my sense of humor...

has not transformed in the slightest.

baby lei apparently gave her mother cute things like this:

note the presence of an expiration date in the bottom right corner.

a prayer request slip i filled out at the christmas eve service last night:

fresh kicks... to the nuts.

i know i know, it's 2:25AM, and you need to be up to cook for brunch tomorrow at Asifa's.

i'm not making excuses. sleep is one of my truest loves. from what i've gathered in my short twenty years, love requires reciprocation in all senses. sleep has reciprocated in wonderful ways lately, my dreams have spun silky outlines of good company: the kind with bright eyes.

as i packed my wallet with fresh birthday money to endure holiday shopping, i fully immersed myself in the consumerdom (and i mean that in the exact way kingdom connotes totalitarian rule by the king) that makes the US of Armadillos' armor so tough.

whilst roaming through Ross, watching lines pile behind the cash register back to the dressing rooms with the overstocked knickknacks and great deals (that for some reason are much more popular in Hilo than anywhere else i've been), i sat down on the shoe bench. in my lap sat a pair of Nike high tops, glittering with outrageous colors, size 7-and-a-half. and as my well-practiced middle class fingers fumbled for the price tag, i knew that no matter what it said, they were going to be cheap enough.

cheap enough to come home and tell mom about how excited i was they were so cheap and wonder if she needed anything from Ross so she'd throw them on the conveyor belt with her stuff?

yes.

cheap enough.

it slapped me in the face all of a sudden. i am a thief. not of my mother's generosity, not of my pride, not of my own bank account, but of the concept of need. i have taken need hostage and disguised it as want in virtually all aspects of what i buy. my personal wants have become needs, thus trampling over my poor mother's needs too.

and what do most say? what makes us human, what makes all of the diversity within our species come together? our needs. need for food, shelter, and love. and here i am, hijacking the beautiful ties that bind us for these nike high tops.

perhaps this is where we should really evaluate what type of free market we are not only a product of, but are creating in our lives.

something to checkout if you think any of it's interesting:

Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping

or more so... the movement called culture jamming.

a day of gratitude

more like days of gratitude. why we only have one holiday to celebrate thankfulness, i have no idea. we need it at least once a month, don't you think? i digress.

once upon an august day, i met someone that changed my life. i've been waiting until this assumed day of gratitude, secretly, to post this.

it's easy to argue that someone has changed your life, since in the grand scheme of things, life is about the relationships you make and break. maintenance is i suppose a component of all that, but the truth is, they come and go, often times going more quickly than they've entered.

college for me isn't and won't ever be about getting my degree. college is a four-year crash course in relationship building and breaking. so to me, with so little time to absorb the individuals i meet, it's become like a strategic vacuum of the beautiful pieces of people that i've had to run all over the place.

no one really plugged that vacuum until i let you into my heart. time has slowed with you in my life, and i suppose i can't really be more grateful. i've been a place for so long where i can't get past the fact that college really is just about the selfishness of getting what you can out of it and then leaving it with a mortarboard toss and a picture of you and a dean you never knew. on the contrary, you have changed that feeling for me. i don't feel rushed to discover and retain when i'm around you. i don't dream further than the future in which we both seemingly find trivial, when the dream is here, in this moment, ready to envelop us if we let it. i'm incredulous at your ability to meet someone and have them welcome you below their surface in literally one conversation. to know so many so intimately, i couldn't really guess what it really feels like to know someone in your heart. but i can guess that i've become one of those people you know, or it sure feels like it.

flaw (n.) : a mark, fault or imperfection that mars a substance or object.

you've given me this: that the only faux pas one can commit is the inability to embrace the flaws in oneself and others. i suppose the concept of the flaw that you've redesigned in me is that it is simply something to be appreciated over an asset.

this is Rachel. she's kinda boy crazy, too flirty all the time, too sexual when inebriated, and consumes way too much diet coke. but she's one of the most phenomenal human beings i've ever met.

you're Beautiful, don't let anyone or anything (including yourself) lose sight of that. So it goes, I don't feel a need to fill the silence, to withhold my thoughts, to hesitate in asking for what i need, to be anything other than what should be forgiven by default: human, while in your company Miss Drummond.