Years later, I still dream of you.  I'm not foolish enough to think that it's who you are that I dream of: it's who I remember you as.  The two are not the same.  And I'll never get to know who you are.

You'll forever be to me what little exists in my memory.

Now, if only the dreams would stop..

If life has taught me a lesson more than any other, it's that each situation should be handled calmly and with as much patience and pragmatic thinking as possible.  My biggest failures have come from the few cases when I have not given people time and an open ear.  I work every day to make sure that doesn't happen again.

I was given something beautiful and I destroyed it.  Just as I was destroyed by someone, just as he was destroyed by someone else, on and on it goes.

Some of the best music is not the kind you immediately like, but the kind that takes time and many listenings to grow on you.  The same goes for food, or art, or anything in life that one can develop a passion for.  It's so easy to gravitate toward the familiar.  Everyone has their "thing."  You can find something you like and stick with it.  But some of the most beautiful things in life are often so because they're new and unusual.  So how does one open up to something new?  Sounds and flavors that are foreign to our palette are normally immediately rejected.  The unusual sensations are distasteful at first, like eating a fresh, juicy strawberry for the first time after years of only having strawberry candy.  With the familiar, comforting rush of artificial sweeteners lacking, the real thing seems sub-par at first to your dulled senses.  However, that same flood of artificial flavor also desensitized your palette to the rich, complex true flavor of the real strawberry.  Cut out the candy and eat more strawberries, and with time, the flavor of the real fruit is incomparable.  The same process applies to music, with our minds flooded with the sugar-sweet cookie cutter songs we're used to hearing on the radio.  Keep an open mind, and what you may discover could be better than anything you've seen before.

when you reach the part
where the heartache comes, the hero would be you
but heroes often fail

I don't know where we went wrong
but the feeling's gone, and I just can't get it back

Live like it's the last night of your life

You ask me what I want.  You ask me if you have a place in my life.

I don't want a life in which the point is to live, to survive.
I want to thrive.

I want to wake up every day not knowing where I'll rest my head that night.  I want a life so full of new places and ideas, so rich with opportunities, that each step I take will resonate with the nervous excitement of each beat of my heart.  I want a life so intense that it has its own soundtrack.

When you ask me if you have a place in my life, I ask you this: can you handle the journey?

"What do you fear, my lady?"

"A cage.  To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire."

Now that life has calmed down slightly, I can reflect on my Halloween weekend...

Amazing food, great company.  Some much needed rest & relaxation.  Overall the best Halloween I've had in years.  Who knew that I moved to the city with the scariest haunted house in the country?

Thanks for making me face my inner wimp and doing the haunted house with me.. sorry for the claw marks in your sweatshirt (I wasn't scared, I was catching my balance..!)

When I was young, I used to take 45 minute showers.  I'd wake up extra early (5:15 AM, since high school started at 7:45), and my dad used to get really angry with me.

"You only have a square meter of surface area on your body, what can you possibly be doing in there for that long??"

I made up some excuse, saying that I had long hair that took extra long to wash ...

Years later, now that I live alone, I realize exactly what I was doing back then.  In high school, I had a busy life; 8 hours of school a day, work, family, clubs, and hours on the phone with many friends every night.  Life was hectic.  I was around people constantly.  It felt good to be active, but I needed time to recharge.  It was the same reason why I used to take long walks at midnight.

I simply needed time to think.

Some of my most important realizations and decisions happen after I've had time to let my mind wander and explore, uninterrupted and free.  Difficult problems, both the kind that I do for homework/research and the kind related to people and life in general, are best solved not by focusing on them, not by struggling and staring at a blank page for hours, but by getting up and walking away.  The importance of time set aside simply to think is so often overlooked..  And so few people take the time that they need to do so.  It's easy to do things without giving them plenty of thought, to act on impulse and pay little heed to the world and people around you.

Today, give yourself a little time to think.  Go for a walk.  Stare at the stars.  Clear your head and let your mind wander.  Breathe.

Don't be afraid to take that 45 minute shower; it might be the most important part of your day.