an anecdote.

I love my girlfriend very much, and here's one example why:
We're sitting in a cafeteria, the tables aren't the cleanest in the world, and I procure an apple.
We're conversing, I roll the apple around on the table absent-mindedly, pick it up, and slice off a piece. We sit and talk, munching on the apple as I cut slices off.
One slice slips off the knife and smacks onto the table. I shoot it a dirty look, ignore it, and continue cutting while explaining some topic.
Girlfriend interjects and makes this comment:
"you're not picking up that piece because you're avoiding germs,"
(this was true)
"and yet, you rolled that apple on the table before slicing off a piece and sticking it in your mouth."
I have a logical response, of course, and I explain that the apple has a waxy skin that inhibits germ collection, but the juice from the slice creates a super easy pathway for bacteria to glide off the table and onto it.
The reason for the story is this: it clearly illustrates one of her qualities that attracted me in the beginning - her sharp and unusual mind.
I just find the way she reasons to be phenomenal.
I love this girl.

why the tides go out.

It has been nearly a year since I abandoned this blog, and that year has led me to new people, new thoughts, and new perspectives.
It is crucial to note that this blog is, as blogs are wont to be, a chronicle of evolution and development of one immature mind. This blog will remain, at the end of the journey, a thing between a film and a map in the telling of one man's story.
Now, at this particular moment, I'd like to speak off of the words I wrote eleven months ago - on the subject of happiness. The nietzscheism I was engulfed in at the time has since faded, not completely, from a splash of adolescent rebellion to a philosophy of the tourist: to try new things, to take pictures, and to make memories without a pressure of conformity. I'm sure that once enough memories have been made, and a suitcase of pictures accumulated, I can sit down to sift through them and figure out for myself the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
Until then, I can say from experience this:
Happiness does not lie in, as my younger self put it, content and satisfaction of one's mastery over himself. Life on this planet is too short to master yourself, and it is much too selfish of oneself to devote his time spent on earth focused on himself.
Life on this planet, as I have been led to understand by example of people very dear to my heart, is about contributing to a general well-being by sacrificing all that you can. As money in a safe does no good, likewise, energy bottled up inside of you, whether positive or negative, does no good. Investment is an integral concept of energy fluctuation, and it is this fluctuation that creates the currents of the world.
I don't claim to understand the world just yet, but I can see that I understand a great deal more than I did a year ago. In truth, dear reader, I see this: the best way to master yourself while giving yourself, is in the age-old channel of love.
Yes, there is love for your birth-givers, love for your womb-mates, and love for complete strangers, too, but it is the love between two partners, some hint of power and air of energy, in the connection between two hearts quite unlike any other love. It revitalizes, drains, fuels, consumes... quite the array of oxymorons here but that is the truth - love is a constant tide between the hearts of two that slowly, eventually, wears at the hearts of both and shapes them.
The self-mastery and self-refinement from a true love is infinitely greater than any brooding nihilist can dream to achieve, simply because it is the shaping of one heart, with the minds of two.
And that, is sacred.

observations from behind a coffee cup.

• Music exists to make life bearable.
• Beards, once deemed a majority of a man's face, should be granted unalienable rights. Such as voting.
• I wish Jeremy Irons narrated my life.

on the preferance of lit circles.

Essays are death.
Essays on the analysis of Hamlet are death come to stalk me.
Seriously: this guy Shakespeare has been around since 1564, written thirty-eight plays and a buttload of sonnets, been analyzed and scrutinized and disassembled and dismembered and reassembled and cast in bronze and completely picked apart by Harvard and Yale professors for the past four-hundred-odd years and they expect freshmen to write something new and refreshing about him?
Fat chance.
This is why lit circles and Socratic Seminars would be the ideal sole teaching tool in college English classrooms.
Buncha kids come in, read a book, chat about the book, bounce ideas and suppositions off each other until something magical happens, then go on about their daily lives with no written homework to headache about while still retaining the essence of discussion and musing on the mentioned throughout their daily lives.
Perfect.
Why essay.
Whyyy essay. :c

walrus.

Trust me on this: if you project a desire into the universe, the universe will answer you.
A time ago, I was a wee lad and had no idea about women. At that time, I really could be satisfied with anyone, as long as I had an outlet to pour my feelings out. There were a few girls in my school I was close with - and though we called it 'dating', it was more just an excuse to waste phone minutes.
Then there came a girl who changed my life by being my first everything: first date, first kiss, holding hands through the hall... and I thought this must be what love feels like!
I was convinced I was in love, and, (I blame my foreign upbringing) that I must hold on to it since I found it.
This sick mentality caused me to stay with her for three years. Three (miserable, by the end) years.
What a bitch - lady love. Really.
It was hard to break off from her, since we'd both grown so used to each other, but it had to be done because it was killing both of us. A big help in this part of my life was, ironically, another girl.
By the end of the three years with that girl (let's call her Betty), I had fallen out of love and was wrestling with the idea of finally breaking it off, and suddenly: into my life comes Kathryn.
This revolutionized everything.
As I fell deeper and deeper in love with Kathryn, it became easier and easier to ignore Betty's texts, emails, phone calls... until she figured something was up and confronted me.
Women make the worst conversations even worse.
I told her "Hey, look: you're a nice person, a great friend... I just don't feel we should be together. After three years you've started treating our relationship like a marriage, and I'm not ready for that kind of commitment. Also, I'm in love with someone way prettier than you now."
... Not exactly verbatim, but that's the gist of it.
You know... she didn't take that very well. Not well at all, in fact.
I broke up with her on the last day of Junior Year.
Kathryn and I developed mutual feelings for each other and that summer was the most amorous summer in my -life-. I didn't drive yet, and neither did she, so whenever I could I would walk, in the July heat, to her house from mine. On average, that took about two and a half hours.
She was an angel, and I tumbled down the deepest rabbit hole ever.
I think I truly love her. I feel it.

their importance is underestimated.

Beards. Boys don't grow beards to make men, no.... Beards grow men to make boys.

happiness is not good for my health.

2 hours of sleep and a venti cappuccino.
I may ramble; you were warned.
Through analysis of my life thus far (and granted, that's not a very diverse nor substantial sample), I have come to realize that happiness is not good for my health.
In fact, it is detrimental. Any times I have been truly happy have either immediately or subsequently caused negative vibrations throughout my web of life... and I've started to avoid it.
Neutrality is safe, no?
Neutrality is beautiful. Emotions are not relevant in the pursuit of general self-realization.
Nothing matters in this life unless you make it matter, right? Nietzsche is my teacher.
Nihilism is such a... base philosophy. Wipe the slate clean, believe nothing, disregard society, make yourself matter. That's the truth if it, really.
Look: anyone who has ever made anyone of themselves have always been completely innovative in their own time. Completely fresh and original. They've disregarded the social norms and proceeded to make their own values dominant of their lives, and, by doing so, influenced people around them to accept their values as well.
Adolf Hitler. Joseph Stalin. Arthur Pendragon. Alexander of Macedonia...
You know, people being übermen.
And the überman, as we see, is content and satisfied; not 'happy'.
Happy people are ignorant (ignorance is bliss, right?) and in general unconcerned with self-mastery.
Temet nosce, carpe ipsum, carpe diem.
The world is such that it is impossible to both master and be happy.
Human nature is such that we always see our flaws, and wish to be perfect, therefore: one must either free onself of self-mastery and be happy to be governed (and find perfection of oneself in pledging oneself to a perfect entity (i.e. God)), or be master of oneself and never truly be happy.