Reminder

I feel like things had been happening to me. I wasn't really experiencing things, they would just happen to me and I would respond. Instead of actively participating, I would just sit back as different events occurred in my life. They would occur and I would respond accordingly.

I realized recently that this isn't a great way to live. I don't feel nearly as *alive* as I used to. I didn't know how to break out of this slump though. I would reach different breakthroughs, however. I remember feeling great because I realized that all of the resources I needed were there for me(mainly my friends and family). But I would struggle with how to utilize those resources. I would talk to my friends and family but i wouldn't really make any progress.

I'm not sure what's changed in my life, but I just feel different now. Different in a good way. Instead of letting things happen to me and responding, I'm actively participating. I'm taking action. I'm being proactive in a way that I haven't in years. It feels great.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. I would stop breathing(10 seconds or more) 95.5 times an hour. That's WILD. Surely that had an effect on my everyday life.

Now that I've been diagnosed and started treatment in the form of a CPAP machine, I've felt a lot better. I wouldn't say the difference is night and day, but it's absolutely noticeable. I don't fall asleep at work anymore. I've been having much more meaningful conversations. Not only have I been more physically active, I've felt better as I exercise.

I feel a lot more normal. It feels like I've reached a mountain peak and I get to look down(or back) on the world below. I'm reluctant to say that I'm *okay* now, because I felt that I was okay many times before, only to find that I still had a ways to go. But I do feel very optimistic with how things are progressing.

I've found that I've experienced a lot of love from different friends and family. I also have to give credit to my primary care doctor and seeing a therapist. Seeing them has helped me sort out what's real, what's not, and how I can improve.

There's a lot of music out there about how love is the only thing that's real and worth striving for. Money and possessions are awesome but at the end of the day love is all you really have(or something corny like that, lol). I've been fucking with that message so much lately. Yeah.

I feel good. I feel happy. I felt joy today for the first time in foreverrrrr

Siegfried

I'm a big believer that you've got to go through the struggles in order to appreciate the peaks. Sometimes you have to suck it up and take it on the chin. You learn and you grow from that kind of thing.

I don't like it when people take the approach that they need to get better as soon as possible. You should take the bad with the good. You can try to do whatever it takes to feel better ASAP, but I feel like you won't genuinely feel okay. It's okay to be down in the dumps(healthy even, in spurts). Take your lumps and when you're ready, get back to killing shit.

Summer Friends

It's no secret that I've been having a rough time for a while now. I had a lot of good stuff that I'd write but i wouldn't post it cuz this blog would turn into the most EMO of emo blogs.

But i do regret not posting them. It'd be like when an artist drops a real dope, dark album out of no where. I missed out on a chance to chronicle how i really felt during one of the darkest times in my life.

I will say this though. One of the biggest things I've learned while gong through it is that family and friends really are the most important things in my life.

I never saw why it was dope important that you be at every hangout, every party that you're invited to. There's always next party. I'll see you motherfuckers then.

Now that I'm older and the chances to see each other are lessening, I see the value in all of us being together, reminiscing and building memories together. If you miss the birthday party, you might miss out on the one chance you get to see your old college friend. You might not be able to see them again for another couple of years.

So try not to make excuses to not see people. Shared experiences come few and far between the more we grow and tack on more responsibilities.

Be there for each other, tell your loved ones that you love them, and appreciate the times you get to spend together, no matter how often it is. God bless

One In A Million

Listen to One In A Million (dvsn remix) by dvsn #np on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/dvsndvsn/one-in-a-million-dvsn-remix

This reminds me, I gotta make a "late Sunday night driving home and thinking about how your next girl has no IDEA what she's getting into" playlist. Lol

Skipping Stones

https://youtu.be/_mcJaH0XJMg

Holler at chore motherfucking ghorl!

Wolves

There's a point in everyone's life where your parents are no longer the perfect beings that you look up to. It used to be "momma knows best" or " I know pops will have my back!"

Now you're witnessing as your mom is losing her memory and your dad just cussed out this poor restaurant worker for a simple mistake. Now you feel responsible for them. Now it's on you to take care of them.

But wait, these are my parents, they're supposed to take care of me, not the other way around. Wtf is going on?

I remember I had a high school teacher who had a nervous breakdown and told us how he was struggling. He said there's a point in your life in your 30's where you're stuck in between three generations. You're 30 years old, competing with your peers. You want a better job, better car, better relationship than them. You also have parents who are aging and you have to take care of them. On top of all of this, you're a brand new parent and you have to figure out how the fuck to raise a baby. Add all of this together and ain't no way BUT to feel absolutely FUCKED.

Well fuck you Mr. Hardin, that shit doesn't wait til your 30's. I've got a friend whose dad attempted suicide. Cops busted down his door, sent him to the hospital, the whole 9. Meanwhile, my friend was working thousands of miles away, unable to come help the situation. Thank God everything worked out in the end, but how the fuck are we supposed to deal with something like that?

I have another friend who's working hard to support him and his parents. He's working hundreds of miles away and the only way to help his dad with his mentally ill mom is an occasional phone call and visit every couple of months. He talked to me about it and we were able to get both of his parents on Medi-Cal and CalFresh. His dad thanked him and I because his mother was able to get the medical attention she needed and now his dad has been getting the best sleep he's gotten in years. Thank God everything worked out in the end, but again, how the fuck are we supposed to deal with something like that?

I have a post buried somewhere deep in this blog(too lazy to find and link to it) talmbout how maturity doesn't come until you're not ready for it. That absolutely applies here. Me and my friends are in our mid 20's, struggling to get our acts together. Meanwhile, life is hitting us hard and we gotta deal with taking care of our parents. Our parents used to be a symbol of strength, safety, and togetherness. Now we can't look at our parents without seeing a shell of their former selves.

No longer does my mom's advice scare me because I'm scared of how she'll react if I don't follow what she says. Her soon to be 55 year old soul just doesnt elicit the same fear in me that it used to. She used to yell at me and it would physically shake me. She probably stands like 5 foot nothing, but she always commanded this fear and respect from me.

Now that I'm getting older my mom isn't passing off this facade that she's this all wonderful person. She's allowing me to see the more human side of her, and its scary. Now I see why my parents were so quick to make me respect my grandparents. I'll always remember taking my grandpa to his cancer radiation treatments, and my dad would always tell the nurses and doctors, "be careful, he's the only one I got left."

What's cool is that through all of this, I've grown an even deeper appreciation for every little thing I get to do with my family. Any time we take a walk together, any time we get to take time out of our busy schedules to have dinner together, any time we get to spend together period, I'm appreciating it more and more.

My mom's been a manager for years and years and years now. I just had dinner with her at the mall(Genghis Khan all day erryday) and told her about my struggles as a trainer at my job. She was able to listen to me and give me great advice on how to proceed. I'm soooo appreciative of the fact that even though I'm old and grown and the list of things she's able to school me on is getting smaller and smaller, we were able to connect and have another mother-son conversation that I'll always remember.

When was the point that you realized your dad wasn't as strong and sharp as he used to be? My dad died when I was 11, so I never got to see much of that, but I think it's an interesting question to pose to people my age.

Small Talk

http://pic.twitter.com/gGiKjF8pKO Corny Ryan might be making a comeback y'all.

I Got A New One For Ya

"I'm content, I'm not bitter, I'm happy. I reached all my goals."

-Momma Bear Manalili

Look out world, i aint gotta worry about momma bear. Commence the fuckery!

Sasuga!

I spent most of 2015 heartbroken and depressed. Mind you, I never was diagnosed with depression by a doctor or anything, I just had a lot of symptoms you see in someone who's depressed. (As an aside, I do believe it's disrespectful to people who are going through depression to jokingly say you're depressed, if you know fully well that you're not.)

Anyway, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. I didn't know how to deal with things. Every day and every week felt like a struggle. I felt like I was drowning. Any chance I got to grab my breath, I took. I felt out of control and it was stressful.

To complicate things, I was experiencing burnout at work. It was weird because I love my job and I love coming to work. Anyone I work with will tell you that I always walk around smiling like a fucking weirdo.

However, I was working too hard. I didn't take a real vacation from June 2014(Copa Del Mundo en Rio De Janeiro, holla!) til Christmas 2015(Philippines). I would both dread and love coming to work. On one hand, work was my safe haven, where I was good at what I did, everyone loved me, and I didn't feel so much like I was drowning and gasping for air. On the other hand, I needed a fucking break.

I learned that I'm a fucking weirdo because I would show up to work even if I was sick. I would rather be at work being productive and helping people, than at home JOKOing and playing video games. I'm so selfish that I would rather put my coworkers at risk of being sick than stay home, call in sick, and recover. Really weird, contradictory feelings here.

I also started to feel the phenomena (there's gotta be a name for it but I can't think of it) of "I go to work, I come home, I pay my bills, and that's my entire week. I don't do anything meaningful to me aside from my career. I felt like I was living to work instead of working to live."

That really bugged me because having been blessed enough to have traveled around to many places, one of the main things I've learned is that many Americans work too hard and don't put enough focus on enjoying the other things in life. There's more to my life than my career. Somehow I turned into someone I spent so long avoiding.

There's a theory called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that I've always been interested in. I'm probably going to butcher this(we dont like to fact check too much on this blog, lol), but the gist of it is we as humans need to meet our basic needs before we can address bigger, grand scheme kinds of things. It's imagined as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are the absolute basics we need to survive, like feeling secure enough to know that no animal is going to come and bite my head off in the next 30 seconds. Once I feel secure enough with that, I need to feel safe enough to take care of basic bodily functions like pissing and shitting. Once I get that taken care of, the next level up is something like building meaningful relationships with others. You can't reach one level until every other level below it is taken care of.

Eventually, you reach the self-actualization stage where you can start thinking about philosophy, mankind, earth, and big picture theories. I feel like I was able to reach this stage in college. I didn't necessarily have my shit together, but I was taking care of myself enough to think a lot about  random, crazy things. Coincidentally, a lot of those things ended up in this blog.

Anyway, during my drowning period, I never really thought about the crazy things that I would when I was still in college. I was too busy worrying about what the next hour, day, week had in store with me and how I was going to deal. It was really weird how every hour, day, week would blend into the next. I was just showing up to places without really being present. Next thing I know, the day is over. The week is over. Jesus Christ, six fucking months have passed, and I dunno what I really have to show for it.

So now I can say with confidence that I'm working my way out of that weird slump. I'm a little disappointed because I don't get to blog about anything that I feel is worthy of posting when I'm in that weird drowning state. But now your boy is BACK and I's gon' keep posting that provocative and interesting SHIET for yalls(and mostly my) reading entertainment!

Learn from each other

I've talked before about how important it is to consider who you talk to first about something. I'll find the link later and link it to this post(or maybe I won't! Fuck you! lol). Like when you come back from a first date and start talking to your friends about it, they help you digest and figure out what happened and how to deal with what happened. The person you choose to share that experience with has a good amount of say on how you feel about that first date.

On a semi-related note, I've seen advice that you should be careful about venting to your friends and relatives about your significant other. You don't want to tell your best friend about each and every fight you have with your significant other, because fighting and conflict is natural in any relationship. Eventually you're going to tell your best friend about 500 different fights, and your best friend might start to think your significant other is a fucking douchebag, when in reality you guys are just going through the typical growing pains that any couple goes through.

So you don't want to tell any one person about each and every fight that you and your SO go through, great. But how do you go about it so you're not just holding everything in? I guess the best way to go about it is to spread the wealth and go to different people each time. But what if you only want advice(or simply to be heard) from one or two people? Everyone else gives you shitty advice or is a bad listener? What then?

That's an interesting decision that any boyfriend or girlfriend has to make. I dunno why this interests me so much but it does.

In other news, new Majid Jordan in a couple of weeks, new Kanye in February, and new Mayer later this spring. Let's. Fucking. GO.