my friend, it is all about the word play.

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
- Tom Stoppard

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."
- Sir Winston Churchhill

"Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything."
- Floyd Dell
(I like this one b/c I'm realizing that it's really true.)

"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest."
- Hermann Hesse

"Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content."
- Louis L'Amour

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
- Galileo Galilei

"I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later."
- Mitch Hedberg
(I don't really feel this way, it just made me laugh!)

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
- Voltaire

"It's never just a game when you're winning."
- George Carlin

"When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong--or absolutely right."
- Albert Guinon

"Astonomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things."....like my car keys.
- Unknown

"Reget for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
- Sidney J. Harris

"The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion."
- G.K. Chesterton

"At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies."
- P.G. Wodehouse

"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
- Iris Murdoch

"I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on."
- Beryl Pfizer

"My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
- Oscar Wilde

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-Winston Churchill

"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight."
-Phyllis Diller

"She was a woman who, in between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table."
-Henry James

"Laziness is nothing more then resting before you get tired."
-Jules Renard

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I thing I ended up where I needed to be."
-Douglas Adams

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt."
-Abraham Lincoln

"I will prepare and some day my chance will come"
-Abraham Lincoln

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A friend is one before whom I may think aloud."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I walk the line."
-Johnny Cash

so, i'm slightly in love with quotes.

Reminiscent of "those" days.

It's really amazing how far I've come the last few years. I was flipping through my notebooks from a couple of semesters ago and it reminded me of how great God is. I fought depression for about 3 years solid, and I found somethings I wrote in those notebooks that just magnifies where I was in those moments. It's scary, but at the same time relieving knowing I'm as far from that now as I can hope to be. Sure, I have my bad days...but who doesn't? These few excerpts are just a part of a long journey. Every day I look in the mirror and thank God for me still being here. Here's for some interesting reading:

"I am no one special, everything about me you can relate to someone else. I am viewed as a mess, unorganized, and everywhere. I am only me, that's all I seem to be proud of. Nothing I've written, drawn, or painted is waved about for people to see. I want to exist in what people expect, nothing more and nothing less. If I set myself up too high, I will always feel I have failed. I'm content being a mess, it's the only thing I can claim."

"Loneliness destroys the soul, it pushes it to it's limits. The feeling of longing is the break down. Sometimes the long becomes so powerful it dies."

"The soul is empty and completely dry. The abyss inside my being. My hallow existence seems so light, but heavy is all my heart has ever known."

This one I wrote after studying Sylvia Plath. I wrote this as if her point of view when she commited suicide. See, depression + suicide....God is great.

I'm caged inside my own skin
Pushing and punching to be released
I see this figure in the mirror
Lost and bewilderment screams in my eyes
When will I be set free?
Your chains and bounds tie me to this hell
They laugh at me when I struggle
My prison beneath my clothes
The fair walls are a lie
I pray for my freedom to come
My body has become a machine
Producing ACTS 1 to 5 that they long to see
Pearly whites shining in the flames
The applause echoes through the cells
I can feel the freedom coming
Alone I sit in the chill
A sweet fragrance floats through the gate
I'm warm for a moment
My head is becoming heavy
Today is my liberation
My body becomes as stone
But my heart as a feather
Breathing in the sweetness of freedom
I tease and play with her until finally
I am free.

Yeah. God is amazing.

a day of remembrance and outrage.

today is a day i think every american has cemented in their heads. we can probably all remember where we were, what we did, and how we felt when it happened. i, personally, was in my room getting dressed for school when my dad knocked on my door and called me to come into the living room to tell me i'm witnessing history. as we were watching the second tower was hit. i don't think i will ever forget how my mind felt like it turned off. staring at an event that i could not even fathom. sure, we've all heard the stories of pearl harbor (which was made into a horrible film. josh hartnett and ben affleck do not equal a great cinema experience no matter what people say) and all the war stories. but, this was different. this was my generation being viciously attacked on home soil. i remember the rest of the day was spent gathered around either a television or a radio. teachers had to sneak in radios into classrooms because our school system wanted "everything to go on as normal". normal? what's normal about thousands of civilians dying on a tuesday morning? what's normal about the president of the united states flying to the air force base 10 minutes from my school because of this event? this to you, school board associates, is normal? that being said...

every year on september 11th i google images of the event. i feel i need to remind myself of how vulnerable we felt, but also, how it seemed to drop barriers between us. it gave me a new outlook on the human race. or, it did until i found the picture imbedded in this post. i couldn't believe it. i don't think i've been so enraged over a picture. it was published by some british company as propaganda against tony blair. and, i understand, it's propaganda. activists will say anything to swing a vote. sometimes, there's a line you do not cross. and that's a large blinking one. maybe i'm overly sensitive, emotional, or (as my father calls it) just trying to pick a fight...but i just don't understand it. compassion has been compromised for politics. again.