Stevi's Storied Life

Ah, The Who. They're coming in April 2015. Want to see them!! Anyways... That brings me to today's musing. We spend most of our adolescent and early adult years figuring out not only the ways of the world but who the fuck we are. Where do we fit in? What do we want to accomplish? Who do we want to spend our time with? What do we want to spend our time doing? What's important to us? What feels right? What feels wrong? What makes us happy? What makes us sad or angry? What makes us wanna kill ourselves? What makes us feel alive? How can we do everything we want if we don't have money? How can we make money is we don't have a job? Why are we working at this job we hate?  Oh yeah...so we can do things we want to do. But when will we ever have the time? It can be overwhelming enough to send us into an apathetic stupor. I don't know what I want so I'll be content with nothing. Trust me, I've been there. I still get in that mode sometimes. It sucks. It m...

Billy Joel's "Vienna" captures the mood of the following pretty well, I think. I find myself thinking about time a lot, which ironically enough, you could say is a waste of time. Alternate realities, parallel universes, things of that nature. If I had only done _______ differently, I could be a different person right now. It's not because I'm not happy with the person I am in this reality, it's just that it's fun to wonder sometimes. I bought a book called "The Time Paradox" by Philip Zimbardo, and it has me analyzing my time perspective. There's past negative, past positive, present hedonistic, present fatalistic, and future. I rated highest on past positive, followed by present hedonistic, future and ranked lowest on past negative and present fatalistic. All in all a decently healthy perspective...or is it?  If you'd like to see where you rank, go to http://www.thetimeparadox.com/zimbardo-time-perspective-inventory/ Anyway, th...

I'm taking my second semester of Creative Writing and I've been having fun with different points of view. First is great because it's personal, in your face and carries a lot of voice. Third is similar since our professor wants us to write in a limited perspective (staying inside one character's mind) rather than omniscient (knowing everything before the characters do, like God). Last week I tried second person, which is also similar to first, but it's a liberating point of view because you're not tied down to the pronoun 'I.' That's not to say that just because you use 'I' you're doing nonfiction, but it's easier for me to transcend my own lens of experience when I'm in a different point of view. There's a certain disconnect that comes with using 'you.' Here's the piece I wrote, if you'd like to read it. The prompt was to come up with a strange first sentence and build from there.   Hallelujah You’ve n...

More and more light is being shed on mental illness recently, especially with movies like Silver Linings Playbook and the death of Robin Williams. There's a quote of his that I love, "You're only given a little spark of madness--you mustn't lose it." I love that quote because it's true for us all, whether you've been diagnosed or not. Madness is both a blessing and a curse. It makes us do things we normally wouldn't, whether it's something positive, like creating an inspired work of art or something dangerous, like playing chicken with a car in the middle of the highway. I've done both during bouts of mania. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder about five years ago. I'd experienced bouts of severe depression off and on throughout my mid to late teens, where I slept for twelve hours a day and cried all the time for no apparent reason and when I was nineteen the proverbial levee broke and I experienced my first full-on manic episode. Wha...

I feel like I should share my beliefs, not because I want to shove them down anyone else's throat, mind you. You have to believe what works for you, whether it makes sense to others or not. For me, conventional religion doesn't make total sense anymore. It was created by man to control man and is used as a reason to hate and kill people who disagree. Don't get me wrong. There are many valuable lessons to be learned from the Bible. Love your neighbor as yourself, do not kill, love your Creator, and respect the people who love and care for you, to name a few. I'm on board with all of those. I was raised Methodist, and while I do not regularly attend church anymore, I still hold my upbringing dear to my heart. If not for church, I wouldn't have developed the beginnings of my relationship with the Creator, whom I still refer to as God for all intents and purposes. Do I know if God is a He? No. I'm open to Him being a Her or having no gender at all. It doesn't ...