all good things

i'm happy. everything is good. 

good friends. good grades. good city.

everything is constantly up and down in LA. i go from loving the city to loathing it in about twenty-three seconds. sometimes it's almost impossible for me to let go of the constant annoyances i'm faced with, and i've just got to stop and think about what i already know. people can be cruel, but people can be really great. don't ever let yourself lose the ability to be surprised.

it's so easy to get caught up in the ugly things sometimes, isn't it? but then in the end you've just got to stop and think that there isn't any pretty without knowing what is ugly. nothing would ever seem decent if things didn't turn out shitty every now and then. 

i've started this whole 'live in the now,' thing. i'm not denying the importance of remembering the past and learning from every second of it. but at some point you've just got to stop and realize that the past is in the past, and living through moments past is so incredibly dangerous. in that same light, isn't it true that we can look towards the future with hope, always remembering that hope is virtually all we can do. 

we can live in the now. we can make the decisions we feel are right using the knowledge we've accumulated through the past, and we can do this all in hopes that the future will turn out however it is that we like. but really, that's it. the end.

i'm not sitting here saying that you shouldn't count on your life being decent. but we can't, can we? i mean i would like to say that global warming won't eventually kill us all, and i can certainly hope that it won't. but what i cannot do is wish myself back to when the world was genuinely good (if it ever was genuinely good), and loathe the life i'm living for not being as great is it might have been. and i cannot live in a manner that is entirely dependent on things going my way. because they won't. that is all i know.

i can inhale and exhale. i can appreciate whatever is going on within this minute of this day, and take what comes to me as i stumble upon it. i can learn from the shit in a way that makes me appreciate the good things a little bit more. and i can appreciate what is real and what is now.