push the pedal down, watch the world around fly by us.

im not sure what i want to accomplish in this entry. what i want to say. what i want to discuss. i became inspired to write again from my trip to hawaii. the trip was amazing and i love everything about hawaii and if i had to relocate tomorrow thats the first place i would go.

while there i got to work with a local photographer. i asked him how he got started and he told me he just started showing up at a resort near his house and photographing families on vacation. he would run the film home and process it and come back with prints the next day. it blossomed from that and eventually he was doing it for real.

ive been around enough photographers to finally realize that that is how its done: you make your own way. your future becomes what you want it to be. kelly went to the art institute for photography and has now settled in a job working around photography but not with it. im sure she could be great if she struck out on her own, but i just dont see that happening right now. belton moved to california. now hes working around people like mandy moore and sarah michelle geller. belton and kelly both have made their own way, but with very different aspirations in mind. i prefer the belton method.

the hawaii trip gave me time to sit back relax and just think. its something i havent done in a while because ive been so busy trying to cram all the pleasures of home into a seemingly miniscule summer. in the end i came to a singular conclusion: over the past year, i grew up.

ive always been mature for my age, but even the mature have issues along the way. i spent a lot of time with myself, and when you have nowhere else to turn and no one else to rely on that makes you a very strong. yes i was meek. i was shy. i was ashamed that when my friends from home came to visit me at school i couldnt show them a good time because i didnt know what one was. but in the end it made me strong.

it was a long road to get to strength though. in one simple moment at the end of last summer, i felt quite worthless. its almost like when someone who supposedly cares about you lets you go, you wonder to yourself "if that person of all people doesnt care, then i guess no one does...and then again neither should i care about me"

so i stopped caring about me. i did whatever and went with the flow and by the end of january i found myself at an emotional breaking point.

so i moved on. i pretended to delve into my schoolwork for the remainder of spring semester. i developed a relationship with jbh. i may have even started to like my sorority, kinda.

and thats what i did.

then i came back here and found my art again and slept in a comfy bed and spent time with the ones i love and achieved some assimilitude of familiarity once again.

but ill never achieve paradise. home has its deamons as well. they never fail to return at my doorstep pushing my limits and asking me questions i don want to entertain. im dealing with these deamons one by one each day.

maybe i dont see the real changes in me over the past year. maybe ive become a coldhearted bitch. maybe im not interesting. maybe im becoming my parents. maybe i think im better than everyone else.

im not really sure of anything else, but i am sure that i feel stronger. its something im working on everyday. jbh says i have a tendency to go along with anything anyone tells me just to avoid conflict or having someone dislike me. hes absolutely right and i know this. and ovbiously being disliked is not really something anyone wants to be, but there are times when its for the cause of self defense. you can shoot someone in self defense and not be charged for murder.

so thats where im at. working each day to try to convince myself that i am in fact worth someting despite how i may have felt in the past.

and thats why last tuesday i cried for an hour.
and thats why in my relationship i feel like im getting the better end of the deal.
and thats why im ready to stop dealing with the fallout of last year, and start seeing the good that has come, the strength and most important enjoy my newfound highly-improved ecstacy.

this has been long and disconbobbled and i apologize to anyone who tried to read this for that. i leave you with a word from my favorite poet pablo neruda:

Love, a question
has destroyed you.

I have come back to you
from thorny uncertainty.

I want you straight as
the sword or the road.

But you insist
on keeping a nook
of a shadow that i do not want.