How can you sleep? Kiss your feet Things I like in life right now:

~The family and friends that dwell in my heart but live far away
~Thinking until my brain starts to sleep and then my body follows
~ The concepts of war and peace and how I can't figure them out
~ Eating ice cream with sprinkles in it and feeling no shame in that
~ Having a sore throat that sounds like either a man or phone sex operator
~ The music on my computer which sounds like goodness personified
~ The lack of perfection and presence thereof in my life
~ Closing my eyes while walking in the rain
~Getting wet on purpose, especially soaking my mocosins and then laughing alone at their sogy skins
~ Recieving phone calls from my dad where he lets me know that he is a person too
~ Thinking about colors
~ playing on abandoned pianos until someone sees me and then acting like the piano was playing itself and then proceed to slowly walk away
~ Writting because I can't do anything else until I do
~ Turning off my phone when I know a call is coming just so that I can hear the noise it makes when I get a message
~ Simple physical contact with another breathing being
~ Holding hands with children
~ Comforting a scared bunny in my arms until it closes its big blue eyes
~ Looking at art and then thinking some more


Things I don't like in life right now:
~The family and friends that dwell in my heart but live far away
~The idea of the future not being in my hands
~ The concepts of war and peace and how I can't figure them out
~ the inescapable quality of living in a city which relies on cars but not owning one myself
~ Sudan, Rowanda, Louisianna, Burbank, South Africa, Cambodia, and their politics
~ politics
~ Not having someone here to cuddle with
~ the recent disappearance of fresh tofu in the Lair salad bar
~ the cracks in my feet from walking barefoot around campus
~ bills and money
~ dead end trains-of-thought
~ disorders

Life is good...yea...it is.  ¶ 10:09 PM 3 Comments

  Cereal Bars and Cars And yes ladies and gentlemen we've hit a moment in time where KAra's brain is about to once again explode from the impending doom of THINKING TOO MUCH....Thats right, she's done it again; temporarily lost sight of the world in order to ponder philosophical thoughts and brought herself into downright confusion and depression only to fall asleep disturbed and wake up realizing nothing has changed in life. What an odd specimen we have here ...

The only link back to reality for me is walking. I walk and I think because then everything that is so evident in the world that i apparently miss when I get into my think-train passes befor all of my complex sensory organs and slaps into my brain. I can't wonder as much and i focus much better. So after nearly an hour of tracing a mind-web that reached all the way from "im bored" to "the world is useless", I found my fatal flaw: I don't know what I think a human is.

The ramification of a human being 100% mammilian, 0% divine, wholy particle and anti-spiritual leaves me thinking that nothing in this world is wrong and that society has made up a whole intricate code of laws and outlines for being civilized and figured out a way to call the right emotional response from us if they are violated. I could kill, poop in public, have sex with hundreds of people, shout slanderous claims, and carry a rifle with me to the marketplace and feel absolutely fine if society wasn't in place. However, I have a hard time fathoming that everything I feel is a construct. I like to take some ownership and pride in my convictions of beneficial and harmful behavior.

I know I am not 100% divine, therefore I can't even begin that thought.

SO I am somewhere in between like the rest of the human race yet I struggle with the ratio. Why is that important? Isn't this just more of that thinking that puts me into the freak-show classification in the first place? No. It is not. How guided and by whom my principles are guided by makes the difference between how I feel right an wrong, how i live through a day, how i love those things or people i encounter and what value I can give myself. Guilt-one emotion that makes me classify myself part divine. Most other feelings I can abstractly trace back to an instinct to survive (which ryan has proved can also be put into question) how ever guilt provides a complication. To feel guilty about an act, one must consider the other party involved, and the consequence of the action. Do animals calculate such things? Do they cower after they poop on the carpet out of guilt or because they have learned that behavior warrants punishment and any such a thing is closer to death than life? If that be the case, than are we just evaiding punishment? is religion and faith our own way of encompassing punishment upon ourselves so that guilt may be felt after certain actions?

What species would ever knowingly entrap themselves in such a way?

As you can see, this is quiet a mess and I will continue to boggle my mind and walk through campus until something is reached; hopefully not a conclusion, but at least a temporary resolution of thought.  ¶ 4:54 PM 2 Comments

  Ride a Tear Through this world Strong and beautiful. I have yet to experience a more poetic and moving combination of traits than those. In between Poetry lounges, speakers forums, plane rides, and long walks, I've found that beauty and strength come in abundance and are to be treasured like jewels fresh from their cave.

I sat in the back row. I forgot my contacts so I couldn't see the speaker; I felt her. I felt her soft voice, her dark skin, her rich spirit, her strength. She mummeled words that scorched my soul, burning holes into my comfort and placing burdens on my heart. She spoke of genocide, a machine fashioned only to kill without hesitation, attempting to mask and drown the very soul that makes us all human. Her country, Rowanda, has changed since 1994. People are still dying from the genocide, women who were raped as a war tactic and are now slowly disinigrating into death with HIV AIDS. Since the tolls took the men, the countries demograpohics reflect taht of the average American college; 65% females, 35% males. A place that previous to the destruction only let their women clean dishes and birth babies is now being run by females. One of the most progressive countries in the last 10 years in terms of womens rights, Rowanda stands underdeveloped and under pressure to make something out of their desperate situation. Norah, the woman up front, spoke with tears in here eyes as she told me a lesson I am mulling over in my head like lyrics that won't leave.

Her country was abandoned my the world; no one interviened. The movement of any one country in Africa would have been powerful enough to not only stop the genocide but harness the rebels. One could only imagine what would have occured with US involvement. The war was political, not for the people. In fact the country had been living in peace for the past 400 years. SO how does she live everyday, seeing the very faces of her people's killers, and not be bitter? How can she come to America and speak when we are her foresakers? How can she love anyone when no one showed her love? How can I look at the world with open, lit up eyes and feel good about tomorrow when the blood stains of Rowanda and Sudan and who knows where else block the sun?

Forgiveness and love. Forgiveness....and love. If those two traits aren't beauty and strength personified i dont know what is. Norah told how today, two of her 3 neighbors are hutu's whose husbands were involved in the massacre. Norah's whole family died in the genocide, and probably at the hands of those men. Yet she knows that retaliation, killing the killers, hating the people would only create further hurt, further bitterness in her nation. So she has to go to work everyday and leave her 3 year old daughter with her neighbors, the hutu themselves, and be at peace knowing that she has forgiven and must continue to fight with love. What power.

It makes me feel so little for finding it hard to forgive a friend who tells a lie or a teacher who grades me poorly. I must learn to develope my heart so that the world begins to look more like a wound to heal than a battle field which I must choose a side. I will choose, I choose life. Affirm life in the words or Suheir Amad, I am looking for peace.  ¶ 4:34 PM 3 Comments

  Stay Inside the Lines Im living on the upside, needing nothing but more time to continue to do nothing and I am loving it. My days are made up of lovely things, like playing through an entire book of classical piano music, half just to prove to myself that I still can play and the other half because music is soothing to my soul. I wake up early and watch the Oregon sun creap up through the cloudy sky until it pushes through a crack in the fog and reflects off the red walls of my room I've missed so much. I enjoy a large breakfast, home cooked with fresh vegetables made just for me by the boy whom my love belongs to, followed by an afternoon nap atop his warm chest under an open window. I drink my long missed iced drinks and drive in solitude to the soul-pouncing beat of Marley reggae, thinking about nothing more complex than how to describe the content I feel in just existing. Play the few notes I know on the guitar, sing words of nonsense, make a smoothie out of peaches I found, and type it all out. I kid myself into thinking that I would ever need intoxicants when I have this simple life, always waiting for me and loving me with all the right moves. God bless  ¶ 5:22 PM 2 Comments