everythinginitsrightplace

I never knew
I never knew that everything was falling through
That everyone I knew was waiting on a queue
To turn and run when all I needed was the truth...
But that's how it's gotta be
It's coming down to nothing more than apathy
I'd rather run the other way than stay and see
The smoke and who's still standing when it clears

= the story of my adult life so far.

...but thankfully these things don't last forever. it's time to turn the page

greetings from new york!!! i've been here for no more than a day and already I feel like i'm going to be an insomniac while i'm here. I slept as much as I could after being awake all night only to wake up at 7:30 pm west coast time. shitty shitty. and taking off and landing in airplanes scares the shit out of me. but onto matters of more importance... you all should read thisss. it's an excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays on self-reliance that was posted by Dustin Kensrue of Thrice to shed some light on the change of pace presented on their newest album. I simply love this man and the rest of the members in the band, they really have their minds right where they should be. He answered all the "why does the album sound so different??" questions from disappointed fans with a simple "cause we like it". and that's all that's necessary. It's one of the most self-empowering things I've ever read and it needs to be shared, so I hope you enjoy it :)

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility … when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each or us represents…but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its member.
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is it’s aversion. [Conformity] loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life. may serve as the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find people who think they know what is your duty better that you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loathe to disappoint them.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood,’ Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson