Survival of the Fittest
Take away feeling;
Give them hearts of stone.
Let them build their towers
All alone.
Bury their homes into the ground,
Let them adapt to darkness
And never be found.
Sins,
Sins,
Take them away.
Let from the sky fall
Acid rain.
The harshest conditions
Shall not surrender to them.
They shall surrender to the earth
From which their bones were made.
Steal from them
All things sweet;
Let them forget the texture
Of meat.
There is no God
To watch over them now;
No God to blame.
Each disaster
Shall be a disaster woven from
Their own fingers;
Each disaster
Their own creation.
If they should fall,
Let them hit the ground.
Only the toughest
And most grateful
Will survive.
Censorship
There is this shitty thing that happens
When a writer is reluctant to write
What they feel; they are afraid
Of what everyone else will think.
As writers, it's quite idiotic to give a fuck
About our reputations because they claim:
We are a dying breed.
We cannot be categorized
Or placed into labels.
Do not let the world enter your bloodstream:
It will interfere with your writing.
It will no longer be yours if you keep
Second guessing yourself.
We must learn to write for our future selves
In consideration of our present lives,
Trying in vain, to forget our troubling pasts.
The Contrast
Why do people freak out so much about sex? As long as you use protection, it’s no big deal. I lost my virginity at 14. I lost the guy at 14 ½. Did this devastate me? No. Physically, I was slightly changed. Mentally? Barely a dent. Rinse and repeat getting guys, having sex, and then “losing” said guys several more times over the years. Having sex is something you do out of lust, or a feeling of obligation, or, honestly, sometimes pure boredom. It happens. It ends (sometimes more quickly than you hope) and you move on. It doesn’t really affect your day to day life.
That’s why I was so “heartlessly” annoyed when one of my college roommates made a huge deal about the first time she had sex. When I arrived back at our dorm after a late night study session, I was ready to crash right away. Unluckily for me, I found Kelsey sitting at the edge of her bed, looking distraught. Her eyes pleading for me to talk to her before her lips did.
“Jen, I need to talk to you, but please promise you won’t judge me.”
Suppressing my sigh, I agreed to talk and assured her I wasn’t the judging type. She then went on to describe how the night before she got really drunk at some party. Clearly exaggerating, she made it sound like she drank as much as six men. Afterwards, Kelsey let some guy she had a crush on for weeks take her to his apartment. They fucked. Or as she put it they “you know...did it.”
I think she wanted me to be sympathetic and tell her that this one decision didn’t define her. But I’m not good at that type of thing. Because, to me, I can’t even see why this would be a remotely interesting conversation to have. Of course it didn’t define her. Had she confessed instead that she had coffee for the first time last night, I would have felt the same. Bored. Rather than assure her things were fine, I asked a few questions to see if I were missing something important. Nope. When I asked her if there was anything else she wanted to talk about before I went to bed, and saw the look in her eyes, I realized we would never be friends.
To her, she had lost her innocence. She knew nothing about how that felt. But I did. I had lost my innocence just the summer before. His name was Jordan. We both had the same summer temp job working at a burger stand. It would have been the worst job ever, considering I’m a vegetarian and all, but since Jordan was there, it was the best job possible. At first, we just casually flirted. But then things became more serious.
You see, this burger stand was in a pretty bad neighborhood. One day as Jordan and I were flipping burgers as usual, this punk kid comes up to the stand and tries to rob it. Boy doesn’t look a day over 17 and he’s pretty scrawny, so I think he’s bluffing. I walk out of the stand, get right in his face, and tell him to get the hell away from us. That’s when he pulls out a knife and slashes me across the arm. I stand there dumbly. When Jordan rushes out, holding a knife himself, the kid scrams.
Jordan rushes me to a hospital and makes sure I get all cleaned up. He convinces me to go to his place so he can order us some pizza to unwind after the craziness. But first we have to go grab my stuff from the dumb burger stand. When we get there, our boss is standing around pissed. When somebody from the next shift arrived and nobody was there, he was called. Jordan calmly explains what happened. Our boss doesn’t care and says we aren’t getting paid for that day at all and maybe not the week. My hero, still calm, talks about lawsuits and poor training and I forget what else, but I remember the result. I got a raise. I was really starting to like this boy.
Back at his place, I expected some of the second kind of sex I mentioned to you before -the kind you have when you feel obligated. But Jordan didn’t try to have sex with me at all. We started going on dates and sex didn’t seem to be on his mind. When I finally seduced him one night, I expected it to all be over. It wasn’t. We kept dating, it just now included sex on some of those dates. I really really liked this guy.
Finally the day came when I lost my innocence. That day, I was scheduled to work, but Jordan wasn’t. We agreed that I would meet him at his place after I got off. When I showed up, his mouth dropped as I came in. He couldn’t understand why I had worn long sleeves, flipping burgers, on a day that I knew would be 90 something degrees out. I sat on his couch. Suddenly shy, I slowly pulled up one of my sleeves.
“When that kid cut my arm, it left a big scar. I don’t want people staring at it.”
Jordan came and sat next to me. Very gently, he traced my scar with his finger. He lightly kissed my arm and then my forehead. I remember exactly what he said.
“Our bodies are our life’s timelines. Freckles show time in the sun. Stretch marks show the birth of a child. Your scar shows a time when you were brave. You should be proud of it.”
That was the moment I fell in love and lost my innocence. You see, when you fall in love, it changes how you see the entire world. You realize everything isn’t about you. It shows how amazing a person can be, and in contrast, how awful others have been. People are right when they say you can’t be truly happy without being sad. Love brings the greatest happiness, but it also exposes you to the greatest pain. So don’t worry about sex. You lose your innocence when you experience love in all its contrasts.
How to Get a Boy to Like You
How to get a guy to like you:
One, always dress your best
Two, always act confident..
even if you aren't (why should
it matter if you aren’t if you can
fake it?)
Three, if he wants to touch you,
let him
Physical contact is the most important
thing in differentiating a friendship
from something more
Four, wear perfume,
appeal to his senses
Five, talk about HIS interests,
nothing is more important
than what HE likes
When I was younger,
these articles were my bible
They taught me to bow down to boys
like they were my God
To do what they wanted,
they were always right
That my own worth,
was based on how much
they valued me
And that in every aspect of life (or
what they taught me life was),
I was failing
Those articles never told me
“Be Yourself”
“Don’t change a thing”
“You are enough”
That is what I really needed to hear
I wish I hadn’t placed my value
on some boys who didn’t even know
what they wanted
I was waiting to be loved
By people who didn’t know what love was
I didn’t understand that being myself
Was the best thing I could do
But now I do
And I am so much happier
Because of it.