a tandem bicycle hits the ground twice as hard

A heart

Is a pendulum

Passing time.

I’ll be fine.

My eyes tear bloody holes:

Holes in her face.

Holes in her heart.

Holes in all the wrong places.

For no fucking reason they do,

For no fucking reason do the superman-style lasers of

Feelings

Drip from these unfeeling sockets and soil the layered newspapers that line my skull.

And for someone that thinks they know everything

The frown on her face is a hole in my universe.

And for someone who wants her to be everything

When she is not

It tears down the walls.

These paper mache walls,

Like a pre-kindergarten volcano,

Stolen from the porch before the vinegar could ever hit the baking soda.

Who would take a volcano?

She took the volcano.

And I don’t know how or why, or what I could do about it, even if I knew

How?

Or Why?

But I do know that, 

For some reason,

I and She exist somehow in tandem,

Somehow in unison;

Like a two person bike,

I am falling fast towards the ground

Hoping that somehow by sheer force of will

I can overcome gravity for the two of us.

And I could right this bike.

Even as the rubber runs away from me,

As the sound shoots through my ears:

That great pendulum’s brawny swing stops the movement,

Stops the fall of our bike,

Stops the air that supports us.

And it leaves my heaving chest

Pounding in her dry cold breath

As the only thing that supports this bike

Stopped in space and time.

Photo via Amazon.com

Does shampoo cause cancer?

We use shampoo in our everyday life. “Dove,” “Head & Shoulders,” “Suave…” There are over 10 categories of different shampoo, but often times we’d use shampoo without investigating what we’re actually putting on our head. 

Photo credit: bustle.com

Cocamide diethanolamine, or cocamide DEA, is a kind of emulsifying agent used in the making of shampoo products. According to the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer), cocamide DEA is an IARC Group 2B carcinogen, which means it has the potential of causing cancer. 

However, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has declared that there is no need to worry. In a document that gets updated only when needed, and hasn’t been updated since the March of 2018, it says “FDA believes that at the present time there is no reason for consumers to be alarmed based on the use of these substances in cosmetics” because the NTP‘s (National Toxicology Program) study result in 1998 didn’t find a connection between DEA and cancer. Plus, if the customers still want to avoid using carcinogen-related products, they can do it simply by “reviewing the ingredient statement that is required to appear on the outer container label.” 

So, it would be overreacting to panic. Nevertheless, checking the ingredient statement of the products that we eat, use, spray, and wash with, is indeed important. We use shampoo everyday, but do you check what you use, everyday?

Photo credit: goodhousekeeping.com

optimistic and curious

I am optimistic and curious

I wonder how this world works

I hear raindrops dancing on the roof

I see the lightning hiding behind mountains

I taste the sky covered with dark clouds

I smell the wild wind blowing over

I want to fly under the sunshine

I am optimistic and curious

I pretend we have good weather today

I believe tomorrow will be better

I feel unicorns do exist

I touch the clouds with my fingers

I worry I can’t do it alone

I cry for my melted ice cream

I laugh when others cry for their melted ice cream

I am optimistic and curious

I understand sometimes life can be hard

I say everything will be fine

I dream that peace will be around us all the time

I try thinking about nothing

I hope I can change the world once upon a time

I am optimistic and curious

photo credit: miro.medium.com

over spending

Getting out of a mundane lifestyle is refreshing. Especially if you are a boarding student. It is really painful to spend your whole week in a tiny room. So school provides weekend activities for student’s entertainment every week. The activity could vary, from hiking to a mall trip.

            Personally my favorite activity is a mall trip where I can have fun eating and shopping. However, every single time I go shopping I tend to overspend. I always think that it is ok to waste my money on stuff that would be a waste for me eventually. Because of my habit, I have bunch of waste that I don’t even look at. I always regret when I look at stuff that I bought a while ago under my bed covered in dust.

From this point I will not over spend on stuff that is unnecessary.

pc; forbes

Noodles

Recently I had a dream no different from most, I was at a grocery store with an old friend of mine. It used lightbulbs that just made the store appear sickly (obviously not LED), the flickery hospital lighting that evokes the smell of latex gloves from nowhere. Anyways, apart from the lights that bothered me a lot, the shelves were only partially stocked, but they were all stocked wrong and without any tags. This made it especially difficult to find the ramen that my friend and I had gone in there looking for. After wandering through rows of of tall, black, and poorly built shelves with pretty much anything thrown on them, we finally came upon the milk section. Now this was a bit of a problem because we had gone in there looking for ramen, and I was now browsing cartons of milk that looked as though they smelled like goat urine. After my brain had somehow remembered that the dream had begun with the task of looking for ramen, we began to move away from the milk and towards the rest of the store.

Now, personally I do not know why I so vividly remember this dream. I can only attribute it to me having had a boring day, and the dream being the only interesting thing that had happened to me since the morning.

When we finally came across the ramen, it was behind some boxes of Chinese snacks that I can only describe as milky bread sticks. The ramen was also sub-par because it was the off-brand Korean kind that was made to burn your eyebrows off that once made me sneeze chili powder. I was upset but still willing to take it, because after an extended period of time in a poorly managed grocery store that I have dreamt about many times before, I was getting fairly irritable. However, this is when my hulking, pigmy of a friend decided to grab it and run off.

I was furious, I had just wasted so much time staring at milk, wandering through aisles of nothing, and putting up with stress-inducing incandescent lighting, all to have my crappy ramen stolen away from me. Normally, this is where I would wake up, barge downstairs, and make myself food, but my dream-self was feeling particularly determined tonight. I continued searching for ramen, I spent hours searching the shelves of the store, running into half-asleep janitors, and many soulless patrons, destined with the same fate as I was.

After my search of the store came up empty, I somehow stormed myself to the loading dock in the back of the store that for some reason was also the location of the dumpster. It was beside this dumpster that I had found almost exactly what I was looking for, garbage bags full of contaminated ramen noodles. I do not know why I thought to look in the trash bags, I do not know how I knew they were contaminated, and I also do not know why I eventually took two bags home, but I do know that the story did not end well for me.

I don’t remember exactly how the dream ended, I eventually woke up, and I remember being fairly put off by the end, but as is common with dreams, I quickly forgot it. I didn’t find much meaning behind this dream. This is by no means the first dream I have had about grocery shopping, those have always been quite common for me. I didn’t think about the dream again until I came home that day from school, and saw that among some of the things my mother had bought from the grocery store was a few packets of ramen. Needless to say, I did not eat the ramen. That was the night I discovered that perhaps store bought ramen wasn’t for me, that was also the night that I discovered I was clairvoyant. So if there’s anything you should take away from this experience, and I seriously doubt there is, I’d say it’s probably to use LED bulbs, because they won’t cause irrational and dangerous decision making like incandescent bulbs do.

Photo Credit: Imgur.com

minty

By the river with the low hanging cypress trees and the strong rapids, down by the field, she was sleeping, 

envisioning God,

envisioning freedom, 

envisioning life. 

But reality woke her from what she knew to be a dream, and not her future. 

she was neglected, hurt, defined by the scar on her forehead. 

she was abused for the color of her skin

she was owned.

she was cheated by the world, just like each of her brothers and her sisters.

photo credit: phoebewahl.tumblr.com

she was alone. 

she waited for an answer, an answer that could only come from liberty or from death. 

so minty ran. 

minty ran far,

one-hundred miles far following the North Star that shown bright in the sky.

when she was lost, He guided her to the river that took her home, 

the river that took her away from the heat of hatred and grimness

the river that washed over her face, cleaning her from the dirt of her “masters.”

in thirty-days time, she felt 

the warmth of acceptance, 

the warmth of respect. 

she stand there,

with the right of her freedom in her grasp,

the sun reflected in her tear-filled eyes. 

Minty felt the freedom embrace her,

she felt her brothers and sisters around her,

she felt the comfort of a home.

I Want to Believe

dear world, dear life, dear faith,

tell me your secrets,

fill me in on your knowledge,

and cast me away with your limitless being.

dear god,

whoever or whatever you may be,

listen to my problems, answer my prayers, make right all the wrong,

and give me hope.

oh please

give me hope that you can fix the evil in this dark world we live in.

oh god…

I want to belive in you,

I envy and pity those who do,

because, how great would it be to live

and believe that someone in the sky will make everything okay,

to believe that you are protected by one overarching being,

to blame your stupid mistakes on the ideology that

“everything happens for a reason, it’s god’s will,”

to not fear death because heaven awaits the good…

How great, how easy, how amazing would that be,

but how naive do you have to be to believe.

dear self, dear time, dear life

i’m afraid

my being is all in my hands.

Photo via Pinterest 

Eat your greens

People are getting more aware of obesity, and a lot of people are starting their own way of healthy life style that would allow them to rationalize eating junk foods. Of course, there are plenty of people who are eating healthy and working out constantly to be healthy, but some people are exceptional. There is always that people in your life who is complaining about their weight gain, despite their “healthy ” life style.

It is indeed ironic to watch people who are complaining about their weight, when they are eating junk foods all the time after working out. Healthy diet is the way for you to be healthy. So eat your greens.

PC: pinterest

go be a night owl

It is so good to stay up late. 

If you stay up late only once in a while, that is NOT ENOUGH and please change it as soon as possible! If you like to stay up late constantly, that is GREAT and please keep doing that as long as possible!

There are plenty of reasons to go to bed late, for most people it’s something really “important” and “urgent” they have to do. Either of these two reasons is definitely WORTH burning the midnight oil for. 

This is a slippery slope, people who pull an all-nighter will get up late the next morning, then they can continue to go to bed late again. 

Studies show, people who habitually stay up late gain weight really easily. In the late-night, your appetite will be better and the rate of metabolism will be affected as well. Then you can have more weight than others who eat the same amount of food and go to sleep regularly.

And you can also gain confidence through staying up the whole night. Your vision will become poorer and poorer, too poor to see your face with the poor skin condition in the mirror clearly. Of course, you will feel much better when you can’t see your pimples, dark circles, wrinkles, receding hairlines…

The most important thing is that both your focus and memory worsens, and productivity decreases. So you will forget unhappy things more easily, and you can enter the realm of true happiness.

So, for pursuing TURE happiness, please be a night owl and continue to stay up late.

photo credit: dailytitan.com

Bapples

“an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” Horseman69 said to me today.

“ow about bananas?” I asked.

“too much work peeling them.” Lazy ass.

“but you also need to peel the apples.”

“no, you don’t.”

“fine.”

“and they get gross quickly, if you have left a banana in your bag, it will smell fantastic.”

“so does an apple.”

“no, apples rot slowly, they wouldn’t smell like someone has died in my bag after a day.”

“fine.”

photo credit: dmcdn.net

I like bananas as much as the Minions do. I always have a banana in my hand when I walk out from the cafeteria after breakfast.

Bananas can make people happy, at least they make me happier. In fact, they do possess tryptophan, and it will convert into serotonin, which is the happy-mood brain neurotransmitter.

Happiness is prominent to our health, so why not eat bananas? A banana a day can also keep the doctor away. 

photo credit: media1.tenor.com

Btw, the Minions love apples as well, they call them “bapples.”

So maybe we shouldn’t be picky between apples and bananas… a bapple a day keeps the doctor away.