In this peice you will find:
- your wildest dreams (pssssssshhhhhhh)
- Abstract and concrete stories about a few different people, things places that somtimes stray off topic but are still good anyways
- A form of an apology (rarities)
- Things that are just specific enough for certain people to know who they're for but just vague enough for others to maybe relate, anyway
- A story about my dad
Why I wrote this:
- The first step to getting what you want is identifying it ... right?
- Every day I outright ask other people to publically share their utmost personal stories. It is my belief that sharing helps humans connect to one another ultimately creating more empathy. Time for a taste of my own medicine.
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| 4 years later she figured out how to use her macbook, eh? |
1. My own apartment.
The magic of my own weird aloneness is too awesome not to. Plus I need to be able to listen to music super loud at any point in time, not just in my carrrrr. (Even though my current roommates are awesome.)
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| I'll be doing activities like this, obviously. |
2. Make art.
An argument to which a conclusion was never an option. Just keep it flowin.
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| "Christ you know it aint easy" is my favorite work of art, and yes, that is jesus on the cross made completely out of cigarettes. |
3. Not format the future based on the past.
To navigate the now based on the purity of my own being.
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| How many things can you definitively say changed your life? I can say this book did. |
4. To almost always give someone the benefit of the doubt.
I don't care if I know you or if I don't know you or if you're the biggest dick on earth. If you want to see the good in someone, you will. If you want to perceive the evil, well, that's on you.
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| Originally saw this posted by Jade :) |
5. Stop accumulating so much SHIT, and donate a lot of it.
By shit I mean material items. I have a friend who I am lucky enough to call a friend... by the name of Matt C. (We'll leave it at that just in case he doesn't want the attention, which I'm sure he doesn't, haha, most good people don't. And I say good not in the idea that some people are bad and some are good but just in the way that, if you met him, you'd be like, "What a good guy."
Dude has what I assume to be a well-enough paying job, and yet, downsized his whole element of life to live out of a converstion van that housed a bed, some sort of heat element because, yes, he did this during the WISCONSIN winter, and a couple other material items.
Why did he do it? I can only assume to get rid of the distractions that are material items, though I am not completely sure.
A big question people had was how do you meet girls?
Well, I'm not exactly sure, but maybe getting rid of those distractions truly worked, or maybe it had nothing to do with it at all, but I was lucky enough to get a wedding invite from Matt and his finance, so I am assuming he did OK :)
6. Work in a career I truly care about and that the people around me care about.
I am truly lucky enough to work with people who give a shit about their job. Feeling passionate enough about something to actually give a shit and not simply just do what's asked of you, but to care about what you're doing beyond what your obligated to care about, is a beautiful thing.
I don't know if I'll be in journalism forever, but I always want to be in a career that I not only care about, but that the people around me do. Having talent in your career choice is an obvious want, but to be around people you can flow with, collaborate with, and ultimately not hate.... that's becoming a luxury, when it doesn't have to be.
7. To be the person someone meets and it makes them feels better about life, and maybe, even about themselves.
There are too many people who don't care about others because they feel no one cares about them. I want to affect that person to let them know someone does care, even in the smallest instance.
Why? We all have a much larger effect on each other than we could possibly know; it's time to be brave enough to recognize it.
Another reason for this is I had an immensely large role model in this realm: My father. And I see myself becoming more and more like him everyday. In all his oddities and quirks was a man who took a genuine interest in every person he met, whether they were one of my 16-year-old friends, one of his students, a random person he met on the street, or a convict who literally stole my family's car. (He then bailed him out of jail... hahaha. Oh... I laugh as I type this because c'mon dad... my mom was SO pissed. It's a story she still tells today.)
When Michael got out of jail (not for car stealing but for other things) more than 10 years later, my dad hired him becase no one else would. Hired is a humourously loose term.
He did yard work and odds and ends for my dad who was retired and at home. Living at home at the time, and being a journalist with atypical work hours, I'd watch as my dad treated Michael not as some charity case, but as an equal.
Each afternoon, they'd have conversation over turkey sandwichs and potatoe chips on our picnic table in the front yard of our little suburban paradise, unbenounced to my mother, who probably would have had a shit fit had she known my dad gave this man yet another chance. (She was probably justified in this line of thinking.)
Michael would pull me aside sometimes and tell me how he wanted me to write his memoirs and carry on about stories from his past as he raked leaves, clean out gutters and pull weeds.
My dad even helped him type of a new resume, of course, having me type it. He even offered to pay me to type up the resume. Dad, really? It took me like 7 minutes to do it, don't pay me, haha. I noticed on the resume that Michael was working for my dad during the time he was in jail... a little white lie perhaps?
But my dad gave everyone the benefit of the doubt, always. It didn't always work out for him. It wasn't always fruitful, but I am venturing to guess that it was pretty fucking powerful to a lot of people in a lot more ways than not.
That was confirmed to me in too many ways to retell, but in one specific instance that was ironic and will stick with me forever. I played on an ultimate frisbee team with someone I didn't before the team started. But by the end of the season, she finally realized that Vlisides is that unique of a name and that I was Peter's daughter.
We shared a hug, and I cried a little. She had been at his funeral, or at least at the wake, and she had taken his class. She basically relayed to me that he was the reason she is where she is today -- (a pretty amazing person, but besides that) an awesome athletic trainer. She said my dad helping her get an internship and working through the class made her believe she could do it. He had changed her life. I paraphrase, so forgive me, but it's been a year or two.
It's powerful, you know?
And it's the type of power that money can only come so close to, and my dad, always knew that, but what's more, he believed that wealth wasn't something you accumulate, but something you share with other people: your family, your friends, your neighbors, and yes, even with people who you aren't quite sure about.
And you do it not because it'll benefit you -- even though it will. You do it because that phrase "be the change you want to see" couldn't be more cliche but more true.
I am sick of bitching about other people changing their actions when I have all the power in the world to change mine and exemplify this behavior to others -- if they so choose to take notice. Because I think inspiration is illustrating to someone that something can be done, so they feel like they have a chance to not repeat it exactly, but to at least try it.
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| Such a bad picture of me but..... ya know. (Note: Alex, you're still not forgiven for getting too drunk to come to my college gradutation ... Especially when I sat through the 50-mile long circle jerk that is UW-Madison grad ceremony.) |
8. Not think of my mind as a separate entity than me.
This type of thing slowly degraded everything i wanted and looked at as mine for about the 3 past years. I wish I could apologize to those I hurt because of it. Because I had no true grasp on the degrees of my actions or who I was throwing away.
Even though this sounds like an excuse, but i cannot excuse myself.
I say no true grasp. I cannot say I didn't have some sort of grasp on it, after all, I wasn't totally mad and I wasn't addicted to drugs or something as dramatic as that. But to say my life was devoid of tragic would be a gross understatement.
I did have some life changing events piled on top of previous unattended to mental shit that added to the lost cause that was my headspace. It felt as though no matter what I did, I ultimately, didn't have control of how (most) shit went down. That my actions were as separate to me as the actions of an actor in a made-for-TV drama.
(I say that instead of a film, because seriously, who am I to claim that my life is as fabulous as some Spike Jones flick, but still, it's... something, alright.)
And, maybe, there is a term for this.. because I began to see myself, instead of be myself. And it was goddamn miserable. I would do something or say something and it was like dropping a penny into a fountain laced with other decaying little pennies. And all the little pennies in my mind would gradually oxidize together until I was thinking, rethinking, dethinking and unthinking almost everything I did or felt. To just feel something became too easy somehow...
It became passe.
I needed to feel something, then stop myself. Figure out why I felt it, and if I was actually feeling it or tricking myself into doing so. I was on this quest to know exactly how and why and what brought me to this feeling and was it because i wanted it or was it cuz i was just convincing myself i wanted it or was it just .... You get the point. Exhausting.
As if each feeling or sense was so complex that getting to the root of it was like attempting to open 100 of those Russian dolls where there's a smaller one inside the other and so on.
It wasn't fun for me, and it was a literal nightmare for the people who tried to love me.
For that, I apologize. But, I cannot apologize for it all, because all I can do is keep learning. And that's what I hope I've done to bring me to the very second I am at right now, 5:51 a.m. on a Sunday, the scent of bonfire still slipping away from my dark maine that surrounds my head on the pillow as I type from my bed.
9. To explore as much as possible before I die.
10. And, of course, you.
