-NALEN+

When age and forgetfulness sweeten memory

This ad last year:



The ad this year:




I'm not really sure what incited this change. I thought it used to be pretty funny; it was one of the city's defining ads, both tongue-in-cheek yet sadly appropriate. But what is the Mona Lisa supposed to imply? Whether or not I'm the father is wonderfully and titillatingly ambiguous?

For some reason a lot of my favorite ads have been replaced this year, ineffective clichés like "Marriage works" or the bewildering "I'm not giving it up and I'm not giving in" with a hideous girl plastered on the image. A nearby church used to have an announcement board saying "Thou shalt not kill" but, sadly, they've changed it now to something less simultaneously provoking yet applicable.

Knowing that this is the last year, the last time for everything, lends everything overtones of cloying sweetness. This is the last fall, the last September, the last Monday, September 22 that I will ever experience in this place. And through this feeling I have become a little more in love with my school, more able to see the good as the bad takes a bad seat. This place has been good to me and has given me what I needed and for that I am endlessly grateful.

Lately I have been developing a sense of self-preservation. Whenever I am confronted by shadows of the past, past mistakes that hinder my present, the realization that everything I do and everything I have done have an irrevocable hold on my future makes me stop and think a little whenever I take action now. Why be good? Why try?

Because you will always have yourself, whether you like it not. You can't mistreat it and then avoid it, trying not to see the mess you made, because that mess is you.

The other day I was at a café (adorable place near campus, with gourmet chocolate truffles and Asian fusion cuisine and the most delicious tuna tartar) with a friend whose opinion I have the utmost respect for. We were discussing a passage from a book she's been reading from her politics of good and evil class. There will always be people that make you feel appreciative of the opportunities you've had, and people who have immeasurably more than you do. Yet it's not about what life gives us, which we cannot control, but what we do with it. Life is short and you never know what will happen, so all you can do is strive for the best and try to be the best person you can be, every day. And in this way we have no regrets, we find happiness.

The sky was beautiful the other day:



If you have ever really talked to me then you have probably been subjected to one of my obsessive discussions of what is the best for me and my future. Sometimes it makes me unhappy, everything I have done wrong, and what I may potentially do wrong，but I have never wished I tried less. Recently I've been under a lot of stress because of some significant decisions I've had to make, issues about my future that I needed to confront. But I've come to a conclusion and taken a breath, and looking at it all, I'm pretty happy. My life is kind of really sweet. I'm in a good place, and the fact that I worked for all of it makes it that much sweeter. It's mine, and because of everything that I have done- the world is pretty much my oyster.

Labels: ♡L, dreams, East Coast, life, pictures, reality, school

posted by ♡ @ 11:08 AM