least once as well.

For me, the strangest thing brings out my beast, and enters me into the Red Zone: my parents. They tend to yell if a question is repeated (days later, mind you), they like to alternatively put down my efforts or tell me to begin trying, and they seem to not listen to me.

Of course, if this essay were just grievances against my parents, it would last a good 30 pages!

No, it’s more like when they used to do this, all I could do was pin myself up into my room and despair. Maybe cry, maybe just play Civilization 3 very sadly and mournfully, but it was always something. Eventually, though, I would go into little fits of rage inside my room. This started Freshman year, which I’ve always called Shit Year.

Eventually, the little fits of rage got larger and larger, until one day not even my room could contain them. I just burst out one day, walked up to my mother, and screamed my pain out.

This was one of the worst things ever.

She started to cry, right in front of me. Sobbing, in fact. Instantly, my demon subsided, and I was thrust back into my blue zone of calm, and I felt like a dirty shit, to say the very least. So I went into my room and I cried. Sobbed, in fact. (Really, my mother and I are a lot more similar than I would ever care to admit) Soon enough, I stepped out to apologize.

Well, it started out like that. If my Mom hadn’t been in the back room with my Dad telling him how I had hit, actually HIT, her, I may have just apologized and dropped it. But instead, she was insisting that I had smacked her in the face, which I thankfully did not do. So I yelled some more, a kind of passive-aggressive rant in which I apologized for yelling but screamed about her lies and cursed them. In the end, (half an hour later, 25 minutes of it being a 2-way sulk) my Dad defused the situation, thank heaven.

That was my first major experience with the Red Zone. Since then, I’ve had a few encounters with it, but nothing quite as bad. Of course, I thought it was always lurking underneath the surface.

Thankfully, one of my friends showed me how to truly relax. Relaxing isn’t turning off your mind, it isn’t necessarily a nap, relaxing is simply doing something you love to do that’s very fun. You go and sit with buddies and make up fanciful stories and adventures that last from a second to 50,000 light years (even though it’s a distance), or you go and play soccer, or you go and play on the swings. Whatever floats your boat!

Right now, in fact, my Red Zone seems practically gone. It still boils and bubbles up now and then, but now that I’ve learned how to chill it off it has no power.

            And of course, getting rid of that isn’t the only benefit of relaxing. The greatest is the relaxing itself! You’ll feel better, be nicer, and feel much happier with your life! So once again, I find myself nearly thankful of my past mistakes.

Essay One- On Love, Loss, And Pets

Where to begin… That seems the perennial question when it comes to love, on where it begins. For me, love began in 5^th grade, as silly as it seems. This beautiful girl named Claire (and I say no more, no last names in here besides my own!) kept on hitting me with her hair. Weird, huh? And eventually I developed a bad crush on her, one that nothing could fix. And to make a long story short, the Problem didn’t get fixed. It got slapped in the face and left to sadly consider the future love-life debacles it would have whilst standing in the middle of a library, surrounded by friends who wouldn’t meet poor Problem’s eyes. Little did Problem (Me, if you hadn’t guessed, reader, though I am sure you have) know, this was just an example of hard times to come.

The next great debacle in my love-life came during freshman year, 9^th grade. There were a few smaller incidents in between, but I don’t think those are worth a mention. Compared to this catastrophe, they were barely noticeable. You see, once upon a time there was this girl named Lisa. Wonderful gal, I’m still close pals with her, but during Freshman year I thought that We, note the capital, had fallen deeply into love. What a mistake!

First off, it manifested itself, I was told, rather cutely. I would kind of follow her around like a lost puppy, and compliment her almost incessantly. I was deep in love, folks. Head over heels would be an understatement! Eventually, I worked up the guts to ask her to Homecoming, the big local dance, and she gladly accepted!

You should have seen me! I was beaming excitedly, maybe touching the ground every twenty feet or so when I walked. Essentially, I was making a fool out of myself.

Anyways, since this dance happened to be near Valentine’s Day (of course), I went off on a little hint, maybe just a mere felt desire, that I had gotten while talking to her, and I picked her up a book, rarely sold in America, but just happened to be at the local Barnes and Nobles. It was actually an awesome gift, if I may say so. Actually, she said so too, but I didn’t hear her until later.

Also, for Valentine’s Day we had this thing where single people would wear green (as in go), and couples would wear red (as in stop, I’m dating or something).

Of course, I showed up to school in the brightest, proudest red shirt I could find, present in hand and wrapped beautifully. At the other end of the hallway, though, as I stepped in the door I saw something else wrapped beautifully.

Lisa, in a bright green shirt.

Ouch.

So Problem shambled, limped rather, over to her, smiled a wane little smile, handed her the present, and walked away trying not to cry. But then, horror upon horrors, she asked me, in her typical bubbly way, “Matt! Who’s going out with you?”

I kept up my sad limp, my soul-less hobble, and croaked out two words.

“You were.”

And on that note, I had the worst week of my life. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could get me out of that blue funk. My grades dipped, my friends started either taunting or worrying, and my parents thought I was experimenting with drugs. Fun, no?

But eventually, I wrested myself from that pile of shit, and got back up onto my feet and started to walk again. One of the first things the reforged Matt did was talk to Lisa, the source of my anguish. Shockingly, my first action was to ask her about the book. That surprised even me! And even more surprisingly, we somehow rebuilt and rearranged the ruins into a great friendship that I’m infinitely glad to have today.

Oddly, that isn’t what I would call the worst experience in my love-life. It at least had a happy ending, although definitely not the one I had planned upon.

No, the worst was a love without loss. What could be wrong with this, you say?

Everything.

There was this girl named Melissa, Lisa’s best friend (how I met her), and I thought she was the greatest thing in the world. I thought her beautiful, smart, kind, all kinds of shit. Later on, I would discover that she was maybe one or two of the above. Point is, I fell for her as bad as I had fallen for Lisa a year ago.

Now, this wasn’t a sharp, instant torture, it was long, drawn out, and deadly. I fell in love with this girl for about a full year. Every time my mind would turn to her, it would stumble and fall away from the pedestal that I had put her upon, just like Francesco Petrarch and his Laura. Unfortunately, while Petrarch could write poetry and beautiful and glorious sonnets, I could only angst and yearn. That in itself was the worst torture, plus the little put downs Melissa would heap on me every single day. By the end, I was kind of an emotional wreck, with an outer gleam of shining Happiness that no one cared to see through. Eventually, I broke down to someone, and, thank God!, it was Lisa.

Without the bias of “what a man should do”, which was obviously ask her out, she told me to go and relax with the men for a while, and lose myself to some Rock Band or something. I promptly did so, and while I still knew, deep down, that I loved Melissa, a part of me stopped caring that weekend.

Every week afterwards, I felt better and better, using my friends somewhat like crutches, but I still got there. Eventually, I saw her kiss my best friend and all I thought was, “Good for him”. And I walked away and went about my business as usual. That was one of the greatest triumphs of my life.

And now that I’m done ranting about my deeds, it’s time to put some philosophical thought onto the issue of love. Love is a beautiful thing. No other words can fit! Even with the losses I’ve had, I’m still kind of glad to have had them. But when it comes to love, it is a two-way thing. You may love someone, but they may not love you back. It’s hard, it sucks, but people, let me tell you, are damned strong. Everything is recoverable from. You can live. Amazing, no? But I’ve done it enough times to know.

Also, when it comes to love, without a doubt, it is universal. Gays feel it, lesbians feel it, bisexuals feel it, everybody does in some shape or form. And no matter what, it’s still as beautiful as between a man and a woman. But that’s just my opinion. I think that if they want to be married, by all means! Why not! My argument with those mega-Christians is this: If it’s a sin, and you don’t want to do it, why don’t you want others to do it? Sure, it’s a “sin” for them too, but it’s similar to protesting because a man likes to pig out every Sunday on cheap Chinese because it’s gluttony. Let them sin if they wish, I would think.

Of course, being very loosely Christian, I probably have no right to say this. Maybe somewhere in the Bible it does say that allowing gays to be happy is a sin. Maybe it comes right after “Love thy brother”…

Anyways, my luck on love is not way too sour. I still have one of the greatest things anybody can ever have: a pet. They’re a source, I swear, of constant, causeless, free and deep love. It’s probably a form of payback for all the time and affection that we lose on other people. Like a week after you break up with a girl, you find a puppy on your doorstep! Wouldn’t that be great?

Or a kitten, of course. It’s actually kind of funny how cats and dogs love differently. Dogs love like a child who has the absolute Bestest Parents EVER, and cats love more like a best friend does. Unfortunately, as I’ve never had anything else, I don’t know how parrots or iguana show their affection.

But one thing about pets is that they show their love constantly. You get home any day of the week, feeling like shit, they are going to greet you with a nuzzle and a mew (or a squawk or a hiss), and you’ll feel better.

Another thing, especially when it comes to love, that will make you feel better is actually rushing. It’s weird, right? But if you ask a girl out quick, that’s nearly the end of your pain.  If you don’t you’re stuck in the Petrarch cycle, and it will hurt far more than asking. Compare a long, throbbing ache that will never go away to a quick smack to the jaw. I’d take the quick punch anyday, thanks to the lesson Melissa so painfully taught me!

            And no matter what, rain or shine, failure or success, you can always come home to somebody you know that loves you, with all it’s beating heart and all it’s wagging tail.

The Beginning

     Alright readers, just a brief warning: at first, this blog will just be copied from my botched attempt at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). While I discovered that I have WAY too much homework for that, I also discovered that when I wrote, I felt free. While I may be inarticulate in day-to-day normal speech, when I put my thoughts onto paper my words tend to flow, to actually sound like how I would really speak if I could speak this well.
     So even though NaNoWriMo may be over for me, I don't think that writing should be. That would be like discovering that you can fly, but since you've started paying auto insurance, you might as well not because you'd still have to pay the insurance.
     Oh, and reader? Get used to some crappy analogies, because they're kinda my thing. Some of them are absolute gold, though, and I figure that those are worth trawling through the muck for. Anyways, if you're reading this, hello! Prepare yourself for a voyage through morals, confusing thoughts, wild goose chases, a few different worlds, and confusion. The destination is unknown, but hell, the journey there is always more important than where you're going!