came out to watch you play.
so i finally did the unthinkable. i sent out my resume. har!
in celebration, i will now post an essay i wrote for a certain loganimal 2 years ago as part of his Debate Class assignment. only cause it seems relevant now. even if only for myself.
Running away is not an option.
There’s a bottle of wine on the table, you pick it up and pour yourself a glass. There’s a weight on your shoulders that you can’t shrug off. You know you should be letting go, but it’s so much easier seeing the empty bottom of that glass and drifting into a haze of bitter grapes and sweet vomit. In the morning, the weight will be just as deadening again, if not droop your shoulders even lower. But for now it’s alright. All you have to do is forget, and no ricochet of memories could stop you.
Ten years ago you wouldn’t have resorted to this. But as age catches up with you, complications become overwhelming.
Humans have the innate inability to deal with their situations even when they don’t realize it. We become so accustomed into building sets of rules that will help us draw lines into places of grey, where the line between what is acceptable and not becomes so wide, it dissipates. We take the one biggest problem in our lives and throw it around or squint our eyes, hoping that maybe someday, it won’t come back. But of course it will. Newton was poetic with his theory of all things falling. You’re not providing a solution to the problem, you’re just hiking up the symptoms on painkillers.
Courtney Love, rock goddess extraordinaire, victimized herself to every drug, alcohol and substance that could be abused, created in the name of man. She’s still on drugs, but she’s not much of a rockstar anymore. She built her music on drugs. She built her marriage on drugs, backstage smoking shrooms with Cobain. Her whole life fell on a bitter heart ache that she couldn’t quell. Am I generalizing? Not so much. She ran away from a broken family; a father who fed her LSD when she was 5, step-mothers who never stayed. And once you start running, it’s not quite so easy to stop. Everything becomes an escape. The stars in your eyes that you see onstage, the line up a straw that you snort up backstage, the love that you find, that fits in with your fantasy of stardom and everything that isn’t a part of the reality you left behind. And just how she feeds on this, so do the millions of people who look up to her do, cause if she finds it acceptable, why can’t we?
We feed ourselves so many lies which are just another byproduct of how we can’t deal with the situation. We become accustomed to our lies, till at one point we can’t live without them. Then come the consequences, you lose faith in yourself, every action isn’t trustable, the faith people have in you die as well. They see so much potential, but you spend too much time doubting yourself that by the end of that line, people see you wasting away time spent where you could have lived up to your potential, then they tell themselves that maybe you’ll never reach it, it’s just as well if you’d never had any potential at all. In business corporations, if you don’t make any money by the end of the day, no matter how good you are in running it, your shareholders pull out. You lose money, become bankrupt. Cue: life falling apart.
So, Courtney Love’s a joke now. If it seems like an extreme scenario, imagine that every camera on her are all your friends, and that every substance she abuses are the excuses you give yourself to not do something. There’s a deadline around the curb but you push things to the last minute anyway, even though you know there won’t be enough time, cause you’d rather not deal with the stress even though you knew what you were getting into. You know you won’t be happy after giving yourself away for one night, but you do it anyway, cause maybe, just maybe if someone accepts you for that brief moment, you’d actually be able to accept yourself. There’s a group of friends that love you, but you run away from them because you’re scared that they’ll be disappointed, despite the fact that you have yet to do anything to piss them off, even though they’d still accept you no matter what. It’s easier to let them be disappointed now so that you’re covered in case you fuck up later. Despite the fact that if you just tried to not fuck up in the first place, you wouldn’t have to worry about that at all. And these are actually the thoughts that go through the heads of most people everyday, even from the most intelligent and rational of people, to the most ignorant or over-emotional of human beings.
We’re all bound by human emotion, despite all the rationalizations that we try to abide to. It is because of this that through time, especially throughout early adulthood, humans tend to pursue pain over happiness. We’d rather accept the pain now, and get it over with due to the comfort factor of pain always existing over the brief untrustworthy sparks of temporal happiness. If we constantly mess things up then it becomes acceptable because we choke on the excuse that, hey, that’s just who we are. Especially with the birth of this Prozac Nation mentality; if we’re depressed, suddenly it’s okay that we are, because being a depressed human being is just something we were born into. Suddenly teenagers everywhere feel like it’s acceptable to be depressed and not do anything about the things that are making them feel that way, because maybe they just need some drugs to make everything all fine and fucking dandy.
But life isn’t that way.
Life was meant to be painful so that it would drive us into the pursuit for tangible happiness, or at the very least, contentedness. But we can’t learn to appreciate the simpler things if we do too much to inflict this pain upon ourselves; by making excuses for ourselves, hurting others so that our emotions become justified, throwing cigarette boxes on tables to draw attention to our every constant pain that could be solvable if we actually had the guts to do it. We become too focused in trying to see the pain in life that we become blinded to everything else. Is this really the kind of life we want to leave behind at the end of the day? Is it really worth it, reaching the bottom of that bottle, just to forget everything? If there’s one thing I’ve always believed in, God doesn’t give us things we can’t handle. There’s always a way out. Even if it means losing all your friends, ripping yourself apart and spitting it out on a plate for the world to see.
It all comes down to the critical self-analysis that we can culture within ourselves. Stop blaming other people or circumstances for the things which are making you unhappy. Because if it is about the people, how they don’t understand you enough, or how they’re just really fucked up human beings, then move on, find new friends, build new relations. Examine then, is it really them who isn’t trying enough, or is it you? Are they the ones with all the problems, or are you the one being judgmental and un-accepting of who they are? If you’re trapped in circumstances beyond your control, try fitting yourself in somewhere else. Get a new life, find a new career, and build a new family. Are these really the things making you unhappy or is it just that you’ve lost the ability to find happiness within these things. Are you so hardened and bitter by past experiences that you refuse to look at things for the true nature of their value? Find the middle line and constantly test that line, push yourself to the limits of extremes, so hard till you choke. Face every fear you have, no matter how small or mind numbing it gets. Is who you are now, really you, or what all these factors have made you to be?
It may not seem that easy, but it is. Would you rather become an unhappy abusive parent, friend, lover, who disappoints and hurts everyone you meet, or would you rather grab your inner demons by the balls and give them a good hard anal fuck? Because all our actions have consequences, even the ones we don’t realize, and these consequences multiply in the magnitude of their effect from person to person. The only way we can stop the never-ending cycle of all-consuming rage throughout the rest of the world is if we deal with our own pains first and quell it there. If you really feel like everything is a lost cause at this point, then fight for yourself and the things you really do believe in, and lose all the others holding you back. If everything really doesn’t matter to you at this point, to waste away your sanity and the ones you’ll hurt the most, then leave it, and really try living your own life for once. Fight for yourself, cause no one else can fight for you.
Running away from yourself, isn’t an option. It’s selfish, it’s defeatist, but worst of all, it’s a shame. Every human being has the potential to change themselves and the world around them. The moment you give in to circumstance, you’re killing a possibility of a kid being saved from molestation, a family in Africa dying of AIDS being medicated, a revolution for an oppressed country such as Palestine. There are bigger things around us, and every bit of contribution counts. Every selfless action builds a more open and giving environment just as how every negative mentality snowballs into bigger defeats for societies. We do hold the world on our shoulders, and it’s time we looked into and beyond ourselves to uphold this responsibility. Cause if you don’t do it then you can’t expect others to do the same for you. - 04/07/06
p.s: don't feel obliged. it's too damn long and written when i was still a young 'un.
in celebration, i will now post an essay i wrote for a certain loganimal 2 years ago as part of his Debate Class assignment. only cause it seems relevant now. even if only for myself.
Running away is not an option.
There’s a bottle of wine on the table, you pick it up and pour yourself a glass. There’s a weight on your shoulders that you can’t shrug off. You know you should be letting go, but it’s so much easier seeing the empty bottom of that glass and drifting into a haze of bitter grapes and sweet vomit. In the morning, the weight will be just as deadening again, if not droop your shoulders even lower. But for now it’s alright. All you have to do is forget, and no ricochet of memories could stop you.
Ten years ago you wouldn’t have resorted to this. But as age catches up with you, complications become overwhelming.
Humans have the innate inability to deal with their situations even when they don’t realize it. We become so accustomed into building sets of rules that will help us draw lines into places of grey, where the line between what is acceptable and not becomes so wide, it dissipates. We take the one biggest problem in our lives and throw it around or squint our eyes, hoping that maybe someday, it won’t come back. But of course it will. Newton was poetic with his theory of all things falling. You’re not providing a solution to the problem, you’re just hiking up the symptoms on painkillers.
Courtney Love, rock goddess extraordinaire, victimized herself to every drug, alcohol and substance that could be abused, created in the name of man. She’s still on drugs, but she’s not much of a rockstar anymore. She built her music on drugs. She built her marriage on drugs, backstage smoking shrooms with Cobain. Her whole life fell on a bitter heart ache that she couldn’t quell. Am I generalizing? Not so much. She ran away from a broken family; a father who fed her LSD when she was 5, step-mothers who never stayed. And once you start running, it’s not quite so easy to stop. Everything becomes an escape. The stars in your eyes that you see onstage, the line up a straw that you snort up backstage, the love that you find, that fits in with your fantasy of stardom and everything that isn’t a part of the reality you left behind. And just how she feeds on this, so do the millions of people who look up to her do, cause if she finds it acceptable, why can’t we?
We feed ourselves so many lies which are just another byproduct of how we can’t deal with the situation. We become accustomed to our lies, till at one point we can’t live without them. Then come the consequences, you lose faith in yourself, every action isn’t trustable, the faith people have in you die as well. They see so much potential, but you spend too much time doubting yourself that by the end of that line, people see you wasting away time spent where you could have lived up to your potential, then they tell themselves that maybe you’ll never reach it, it’s just as well if you’d never had any potential at all. In business corporations, if you don’t make any money by the end of the day, no matter how good you are in running it, your shareholders pull out. You lose money, become bankrupt. Cue: life falling apart.
So, Courtney Love’s a joke now. If it seems like an extreme scenario, imagine that every camera on her are all your friends, and that every substance she abuses are the excuses you give yourself to not do something. There’s a deadline around the curb but you push things to the last minute anyway, even though you know there won’t be enough time, cause you’d rather not deal with the stress even though you knew what you were getting into. You know you won’t be happy after giving yourself away for one night, but you do it anyway, cause maybe, just maybe if someone accepts you for that brief moment, you’d actually be able to accept yourself. There’s a group of friends that love you, but you run away from them because you’re scared that they’ll be disappointed, despite the fact that you have yet to do anything to piss them off, even though they’d still accept you no matter what. It’s easier to let them be disappointed now so that you’re covered in case you fuck up later. Despite the fact that if you just tried to not fuck up in the first place, you wouldn’t have to worry about that at all. And these are actually the thoughts that go through the heads of most people everyday, even from the most intelligent and rational of people, to the most ignorant or over-emotional of human beings.
We’re all bound by human emotion, despite all the rationalizations that we try to abide to. It is because of this that through time, especially throughout early adulthood, humans tend to pursue pain over happiness. We’d rather accept the pain now, and get it over with due to the comfort factor of pain always existing over the brief untrustworthy sparks of temporal happiness. If we constantly mess things up then it becomes acceptable because we choke on the excuse that, hey, that’s just who we are. Especially with the birth of this Prozac Nation mentality; if we’re depressed, suddenly it’s okay that we are, because being a depressed human being is just something we were born into. Suddenly teenagers everywhere feel like it’s acceptable to be depressed and not do anything about the things that are making them feel that way, because maybe they just need some drugs to make everything all fine and fucking dandy.
But life isn’t that way.
Life was meant to be painful so that it would drive us into the pursuit for tangible happiness, or at the very least, contentedness. But we can’t learn to appreciate the simpler things if we do too much to inflict this pain upon ourselves; by making excuses for ourselves, hurting others so that our emotions become justified, throwing cigarette boxes on tables to draw attention to our every constant pain that could be solvable if we actually had the guts to do it. We become too focused in trying to see the pain in life that we become blinded to everything else. Is this really the kind of life we want to leave behind at the end of the day? Is it really worth it, reaching the bottom of that bottle, just to forget everything? If there’s one thing I’ve always believed in, God doesn’t give us things we can’t handle. There’s always a way out. Even if it means losing all your friends, ripping yourself apart and spitting it out on a plate for the world to see.
It all comes down to the critical self-analysis that we can culture within ourselves. Stop blaming other people or circumstances for the things which are making you unhappy. Because if it is about the people, how they don’t understand you enough, or how they’re just really fucked up human beings, then move on, find new friends, build new relations. Examine then, is it really them who isn’t trying enough, or is it you? Are they the ones with all the problems, or are you the one being judgmental and un-accepting of who they are? If you’re trapped in circumstances beyond your control, try fitting yourself in somewhere else. Get a new life, find a new career, and build a new family. Are these really the things making you unhappy or is it just that you’ve lost the ability to find happiness within these things. Are you so hardened and bitter by past experiences that you refuse to look at things for the true nature of their value? Find the middle line and constantly test that line, push yourself to the limits of extremes, so hard till you choke. Face every fear you have, no matter how small or mind numbing it gets. Is who you are now, really you, or what all these factors have made you to be?
It may not seem that easy, but it is. Would you rather become an unhappy abusive parent, friend, lover, who disappoints and hurts everyone you meet, or would you rather grab your inner demons by the balls and give them a good hard anal fuck? Because all our actions have consequences, even the ones we don’t realize, and these consequences multiply in the magnitude of their effect from person to person. The only way we can stop the never-ending cycle of all-consuming rage throughout the rest of the world is if we deal with our own pains first and quell it there. If you really feel like everything is a lost cause at this point, then fight for yourself and the things you really do believe in, and lose all the others holding you back. If everything really doesn’t matter to you at this point, to waste away your sanity and the ones you’ll hurt the most, then leave it, and really try living your own life for once. Fight for yourself, cause no one else can fight for you.
Running away from yourself, isn’t an option. It’s selfish, it’s defeatist, but worst of all, it’s a shame. Every human being has the potential to change themselves and the world around them. The moment you give in to circumstance, you’re killing a possibility of a kid being saved from molestation, a family in Africa dying of AIDS being medicated, a revolution for an oppressed country such as Palestine. There are bigger things around us, and every bit of contribution counts. Every selfless action builds a more open and giving environment just as how every negative mentality snowballs into bigger defeats for societies. We do hold the world on our shoulders, and it’s time we looked into and beyond ourselves to uphold this responsibility. Cause if you don’t do it then you can’t expect others to do the same for you. - 04/07/06
p.s: don't feel obliged. it's too damn long and written when i was still a young 'un.