April 2013 - mindjames

Eruptions

I once had a dream. I was a seagull, on a first class tour of the clouds and mountaintops of a set of lush, coastal islets.

This land, remote, was pimpled green, and the tips of the great hills and mounts oft charred and exhaled steam, the air smelling of seawater and steam and fog. The isles curved around like a lowercase j, with the largest of the mountains dotting like the top, looking down on the rest of the chain.

At the bottom of the ‘j’ were many smaller ones, and atop each one sat a different person. On my tour, I flew past the first of the pimply hills, surveying the inhumanly large men and women sitting on the various tips of these mountains.

What Stays Personal? Thoughts on Personal Blogging

I am an endangered species – a personal blogger

The blog. A web log. In Internet years, these things have become antiquated. When blogs were new, the concept was mostly personal. You didn’t have news entities or people making a living off of the thing, people just wrote about what they wanted and put it out there. I’d wager that most anyone doing such a thing in the early days of blogging never did this with the idea of anyone else really reading it, we just did it because we could, so why not? It was the same principle as building your own website in the 90’s. You probably had nothing of worth to really share or create, or if you did, you didn’t stick with it long enough to get that good at it, but it was something cool to do online, so why not? There’s no better reason to do anything!

Closely associated with the birth of the blog were services like Xanga and Livejournal, which turned into everyone you knew having one. This was kind of an unfortunate time for the Internet. At least with Tumblr, everyone can just post stupid pictures and quotes, because as soon as most people (kids) start putting down words, it just gets messy.

The Downside to Achieving Goals

Goals. Sometimes you forget that they are meant to be something more than just an aspiration. You set all these goals for yourself. You tell yourself that you’re going to start from a clean slate. You wipe everything clean. You’ve got nothing to lose, and all to gain. You take yourself and shred it into pieces and throw it on the ground, and you make a puzzle out of it. Construct yourself several years from now. You tell yourself what you want to do with your career. You decide you want to be a serial entrepreneur, whatever that means; carve out your own destiny. You nod assuredly, and it’s set. You tell yourself you need to move back to the city. You give another nod, and it’s set. You want to rebuild your eroded social life. Another goal. You tell yourself you have no time for love, well, no time for a relationship, in that sense, you set another goal.

Piece by piece, you create a mosaic of what you want to look like in the near future. One day at a time, you chip away. You move any little thing in your life that you’re able to in order to come closer to becoming that mosaic. Most of the time, the only thing you can do is strengthen a mindset. You know that goals take time. They are abstractions, and you have no idea how or when they will shift from the ethereal to the corporeal. You have to be patient, but you hate being patient. You have no choice. And because you have no other choice, you are patient.

One day, you catch yourself in the mirror, and you pick up on the striking resemblance of that collage; that goal-completed self. You’ve done it, but now what?

Heart Matter, Mind Matter, and the Stuff Left Behind When You Leave – Life is Significant

It’s a Thursday with no plans. It’s raining outside. It’s a little chilly. It’s dreary. It’s been a long week. If I don’t put out something real this time, I doubt I ever will. I’ve got a lot ready to pour out. Spare me just a few paragraphs to get into why I’m here today.

Something that’s always scared me is my lack of middle ground. There is the whimsical fool who floats clumsily like a butterfly just out of the cocoon, and there is the somber, pensive one who slowly processes and feels every single thing at the pace of a thick liquid slowly staining into denim. There really isn’t anything between, barring the neutral, transparent me, who simply is there to exist, and contributes nothing either way. I really am a person of extremes. I have to get used to this.

These two sides both have nothing but admiration for the other, because they have everything their counterpart lacks, and today, the somber one reigns, and today, the somber one is at his best.

I’ve been through a lot of life lately. I think over the weekend alone, I visited the respective zeniths of everything that I can hope for, everything that I imagine to be perfect and complete and right, to the brink of despair, hopelessness, confusion, and continued hauntings of my past. I know that all sounds so dramatic, but it really was a very expansive personal ride in such a condensed amount of time. It’s what happens when you get gunned down by rapid fire surprises. I think I am through that tour through Willy Wonka’s Psychadelic Tunnel, and overall, I’m just so content and happy with it, because after all those years of stagnation, it was ultimate confirmation that I’m alive again; in the figurative sense. I had myself a spoonful of life. What’s not awesome about that?

The Pristine and The Ugly

I’ve grown up so much in the past couple years. Especially in the past 6-12 months. A lot of times, it is easy to assume — time has passed, I must have matured some more! Check yo’ face, cause often times that might be the only way you’re maturing. I am talking about growth that I can visibly, circumstantially see.

I’ve been keeping a personal blog since I was at least 16 or 17, and it has been one of the most instrumental pieces in my personal growth and discovery as an individual. When I think about it, it is a measuring stick– a qualitative, wordy measuring stick. I don’t know how anyone could live without one? Not necessarily a blog, but a means to personally measure where they are in life like marking our height on the wall over the years.

I am paranoid of stagnation.