oh my god this is seventeen year old me here you were awful twelve year old me i am ashamed to be the same person as you

letter to myself as a 17 year old, from myself as a 12 year old.

here is what i want you to do:
never get a car
wear only secondhand/recycled/organic cotton
go raw (http://weoverstep.com/blog/2008/08/31/raw-vegan-food/)
start writing regularly-on your typewriter
if you haven't learned guitar already, GET TO IT!
ditto for spanish
tarot
try to get your dad's house to get wind turbines-mom's house solar panels
plant a vegatable garden
continue writing this blog
do some activism
clowning
henna
travel
just be the person you wish you were, and the person i wish you were.
thanks.

i have made a decision; "it's not natural" is not good enough reason to dislike something. if human beings lived in a way that was "natural", we would destroy the earth very quickly and millions of us would starve. not that that's not already happening, but it would happen more quickly. for example, farming is not natural. it is a manipulation of living organisms to suit our needs. without farming, however, providing food for six billion people would be impossible.
to logically disapprove of something, you should have reasons that its negative aspects outweigh its positive ones. emotional reactions are not sufficient reason.

CLICK

dalton+kushner

i learned recently that, in science, it is a commonly accepted fact that it is impossible to create anything. there are a certain number of atoms in the universe, and they are impossible to duplicate or destroy; they can only be shifted around. the amount of matter doesn't ever change, it's just translated into other matter.
so, it's not really possible to create anything. therefore, everything comes from nature. nothing is artificial. this computer that i'm typing on right now is made up of melted, hardened dinosaurs. so is the chair i'm sitting on. my glasses are made from age-old sand and metals. i am made from the food my mother ate while she was pregnant. it's amazing to think about, actually.

a similar principle goes for the imagination, i think.

"Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?"

-tony kushner, angels in america

nothing is new. the only revelations people can ever come to is to rearrange preexisting knowledge or facts into a different manner or form, so that they are understood differently.