The craziest part about feeling like something out of your control and shitty just happened to you or someone you care about, is that sometimes it can put you into this really clear headed state of mind afterwards. My friend got basically persuaded into signing a waiver, stating that she agreed to give up her free will, and let herself be locked up at Belleview Hospital for 72 hours. The story of how this happened is a huge complex web of factors that I won’t explain, but it all sucks and the person needing help is feeling like shit. Now I’m sitting in my room, with a lot of homework to be done, and a lot of other obligations hanging over my head, and all I can think to do is sit down, smoke some weed(part my NYC anti-stress toolkit) and write my thoughts while I’m this mode. I’m in a headspace where things aren’t taken for granted as much. Living the student life, in a city with a ridiculous amount of stimulation, from beautiful colorful graffiti covering an entire building, to a street covered in adds and lights and cars and bikers and skateboarders zipping along at crazy speeds…you get desensitized to so much. I see adds everyday that would make me angry if it was the first time I saw it, but I’ve seen them so many times now that it’s not a big deal anymore. If it were I’d be unable to function. Desensitization is an adaptation to the environment. The same goes for lights, and noise. So much florescent light in my life. So much sitting in horrible chairs that aren’t meant for my body, making my posture progressively worse all the time. So much hunched over reading, writing, typing, drawing, doing dishes, throwing off my back. So much staring at screens, checking email. So much breathing indoor air with all kinds of nasty shit in the air. So much smelling fried chicken and pizza and exhaust when I go outside. So much of every possible bad thing about living in the city that is just the reality of living in the city. In New York City everything is blown out of the proportion. The good parts are awesome and the bad parts are so present. So much amazing culture and art and activism, and so much capitalist, materialist, transactional thinking running through everything. But when I found out about some awful shit that my close friend went through, I remember all the things I slowly start to take for granted, and it’s just a total reality check. I’m listening to Godspeed you black emperor! right now, and its really dismal, but it seems to make more sense, it’s more real in a way than a lot of the happier music I could listen to. It feels more connected to what is really happening in the world… Luckily I’ll be able to go back to doing what I have to relatively easily, since the art of self restraint was taught to me from a young age, and I’m still realizing and trying to free up the habitual patterns of restraint and tension. I guess lots of things can be cyclical. Feeling like I’m getting somewhere with my thoughts, and feeling like I’m lost as ever. Feeling like I’ve got it with meeting new people, and feeling like I’m no more socially adept than when I was in high school. Landing every kick flip like I’ve been doing it for years, since I have, and feeling like I’ve completely forgotten it, or my legs are just not working right. The biggest one is that sometimes there’s meaning everywhere and sometimes I can’t find meaning anywhere. Sometimes my life is an amazing journey that I’m flying through like a colorful psychedelic time warp tunnel of transformation and expansion and sometimes it doesn’t make sense and I seem to have lost my flow, or my direction, completely. I guess the wisdom I try to take away from it is to actively let the cycles happen, to not hinder them too much, and new things will come, new meaning will crystallize. It kind of takes some kind of faith; faith in letting your self(your inevitably skewed and partial interpretation of who you are) become something new, and accepting the fact that a new self is always going to have a positive and negative side. I don’t see how it couldn’t: everything else that I encounter seems to have a positive and negative side to it. I think the psychological concept of unconditional positive regard, which most people refer would just call love in the broader sense, has to be turned inward and outward. I think that if I accept who I am, and see that it is always changing, my muscles will relax, my mind will relax, and movement will happen, leading to new senses of self, new perspectives on the world, and an expanded consciousness of how my mind and body work. … 80 pages of reading awaits me -mike