Valentine's Day

Well.
It's that time of the year again. You can't go anywhere without seeing people who are in love. Everyone's in love on February 14th.
Naw, I don't want to do some deep entry about what love really is (Mostly because I've already done that: http://changetheworldplease.blogspot.com/2008/08/i-love-you-so-much-i-would.html).
And I don't want to go all cynical about love and relationships (Mostly because I haven't done that yet, and don't want to disrupt my perfect record).
For everyone out there who actually is in love, there's about three people who's hearts are broken. And have been broken for a long time. This isn't a statistic that I found on some government website.
I just made it up.
But, when you've got that broken heart, how should you deal with it? Well, match.com has some ideas, for starters. While the original ideas were much longer, the gist of their seven tips was:
Court your career, focus on the negative, (my personal favorite) make out and move on, shush yourself, pump yourself up, go all natural, and trash it.
Do we want to simply be making out and moving on, while constantly focusing on the negative in order to shush ourselves?
Obviously, match.com was made to get people together, not help them cope with being apart.
Anyway.
I don't want to talk about match.com, either.
If you've got a broken heart this Valentine's Day, here's what you do in five tried and true steps:

[1] Do not watch the Lion King, under any circumstances. Simba and Nala are a sure fire way to make anyone tear up.

[2] Make Valentines. Make them make them. Don't just buy a box and write your friends' names in them. Get out the construction paper and the ribbon and make a pop-out Barack Obama Valentine for your best friend. Not only will they appreciate the gesture, but you'll be so insanely proud of your creativeness that it just might distract you.

[3] Say no to band-aids. They don't work. They only make you think it's better, but it's really not. It's been proven that a band aid could make any injury feel better. Actually, I don't know if it's been proven, but the point is that band-aids don't last and shouldn't be used for something this serious. Try The Office instead. The Office is more like a splint, or a cast, or really really strong Tylenol.

[4] Play Scrabble with your grandmother, or an equivilant relative. Be sure to use the letter 'Q', though. The best words to use it in are: Quick, Queen, Quarter, Quack, Quaker, or the two very best Quartz and Quiz (you get the 'Z' in there, too).

[5] Cry, if you have to. Sometimes, crying really puts things into perspective. After you've spent a good hour or so at it, not only do you get a headache, but you start realizing what actually caused you to start crying which gave you the headache in the first place. After you realize that, you usually come to the conclusion that maybe it wasn't worth crying at all, because now you just have a headache. This is the point where most people go to sleep. Once they wake up, they may not be cured of their broken heart, but they now have a new perspective on their brokenness, all because they cried about it and gave themselves a headache. Make sense? Probably not, but that's the reason why it works.

And a bonus #6 for this Valentine's Day:
Love like crazy.
No limits. Everyone gets some love. Hating anyone is a sure fire way to keep your heart in its broken down stage. Don't be so afraid of getting hurt that you forget how to love. Keep an eye on your heart, and you'll be just fine.

Happy Valentine's Day.

"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give." [Winston Churchill]

think about it....

Easier

Without a sound
Without a noise
Without a whisper
Without a word
Voices fill the air
thickening the atmosphere
Screaming silently
Forgotten voices
Forgotten by the world
Cruely forced to retreat
to disappear, to remain forgotten.
Their existences only distub
the world's complacent comfort.
God forbid that be disturbed.
And so the voices continue
Silently haunting,
Crying for remembrance
Without a word
Without a whisper
Without a noise
Without a sound.

"Sometime they'll give a war, and nobody will come" [Carl Sandburg]

Yes we can, I guess

Change.

I've heard so much talk about it this past year. People like to talk about change, I think. It's one of those things that just sounds exciting. There's been a constant flow of change talk, so it's basically my turn.
The dictionary defines change as:

to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc., of (something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone

"if left alone" implies that change comes from outside of yourself. Perhaps people don't have the ability to change just out of sheer will-power. Or, the dictionary just doesn't know what it's talking about.

First possibility: change does not occur naturally. If you think about it, this really makes sense. Changing something means making it different than it was before, different from its natural state. Change is one of the most un-natural things, and yet it happens everyday.
Paradoxical, much? Eh, not really.
Alright, so change doesn't just happen on its own. Change has a cause. All the time.
People change for many reasons, but there is always a reason. Maybe these people do change themselves. I'm inclined to think that those kinds of changes don't last for very long.
In order to for someone to truly change through and through, there has to be an outside factor influencing the change.
Change is still a lot of work on your part, though. Change may not be easy, but it is possible.

Second possibility: the dictionary gave a bad definition, meaning that people are perfectly capable of changing themselves from within, on their own. This is really appealing for people to hear. It's nice to think that you can conquer the world --or at the very least your own life-- without anyone else to help you. I haven't found this to be the truth.
When I am in most desperate need of changing, I am also the most incapable of changing anything about myself. The little things -yeah, maybe those can be changed through will-power. But, the larger and more important things of life are the things that people actually need help to change, at least if that change is going to last.

Quote: a bird does not sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.