Shining Thru

Who determines what is and isn’t worth having a federal holiday?  And, why don’t all of the declared Federal Holidays have to be observed?  President’s Day is a weird one, some people have it off, some schools are closed, some offices are closed….but then others are not, some teachers have to go into work, some offices are open, it’s like a guessing game to decide where you can and can’t go…well you can go, but it’ll be a waste of your time because it’ll be closed due to the “holiday”.

Are there committees formed in order to decide if something is important enough to have its own holiday?  Or does someone just suggest it to the president?  Some of our holidays just seem odd to me.  President’s Day???  What are we suppose to be celebrating?  I wish I knew the history behind the holiday and what the point was….

Columbus day….ugh, don’t get me started on that one.  I really do not feel that we should celebrate someone “discovering” a land that already had people living there.

There are so many holidays and I’m not sure what make some of the days so special, and why we don’t honor other things.  There seems to be a day for everything…even a day for speaking like a pirate, but what makes something leap to a federal holiday?

Valentines Day reminds us of the love we have in our lives.  There are so many different types of love in this world and a lot of people look for different things when they look for love.  There are some people who are in love with all sorts of things, which I realized while watching the show Taboo the other day.  There were two guys who were in love with their life sized dolls, which weird for me, makes perfect sense to them.

Personally I have different kinds of love with the different live people in my life.  I love my siblings and parents and friends and boyfriend, and all of those kinds of love are different kinds….sow hat is love?

Can people love inanimate objects like cars and beds and dolls?  Is attachment the same thing as love?  You see little kids who wont let go of their blankets or teddy bears for anything, but is that because they love them or they just represent security to them?

What is love?  Even the dictionary isn’t really sure, or at least acknowledges the fact that there are all different kinds of love and that at least in the English language we use the word for everything that we like a lot.  Looking on dictionary.com I was amazed at all of the different definitions that are acknowledge in the dictionary for the word “love”.  I thought it was just the way we use it in our culture, but actually, it seems to have worked it’s way into our dictionaries as well. Does a word lose its meaning when it has so many uses?  I know it still means something to me when my boyfriend says that he loves me, but I think that’s because we don’t say it in every conversation.  For a lot of people the words “I love you” have replaced “goodbye” when talking on the phone.  I think that the word means something more when it’s not used all the time….but then what about all of the uses it has in the English language?

From Dictionary.com :

love

/lʌv/ Show Spelled Pronunciation

—Verb phrase

Do you ever find yourself in a situation that forces you into realizations that you have been avoiding for awhile?  Denial can be tricky…sometimes it’s a conscious effort to put yourself in denial and not look at all of the facts, and sometimes you don’t even know that you’re there.  A person can fool themselves into thinking that everything is fine as the world crumbles around them.  The mind is a very powerful instrument.  We can make ourselves believe whatever we want and ignore whatever we want.  The imagination can sometimes run away with us though…

Sometimes people let their minds wander into the impossibilities of this world.  Sometimes they just try to create their won perfect world.  A world made of day dreams and imaginary situations that go just as they’ve planned…

Where as the world often times brings ups back to reality with a powerful slap.  Crashing down around us as our bubble of denial is interrupted.  Disturbed, the nerve of the world to interfere with something that someone took all the time to dream up or the facts that have been pushed to the far corners of the mind, to be left there and ignored….

Ignored until the world points them back out, over and over again, until you can no longer ignore them…or at least not without going crazy.  I think that a person can ignore whatever they want, but it’s only a matter of time before their mind starts to slip away from them, before they can’t grasp any part of reality because they’ve pushed it too far way, creating their own handle on things.  Or they can choose to go the other way and embrace reality and let their dreams fall away…crashing down to the ground and below.  Leaving them afraid to hope or dream for anything else, stuck with only the cold reality of this world we live in.

Doesn’t it always seem like when you give up on surprises that they appear out of nowhere.  Just when you thought that spring was on the way, the whole deep south of the United States gets blanketed in snow…and Vancouver is hauling in snow for the winter Olympics with highs of 62 degrees.  Funny how things work out.

Or the surprise ending of a book that comes at the last possible second when you thought that things had already concluded and the author was just trying to wind everything down and throw in a few more conclusions that you already realized yourself….and then all of the sudden they throw something else out there that you didn’t think was even possible to make happen with only the couple of pages left in the book…but they do it, and it turns out to be logical….brave strategy, people like me end up with mixed feelings about how the book ended, not appreciating the surprise, but knowing that it makes perfectly logical sense for the whole storyline.

Movies do it to…all the time, especially by writers and directors that want to set everyone up for a sequel if things go well with the first one at the box office.

There are all sorts of surprises….how do you feel about them?  I know some people that hate them, I know some people who have mixed feelings about them, and others who love them and I mean love them…the best thing in the world for them is a surprise birthday party or a gift for no reason.

I was reading a list of memorable quotes listed by USA Today and one of the quotes caught my attention…

“Obviously a major malfunction.”

Steve Nesbitt, NASA public affairs officer, Jan. 28, 1986, shortly after the space shuttle Challenger exploded.

I feel like this quote can be applied to how we feel when looking at something that happens in life.  Sometimes you can only look at a situation and say “oh shit”…..I mean, really, what else is there to say?  It’s done, over with, a major malfunction in the plans that you had set forth and were going well until that point.  But now it’s in the past, you might not even be sure what went wrong, it probably doesn’t matter what went wrong, it simply did, and now you have a mess.  Just like the pieces of the space shuttle, floating out into open space.

Sometimes a moment catches you so off guard that it’s like it happens in slow motion, or in a daze, or just replays over and over in your head…and there is still nothing to say other than….it’s obviously a major malfunction.  Nothing more…nothing less….what else is there to say at that point?

Does it ever feel like things happen without rhyme or reason, that there is no pattern to anything that happens in life?  Even though at other times it feels like everything is linked together and you could never have the same day without every single tiny detail working perfectly….

Why is it that sometimes things come out of no where and hit us like a brick wall?  Why is it that while many events throughout the day are predictable, there is always something that happens that you never would have seen coming, no matter what angle you looked at it before it happened.

Some things are so random in this life that the quote “crazy random happenstance” really stuck out to me from the movie “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog”  I thought that it was cleverly used in the movie as a very ironic situation because the character is speaking of a very planned event.  I have a friend who says that the most important part of spontaneity is careful planning.  That phrase has always interested me.

If you could change the past what moment would you choose to change?  Not just in your life time, but if you could change one event in all of the world’s history what would it be?  How could you possibly know the outcome of that choice?  Would it be worth possibly erasing your own existence from the earth?  What if the moment you choose, even if it is centuries ago, is the moment that makes it so that your parents never meet and therefore you are never born?

If we had time machines, I am afraid that people would jump into them without ever seriously considering the fact that they might screw up their chances of ever existing, or change the world completely….what if that is what somebody wants…a whole new existence?  I think that many people would jump into the past and think it was pretty awesome to be there, myself included, but what if they just wanted to change one thing….then what?

How would you ever choose what one thing you wanted to change in history?  Everyone’s perspective is different, because everyone has been affected by the outcome of events in a different way…The impact of a single event may mean nothing to someone from NYC in the United States, but might be everything to a whole village in China…

We never know how the events of history have formed because we weren’t there…but what if we could go back and see for ourselves how things came about?  Would we want to change them?

They say that laughter is good for the soul…I’m not sure exactly what “good” means, but I think there is a general understanding of it, even if the dictionary version can’t possibly encompass all that the word is intended to mean.

It’s funny how certain people, pictures, movies, books, etc can always make you laugh, no matter what kind of mood you are in or what kind of day you have had…some people or things can unlock that thing that makes your smile turn into a laugh.  I love to see people laugh, I think that people were right when they told me that laughter is contagious.  It just seems to flow so easily out of some people…

I think it’s interesting how no one laughs the same.  Everyone’s laughter is different.  Some people laugh easily and loudly, booming out their emotional expression; while others can only manage a nervous giggle at best, or a half hearted..hah… that sounds more like someone clearing their throat than the sound of someone who is happy.

Laughter can make your day, or at least mine…if I’m having a bad day and someone can make me laugh, a lot of times it saves me from crying.  It’s almost like laughter has some type of magical power that washes over you and releases a lot of the tension and stress of the day.  I love it when I can start the day off laughing.  I’m always thankful when I can talk to someone who can always make me laugh in the morning, it just sets me up for a good day, a good start at least.  I have found that if I can laugh in the morning, then things that happen throughout the day never seem quite as bad.

A brick wall crumbles down as the waves of ambiguity break their caps

The flashes of white caps gain speed as their precision of aim grows apparent

The cold bricks brought down by the forces of nature

Natural fury that builds up until the growing coals that have been simmering erupt into a fire of passion

Passionate fury that explodes against the building blocks that lie on the bank

The high cold wall that moss attempts to cover, getting into the crevices

Weakening the mortar that that waves will soon crush

As the monsoon of life hits hard against the protective barriers that we have built up

One by one the bricks are torn down until the bottom gives out

And the wall crumbles down

Looking at the pile of ruble, what do you see?

A mess….a tattered beauty…..a waste…..what it use to be…what it could have been…

The beautiful remnants that lay in a disconnected heap at the water’s age

Nature’s true power and efficiency shine through as they crash into man’s week attempt to mimic what would come naturally

Or what shouldn’t be there, going against nature only infuriates the true master

Fighting the path of life, going down whatever road or over whatever hill we see

Only leads to natural disasters, your attempts at craftsmanship end up crumbling

Lost and alone in front of the chaotic compound of hopes in disarray

The persistent water rejoices at its victory.

I’m not sure how much you are suppose to take before you just decide to give up.  What does it take before a person just hits their limit and says it’s enough…and how do individuals react to such a limit being met….

Do you stretch your limits and just push it back a little further and a little further than you ever thought possible, or do you follow through with your original plan and just quit…

How long can you live on the edge of hating your life, or just an inch away from despair?

Maybe it’s not even in every aspect of your life, of course it’s harder when that feeling of worthlessness hits more than one area, or if not worthless, at least to the point where you don’t feel like you’re ever moving forward and most times feel like you’re being pulled backwards….Sometimes that feeling only hits one aspect of your life, social, financial, professional, etc….Sometimes it’s just one area that just can’t seem to get on the right track no matter how much effort you put towards it.

When it is only one area of your life, how much time and energy are you suppose to take away from other areas in order to try and get that one back on the right path?  Wouldn’t it be easier just to roll over and go back to sleep most days?