A Look Inside

Last night, my cowboy boots, one again, took me to an unrestful night of sleeping in fits. This resulted in me awaking at 4 a.m. and thinking until now. I have many issues. Some that I am happy with and others that I completely dislike.

I show my emotions, so much so that I often make a fool of my self, but I like not feeling like I must mask my emotions. It's real.

I have very low self confidence. This I dislike. People in my life often tell me good things about myself. Last evening, someone that made a big difference in my life told me that I was a delightful person. This was a wonderful thing to hear, but I just can't see it. I long to, but I cannot. I try, but am unable to see myself in a good light. I want to see in myself what so many others say that they see in me.

I love strongly. I like this one, but it gets me into trouble. I care so much, and when I feel that others don't care as much for me, I become sad. I don't think that they care less, I think that I just care overmuch.

I know that the things that I think of are focused on me. Well, I believe that many people, due to other obligations, do not think of themselves enough. Not to a selfish point, but it is important to look inside at who you really are and how you really feel. Individuals need to spend time thinking about themselves, not about their superficial wants, but their true feelings. This is what I have been doing for a while now. It has taken me many weeks on my journey to self realization and I am not there yet, but I am trying. I think that I will be a better person if I know who I am. I will continue this journey until I feel comfortable that I know myself well enough to know my mind, my heart, and my feelings.

Dreams

My cowboy boots take me many places, but inevitably they always take me to my bed to rest. They have good intentions, they really do, but I don't rest. I am plagued with dreams. Good dreams, bad dreams, scary dreams and sometimes sad dreams. The constant is that they are so vivid and I am so involved that I do not rest at night. This is not a new occurrence, my sleep has always been like this. The only instance that I do not dream, and dream vividly, is when I physically work and go all day long until I am completely worn out. I think this is the reason for my love of cutting and splitting wood. Nothing puts me to actual sleep like an entire day of splitting wood.

My dreams have varying levels of intensity, but what bothers me the most about them, the part that really unsettles me, are my emotions. In my dreams I feel emotions so strongly, they can leave me with an ache in my chest when I wake. It is disturbing to feel certain emotions so keenly. The worst is when I have feelings in my dreams for people in my life that I don't have those feelings for. It can unsettle and unnerve me in a way that leaves me dissecting situations that I should have never thought about, that I would never have, if not for my semiconscious mind.

I say semiconscious because I wake at the drop of a pin. I can be deep into a dream in a matter of seconds and out of it instantly. I don't think that this is normal. I thought that it took time to get to REM sleep, which is where a person would have dreams, I think. I'm not sure on those facts, but that is my understanding. So, the fact that I can got to sleep have an entire scenario in my mind and wake in under five minutes fascinates me. It is the content of these scenarios that frightens me.

As a mater of fact, I just realized that the content of my dreams is never happy. Often they are sad and terrifying, but even the better dreams are nuteral at best. Almost a bitter sweet, maybe my mind realizes the unreality of the situation. I would really love to be an experimant for someone who studies dreams. I think that they could have fun with me.

Television Today

Recently my cowboy boots took me to The Maryland Renaissance Festival. On this trip I stayed in a hotel. The festival is very tiring so there were two night in which we laid on the bed and watched TV. I do not normally watch TV and when I do the modern technology of Netflix instant queue allows me to watch exactly what I want when I want.

This hotel had 24 channels. In our modern times this is few but this did not bother me I figured that we could find something to kill some time before we drifted to sleep ... I was wrong. As we began to try different channels I realized that TV is horrible. There was not one pleasant thing on. I went through each of our 24 channels pausing to see the available show and each on was featuring something horrible. One show was about shipwreck survivors who floated in a small boat on the ocean till they were rescued. The show was not positive. It began with five survivors and ended with two. I won't go into the details because it was horrible. This was the case channel after channel.

It made me think of TV years ago when it was about the good things in life and lessons to live by. Now it i about society getting away with horrible things that our children should not be allowed to see. Even the shows that try to show society in a good light feature the worse side of life. Shows such as Bones and CSI are featuring people trying to catch the bad guy and do right in the world, but they focus on how awful the world is.

There are those who say it is necessary for society to see the world as it is at a young age. I disagree. Censorship with reason is a good thing. I have seen children who talk about killing and death at ages that it is difficult to comprehend. I think that television has a lot to do with this. But I have swayed from my topic. I as an adult want to relax and not watch a show that makes me wonder on the horrible things in the world and focuses on the good. I hope that society will go back to that in their idea of an interesting pursuit. I am doubting this, but I still have hope.

A Different Time

This past weekend my cowboy boots took me to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. This is my third year attending the festival and it was probably the most necessary. My meaning is that this is my favorite thing. I have been stressed out and truly needed it. It allows me to see things differently. For many years I have believed that I do not belong in this time. I was born hundreds of years too late. When I attend the festival I get to dress up and be thrown into another time. There is so much laughter and merriment it is easy to forget the troubles of today.

Don't get me wrong, I am not naive about the times. I realize that dressing up is not what they considered it. It was everyday clothing just as jeans and a tee are today. I also realize that in these times all was not merry and life for them was much more difficult than today. Thus the interest to me. Because life was so difficult for people of times past they cherished it more. This, to me, is symbolized in the times of their festivals.

When I attend the festival I see people of our time living and laughing and it makes me forget when I am. In our time life is so easy and because of that people have so much time on their hands to be malicious. People of our time crave drama and create it in hateful ways through television, movies and even social networking. People of times past loved drama as well but it was created on the stage to generate happy emotions and tell stories, now people create drama to be cruel.

At the festival I feel like I can see the citizens of this time trying to go back to when life was a struggle to live and the good times were valued, not taken for granted. It lets me see that society of our time is not so bad as it seems on a daily basis. It gives me hope and I look forward to festival season all year round as I am sure those of a different time did.