This photo I do develop and print and whenever I look at it, it chills my heart and I can’t look at it for long. I realize that it brings to the surface the dark aspect in the depths of my soul, which terrifies even me. I can only recoil when confronted by beauty or evil.

—narrator, Soul Mountain

For some, every day is a struggle.

Me? I tend not to notice.

(Finally.)

I’m a re-gifter and I don’t care who knows it. Some gifts are right for some people, and other gifts are right for others. If someone is thoughtless enough to get me a gift I wouldn’t use, I’m doing them a fucking favour by finding a better person for it. Sometimes, the best gifts are second hand, when one knows that it’s right for oneself, but also knows that it would make someone else even happier.

Andrew and Alex are going on a backpacking trip to Europe until the end of this month. They’ve requested a list of people interested in receiving information and details about their trip, so naturally I let them know that I’d like to have some documentation during their journey.

And while I understand their motivations for trying to have such an inter-personal correspondence, I don’t understand why it has to be because of a trip.

Isn’t everyday life interesting enough to talk about? Can’t one learn as much on the bus ride to work as being some place completely foreign? I never decided to make an extra blog or something for my trip to Hong Kong/China/Macau, even though it was still a somewhat life-changing event. To me, the month was another part of my schedule, something I had planned to do. It was as significant as anything else going on in my life, or maybe I should say, anything else going on in my life was as significant as that. I hope I never have to rely on travel to consider my life important enough to discuss with someone.

Perhaps, I feel like I still have so much to learn about everything else that I would gain as much just thinking in the shower as I would being exposed to new things. Every day can be exciting. Every second, there’s a chance to learn and grow. There are still so many things to figure out.

And I probably consider myself to be one of the biggest.

Ever see those guys sitting alone in the pubs, with the same burger and fries, the same worn paperback, the same pint in pilsner? I have yet to see one of them who wasn’t creepy. It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, but there’s a certain quality that just screams out, “NOT HERE TO EAT OR READ”. Maybe it’s given away in tint of their beards, the scraps of food stuck to their faces, or the sort of laid-back, eyes-over-the-glasses attitude.