Perspectives and pageviews

This morning the tree outside my house still has green leaves. It is clearly confused. The snow-and-fallen-leaf-patterns color the ground like camouflage. My window looks out from the dead end of a dead end road, with my road coming from the right and going left. It is like looking at three different worlds. Straight ahead is desolate. All the trees have lost their leaves with the exception of a small, spindly tree with fifteen yellorange leaves.
To the right, it may as well be summertime still. Green leaves abound despite the now-crunchy lawns. Blue skies with perfect wallpaper clouds trapped in their summertime slide beyond the mountains.

To the left, it is certainly winter. Snow snow snow snow snow.

I get to choose my season.

In a sense, we always have the option to choose our season. I can more literally experience a little more summer, fall, or winter, depending on where I turn my gaze. The temperature outside is all the same. The winds will be chilly; I will see my breath in the air.

In life, it's all gonna be the same temperature. My perspective depends on where I focus my gaze.

That's your inspirational quote of the day.

On a completely different note, I cannot figure out for the life of me how blogger keeps track of pageviews. It keeps telling me I have a lot, but that each page has only been viewed once. Weird. Yes.

So...if you could like or comment if you read? That would be cool. But just on this post. Unless you didn't read this post. Yep.

Poem for the Day

Classical Morning

I woke up today and
The first thing I remember:
You were holding me

White fluffy ground 
Not too cold for us
Snuggled under the covers

Your lips on mine
Once
Twice
Thrice

And in the first snow 
Six weeks and six days before the world ends
Cherry blossoms 

Interdisciplinary Randomness

Completely random post (because meetings do this do me)

Paper clips-- best anti gravity device ever 

"I have maintained that sci-fi paves the way for science. Without the great literature, great writers and thinkers, we would not have the great scientists. We must remember that they go hand in hand. 

Music, art, literature, maybe even fashion, prepare the world for what science and technology bring. By working together, we can help prepare the world so they do not roar against the new, the unfamiliar, the ground-breaking, The Change."
~Me

And The Change could be anything. Be open to it.

We must be interdisciplinary-aware. To have great minds from different disciplines meet and discuss the recent and exciting work in their fields would shape the future and, I believe, change it for the better.

A love poem, unfinished

You tell me you love my thighs
(even though they smash
against each other when I walk

every step, they smoosh
and I don't mind because
I know you love them)

You tell me you love my ass
And you smack it affectionately
(at first I didn't like it

but now I do because I know
it's how you say "I see you"
and how you say  "hello")

You tell me that you're sorry;
You can't love like I do.
You won't lie about a feeling
You're not having inside you.

I'm happy that you're honest;
I'm glad you know me well.
I just wish you could see what
I find it hard to tell.

It's loving you that makes me happy
Giving that makes me glad
Offering time or chores or money
I'd give all that I had.

But I won't; we'd be miserable.
A one-way street for two
Dead ends in destruction.


Instead you just must understand
I love, I give, so let me live
As I am wont to do.

I'll temper my gifts with moderation
You'll respond with appreciation
And when you say "I can't say I love you"

I'll sigh, I'll laugh, I'll look the other way.
I'll wish we had this conversation on another day.

I don't need to hear "I love you."
I see it all the time.
From rose petals in hot tubs
To affection in iambic lines.

The feeling's not important
It's the actions that show
What feeling or art
Reside in your heart
By the affections bestowed

So honey baby
Don't worry your pretty little head
About a thing like that

Today I find that waking up early improves my attitude drastically...once I do it a couple days in a row. At very first, it was tough. I complained to myself and was so tempted to just crawl back under the covers.

I know myself. I will not get out of bed that early unless I know someone is counting on me. So I have had to meet people early for multiple days now, on purpose, to get my lazy self out of bed.

It works.

Now my body is getting itself up earlier and earlier. As long as it stops that soon, I'll be pleasantly waking up early. If I keep waking up earlier and earlier...well, I'll have a different set of problems.

I don't know where you live, reader, but I live in such a beautiful place. The leaves are red and orange and yellow and covering things. It's like someone is sharpening crayons and letting the shavings crumble across the tattered canvas of the earth.

Yep. Definitely a poetic day.

"I'm not angry."
That's what I told myself. That's what I told myself, and others, and doctors, and everyone. Because I didn't feel angry. I didn't feel like I had a reason to be angry, and one must always have a reason to be angry. Anger without reason is like war without cause.

...and it is how many women around me were negatively stereotyped. They just had emotions. For no reason. And it baffled me.

Turns out I have a lot of reasons to be angry.

I should tell you now, if I haven't already, that I am a recovering altruist. I will do a hundred and seven things for you and the stranger I met in the line at the grocery store, but to get me to do anything for myself becomes a monumental task.

I used to stay up late in the library, making up excuses to stick around until my best friend there finished her paper. Or her lab. Or whatever. And then I would walk her back to the dorms to make sure she made it back safely. One particular night, I actually carried her back to the dorms, her backpack and mine slung over her shoulders, because she was literally falling asleep on her feet.

I have always been strong --for others. (And I don't know how to get the dash to work on blogger, dear reader, so I will work on that.) I would fight tooth and nail for a friend, but never allow myself to lose control over something so small as my personal honor, or my feelings being hurt, or anything like that.

So I just never admitted to anger. That doesn't mean it wasn't there, building up and growing. It just found ways to mask itself. Some of it was in my intellectual superiority complex, I'm sure.

And now that I have discovered this anger, I don't know what to do with it. I started this blog, for one thing. I think I'll paint. I miss having extra artistic time.

As a disclaimer, this is a rather angry blog. I don't walk around ranting about everything here. I do rant about things that I care about, like educational philosophy and grammar.

Back to artistic-ness. I feel like a great artist sometimes. On occasion, it is only because I feel crazy, and feel very strongly that the Great Artists were all nuts. Not cashews and almonds and such, but a little loopy, insane, batty, etc.

And that is part of why I am angry. I feel like I lost a part of myself, the part of myself that kept me from going insane. I watch movies and identify with both the villains and heroes (it used to just be heroes, but maybe the villains aren't so clear-cut and definitively evil anymore).

I just don't think that's normal.

I think that's psychopathic. Or at least unhealthy.

And that makes me angry. Or maybe I just have PTSD. It's tough to tell.

Have you ever known someone, and felt like they should know you, but they continually display complete ignorance of your character?

I find it not only insulting but revolting when people treat each other this way.

My biggest heartbreak came from an incident like this. In a way, it's worse than the death of a friend, because they are there, standing in front of you. They just can't see you. They see something else, someone else. One of my friends was projecting, and saw too much of herself in me. Another person couldn't see me for the swarm of percentages and statistics surrounding me.

These two instances stand out to me so vividly, and they make me so angry. In fact, it has affected my attitude toward any percentage or statistic. I am completely turned off by arguments supported by statistics because of how they have been used against me.

When I was 16, I was discriminated against because "sixteen year old females have the highest" chance of getting in a wreck, or something like that. Therefore I shouldn't drive because I'm the most dangerous driver on the road. Never mind my impeccable driving record, cautious (like someone who is 103) driving style, and the fact that I had to drive to get time logged to get my driver's license. I was a straight A student, what most parents would consider the perfect child (I knew, because my friends' parents chided them for not being more like me). I didn't party, drink, smoke... I ran cross country, was stage manager for theater, sang in choir, volunteered at the library.

And I was still such a troublemaker, a rebel, in some people's eyes.

I guess in a way they come from a different world, a different culture, a different time.

...but they didn't even know me.

So now I have resolved to be myself, and to not give one single dam (for I am not a beaver and hence have no dams to give) about what anyone else thinks about me. I have been nice and people think I'm mean, mean and people think I'm kind, kind and people think I'm overbearing, overbearing and people think I'm decisive. Now I'm just me, and they can think what they want.

I'm done trying to change your mind, to show you who I am. We don't even need to talk anymore. I love you, so I'm leaving your life. It will be better for both of us this way. It has taken more than ten years, and at some point I need to decide which bridges to burn and which ones to cross. You can chalk it up to my being  a bitch. Or a rebel. But I'll know that I had to make this decision for you and me. This just hurts both of us.

Songs for this feeling:
Second Chance by Shinedown
Starts With Goodbye by Carrie Underwood

[Yep. Rock and country recommendations in the same blog post. Don't tell; I'll get in trouble. ;) ]

When you think that my pain is made up, an attention-getter, you drive my desire to share it further inside me, further down in the murky, freezing pond of my emotions.

P.S. If you have trouble with credit cards, try rubber-banding it to a spoon, sinking it into a bowl full of water, and freezing the whole thing. Random advice of the day.

Some days, you just need to talk to a good friend. The kind you can talk about suicide with, and move from there to a definition of god, and then perhaps consider solution to world overpopulation.

This was one of those days.

Why I write (Written when I began blogging)

To my audience:
I'm writing for the outcast majorities, the fringe people, those on the outside. I'm writing to the amputees, the soldiers with PTSD, the angels whose wings have been singed by hellfire and who are wartorn and beaten and get up and go again. I'm writing, and I know that I tend to exaggerate and use lots of metaphors instead of concrete concepts, but that is how I think.
If I am honest, I'm writing most of all for me. I'm writing to feel alive, to feel real, to see it in print. I'm writing so I remember, because I so often forget.

On anonymity:
Being anonymous makes honesty just that much easier, in a sense, because I'm not afraid of hurting anyone's feelings with mine. There will be thoughts I have already shared, and those I have yet to share *in person*.

About where and why:
I'm having a crisis. It's long-term and difficult. It has been in process for a long time. For perspective, and to make this short, I delayed my rebellion (supposedly a teenage process) against my parents until it coincided with going off to college, developing chronic pain, having my heart broken badly, and making all sorts of crazy life changes and choices that affect everything...or so they say.
I struggle with altruism, what seems to be the symptoms of PTSD, and my responsibility to the earth and my fellow man.

I'm also writing because it is time. I need it again. It is fall, and everything is dying in front of me. It is also in this season that the Pain began, about four years ago. I capitalize it because it is significant, almost sacred to me. It has changed me: my life, my habits, my thoughts, my perspectives, my beliefs, my personality. It is almost as if I died and came back a different person.

More on that later. This writing is to record, as honestly as I can for my own sake, life. Reality as I see it. It will not have a specific topic. It will not follow a set chronology. It won't even make sense at times, because this is me. In text. On screen.

**UPDATE**
Timeline in above passage is no longer relevant because I wrote this just over two years ago.