#OctPoWriMo: Rose Bushes
Last year, I participated in OctPoWriMo, a month-long poetry challenge where participants attempt to write and share one poem every day throughout the month of October. I successfully completed the challenge, but when everything was said and done, I had a pile of poems that were pretty random and didn’t gel together. Some were long, others were extremely short, and the topics had nothing to do with each other. This year I have decided to take on the challenge again but with another goal in mind. Create a more cohesive string of poems over the course of the next 31 days that will have a connected theme, and if you follow along to the end of October, then I’ll tell you what it is. (more…)
“B” is for Books
So, there is a Facebook trend going on right now that asks users to list the 10 most influential books in that have stayed with them in some way. Thousands of people have completed the task and have tagged others in their post to do the same. And although I have been tagged twice, I still haven’t gotten around to doing it.
So here are the 10 most influential books that have stayed with me. If you are reading this, then I challenge you to do the same. (more…)
Go Ahead and Exaggerate A Little
Teen Brain
After watching this video the other day I’ve realized something about the readers of this blog and me. For some reason we all love it when I exaggerate (for the most part). I literally do nothing during the day except for going to work, or school and then I go home and hang out with friends. Most of the rest of my time is spent writing all about the mundane things that I do and then posting it on the internet.
I’ve written a post about watching cat videos for Pete’s sake, and people still enjoy coming back to visit my blog. It’s entertaining at times to read all of my posts about nothing, but I worry now that it affects my relationships IRL (in real life) as well. Everything with me is “life or death,” “do this now or the world will end,” and “my situation is the worst situation in the world and I’m going to die right now.” Nothing is ever just moderately normal or just boring with me, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m within that twenty to twenty-five-year-old last bit of brain developing stage or because that’s just me.
I take stories about picking up someone’s lunch at Wendy’s and I turn it into some disastrous catastrophe that ruined my life, or I talk about my experiences with watching training videos at my department store job and I turn it into something that sounds completely ridiculous. A planned trip to Oregon with friends has gotten stretched into an epic tale about life and love, and when I do get around to writing a completely made up story no one seems to respond to it. I suppose it’s something about my exaggerated life that draws people in and keeps them coming back for more. (more…)
The Shifts and Changes of Thoughts
Sometimes thoughts and ideas change. Sometimes they grow and shift from one way to another; and sometimes they even shift their way back again. The way we think and what we believe comes as a result of a complex construction of your environment, upbringing, experiences, and practically everything else that you come into contact with in the world. As we grow older and build new memories with the various pieces of life that make us who we are, sometimes the thoughts we gathered in order to answer complex questions evolve and modify, and that’s completely okay.
You won’t ever know every single piece of knowledge that has ever been leaked out into the world because you are not every single person on the planet. One person can never walk in everyone shoes because they are just one single person, but you can definitely try your best. Even super geniuses and the most adventurous travelers can’t see or know it all. The flow of knowledge that comes into the world never ceases, and the range of different perspectives never stops accumulating. (more…)
A Labyrinth of Weathered Book Pages
I find the way humans use language so incredibly amazing and wonderful. The fact that words and symbols take the place of sounds and emotions is daunting if you really think about it. Having a name for something so abstract, or even being able to describe an unnamed entity with a combination of expressive phrases, is just so amazing.
We communicate all of our thoughts and feelings to one another with a range of building blocks that we arrange into larger systems of words and terms and then again into complex sentences and expressions. I fall in love with the English language all over again when I pick up a book and dive deep into my imagination filled with new worlds, interesting people, and strange universes populated with wonder and awe, and thinking back on it, this is probably the reason why I got lost in a labyrinth of weathered book pages at the mall. (more…)
