Maggie

Last summer I thought I was excited for college.

But then I got there and it was the same as everything always is. No one interesting, too much weed, wishing I was alone when I was at a party, wishing I was at a party when I was alone, feeling trapped and closed in, nowhere to go when I wanted to get away.

I think Boston will be different. I think this time I’m actually excited.

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"I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on."

—

Henry Rollins (via girlinlondon)

In telling people about where I’ve been, I try to encourage them to do THIS THIS THIS. Nothing makes you appreciate where you’ve been more than leaving it behind for a while.

(via xokelly)

(Source: emotional-algebra, via xokelly)

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(Source: remain-reckless, via imgfave)

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(Source: wiltedrosesandgoldglitter, via pancakesbitches)

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I want to get this tattooed on my hip. Except first I should probably have someone who can actually, you know, draw… sketch it for me. It’s supposed to be one of those kind of foil-y star-shaped balloons, the ones with the pressed edges that aren’t very satisfying to pop?

Here’s why: (I never write posts this long because I assume no one reads them, but here we go). One day during my senior year of high school, I woke up, sat up in bed and immediately noticed that the star-shaped balloons tied to my bed post (the swim team had decorated my front lawn for Districts and my grandmother had apparently brought the balloons in and tied them to my bed) weren’t shaped like stars at all. They were actually just pentagons, with no indentations to make the points of the star. My mind was just so sure of what they were that it didn’t doubt it, didn’t look closely enough. (I think I posted about this a year ago too, when I noticed it).

For a while, I found this really depressing. It made me think that nothing could be as beautiful as my expectations, nothing could satisfy what I imagined. It made me think that when you looked to closely at something or really thought about it, it lost all of its perfection and luster. I wanted to get the same balloon as a tattoo, but with a different saying. “Beauty is unbearable,” the beginning of a longer quote from Nabokov’s Lolita: ‘Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a moment a glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.’ I related to this quote a lot at the time. When you see something really beautiful, whether it’s in your mind or in a few fleeting seconds in real life, it ruins you. The way love feels. Before you feel it, everything else around you seems normal. After you know it and have it and love somebody, and then they leave, everything hurts. Things you never noticed before are suddenly the most ugly, depressing, and lifeless things you’ve ever looked at.

However, finally my views are starting to change. Who’s to say that a star is more beautiful than a pentagon? I have no reason to believe or to trust that one is intrinsically better than the other. It’s just the way that the world teaches us to isolate opposites, to make one thing good and something else bad. The world teaches us that the sky, perfectly cloudless is bright blue, is the most beautiful the sky can be. But, when I think about it, I love when there are clouds, and I love when the sky is gray and calm but somehow expectant before it starts raining. So why can’t a pentagon be beautiful too, just like a star? It’s easy to look at something like a star or a clear blue sky and see beauty, but I think it’s really amazing to find beauty in places where it’s not obvious, like a rainy day, or how it feels to be alone again, or a pentagon-shaped balloon jerking in the current created by the ceiling fan and clinging to my bed post.

So that was a lot of explaining… and probably no one will respond to this, but do you think it would be a good tattoo?

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