forgiveness

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong." -Mahatma Gandhi

forgiveness is something that most people struggle with everyday. i think it may be one of the hardest lessons we learn in life. my mom sent this to me in an email during a time when i was working through forgiving all my transgressors. her message is short but somehow manages to capture the very essence of what may seem like a elementary definiton of forgiveness, but

"Just remember everyone is important even if they've wronged you. We have wronged plenty of people in our time whether inadvertently or on purpose or just to get even. No, you don't have to be bestfriends with everyone, but you need to treat everyone politely. Love and forgiveness go hand in hand. They are both wellworth the effort to give and a gift to receive."

i wrote this in october of last year-

i want to see a world that can unite even through all of our differences and fix this place we live in. i believe the simple act of love can heal a multitude of wounds. i want to live in a world that is not so focused on self and that actually cares about things that are outside of their realm. i believe that in order for these things to happen we as people need to stop focusing on all of the things that divide us and look to fixing the future.

i want to be part of something bigger then me. so i am going to stop letting the past dictate my future. the past is in the past, we can not go back and we can not fix it but we can try and learn from it. we only have today so i am going to live for the future. in the entire span of my life, the people who have mistreated or offended me play such a small role that i dont want to focus my energy dwelling on those situations. i want to start focusing on things that mean more then anger and bitterness like trying to heal a broken world.

for me to believe that love is the movement and to be a part of that i need to start showing love. i need to be able to show it to those who arent the easiest people for me to love, those who have angered or wronged me. so im forgiving and forgetting. i realize forgiveness is easier said then done, but it is something i am going to have to do every single day. there will be times i will fail because i am human but i can try and do my best to let go. it doesnt mean that i have to be friends with those people but it means i am not going to spend my time being angry at them. it means if i see them i can be polite to them but i dont have to have a conversation with them. i want to be the bigger person in those situations. it wont be easy but life isnt always supposed to be easy.

i dont want to look back on my life and see that i never actually did anything. so this is just the first step towards becoming the person i want to become.

coloring outside the recipe.

so i've been trying to learn to cook this past year, but i've learned it's very hard for me to follow recipes. i kind of look at cooking like some look at blank canvas, as a space to create. i like to just do my own thing, throw in a pinch of this and a pinch of that and see how what happens. it drives my dad nuts since he is a firm believer in following the rules. but i've always enjoyed coloring outside the conventional lines, because i think that, sometimes, it's what you discover beyond those lines that turns out to be the greatest. how will i ever discover a new combination of spices to give basic spaghetti sauce a twist or learn that sometimes throwing a pinch of brown sugar in a vegetable soup makes it so delicious if i only ever stick to the recipe?

the kooks-sofa song

this is a fan video made from 2 people in Russia, but i like the way they used the stop-motion type animation.

grow baby, grow

okay, i'm trying to grow my hair out so it's healthy and long. for the past 3 years i have bleach washed it twice, laid out in tanning beds for almost 2 years with it unprotected and cut my own split-ends with dull scissors. this post will be dedicated to my hair growing attempts.

May 18, 2010
i read this long hair blog http://www.longlocks.com/how-to-grow-long-hair.htm a couple weeks ago and i've been trying my hardest to abide by her rules. no, i don't want hair past my butt however, i would like full, healthy hair that's almost to my elbows. i bought some of the products this lady suggested and the stainless steel scissors and i cut off the rest of my dead hair. so i'm praying that this actually works, cause otherwise i'm just gonna resort to extensions and i know those are a pain in the butt.
i'm a person who always wears her hair down, i hate up hair on me. i talked to an old friend at a baby shower a couple weeks ago, whose hair is so long that i thought she must have extensions, and she told me that her hair grew the most when she wore it up for about 6 months and didn't really style it that often. now, i know that me saying that seems like a huge "DUH." but for someone who only wears her hair down, actually realizing the truth to wearing my hair up was a huge surprise for me...
so we'll see how it goes, i'll update on my progress. but for now, no dying, no styling. only trimming and conditioning.... yikes, keep your fingers crossed for me!

regret

it used to really annoy me when people would say they had no regrets, i always thought you couldn't really say that statement without it being false. but after my really rough times and stupid decisions, especially ages 19-20, i can say that i do not regret anything i have done.
 sure, i've done some really stupid and some terrible things... but i look at the person i've become because of them and it's a whole lot better than the person i was. i guess i can understand when people say they wish they would have just taken the easy route in life but easy is boring and each bump in the road has made me a little bit stronger.
 i am not finished becoming the fully-developed human being i hope to be one day but i would not have come this far without those mistakes and the hard life-lessons i had to learn from them.

song for this ranting: Ooh La La by Faces

layout

i've decided i'm a fan of this plain blog set-up so i'm just gonna keep the basic template. who knows, maybe the creative thoughts will flow now...

Across The Universe

watched this movie again last night. every time i watch it something else stands out to me, this time it was the song "Let It Be". carol woods voice gives me the chills, she comes in at about 1:23... this movie has definitely become one of my favorites.

A Fine Frenzy - Electric Twist

alison sudol is the cutest person in the world... lovelovelove a fine frenzy.