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one should not leave their tumblr signed in.

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mosquito muscle fibers

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columnar epithelium

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cross section of roundworm

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cross section of roundworm

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Halloumi is a multipurpose cheese. (Taken with Instagram)

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Halloumi is a multipurpose cheese. (Taken with Instagram)

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Ok. I'm finally giving in. I now have instagram. Here is my morning coffee. It is next to some flowers. It is beautiful. NOW LIKE IT! (Taken with Instagram)

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Woman in the Waiting Room

As I sat there in the oncologist’s waiting room expecting my patient to come out from his appointment at any moment, I couldn’t help but notice her. She was sitting diagonally across the room from me in the opposite corner. Her clothing was uninteresting, beige flats, stockings with lines torn into them, a skirt coming just past her knees that was the color of fresh tilled earth, and a blouse to match her shoes with a flaccid collar so large it was almost clownish. I couldn’t help but notice the latent tension that emanated from her entire body. She sat there on the edge of her seat like an uncertain little school girl on the first day of class, waiting for her name to be barked during role call. Her hands clung to a raggedy black purse, thin white fingers wrapped around the edges with even whiter knuckles. There was a stony expression on her face but underneath I detected a note of silent urgency. Despite it being comfortably cool in the room, I could still see the beads of sweat clinging just above her pursued lips. She had auburn hair, shoulder length, and bright blue eyes behind which there was a fear so subtle it was almost imperceptible to the undiscerning eye. She had practiced this. Many times. I don’t know how I could tell but I just could. This woman had been waiting. Not just in the waiting room, then and there. No. She was taxed. She had been waiting like this for a while. On her face was the semblance of the coexisting strength and anxiety of a mother waiting up hours after curfew for her child to come home from their first night out with the family car. But there was something slightly different about this look. It was more personal, if that’s even possible. Somehow, I had never seen anyone in my life who looked so simultaneously strong and determined yet frightened and alone. And then I noticed that underneath her blouse, one side of her chest was sunken in. Her left breast was missing. Who knows how long she had been waiting for good news, she looked tired, yet still, there she was. Sitting in a waiting room by herself, both dreading and longing to hear her name.  Only one question remained in my mind: was she waiting to live or was she waiting to die? That, I couldn’t tell.

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Action is the antidote to despair. - Joan Baez

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Dancing Through Life

I'm coming to realize that it is incredibly easy to go through life being selfish. Life just seems so simple when we can do whatever we want with disregard to the feelings and needs of others. It's hard to be selfless. Altruism does not come naturally to most of us, myself included. But what I'm finding is that always getting what you want doesn't necessarily lead to an improved quality of life. From my own experience, I've seen two different outcomes to chronic self-serving behavior and neither is attractive. The first is obvious, when we are selfish we tend to hurt others. Actions have consequences. By causing suffering to others we create a more hostile environment for ourselves and our overall quality of life declines. The second outcome is more subtle but may in fact be the more costly of the two. When we act selfishly on a regular basis we make ourselves the prisoner of our own, small sphere within the greater cosmos of life. Ego-centric behavior may get us what we want but without us realizing it, it also makes our world smaller. In this way, to take a line from a favorite musical, we are only skimming the surface of the depth of experience we could be getting out of life. Like a molecule of water within a vast ocean, we can enhance our lives through positive interactions with others. But if we become self absorbed, we can only ever see things in terms of ourselves, thus, our experience of existence will be truncated beyond the surface of our own skin due to our inability to connect. By closing ourselves off to others through our selfish behavior, we are unknowingly disassociating ourselves from reality. The reality is that we are not in a void. We ARE individuals but individuals among a mass of billions of others. To treat life as if we are one of the few novel things on this earth is to deny the real nature of things. As with anything, balance is important. Sometimes it's ok to be selfish. People need to take care of themselves and sometimes we need to be a bit selfish in order to do that. But we have to take care not to use that as an excuse to explain our chronic inability to consider others. Some people are inherently selfish. But hopefully, they will be lucky enough to experience the negative effects of their behavior. If not, they run the risk of dancing through life, skimming the surface, numbed by obsession with satisfying their own desires. The result is a vacuous existence and absent is the infinite depth of connection that can come from caring for the needs of others over our own selfish whims.

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Wisdom

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. - Abraham Maslow

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A New Project

Hello. My name is Dana and I am creating this blog to fill, what I feel, is a creative void in my life. Also, writing is generally therapeutic. A little about me...I'm 22 years old; currently going back to finish my bachelors degree at a New England liberal arts college after a two and a half year hiatus; and I am employed as a Certified Nurses Assistant or what I like to call a professional ass-wiper. Despite being a messy vocation and one that constantly tries your patience, I do enjoy my work. How would I describe myself? I am a dreamer, a romantic (of the tragic type), educated, well spoken, polite, animated, funny, giving, and I generally care about people. My faults? I can be a selfish bastard at times. Also, despite the image of confidence that I like to project, I am incredibly insecure and petty. Please feel free to add more if you know me. I also happen to be a grateful and recovering alcoholic and gay (note that my sexuality is the last thing I use to define myself). If the thought "he can't be an alcoholic he's only 22!" has crossed your mind, please remember that all the old, drunk derelicts in your own life had to start somewhere. I've been fortunate enough to catch it early, but enough about that for now. 

I aim for this blog to have structure simply because I like structure and find it a comfort. I'm going to dive into events and experiences from my past up to the present day, relive them, analyze them, and hopefully come to some sort of resolution or obtain a grain of wisdom and insight (two separate grains really). My mission is to better understand myself and to find whatever meaning I can in my own life. How sickeningly cliche. But I persist, I firmly believe that knowledge is power and that each and every person is on their own journey, grasping out in the dark for some sort of purpose and if they can't find one, at least a measure of comfort. Author and journalist Daniel Pink argues something similar in his book A WHOLE NEW MIND. In an age of abundance of material goods, jobs being outsourced to asia, and the automation of many things people are losing the sense of purpose they once had in past decades and left with more time on their hands but no closer to that sense of meaning that we all strive for. I do not believe, as some do, that the answer lies somewhere out there in the world and just needs to be found. Instead, imagine that each and every person carries around their own meaning, their own purpose, and merely has to develop the faculties to access, understand, and accept it. So many people define themselves by what they do, the things they have, and the people they surround themselves with. This is understandably so, because I think that we all tend to project our own personalities onto the people, places, and things in our lives and thus we draw them into our own versions of reality because we see ourselves in them. At this point we make the mistake of thinking that those things are what define us and give us meaning. False.

I have come to believe that this elusive feeling of meaning or purpose can only be found by delving deep within and scouring the depths of our characters, thoughts, feelings, and past experiences. Once we fully understand, love, and accept ourselves, it is then we can see our true connections to the world around us; unadulterated by rash emotion and insecurity. If one chooses to undertake such a task, it is essential to be brutally honest because I am here to tell you that denial is a powerful enemy and one that lays waste to the lives of even the best of us. I AM afraid. I am afraid of the things that I will learn about myself. I also fear that, after all the searching, I won't find ANY meaning. But if I've learned anything at all, it is that if we wait around for things to happen, the world will pass us by. I must be my own catalyst for change.