Sometimes

Sometimes it's more about wanting to impress someone than wanting to be impressed by the same.

Beating a dead horse.

We all know what Kodak is. Some also know who George Eastman is. There we have it the Eastman Kodak Company. He was a very successful man. He never married and he donated oodles of money to charity. Good for karma, tell me how you're enjoying Nirvana mr Eastman? The story of his death is also worth a mention. He was getting caught up, so he wrote a note saying "My work is done. Why wait?" and shot himself. Productive in life and in death. Very impressive if you ask me. Now, it does make me wonder.

No perfect way to end anything. Like that song I posted months and months ago holding the line of "I always cry at endings", most things look better in retrospect. But sometimes the fear of what we stand to lose is overshadowed by what we stand to gain. Yes! I know! I'm slowly but surely becoming an optimist like the happy customers in infomercials or the after picture in a poorly written article in Amelia. Does being an optimist even rhyme with being a cynic?

It doesn't make you shallow to want to be happy. It doesn't mean you don't try even if you were to fail. Sometimes what you want isn't what you're ment to have. At times it's simply not worth the fight just so that you can say "at least I didn't quit". We all quit, everything ends, it's how much you enjoy yourself during that counts. In 40 years your children won't remember that toy they never got, they'll remember how you picked them up and spun them until they were wheezing with laughter. Your lovers won't remember the diamonds, they'll remember how you smiled when you said good morning.

Think like a cat. If you're hungry, eat. If you're tired, sleep. If you're snuggly, curl up next to someone. When you love someone look them in the eyes. If we take more pictures, like I'm sure George Eastman intended us to do, take pictures of those things you want to remember instead of what you think others want to see. Those tiny moments that make up a life.

Change your life

When it comes to make over shows, no matter if it has to do with your finances, your looks your home or any other bad habit you might have the key is to have a bad starting product or else it won't get any effect when it's changed.

Is this becoming an issue? Do people think that it's all good, I'll make over my life later. I don't know. But I'm beginning to think so. Where else would all these people on tv come from? I never even knew people could collect (literally!) 10 tons of garbage in their house and maybe not that much excess weight, but still. It scares me a bit.

Take this reasoning and apply it to the current world economy. Seems the same thinking is behind it. "We all know this is going down the crapper, but we'll fix it later". If this is called fixing it, I don't think so.

But the truth is that it's easier to blitz through your house for 6 hours every three months or so than it is to clean a little bit every day. The problem is to do those things every day, we crash diet instead of eating healthy every day. We chop all our hair off because we haven't used conditioner.

Perhaps it's becoming a need to see that utter change, we're not happy with the flow of every day life anymore. I know myself well enough to admit I do it too. I won't tell you which things I fail to do, and then try to cover up by looking for easy fixes.

Also it has to do with responsibility. Always looking for something or someone to blame for your problems. An easy way to get out of responsibility is to pay someone else to do it for you. But the truth is we're all responsible for ourselves and our own actions and what our life boils down to. Don't make yourself a victim, make yourself satisfied.

My friend Nietzche said...

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.


In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

So what am I trying to say? Possibly that I'm a cynic that finds religion the expression of mankind's credulity. Or that we are all selfish. Surely I'm not trying to paint a pretty picture of what we are. Noone's special, and this is just an illustration of that even when I sometimes seem stubborn and cold, not even in that am I so special. Everything I've ever said has always been said by someone else first. Every trouble of my heart and mind has troubled someone before me. So it pays off to be humble and not see yourself as the chosen one. Sometimes it pays to get right to the point. Me saying that Nietzche said it first just gives me more umpf. All those quotes that I excluded might have said more about his actual beliefs, but I'm selfish enough to skip all of those to make a point. That's how special I am.

Naturally

The word "natural" has been on my mind a lot. What is natural? Is anything natural, or is everything natural. We can't create anything from nothing at all, so in that sense everything is natural. All the chemicals must have come from something, so they must therefore to some extent be natural.

Same with all those shameful acts. If we can do it, it must be natural. Yeah. I don't even know how to argue this point because it just feels so natural to me.

That torn piece of wallpaper

So I was trying to decide what to do with my hair. I somehow manage to always end up with the same haircut, in variations. below my shoulders, a little layered and some kind of brown. That is of the last 10 years or so. And it's getting to feel awfully uninspired. I know I have alright hair. It's naturally curly, but I straighten it to feel good about it. Straight hair is just more socially acceptable in my world.

Question is though, why do I want to change? Why do we always think we want something different than what we have. A constant motion towards a goal we can't quite picture. We can be like stubborn little children proclaiming that "I don't wanna" but things will change, with our without our help. Moments can't be frozen and emotions aren't always as predictable as we think. Lets do an example. In 3rd grade a friend of mine and I had some sort of pocket horses, really small that we used to play with. It was fun. I enjoyed doing it. The habit of doing so three times a day is however broken. I have no idea what happened to my horses, they probably fell off the road somewhere down memory lane along with a lot of other things. But the memory is still there. Now, how does this illustrate my point? I was quite happy when I played with her and those toys, but I had to change, I outgrew it whether or not I liked it. I lost touch with her even though she was my best friend for years. I don't feel about her the way I did when I was a child, nor would I enjoy playing that game in the same way if I was to meet her and attempt it again. The world has shifted too many times since then for those moments to come back. All I can do is bottle that emotion and try to feel like that again. But can I? Really? Part of being that child is to not see the bigger picture and not worry about what's to come but to only play with those horses in the grass outside a brick building.

Change happened, it's not something I decided on. What makes us happy also changes over time, as does our ability to know what happiness is. Perhaps happiness isn't a state of mind, only an ability to notice the good things and not being blindsided by all the other issues that bring us down, and hoping that those brief moments of sheer happiness aren't too far apart. Yes I have now solved the mystery of happiness.

Think about time like a piece of string with tiny knots. Each knot is a moment of happiness, if the string has lots of knots it brings texture and you don't lose intrest in following the string. That is if they happen occationally, if they happen constantly you'll need an even bigger knot to notice them. We need those flatlines inbetween to notice the knots, which, yes, are being used here to mean happiness. Therefore happiness can't be a constant state, it's those smaller parts that makes us look back and think "wow, that was pretty amazing", like playing with some pocket horses in the grass.

Change means to leave things behind and move on to find new moments to remember. And now I also remember why I have this haircut. I can't decide what else to do with, and it will change over time as well, no matter what I decide to do with it, it'll turn grey and perhaps it'll get thinner. I can live with that as long as I get to decide for myself which way it's cut.

Another Spongebob lesson

We do all kinds of things to be entertaining for our friends. But sometimes it's better to just accept that they'll either like us or they won't. Not saying you should act like a douche, just value yourself more than to be reduced to a gag joke and the constant clown. True friends will like you even if you're exploring the bottom of the deep blue sea.

Maybe I'm just dreaming out loud

Sometimes it just seems like things aren't lined up at all, not until you look back and see that even a zigzag pattern has a fixed middle.

Waiting is better than having

Tomorrow's the second week of advent. Yes, I celebrate Christmas even though I'm not religious, but I'm quite willing to overlook everything churchy just for the lights, the scents and the movies on TV.

There's something else to it though, the notion of moving towards a fixed point rather into a vast open field of nothingness. December with it's advent offers a break from the endless oceans of time and with presents in the end. Though, wanting is better than having. Once you have, there's no more wanting, no more longing, and very rarely does it even begin to meet your expectations.

When Christmas Eve has already been it's done. Finito. What good were those presents, did you get what you wanted? Is your stomach full and your bank account empty? So really, advent is better, candles and oranges.

No matter how it feels in the middle of March when everything's slush and damp, we're still moving towards a fixed point, the final end, and you can't take all those things with you when you go.

The other tale of change

Sometimes even I forget that change and chance is only a letter apart. You already know the clichés, "God doesn't close a door without opening a window", that particular one I don't believe in myself for all the reasons you already know, and also, I don't see jumping out a window as a very good option, we all know what kind of people who end up leaving through windows. Burglars and lovers.

In a way those who have more in common than we think. They both break in where they aren't necessarily welcome and they take things with them that weren't intended for their eyes and hands, hiding from the world, sin and shame.

I've never seen a bird fly so high it didn't have to come down either, so the best in all things is to not lose one's head, no matter how tempting it seems. So in all sincerity what the world as a whole really needs is a big revolution to give us a kick to move forward, a mental revolution, if you will, to get us out of our own heads and open us up to a new beginning.

The swine flu failed my hopes of being that factor to overthrow all known reason and toss us into a new era, it's not the new black death, no new cholera, no new AIDS. No wars were started to get the vaccine. I'm disapointed.

So when God closed that door to my hopes I must get a chain saw and cut open a new hole so I can breathe, and fly, but not so high I forget what the ground feels like beneath my feet.

Burn this fire

If the forest was to catch on fire while the men were fighting for their land, would they lay down their weapons to put it out or would they put their heart into the slaughter hoping there'd be enough time for the victor to escape?

There are things in life worth fighting for and possessions is not one of them. If you look up the Swedish word vämjelse it translates to disgust, but if you look up avsky it gives you so many more options to choose from. Should this moment be spent to find the perfect word to express vämjelse? Loathing? Abhorrance? Disrelish? I'll never feel the English expressions gut stabbing effect in the same manner I do the words of my mother tounge. Perhaps I've forgiven words too easily because I simply don't fully understand the abomination they represent.

Words are powerful things, but some of them hold more fear than others, some of them are things we commonly as humans have learned to unite to avoid. Fire. Run. Small words containing so much of our history. Our survival have depended on our understanding of those, but now, at times, it's heroic to run straight into the fire, right into the pit of disaster. What happened to those other small words? Love. Lust.

It's possible to combine them yes, four words holding most possible outcomes for human interaction. Add a couple of "to" and "from". Try. Run to love. Love from lust. Lust from fire. Fire from lust. Run from love. How many times do we not find ourselves as part of it and we trust our instincts to make an appropriate decision. It's hard to believe that run from love to fire is in our best intrest.

So, why can't we stop saying those disgusting things and lay down our differences and let the world be a peaceful one? Yes it's another plea on my part, my tiny attempt to show that I will not respect you if you can't stop setting the world on fire not with your words, but your lack of understanding for the mess you make. So please, just stop.

In lyrics

I was really startled before, I thought something was going on outside, but it was just a bluetit enticing the cats. Humans are equally easy to distract, willing to accept just about anything they're told. Natural followers due to the love of the path of the least resistance.

We all rebel on occation, but surely, isn't it really against ourselves? But it can't help but make me wonder who the leaders are if people are generally followers. I have a tendency to be a bit bossy at times (yes, take a break so you can finish laughing before you go on) but it's a process, just like everything else. When two leaders are put together they must do a few rounds to see who's the bossiest. You can have an endless amount of followers while there's only room for so many leaders. I've done this on occation, and I quite enjoy the challenge. We're animals in that sense, pack animals, some claim it's civilization. Maybe it is, I don't really care as long as I get my way.

I didn't really see myself as a leader, I still don't, in all reality, but people do tend to listen to my suggestions and go with what I say. (Yes, darlings, I am seeking help for my addiction to commas!) Maybe it just means I have good ideas and I'm not afraid to stand up for what I believe in.

Today I believe in the weakness of mankind and it's inability to solve even the simplest of tasks, even if they're necessary for societies' wellbeing. Trust me, it's in all the lyrics of all the songs. Just listen.

"Love will turn you around"
"What's with that sod face, has your heart been beating at too a slow a pace?"
"And you're still out there, darling, clinging to the wrong ideas"
"Would you lay with me and just forget the world?"
"I know it's gonna hurt your pride though, to have to put away your knife so, I come back here tomorrow night, alone, and you can take anything, you can take anything that you want"
"I change shapes just to hide in this place, but I'm still an animal"

Surely you don't need X university credits to read what lines like that really say. Surrender, let someone else do it for you, nothing but you concerns you in this world.

Some words on the way

Welcome to the Molly helpcentral. We don't help mollies, we have a Molly on duty to serve you and today she offers the following advice.

First off, turn this on


Nutritional:
Eat a pear.

Physical:
Enjoy your shape and breathe.

Philisophical:
Worry just as much as you feel the need for, but if enough things tell you there's nothing to worry about you probably shouldn't.

Intellectual:
Angles

Beauty:
Shape your eyebrows

That's it, pretty much. Yep. I think so.