There are times when you watch something, hear something, read something, and it immediately takes precedent and opens your eyes like they have never been open before. You immediately stop whatever you are doing and start taking action. You realize that not only the future but the present is on the line.
When you hear about the hell that Joseph Kony is spreading on this earth, you immediately realize your problems are of really no importance in comparison to what is going on. I had always heard of Invisible Children in high school and had heard a little of what was going on in Africa will child soldiers. I wish I would have really payed attention. I know I could only do so much but at least I could have done something. However, this time I am not just going to listen and give my sympathies. I will be damned if this man roams free, abducting young children and forcing them into the hells of prostitution and war. THIS NEEDS TO END NOW!!!
I don't know how we can go on saying we are trying to live good lives and be good people when we just sit idle while children are being killed and being forced to kill every day. We need to speak up and let congress know that we are not a people of just our own interest. If we take pride in proclaiming we are the greatest country in the world, why do we just sit and bicker over jobs and taxes while children, let me repeat, CHILDREN! are being victimized, kidnapped, raped, sold, forced to kill, and killed every single day. It our duty to make sure every child is cared for and protected.
I may just sit with my thoughts on many of the trivial things my privileged life has to offer.
I WILL NOT JUST GIVE MY IDEA ABOUT THIS!
THIS IDEA HAS BEEN AN IDEA FOR TOO LONG!
THIS IDEA NEEDS TO BECOME REALITY!
My voice will not know rest until Joseph Kony is the most famous person in the world, sitting in a prison cell and there are no invisible children.
Save the Invisible, Save the World
Aaron
Please click on these links to find out how to get involved:
So here I am. I promise more writings, more thoughts. They are just scattered in oblivions unknown to me. Sometimes I wish I could write about nothing of substance, but who am I to assume my writings mean anything to anyone else but myself. A bold assumption indeed. Keep to myself and I will be safe but I never got anywhere by playing it safe. Safety is my biggest vice it seems, or at least the desire for it.
Valentines Day is upon us once again. The one day to celebrate success to those received the prize promised and to remind everyone else of the constant failure love has to offer. We drug ourselves with all these love stories and we start thinking irrationally. As if one day could change it. One day to turn it all around and for everyone to realize they are in love. Irrational. Unacceptable. I just don't understand these things. Maybe they are not for me to understand. Someday? Sometimes I think never.
I hate to think such cynical thoughts. I feel like I am just turning into a bitter prick. 'Oh son, why are you so bitter? Life has been good to you, I'd hate for you to throw away all your hope away just because of the fickle things life has to offer, like love and romance.'
Life has been good to me. I see some people struggle so much more than me and yet are so content with what they have, with who they have. I feel guilty for my desires sometimes when I see everything that has unfolded in my favor. So why do I yearn for something that is completely out of my control? My greatest bet is my humanity. I am just a man, nothing incredible. I was born with inherant weakness and yearnings.
And then I realize the bigger scope. I come to discover my plans are just planned out mistakes. What am I ever to do? Someone restrain me from jumping into the future, for the future is the cliff which I must avoid at the moment.
"But then, my knees give under me. My head feels weak and suddenly it is clear to see it's not them but me, who has lost my self identity. As I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling my poetry, like art could save a wretch like me, with some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve" - Bright Eyes
And there are some things which I just don't understand at the moment, and all I can hope is that through success and failures it will all become clear. Yet, I use trite expressions to hide in the meantime, since I am so insecure about the answers I don't know. But then I realize something, 'I don't know' is perfectly acceptable answer sometimes. And so this time, all I have to say is 'I don't know'.
It happens again and again. I run mental sprints all day long, occupying my mind with thoughts that seem to make entrance too early. I start to worry yet again, oh that vice that I have. May it be damned with the rest of my sins. I start seeking reassurance and in the process spread the disruption of peace. I set off a chain reaction of thoughts that I never intended too. And even worse, it begins in minds other than my own. What can it all mean? Why do I waste energy on such non sense. Why do I bother trying to make non sense into normalcy? Then I remember the most valuable feedback I have ever received ' You talk too much '.
Then I walk into my apt and feel the weight of my thoughts on my chest. The sighs become more frequent and you wonder why you are thinking and worrying so much. Nothing is even necessarily wrong, but the thoughts keep running circles in your head and your convince yourself you are just jaded and hope may not apply to you in this situation, or any for that matter. Then you start kicking yourself for letting yourself get back to this frame of thought where you seem to ignore everything good that has ever happened to you and focus on only what if's and could-of-beens.
And then you see a friend, his look of distress ten times darker and discouraged. You immediately realize that your problem isn't even enough to be considered a problem. A concern, but not a problem. You ask if he wants to talk. He says he can't. Later on that night as we lay in our beds in that little room he opens up about the despair he is feeling. He asks why God doesn't care? Why this? Why him?
You just sit and you wonder how you can give him the answers he wants. You know that God is real and that whatever my friend is experiencing God is aware of. But I have been in the same spot, where no answer can satisfy. I was in the exact place he is just eight months earlier, where I was sure God had forgotten and didn't care about an insignificant sinner such as myself.
I made it through though. I worked and worked and pleaded and prayed. I know things get better. I have seen it through to the other side and know I will many times over. And then when you think back on this you realize that I have had just as many experiences that things work out to the experiences where things didn't turn out in good favor with my expectations. The choice is up to me? What am I to believe in? Hope or tragedy? It is entirely my choice, nothing about it is left up to chance. It all rests in me.
So you just have to turn to your friend and tell him 'Look, I can't tell why. All I know is things will get better. I know they do. I am living proof they do.'
And then I think of how I have let my foundation turn into sand. And I have been building a house on fickel ground which can only betray me in the end. Maybe I need to stop before I get so far ahead and think of where I really want to claim my spot of earth. My life depends on it.
And then I realize I need to understand that just as much as he does. So I just remind myself 'Aaron, you talk too much.'
I've been told I spend too much time trying to not act the part. I have been told I put more effort into making sure I am not a stereotype that I don't have enough left over to become someone. I make sense of it in hours and minutes. I make my odds with chance and fate. And people ask me how I have it so figured out. They can't see that I don't.
Some people get caught up in trying to fit in. I think I have gotten caught up in going against the grain, in securing the fact that I am not those people as so desire not to be. To be true to myself. But it's hard when you spend so much time focusing on what not to be that you forget to be yourself. Maybe the time might be better spent figuring out who I am instead of who I am not.
I often wonder what people's impressions of me are from across a room. I wonder if they mistake my shyness and timid glances for something else. Yes, it's true that I do not like parties filled with people I do not know from strangers. It doesn't mean that I am not open to conversation. I am just not much for small talk. I joke. I laugh, maybe too much and over things that people do not find funny. But I don't care for the fluff. I want to know you, not your technique.
Maybe there isn't any impressions. Maybe I just don't make impressions. I am just a glance over, overlooked and counted out. I deserve it though. I often I am labeling and judging inside my mind and bones. It's sad. It's not right. It's true. In ways, I am no better than the self righteous artist or the beautiful people. I go around judging to justify my own insecurities. It's pathetic. How much I limit my vision due to fear of myself and others. I am more blind than I like to admit or give credit for.
Yet, I still buy into it. I say I don't believe in it but I have bought into it. Apathy is the name of the game. I go around proclaiming the scam that it is and how I don't care for it. You would think if I didn't care I could just leave it alone. I just lie to save face. It really does bother me. I feel like I am being denied my fair chance to show who I really am. The whole system is working against me and limiting me and not letting me thrive. That all I have to offer is being written off as replaceable and mundane. I don't blame them for doing so, but it's all I really have to offer. Maybe I don't posses the intangibles, whatever they decide those are.
Yet, I still fake the apathy. I care though and the insecurities are there. Over the superficial things that we are told not to worry about. About if I wear the right clothes, if I am skinny or fit enough to be around certain types of people. If I am something they want. Yes, some things will always be there in the back of my mind, even if I tell you they are not. I just act like I don't care so I don't show my secrets on my face.
And maybe I will spend more time figuring out who I am rather than who I am not. And then I won't need any approval but my own.
You know, sometimes I get sick of everyone and mostly myself talking about love. Some days I want to say that love is all the matters, others I want to scream out it's all a lie and we should fend for ourselves. At times, I feel complete in my yearning for companionship, other times I feel weak for wanting something that seems to evade me with great tact. And at other times, I think I have just lost faith in it. The whole idea has become so foreign, so distant, like something long ago in the past that you once believed in but you grew out of it.
And so I think back to how much I used to want it, yearn for it, desire it. Maybe I still do but I just keep talking myself out of it or just distract myself with selfish interest. Either way, it is a dilemma. I want it but it seems to evade me and when it comes to me I run from it. What I want scares me the most. Maybe I am just too stubborn for wanting it my way. Maybe my way doesn't exist.
Other times I just can't figure or convince myself of the possibility. How do you connect with someone to that level. There are people who are constantly in relationships. I wonder how it is that they make that connection. I feel like I have made that deep and binding connection maybe once or twice, ever. And even then, the connection didn't last. So what am I to make of it? Who knows.
Maybe it is has just been so long since even the potential of this alleged connection has even arisen in my mind. It seems like too many winters have come and gone since the last time I even could put someone in that picture. I used to be so sure of it in my youth, and I spent desperate misguided hours trying to find it. Where did that longing go? Has it been destroyed by doubt? Has it been drowned out by modern thought?
"My memory no longer allows me the luxury of remembering such frivolous times" - Kristen Warwick
Some people tell me you just have to be this or that. They tell me what women really want and what will attract and sweep them off their feet. Yet sometimes I think we are all just animal instincts. It all comes down to some physical attraction. It's a sad fact of reality and looks matter more than we like to admit. Maybe it's a sign that I feel so totally uncomfortable around those crowds known as 'beautiful people'. Maybe it's just a crap shoot. You roll the dice and you just try your chances. Maybe love is just some trivial game of chance. And no one is ever the complete. There will always be someone who is more attractive, more successful, greater, taller, smarter.
But they tell you it will eventually work out, and you just put your faith in someone else's hope for yourself. They tell you to keep trying and just keep asking around. I see where they are coming from but I have to trivialize something so sacred as the idea of love and combine it with the law of average. But maybe that's what we will all end up in the end, average love. We are rarely get everything we want.
I don't mean to sound like a pessimist. I am really not trying to extinguish the flames some people have worked so hard to create. They have probably made sense of something that I still can not wrap my understanding around and make my own. Maybe that have suffered enough doubt to see through to the reward. Who knows. I am just trying to understand that's all. I am just asking questions. But they are questions to myself that I am trying my best to answer in my own time. Yet, I will keep asking friends who have seem to have found the needle in the haystack. They found someone that answered the question. I ask them how they knew it was that luminous intangible thing known as love. And they all say the something "I don't know, I just somehow knew". So I realize that no one can answer this question for me. So questions must suffice for now.
It still occupies my midnight thoughts and occasionally I trail off in thought from a lyric, story, or even a mere glimpse into my past when I was so sure of what was to come and more importantly who was to come.
Yet, just like my friend keen, I am completely infatuated with the idea. But that is all it is for now, an idea. Maybe one day, it will be more than just a midnight thought.
Another weekend, another party. I am growing really tired of this town, maybe it's the scene, maybe it's the people, maybe it's just me. I guess it just depends on who I feel like blaming and what my conscious will let me get away with.
I never want to complain. I don't think like writing just for criticism. Yet, we all complain. Some of it is never vocal, yet my complaints too often escape past my teeth by manipulating me into thinking I am just speaking my mind. I have a good life, I really do. I consider myself more than blessed to have the family and friends that I do have. But I have my pet peeves and I know the places where I feel in my element and the ones where I feel completely out of place.
I went to some dessert party. It was in south Provo in a really ritzy neighborhood full of Provo all-stars, summer sales MVPs, and future pinnacle wives. I felt uncomfortable just walking into the place. Anyone who was above 5% body fat was looked at suspiciously. Every girl looked the same, every guy looked the same. I should have known better walking in wearing a plaid shirt and my moccasins. The place was way too crowded and the perfume and cologne made me feel like I was in Macys. We stayed for five minutes and then left. My friend tried to talk to a girl, she just looked at him and then walked away. Apparently we didn't have the 'it' factor, whatever it is.
"All the hours that you've been sitting at your vanity. May they carry you far from your misery" - Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley River Band
Provo. I like to call it the Mormon L.A. sometimes. It's eating away at me. I feel out of place more often than not. It's not that I wish to be involved in whatever other people are doing. I just wish for real conversation and real people, which is becoming harder to come across with each passing weekend. Yet, I feel stuck. I am so far into school here and all my friends are here, but they are all moving on to greener pastures of life. So am I, but I want out of here.
You know, I am beginning to wonder if everything that has been a waste. Maybe the ideal and whatever is good is dying with my generation. It seems like we have been so caught up scenes and fads and trying to establish our collective identity that the philosophy of being an individual has died out. Maybe I am just looking in the wrong places or maybe the vanity seeks me out. I can't tell. But I do feel like so much is wasted on my generation. So much is pinned on the clothes, the make up. We have been taught form very young ages to walk around with a mask on. Our generation is the first generation where it is weird to strike up a conversation with someone. We have to be facebook friends first or there has to be selfish interest. Rarely is there conversation just for the sake of good conversation and getting to know someone. It's all become about intentions, which are often misread and are even more often selfish.
Everyone keeps telling me I need to put myself out there, I need to talk to more people, more specifically girls. Every long lost friend will inevitably ask me about my love life. I tell them I date here and there. I try to talk to a girl when I see an opportunity. Truth is, the older I get the harder it is to find the connection, the spark, the 'it' factor. I see some people who are in love or at least confess to be and I can't comprehend it. Of all the people in the world, of all the little quirks and your preferences, not to mention being comfortable enough to share yourself, how did you two make the connection? What made this one different? Sometimes I wonder if I am just lost on the whole thing, will my over analytical mind ever let things take its course. Time will tell I guess.
But I do know where it will not be found. It won't be found in a scene, in some fashion, in a trend, in the masses. It will be found in a individual, who knows who she is and doesn't make excuses for it. Who in genuinely concerned for others well being as well as her own. Who has her own view and knows what she wants and sticks to it. She is going to be an individual, a complete individual.
And I will continue to try and stay true to who I am. And not get caught up in the fads, the parties, the people, the noise of the world.
Spring semester starts on Monday. Back to the grind. I am taking math 1010 again (I know, pathetic but true). I was going through all my old word docs on my comp, trying to get rid of all the papers I hope to never see again. Yet I came upon my favorite paper I ever wrote. It wasn't for some English class, it wasn't profound. However, I enjoyed writing it. Auto-biography you might think? No, it was a paper as to why my math assignments were late. I thought I would share it, just because I feel like laughing. Here it is. *Disclaimer* I wrote this in the fall of 2010 which explains the outdated sports references.
My excuses for Not Turning in my Test Corrections
It has been a tough go this semester for me. As I write this paper I hope you will laugh and cry with me as I tell you of the last few weeks of my life, telling of all the triumphs, failures and frustrations along the way. After all is said and done I hope you will graciously accept my reason as to why my test corrections were late and give me the credit you feel I deserve.
First off, can we just touch on how bad BYU football is this year? I don’t know if you are a BYU fan but I have been a BYU fan since conception. And in all of my 23 years and 9 months (counting time spent in my mother’s womb) I have never seen a BYU team that sucks as bad as this one. Our receivers can’t even catch the most elementary of passes. It is the equivelant of having an engineer that doesn’t know his multiplication tables. It’s pathetic. I think I can come up for a mathematical formula for why BYU sucks. Crappy receivers is represented by x and Robert Anae is y, with Harvey Unga being represented by z. The equation goes something like this: (-4x^3)+y(-z^2)=BYU’s terrible offense this year.
Then there is the Minnesota Twins. The Twins are my baseball team for two reasons. One is that my mom grew up in Minneapolis and my whole family roots for the Twins. The other is that the twins won the World Series in 1987, which also happens to be the year I was born. I was born in August and the Twins won the World Series that fall. Now, I am not saying that they won that year because of my grand entrance into this world, but it could have been a factor. It is a very controversial theory that ranks up there along with the Makaveli theory that suggests deceased rapper 2pac is still alive.
Well the Twins did great this year, clinching their division and having home field advantage in the playoffs. But the Yankees came in and man handled them as they have done over the last seven years. It was a traumatic experience to say the least. I am currently seeing a therapist on campus to help relieve my post traumatic stress symptoms from that loss.
There is the Jazz though, they are my whole numbers in a world full of non-simplified fractions. They had an awesome pre season but looked really rusty in their first two regular season games but sure enough they came through on the road against Oklahoma City. They did to Oklahoma what I did to the mid-term, they freaking stomped all over OKC and dominated the whole game, kind of like how I was kicking a** and taking names when I took the mid-term. I dominated that test hands down, putting in a brilliant performance that would have made the weekly top ten of sports center if they counted test performance. What I did to that test is what Cliff Lee did against the Yankees in game 3 of the American League Championship series. Overall, you have to admit that my performance on that test was simply brilliant.
In all seriousness though I have been working insane hours and doing school full time as well. I worked 80 hours in nine days late last month. With that on top of school, it has been hard to get around to all of my assignments. I do however feel I have been doing great in this class. If I had to convert my performance in this class into a batting average, I’d say I’m batting at a solid .435 right now. I have done every test review, done every assignment on mymathlab, and scored no lower than an 82 on my tests. This is my breakout season in my math career, putting up numbers that would shock most of my past math teachers. If there is a most improved player award given in this class, I seriously see myself getting the most first place votes. But I’m not in it for the attention or the glory; I do it for the love of the game. Simply put, there is nothing more pleasurable than dominating test after test, week in and week out. They say that these kinds of performances are what seperates competitors from champions; and I am here to prove I am a champion.
But I’m not going to shoot a hundred percent from the field, even during my breakout season. I’m sure Albert Einstein missed a test correction or two in his day, just like how Michael Jordan didn’t make every shot and how A-Rod got caught looking on the third strike that ended the Yankees season and sent the Rangers to the World Series. All super stars have come up short like I have with not turning in test corrections, but when my student number is retired and hangs from the rafters of the math department, people are going to remember the 99 I got on the mid-term, not the test corrections I forgot to turn in.
