i almost can’t relate to anything anymore.

I really thought I would have fallen in love by now. At least once. I really did.

My parents are visiting right now, which is really nice. But it’s funny when you start to see your parents when you’re getting older, and they are getting older, and you become very aware of everyone’s mortality. It scares me because I have not figured out what to do with myself, and I don’t want to be alone.

I’m really glad I have great parents. They are very supportive, and we can talk and I have them to be close to. I don’t know what the point of this post is, I was just feeling really sad this morning being aware that time will always move on and you just have to try to make your life what you want it to be before it’s too late, and that everything and everyone will be gone eventually.

And you hope you will fall in love because that will help you to be motivated and inspired to do the most mundane, boring shit in the world because, hey, you’re in love. Isn’t everything grand?

All I know is the times in my life when I felt there was some one I could possibly love, and I thought about them a lot, it was much easier to just do things. And I sang a lot more. I would like that.

Alright, gotta get up and get ready for breakfast at Cafe du Village with my parents. We like to go there when they visit and the french dudes always have a nice time joking with us.

bon matin neverland!

i am quite alone, and feeling depressed. Gotta figure out what I can do about that.

Making friends used to be easier, you’d just turn to the person who was your age and likely had the same interests, that you saw everyday in homeroom.

I always see groups of friends chatting, making jokes and think, “Where are my people?” I have NO idea, but all I can do is keep trying.

I found this image in a search for “wallpaper” on flickr. My wall calendar this year is of wallpapers from the 1910’s from the William Morris collection at the Brooklyn Museum. It was a bit of a departure for me because older wallpaper can be such a traditional and even conservative (read: stoic and un-sensual) visual choice. The samples in the calendar I’ve got are more on the creative and color-themed side though, so they really appeal to my eye. They’re a little traditional and very symmetrical, but some have really modern and striking color choices, some are heading toward deco. On a side-note, that kind of gives me an idea of how limited mass media is, because I think I’ve been under the impression that really funky-type, interesting, expressive stuff wasn’t as common in certain times of history, but really more of it was going on than people ever see commonly.

I like the image above because it has a very beautiful, kind of ornate flower design, it’s in one of my most favorite colors – blue, and the paper is aged. I LOVE when coloring on things ages or fades. What I actually love a lot is when you see use of color in that way, but the image or object it used on is not aged or distressed itself. For example if the coloring on the paper in the image above was exactly the same as it appears, but the paper was new, I would think this would be an awesome choice. You get the combination of clean, intentional designs in the wallpaper, but then these fading colors that look luminous and natural and kind of mimic the flow and ebbing of energy. It’s like, colors that you see naturally or chemically faded (like with bleach or something) have these smooth gradients that look like the visual representation of emotion. I really like that.

Daylight Saving Time has officially started. I am so, so thrilled. This is one of my favorite times of the year because it is MAGICAL. Seriously. For the past 6 months in the northwestern hemisphere the sun has set around 4:50, and then 5:50pm, and everyone was getting all tired right when they got home from work, or feeling like blowing off the rest of their evening and just going to sleep if they work from home. People were feeling the time crunch of their daily lives more pronouncedly because the day itself was OVER by the time anyone got out of the office. And so was most people’s energy for the day, just totally over.

Now, by some lucky circumstance that the US federal and state governments feel it an appropriate practice (any state can submit itself to be exempted from dst), we magically get a whole other hour of daylight. And because of the optimism this inspires, it really feels like another hour and a half or so of time and energy. And of course, because the Vernal Equinox is coming just 12 days from now and we’re heading into summer, it equals more like 2 and a half hours more of daylight in the evening than we had been seeing in the winter. The days go on forever!

Finally!! More energy!!! No more feeling like you’re falling asleep around 6pm, and just wanting to crawl under some covers and hibernate. Now you will have seemingly more time and concretely a lot more energy to do what you need and want to do!

Well, at least that’s how I feel about it. This time of year really helps me get more done, feel and be healthier, and just be in a better mood in general. Usually what I hear every year is, “Oh NO! Not Daylight Saving Time again!! We lose an HOUR of sleep!” Oh my god, babies, calm down. You loose 1 hour of sleep for 1 day! Then after that everything is SO FREAKING AWESOME for about 6 months!!

Now, okay, some of you the sun doesn’t effect as much. Some people don’t react the same way regarding their energy and the amount of sunlight they get or what hours the sun is up during their waking time. For you guys, alright, it would be kind of annoying to lose an hour of sleep when you’re not gonna feel much difference either way. But come on, it always happens on a Sunday! You could just stay in bed one hour longer than usual and relax! 

Anyway, my opinion: DST is AWESOME and WONDERFUL. Hooray for a new period of positive energy!!!!

“I’m all up in your noun(s), verb-ing all your noun(s)”

Too tired to write something good, but still want to post on blog. You’re doin it right.

I discovered alcohol.

It has just occurred to me, on this evening of the 22nd of January, two-thousand-and-nine, that I have not yet blogged about drinking and alcohol.

What an institution, that in a thousand billion years will NEVER become obsolete. Drinking is as old as time itself, and it is a grand tradition. I myself know nothing personally about the histories of alcohol, brewing, fermentation, and… other crazy ways of making a beverage that will f you up. I do have some field experience, though, and I must say, even being a relatively tame person who does not drink that often and who does not process alcohol well (I can hold my liquor with the best of them, but the hangover is very debilitating; and i’ve never liked beer – *gasp* sacrilege!), there’s nothing like an evening of drinking. In fact, I am drinking right now, and I can tell you my night is already 68% better than it would have been if I had drank the water I should be drinking right now instead.

Now don’t misunderstand me, there are are several very important drawbacks: terrible for your liver/health, addictive, dehydrating, generally a physically degrading practice, drinking is. You should never drink too much, neither at one time or on a regular basis. Over-drinking or chronic alcoholism are serious problems that are hard to deal with, and hopefully they can be avoided. But if you can manage to keep it sporadic, drinking is such a lovely pastime.

I think my most favorite thing about it is that it releases all your happy chemicals (like for serotonin production, etc.). It’s a depressant, and when I drink I am much less self aware/self conscious, I feel generally amused and pleasant, and I am not sweating the small stuff. This = things being at least 10 times more enjoyable than they would be otherwise. It’s always fun for me when I get together with friends and I know we’re going out to drink and dance, or when we’re chilling in and we’ll be finishing a couple bottles of wine watching some hilarious movie or something to that effect.

In the past few years I have really come to appreciate why there is a cocktail hour. After work drinks, or a drink when you get home after a long day seems to put you right. It’s a mental break from your usual state, and it’s important to try and relax. I have also always LOVED how it is totally accepted that everyone, older and younger adults alike, will be drinking or drunk at various holidays, dinner parties, and of course, weddings (hopefully it’s for fun though, and not because of some tension or general bad feelings in the group).

I love hearing friends who come from a mild-mannered background say something like, “I am at my parents for Thanksgiving! We’ll all be totally toasted by the end of the day.” Grandma and everyone. :)

Anyway, this is the part where I end this post because I am a terrible writer.

Some of my favorite things to drink:

red wine – fragrant and warming

margaritas! – no explanation needed

brandy sidecar

whisky sour –  if I’m in the mood

“I’m leaving here anyway, so it’s okay.”

I can apply this in almost any way and it should make me feel better.

Does something matter or not? It depends on how you feel about it (btw, I think “It depends,” is the most universally true answer to a vast amount of questions and then you should go from there). A lot of people talk about how happiness comes from within. I think this is basically true in the sense that no outside force is going to be responsible for making you happy, or creating happy feelings in you. You are who you are and you feel how you feel about the world around you and that is the cause of your happiness. But this is where my understanding of it ends.

I always get hung up between the ideas of reaction and creating/deciding your feelings on things. I personally feel almost completely incapable of “deciding” what my outlook or reaction will be to something that happens or that I am exposed to. Things are so, and I feel a certain way when they are present in my consciousness. I’m disappointed about something, or looking forward to something, or it’s cold outside or too hot, or I don’t like the way a food tastes, or I hear a song that makes me feel excited.

When it comes to my emotional response to things, I feel like I could think about it and get used to the idea of feeling better about something that makes me unhappy, but that doesn’t change my true feeling. To me that feels like saying, “Well yes, I know that I have no desire to go the laundromat, and it will make me tired and take up a chunk of my free time with a less preferable experience, but I am going to not feel negatively about it.” The good thing is if you try to be more acquiescent to everyday stuff like this, you can suffer less, but still, you don’t want to be at the laundromat any more than you ever did. Or at least that’s my experience.

Part of the reason I have trouble with my reactions is that I am a ridiculous idealist, I am as picky as the day is long, and I do not like lying to myself and try to never do it. Trying to change your outlook is not really lying to yourself, but to me one of the first steps of changing your outlook is saying, “I do feel this way, but I’m some how going to say I don’t feel that way anymore, I now feel a new way about it.” I don’t really understand this because to me that is just saying that you feel differently, where if you really acknowledge how you actually feel, at least for me, my original emotional response are my true feelings.

You definitely have to take into account what it is your being unhappy with. Is it something more trivial or transient, and if you just thought about for a minute you really could arrive at a new revelation about how you feel? Sometimes that happens for me, and it is good, I feel like I change my mind, or really more like I “get over it”. But that’s the thing that drives me crazy. I guess I ultimately think that any changing of our minds we do, or any change of response to a certain thing or happening, involves GETTING OVER, or BEING PAST something, letting go of it. Letting go of an idea, or hope, or material thing that you are attached to. Ie: I am going to accept that I need to go to the laundromat for the next 2 hours. It just has to happen, so let go of those two hours, and you don’t ever need to be stressed out about it again. I still don’t want to be at the laundromat, but now I am not desiring to not be there, so my discomfort lessens.

To me, letting go is not the same thing as changing your response from unhappy to happy. It is more like changing from resistant to accepting, which will help you suffer less; and I guess this is what people mean when they talk about deciding to change their reaction in order to be happier. But being less resistant is not something that will directly create more happy reactions, it will just lessen the unhappy ones. I feel like our happiness and desire reactions are sort of already built into us, and that we may not be able to create them.

So I guess my point this evening is ultimately that I feel like I cannot make myself feel happy about anything I don’t naturally feel happy about. I can learn to let go of things that make me feel unhappy, and at that point the issue is kind of irrelevant since I have deemed the thing to which I’m reacting to be  something that doesn’t need to be different in order for me to be happy. I will surely be able to suffer less and therefore have a better, more calm, experience of life.

But what about feeling HAPPY!!? I want to be moved to live! What about the euphoria, and the ecstasy, and warm contentment, and all of that?

goodnight neverland!

Hello. I’m in Santa Rosa, kicking it at my parents house for my holiday vacation. I’m knitting, watching Chelsea Handler, relaxing.

Chelsea was interviewing Ludacris (Luda!) a second ago and they were saying hello and complimenting each other’s clothing and accessories, Ludacris really liked Chelsea’s shoes. Then Chelsea remarked how she loves when rappers come on the show because, “You guys have the best personalities, and you’re funny, and you all wanna have sex with me, I know it.”

Then Ludacris says, “If we had sex would you keep those shoes on?” 

And Chelsea says, “Yeah, I always wear shoes when I’m having sex…”

And she kind of pauses. And then I say aloud, ‘It’s safer.’

Then Chelsea says, “… it’s safer.”

And then I burst out lauging!!

NIGHT!

I just got off the phone with my dad. We like to have long rambling conversations about stuff, life philosophy, how I’m feeling, or politics and stuff. I don’t know what I’d do without my dad. I have really great parents, both very supportive.

He had to go because my Aunt Alison was calling from Hawaii. But he didn’t say Alison… I think he said Injen, or something like that. She was calling from the monastery where she lives, Lotus Buddhist Monastery, in Hilo. I guess she has taken a new name by now. I had still known her as Alison I think 6 years ago or so, but I haven’t talked to her in a long time. I always find out these pertinent things, like name changes, inadvertently. No one ever tells me about it.

I actually didn’t know for so many years (not knowing much about buddhist culture as a young child) that my Dad’s mother’s name was not her birth name, and I had never understood when I was younger why she had no last name. My dad’s mom has been a buddhist for many many years, but I have just been getting aware of the practices. My dad leans more to buddhist thinking, but is not particularly religious. My mom was raised baptist, but it not particularly religious. My parents didn’t bring my brother and I up in a specific religion. We did do Easter every year with my Mom’s parents at their church, and Hannukah with my Dad’s step-mother, Grandma Ruth, aka Ruthie (yep, I have 3 grandmother’s! :) ).

I’m glad I have been getting more exposed to buddhism, and people who are interested in that type of thinking. I never really knew how much it was around my family, my dad’s mom and sister both practicing. I think it’s important not to get too immersed in religious rules and specific beliefs (unless you want to be a monk or nun), but I do like the way buddhism in general has a very compassionate and healthy approach to living. My yoga teacher, Vanessa, has been really helpful to me and it’s nice to have regular contact with some one who you can relate to thinking about the world in this way.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to ramble for a bit. I haven’t posted anything in a while. But just for kicks, here are my grandmother’s four names:

Patricia

Narayani

Yun Seong

Yun Sooo (no typo, there are three o’s)

NIGHT NEVERLAND!