Sometimes thinking is a challenge.

          The other day, I was drinking a bottle of Naked Juice (Green Machine, because I'm hardcore like that) and was reading, as is my wont, all the text on the label. There was a note on the side, written in all excited capitals -
SHAKE WELL
SEPARATION IS NATURAL
          This just struck me as an apt philosophy for life.

          I've been noticing a lot of those lately.


          [An eloquent and quirky friend of mine is in New York right now. She posted this photo on her travel blog, and I don't know why I find it so ... charming? "KITE FLYING ALLOWED." Heck yes, it is.]


          But returning to the original catalyst for this post -
          Shake well. Separation is natural.
          You could turn this into a number of philosophies. Things inevitably drift apart, so you just gotta go with/resign yourself to it; Shake things up every once in a while, don't let life go stale; Live it up because it's not gonna keep. Or maybe I'm just being pretentious.
          I do have a love/hate relationship for those life-encompassing, generalized statements about life. "You don't know what you have until it's gone." "Love like you've never been hurt." "Carpe Diem." All of those - on the one hand, the hopeless romantic in me squirms with pleasure at these happy little phrases, life neatly encapsulated into easy-to-swallow sayings. But, more and more lately, I've just been frustrated by them.
          Not to say that I'm becoming a pessimist. I just find it cheap, I guess, to think that you can reduce all the intricacies and waywardness and digressions of human life into tidy phrases and rules of thumb. It's like saying you can describe a hypotrochoid with a circle, or a fractal with a line. Generalizations are no use to a life that's composed of messy, absurd, lovely particularities.
          Admittedly, I like to function on philosophies. I like to think that "Fuck that noise" and "Have a spine" are ideas that apply to everything in life. Are they? I really don't know. Are they any less condescending and limiting than any other overarching, arch, sweeping observations anyone else has made?

          I guess I don't really know what I'm talking about.



          But in other news, tonight I'm debuting my newest song (which I've finally finished, by the way - in just a shade under two weeks, I think) for the listening enjoyment of my fellow students (a handful of them, anyway). We'll see how it goes.


          I can feel myself sliding into that inarticulate state again, when words go slippery and magnetized, but I'm trying to force North to North and South to South, and they spring away from me. All my sentences are becoming contrived - meaning is forced and the words sound violent and strangled into strange shapes. I hate when this happens.
          I guess I'll try toughing it out it this time, just writing even if it sucks. As opposed to my usual method, which is to go on a writing hiatus and hope it gets better on its own. Now that I write that, I realize that it's probably a stupid method.
          I feel like nothing I write is getting through.

          That skylight, man. It's a bitch.

          "They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view."
          Thoreau, man. He was a smart guy.