.[consumption].

What do you consume?


::ALCOHOL:: For many people, especially here in Utah, consumption of alcohol is the evil which takes advantage of mankind. But I ask, what do those people consume. If it's not alcohol, what are they reaping?

::HATE:: Many consume a drink of hate, and deny the acception of those that don't fit in their... "box" of normal.

::GOSSIP:: Others ARE consumed in a love of gossip. The lack of control with information. A lack of respect for those around them, and a lack of tact with when and where they share information. Superfluous sharing of "news"

::SEX:: A huge demeaning aspect of our polluted society, Sex. Majority of the world consumes sex; Lives and thrives on the carnal needs of their bodies. Is it to be assumed that sex is a "need of the human body" and therefore isn't evil?

I propose that the hypocrite shouldn't judge those in consumption. Whether that be myself judging those consuming sex, or those consuming hate for gays. I am not here to judge I am here to accept my fellow man, and leave judgement to the courts, and to whatever higher being may or may not exist.

Consumption:: The taking of matter/ideas into the body.

.wasting.away.of.the.[body].

.choir.[tour].2.

One thing I missed in the last post was going to the Farmer’s Market, and going to the freaking most amazing Abercrombie and Fitch store I’ve ever been in… it was like being in a shopping museum. Not a store. Absolute magic. I’ve since developed a hate for that store, but at the time it was euphoric… an OCD persons dream, perfectly folded clothes separated by color and design.

Returning to the regular timeline, Disneyland came and we performed the morning of the first day there. We sang our songs, I accompanied on one of the worst pianos I’ve ever played, and we were off to enjoy the day. The first day of Disneyland, I had set up somewhat of a schedule of what we would do and in what order… The day was extremely rough because everyone had a different way of “doing” Disneyland. By the end of the day I had pissed off enough of the group that it was obvious the second day wasn’t going to include most of the same people.

Todd and I got into a fight… More like Todd and the group, but it’s a long story, and somewhat pointless now. That night the room was awkward, having participated in the day’s trauma Todd was not included in my trip to Chili’s. We spent the whole time in the restaurant complaining about what they had done, and I honestly believe if we hadn’t made one of our religious trips to Chili’s that the drama of the night would’ve been much more elevated. I am glad that it happened, because it was the first “fight” I had with Todd… and I learned a lot about how he reacts to problems, and how he fights for what he believes.

The very next day we began the trip home. The trauma of the previous night started to blow over. And when we stopped for lunch we made yet another trip to chili’s, this one involving Todd… and I was glad that it had been resolved… for the most part:) As I look back on Choir tour in general I can only imagine the difference it made in my life. I will always be grateful for the friends I made and the impact they have on my life.

.choir.[tour].1.

The quick gist of prep for tour, was that I wasn’t going to go. I ended up taking a spot of Todd’s ex-best friend and would be in a room with Todd. It was rapidly becoming very exciting…

The tour would consist of Driving in a bus to California, Sea world, Disneyland, More Disneyland, and another bus ride home. I will try and explain as much of the tour as possible, seeing as this was a pivotal point in many of my friends and my own relations…

Driving TO California was beyond fun. I sat next to Rachel and we stayed up extremely late laughing about our txt tone being “Kim Possible”… :) I was a little disappointed because Todd had talked up the bus ride and told me we were going to have a bunch of fun driving down, but I couldn’t seem to find him… he disappeared with Megan Crosland or someone… Skipping stupid details, we arrived in the hotel, and began to set up sleeping arrangements. Todd and I had previously discussed that I would pull the “I like sleeping on the floor” card so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the drama of people calling us gay. But truly I could’ve cared less… and we both shouldn’t have worried because I’ve never seen so much homosexuality come out of supposedly straight men in my life… given that all of our roommates were on top of each other practically ALL the time.

That night I slept terribly. It would’ve been so much better being on the bed, but I wanted to respect what Todd wanted, and if that meant being miserable I was ok with that…
My timeline may be completely faulty, but the next event was SeaWorld. I think… well yes, I’m skipping the rather mediocre tour memories, and jumping to the important ones. The day in SeaWorld was brilliant we had a group of 7 people. This included myself, Shaunzi, Rachel, Kara, Amberly, Whitney, and Todd. We were perfect that day. Everything went sooo amazingly and we were all really happy. It was easy for us to decide what to do, and the pictures were incredible. I remember feeling so at ease with life that day. The whole group was accepting of one another and it was all going really well.

I do believe the conversation from hell happened that night. Mind you, I to this day don’t know why this bothered me so much, me being gay. But, driving back to the hotel, a conversation was started about marrying an RM (Returned Missionary)… I knew at that point in my life that I was questioning the mission. And Whether I was going to be able to come out before, and if not, if I would serve a good mission knowing I was gay. Kara, Amberly, Rachel, Shaunzi and plenty of other girls on the bus loved to pipe into the conversation… but the one that really pissed me off was Kara… because I had some dream of me and her getting married, stupid because of two reasons, 1 – I’m gay. 2 – I hate the idea of marriage. I can’t explain why it pissed me off, but it did. And only until recently have I had to deal with that conversation. Looking back I realize that a lot of the ideas that Kara was vocalizing were really coming from Amberly, who I’ve learned to healthily hate. (We’ve accepted we hate each other, and we are civil and treat one another with respect whilst still hating).

It’s looking like I’m going to split Choir tour into 3 parts. This will be the end of the first phase. I was on the fence about my friendship with Kara, and was secretly dreading the start of our days in Disneyland, seeing as I have a terrible history with the place.

.[quotes].of.daily.life.

To prove that I am just as weird as everything thinks; I’m going to post some of my favorite quotes. Most of these come from OTH, but no matter where I got them, they all some personal meaning to me.

“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically… to those who hardly think about us in return”

-TH White

“There seems to be a kind of order in the universe… in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth… and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance asserts his own rights and feelings… mistaking the motives of others and his own.”

-Katherine Anne Porter

“Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

“It’s the good girls who keep diaries. The bad girls never have any time.”

-Unknown

“No man, for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude… without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”

-Unknown

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alive.”

-Otavio Paz

“Your reason and your passion are the rudder, and sails of your seafaring soul. If either be broken, you can but toss and drift… or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas for reason, ruling alone, is a force, confining. And passion unattended… is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”

-Kahlil Gibran

“There will always be something to ruin our lives. It all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”

-Charles Bukowskil

“Who knows what true happiness is? Not the conventional word… but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory… or illusion.”

-Joseph Conrad

“Time takes it all. Whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it all away… and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness and sometimes we lose them there again.”

-Stephen King

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream. And he sometimes wondered whose it was… and whether they were enjoying it.”

-Douglas Adams

“Let us drop these breadcrumbs, so that together we find our way home… because losing your way would be the most cruel of things.”

-Hansel (to Gretel)

“We all live in a house of fire. No fire department to call, no way out. Just the upstairs window to look out of, while the fire burns the house down… with us trapped, locked in it.”

-Tennessee Williams

“You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures."

-Charles Noble

“Keep away from people who try to believe you ambition small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you can too become great.”

-Mark Twain

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest. The glory of god that is within us and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”

-Marianne Williamson (also used in “Akeelah and the Bee” and Nelson Mandela’s Inauguration Speech)

“Don’t let the fear of striking out, keep you from playing the game.”

-Leigh Dunlap

“I can’t sleep without knowing there’s hope. Half the night I waste in sighs, in a wakeful doze I sorrow. For the hand, the lips, the eyes. For the meeting of tomorrow.”

-Tennyson

“Some people see things as they are and ask why, others dream things that never were and ask why not?”

-George Bernard Shaw

“You save all your money in a piggy bank to buy a bike. But when you break open your bank you realize it wasn’t a bike yo4u were saving for, but a Harley”

-Lois Lane (Smallville)

“Don’t judge a man by his answers, but by his questions”

-Unknown

“Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.”

-Unknown

“Does this darkness have a name? This cruelty, this hatred, how did it find us? Did it steal into our lives or did we seek it out and embrace it? What happened to us, that we now send our children into the world like we send young men into war, hoping for their safe return, knowing that some will be lost along the way… When did we lose our way? Consumed by the shadows… swallowed whole by the darkness. Does this darkness have a name? Is it yours?”

-Lucas Scott (OTH – 3.16)

“You should be ashamed of yourself. There are kids inside our school [in our world] fearing for their lives right now! Terrified that someone is going to put a gun in their face and pull the trigger, and you want to know how I’m feeling? Our pain is not a commodity for you. It’s not a news bite to boost your ratings because tomorrow or the next day or the next week, when we go back to school [back into life] changed forever by a day that will never leave us, where are you going to be? At the next tragedy thrusting your microphone in the face of the next fractured person asking how THEY feel? That’s not journalism. You are not contributing anything to society. You are buzzards circling the carnage, but you prey on the living. That is how I’m feeling, but something tells me you’re not going to air that.”

-Brooke Davis (OTH – 3.16)

“The stages of our Grief; Anger, Fear, Guilt, Depression, Acceptance… and the first seeds of grief [DENIAL]”

-Lucas Scott (OTH – 3.17)

“6,470,818,671 People in the world. 6,471,818,671 Souls, and sometimes all you need is ONE.”

-Peyton Sawyer (OTH – 3.17)

“It’s funny how you think you really know yourself, like you would never lose yourself to someone else…”

-Katherine McPhee – Everywhere I go

.senior.year.biographies.[shaunzi].

Here it is. I decided today that I'm done being... whatever I was. I wasn't mad, I was simply frustrated. But, through it all, Shaunzi is among my best of friends. So here is the last of my biographies. To those of you who may be saying, "why didn't he write one for me?" I simply admit, I chose those of my friends that I felt made the biggest impact on my senior year alone. So all of my other friends that I have left out so to speak, are still important to me.

This is the final of my biographies. Shaunzi is last, but not because she is any more important to me than my other friends, but that she has helped me more than I will ever be able to explain. She was the first person I came out to, and has always been there for me.

Shaunzi, being the “boy-loving” girl she is, had a huge crush on me. When I was dating Sophie, she hated me and always said that Sophie was stupid for dating such a jerk. I was a jerk, and I deserved her judgment. The last time I broke it off with Sophie and truly decided it was over, and I was done pretending, Shaunzi had decided she still wanted to be friends with me, which sufficiently ended her relationship with Sophie, which was never really a healthy one (in my opinion). I am glad that this happened because if not, Shaunzi and I would not be half the friends we are today. Shaunzi being in love with me, and me clearly being gay… has and continues to present a big problem for our friendship. I had to figure out how to get her off of me, without coming out. So I basically decided to be a super douche and tell Shaunzi to back off or else. Haha :) She would probably say I yelled at her… which is pretty close to what happened… I think that telling her she needed to get over me really NEVER worked. I knew that she would always love me, but that, hopefully, the love would change into another kind of love… There has been a lot of trauma with this problem, and it has put a big fork in our friendship. In starting college Shaunzi moved to logan to attend Utah State. I stayed home. In growing apart, Shaunzi has realized what an integrated part of her life I have been. I know it’s not the same for a girl to get over a guy, especially when the guy is so freaking awesome (self-righteous?, No!!!) but I have had the hardest time understanding why it’s such a traumatic process. I simply have to realize that it's not the same for me as it is for her, and that we BOTH have things that need to be done to move past this little "problem" :)

As the year progressed we grew closer and closer. Near inseparable. It was very bittersweet because I wanted to tell her the truth about myself and not have to lie to her anymore. It sucked lying to her and lying to everyone around me…. But, Senior Year couldn’t have been better if I didn’t have her… she made everything so amazing… EVERYTHING I’m so glad we found one another and ended the year on a high note… I hope that our lives, just like high school, will end on high notes, and that we both find who/what makes us truly happy.

.timeline.[break].

I don’t need to be cured. Just like I don’t need to cut myself to feel, or think.

From now on, no one rewires my mind but me.

Back in Diego, the doctors said that I could learn to control my behavior, and I have. You all helped, in one way or another.

But you know what? It’s not my behavior I’m worried about anymore. It’s yours.

That’s why you won’t be seeing me for a while, maybe a long time. David and I are staying out here in the wild.

You all say you need us. Well, maybe you do, but not to help you. You have enough help, with the millions of bubbly new minds about to be unleashed, with all the cities coming awake at last. Together, you’re more than enough to change the world without us.

So from now on, David and I are here to stand in your way.

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things

You have your New Smokes, your new ideas, whole new cities and New Systems.

Well . . . we’re the new Special Circumstances.

Whenever you push too far into the wild, we’ll be here waiting, ready to push back.

Remember us every time you decide to dig a new foundation, dam a river, or cut down a tree. Worry about us. However hungry the human race becomes now that the pretties are waking up, the wild still has teeth. Special teeth, ugly teeth. Us.

We’ll be out here somewhere – watching. Ready to remind you of the price the Rusties paid for going to far.

I love you all. But it’s time to say good-bye, for now.

Be careful with the world, or the next time we meet, it might get ugly.

- Tally Youngblood

In a strange turn of events, I’m left with 2 biographies to post/write, and no motivation to do at least 1 of the 2. I have a core of what I want to say, but I’m lost as to where to start. Do I put ALL of the problems aside and treat everything like its… ok… when it’s not? I read nearly the entire book Specials by Scott Westerfeld (Book 3 of the Uglies series) after remember how vivid it left me. I love when you read something, and the meaning the author (or the character written by the author) is trying to portray comes across so bluntly into your life. As a reader THAT is what I look for. Something that can intrigue me and make me contemplate what I’M doing with my life. What I can do to make the world a better place. Who I need to be to make people around me happy, and more importantly make ME happy.

So should I write post when I’m not motivated. No. Should I do or say something that isn’t 100% what I need. No.

I apologize to you as a reader, if I’ve left you hanging. Left you wanting more… But as of now. It seems I’m going to have to skip at least 1 post. Matter of fact, here’s the biography I feel I can post right now.

.senior.year.biographies.[sophie].

This encompasses so much more than just senior year. I would say since the last major “break-up” Both Sophie and I have grown exponentially. I find myself almost missing the immaturity. I see my friends struggling through high school, and honestly feel a longing to be back there. With college I can choose not to be friends with people that don’t like me, and rarely ever see them. In high school, you’re crammed into a building full of hormonal pissy teenagers. And guess what? You see everyone. Even the people you don’t like. No matter how much you try, you’re bound to see someone you don’t like, or doesn’t like you, at least once a day. So why do I miss that? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because It’s consistent. I’ve learned in the last week or two, that I hate inconsistencies. I don’t like when people act or appear one way and then completely change overnight. I don’t like when I’m not in control of whats going on around me. I don’t like when I say something I shouldn’t and have to go to a class everyday and regret what I did. Regret how stupid and desperate I made myself seem. Sorry to rant. But, college is stressful. It’s completely inconsistent and puts a wrench in my OCD blender, crashing the tiny metal blades into the chunk of mass-produced hardware. All of this just so happens to fall under Sophie, because through all of my relationship with Sophie I have been able to rely on it being consistently… … broken. We’re both so messed up, yet so put together. I think Sophie would agree with me that no matter how much the world throws at us, no matter how much either of our families can make us crazy, it doesn’t matter. We are strong people, and we can stand up for ourselves in any kind of weather.

Sophie will always be listed among my BEST friends. I have always said, it’s hard to pick ONE best friend, but that I have many. And Sophie definitely fits in that category. She is important to me, even if I don’t make that very clear. Through everything with her, I always hoped it would end like it has. With a “happily ever after” even though it may not be the conventional HEA, it’s more than good enough for Walter. For Walter’s OCD consistency loving brain.