the 2 H’s: halloween costume and high school mentality…

So I had been struggling to figure out if I want to dress up in costume for this Halloween.. I honestly didn’t feel up to it initially because it seriously is not as exciting with no friends around and Gojira not here. But then because of my office Halloween party which is apparently mandatory I decided to put some effort in figuring out a costume to wear. First I thought I’d dress up in a sari since its different and would say I’m a traditional Indian. but that’s lame and I donno it’s like cheating. At Michael’s I saw these cat ear hairbands so I figured worst comes to worst I don’t find a decent costume I’ll just dress up in black and wear the cat ears. But then I started thinking maybe I could be a pirate.. but then I didn’t have the eyepatch, the hat or the sword.. or the right shoes. I honestly want to avoid spending as much as possible. So then I started thinking what costume can I come up with without spending anything. That’s when I realized I could be a gypsy, I have plenty of beaded necklaces, anklets, colorful bangles and dangly tribal looking earrings. I have this cool bohemian spaghetti strap top that has all sorts of different Indian fabric sewn together with pretty sequins, lace and beads. I’m going to wear that with a skin tight, long sleeved, olive green shirt inside. (It’s cold outside, don’t wanna freeze my ass off!) and then I have a half patiala bottom which kinda looks like genie pants so I thought those look kinda gypsy. Theyre magenta pink which goes really well with the rest of my outfit. I also found hip chains which you actually wear on your cumber when dressed up in a sari but oh well.. the more clinky-chimey-jingle stuff i wear the more gypsy I’m going to look (and sound!) I’ve also got some nice kohl that I can wear and kinda extend on the sides of my eyes to make it gypsy ish.. maybe I’ll do the traditional three dots on my chin like traditional women do. I also have a colorful batik scarf which I’m going to wrap around my head. Now when I go home I’ve got to hunt through my mom’s closet to find comfortable but interesting shoes I can wear with it.

My coworker was sweet enough to bring in a skirt I could wear if I wanted. I’m going to go home and try it on to see if it goes and if it fits. But to the best of my ability without being rude I’m going to try to avoid using it because I didn’t expect her to offer me one because I was originally looking to wear a long skirt as  a part of my costume and then decided to wear the genie pants. Hmm… She’s a tall women so maybe it will be too long and I can use that as an excuse so she won’t get her feelings hurt. Either way I’m excited I have my costume all put together. I will definitely take pics to put up.. and of course of my pumpkin carving. I’ve decided to do 2 carvings. one on each side of the pumpkin. (It’s big enough to contain 2 different carvings) I’m going to try and do both of the designs I discussed in my Halloween fever post.

Some people in my office are planning to dress up as Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs for Halloween. Since there are so many of them they are going to have doubles of characters.

But it makes me roll my eyes in my head because these people never asked any of us (my team) to join them. The high school mentality just continues for some people. The “popular” “cool kids” never including everyone in their grand plans. They enjoy making others feel left out and the idea that they are so much better than the rest. These same cheerleaders and snobs that were in high school have grown up to rear their children in the same mentality therefore making sure there are plenty of teens who experience a miserable high school. It’s a vicious cycle if you ask me. In the news there’s all this hype about bullying going on. With the recent hike in the number of teen suicides due to bullying, I’m so glad people are spreading awareness and making sure to prevent incidents from occurring. But how many people are guilty of just plain neglecting their peers? I’m sure there are plenty of kids out there like me who weren’t bullied as much as ignored in high school. I think it falls in the same realm. To make a person feel invisible. To feel not good enough to sit at their tables at lunch just because I didn’t wear Ambercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle and because I wasn’t a cheerleader just is seriously pathetic. I’m not saying all of them were like that but most of them were. You’ve got to be genuine and heartfelt to be motivated enough to get to know the quiet kid who sits in the back corner of the classroom or make the last person picked in gym class to feel like they weren’t left behind but it was just a matter of chance. There are so many people that can make the effort to make everyone feel included but it’s easier to just ignore problems. It’s a shame that people “grow up” about communicating and interacting with their peers only when they hit college. But what people don’t realize is that the damage has already been done with all of primary and high school being one lonely existence. One of my very good friends from high school was valedictorian and came from a rich family. I appreciate that she didn’t judge me for the brands that I wore. I’m not saying my family wasn’t rich. We were upper middle class and my family gave me a lot of things to be grateful and proud of. But they didn’t understand the importance of clothing and brand names and being popular and couldn’t grasp my sadness of not fitting in. This whole experience has made me passionate about making sure that when I have children and they start going to school, I will make sure they fit in by giving them what they want to wear. But at the same time I will make sure that they behave like my friend who was friends with everyone no matter what they wore. I hope this high school mentality disappears along the with the bullying. More psychologists and behavior specialists need to be brought into high schools to have workshops with children to give them a chance to remove the walls they’ve put up around themselves and to see everyone for they are and to respect and appreciate everyone in their class. It’s a far off dream but by doing so we would no longer have the need to classify students and peers as “nerds,” “jocks,” “popular,” “losers” and so forth. It would make the experience of high school a lot less stressful for our youth. anyways im done with my rambling for today. this light is turned off.

METTA MIND JOURNAL WITH CYNIC’S PAUL MASVIDAL: “A BRIDGE TO THE VIEW”

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 5:00pm by Paul Masvidal

Journal entry, twelve years ago:

“Today I am sad. It hurts to be human. The walls are closing in on my peace and I go deeper into a sadness all too familiar. The tears from my formative years when I would cry incessantly because of psychic pain have arisen again. A resurgence of that old pain is in my body like a parasite I can’t control. I’m a suffering child. The human experience can be very trying and today I am tested. Today I am broken. All hope is lost. I am exhausted. Where does my fervor for life come from?”

…after that journal entry, I wrote this poem:

Cactus
Black bones in me
Corroding everything
They’re floating free in my eyes
You say I’m losing my sight
Don’t rescue me
I don’t plan on getting out
I’ve lost the key
Hug me I’m a cactus

I was on the edge that day.

Reading through old journal entries, those words struck me like a person from a past life—a person who’s not around anymore. I see in those words someone who didn’t know what to do with his pain. I spent many years in that place of sinking into my own sadness. My depression was insidious…and slow, like a turtle. It kept me in bed for days at a time. It was like a deep sleep that I couldn’t shake. Eventually the walls began to close in. If I didn’t put myself back together and find some way to engage with life again, I was going to end my story.

For the thing which
I greatly feared is come upon me,
and that which I was afraid of
Is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither
had I rest, neither was I quiet;
Yet trouble came.
—Job

This epigraph appears in Darkness Visible, William Styron’s true account of his descent into major depression. Since I was meditating even during this period, what I discovered was that the depression was in my biology and in my bones like a genetic disposition. Beneath this biology I found a lot of psychic pain that wasn’t my own, but like an empath (and all humans are empaths), I had been taking on the “life” sadness of my family, our collective history, and the environment around me.

(Chicken or egg conundrum: Does depression begin in the mind and spread to the body? Or, is the physical body weighted down, depressed, and suppressed by ancient human history / DNA…and this (ill)informs the mind? And, in all cases, the human spirit remains “untouched,” quietly cheering you on, until the mind or body, or both, give out and then that’s all you wrote?)

I was always able to reference a spiritual perspective throughout my period of major depression, but none of that mattered. And that’s why I return to the biological and psychic perspective. It was deeper and larger than me. The sadness overcame my entire being. On the other side of that sadness, I discovered courage. The courage to suffer with dignity and grace. The courage to look straight into the darkness and not be afraid. I realized that this sadness was actually powerful and beautiful, and it didn’t have to be debilitating. I could wield it and make it work for me, like an energy that gets channeled into something constructive. I had the courage to be sad and not push it away any longer. I accepted things as they were, and that was when the healing took place.

Whatever series of life events it was that initially triggered the depression now seems inconsequential. What’s crucial is that it acted as the “bridge to the view.” I was finally able to see the wealth of sadness and depression that I had been holding for so many years. This gigantic black whole finally gave me a vantage point to access the underworld of my deepest fears and quiet childlike pain that I’d been carrying around my entire life. I finally got intimate with this monstrous empty space and gave it a big hug, cactus thorns and all. I’d been a prisoner of my mind, my conditioning, my whole being, for all of my life, until that moment.

Today, depression still arises, but it doesn’t have the same charge. It’s a softer blow now, and familiar enough that I’m able to see it as though it’s someone else’s pain. I don’t have to embody it the way I used to, and I no longer care for it and feed it in the way that I had grown accustomed. Instead, I just let it move through me like a wind, and I’m better now at taking care of myself when the confusion appears. I see how transient these emotional energies are and I trust that they’re going to change and transform into something else. I don’t know if it’s years of sitting on the cushion and meditating that caused the shift. Maybe all these years of songwriting saved my life. I’d guess it’s a combination of the two that helped?

Life experiences rise and fall like the ocean’s tide, so I now choose to see depression as a big, unknown space that invites me in for a specific transformational purpose. Nightmares usually end, or “come to light,” when we face our fears and hang out in that space, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. When that happens, we begin to see into and through the darkness, making friends with our enemies or our own shadows that aren’t fully integrated into our personalities. They appear like phantoms that almost have a mind of their own, but once we become still enough to take a look at these “dark” parts of ourselves, we find that the monster was our own creation. We made it up in order to cope with life.

Life doesn’t require us to do anything except show up, but we try so hard to give it purpose with our stories of what we think life should be. We love to play god and think we’re running the show, but the show runs itself without our help at all. One could say depression, or darkness, in general, is not really negative at all, and that it’s more closely related to clarity. It could be an opportunity to slow down, take a long, good look, and get to know ourselves a bit better.

-PM

NOTE: Do you ever get into bed ready for a good night’s sleep, but all that happens is… nothing? You just lie there in the dark with your eyes open? A friend gave me a relaxation / sleep mask called “Mindfold,” that blocks out all light but allows you to keep your eyes open comfortably. It’s interesting to discover that after awhile, you’ll notice that you’re able to penetrate the darkness and see within it. It’s like using your eyes in a new way. Because my eyes are no longer receiving and processing visual information, one of two things happens: (1) the mind comes in and starts to turn the darkness into a movie screen for my monkey-mind thoughts, or (2) I relax into the emptiness and find a sense of ease in this unknown space. It’s like moving straight into a void of blackness and into “Darkness Visible.” Maybe the “Mindfold” returns me to the womb experience again and that’s why I like using it. I invite you to revisit your ideas of darkness and see where it takes you.

(Gojira showed me this and I wanted to share this with you all. I’ve never read something so inspiring.. I hope it makes me stronger and helps me to become patient and calm and happy and focus on my life till the right train comes along… This light is turned off.. )

Currently listening to
Chapter V
By Staind

today is a pretty sad day..

Today is a pretty sad day to wake up and find out about this. As of now, there have been 10 blasts with terrorists targeting foreign tourists in the city of Mumbai as well as common civilians. They went on a rampage in two luxury hotels and have randomly killed up to 78 people and even have foreign hostages within the Taj hotel.Why do people get motivated to kill others? I don’t understand this. Tell me why do people do this? What is their motive? Are people filled with so much hate? Foreignors will be afraid to come to this country and help our economy especially with economic slumps occurring recently all across the world. We are only shooting ourself in the foot if there are citizens of India out there that support the terrorist effort and think this is a good thing. It’s very sad and frustrating to think such illogical rash people with so much hate, are the ones representing our country across the news all over the world right now. It’s a shame to be an Indian right now. As far as the latest update, they think its a Muslim terrorist group. I am tired of Hindu-Muslim fighting. Im tired of the bloodshed. All over the world in fact.

I was brought up as a Hindu, For 12 years I spent my whole childhood living next to a Muslim family in the US, and they treated my family like one of their own. I turned out just fine, normal and unprejudiced against Muslims! Sure they had their habits at times which were completely different from what I was brought up with. Like going during their set times to pray and do Namaaz, and not eating pork. So many times my sister and I would go over to their house waiting for my friends to come out and play. My friend’s mother would tell us they were praying and would come out as soon as they were finished. I secretly used to love coming over at a time like this because I would sit quietly in the room they were doing Namaaz and gaze at them praying. I was so raptured and fascinated by the beautiful movements…the turning of the head, the bowing down and touching the forehead to the ground, the stray whisper of prayer under their breath, the closing of the eyes, the look of pure devotion on their faces. It really is magical to watch if you’ve ever seen someone do Namaaz.  Inspite of our cultural differences we were best friends that lived happily next door to each other for many years. I truly consider them as a key factor to my happy childhood. Their doors were always open for my family as our doors were for them.

Why can’t we respect each other and co exist? I don’t think there’s a country out there not fighting with someone else, marred by terrorism or genocide. Whether it’s the Irish and Scottish , Isrealis and Palestineans, Hindus and Muslims, Blacks and Whites, the fighting between African tribes, the list just goes on… what corner of our country is free from racial, social and cultural prejudice?I really believe this quote by Bill Hicks describes my feelings perfectly and my disgust with our world being consumed with so much hatred: “I’m tired of this back-slapping “Isn’t humanity neat?” bullshit. We’r e a virus with shoes, okay? That’s all we are.”   Why cant we live in peace and respect the next person’s belief?  As my last words on this issue,  I pray for the families out there affected by this disaster, I pray for those fighting the terrorists, I pray for the terrorists that they will be able see their wrong and mend their ways and for the hatred and bloodshed to stop. and last of all I pray for the one and most important thing which every country needs: Peace.

 

 

Currently listening to Fix You
X&Y
By Coldplay