It was dusk when the distant house met my sights. A dilapidated three story home of southern style, uniformly tinted a faded, pale blue entered frame. I didn’t remember how I had got there, and I had no prior memories of the house, but it looked familiar. It looked like it might be comforting. As… Continue reading Dreams of Anton Chigurh, Abandoned Blue Houses and An Awful Backhoe Collison
Author: james
On my unlikable side, and being frustrated
When I have downtime, I sometimes find myself tasting bitterness. When this happens, I feel as if I am one of the few terrible people who can have a great day and still feel upset at the world at the end of the day. I’ll reiterate that this kind of thing is pretty rare, but… Continue reading On my unlikable side, and being frustrated
Mind’s Eye Blindness
I spent at least an hour the other night just watching myself. I fired up the camera on my computer and just took a good look trying to absorb everything, partly because I’m too broke to afford a mirror. I came to a couple conclusions lately. First, I’m still not fully recovered from my last… Continue reading Mind’s Eye Blindness
Stories from my Childhood: Tel-Aviv Terrorist Attacks
I was curled up on the floor next to the bed. My body pretzeled into a mutated half-prone position as cold sweat altered the chemical relationship between my body and the thin layer of carpet. My parents were only three feet away, lying unconscious on the bed, but that fact only made the terror worse.… Continue reading Stories from my Childhood: Tel-Aviv Terrorist Attacks
The Wandering Twenties – A Few Thoughts on Feeling Lost
Lately, I find myself spending a lot of time trying to figure out what I’m doing. In our age, it’s the common struggle of twentysomethings; all the uncertainty, bumbling around for years, worrying about careers and the future, but meeting it with a special kind of indecision that ends up being the equivalent of that really out of shape dude struggling to walk the treadmill right after New Years.
At 26, I feel like I’m beyond most of the general struggle as far as my peers go. I’m not stuck waiting tables or shriveling up in misery each day at some dead end job that I can’t get out of. I’ve got a good job. I don’t see myself needing to find something more substantial in my foreseeable future. More key, I’ve got a general career path etched out. I’ve got goals, ambition, and all that stuff, but I also have an idea of how I’m going to get there; a rough map, and I feel well-equipped enough to have no problem maneuvering myself in the direction I want.
And that really handles the biggest thing I tend to see as far as those around me come. In fact, it almost feels like my friends my age are almost exclusively in two classes. Married, on average, now with a kid or kid on the way, and projecting the sense that they have their life ‘together’ because they have no choice but to, or the others. Those of us who aren’t married, ranging from single with no idea when or how anything substantial is going to surface as far as companionship goes, all the way to the ones in long-time relationships, where you have no idea what they’re doing or thinking because they don’t, they just are in it because they always have been. And that class commonly projects all the uncertainty, all the wavering.
I think the emphasis from that last paragraph should be perception….. (click the title to read more)
The Shame About Respect
It’s a shame we live in a world where restraint, respect, and consideration are viewed more as disinterest, lack of confidence, or unattractive behavior as opposed to coming on to women with half-assed sweet talk and unveiled attempts of puffery to appeal to ones self-image; because I don’t use some cute way to tell you that I think you’re sexy or beautiful, doesn’t mean that my reverence of that fact preventing me from buzzing about your ear like some mosquito is disinterest– instead, it is probably the highest honor I can give.
Smiling Practice
This morning, I made it my personal goal to hold a good, genuine smile during my drive to and from work. I did OK on the first leg, and we’ll see how the second leg goes, but besides being a mood augmenter, the personal challenge is eye-opening to a lot of things.
The thing about smiling is that it seeps into your mood. If you’re smiling, and by that I mean replicating a genuine looking smile, then eventually the line will cross from just forcing that smile to actually smiling, and because pleasantness and happy emotions are so strongly bonded with that facial expression, that smile gets you feeling better; feeling good.