Lackadaisical
I can’t believe I’m saying THIS, but I actually feel quite jealous now that Josh, my fellow drummer is back from his semester break and there are times now that I don’t get to play in the worship team. ahahah. It’s a silly sort of jealousy, let’s not fret now. Nevertheless. :/
Now to the Internet report! It’s interesting how this morning all I could do was to youtube so I went through a little bit of my to-watch list, listened to Maiko Watson, Jeff Beck (LOL) and read and listened a bit as I go along this: http://www.titletrakk.com/music-interviews/jon-foreman-switchfoot-hello-hurricane-songs-interview.htm (MUST READ if you are a thoughtful song listener)
It all effected a heart-burn in me. So aroused am I by their “creations” that I WANT TO CREATE TO. (read: I want to jam) haha. Well, I’ve been saying this for way too long. What’s to hold me back?
Ivan likes sticky leaves and children.
I came online just to find someone, anyone! that I could pour out my inspirations to but atlas, it seems that only Tumblr’s server not down. Bummers. Anyways, EVERYONE OF YOU MUST READ ANY OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY’S WRITINGS! I really love how God has placed this writer into my life (yes, when I read his works, it’s like I’ve met him and known him, it sure feels that way). Every of his book I’ve been reading so far is just so edifying to the soul in such a beautifully-written way. You wouldn’t even realize you’re reading a book from a Christian author, and though the themes might be quite universal and even typical, I am sooooo amazed with how he presents them in such a real and fresh way. (Or maybe it just particularly appeals to me. hmm) Plus, you get to really hear the heartbeat of the Russian people, one of the lovelies of reading, not only do you travel but you experience people halfway across the world too. I am soooo curious now as to how the Russians of the now would have changed from the Russians of the 17th century that he writes about. Ah, I’m so in love with his books. As much as I always take AGES to finish them up, due to studies and mostly due to its overrrrr intensity ohthepagesareonfireeee, it’s so timeless that even when you pick it up four months later from the last you left it at, it still jumps at you and grips you at your heart whichever juncture you’re at. I’m serious, you want an enriching read that really imprints something beyond an earthly fascination on your soul, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s the way to go! I admit it is NO LIGHT READ, but really walking down the paths of the turbulent emotions and colourful speeches and the chim-chimness is worth it! It’s worth every time I had to close the book and breathe in deeply to stop myself from tearing up so I could continue. Probably the thing that I find the most inspiring of all about his writing is, how it’s protagonist or antagonists could so aptly envision the Kingdom of heaven in their super heightened state of desperations or emotions, it’s all so thrilling! Fyodor Dostoevsky writes his philosophy as if it were a thriller. He’s totally on the same level as C.S. Lewis to me now, see you guys in heaven man! :D
P.S. It really is much to my regret that even after reading writing of such superior quality, I could write so childishly still, haha, I’m just bad with writing man.
He’s more than the laughter or the stars in the heavens
As close as a heartbeat or a song on our lips
Someday we’ll trust Him and learn how to see Him
Someday He’ll call us and we will come running
and fall in His arms and the tears will fall down and we’ll pray,“I want to fall in love with You”
Why Ivan?
“No character in The Brothers Karamazov is afflicted with more trauma or inner conflict than Ivan. Ivan is a brilliant student with an incisively analytical mind, and his intelligence is directly to blame for his descent into despair. Unable to reconcile the horror of unjust human suffering—particularly the suffering of children—with the idea of a loving God, Ivan is consumed with doubt and argues that even if God does exist, he is malicious and hostile, and loves to torture mankind. Ivan believes that human concepts of morality are dependent on the idea that the soul is immortal, meaning that people only worry about “right” and “wrong” behavior because they want to experience pleasure rather than pain in the afterlife. Because of his feelings about God, Ivan himself is unable to believe in the immortality of the soul, and thus he argues that good and evil are fraudulent categories, and that people may do whatever they wish without regard for morality. But Ivan only starts thinking about these concepts in the first place because he loves humanity—it is his concern for human suffering that initially leads him to reject God. His logical disbelief in morality is terribly painful for him because it would make a way of life such as Fyodor Pavlovich’s, which Ivan detests, an acceptable mode of human behavior. Dignified and coldly moral, Ivan wants to be able to accept an idea of goodness that would exalt mankind and reject Fyodor Pavlovich’s brutishness, but, trapped in his own logic, he is unable to do so. He is so beset with doubt, and so defensively determined to keep the rest of humanity at a distance, that he is unable to act on his love for Katerina, and seems to scorn the very thought of pursuing happiness for himself.
After Smerdyakov murders Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan’s crisis of faith becomes more traumatic still. Convinced by Smerdyakov that Ivan’s philosophy made it possible for Smerdyakov to kill Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan is forced to confront two very difficult notions: first, that he is responsible for another human being, and second, that his beliefs have paved the way for murder. Ivan’s subsequent collapse into hallucination and madness represents the novel’s final rejection of his skeptical way of life. When the novel ends, Ivan is feverish and unconscious, having been taken home by Katerina to recuperate, and his future is uncertain. It may be that, with Katerina’s love, he will find a way to accept Alyosha’s faith or come to terms intellectually with morality and his own responsibility for others. Or it may be that he will never resolve his crisis—he may become permanently insane. But the extremely optimistic note on which the novel ends suggests that he will find some form of redemption.”
from sparknotes, a little character analysis of The Brother’s Karamazov.
Paralysis of the Heart →
By MICHELLE FIORDALISO
NY Times, Published: May 10, 2012I WAS driving my 11-year-old son, Joe, to school. It had been one of those mornings. He was singing opera and doing hip-hop moves when I needed him to put on his shoes.
As we pulled up in front of school just in time, I snapped: “I can’t start our day this way. This kind of stress is going to make me sick.”
He burst into tears. “Don’t say that!” he yelled. “Promise to never say that again!” He raced out of the car, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
On more than a few occasions, he has expressed his fear that something might happen to me. As the child of a single mother, he clearly has been pondering the same questions I do: Who will take care of him if I die? Who will love him as much as I do?
Joe’s fear of my mortality jarred me into reality, and I called my doctor. There actually had been a reason for my harsh statement. My face and arm had been numb for months. I had shrugged it off as stress but then started to get chronic headaches, too.
My doctor agreed to see me right away. After examining me, she said, “If I can’t get you in for an M.R.I. at the imaging center, I’ll need to send you to the hospital in an ambulance.” She explained that stress doesn’t create the symptoms I was having. It could be an aneurysm, a tumor or early signs of multiple sclerosis.
Someone else might have panicked, but this kind of situation makes me practical. She got me an appointment for an hour later. In that time, I did what any sensible person who has been ordered to get an emergency M.R.I. does: I got the car washed. I wasn’t in denial; there’s just so much time to get stuff done, and worrying wasn’t on my checklist.
Some people are terrified of sickness and death. Not me. I decided to face death head on when I was about 10 and saw a photo spread about AIDS in Life magazine. I declared that one day I was going to help those men.
And I did. At 20, social-work degree in hand, I applied for a job on the AIDS unit of St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. When asked if I could handle seeing gaunt men with tubes in their mouths, I said “yes.” When asked if I was afraid of watching people die, I shook my head no.
I was like the naïve teenager who enlists in the Army without any idea of what war is like. For the next two years, patients of mine died every day. After a while the pain caught up to me. If I were going to befriend death, I needed a different approach.
So I became a sky diver. Then a motorcyclist. I climbed rocks. Canoed in Class-5 rapids. Bungee jumped. And most harrowing of all, I moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. I hoped all these experiences would give me something I desperately wanted: fearlessness.
I walked into the imaging center. In the waiting room, I got down to business on my cellphone. I made arrangements for my son to be picked up from school and got a friend to take care of our dog. I like things that can be checked off a list. Kid, check. Dog, check. Custodian for my son should I die, check.
The technician called me in. He was kind and covered me with a blanket. I almost told him I loved him. Some people might dread an M.R.I., but lying down in the middle of the day without anyone asking me to do anything is a single mother’s dream.
The technician asked, “Have you ever had an M.R.I. before?”
“Yes.”
I got pregnant in 1999. I was 26. At the beginning of my ninth month something unimaginable happened: I had a mild stroke. A small bleed in the front left lobe of my brain took away my ability to speak and control the right side of my body. They rushed me to the hospital. I didn’t remember reading about sudden paralysis in “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and I wanted my money back.
In an instant I got a glimpse into how vulnerable motherhood was going to make me. My usual hubris turned into humility. I did not like it one bit.
Just before putting me into the machine, the technician handed me a red rubber ball, explaining that if I needed to communicate with him, all I had to do was squeeze it. He reassured me that while I might feel alone in the tube, I wouldn’t be.
I could have used a red rubber ball back when Joe was 10 weeks old. That’s when his father left. Feeling lost, I fled New York and went to Miami to live with a friend. On my back I carried a pack with five weeks of clothing for the two of us. On my chest I strapped my baby in a Bjorn. In my left hand I held his car seat. In my right, his stroller.
I looked like a soldier. Walking through the airport, I felt more alone than I ever had. No one offered to help, and why would they? From the outside it seemed as if I had it all handled.
My brain and neck scans were done. It took three hours longer than I expected and it was too late to take Joe to the movies, the promised reward for his stellar report card.
When Joe is testing my patience, it’s difficult to be alone as a parent. But when he does something amazing it’s even worse, because there is no witness but me to mark the milestones. No one else who will know and remember all the funny, lovely things he says and does.
I HAD the M.R.I. because I was numb, but my numbness actually started long before, when Joe was a baby. I needed my eyes and ears to be vigilant if I was to single-handedly care for him. But I didn’t need a heart to feel. It was safer to focus on the details and forget that my baby was more intimidating than caring for dying men and much scarier than hurling my body from a perfectly good aircraft.
With Joe, I wasn’t fearless. Quite the opposite, I was petrified of how much I loved him. Death was something I had grown comfortable with; it was life I wasn’t so sure about. The problem with numbness, though, is that you don’t choose which parts not to feel. You don’t get to block out pain and suffering but keep all the good stuff. You get everything or nothing. That’s the deal.
The night of my M.R.I., I walked into Joe’s room one last time before going to sleep. It had been a long day. Safe and sleeping in his bed, he had one hand on his left cheek and one on his right. It reminded me of when he was a baby and we shared a bed in Miami. He’d wake in the night and find my face with his tiny hands. With one he’d hold my left cheek and with the other he’d hold my right. Only when he’d found both would he fall back to sleep. I was his red rubber ball.
My eyes welled up. The enormousness of my love swelled bigger than any fear. The terror of potential loss flooded in. But so did the joy of connection. Joe hates to see me cry, but he was sleeping so I figured, why not.
I thought about the fact that eventually one of us will stand at the other’s funeral. That day will come, and no amount of list making or numbness can keep it away. I didn’t know if the moments between my sitting on his bed and a funeral were few or many. All we can do is make the moments we have matter.
I put that on my list: savor our time together. Check.
Like how he still holds my hand. Or hangs out in our front yard in his plaid bathrobe, holding a fake cigar in his mouth. Or how he nicknamed me “cita” for mamacita, and how I always wanted a nickname from someone who’d love me enough to give me one.
Suddenly I saw that his eyes were open. He had caught me loving him. And his eyes had tears in them, too.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“Because I’m happy,” he said.
“Me, too.”
And just like that, he fell back to sleep.
I knew I was happy, because even though my face and arm were numb, my heart wasn’t. In two days I’d get the message that the M.R.I. was normal. But in that moment all that mattered was that Joe was alive, and so was I. And we were happy.
Escape where?
Oddly enough, the washed out blue walls and peeling paints on my bedside actually remind me of the ocean. Something I’ve never fancied in its literal sense but more so for what it stands for- freedom, boundlessness, FLOTATION?!
Here’s a shout-out to whoever’s reading out there! I LOVE ALL OF YOU SO MUCH! You’re beautiful remember remember. I also love myself quite a lot. Haha. Yes, I go about gushing over every other perfect girl that I chance upon and envy, but still, I think I wouldn’t change the saucy Joycey for anything in the world. There will always be better people out there. What would really help is if we all chose to be true to ourselves, let me be me and you be you, tadaa, out pops Utopia! Everyone deserves to have their clothes custom-made. Everyone should be called by their lovely names. Everyone should be given a self to call their own. A self they could give away willingly to a lover and a self they could surrender to the Potter to carve into beautiful art. Have you thanked God today for yourSELF? (HAHA, this line is EXACTLY like that “Have-you-hugged-your-child-today?” ad!)
There’s a hole in the world
like a great black pit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it
And its morals aren’t worth
what a pig could spit
And it goes by the name of London
At the top of the hole
sit a privileged few
Making mock of the vermin
in the lower zoo
Turning beauty into filth and greed
I too have sailed the world
and seen its wonders
For the cruelty of men
is as wondrous as Peru
But there’s no place like London.
from Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
P.S. we must finish it poo!
I don’t wanna be someone who walks away so easily
I’m here to stay and make the difference that I can make
Our differences they do a lot to teach us how to use
The tools and gifts we got, we got a lot at stake
And in the end, you’re still my friend at least we did intend
For us to work we didn’t break, we didn’t burn
We had to learn how to bend without the world caving in
I had to learn what I’ve got, and what I’m not
And who I amNo, I won’t give up
God knows we’re worth it.
I won’t give up on us. - jazon mrazi don’t give up easily; I fight for what I want. It takes a lot for me to actually give up on something or someone. I can’t just throw away all the hard work and time I put into it. I can’t just give up because times are hard, especially if that person means so much to me. I keep fighting for what I want until I can’t fight anymore, until giving up is the only option left.
I can’t promise you a perfect relationship without arguments over the littlest things, However, I can promise you as long as you’re trying, I’m staying.
i won’t give up on us.
intellectual constipation.
Foundation’s done with, I can’t even begin with how different my perspectives, habits, standards and values have changed. Funny how this sounds more alarming than reassuring, as if growing up always meant, waning out, watering down, a picture of walking down a staircase from heaven, instead of towards. Some things must never change. Some things we must be ruthlessly stubborn with! And it’s our duty to find out exactly what are these things we’ll hold on tight to and what we can do without. Lest we be combing through waters. Or grappling with a giant beanstalk always morphing into an impossible form.
Wish You could breathe life into all our dreams. Or show us which part of our hearts need a little tweak to beat once more.
Blow Job
Photographer Tadao Cern captures faces with an industrial strength blower focused on their heads. See more on the shots and experiments on Tadao’s personal Facebook page.
Found on Behance
Page 1 of 45
