Bottled Water (written for a former English class)

Bottled water sits motionless within the confinement of its cylindrical or often rectangular plastic bottle. It forcibly resembles a colorless solid, sitting comfortably on desks, in refrigerators, and on multi-colored counter tops. What covers most of our earth and runs through us in its untamed fluidity is captured in this manmade creation. We carry around this most vital piece of nature, as if we have some measureable amount of control over its distribution; eight, 16, 32 ounces. We treat it as if it weren't dripping freely off the rooftops on a warm January day, overflowing the rivers' banks in the first weeks of spring, or pouring over us in the lustful days of June. It is as free as the animalistic love we chose to domesticate; confined within the most popular labels in society: girlfriend, fiancé, wife. When committed, love is trapped within the same confined scope until, although able to move, sits perfectly still. It is two, once free spirited lovers, dancing around a familiarly drawn out comfort zone. Or parents, stuck inside a routine that has rendered them companions, stripped of passion and desire. We love, unconditionally, regardless of our situation. We love those who have betrayed us, we love multiples at a time, and we can even love those we haven’t met yet. We render that passion as such a rarity that we are driven to stamp our label on it, and claim it ours. Rather than let love run free, in its naturally rapturous manner, we selfishly carry it with us until it is as stale as the bottled water that litters our purses, backpacks, and car trunks. 

Morning Run

Love is:
running
through lavender washed side streets,
drowning
in stretching orange sun rays,
savoring
freshly sodden grass blades,
hearing
every breath through pulsing veins,
vibrating
with every subtle heart beat,
feeling
the filling warmth of silence.

The Heart of A Child (written for my brother)

           
"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless" (Ernest Hemingway). For some reason unknown to me, society associates maturity and growth with the realization that we live in a tainted world in which all our endeavors are futile and trapped within our own mortality. As children we are told that we can do anything, be anything we want. Yet as adults we are continuously reprimanded for dreaming beyond the confinements of society's man made limits. Self awareness is taught to recognize the world as it is, rather than how it could be, logic is used to banish the need for emotions, rather than to acknowledge and appropriately express them. We believe that wisdom comes with age, but isn't the most profound wisdom in the heart of a child? Only a child can see the endless opportunities the world offers him, can truly believe in self actualization, can think logically without losing his ability to love. We were created in this blissful simplicity, talented, and perfect all in our own, undeniable way. Only once we started trying did we lose what was so natural and effortless to us: to dream.

Dream big and never grow up.
-your sister

The Passionate Life (written for my brother)

The Passionate Life

"There is no passion to be found playing small- in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living" Nelson Mandela. We live on a little blue planet that floats in infinite space, yet daily, we dwell on the impossibilities that surround us. There is no God, we say, world peace is unattainable, they tell us, it's too hard, we tell ourselves. Only with passion can we expand. Passion, passio (Latin) "to suffer" is what it means to love to the extremity that causes pain, a constant anxiety to appease, which only through action can be alleviated. Whether it is a mother protecting her child, a professor molding young minds, or a doctor saving the life of his patient, passion is what drives our efforts. It allows us to dismiss logic to the extent to which we abolish all impossibilities, tapping into our imagination to develop ideas that often, are not only insane, but are great. We look for our passions, in our jobs and in textbooks, trying to identify what it is we love; what sparks that "fire" everyone talks about. Seldom do we reflect on the solutions we've already made, our greatest anxieties, or the solutions we've already created to alleviate them. Seldom do we reflect on what makes us suffer to discover what we truly love, instead we linger in our logic and our comfort, settling for a life of complacency.

You will find your passion, and you will be great. Never settle.
-your sister

Make A Difference (written for my brother)

"You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you" (Frederick Buechner). We are all made of moments, of negative and positive experiences that have molded our perception of life, of humanity, and our own value of self. All that is, has been since long before we were put here, and is only influenced through our interactions with each other. You carry a piece of everyone who has ever touched you. You may clean like your mother, write like that high school teacher that was deeply inspiring, comfort the way a stranger once comforted you in a time of need. We are pieces of others, yet we are greater than the sum of our parts. We have the power to give away fragments of ourselves and remain whole. So do it. Spend an extra minute to ask about someone's day, donate that dollar that you may have saved for your morning coffee, empower those without guidance. We make up the world that we live in, and a world lives inside of all of us. So who's to say that one person can't change the world? Who's to say that person isn't you?

Drinks for Thought, not Food

   People drink and do drugs to feel good right? It's all about that Euphoria; the presence of pleasure, the absences of pain. But what if drunk was our natural state of mind, would we get sober for fun? I guess sobriety would feel like we're using the other 90% of our brain. Just like in Limitless, and how many describe when they abuse adderall. I feel like sobriety would just bring this overwhelming sense of clarity. If it did, would that mean that being drunk brings clarity to us now? Think about it, all that comes out of drunk people is raw emotion. And as they say, a drunk man's words is a sober man's thoughts. Maybe we're just more in touch with our subconscious when we're drunk. Can we really consider that impaired? Anyways, this idea that we get this euphoric feeling from drinking, the same euphoric feeling that we could have gotten from being sober if drunk was our permanent state of being, makes me wonder what we really are. What if we're all drugged and our brains are actually impaired??? We would never even know. 


--written "under the influence".
 

Faith

This Excerpt from The End of Faith by Sam Harris is nothing short of perfection.

"The belief that certain books were written by god leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present. How is it that the absurdity of this idea does not bring us, hourly, to our knees? It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they did not actually believe it. Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by god or that a specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Window 98. Could anything- anything- be more ridiculous? And yet, this is no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."

Darwin: The Stranger we've Always Known

I’ve lived in the same place for about seven years now. Sometimes I’ll drive through town, on the same little road that I’ve driven down a thousand times, and I’ll ask myself, when did they put that building up? How long has that house been there? It’s as if I’m so familiar to the area that I don’t even realize that I’m unaware of how it looks. Weird right?

            I’m experiencing this same feeling in the library. I’m in the library with three friends, and like any typical group of college kids, we’re at this huge table with four laptops and paper scattered everywhere. There’re about ten other tables on this floor that look exactly the same. It's such a familiar scene until I look at is as if I've never seen it before. So I start to wonder whyyy we’re doing all this work. Well obviously because we want good jobs, so we can find compatible mates, so we can feed our children, for our own sense of accomplishment.

            I don’t know if it’s because I’m writing a paper for biology, which started the semester off with evolution, but I just wonder how reading, writing, and memorization came to determine our success as people. Hundreds of years ago, the man who could hunt was the best provider for his family. People with skill were successful in their trade. I wonder how many of us pre-med students with 3.6 GPA’s will go on to med school and never adequately suture a patient. And I wonder where the artist with the steady hands is. The artist that could detect the slightest disruption in symmetry but didn’t understand algorithms or chemical bonds. The point of my random rant is that for the longest time we’ve believed “survival of the fittest,” but what’s “fit” has changed, it is changing. I wonder what the road to “success” will look like 50 years from now.

Marriage

   There is rarely any success in marriage, so what's the point? Marriage is considered successful if it doesn't end in divorce, which accounts for only 35% of marriages today. 35% of marriages are successful, including couples considered swingers, hiding affairs, together for financial reasons, together for their children, and experiencing domestic violence. Of those marriages that don't fall into these categories, how many couples are perfectly happy? How many people haven't sacrificed a part of their lives, their dreams, or themselves to please their partner and to keep their marriage "successful?" Yeah, you might die with someone by your side, but I don't think that's going to make you happy when you didn't live the life you wanted. It's believed (through studies, according to my current psych professor) that older single women are as happy, if not happier than married women. Maybe we should just join rest of the world (except for penguins) and ditch this whole monogamy virtue. It's worth a shot.

Social Networks

       What is our generation's need to document their every feeling on some social networking site?!  There was a time when complaining and showing your sentimental side was discouraged. People were considered weak; women were drama queens, and  guys lost their manliness because of it. It's great that over time we've been able to open up to improve our emotional health, but to what extent is expressing ourselves healthy or beneficial to us? Especially when we're doing it publicly and online.  

       Half of the things that people post on facebook or twitter, they would never even say to someone in person. Even when people text, they say things they wouldn't have the courage to say to someone in person. I would love one day for a guy to call me to talk or come up to me and ask me on a date so we can get to know each other. Instead, we get to know each other via text. It's hard to read a person's tone or emotion in a text, yet for some reason we feel more connected this way. Will we reach a point where we don't know how to personally interact with each other? Think about it, how many times have you been walking to class when a stranger looks at your and says "Good morning, how are you?" It's not only a rare occurrence, but when it does happen, we think that person is talking to someone else or just weird. In another time period, or in other cultures, this would be expected. Social networks are making us bolder maybe, or more connected, but I wouldn't say they're making us more social. 

Mediocrity

  I realized today that hard work doesn't pay off. Think about it, it doesn't really matter how well we do in something, it matters how poorly everyone else does. Once everyone is put into the bell curve, the bad become average, the average become good, and the great just blend in. Some work ethic, huh? We could be mediocre, but in a place where the average person is inadequate, mediocre is considered great. How could we ever reach our full potential in a culture of mediocrity??!

Questions

           So there's this kid in a few of my classes that always has a question. Actually, we call him Questions. There's always one in every class; those kids that ask when the exam is right after the professor says "Exam on Friday!" When we first hear his voice and realize that it's him who is asking the question, the class just sighs in unison. He aggravates everyone with his irrelevance. For example, in biology our professor will be explaining how two specific amino acids compare to each other, and he'll ask a question like "well, how is that amino acid related to (some random amino acid irrelevant to the course)?" or "how does this amino acid aid in fighting cancer?" It's safe to say that this kid has some form of A.D.H.D or A.D.D., but should we really consider him to be as weird as we do? Questions is an outcast in our classes because he asks about things that we aren't going to be tested on, and if its not on the test then who cares right? That's the mentality of most college students. It's not about the knowledge, it's about the grades. It's sad that this is how our generation views education, but we can't be blamed. All that teachers and graduate schools and employers emphasize is GPA and class rank. It's unfortunate that most kids cheat their way through college, or just temporarily memorize what is supposed to be learned. The only knowledge we are really attaining is how to survive in a dog eat dog world, and that the ends justify the means.

Does this Make Sense?

     From personal experience, I've come to the conclusion that compatibility isn't always the biggest factor in friendships. Some of my best friends have been people that I can be crazy with and do ridiculous things with. Those friends that you can just sit in your room with and die laughing for hours. Then one day you come to the realization that you don't actually know much about each other. So what happens when you've been "best friends" with this person for so long, and you realize that you aren't compatible at all? You have opposite opinions about love, life, people. Your goals and aspirations don't match, your work ethic is completely different. On the other hand, when they're gone, you miss them. I don't think that feelings really matter, I don't think that love is what brings us together. I think that people are tied together because of what they've been through. I think that relationships are based on experience, and the understanding that comes from these experiences is where that love roots from. Maybe this is why so many people fall in love with that person that's always been right in front of them. Or why a widow is attracted to a widower. Or why arranged marriages end in love. But then maybe its not love at all, maybe it's just need.

Silence

      There is so much more to silence that most people don't realize or appreciate; it's beautiful really. Before I got my driver's license, my dad used to drive me to my softball tournaments everyyy weekend. We'd drive for hours sometimes, without saying a word to each other, just listening to the radio. We'd listen to what i want for a while, and then what he'd want, since our taste in music is completely different. Sometimes we'd just drive in silence, and it was awesome. There's something powerful, i guess, about sharing a space with someone without needing to talk, with being completely content with just each others' presence. You don't need to communicate to connect, there's just an energy that you both feel, so you're on the same page, even though you're both lost in completely separate thoughts. It's hard to explain  it, and there aren't many people that I find I can do this with. My dad and my brother, and at times, my best friend Erica. Anyways, people need to cut down on the small talk. Stop trying to force some kind of bond, and just feeeel it.