Sorry that it’s been so long yet again, it is pretty easy to get caught up in life and distracted from the things that really benefit you the most.  I will say that this season makes it harder to write, as things are slowing down, and I’m spending less time with things that really give me insight.  I finally caught the bug, though, and even have a few ideas after this, so maybe I’ll be able to keep up a little better.  Thanks to all who let me know that people do read this!  You have been a big help, especially Sam (samjaleigh.blogspot.com), you’re pretty awesome, girl!  Anyway, I hope you enjoy this post, it really was a kind of fun realization for me to think about which songs really do flash visions into my head.

It’s rather funny what kinds of effects music has on people.  It is said that smell is the most memory-inducing sense, but music brings back more for me.  Anytime I hear a song from a particular WoW soundtrack I see Rollercoaster Tycoon in my head, or when I listen to Stephen Speaks I’m often visited with visions of Counter-Strike.  Lifehouse’s Everything reminds me of the most religious experience I can remember, and old school John Mayer brings me back to the second-most.  I still remember the first time I heard Konstantine, and how I left it on repeat for over 24 hours.  Some Secondhand Serenade gives me flashbacks of mowing lawns, and Disturbed gives me recollections of one in particular.  Relient K puts Ohio on my mind and a girl from a past life.  Kings of Leon always connects me to the deepest love I’ve ever felt for another, and Lucero connects me to other correlating emotions.  Dreaming with a Broken Heart always brings me back to one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made, and St. Patrick’s Day to one of the best.  Even Pretty Ricky elicits normally uneventful memories.

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Many of these memories honestly seem like dreams, whispers of past lives, and it’s nice to know that I’ll always have something to connect me to them.  It truly is amazing what a song can do: change your mood, give a personal revelation, set the stage for – or add particular impact to – an important event, or, obviously, evoke many different types of memories.

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The power one wields over a listener’s soul with a musical instrument in his hands is unparalleled in all of creation.

I am constantly put in awe by the way that music has a nearly weapon-like power over my soul, it is unreal.  I also really do think that music can almost be considered another sense, but I’ll save that for another post, since obviously I’m having trouble coming up with them!  So how about ya’ll?  What songs make you relive certain moments of your life, and do you enjoy it as much as I do?

So a lot has changed since I last posted, and I sincerely apologize to those of you who were reading that it has been so long.  I have moved, so I got behind during the packing/moving stage of my life, and then started taking a couple classes, so haven’t had as much time lately.  I’m going to try to take some time to at least get one post a month, but we will see.  My birthday was last week, and as insignificant a milestone of 25 is, it made me reflect a little at where I’m at in life.  Halfway through my 20s and still no career, significant girlfriend, or much to say for my life aside from having enjoyed it.  However, I still hold out hope because I have developed a great ability to adapt to rejection.  Hopefully my writing can help others develop this ability as well!

I am not at all where I thought I’d be at this point in my life, but if there’s one thing I learned from moving eight times before I graduated high school, it was how to adapt.  I’ve come to the conclusion that this not only made me better as a person, but it made me better able to enjoy life.  When you move that often, you learn quickly that to have friends you have to be a friend to as many people as you can stand to be.  Some, for often illogical reasons, will want nothing to do with you, but rejection is nothing to shy away from.

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My dad taught me that there is nothing to lose by going up and talking to someone, the worst that can happen is they don’t find you interesting.  This mindset applies to all aspects of life as well; you are constantly trying to sell yourself in some way, and selling is all about numbers.

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Rejection, like pain, is just a necessary aspect of life that one must accept, and maybe even find a way to enjoy.  If you’re not getting rejected periodically, you’re not putting yourself out there enough.

I’ll do my best to keep writing, help me stay motivated with some comments!

So I am out of old writings, down to pretty much having to come up with new stuff once a week, and so far, it’s actually working.  Here’s to being able to keep it up!

I believe that, like the author of a book, destiny has a loose plan for our lives, but how we get there is often flexible.  Destiny deals with the larger, important things that connect us to others, but the smaller things, which more often directly affect our happiness and outlook on life, are left up to choice.  We are meant for certain places in life, and the only thing we can change is the timing and how we feel about it.

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We can change when something will happen, but destiny always finds us.  Who we are to be and be with is inevitable, but our choices are still important, as the right choices help us to feel better about who we are destined to become.

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Take advantage of coincidence, because destiny isn’t as rewarding when the timing is off.  Remember to always be looking for something more, because it is when we look for what we want that we find what we actually need.  Destiny is not a treadmill that comes to you, it is a course laid before you that you must choose to run at a pace suited for you.

Any thoughts?  Anybody with a different perspective on the philosophy of choice versus fate?

No background here, just some straight up prose I came up with while trying to sleep.  It’s funny how laying in bed relaxes the writing out of me somehow…

My favorite Disney movie has always been Aladdin, and I’ve come to think that it’s because I most relate to his character, of all the princes.  I go for women I can’t have, that are out of my league, and that make me want to be more than I am.  My goal in life has always been to land a girl that I don’t deserve, and spend my life becoming a guy that does.  However, as of yet, this leads inevitably to unrequited love.  I’m starting to wonder if that goal came about because my subconscious is masochistic.  It has definitely helped me learn about love, though, and I’ve come to the conclusion that love is a strictly internal feeling.  The feeling of “love” that we get from others boils down to a sense of pride that someone thinks we are worth loving.  This is why acts of love aren’t always reciprocated, because they don’t necessarily inspire the feeling of love; it is a seperate, though often connected, emotion.

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Love is not something you can give or take; instead, you can only show what you have been filled with.

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Some say love is the greatest feeling in the world, and I agree that it is phenomenal.  Even when it is unreturned, it is still great to feel.  However, I believe no feeling can be greater than another, as they all are ways in which we experience life emotionally.  A life is not fully lived that knows no pain, just as with no pleasure.  Thus, unrequited love may be my destiny, as it most fully allows me to experience life’s range of emotions.  However, I truly hope this is not the case, as Jasmine was hot as hell!

So what was your favorite Disney movie?  or prince/princess?  Any insight into your personality you can interpret from that?

So I used to try to write poetry.  Now, I tend to try to make my words sound beautiful without being forced to narrow them down to a certain rhyme or meter.  It’s just too restricting for me to use the words that truly get across what I’m trying to convey, and I just can’t do it in a way I find satisfactory.  Some people can, and I don’t understand how they do it, but we all have our strengths and weaknesses.  Anyway, this is one of the poems I wrote back in high school, before I even started dating (so excuse the cliches, I hadn’t actually experienced anything yet).

One more conversation…

not about work, but about life;

about who we are, not about strife.

The unawkward silences and the breaking of ice,

even but one more of these would be incredibly nice.

One more night…

where nothing else matters, but being with you;

in a crowd of people, it’s just us two.

I’d give anything for one night with you to walk;

we could act crazy, or we could just talk.

One more look…

Not just a smile, for a simple smile won’t do;

not the happy, but the loving smile I long from you.

Any amount would be too small a fee;

once more don’t just look at, but into me.

One more touch…

To hold you, to feel you in my arms,

this reverberating feeling is no cause for alarm.

I could simply sit here holding your hand

until the day the ocean doesn’t touch the sand.

My heart is starting to say goodbye,

but my mind is still wondering, “Why?”

I’d give my left arm for her love to regain,

but I’d give my whole body to spare her the pain.

This is the reason that I still want to know.

My love for her I’m desperate to show,

but if this love will hurt her in any way,

I’ll love her from a distance, and there will I stay.

So what do you think?  Any advice for how to not be so tied down by poetry, for you other writers out there?  As always, comments are greatly appreciated!

So surprisingly, this didn’t take that long to write!  Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this up, writing new stuff.

“Life is tough and unfair, but it goes on.  I lie awake some nights hurting, wondering what I’m doing here, and why.  If not for having made so many mistakes through the years, I might be doing something worthy with my life by now.  I wonder if and why I’ll see another sunrise.  Then I hear her playful laugh in my head; I imagine the experiences I’ll surely have with her, and looking into her loving eyes for the first time.  I remember that every one of my mistakes got me to where I am, and I wouldn’t have been ready for her before.  I’ve gained the strength and maturity to be with her, and I know God is still preparing me to finally put her in my life.  She is the reason why I face another day, so I silently and patiently drift out of consciousness, waiting for one more sunrise to bring me closer to the first day I get to hold her and see her beautiful face.”

This is dedicated to my future daughter, Abigail, but hopefully it hits close enough to home to draw out some emotion in others as well.  What would you call this type of writing?  It’s not long enough to be a short story or anything, but I don’t know that I’d call it “poetry” in the general sense either, any ideas?  Anyway, hope ya’ll enjoyed it, and I plan on keeping the writing up if I can keep the ideas flowing.  Someone get me my muse!  lol, and comment!

So this is a letter that I wrote to my first girlfriend, my first love, my first everything.  She was a Texas girl, and there are still times that I imagine what my life would have been like if we had worked out.  I know now that she wasn’t the one for me, but it’s hard not to feel that way the first time.  Per my favorite song ever, Konstantine by Something Corporate (that was quoting Jimmy Eat World’s For Me This Is Heaven), the first star I see may not be a star.  As far as stars go, it works perfectly as normally the first “star” you see at twilight is actually Venus, unless it is hidden by earth in which case the first is still probably a planet instead.  When you first see it, you definitely would think it is a star, but after seeing more stars and learning more about them, you begin to notice why it wasn’t.  Anyway, this is a letter I wrote her towards the end of our long distance relationship, and hopefully it has more effect on you than it did on her.  haha

“You once told me that feelings cannot be explained, and I believe you, so I can’t exactly tell you why I love you, even though you desperately want to know, and for that I am eternally remorseful.  I know that there were many things about you that made me fall in love with you, but why I fell so deeply in love that I can’t let go of you, even temporarily?  That I cannot explain.  I can’t explain what it was, but I can remember that exact moment, looking into your eyes shortly before our first kiss and realizing that you were the one I could spend the rest of my life looking for, but never find again.  That is why I don’t remember ever being as scared in my life as I was when I gave you my first kiss that night, and why we gave each other our virginities not much later.  I don’t know why we are meant for each other, but everything told both of us that there was no way we couldn’t be.  Our love was perfect, because as you know, perfect love changes people forever.  I know I was changed, and I feel like you were, too.  You are the answer to every prayer I’ve ever offered.  You are a dream, a song, a whisper, and I don’t know how I lived without you for as long as I did.  I love you more than you could ever imagine.  I always have, and I always will.”

Maybe I shouldn’t be posting this so that I could potentially reuse the material for my future wife!  haha, just kidding, I’m sure if I became that in love with someone again, the inspiration would flow a little more.  Anyway, hope ya’ll liked it, please feel free to comment any type of discussion.  How would you describe your first love?  Was it a planet?

This is officially to the point I can call “done,” though that’s not to say I will never improve on it if I find something to be changed.  If any of you haven’t read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, you really should, as it is the main idea that inspired this writing, and it’s just amazing in general.  I wrote this very specifically to my life, or how I wanted my life to turn out, because it helped me really go through the entire thought process of it when I was imagining it as me.  I even went as far as to check the moon phase on my thirtieth birthday!  Anyway, my main point is Aristotle’s “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  Hopefully you enjoy it!  My best friend thinks I should expand on it and make it into an actual book.  We’ll see if I even have the ability to make that happen, but I’m going to try, so you might even be reading this story again!  haha

They say that your entire life flashes before your eyes in the few moments before you die.  I desperately hope that this is true, because I long to remember a truly happy time in my life.  I want to look back on a moment in time, and find in it the reason I should have to continue living.  Right now, with 30 years of memories, I am unable to find one.  This is why, instead of being with my loved ones on my birthday, I stare down the fluted barrel of a Desert Eagle Mark XIX.

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It couldn’t have always been this way.  There must have been a party in college where I was happy, a family event where I felt fulfilled, or a vacation where I was able to relax and escape the ordinary pattern of my busy, yet dull life.  Surely, at some point, I was able to escape the feeling that I am undeserving of everything I have managed to gain.  I am where I am in life because of the choices I have made and relationships I have created.  However, these choices and relationships were based on false pretenses, as I have done and been only what I felt others wanted me to do and be.  I feel as though I’ve cheated on a test, but then not only got the grade, but additional awards, so I live with the guilt of undeserved fruits of my labors.

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I grew up in the popular crowd, as I was quickly able to learn the art of social adaptation, making people like me by finding a way to show them that I was like them.  It only helped that I was also academically and athletically gifted, but I always saw these blessings as curses, as more was expected of me.  My family would’ve found better things to do than come to all my games if I wasn’t the star player, and I wouldn’t be respected if I wasn’t pushing and excelling in school.  I taught myself to endure these absurd expectations, and managed to get a full scholarship to the University of Texas for undergrad, then proceeded to Duke for my MD/PhD.

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As an athletic, social, career-minded college student, it was with relative ease that I found a woman I could be proud to call my wife, and two months after graduation our wedding was a festival of our large families and groups of friends.  However, even with her I was unable to let myself be anything other than what I thought she wanted.  Though I showed the necessary emotion and vulnerability, I never felt that I could truly open up to her.  Nonetheless, exactly on schedule, I fathered my son Alex at 25, and two years later had Abigail Mae, the daughter I had always wanted.  The years of enduring the ridiculous expectations growing up gave me the strength to provide for a family while completing graduate school, and upon graduation I started my own research on the treatment of cancer through organometallics.

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I had a perfectly enviable life, but after over two years of fulfilling research, I realized the expectations would never end.  As if sprinting for miles only to realize there was no finish line, I collapsed inwardly into a depression I could share with no one for fear of losing all I had created.  I began creating my own finish line, my 30th birthday, and put a hit on my life to allow my family at least to collect the insurance.

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The gifts have been collected, the paper napkins thrown away, and as the guests have gone back to their homes and my family to their beds, I lounge on the back deck with my routine nightly cigar.  I have informed my killer of this habit, and he waits in the shadows for me to relax before he instructs me to kneel on the damp grass.  As I stare into his eyes, the nervousness of the past couple weeks fades into a chilling calm when I imagine looking into my own eyes instead.  If only I wasn’t just an anonymous hit to him, and if he knew the pain I’ve felt my whole life, maybe he wouldn’t be so graceful and resolved about this.  I feel the chill of an autumn wind, and the gun against my forehead, and I can feel each individual hair raise as a chill courses through my body.  My steady pulse reverberates through my fingers, chest and neck.  The low crescent moon spreads a blanket of stars across this Texas sky, and as the oak remnants of the earlier bonfire hang in the air, I inhale the fullness of them.  My seemingly preternatural awareness of my senses is surprisingly soothing, and I collect every detail that I can of this moment.  My shoulders relax for what I imagine to be the first time in my life, and I watch my killer’s forearm tense.  The loud, metallic clang of the trigger seems to hang in the air, and time stands still.

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I wait for my life to flash before my eyes, but it never happens.  Instead, I merely realize why my life was worth living, without being able to look back on the memories that I could now cherish.  The person I am is who I have chosen to be, regardless of the reason behind that choice.  I am a successful person, and have earned all that has been given me, despite only earning it to make others happy.  I have the daughter and family I have always dreamed of, and the ability to provide well for them, and the false premises by which I got them were only false in my mind.  Happiness, like the love I’ve given my wife, is a choice I have to make.  However, this enlightenment has a cost, and it would seem that instead of living out this realization, I must face the consequences of my recent choices.  My punishment: to spend eternity in my final moment, waiting for the bullet, with the two people I truly lied to: my killer and myself.

So what do ya’ll think?  Better than the first one?  Any other improvements to be made?  Any feedback at all would be greatly appreciated.

There is a lot of beauty in this world, and it’s really cool when some of it stops everybody in their tracks.  That’s what happened this weekend when we floated the Buffalo.  We came around a curve and finally saw one of the many gorgeous bluffs on that river, and everybody in my raft just stopped for a second and admired it.  It was a great trip in general, and I also experienced my first bluff dive!

My First Bluff Jump

This actually isn’t me jumping, but I’m in the raft to the right of the pic paddling upstream to get to where I can climb up there.  It was probably 40 feet up, it looks a LOT higher when you’re up there, but once I finally got up the nerve and started sprinting, I felt absolutely amazing.  Even after a case of beer, I can still remember many specific moments in the jump, little still frames in my head, that’s how exhilarating it was!  Anyway, I thought those thoughts would apply a little, since they were truly experiencing life.  I have this quote, newer old stuff I guess, as around a year ago I wrote this:

“Actions speak louder than words? Surely not, for words are simply the product of the action of speaking or writing. More likely, they speak at the same volume, for either can be misunderstood, misinterpreted, or mistrusted.”

Another one of the more contemplative times in my life, the beginning of a summer.  Not my best, but a little more poetic in the flow and rhythm.  Still working on the rewrite of my fiction, hopefully will have it up soon!

So my senior year of high school (January 2003 to be exact) I was assigned to write a paper showcasing human emotion.  I don’t recall any more details of the assignment, but this is what I came up with.  I’m a little hesitant to post it, because there are quite a few things I want to change about it.  All in all, though, considering that I hadn’t even really lived yet when I wrote this, I’m proud of it.  I am going to expand and perfect it in the near future (my first new writing since starting this blog, yay!), and I’ll post that when it is finished, too.  Anyway, enough intro, here it is.

They say that your entire life flashes before your eyes in the few moments before you die.  I desperately hope that this is true, because I long to remember a truly happy time in my life.  I want to be able to look back on a time in my life and say that it was worthwhile.  Right now, however, I can’t think of any moment in my nearly 30 years of life that makes it worth living.  So instead of holding my gifts or loved ones on my 30th birthday, I hold a gun.

It couldn’t have always been this way.  There must have been a party at which I had fun, an event that I enjoyed, or a vacation that I went on when I was actually able to relax and escape the ordinary pattern of my busy, yet dull life.  I’m sure that I had them, but I can’t think of any no matter how badly I want to, or how hard I try.  All I can think of now, though, are the times in which I was lonely in a crowd of people, and how nobody would ever have thought that I would be doing this.

I was always fairly popular during my school years.  I loved the attention that I received when I did well in sports, and I worked very hard to be the best that I could be.  I felt that I wouldn’t be loved if I wasn’t the star player.  My parents came to every game in every sport that I played, no matter what.  I knew that if I did not have my best performance that they would find better things to do.  I had the same attitude toward academics as well, and I was very successful.  I was on the A honor roll every year, and was the valedictorian of my class.  I did well on standardized tests, and was then able to get into an Ivy League school.

I like to think that I am attractive, but I worked very hard to obtain this image that I possess.  I worked out, tanned regularly, and spent countless hours trying to stay fashionable, all for the sake of being appealing.  I haven’t had problems attracting women, but I always have to keep up this false front.  I’m never able to truly connect with girls, or anybody for that matter.  Nobody would love who I really am , so I never really open up to anybody and am often lonely.  I make people think that I truly connect with them, but nobody actually knows the real me.

I have a good job as a research scientist, and I have a beautiful wife and two wonderful kids who threw me an awesome birthday party.  If they knew who I am on the inside, or the thoughts that I fall asleep contemplating, my entire family would probably disown me.  I already obtained insurance for my life so that they will be taken care of when I’m gone.  I hope that I don’t wake the kids with the shot.  I put tape on the doors with my signature so that nobody else will be blamed for this.

As I hear the trigger click, time seems to stop, and the soft but terrible noise lingers in the air for an eternity.  This must be my final moment in life.  Instead of seeing my entire life flash before my eyes, however, I only have a realization that this “false” life that I have been living truly is who I am.  I do love what I do, and who I am with, so the only cause of my unhappiness is my own attitude.  I have led a great life, so this “false front” I have put up was only false for a short period of time, and it is now the real me.

All I must do now is leave my false and wretched interior that I can barely remember anyway behind and live the wonderful life I have created for myself.  I have rediscovered happiness, my life has meaning, and I now see that it has been worth living all along.  Sadly, I cannot stop the actions that I have started, and now the only thing that I can do is lay here by myself, waiting to hear the deafening sound of the gunshot.

I won’t really get into too much explanation with this, for one because it’s longer anyway, so a lot more self explanatory,  and because I’m sure I’ll talk plenty with the adaptation of this I’m writing.  I do however, want to say that suicide is a completely sane contemplation.  It is the action that is not.  The unexamined life is not worth living, and if you haven’t considered ending your life and realized the reasons why you shouldn’t, you haven’t truly examined your life.  That’s all for today, more to come soon, hopefully!