School Impacting My Actual Life for the First Time in Years

I'm doing a photo-essay in school, and it's forcing me to reflect on the things I truly value in life. School, causing me to think-that's a first. Still, I'm not sure it's what I truly value. Maybe it's a sequel to my favorite things. Not much of it matters to anyone else. It matters to me. And the more I think about it, the less it makes sense. I'm focusing on what makes me content, even happy. Moments in time are never repeated; and I think that living, not repeating, is what should make sense. When so many things in life are repetitive; so slightly varied that you can barely tell one day from the next, one moment from the other; maybe moments should be taken more seriously.

Everything about those moments: the sounds, the emotions, the mood, the smells, the energy; the physical and the mental should be recognized, appreciated, and absorbed. If no two moments are the same, then each one should be celebrated. Don't get me wrong, familiarity isn't a bad thing. Familiarity is part of a moment though. It's part of what I wouldn't mind taking with me. And let's be realistic: not all moments are good. Some of them should be shut up in boxes, shipped to France and dumped in the sewers of Paris, for all I care. It would be better that way. But you can't send a moment to some disgusting city and hope it will disappear; moments have their ways of sticking to your mind. But at least you know that a moment like that will never be experienced again.

That's Depressing. But not really.

I was reading through Elizabethan World-Primary Sources for an English project, and I stumbled across a description of romance that I couldn't help but laugh at:

"romance: A literary work about improbable events involving characters that are quite different from ordinary people." (Shostak, xxii)

My reaction was, "Is she serious?", and I believe that she (Elizabeth Shostak) did in fact mean precisely what she wrote. Upon concluding this, I laughed. A lot. But it really is sad, isn't it, because a large part of it is true. If anyone could experience life the way it's experienced in books, biographies would become best-sellers. Or, perhaps no one would bother reading anything at all, seeing as they would already be living their wonderful romance.

There is no real purpose to me writing this, but there's never been solid purpose in the first place, and I thought it might be funny for someone to "stumble" over. It makes me smile.

Beauty's Rose (Shakespeare's pretty cool, I'll admit)

From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beauty's rose might never die.
-William Shakespeare

I have a question: What about all of the other creatures out there? They don't call you the fairest for nothing. So what about the rest, those who watch said rose wilt away into nothing, with no one to watch or care? Is there nothing that can be done about it? I don't like it and it's not fair.

On the other hand, this is a beautiful and perfectly human way of thinking. An immortal beauty and wonder is always appreciated, if not strived for. And maybe it's just the thought of love itself that makes the writer feel so passionately. Maybe it's that he sees her as the most lovely creature ever to set eyes upon, and this is all his personal opinion of her splendor. If that's the case, I like it much more.

Turning to Roald Dahl to Make Me Feel Better

I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so I'm looking up quotes that talk about nervous breakdowns, and Dahl was the first one I found. Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset. -Roald Dahl One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is tha belief that one's work is terribly important. -Bertrand Russell A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it. -Art Buchwald

• I have been to hell and back. I had a very, very bad nervous breakdown.

-Andy Gibb

• Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

-R.D. Laing

• I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn't much of a stretch.

-Emma Thompson

It's sad that I can't find anymore. Sort of a let down on today's society, what with it's stress-propelled lifestyle. Ah well. On with a life I live my way; umph.

Life sucks. Shoot me in the foot.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. -Shakespeare Um...yeah.