Its not about love, its not about rejection, it’s about not being lonely. It’s about having that one person to go to when you feel like nothing makes sense. It’s about having someone to share those moments that call for a drink—maybe even a hangover. It’s about strolling down the streets holding the hand of someone who cherishes you. It’s about having that person that laughs at your silly jokes, that tells you how pretty you look without make-up, that ditches his friends to spend the night with you, that listens to you—or at least pretends to. That is what we want. It has nothing to do with whether or not it is the right person or prince charming. It is not about how you met, or what games you had to play to catch them. It is not about love or about rejection; it is about not being lonely.
When you get that feeling that someone wants to be with you, a part of your heart fills up like an empty balloon fills up with air, and you forget everything else. You put aside your fear of getting hurt, your busy agenda, your so-called requirements… All you want is that rush that comes with the first date, the first kiss, the first night together… All you want is that feeling you get when your cell phone rings and it’s him. How your face changes without you even noticing and a smile finds its way into your expression. People wonder why is it that when it comes to love, none of us are immune to an act of stupidity, and regardless of who agrees with me, its as simple as this: we can’t stand being alone.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
"Hey Mr. Einstein, You forgot one thing!"
With respect to romance, common perception dictates that one has to feign dislike or indifference in order to attract the object of his or her desire. At best, this comes off as some kind of inherent acceptance of reverse psychology. At worst, it’s an exercise in unnecessary complication. It’s true that when it comes to love—or most things—human beings are complex, often nonsensical animals. Yet this complexity has given way to the invention of so many things in order to simplify life. Everyday you wake up to a new product created to minimize the amount of energy spent on daily activities. The fact that we are able to put food in a microwave and have it cooked in a matter of minutes or we can send someone in China a bucket of roses with a click indicates the extent to which human beings have gone in order to make life simple.
When it comes to love, it is a whole different story. For centuries, philosophers, poets, and great minds have pondered on the subject only to reach one common denominator— which is pretty obvious to all of us: love is a complicated thing. Despite the extensive analyses, no one has been able to simplify this feeling and make it less emotionally exhausting. So you ask yourself, how is it that you can manage your bank accounts thousands of miles away from the actual bank yet find it impossible to hold a relationship for a month? Could it be that we have spent all our energy simplifying other things to avoid having to find a way to simplify the complexity of love? Or is it that because we have spent so much time creating all these gadgets we have forgotten to spend time trying to find a simple way to handle love?
Monday, June 4, 2007
Positive entertainment sponsered by Barnes & Nobles
My roommates and I have this sort of weekly tradition, where we go to Barnes & Nobles, grab piles of magazines with the latest scoops on Hollywood, fashion and the “hottest” trends, and just sit in those highly uncomfortable chairs quietly getting updated/ bored for hours. Once in a while, one of us comment on a picture, an article or an out-of-our-reach item we would LOVE to have, we laugh or agree—depending on the nature of the comment—and then resume to our previous silent- concentration mode. As dull as it may seem, this routine is actually quite amusing in a town where there is absolutely nothing to do that does not involve the expense of at least 10 dollars a day (this of course is excluding the weekly trip to the supermarket in search for milk, cereal and snacks that ends up being a 20 to 30 dollar expense).
By this moment, you must be asking yourselves what makes this event a story worth “bragging” about? The answer is actually a bit long but since I find myself with a lack of activity and a necessity of using my brain in a useful manner, I’ll narrate it.
A week ago, as we were picking the magazines that were to make our day of more avail than usual, I started to notice the excess of the words skinny, weight and body on most—if not all— the entertainment magazines. I picked up a few of them even though I was extremely pissed about the fact that the media does not allow us to avoid thinking about weight a single day of our lives, and headed towards my usual chair. As I skimmed through each one, I found myself in a state of confusion/anger/envy/vanity that eventually lead me to hate myself for ever thinking about choosing those magazines as a resource for “positive entertainment.”
One magazine expressed their “utter” concern regarding Britney Spears’s fast weight lost, which I found kind of ironic considering not even a month ago she was being constantly bashed by the media for being “fat.” Others talked about the perfect legs, or the hottest summer bodies using as example pictures of Hollywood stars with their definition of the perfect body, none of which seemed non-fictional to an average college student like me.
The one that actually made me laugh out of pure commiseration for being extremely ridiculous was one that sadly commented on the possibility of Nicole Richie, Angelina Jolie and other A-list stars suffering—to their eyes—of eating disorders.
Ever since the whole drama regarding Mary- Kate Olsen’s anorexia issue, any star that looses weight extremely fast is put on the front cover as an anorexic/bulimic victim without any actual proof. I am not saying that the media’s necessity to highlight these so called victims is completely out of the line, but I do believe their concern is truly hypocritical and must be stopped before any actual harm can be done to our society. Writing articles about actresses with anorexia and pages later putting pictures of the “perfect” body everyone must have to consider themselves appealing does not seem to me as an actual therapeutically technique to those commoners who read magazines searching for solutions to their self-esteem issues. Isn’t talking about people that suffer eating disorders and as a result get skinnier and later on stressing that the type of body everyone must aim for involves a skinny one, a complete contradiction that only corrupts the mind of the reader? Personally, all I wanted to do was stop eating for a week and see if that way I would achieve the summer body of the year, yet thankfully my self-esteem was high enough to know that all this was nonsense. A nonsense I was able to escape but one that I am more than aware has gotten into many people’s mind and caused them to fall into the I-must-be-skinny-or-else idea.
I am sure it is obvious to any world-updated-person that the percentage of people suffering from eating disorders has sky rocketed over the last couple of years and even though there has been many attempts to help our society change their views regarding weight, nothing can actually be done as long as the entertainment magazines continue their weekly campaign to mess with our brains. I can bet anything that if these magazines vanished the words skinny, body, perfect and weight from every single issue for a month, a different perspective will flood the minds of their readers, a perspective that might actually do some good to our morally declining world.
I know this all seems as an out-of-reach dream for the battle against the media is one extremely hard to plan and an even harder to prevail, but putting these words down set my mind at ease. I know not much can be done by my significant piece of advice in my insignificant blog page but as long as I know those who read this will reflect on the matter and actually agree with me at some point I am satisfied. At the end what fills me with joy is the knowledge that it is me and not those ridiculous magazines who is in fact giving “positive entertainment” (even though the crowd is a bit small).
By this moment, you must be asking yourselves what makes this event a story worth “bragging” about? The answer is actually a bit long but since I find myself with a lack of activity and a necessity of using my brain in a useful manner, I’ll narrate it.
A week ago, as we were picking the magazines that were to make our day of more avail than usual, I started to notice the excess of the words skinny, weight and body on most—if not all— the entertainment magazines. I picked up a few of them even though I was extremely pissed about the fact that the media does not allow us to avoid thinking about weight a single day of our lives, and headed towards my usual chair. As I skimmed through each one, I found myself in a state of confusion/anger/envy/vanity that eventually lead me to hate myself for ever thinking about choosing those magazines as a resource for “positive entertainment.”
One magazine expressed their “utter” concern regarding Britney Spears’s fast weight lost, which I found kind of ironic considering not even a month ago she was being constantly bashed by the media for being “fat.” Others talked about the perfect legs, or the hottest summer bodies using as example pictures of Hollywood stars with their definition of the perfect body, none of which seemed non-fictional to an average college student like me.
The one that actually made me laugh out of pure commiseration for being extremely ridiculous was one that sadly commented on the possibility of Nicole Richie, Angelina Jolie and other A-list stars suffering—to their eyes—of eating disorders.
Ever since the whole drama regarding Mary- Kate Olsen’s anorexia issue, any star that looses weight extremely fast is put on the front cover as an anorexic/bulimic victim without any actual proof. I am not saying that the media’s necessity to highlight these so called victims is completely out of the line, but I do believe their concern is truly hypocritical and must be stopped before any actual harm can be done to our society. Writing articles about actresses with anorexia and pages later putting pictures of the “perfect” body everyone must have to consider themselves appealing does not seem to me as an actual therapeutically technique to those commoners who read magazines searching for solutions to their self-esteem issues. Isn’t talking about people that suffer eating disorders and as a result get skinnier and later on stressing that the type of body everyone must aim for involves a skinny one, a complete contradiction that only corrupts the mind of the reader? Personally, all I wanted to do was stop eating for a week and see if that way I would achieve the summer body of the year, yet thankfully my self-esteem was high enough to know that all this was nonsense. A nonsense I was able to escape but one that I am more than aware has gotten into many people’s mind and caused them to fall into the I-must-be-skinny-or-else idea.
I am sure it is obvious to any world-updated-person that the percentage of people suffering from eating disorders has sky rocketed over the last couple of years and even though there has been many attempts to help our society change their views regarding weight, nothing can actually be done as long as the entertainment magazines continue their weekly campaign to mess with our brains. I can bet anything that if these magazines vanished the words skinny, body, perfect and weight from every single issue for a month, a different perspective will flood the minds of their readers, a perspective that might actually do some good to our morally declining world.
I know this all seems as an out-of-reach dream for the battle against the media is one extremely hard to plan and an even harder to prevail, but putting these words down set my mind at ease. I know not much can be done by my significant piece of advice in my insignificant blog page but as long as I know those who read this will reflect on the matter and actually agree with me at some point I am satisfied. At the end what fills me with joy is the knowledge that it is me and not those ridiculous magazines who is in fact giving “positive entertainment” (even though the crowd is a bit small).
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
,drop it while it's hot!
As I nagged my roommate with idiotic metaphors regarding a topic none of us actually wanted to keep discussing, the most significant phrase to put into consideration as a an actual relevant topic to discuss was unconsciously splurged out of her mouth into the cool, quiet air of our college dorm: “Drop it while it is hot.” My immediate reaction as expected was honest laughter—what else was I suppose to do considering she was actually trying to shut me up in a nice way—yet seconds later, I found myself considering that actual phrase as a title for something, a book, an article, a “something.”
I have had many ideas for future books I “intend” to write and I constantly collect funny, ironic, or simply leave-you-wanting-more type of phrases in a journal hoping one day they actually materialize into something worth reading, yet this one couldn’t be left untouched, at least not now.
So why did this particular phrase struck me so much I was eager to write about it? Some may look at all this scenario as completely absurd—of course there is no way I would actually hold it against them because this phrase resembles the line of a famous hip-hop song by Snoop Dog— yet if anyone cares to analyze the meaning of it as I have set my mind to, a much more complex rationale takes life, one that is actually worth writing about.
I’m the type of person that has managed to find drama even where there can’t in fact be any, and even though a part of me hates it, I know it is one of the things that actually helps me breathe better in the morning. Knowing there is a problem out there I have to fix or a soon-to-be problem I am bound to deal with/cry over, actually makes me want to move forward. Yes, I am one of those freaks who LOVE drama, one of those who finds the whole rush toxic and enticing at the same time. Nevertheless there is one type of drama I find considerably unattractive and dangerously poisoning. A drama I find myself incapable of managing mentally and physically and this involves “relationship dramas.” Whether it is family, friends or love partners, having to deal with fights, awkwardness, he said/she said clashes that lead into possible lost of intimacy, freak me out. As a result of this fear, I have come to create a system that allows me to avoid such episodes to take place in my life. It is simple: find yourself in a position where you are close enough to enjoy it, yet far enough to avoid getting hurt. If for some reason, that precise spot is hard to identify, then let it go. Some may call this a commitment issue, a fear of getting too attached, or not being able to get emotionally involved. I, from this day on, will refer to it as the “drop it while it’s hot technique,” this meaning—for those who’d rather take cold showers/ live in cold climates/eat cold food—letting go of something while its still good enough to remember without feeling burned.
I know in part that this technique is dangerous for the simple theory that I might risk missing out on something good, on something that was meant to be*.* I have to point out though, aren’t the things that are meant for us, destined to come back anyways? Whatever the case is, I do applaud those strong-hearted folks who are able to jump from a cliff not knowing if the parachute will open—maybe even envy them—but I have to sadly admit I am one of those who are unable to let go easily and therefore rather stare from atop. If I indeed loose on something great, I know I will be able to live with that. One thing that I am sure is that I am stronger overcoming my mistakes than my defeats and that is a truth I am more than willing to live with.
It is a fact that life is a series of unfortunate and unexpected events that will eventually lead us into what our purpose in life is. However, no one ever said we weren’t allowed to escape a few unpleasant surprises before they actually materialize. Maybe I am avoiding some of the rocks set out in my path for a particular reason, maybe I am running away, maybe I am actually missing out on something good but since no one can actually be held accountable for my lack of emotional strength, I’ll follow my roommates piece of advice when I find myself entwined in a relationship drama and just “drop it while it’s hot.”
I have had many ideas for future books I “intend” to write and I constantly collect funny, ironic, or simply leave-you-wanting-more type of phrases in a journal hoping one day they actually materialize into something worth reading, yet this one couldn’t be left untouched, at least not now.
So why did this particular phrase struck me so much I was eager to write about it? Some may look at all this scenario as completely absurd—of course there is no way I would actually hold it against them because this phrase resembles the line of a famous hip-hop song by Snoop Dog— yet if anyone cares to analyze the meaning of it as I have set my mind to, a much more complex rationale takes life, one that is actually worth writing about.
I’m the type of person that has managed to find drama even where there can’t in fact be any, and even though a part of me hates it, I know it is one of the things that actually helps me breathe better in the morning. Knowing there is a problem out there I have to fix or a soon-to-be problem I am bound to deal with/cry over, actually makes me want to move forward. Yes, I am one of those freaks who LOVE drama, one of those who finds the whole rush toxic and enticing at the same time. Nevertheless there is one type of drama I find considerably unattractive and dangerously poisoning. A drama I find myself incapable of managing mentally and physically and this involves “relationship dramas.” Whether it is family, friends or love partners, having to deal with fights, awkwardness, he said/she said clashes that lead into possible lost of intimacy, freak me out. As a result of this fear, I have come to create a system that allows me to avoid such episodes to take place in my life. It is simple: find yourself in a position where you are close enough to enjoy it, yet far enough to avoid getting hurt. If for some reason, that precise spot is hard to identify, then let it go. Some may call this a commitment issue, a fear of getting too attached, or not being able to get emotionally involved. I, from this day on, will refer to it as the “drop it while it’s hot technique,” this meaning—for those who’d rather take cold showers/ live in cold climates/eat cold food—letting go of something while its still good enough to remember without feeling burned.
I know in part that this technique is dangerous for the simple theory that I might risk missing out on something good, on something that was meant to be*.* I have to point out though, aren’t the things that are meant for us, destined to come back anyways? Whatever the case is, I do applaud those strong-hearted folks who are able to jump from a cliff not knowing if the parachute will open—maybe even envy them—but I have to sadly admit I am one of those who are unable to let go easily and therefore rather stare from atop. If I indeed loose on something great, I know I will be able to live with that. One thing that I am sure is that I am stronger overcoming my mistakes than my defeats and that is a truth I am more than willing to live with.
It is a fact that life is a series of unfortunate and unexpected events that will eventually lead us into what our purpose in life is. However, no one ever said we weren’t allowed to escape a few unpleasant surprises before they actually materialize. Maybe I am avoiding some of the rocks set out in my path for a particular reason, maybe I am running away, maybe I am actually missing out on something good but since no one can actually be held accountable for my lack of emotional strength, I’ll follow my roommates piece of advice when I find myself entwined in a relationship drama and just “drop it while it’s hot.”
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