"All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room." - Blaise Pascal

The rough, cheap carpet molds my fleshy skin into a patchwork of hives. My legs spread akimbo with my iPhone in hand, taking pictures of them via Instagram. I had just finished sorting dirty and clean laundry. For three hours.

Is air-drumming to ‘Last Friday Night’ the life of an artist? Is wishing to be Don Drapers new female, touch-me-not client at Sterling Cooper part of the dreamy, dazed artistic mind?

I left everything incomplete today. I drifted past my Coca-Cola painting a few times before my 2pm breakfast. I saw a centipede-like bug in the upstairs washroom last night, so I’ve refused to clean up.

Inexplicably, I lie here dazed and sweating, with a bare state of mind. I preach to myself – everyday – that today is my last. I call myself an artist. I call myself a writer. Yet, I find myself lying down on my back.  I feel.

Stuck.

Maybe I’m in a self-made purgatory.

I need an excise plan – goals, statements, declarations, anything! to get me out of this slump, I figure.

“How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.” - Yeats

I said I would read but my room smells like pizza and pomegranate soda, so obviously that deterred me.

Though, I do not hold contempt for the universe, I sigh. My guilt remains partly intact and my tiresome vetting of others has proved to be hassling. I still enjoy seeking the next thrill, of course. It certainly helps with the recovery. I tell myself I have to move onto the next thing. Something or someone better, worth my time. If I do not, my hope and positivity gets blown away like dust in the wind. Company helps, sometimes it doesn’t. Evidently, I’ve grown accustomed to this pattern.

One thing that I wonder about is how I will look back. Should I be wary of a problem grabbing hold of my ankles like a sea monster? I’ve gotten myself into some sticky shit.

Now, back to reading.

“If you do not raise your eyes you will think you are the highest point.” - Antonio Porchia

Here’s to the full four months of stupidity I have unleashed unto this world. Here’s to the naivety that I mistook for happiness and optimism. Cheers, New Year, to the happy-go-lucky attitude that I adopted – which only produced a hole for me to sit in. And yes, I had the cojones to call upon others to throw me a hand and pull me out.

While no regrets have been spewed as of yet, it is fully comforting to connect the nodes – to see it [the problems] as they really are. Nothing, I find, is as satisfying and as grueling all at once.

On the other hand, I am concerned that I am having less and less moments like these. I am now treading in adult territories and I won’t have little crises to keep me on track every week. Adults are their own compass and sometimes, you don’t find out if you’re going the wrong direction until a long while after when there is little water left in that flask to save you.  I no longer have age or inexperience to blame. Life only gets more complicated as I grow older. There are more connections to more people. I can no longer just have two feet for myself. One foot for me. One foot for them.

That said, I have yet to fully comprehend the depth of the unchartered territories I went in with. I am unhappy to say it was done with a stumbling stupor. I knew I was being unkempt, foolish even but I was relentless. I couldn’t bring myself to really think about things in the long-term and I was taken advantage of. Repeatedly. I just wanted to be a “grown-up” and skip away like a happy flower child. Fucking hippies aren’t around for a reason.

I needed this self-realization for four long months and it makes me wonder where I’ve headed. It’s frightening.

"Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once." - Lavater

YOU PEOPLE.

I can not find myself emotionally invested for my own sake. I feel the last thing I need to do is take on someone else’s problems of which I could (or of course, should) not determine the outcome of. I feel like I’m the pillar of a merry-go-round. I stand still while people keep making loops around me. I watch the sweeping blur of the people. I watch, too preoccupied to slosh deep where we do not bother.

I could very well close my eyes and avoid my stomach from lurching altogether, I realized. However, I squint. The motion- streaks become less nauseating, perhaps a little less infuriating. Nevertheless, at what point is keeping them wide-open in such a naive manner of any considerable use? Only the wide-eyed are fools. Inexperience and indignation ride the coattails.

I figured when I joined in for a ride of my own, I’d squint. My philosophy applied to my own issues was more or less off target sometimes in varying degrees. I stayed on for short while and went through my share. Here I am now, knowing that when my foot shrivels from the door’s crush, it is not for another period of time that I reclude to my reflective state, feeling empty. I am at that point again. Here goes everything once more.

Happy reflections and happy christmas.

Check it.

I don’t know why but I feel as if I’m having a weird out of body “phase”. Many of the thoughts and feelings I experienced were as thick and oppressing as knee-deep mud. Everything felt heavy and as though rain clouds gathered about my head and poured their life out onto me. Now that I recalibrate, my everything is everything but the aforementioned. I feel mobile.  I feel my feet slapping the ground – no longer sliding along the cotton sheets over my 20 year old mattress, waiting for something good to happen in my life. Maybe I’m not really having an out-of-body experience or phase. I’m moving, aren’t I? I’m absolutely in, entrenched. I’m not dying to get out of my body as I feel what I am worth. I have ascertained this sense of self and I am at the ready to use what my mother gave me.

Considering all this, one should not rule out  at times that I fear – fear for lack of control over direction and willpower. I’m reverberating with potential. My soul is echoing, meanwhile I’m looking back to see if some decrepit blob should jump me and make one with my body. On top of that, what zest will life have for me? Buddha knows, how many of us look forward to an insipid and a gag-inducing life. Here, I am reminded that we are only but a danger to our own well-being.

What can I say. That was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t use a question mark. I’ve been reading about something called vaginismus. As soon as your eyes darted over the word, vagina flashes to your mind, no? Well vaginismus is a condition that inhibits sexual intercourse or any type of penetration due to the muscle contracting. I learn new things everyday people.

I was hoping this particular post would have a central theme that would somehow be humourous, overly revealing of my personal life and feelings, and perhaps a twist of emo as per usual… I have not committed myself to this but in recent light, I have been keeping busy with things like veltzshmertz, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Emile Durkheim’s Le Suicide. You may have no idea, but that previous sentence contains some of the most depressing shit I can think of at the moment.

I think I’ll leave this a short and useless one. I let this be a chance for my next one to stew.

“That emotional thing does not change," - Meat Loaf

Part of being an adult is being who you want to be. If I am not mistaken, we were barely introduced to this notion in our youth and as we grow older, whatever part of the idea that had stuck simply dies alongside the child within us. I believe our minds have fraternized with what was acceptable and innocent for society in our youth. We would think we would be this cookie-cutter whatever subconsciously, eventually raking in money, having our own homes, and a wall to put up our degrees.

I’m often reminded of the white-collar man who can not handle having a wife and children but repeatedly gets married and divorced. That man wants a stable and nuclear family, but tosses reality to the wayside. This is no finger pointed to male adults because men are not the only ones. I occasionally see a myriad of young women in their 20s with no distinction among her peers drown into the life of motherhood, babies and bibs, only to quit her job before it has a slight chance at blossoming into a career. While some of these mothers are supported say by a loving partner and friends, it always makes me laugh when the grandparents are giddy while the notion of a child at that age scares me.

Why must people follow in the footsteps of older generations when you have every opportunity at hand in North America? Is it the scrutinizing eye of our families who burn our backs with the spotlight? I feel it is the belittlement of shame that makes us turn around and face them. However, we turn our backs on our own needs and present values. Thus, it leaves a void in our character and in our independence.

It is as if we have dug ourselves a well. For every unsettling emotion and issue that arises from the conflict of what we want versus what is, we snap and drop another step off the ladder into the well, depleting all chances to climb on up. In the end we are left with two stilts – our last resort – ready to tumble face down at any given moment. Can you get up from that?

"The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me..." - Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899)

After going through the first two seasons of Sex and the City within an embarrassing span of time, I find myself shamed. Over Gaga’s “cherry cherry boom boom”, my eyes glazed over the WordPress app – the very one that I thought was of no real use because I have given up.

Only a few moments before, I had made myself tear up over the reality that it was 5:30am, I was horny, and I was playing Cooking Mama to get my mind off being partnerless and lacking physical affection. This was the precise second I slunk into a daymare that I was on my death bed knowing that I was just days away from my nineteenth birthday and I was without goals or aspirations. The pipedreams of being a sex-maniac TV producer doesn’t really count. I remember the last serious aspiration I had and barely fought for; writing.

On several occasions, I called it a ‘losing interest’. I at times convinced myself that it could just be a sabbatical. Yes, a sabbatical from my dream. What can I say? Confusion serves as logical justifications for even the most laughable of notions.

Though as I lost interest in the world around me, I fell for things that were foreign. Edith Piaf was one of them. I no longer faced the politics, the journalism, the issues, and everything inbetween and I slithered off into the dry brush on my belly. The stilts were off. I was no longer in my unnecessary high place where I wanted to be part of the circus with freaks. Little did I know that I was okay at regular height. I didn’t know to use my legs and accept that everyone just is. I didn’t know how to be me; real – not grounded. Grounded was the nonchalant belly phase of indifference. This was when I looked at the roots around me, that which makes me the social (and sometimes the contraire) creature.

Roots did it for me. Coming to terms with your family and life situation deaccelerates, even stalls, the present as you stare into the reflection of your eyes and into the past. Sometimes I think life is a jigsaw puzzle. You can’t keep jamming pieces together trying to get what you want out of it. Take a break and come back to it for another fresh start. Sometimes it’s necessary to settle down with what you have and appreciate the picture so far. It only gets better, does it not?

I realize now that the entire time that I blamed myself for stagnation and patheticness, I had really been overcoming and growing. I was not growing up but growing into me.

And thus after every rocky road, comes a treat like moose tracks. You get through the vanilla icecream, digging through differet facets of you life. This leads to the contemplation of the goodies you’ve scooped (or really earned) on your journey. With each chocolate piece you come across, you cuddle up to the fact that you made it and have one more experience to add to the memory banks. And with a bite, the peanut butter is relish. Tangy or sweet. It plays a string nevertheless.

Writing does this for me.

HOSTAGE: A Love Story with Zachary Quinto

Zachary Quinto’s baby, Before the Door production company has posted this video on Funny or Die. If you haven’t heard of Funny or Die or Z.Q. then I highly question whether or not I have underwear on right now.

Ever been fully clothed and yet feel like you’re going commando? Once in a lifetime experience

Anyway, here’s one of the reasons nerds love this man.