From My Brain to Yours

 I still can't wrap my head around pain. Pain and suffering and death feel so foreign, so out of place in my life, and I'm sure that in itself is a privilege. I guess at some point you just have to get used to the fact that there is bad in the world, maybe even the fact that the world itself is bad.  But if we look at the world as a bad place where bad things happen, where does that leave us? If everything is arbitrary, what's the point? Are we just skating by on pure luck until one day we run out? My existential ramblings are nothing novel, I'm sure; the human condition is made up almost entirely of wondering why we're in this condition in the first place. There's something rather juvenile about the lens through which I view life. It's as though the minute it dawned on me that bad things do and will happen to people I know and love I started thinking of that as some sort of dream. If you separate pain from reality, it becomes distant. But it doesn't go ...

 As I'm not one who seeks out to be scared, come Halloween I'm never quite prepared. Though blood and guts and gore may fascinate my thoughts on that are much less love than hate. However, through the years on me it's grown and certainly in this I'm not alone. I love the autumn joy of making crafts I float across fall winds upon my raft. Creation brings a new birth amidst rot and so I'm grateful now for what I've got. The charm of hallow's eve just doesn't lie in looking up as ghosts and spirits fly, but rather in my little living room where building costumes lifts me from my gloom. But I suppose by any means I've come to the conclusion shared by more than some. I've joined the ranks of folks whose eyes do gleam whenever they hear talk of Halloween.

it's shiny and new, oh so modern and sleek they say it could open in less than a week i'll return to that line, through the window i'll peek at their dozens and dozens of bagels though the new hut may seem to stray far from its roots we must see it promotes the same glorious pursuit of providing the campus with yeast's finest fruit i will be there each day if i'm able while complaining is justified, it's not too wise for the hut's true improvement is in its new size and this upgrade should fit far more bagels inside like with horses in gigantic stables as we sit and anticipate what is in store all my dreams have been filled up with bagels galore and it's reached a point at which i cannot ignore the desire for bagel hut bagels

I'm back! Just over a week ago, I made my return to the real world after a two-month stint as a camp counselor (never thought I'd do that again, certainly not at a camp that wasn't the one I grew up going to), and now I've also returned to Philadelphia, where my senior year of college has begun. I don't know what I'm going to do after I graduate. In about eight months, I'll have a bachelor's degree in classical voice, and I'm really not sure where I'll go from there. I've always known what the next step was in life, and now I don't have any clue where my path will lead. I have a lot of drive and talent and passion and charisma, and I've learned a lot about who I am over my twenty years and change of being a human. I know I love music and performing and telling people what to do, but I'm not exactly sure how to apply that into a Real Adult Career Path. Right now, I'm about to begin my second year of music directing Broadway on ...

if words aren’t meant to fail her, then where is her inhaler? her lungs becoming frailer, her body is her jailer her face is growing paler, the world seems to assail her if life’s a sea, a sailor she is not

I'm writing a story - will you write it for me? I've written too many of years long ago. Please, give me a secret - like tea I will steep it I'll give it right back with a lid on, to go. I'm taking a break and I'm baking a cake I'm planting my secrets, I hope they will grow. The leaves are all falling and I hear you calling my name with your voice like a ball that you throw You're running and skipping, I watch as I'm slipping away from the time and the places I know. We climb up the trees and I'm feeling the breeze and you struggle, the tree's got ahold of your toe. Then later at dinner, we say I'm the winner but winning and losing give off the same glow. To adventure together in good or bad weather 's a dream, like a time when the river would flow. So tell me your story, as you sit before me -  Your secrets and mine have a long way to go.

It's fairly obvious that there's a lot of hypocrisy surrounding the "my body, my choice" rhetoric that is so often thrown around these days. Now, ostensibly anyone throwing around such an argument would be hypocritical to pick and choose what this applies to. The most obvious example of this is the appropriation of this slogan by right-wingers to apply to mask mandates; "my body, my choice" means I don't have to wear a mask in public. These right-wingers, of course, are the same people who are zealously cranking out anti-abortion legislation in Republican-controlled states. The irony stings as many people across the country now fear for their health, safety, and well-being as Republicans strip them of their bodily autonomy. As someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the anti-mask, anti-choice faction, I must be able to back up my stance as pro-mask and pro-choice, while reconciling my belief in the "my body, my choice" slogan...