Do you like dreaming of things so impossible or only the practical...

I want to start this entry off by saying: Hey, hey Jason. Where the hip hop at?!

Okay, now that I have said that, on to other things. Today was great! I didn't go to my nine o'clock. Sleep seemed more important. We never do anything in reading, and I am sitting pretty with my grade in that class right now, so why not? Danielle and I had Chinese for lunch, which was a very good choice. Little Panda....mmm. We spent the afternoon at my parents house baking. We wanted to make brownies for Kim's good show gift. We pulled in a little "Sex in the City" reference by saying we loved her on a brownie. Miranda's doctor-boyfriend said" I love you" for the first time in icing on a gigantic cookie, so that's just what we did. We wrote, "We love you!" on a gigantic brownie in bright pink icing. She loved it. Mission accomplished.

Tonight after the play we ate way too much pizza and talked politics. Sad, isn't it? A bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around at a Pizza Hut at 11pm talking about economic policies-- Kerry vs. Bush. Somehow, we all still had a blast, even though I don't usually like to mix my loves (food) with events that cause stress or arguments (elections).

I want to go to sleep, but when I lay down my mind wanders through pages of books I have been reading-- little snippets of text that are highlighted in my mind. This is one of the passages I can't get out of my head. It's from Sylvia Plath's journal:

"It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles."

I am beginning to believe that Sylvia haunts me at night, daring me to be more...more. In bed I think of her words... I see her image on the cover of her works and she feels familiar to me; her heart, her mind-- through her writing. Sylvia's writing places a great deal of emphasis on human relationships. As she wrote above, there is a beauty in finding someone who you can be open with. She also talks about the idea of sensuality quite a bit; the importance of touch, the feeling of someones hand lightly grazing yours-- be it a stranger or a lover. The concept of touch has me thinking tonight, as I sit here in my pajamas. As humans do we all yearn, do we all ache for physicality? Studies have shown that without human touch, babies cannot live. This reminds me of a passage from "Tuesdays With Morrie" by Mitch Albom. He talks about touch and how we desire it so much when we are young; we will die without it, we crave it so deeply--it is a necessity. Morrie says that desire does not end, but we live in a society that believes our need for touch ends when we are children. In reality, adults desire touch as much as we did when we were young. My question is: Does that desire decrease when you know it can be met immediately? Does it grow stronger, more passionate, when there is no one around?

Another passage from her journal that I cannot get out of my mind is this:
"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."

I want to live and feel everything, but I (like most everyone) feel limited. Maybe we limit ourselves. I am thinking of ways in which I limit myself every day; laziness, fear of rejection, inability to speak my mind when it matters, able to speak my mind when it doesn't. There are so many things I want to do. It's like when you are a kid and the world is laid out before you. One day you want to be a doctor, the next day an astronaut, the next day a firefighter. I still feel that way. I want to be a writer; I want to be a high school teacher; I want to be a photographer; I want to be an editor; I want to be a professor; I want to be a mother; I want to be a wife; I want to be single; I want to live in France; I want to live in Texas; I want to learn how to make pottery; I want to learn how to garden; I want to learn how to cook; I want to learn how to do my taxes; I want to learn a foreign language; I want to learn how to quilt; I want to learn how to make furniture; I want to learn how to play the piano or the violin. Everyone's desires are scattered, and we will never conquer all the things we wish to. But, I do wish I could achieve all of these goals, because with the broadening of horizons we have a renewed and deeper understanding of life. I want to see life from all angles. I want to write about life from all angles. I want to experience everything: every emotion, every climate, every sense. Plath is right-- we are horribly limited. That's why we need to get out there and live!

I will close with one of my favorite quotes from Plath; she writes:
"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
I think it totally works with the aforementioned quote about being limited. As people say, there are two sides to every coin. Typically those sides cannot work together; there is no compromising. Black and white, never gray. If wanting both sides of the coin at the same time makes you "neurotic", then yes... I am "neurotic as hell", but then again-- aren't most people at this age?