Photos, Films and...stuFF

These past couple months of so, I have gone through a few changes in my life.  I am now at home no longer in a four year institution.  I got a girlfriend that I am very much involved with.  I am going out to more shows for spoken word and I have started to spend a lot more time on forums and reading about people and the way they view their lives. Run on sentences aside, I’ve come to realize that today, we are an easily disappointed generation.  We learn from an early age to follow our dreams and as we get closer to real life, adults teach us pragmatism. We learn that there is a need for a balance of reaching our dreams and living well.  

We all want happy lives. But what does that mean? For some its living financially stable lives. Others its living their dreams out.  But for a lot of people, they feel unhappy without one or the other.  They want both. But they feel that its not possible to obtain both.  They feel that society has set the rules so that we can only do one at a time.  Its hard for many of us to accept failure in either.  So we hedge our bets.  Many choose to be financially secure.  The others put their entire efforts into being the superstars they had dreamed of being.  And when we here about success stories of people who could do both? While impressed, we often attribute it to luck and right timing.  So we continue to hedge our bets.  We’ll fool ourselves into thinking that we’re building up to something more for ourselves, when we’re really just making resolutions that we never follow through on. For a lot of us, we keep the New Year’s fervor of pretending to work towards being better 365 days a year.

But when we break it down realistically, there is no need to fear failure. In fact, in order to be happier in life, we need to embrace our failures. Every endeavor in our lives will produce failures.  They do not have to end at these failures. Sometimes the simplest explanation works best.  And it applies here.  When you fall once, you have to get back up and keep fighting.  If things really don’t work out, it’ll be clear to you. And if you had put in the effort, other opportunities will open up for you.  I’ve seen college grads who felt like they did all the work they need to and are worse off than people who had never graduated high school.  Why? Because the college grads stopped working. They stopped learning. I’m not talking about grad school. I’m talking about the necessary action of gaining experience in the real world, taking the good with the bad and expanding on their skills.  A lot of college grads will work in restaurants, trying to separate their goals from their work.  Normally, work will win. 

So my advice to anyone who reads this (including myself)?  Don’t sell yourself short. Yea fucking original right? But I think despite the cheesiness of the advice no one follows it.  When you’re constantly dreaming of your goals? Get the fuck up and do it. There’s nothing stopping you but you. Yea the economy is bad and yea you have to keep some realism. But the question is when did realism ever become pessimism?

And on the flip side, if you do chase your dreams. Don’t convince yourself along with everyone else that this is all you’re good. If you fail at it, its not the end of the fucking world. Keep going for it. But also expand your skills, your knowledge, etc.  Its important to hone your craft. But its healthy to learn about other practical things so that you can become a more versatile human being in general.  If you succeed to the greatest heights of your dream, then not only do you have that, but you also have other things to do, so that your dream job doesn’t just seem like work anymore.

So to sum things up..We as human beings have been given the amazing ability to become a jack of all trades. Many of us will specialize. And that’s fine.  Just don’t get tunnel vision and only see what you want to see. Challenge yourself to the utmost extent of your ability. And then some.  Now I’m going to go follow my own advice. Bwoop Bwoop

Take a deep breath

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2

3

As the spotlight quickly draws attention towards me

I pray to God to stand with me

As I take a step forward

Counting the times that my heart seems to beat

Not fast

But slow

Almost as if syncing to the countdown

Before I have to open myself to this audience

To this stage

This moment

Before the whispers of confusion begin

And I know that to step into this light

Is the same as bringing new life to my old

Never abandoning my old self

But rather opening the doors to my own insecurities

Thoughts and actions

And not just let it be seen

But let it be known

And this thought of complete openness

Is terrifying to some

Impossible to others

And all of the above to me

And I’m in distress

And I know I need to destress

Because I know that the road to epiphany

Is filled with missteps

And that chances never taken

Will always be lost opportunities

In my own mind

As my heart continues to beat

Reassuring me that I am alive

Urging me to come life on this stage

To strive for perfection

and never reach

But to learn once again

The love of this art

As I play these parts

As my body becomes something other than my own

A medium of something

That I still don’t know

And yet I go forth

Tasting perfection one moment

And having it ebb away the next

Trying to connect these moments

into a web of stories

Of tales of old flames

And lost glories

Of new passions

Lost and then found lovers

Of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters

Hoping to open the doors to the Elysian Fields

To sing the stories of heroes unsung

And to tell the tales of saints tainted

Of those before me

Who stood on this stage

Perhaps feeling the same things I feel

A lineage of heroes and heroines

Acting as heralds for those without voices

Without chances to be here to tell these stories themselves

Because we all know that a story is never as good

As to what actually happened

And a feeling is never as good

When you try to remember it

But they tried

We try

I will try to bring these feelings back

To breathe life into these words

Just as these words have brought me here

So I will take up this mantle

As I take this spotlight

A stand in for standup people everywhere

Heroes

Who I hope will become my muses

As I open myself to this audience

This stage

This moment

No longer thinking of anything

But trying to be perfect

Not for me

But the stories that need to be told

Maybe not always for a heavy message

But just to share the feeling

Because it would be selfish for me

To hold this feeling for myself

Because the road to perfection

Is never done by one

And the road to epiphany

Would be nothing

If we didn’t have a little more fun

__________________

Work in progress..maybe. I kind of like it.. WEEEEE

Time to get back on this more often I’d say. Nothing else in life going on =P Sooo..I actually don’t have much to say right now. Just bored in class. Bloop bloop. Just 3 months and life will be peachy keen =D!?!?! Ok enough of that. I’ve been writing a lot lately..so some of those will come out soon enough. Probably sometime this week. Wee. Anyway until next time folks!

Class is very boring. Especially when its a lecture on art appreciation to a community college class. Faaantastic. On another note, I’ve been taking a lot more pictures lately. Its been one of those bitter sweet things. Its bitter because I realize that I need to work a lot more on it, but sweet in that it makes me want to be better and actually work towards it. On another ANOTHER note, jobs are hard to come by. But gotta keep trekking. Stupid economy with your silly troubles. Stop shoving them on me, jeez. I need the money to pay for college and enter a work force that is affected by the…wait a second. Ohh economy. Youu. So tricky. But I would like to find a job soon. I’d like to actually be a financially dependable person. I’d also like the money to be able to go to Korea this summer to see what its like. Its been about…15 years since I’ve been there? So needless to say I’m sure things have changed. Yea, admittedly there’s the bonus that my girlfriend is there and I’d love to see her instead of having to wait six months to see her. But as of late, meeting and interacting with people around my age who came straight from Korea, I’m interested in seeing the place that these kids come from. Which is ironic seeing as how I was born there. But I was raised here in the states. So seeing people coming straight from Korean culture is almost like seeing that family member that lives 20 states away. I feel like I should understand, but there’s a certain cultural bias, not just from an American standpoint, but from a Korean American one, that clouds my judgment about people that are “really” from Korea. Hmm

Julianna Guill..so hot. You need to find her and be happy. She is…yea that

Young soldiers 

with shoulders burdened

Struggling to survive

and provide a life

for those around them

Going to government departments

Getting shot down

Going to department stores

Getting shot down

Begging for a place in a convenience store

Getting shot down

Fight for their run down

One-bedroom rat-infested

Shit-hole of an apartment

Getting shot down

Until all they have left is the ground

on which they stand

Feeling that this is what they have

This is their lot in life

And they will protect

They must protect

So they band together

Under pressure with this

Self-inflicted mandate

Hearts filled with malice and hate

Donning on their cloth helms

doubling as banners

Taking up their swords of

Flame and explosions

Not becoming warriors by choice

But beasts by coercion

Twisted and prodded by the wheels

of a system that fails to see the problems at hands

and attacks the problems they placed

In these young men’s hands

So now these men turned beasts

continue to fight

in the only way they think they know

Bang

Boom

Pow

ring through their streets turned battlefields

Firing at those who claim to protect and serve

Attacking those who may be associated with others

Littering the streets with the bodies of their brothers

As they cast a blanket of fear over those they had intended

To serve and protect

Funding their self-massacre

with once government funded poisons

Let loose like a plague

Infecting the youth

Convincing the youth

to make money

through needles and crackrocks

Until they get sentenced

To lives where all they can do is crack rocks

Cold eyes behind cold bars

10-life

Thrown out again after being deemed “reformed”

Back into the turmoil and strife

with no life line back to anywhere

but straight back into the blood strewn concrete

that reeks of the deaths

of dreams that died young

This is their story

Young soldiers

turned into old martyrs

By the age in which most

begin to live their lives

This is their lives they struggle to hold onto

These lives twisted and poisoned

By the lies that we mold into

A bastardized truth we feed them

Leaving the scene of crime

Letting them do our time

In an irony none too sublime

We lord over these lords of damned and forgotten

Instantly forgetting that it is us who forged this path

So I guess really

This is not so much a story

It is not an homage

This

Is a deposition

Of accounts unheard by the public’s ears

Waiting to be read

Waiting for the masses to realize

That the ones standing on trial

Is not the no longer forgotten martyrs

But us

So I fucked up hard. In a way, that now some of the most important people in my life have little more than an iota of trust or respect for me. So what am I going to do?

The only thing to do is to ask for forgiveness. From then on…What can I do but to shoulder my mistakes, relabel them as responsibilities, and truck on with the decision I decided to make.  Because if you are to concede..or worse just stop. That is where the buck stops short, and all you are left with is an empty bottle of liquor of not really your choice, piss in your pants and a lifetime of wondering what would’ve happened if you had done every other scenario.