brenzy:

tinkandthecity:

Model: Courtney Brooke Pincus

BRC Photography, Melissa Moss Makeup

Times Square, NYC. 

My best friend!!

I’d like to write a post where I sound all smart and learned and have something novel to say about love and loving. But I simply cant. I’m not sure I am there yet.

So there was this girl and I liked her a lot. Said I loved her a couple times. I did.  Then she went away for a while and we grew apart. She came back. I was mad. I still love her. But what is that? Why do I have all these feelings and she doesn’t seem to. I can probably come up with a gazillion reasons for how things played out.

But there is something else further than the feelings of caring, loving, liking… however you want to conceptualize my affinity towards this particular person. There is something else I do besides care. I invest in her. I did it for the time she was away, and I find myself doing it now. It is difficult not to because she is such a safe investment. By that I mean I trust and value her to a much higher degree than many others. I sort of mean committing and holding in my heart. It is romantic in a way. But it is unhealthy. This person is not looking to ‘invest’ in my at this point in time. She may love me and care about me but can’t invest as either of us may wish her to.

Is this a reason to be sad? Perhaps. It is most certainly a reason to stop ‘investing’. To invest is to consistently give your heart to a person and make yourself vulnerable to them. Thinking about them, waiting for them, hoping, dreaming, etc. I cannot deny that I do these things. In some ways romantic, in others pathetic. Odd how the same action can be seen as two very different things. ‘Investing’ takes its toll. Sometimes, I see my actions and by extension my self as pathetic. It is hard not to let a value judgement find its way to my thinking. This is the reason to be sad. That somehow I stopped investing in myself, stopped loving myself in this process. There is a constant covert rejection when you ‘invest’ from afar. It eats at you a little, but it does it often. In focusing on this person, the rest of your life loses its balance. Work, play, self all become skewed.

This has been my process the past 4 months and sort of now. In stating it out here for all the internets to see I can become better able to stop myself from continuing to make these mistakes. Calling it a mistake feels wrong. How can it be a mistake to love? It isn’t, it can’t be. It is however a mistake to not love myself which is a result of this process.

This was important for me. I hope whoever reads this respects it and perhaps can take something from it for themselves.

More to the point, where has the tranquility I lived with at one point, namely camp, gone? I’ve journaled about this quite a bit, I’ll keep the personal stuff in the blogger journal.

At camp I find myself looking after a group of individuals who aren’t looked after by the dominant culture. They are generally forgotten. Before my camp experience I would hurry past homeless people. I would avert my eyes from those with any type of disability. We are not taught to hurt or devalue these people, only in rare instances do we teach our children or selves anything about these populations. In doing this we passively devalue this population. How fucked up is that? In becoming to wrapped up in our own self we ignore the needs of huge group in our culture.

When I wake up what do I think of? Where is my mind? It is already consumed into a monotonous routine of self-indulgent and greater-culture-indulgent thoughts and actions. Not terrible things, but for me… not a particular healthy way of being.  I need and want to be concerned with my well being. To do that I do not have to also sacrifice my regard for others and my community.

I am not pleased with myself lately. My concern with myself has been of needing to be perfect and not letting myself just live and enjoy life. Paradoxically when I realize this, I tell myself I need to let go and stop worrying about how I’m living. Thus reproducing the cycle.

How can I maintain some order in my life, some type of direction; while also letting myself just live and letting go of that need to control.

This I shall ponder for some time..

A very rare reblog, worth it.

So yesterday I was on the train and there was this young lass with a skirt a tad bit too short for her own liking. She wasn’t particularly pleased with her wardrobe choice that day. As we walked off the train she was holding the back of it down. I was a few steps behind her as we both walked towards the stairs this gentleman, or perhaps just man is appropriate, is walking toward us. After he passes the young lady he looks behind himself and is staring at her ass super blatant. He is actively objectifying her. I see this odd pleasure he has for the 5 seconds or so he is staring. As he turns back around we make eye contact. Rather than darting my eyes away quickly I maintain that eye contact. I don’t smile. I don’t look at the young ladies but. I do nothing to show my approval of his actions. I stare into his eyes long enough for him to know that I did not like what he just did.

Now I don’t really know what went on in this man’s mind. Maybe he really liked the pattern on her skirt… But I am willing to bet he was gaining some type of pleasure from seeing or imagining her sexually. I wonder if he gained sexual pleasure from that or if maybe he gained more pleasure from that sense of masculinity that comes from the sexual “domination” that men tend to exert over women through objectification. This young lady was not a student, not a daughter, not an aspiring actress to this man; to this man she was a decent ass being slightly covered by a skirt. I wonder what went through his mind consciously and subconsciously. Consciously, maybe nothing or maybe nice ass. Subconsciously, I might think he is thinking I want to see under that skirt, I want to touch whatever is under there, I want to have sex.

I think our culture provides that expectation for men to be sexually aggressive. Yet they are also taught not to express that sexuality.

Regardless I felt good taking an active role in the cultural process. That exchange was one of many instances of sexual objectification occurring in front of me everyday. Today I said hey… no, that’s fucked up bro. I’m changing the world.

So I’ve been taking this class where we learn what culture is, where it comes from, its history, and how it has impacted people on the micro and macro level.

I’m toying with the idea of living outside the dominant culture, not abiding by its rules. They aren’t written down anywhere, but if you see someone doing something different, they are breaking the ‘rules’. Some of these rules aren’t a big deal and come from legitimate places. But other rules like marrying within race, having hetero sex, making as much money as possible are flawed.

I don’t think people idealize the world we live in, but I also don’t think they question it enough. I don’t think I question it enough. Every once in a while I get a rush when I let myself do something outside of the norm. This is my own proof of a restricting, oppressive culture (not too generalizable, but I encourage others to see if they have similar feelings). So when I walk outside barefoot for extended periods of time, when I stand on a chair, when I walk down the middle of the street in the middle of the night, when I walk around like a dinosaur, when I laugh heartily at myself. When I do these things I feel free-er and I guess more myself.

But here I am white hetero male. The only reason I can touch on the oppressiveness of culture is because I’ve been studying the systemic, cyclical oppression of other racial, sexually oriented, and gendered groups of people. I am oppressed by the expectations of the dominant culture as well. I rarely feel my feelings, I rarely let myself. It is undoubtedly my fault, but I learned to feel was to be weak. Instead I thought and intellectualized and rationalized. Now all I wish was to stop my brain.

Anyway back to my point, I’m not arguing or convincing anyone reading of the reality of covert or overt racism sexism etc.; Is it possible for me to walk outside of the culture and within it at the same time? Can I be/walk outside of our culture’s norms which define what I should and should not be at the same time living my life inside of it, since there is seemingly no other place it has touched.

I think there is another question of: Will I let myself? Do I have the confidence and the strength of self to let myself live differently than others while still being affected by them?

This sounds like something that I will have to grow into and become a part of me. I can never fully depart from the culture, but I can choose to let my behavior be more of my own will. Who and How I am will be integrated into the culture, just as everyone else’s choices and behaviors will be as the culture continues to grow.

This isn’t a particularly clear post. If you’d like to have a conversation about it, let me know I’d love to.

I’m not sure that I fully understand what purpose(s) Tumblr or twitter are meant to have in people’s lives. Part of me is amused at the idea of a few people believing that they are so intrinsically important, smart, or superior that they must share their selves with the world and to not do so is a crime against humanity. I don’t think that to be the case, for the most part.

Beyond this it seems like a means for people to connect by expressing themselves, receiving some feedback from others and providing feedback or reactions to other people’s posts. From my time in graduate school studying counseling I understand this dynamic to be an important part of group therapy, as well as interpersonal relationships in general.

I plan on letting this tumblr be a place where I experiment with myself. I can search the internet for plenty of funny pictures and links, but I think I would like to generate more original and genuine content rather than re-posting. I love my sense of humor and I love that I love. This is an opportunity for me to love myself while being vulnerable and loving myself while I fail.

My summer class jump started my old women studies background. I realized how caged in my perspective has been towards everything, most importantly myself.

I think this to be the general direction and challenge of my life currently… to shed the ideas I have about perfection, the ideas of needing things to be one way and letting myself experience life. This is what I’ll attempt to do through this tumblr as well as this summer.

Annnndddd I also might not use this thing at all.

LOLZ

I’m not artsy…… yet.

Maybe dodgeball is my art.