a pulp fiction of sorts.
instagram: vanhelenn
tomorrow always comes
you’re totally fucked if what’s familiar to you is also what’s toxic.
thanks internet
i posted something on blogsecret and it got 40 notes or something. communal catharsis whatup.
optimism from my sickbed
i realized something pretty awesome today. even though there are definitely things that i want that are out of my grasp, i’m still happy. you can definitely want things and not have them but still be perfectly okay. i’ve got amazing friends and memories to keep me warm and i know how to take care of myself. it’s a nice place to be.
if something good happens to me, you bet your ass i’m going to overthink it and rip it apart until it’s something bad.
confession, i am one of the fools who associate being gentle with being weak.
among all of my super important and significant pictures of pretty things, i thought it would be in poor and stupid taste to not say something about yesterday’s events.
whenever tragedy strikes, social media is both the most useful, but also harmful device to me. like all other social media things, it takes a physical human action (socializing) and it breaks it down, makes it easy, makes all the trivialities and natural human errors of the act obsolete. awkward silences are diminished for elongated typing time. don’t like the way you look? photoshop it. but when it comes to grief, social media is awkward because, something that has taken me an arduously long time to learn, grief is just really awkward. there’s no right approach to it, everyone can agree on that, but yet every way we try to tackle it feels wrong.
yes, you want to contact everyone you know. yes, it’s sad, yes, there’s more news every moment, an aching update that people just need to know about. this is all true, but when put at the volume and the amount that social media rushes it at you…it’s overwhelming.
my comfort from yesterday came from the moments where i turned away from twitter and breaking news coverage and the headlines. i looked out at the prudential on a sunny day, i saw my friends from school and i walked up and down commonwealth avenue. i rode the 57 bus to kenmore and back with strangers. i did my normal routine, and they did theirs, and we continued onward. Boston will move on, and it will move on stronger. I am so sad and confused as to how somebody could target a city that is the epitome of youth, brimming with possibilities and new experiences, so harmless in that it’s just like the college kid version of a city; growing up and just trying to find themselves, unapologetically living life to the fullest because they can rest while they’re reliving the crazy memories. But if there’s anything that Boston, my second home taught me, it is to have confidence that bad things are fluid and there will always be remaining good things, and to hold true to the tenants of youth: strength, passion, and light.
my favorite philosophy professor just made an exception to wave me into his senior class next semester, and it’s a freaking philosophy of emotion course. i know i just tweeted about this but i’m just so, so excited and flattered. it’s moments like these that just feel like i’m doing something right. yay
