The Worst Part

It just came to me, the worst part of the break-up... I couldn't put my finger on it 'til just now.

Knowing she's completely fine without you and has seemingly forgotten your existence, remaining the same before, during, and after she met you - you leaving no footprint in her life, your entire time together meaning nothing in the end. And you, being left a pitiful wreck after she's come and gone, self-hating and weak, thinking you were much stronger in the face of adversity.

And they call it being dumped. I now realize how accurate of a verb that is.

[/emo]

Sorry. Late nights do no good for me anymore.jy5wutitrshhjtr

I know where my comfort lies, I just can't grasp it right now.

Soundtrack To My Life: 2008

January: Dälek - Speak Volumes
I remember specifically driving home for Christmas break and listening to a mixtape DKDustinK of AfterThePostRock sent me in a mixtape trade. We had to take 101 home because 30 was closed. I, at that moment, realized that all hip-hop was not bad. It carried on through December 07 into January 08 and marked me getting interested in underground hip-hop for the first time.

February: Readymade - Nov30
I started getting into an awkward involvement with a girl in February. Readymade set the right melancholy tone for that, because I was a bit devastated. I learned a lot about girls and awkward situations in my school year of 07-08, and this would mark the most awkward of all. Walking around the back-streets of Cannon Beach listening to Readymade helped turn me into the emotional zombie that I became for a while.

March: M83 - Teen Angst
I remember getting a very hyped-up vibe from M83 for a long time before ever hearing them. This was the first track I heard from them and I was simply blown away which led me to a short but intense obsession with the band. The title also reflects my continued "teen angst" from my fails with women.

April: Atmosphere - Like The Rest of Us
I chose this track because it paints a very vivid picture of a night when I rode my little $5 kids bike around Cannon Beach and listened to this whole album. It was kinda monumental to me - this is not my favorite track on that album but represents that night very distinctively to me. April was a time of healing.

May: Windy & Carl - Sketch For Flea
Right after graduating Ecola, I went straight to my dad's house in San Diego. I suddenly had multiple meaningless crushes going on, but it was a cool time despite that. I started getting into drone, and this was the track that started it all. It also represents a time of escape and relaxation, as well as self-confrontation. The atmospheric architecture of Windy & Carl put me in a good mood late at night.

June: Bersarin Quartett - Mehr als alles andere
In June I drove to camp to be a counselor for the summer. Everyone hit it off really well, really fast, giving our great summer an ever greater start. Within a week I already had a super intense crush on Elyse and one of my greatest downfalls started setting in - Envy. Despite the warm June weather, the struggle I was going through made me feel cold - the same atmosphere this song portrays to me.

July: Fang Island - We Were Lions
I used this song once at an end-of-the-week slideshow, and overall, it is the perfect song for my July. Just lots of fun with my kids at camp, enjoying myself thoroughly and growing and maturing exponentially. To wrap it up at the end of July, Elyse and I confess our "like" for one another on a starry night. High-fives all around.

August: Snow Patrol - Set The Fire To The Third Bar
The beginning of August was difficult, I was at a family reunion in Iowa and Elyse was hundreds of miles away. I wrote her a letter with the lyrics to this song in it. Even when I got back, we had to be distant because we weren't really allowed to be "in relationships" around the kids. Camp ended and we both stayed in Stanwood and we finally "made it official."

September: Airiel - Sugar Crystals
September was a joyful time with Elyse, she stayed at my house and we did absolutely everything together. This song paints the mood of this month perfectly, just loving every minute of it. I went back to Cannon Beach half way through and had a blast with my intern family. Leaving her was hard, but I was in good company. My first kiss was also had this month. Sugar Crystals.

October: Halou - I'll Carry You
Lots of "missing each other" and love love love going around. Just lots of intense longing and feeling very loved this month. I substituted my beloved Halloween to drive home and visit my beloved Elyse. This song represents the mood of this month perfectly.

November: Bloc Party - Signs
Ended my Halloween weekend with our relationship totally derailed and going nowhere good. Pulling my hair out in anxiety and frustration and cluelessness until it finally kicked the bucket a week before Thanksgiving. This song becoming my break-up song due to it being one we both enjoyed and also it being very sad. I realize it's about somebody dying, but I just took it figuratively instead of literally.

December: Aidan Baker - Survival
This month marks the most severe apathy about my life I've ever experienced. Some people would probably call it depression, I don't really know though. The mood and title of this song paint my life, getting lost in the droning riffs of Aidan Baker and I'm merely surviving right now. The end of December leaves me with a small aftertaste of hope in my mouth and optimism for the future.


Download Link will be available if anyone shows any interest. I don't really feel like putting a link up if it won't get used... although I might just for kicks.

Purposelessness

I was reading back into my old posts doing research for my "Soundtrack of my life: 2008" (Coming Soon!) and I realized from a post back in September that I was feeling purposeless and thought it would change when I started Ecola and had stuff to do. Nope, feeling as purposeless as ever... well, maybe not, useless is a better word. I'm becoming more optimistic about the future daily, but it's interesting that my feeling of being useless has remained this long and I thought it was just a recent thing. I wonder what other trends seem recent but have been there for a while...

What 'Emotional High' Means To Me (Reprise)

I discussed this with my dad a little bit today - some clarity and expansion was had.

Let's use an illustration, let's also say this illustration may or may not have had significance to me recently. A girl and a guy in a young relationship find they can tolerate each other to the point of saying "I Love You" for their first times (awww). I find that as a man saying that, I am less likely to talk about 'how I'm feeling' at any given moment so that when I tell a girl I love her, I have thought it through and decided that a) Up to this point in time, I've had not much problem with this girl and b) At this point in time, I really dig this girl and c) I could see myself spending some good time with this girl in the future. This is putting it casually, of course, I'm feeling a lot more passionate about all this. So in saying "I love you," I'm genuinely accepting this girl into my life - my whole life. This is affected in part by my how I'm feeling at the moment emotions, but since talking about how I'm feeling at the moment isn't a normal thing for me, when I'm asked about how I'm feeling, I'm talking about my large chapter, stage, movement in life. I could have been feeling pretty down the past few hours, but if a friend asks how I'm doing and I'm at an exciting time in life where things are going pretty well, I'm going to be talking about that, rather than my stress the past few hours at work.

Disclaimer: I'm not a girl and don't know how they work. If I were look at it from the female perspective though, and based on what little personal experience I have in this, I would say that this is flipped. If a girl says the same thing to her dude, she's saying "I love you right now" moreso than she's saying "everything you've done up to this point and what you're probably going to do in the future makes me love you." Girls are more likely to be talking to others about how they're feeling at the moment than guys, so when you ask them what they feel about something, they're most likely going to respond with how they're doing at that moment rather than the overall tone in their stage of life like a guy would. Now, opposite from a man, if a girl has been feeling kinda crappy the past few hours, but she's going through a pretty exciting time in her life otherwise, if asked about it she's going to tell you that she's not feeling so well because that's what's been going on earlier that evening.

And this is why we need to be careful with such things. We need to know where each is coming from because girls, if a guy tells you he loves you it's a super serious thing that he's thought through and is refering to a big picture. And guys, if you assume that girls think through this the same way you do, you might be taken aback later when you find that they were talking about that moment when they said it. Now please, don't take this as 'girls are untrustworthy and don't say what they mean' because I'm not saying that at all. I'm just trying to understand the differences in ways we communicate our affection (and I suppose this can be applied to many other areas of male/female communication as well). I'm also not saying that this is absolutely true - guys will sometimes react based on their hourly emotions, and girls will sometimes make decisions based on their stage of life, but I think more commonly, it goes the other way.

Like a Dove or, What 'Emotional High' Means to Me.

I said, "Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest-
I would flee far away
and stay in the desert;
I would hurry to my place of shelter,
far from the tempest and storm."

-David, Psalm 55:6-8 (NIV)

Totally, but I don't know what my place of shelter is. My Ecola family probably. I will be with them soon.

I hope there's not too much snow that I can't get home from the airport.

If an enemy was insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were raising himself against me,
I could hide from him.
But it is you, [someone] like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
as we walked with the throng at the house of God.

-David, Psalm 55:12-14 (NIV) [Paraphrased by me]

Girls - please know that you affect men much more deeply than you (or even they, at the time) can know. Make sure that if you say something, that it isn't just your emotions talking, but that you really mean it. You may think you mean it at the time, but don't say "I love you" until you've struggled through a hard part of your relationship where you didn't feel the love. If you can still say and mean it after that, go ahead.

A little tip: Guys generally say what they mean and don't get caught up in temporary emotion as much - this is true for me anyway (I might not know what I'm talking about, actually...). My emotions are long-lasting and all-encompassing and don't affect the things I say and do and mean because if I'm feeling a certain way, I'm generally going to be feeling that way for a very long time. As in, it's not an emotion to me, it's a large chapter of my life. I would say I'm very affected by emotion, but I probably wouldn't define emotion the same way as I would in a female. I don't know if I'm making sense.

If a guy (I mean a good-intentioned guy who does have your best interest in mind; use discretion) says he loves you and means it, he isn't going to change his mind when he stops feeling the love and justify it as "I was on an emotional high," because he wasn't. While guys do have emotional ups and downs, they mostly have long underlying emotional movements that last for large chunks of time and define stages of life (Again, call bs on this if it's wrong, because it could just be me). A man's actions are not based on his temporary hour-to-hour emotions so much as his overall 'stage of life' emotions.

All I'm saying is, girls, be very careful not to say or do things very heartfelt when you're on one of your emotional highs - guys don't experience these in the same way you do, and will just assume that you're going to be like them and say things because you mean them deeply - not just emotionally. Deeply examine your heart when the guy in question isn't around you and make sure you feel that way, and not just when you're close to eachother, cuddling, saying cute disgusting things, what have you.

Nyquil

I give it an 8/10. It takes a while to start working.

Requirements for future wife: She must enjoy Underworld
Things I did for 7 hours today: Played Wii Ski
Artists with overrated releases in 2008: TV on the Radio, Portishead
Things that are 'alright' and start with C: Carmex, Cryosleep
My favorite way to tell people about things: This way

I started making short mad libs and posting them as Facebook notes. You should participate cause they're cool.

Good Things Are Ahead or, Why Don't You Drink?

I know it. Things are looking up for ol' Mick Swanson. Maybe.

If you drink too much water, do you puke or just drown?

I was thinking tonight, if the question were posed to me: Why don't you drink? I would answer in a way like this:
Well, I'd like to say it's because I want to obey the law, but that would be a lie because I break the speed limit every time I drive and I really like trespassing on abandoned things. I'd also like to say it's because I just have no desire to, which would also be a lie because I've been dying to try Pumpkin Ale and apparently there's no such thing as "Virgin Pumpkin Ale," (We've looked.) I'd also like to say it's because I like to enjoy things as they are, but while that wouldn't totally be a lie, it's probably not the main reason I don't drink. I guess it's just one of those things that I've stood firm on regardless of what people around me are doing... and I also think drunk people are just about the stupidest, least funny, and least likely people I would want to spend my time with. This goes for other substance abuse as well.