why i can't predict the weather past the storm

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there - William Carlos Williams

Alfredo Jaar

A guy is taking his girlfriend to prom. He waits in the ticket line for a really long time but gets them. He goes to rent a limo. The rental line is really long but he eventually does it. He goes to buy her flowers. The line at the florist is really long but eventually he gets the flowers. At prom, she asks him to go get punch. He goes to the refreshment table and there’s no punchline.

you’ve got to be kidding me

I am in physical pain

Warsan Shire (via ethiopienne)

What I’m really terrified of is leading an average, ordinary life with a regular job and an invariable routine, planned holidays, an average household, fixed responsibilities and not doing anything different to be remembered by.

people are baffling as fuck

I remember feeling this way. I remember feeling this way so recently it could almost be yesterday. I kept feeling this way long after I learned intellectually that it was a lie. I remember telling myself this story and using it as a stick to beat myself towards greatness, which doesn’t work.

I don’t know why no one warns us as children, but this story is a trap. A regular job is the only way to pay for your passions, even if you are lucky enough to find a job that is your passion. Routine is what makes creativity possible. An average household is a meaningless statistic, not something you can acquire by accident. 

Responsibilities grow out of two things, necessity and purpose. One you can’t dodge and the other I wouldn’t want to. There are so many cautionary tales out there about picket fences and 2.5 children, middle-age spread and responsibilities getting you down. Maybe that was a real danger for our parents; maybe they really did give up their dreams to settle in suburbia. 

Maybe striving for difference was once good advice for success. But millennials are learning just how hard it is to write a magnum opus when you’re working full time or more at minimum wage to make rent, or when you spend your days fighting with your parents because you still couldn’t. 

I’m in my mid-20s now, and I feel a turn happening. It’s not a turn towards the mundane. It’s a realization that holding out for the big important thing — my special destiny, my glorious purpose — is the surest way to wake up in my 30s to find myself mired in mediocrity, my life a meaningless waste. 

See, every minute that I spend measuring my life’s meaning by that one great thing I’ll be remembered by (the tense is always future) is a minute I’m not making my life meaningful now. This isn’t about settling. It’s about finding jobs and pursuits that allow me to do meaningful work every day instead of betting on some big payoff down the road. 

All the advice I hear and read from people who have done big, memorable things is that those things require daily effort anyway. No great creation or action is spontaneous; it grows out of practice and preparation, much of which must be done in the dark. You can’t know you’re going to achieve a great thing until it’s already happened.

I don’t want such a fickle thing to determine whether my life is successful or disappointing. 

Meanwhile, I personally find that focusing on distant triumph leeches all the satisfaction out of everyday achievements. I’m happiest with myself when I’m experiencing competency in small, concrete things: writing one good sentence, building one Ikea bookshelf, finding one solution that makes one of my retail customers happy. 

What kinds of achievements are possible and pleasing is different for each person. The point is that learning what makes me feel good about myself on a day-to-day basis is much more important than imagining what kind of superheroic single act I’d like to be remembered for. 

In a way I think millennials are lucky. We were raised on the myth that anyone can achieve greatness. Now many of us, even those whose parents paid for our college and can save for their own retirements, are learning firsthand the value of a steady paycheck and the miracle of simple things coming together and going right.

We are, as a generation, poor. There’s nothing romantic about that. In surviving this injustice, perhaps we can throw off generations of toxic mythology — of bootstraps, of boring picket fences, of lone maverick heroes and strokes of genius.

Maybe the problem with a “regular job” and “fixed responsibilities” was never that they keep us from “doing anything different.” Maybe the real problem is when we scapegoat normalcy instead of doing the work it takes to be extraordinary. 

A feeling I get a lot these days, in the midst of my twenties, which are difficult, is gratitude for things I have learned through experience. We all know that being a teenager is hell, but no one prepares you for how hard young adulthood will be. There are so many things that no one can tell you beforehand. You just have to struggle with them until you learn the lesson, which is how to stop struggling. 

This is one of those things. Maybe I will write the next Great American Novel or break the news story of a decade or spark a social movement and become a household name. Likely I won’t. What I do know is that today, and tomorrow, and the next day, what I crave is to do something useful. What I can do is do the work. 

I don’t understand why friend weddings aren’t a thing

Like I want to have you in my life forever

And I want to have a party where we celebrate that with cake and exchange friendship bracelets and vows and then go on a vacation together