sergio delaguera

I’ve been away from this site – and writing in general – for some time now. There are countless excuses I could lay down: I’ve been in and out of the hospital for the last month now. I’ve been looking for a new job. I haven’t had any “inspiration.” There’s only one real excuse: I’ve been lazy.

It’s hard to remember that people who talk about self-improvement aren’t perfect. We all fall into the same traps. What matters most is whether you give up for good, or you get back up and try again.

There’s also something to be said for accountability. People often read self-help books and blogs because they think there is just one thing in their life that, if they changed it, would make everything better. Of course, this is never true. We endlessly grind against the friction of life until we’re just smooth enough to pass through.

I hope you and I can continue this conversation. Maybe we can help each other buff out a few of those rough edges. I know I’ll keep grinding.

It often seems like the world is just a desperate race to the top. We all want to be the best, the strongest, or the brightest. It’s tough to swallow the idea that we’re not. We drive ourselves crazy with envy and greed, never allowing ourselves to be satisfied, even after we’ve reached a comfortable level of living.

Just remember it’s lonely up there. Power is never created or destroyed; it is simply recycled. Kings get usurped and empires are inevitably toppled. You will fall someday, too.

Do your best work. Remember praise. Strive to be better. Don’t worry about being #1.

I have been dying for a cheeseburger for the past two weeks. I have fever dreams about juicy patties. Intense longing for melted and processed “cheese product” haunts my waking hours.

I’ve also been vegetarian/vegan for nearly two years.

I know that eating that burger won’t make me feel better. In fact, I’ll probably get sick. I don’t even like meat! It’s emotional eating at its finest.

Desire takes many forms. For many Americans, that desire manifests in food. I’ve struggled with food my entire life. My stepmother raised me on fast food chains and I’ve come to regard those meals as comfort food. I grew and grew, in every direction, until I hit well over 250 lbs. in 2010. My first step away from this fast food lifestyle was adopting vegetarianism. Later, I became vegan, and ended up losing over 60 lbs. through healthy eating. I never felt better.

So why do I desire this burger? Because the burger is easy. It represents the sedentary lifestyle we’ve come to pride ourselves on, but never satisfies us. We dream of work: difficult, long, and soul-consuming work that produces something we can truly call ours. Giving up meat is not easy or fun, but it helps create a better world. Eating a burger will satisfy me in the short term and make me feel like a loser afterwards.

Life is filled with desires. What defines us is what we choose not to partake in. Whether that desire is a cheeseburger or an easy desk job, remember what you’re giving up. Ask yourself if you’ve stopped trying.

The word “hate” is so easily thrown around. People “hate” music genres. They “hate” a piece of art. There’s so many things in the world to love, yet we spend a disproportionate amount of energy on being negative. If we don’t like something, just move on. Why bother being actively hateful?

As a former self-proclaimed “punk,” there’s a certain pride in hating on the mainstream. When the newest pop song starts climbing the charts, you can set your watch to it; our punk friends just *cannot* wait to tell us how dumb it is. They’ll repeat this holier-than-thou mantra day in and day out. It wasn’t long ago that I finally understood the silliness of it all. I missed out on a lot of great music. Nobody thinks I’m a better person for telling them that I hated it.

It’s easier to love than to hate. It’s even easier than that to just ignore something that doesn’t appeal to you. Trust me, your friends will thank you.

The old man ignored the punks and the hippies and the upper-middle class white folk. Each step brought him a little closer to flying. The blue and red tights he put on that morning stretched and sighed. Limp, veiny flesh became muscle. A bulldog frown became a beaming smile, every tooth perfectly straight and gleaming. He paid no attention to the impatient businessmen shuffling past him. The old man hobbled up to the top of the street and let the wind blow through his cape, worn thin with age.

I keep waking up early from bad dreams. Dreams where someone’s endlessly chasing me. Dreams where I die. Infinite hallways and black rooms with laughing eyes peering out.

Waking up in the dark is always such a strange and quintessentially lonely experience. It never feels right. I stumble around in the dark, groping for my heather grey sweatshirt, trying not to wake up my girlfriend. The world doesn’t exist at five A.M. Nothing does except your house, maybe even your room, drifting in the ether. I make coffee for one. My dog is curled up on the couch, glaring at my blatant disregard for correct schedules. I know not to look outside. To peek through the blinds is to accept that there’s nothing magical about this.

It’s easy to write when you forget about the world outside. I peck away at keys, imagining this conversation with myself to be the last document of a drifting spacecraft. It wouldn’t be a great manifesto. It would be a simple acknowledgement, a nod, to waking up in the dark.

Habits are easy when we don’t have to think about them. How often do we forget to put on clothes before leaving the house? (Don’t answer that.) Yet many of us struggle with the same old issues: exercise, eat right, get work done. We focus on the current struggle instead of the future.  We lose track of how soon it will be before it becomes second nature.

It’s easy to forget how many habits we’ve learned over a lifetime. What’s one more? What’s a few weeks of frustration to a lifetime of mastered goals?

If I’m over a song two weeks after I made it, I’m not going to put it out. It has to last months.

- Danny Brown on perfectionism

I love to come back to these routines over and over again. It’s always motivational to see just how hard these people we idolize worked at their craft. Nothing comes easy, not even to geniuses.

My favorite part is from Susan Sontag,

I will try to confine my reading to the evening. (I read too much — as an escape from writing.)

What writer can’t relate to that?

As I get older, I find my number of friends dwindling. This is no cry for help or attention. I have grown into this new state gracefully. Often, I am the one who shies away from social events or even text messages. I don’t harbor any ill will towards my friends, for the most part, and when I do see them I usually have a good time.Why would I commit this “social suicide?”

Well, maybe they’re just not cool anymore. In the present era, the fires of our friendships are continuously stoked by an endless stream of updates. Social media has allowed us unfiltered access to our friend’s lives and, in the process, removed that sense of mystery so integral to our perception of “cool.”

By checking these streams over and over throughout the day, we’re seeing all our friends, all of the time. Most people don’t want that. We like to see our friends for a few hours and part ways. The distance gives people things to talk about. I cannot count the number of times that someone begins to telling me about an event in their lives and all I can think is, “I’ve already read about it in your multi-tweet flood earlier today.” The desire to see each other is lessened due to the endless imaginary conversation we’re having with everyone we know.

Imagine a married couple on the rocks. They’ve been together for years. They started deeply in love but their time together has exposed cracks and flaws in each other’s surface. They bicker over increasingly petty things and, eventually, divorce over “irreconcilable differences.” The real reason? That sense of mystery has vanished. Time together will inevitably bring up those facets of our personality we suppress in social situations. Those that have vowed to love us ’til death soon cannot stand to be around us. Remove that (admittedly tenuous) commitment and dismissing friends on the slightest grounds becomes easy.

People often don’t use these sites to see what their friends are up to, however. They’re perceived as a digital soapbox, a place to spew your opinions about anything and everything to a captive audience. There’s little room for conversation. If someone disagrees with my opinion, I can simply delete their comment. They are stuck, forced to digest my thoughts, thanks to the lack of social graces usually applied to real world interactions. This can easily get frustrating. Before the presidential election, you could easily see this in action. People began posting uninformed opinions at an incredible pace. There was no debate, simply lots of people yelling at each other. I can name a lot of people I lost respect for around this time. There’s nothing cool about hammering your friends with your opinions.

I understand I might look like an asshole. I understand there are options to hide people on almost every network. What difference is there, however? If I’ve reached the point where I can’t bear to look at someone’s Facebook posts ever again, I probably don’t want to see them in person. They’ve lost their cool. I know too much about them. So, I disconnect. I don’t read about what’s going on with my friends. I don’t know their opinions on politics, broken down into 140 characters. I want to see them in person, to have a good conversation. There’s just something about a meeting over a cup of coffee that can’t be digitized, the body language and inside jokes shared with a knowing smile.

That “something” is the cool.