Let’s break away from rationality as out of a horrible husk and throw ourselves like pride-spiced fruit into the mouth of the wind!  Let’s give ourselves up to the unknown, not out of desperation but to plumb the depths of the absurd!

John Stuart Mill says if you’re lost pick a direction and go with it; eventually you’ll end up somewhere.  I’m not lost, though, just thinking.  Life always seems to need a little more variation at this time, I think it’s the weather.

You ever get that feeling that the air is  a little too thick, like you’re wading through soup?  Do you ever feel a little suffocated, like if you have to pass by that same stretch of dirty snow, or wait behind a big blue bus or read that gigantic book about shit that you won’t remember in, oh, five minutes, again, you might go crazy?

Those are the days when I accept the idea that my head could pop off, sprout legs and run away as a reasonable theory.  Those are the days when wanderlust hits.

“Some days you just make you want to explore”

It used to hit right at that point when I felt I needed space and silence.  Now, I just feel like I’m dragging my feet and have to move faster.

“There’s such a lot of world to see”, after all.

Thank God for next week.

Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small.  Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they’re becoming atom-sized in their souls.  Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses–the whole world over his fence.

What are you looking at?

Like, if movies were a person I would straighten my hair, put on makeup, jewelry, costumes, etc, for them.  And I would enjoy it.

But, lately I have no time for movies and while I used to just drop everything and bootleg the shit out of them, I don’t even have time for that anymore.  So, where I used to drop everything and do whatever I felt like doing, I now I have to yell at myself (mentally): NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NON.  I throw the ‘non’ in variety, because I like to end it with a French accent.

Anyway, I have a running list of movies on a little pink post-it note that I allow myself to watch when I have time–ie. when working late or when the weekend comes along.

This weekend I got to see TWO movies, that’s right TWO!

One was Precious, which broke my heart/opened my eyes/made me cry tears from heaven and so on and so forth.  Then I saw The Hurt Locker, which made me want to hug a soldier/Iraqi citizen/anyone affected by or confronted with war on a daily basis.

Yes, it’s Oscar season: the most wonderful time of the year.

And in non-Oscar related movies, here’s one I can’t wait to see:

I always thought I’d be a storyteller.  My first and most vivid memory from my early childhood was listening to my dad recite the story of The Tortoise and the Hare for my brothers and I.  Listening, I was standing on the sidelines observing the events.  I was cheering on the Tortoise, I was learning a lesson alongside him.

Soon, I was reading different stories and coexisting with different characters.  Just like Little Bear there was a tunnel leading to China at the end of my bed, and on some days I’d return with chopsticks.

In the third grade, Mrs. Leiker asked me to read my short story about a scarecrow who comes to life when a particular song is played.  She had asked the entire class to turn in their rough drafts for her to read before they would be posted outside, and when I had handed her my story she began to read and started laughing.  Insecurity took over and I was convinced I did the assignment wrong until she spoke.

“This is great!” she had said, asking me to read it in front of the class.  I was the only one who got that honor and I loved every minute of reading that story, listening to the reactions of my classmates.

But writing a twelve page story this past week was exhausting.  It dominated my thoughts and conversations, but whenever I would sit down to write it took considerable effort.  I thought it would just “flow” but it didn’t.  It took preparation, careful thought and a kind of a dedication reserved for marathon runners.  The finish line was never in sight, but every step along the way was important.

It wasn’t easy like I thought it would be, but it was better because of that.

Your thoughts and ideas are the only things that can limit you–ask anyone who has ever done anything worthwhile.

“Showing up is half the battle” isn’t true.  Showing up is the battle; it’s being ready to get your ass kicked, to lose sleep and maybe even your sanity for awhile.  You can always decide to skip the workout, not submit your resume, pick up the cookies instead of the carrots; you can always decide to not show up.

Making that first step is choosing to fight because it puts you in motion.  It doesn’t end there though–you have to continue to show up.

It’s going to be an ass-kicking of a time, and you’re probably going to notice all the bad things first.  It’s like when you’re starting to work out and walking is turned into a foreign task because the muscles in your body ache that much.  Later, when working out has become a part of your daily routine, you notice changes in your body and life that legitimize every moment you spent at the gym.

There was this moment at the Academy Awards a couple years ago that I’ve always loved.  Russell Crowe had just won an Oscar for Best Actor and walked onto the stage.  He studied his award for a minute, then looked up at the crowd, giving a speech about his childhood.  It ends with this:

…A dream like this seems vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable but this moment is directly connected to those childhood imaginings.  And for anybody who is on the downside of advantage and relying purely on courage: it’s possible.

Good luck and don’t forget to show up.

I planned on doing this anyway, but here are my favorite pictures and excerpts from the past year.  And by the way, a year is actually much shorter than you think.

The first: Scott is sure I won’t make it to a full 365 Days

Laura, my old roommate, has friends over.  This is the morning after:

I went to a concert dressed like I was going to a dinner party:

Never took off my wish bracelet (Translated it reads: “In remembrance of our patron saint, good luck in life.”)

Watched bootleg movies on my computer (JAI HO)

“See the world in green and blue, see China right in front of you…” bought a necklace that reminded me of U2’s “Beautiful Day”

Cartwheeled across a room, lost any sense of modesty and had a whole lot of fun with a bunch of guys much more experienced than I was at the art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

The quotes will come tomorrow, right now it’s 20 ’til midnight and if I’m too sick to go out on my birthday, I will spend it on the couch, in my pajamas, watching (500) Days of Summer with my roommate.

The fights you fight today are the fights you fight for the rest of your life

On January 25th, the day before 365, I resolved to do plenty of things.  The original list, in all its single-spaced glory is here: YO.

On that list, I am most proud of the fact that I kept an open mind and interacted with people who I never thought I would.

I was reading Jay Z’s interview with Interview Magazine and while he spends the majority of the interview commenting on his specific industry I found his lessons learned to be universal.  When you get to a position that you’ve worked for it’s easy to put your life on auto-pilot and stay within the confines of whatever box you’ve created because that’s what works.

I wrote in that first post that I don’t typically make resolutions outside of the whole “To be content” box, because that’s easy.

I feel that the majority of my life is all about maintaining whatever state I’m currently in. Maintain my grades, maintain my health, maintain my sanity, consciousness, drug habit, etc. And I think it’s time for me to finally seek to go past just maintaining.  Besides, to maintain your position is to remain stagnant.  There is no way to ever grow as a person, if you’re not allowing yourself to move past a certain point.

A year ago I wrote that and I still feel that way now.  I still feel that I can push a little harder, that sometimes I rest a little bit longer than I need to; that I get afraid about what I want to do and so I don’t do anything, as if that’s a viable alternative.  But, I know that is always going to be an alternative and it’s up to me to challenge myself.

It’s a fight that I will have to fight within every aspect of my life and I like being aware of that.  It’s fun to see how hard you can push yourself, to look back and see that  you conquered something that seemed impossible.

I can’t give myself the true 365 days because some days I just wasn’t in the mood, but my WordPress Dashboard tells me that overall I wrote 364 posts, which is good enough for me.

Thank you for reading!

I can’t wait to not have to add the stupid numbers at the beginning of every post.

I woke up Wednesday morning after going to the gym the night before to an uncomfortable pain in my left foot.  In high school I was a runner and I guess now I’m still “kind of” a runner.  In short, I am highly attuned to what the different pains in my legs and feet mean and can usually remedy them on my own.  The particularly brutal pains, like shin splints, were worked out by a chiropractor a few years ago and changing my running style and type of shoes.

I avoid flip-flops like Mad-Cow carrying bovine and as embarrassing as they look I love my fit-flops.  The only times I make an exception to my anti flip-flop rule is when they’re too cute to say no to, which happens more often than I’d like to admit.  I just can’t pass up cute shoes, and now because of my inability to find a cute pair of boots with arch support, I’ve found myself in pain.

The remedy is easy though, it just involves a little athletic tape.  For the first time in years I found myself navigating through the aisles of Jock’s Nitch (Right?  Clever, but isn’t it funny how the misspelling of “niche” is now immortalized in stores across eastern Kansas?) like I still belonged there.

Of course I grab the wrong thing and by the time I go back and come back I realize that I have never actually taped my own arches–some coach or other had always done it for me.

But then the Internet (ie. YouTube) instructed me how to do it and all was right with the world again.

Driving down Mass Street earlier while singing along to Because of the Times, blind-texting* a friend while simultaneously charging my phone too, I had a moment where I realized: “THIS IS THE FUTURE.”  Seriously!  The music playing was coming from my iPod, YouTube taught me something and I was communicating with someone almost subconsciously.  Where can we go from here?  The world is totally going to end in 2012, isn’t it?

*blind-texting using one hand to absent mindedly send a text in t9 (predictive text) mode, while keeping your eyes on the road.  On the Blackberry Pearl this usually results in misunderstandings, like: “I Luke that song!” or “Sea you going to at there be 6?”

Live your motherf–in’ life, you [have] got to get your motherf–in’ hustle and understand that — are gonna hate on you regardless. GET THAT OUT OF YOUR HEAD–that fantasy world where — ain’t hatin’ on you.  You got to be grateful; you need haters.  What the — are you complaining about?  What do you think a —ing hater’s job is?  To —ing HATE so let them mother—ers hate.

I don’t know why, but currently I am really enjoying Katt William’s profanity laced comedy.  Probably because I curse like a motherfucking sailor.  I don’t even know why I bothered to edit the profanity out of his quote.  He continues with his joke saying: “Ladies, if you’ve got 14 haters you need to figure out how to get 15 by summer.  Fellas, if you’ve got twenty haters you need forty of them motherfuckers.”

One Urban Dictionary user defined haters as:

A term used by others, usually being suburban “gangsters”, whose lives are absolutely and undeniably defined by what others think. These people “rumble” often and think of themselves as original and/or indestructible. People that use the term “haters” are the lowest stage of the evolutionary scale. They bleed the fastest and have thought processes similar to that of a mentally underdeveloped cat.

Hahahahaha.  Homeboy/girl is a motherfuckin’ hater, right??  And I don’t think anyone has had a “rumble” in years, except for Wrestlemania.

I don’t think I have ever used the term “hater” before, but I’m sure I’ve used some derivative of it.  Like, maybe “asshole” or “prick.”  Personally, I like the term “hater,” it’s convenient.  And there are so many out there!

Obviously, calling someone a hater or recognizing someone as a toxic motherfucker is not letting your life being “absolutely and undeniably defined by what others think,” it’s being aware of those around you.  You could float through your life being passive and accepting everyone else’s opinions, or ignoring everything that they say but those don’t seem like viable options for a well-adjusted life.

Sometimes, and not any time recently, I would catch myself in the act of being a total fucking hater.  You would think the wisdom from Queen Bees and Wannabees and Mean Girls would’ve come into play, but apparently those were forgotten lessons.  The more I think about it, I’m pretty sure the first time I used the word “hater” seriously was in reference to myself.

It’s not a good look.

In the spirit of “Help Yourself,” I helped myself and with the wisdom of Katt Williams (sort of) combined with the two women mentioned earlier, I am happy to say that I am no longer sippin’ on that haterade, nor am I even craving that awful, awful juice.

One thing I cannot get enough of online right now is the A.V. Club’s weekly Tolerability Index, a guide to what a variety of their writers are “barely putting up with this week.”

This week’s Index: