Happiness is a illusion.

Happiness is just an illusion, a mask that can temporary blur the reality and truth.

Say Satre's theory "Existence precedes Essence" was completely valid...where would that leave homosexuality? One of the biggest arguments with homosexuality today is whether or not you are born gay.

Existence precedes Essence states that when you are born you are born with no essence. Your essence is something that you come to identify through existence. All the knowledge you have comes from things that you have only directly experienced. So homosexuality would then be clumped with essence...therefore homosexuality is something you learn over your years of living.

I don't think this is true but every time there is a discussion with Satre I can't help but think about homosexuality.

Home is where the heart is?

Having two homes is very unsettling. Whenever I'm home in Manhattan Beach, I want to be in Chicago. Whenever I'm home in Chicago, I want to be in Manhattan Beach. They say that home is where the heart is so why is it that my heart always seems to be wherever I'm not?

My dad says that this will never go away and he should know...He's the man that's been away from his home since the age of 19. I guess I'm the same age but at least I'm on the same continent as my family.

I've seemed to really discover myself in Chicago which is great. The only thing I'm worried about is that I'm going to lose it when I go back home. Here, I surround myself with people who only think highly of me and believe me in me and just flat out love everything about me. If anyone makes me feel bad I just don't hang out with them...Simple as that. At home it's more difficult than that. The people that make me feel bad are right in my very own family.

Honestly...I'm afraid to go home. I'm losing my support system for a few months and I don't know if I'm ready to handle everything on my own.

Of course I am writing all of this while spending my last bittersweet Monday as a freshman packing up all of my stuff. It's only understandable that my current emotional state is sad and reminiscent.

I find writing in this blog very therapeutic. Whenever I'm feeling a strong emotion it helps me to discover why I'm feeling that specific emotion. It's also just nice to vent freely and to not have to censor anything.

Story Idea: A homeless man who lost touch with his family 7 years ago ends up running into his niece (or granddaughter) when she comes with her youth group to feed the homeless. She tells him their new address and gives him a little money for transportation. He shows up at their house for dinner.

I need a personal hard drive.

I am absolutely terrified of death. What scares me the most has nothing to do with the physical pain. It's the fact that our minds completely shut down instantly when we die. All of those memories, all of that knowledge, all of that hard work will in the end amount to nothing.

I wish I could hire Apple to create a personal hardrive just for my brain. That way when I die I will have everything in my brain backed up for someone else's benefit or just for resources (Let's be serious I would never curse somebody with my mind. That'd be cruel.)

I would like to believe in a heaven. After all there is nothing wrong with harmless belief. But now that I have been losing touch with my religion it's hard to find the reassurance in a heaven. Even if there is a heaven, I don't believe that our personal selves make it up there. Maybe our spirits do. But how is that reassuring? People make the mistake of grouping our personalities and our spirits together. Sure we may have individual spirits, but they don't have any resemblance to our human selves. They are our essences. Our core. So even if my spirit lives on Madison Swart will not. Madison Swart is apart of my spirit. My spirit is not apart of Madison Swart.

The only way I will ever be at peace with death is if I die feeling like I made a difference. Enough of a difference to be remembered. The only way we live on after we die is through our impacts on other people. Though it's not enough for me to just impact those close to me because after all they will eventually die as well.

No. I need to create something meaningful. I am a very selfish person. The only way I find happiness is by making other people happy.

Story Idea: Comedy. A man dies and finally gets to meet his spirit. His spirit is completely disappointed in what this man has amounted to.The spirit then shows this man who else he has been a spirit to in the past. A wide range of successful and different things. Perhaps a king, a philosopher, a lion, Martin Luther King Jr. etc

Questions to think about: How will it end? Do the spirit and the man part ways?

I am going to start creating story ideas from the big things that are floating around in my mind. That way, instead of useless babble, it might turn into something.

The beauty of confidence...confidence is beauty.

I believe the most beautiful thing about a person is confidence. In order to achieve confidence, you need to accept and love your flaws. So if I want to be the most beautiful version of myself...I need to achieve this goal.

One of the reasons why I got this hair cut is for that. I feel like a majority of people hide behind their hair and with this hair cut my facial attributes are thoroughly exposed. The parts I like and the parts I don't like.

I have always had trouble seeing how people could find me physically attractive. The only thing I found attractive about myself was my blonde hair and my hazel eyes...but the thing I need to start realizing is that it takes more than just those two things to be seen as beautiful.

A lot of women only think they're attractive if guys find them attractive. Which is sort of how I've been thinking. "Okay if guys think I'm attractive then I must be attractive. I must be doing something right." Do you realize how wrong that sounds? I fail to see myself as beautiful. How in the world am I going to make it if I don't accept everything about myself? I can't just trust other people with something as delicate and personal as my beauty.

We are stuck with all of our physical attributes. We might as well find a way to see our flaws as beautiful otherwise we are going to be one of those people getting plastic surgery.

If you believe you are beautiful, along with your flaws...then you are confident. If you are confident then you are sexy. If you are sexy AND confident you can bet your bottom dollar that you'll have them boys lining up on your yard for more than just your milkshakes.

I also cut my hair because of respect issues. I am sick of being seen as the short, innocent, naive, cute little blonde haired girl. I am sick of guys taking advantage of me. I already got sexually assaulted while I was sleeping which is not even close to being okay. So I figure that this hair cut makes me look older. More sophisticated. More lovely. More elegant. As long as I feel all these things I won't feel as helpless and I'll be able to self defend myself more.

It's time for me to grow up. My life is moving in a direction where I am taking big responsibilities and I need to start receiving respect.

So. I am deactivating my Facebook for about a week. Here is my reasoning:

There has certainly not been a week during which my profile did not exist. Even if I did not log in, my online identity was always visible. So for five continuous years, my identity has existed on this random website that was started by an even more random former Harvard student.

Often times we do not realize what role something plays in our life until we are forced to no longer have that in our life (this works with people too). Thus, I have decided to proactively eliminate Facebook from my life in order to analyze the role it plays in my daily routine.

I will “not exist” in the Facebook world for a week. I will delete anything related to Facebook and will deactivate my account (Facebook allows you to do so and to come back).

I will write at least a few sentences everyday for the next week about how not having a Facebook account is affecting my daily routine.

I realize that to many people out there this all seems silly because they either do not have a Facebook account or only log in every few weeks to check it. I acknowledge that you cannot relate to this and respect that, but I also know that many others out there can relate completely because Facebook has become as ritualistic a part of their lives as brushing their teeth and eating.

Many who do have a Facebook may also think that I am over-dramatizing this one week experiment for the sake of the blog.

I disagree.

I do not hate Facebook. I actually appreciate it very much and love that it allows me to connect with friends from all over the world and show off my art.

What I do hate are my habits when associated with Facebook. I believe that I have become too dependent on it and that I have illogically created a ‘need’ to check Facebook everyday and to update my friends with pointless statuses about things.

I hope to understand this ‘need’ and to manage it better after this one week experiment. I expect that I will survive just fine without Facebook and that I will still have a social life. I want to use Facebook as a tool and I want to control Facebook. I do not want Facebook to use me as a tool and to control me.

It'll be a much needed experiment. Everyone can agree how different I am when it comes to Facebook and how many of the things I do are now measured by "How many likes this will get"

As an artist and a human I need to stop depending so much on Facebook and approval from other people. It has totally warped my sense of reality and it's something I need to work on. My dependency on it is not healthy and there are other things I could be doing this break then spending it on Facebook.

it's about time i realize that birthday's are just ordinary days. they aren't magical. the only interesting thing that happens is you grow older...but that has to do with science. not magic.