We'll never feel bad anymore

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,

it is still a beautiful world.

All anyone ever wants is to be happy. Whenever I'm sad, I read "Desiderata," and I breathe. 

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Let's get rich and buy our parents' homes in the south of France.

I want to talk to you about life. It’s just too difficult to be alive, isn’t it, and try to function? There are all these people to deal with. I tried to buy a can of tuna fish in the supermarket, and there was this person standing right in front of where I wanted to reach out to get the tuna fish, and I waited a while, to see if they’d move, and they didn’t—they were looking at tuna fish too, but they were taking a real long time on it, reading the ingredients on each can like they were a book, a pretty boring book if you ask me, but nobody has; so I waited a long while, and they didn’t move, and I couldn’t get to the tuna fish cans; and I thought about asking them to move, but then they seemed so stupid not to have sensed that I needed to get by them that I had this awful fear that it would do no good, no good at all, to ask them, they’d probably say something like, “We’ll move when we’re goddamn ready you nagging bitch” and then what would I do? And so then I started to cry out of frustration, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, and still, even though I was softly sobbing, this stupid person didn’t grasp that I needed to get by them, and so I reached over with my fist, and I brought it down real hard on his head and screamed: “Would you kindly move asshole!!!”

And the person fell to the ground, and looked totally startled, and some child nearby started to cry, and I was still crying, and I couldn’t imagine making use of the tuna fish now anyway, and so I shouted at the child to stop crying—I mean, it was drawing too much attention to me—and I ran out of the supermarket, and I thought, I’ll take a taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I need to be surrounded with culture right now, not tuna fish.

Laughing Wild.

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

It's just one of those disgusting days. 

Actually, today was the most gorgeous a day has been all year.

The breeze, the sun, the sky, the lazing students sprawled on blankets across the lawns...it was beautiful today.

Outside, anyway. 

Inside, I was feeling pretty busted.

You know that feeling where you want something or you need something, desperately, and you don’t know what it is and you don’t know where to get it or how or why? Like you have this enormous gaping void and it is screaming to be filled…but you have no idea how to go about doing that?

 I don't know. Sometimes you’re so scared. And, you know that kind of sick, feverish, sweaty, scared where you're scared and you don't know why or what to do or how...And the worst kind of scared is when you aren't sure exactly why you feel the way you feel. 

Or maybe you do know exactly why and you don't want to know.  

And it just sucks. It just sucks. Balls.

Because here you are just trying to live your life: trying to go to your classes on time and not swallow your gum and smile and call your mom each night and separate your whites and darks and take the stairs and all that, and you're just trying to follow the recipe for being okay and more or less content…and out of nowhere life is just like,"Hey screw you, kid. Let me throw a wrench at your face.”

Or something. 

And sometimes, it's like how I felt today, and that wrench? The one that slaps the taste out of your  mouth?  That wrench is just a feeling. Foreboding, ominous, exhausting, sad, inadequate, lonely. One of those killers. (Inadequate always gets me, nothing is worse than not being enough for someone…If you need that for future revenge, feel free, reader-friend of mine.)

And sometimes that wrench might be some major shit that happens as tends to happen in life.

And sometimes it's goodbyes and heartbreaks. 

And whatever. But it's always something. 

It's always something.

And sometimes it feels like I'm just living from one something to the next. And my life is just a series of somethings with breaks in between. And those breaks involve a lot of eating.

They tell you not to cry over spilt milk, and that there are plenty of fish in the sea, and that you tried your best and that’s what matters, and that there’s a plan, and that heaven is a much more wonderful  place than earth ever was, that you’ll see them again some day and that it’s not goodbye, only see you later, that time heals everything…

And while your crumpled up on the floor, in fetal position, sobbing, in a yellow-green, foul, acrid, puddle of souring milk, wanting that one fish, the only one that wants nothing to do with you, wishing you did better than your best because you know you could have done better, hating the plan, hating this earth, yearning for later and still waiting…you realize…

Sometimes…sometimes spilt milk is just really, really sad.

It’s sad and it’s messy and it’s cold and it’s wet and it's everywhere and it’s everything and it’s life. It’s life and sometimes you have to cry about it. You have to cry really hard about it, sob, scream, punch the wall, about it…you have to do all of these things, but then you have to realize that no matter what you feel like, you will survive. 

You have to survive. You can fail and fail and fail, an infinite amount of times, but you’ll always come out breathing, maybe barely, but still breathing. 

Some failure in life is inevitable. You can’t live your life without failing at something, unless you live so carefully and quietly and pathetically that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you failed at life. Pardon my slang. It actually works here, though. (My middle name is pun. No it’s not, but it is double entendre.) 

Failure means you can come out stronger, smarter, better, harder and that you are a survivor. Life is so hard, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and you have to cry over the spilt milk sometimes, but you know what? Someone will wipe it up. And it’ll be ok. You’ll make mistakes, but things always work out. Things are always going to be ok.

Everything will be ok…in the end.

If it’s not ok, it’s not the end. 

You’ll make mistakes, and voila! Laissez faire, life will fix them in due course.

And for any other mistake you make, just say Voldemort killed your parents. Unbeatable excuse. 

Life. It’s all anyone has. It’s all we have. You can say it’s hard, but compared to what?

 And everyone has these "somethings" they deal with. These effing struggles, man. They hit you like a sack of bricks right in the stomach and you try to catch them and handle them and push the weight off, but sometimes it's too much and it happens to everyone. And it sucks for everyone. You just have to smile because what else can you do?

Because you know? You just have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you crazy.

Because when you lose your smile, you lose your footing.

Because if you take it too seriously, you'll start living in your struggles and you’ll isolate yourself because you’ll think yours are worse than anyone else’s. 

When you’re struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it’s just as hard as what you’re going through.

So what if you didn’t sleep last night or you had too much stress or your life sucks?

Tough shit, cowboy, no one slept last night, everyone had too much stress. 

There’s no escape.

There’s no excuse.

Suck it up and be nice. 

Some people might be annoying or obnoxious or rude or conceited or arrogant or stupid, but you suck, too. Everyone has flaws and the best way to live your life is to accept that fact and focus on the good things about people or you won’t survive this world. Trust. There’s a reason for the way they are and there are reasons for the way you are. Everyone has a story.

There’s not a single person in this world you couldn’t love if you knew their story.

I believe that. I believe it hard. 

I also believe in hope. I believe in a happy ending for everyone. 

I believe that what you want now, might not be what you need, but at the end of it all, what you have will be perfect for you in every way and your millisecond on this universe won’t be a millisecond at all, rather it will stretch on forever, like an ocean of time, it’ll happen all at once, and it’ll be too much, and not enough and everything you ever wanted and everything you never wanted and you’ll be so blissfully, incredibly, happy for the rest of eternity. 

That'll happen, when it happens, but for now,

I’m here. I'm ok. 

I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.

And everything’s changing.

I'm afraid of what that may mean.

Yes

Mia: Don't you hate that?
Vincent: What?
Mia: Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
Vincent: I don't know. That's a good question.
Mia: That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.

The Mean Reds

Everyone always talks about this really big hawk they see in front of my dorm and I’ve never seen it. I’ve waited and  waited and waited, and this morning I saw it, and I immediately felt so sad. I have no idea why.

Then I thought, boy, isn’t that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

I just wanted to cry and I was wishing I was invisible. Outside, the wind was freezing and the hawk was circling, and I was infinitely sad, sad down to my bones. I was sad for  everyone else who was sad, and for all of the people who were too scared to follow their dreams, sad for the hawk, and sad for myself, for something I had lost. 

"Listen...you know those days when you get the mean reds?" --Holly.
"The mean reds? You mean like the blues?" --Fred (Paul).
"No... the blues are because you're getting fat or because it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?" --Holly.
"Sure." --Fred (Paul).
"When I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away." --Holly.

Don't worry about me getting to the point. You're going to live forever.

There’s a much older man in my English class. The younger students each do a little double take when they first see him sitting in there. He kind of sticks out like a sore thumb, really, amidst the teeming teeny bopper undergrads. A fish out of water, with his wooden pencils and spiral bound notebook to jot down notes instead of a sleek laptop. 

He has crinkly wrinkles and a prickly, graying five o’clock shadow and his hair is close cut in that terrifyingly peppery gray shade that none of us will have to even think about dealing with for at least twenty years. He wears muddy hiker boots every day and frayed jeans and washed and worn lumberjack shirts. He does the internet assignments at the SLC labs because he I don’t think he has his own computer. I’ve seen him there a lot.

He always sits near the front during lecture. It’s obvious that he reads all of the assignments. He does the homework. He participates in class and shares his thoughts, and he always has something worth saying to say. He seems to try so hard, like he has something to prove, some past mistake for which he has to make amends. There’s this overwhelming need in his voice to be praised and smiled at. 

No one talks to him in class. He’s not unapproachable. Just old and I guess that’s weird for us.  For some reason, that scares us. But anything different scares us, so it is what it is.

Sometimes he can’t hear very well, so he raises his hand and asks Professor Iyengar to speak louder, please.

Sometimes he mentions his incongruity in a sort of, backhanded, self deprecating way… “Could you speak up? I’m an old man, I can’t hear very well…” 

He obliquely calls attention to the fact that he doesn’t quite belong in this setting, with its classroom full of hoodie-donning, glowing, Macbook-toting, texting toddlers. He’s not a part of this generation with its self absorbed little babies who don’t even know what anything is at all…he’ll mention how he’s too old to know what it is to Facebook or Twitter, how he’s too old for the rest of the class to understand his allusion to AC/DC.

“I’m just an old man,” he’ll say almost sadly, in his crackly old man voice. A voice that’s probably been in use longer than anyone else in the class has ever existed, even the TAs.

And I don’t really know why, but it just hurts me so much when he says things like that. It makes my silly little heart ache for him because he’s so brave to come back. There’s nothing harder in this world than having the courage to start over. The only thing harder might be not belonging. He’s dealing with both.

I don’t know his name or his story, and I probably never will. But I admire him so much for being so brave. He comes to class every morning to a room full of fresh faced, children, who don’t even know what it means to be alive  yet…and here he is, this wizened old man with so much water that’s passed under his bridge. He’s so brave. It must be so hard to come back, after all that time. I hope that if, somewhere down the road, I realize that who I am at that point isn’t who I want to be, that I have the courage to change my life instead of just settling for what’s easy. I hope I’m brave enough to turn my world upside down and start over for the sake of living instead of just existing with what’s easy. I don’t want to miss my chances. I don’t want to fall into that infinite abyss of “too late”…but if I do, if I ever find out that I left something behind that I really need, then I want to be brave. I want to be brave enough to go back and get it. I want to be braver than that terrifying chance of failure. 

At the end of the day, really, I want what everyone else wants: I just want to be someone worth being. I just want to be happy. I just want my dreams to come true, even though I’m not sure what they are really, or if they change tomorrow, but I’ve learned that you have to be ok with changing your mind or else you’ll go crazy. 

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.  Sometimes what you want isn’t what you need, but at the end of the day you’ll find that everything is ok and what you get is really what you wanted all along. Things always end up how they were supposed to end up and everyone is as happy as can be and we all get what we want, even if we didn't know what we wanted to begin with.

I hope I never meet someone who changes my mind about that. You need hope. You just do. You need to reassure yourself that you will be ok. That it WILL be ok. Keep calm and carry on.

 I wish everyone in the world believed that things will always be ok in the end. I feel like if everyone in the world believed that, then there would be a hell of a lot less sadness flying around this crazy old place.

Life always goes on no matter what barges in and stomps around. Things barge into your life, out of freaking nowhere, but they’ll make your world beautiful. 

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.