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Thursday, November 15, 2012 Y 3:16 PM
been busyyyy, and having what I would call a mental vacay. I remember reading this thing, I believe in the nytimes, about how it's good to just unplug rather than be busy for no reason. Now I will attest that even on a mental vacay I've physically busy, and working on stuff like the following:
and this is what's coming up nexxxxt:
Labels: boyfriend, call me maybe, don't stop, jorge cruz, life, monamiejorge, roby howler, sir nenis, smile, tras récords, WEARE18 0 comments Monday, July 9, 2012 Y 6:36 PM
by Mia McKenzie
"I think I’m a pretty self-reflective person. I think I try really hard to listen and learn and grow. I like the idea of evolving. Some days I evolve more than other days. Some days I do the opposite of evolving. Which, I guess, is still evolving, but in less desirable ways.
The hard work of self-reflection and emotional evolution are everyday practices. Every day, there are things I can do to grow, even if just a little bit. Doing these things won’t make me perfect. Nothing will ever make me perfect. But I can grow to be better at this human being thing. Here are some ways I know that may be helpful to you:
1. Stop hiding behind your intellect. Or your philosophy of life. Or your spiritual practice. Okay, so you’re smart enough to win arguments with carefully constructed points. Okay, so you learned a long time ago that you have to put yourself first. Okay, so you’re a Buddhist. So what? You want a cookie? Nah. You fucked up, and you need to own it. When you gossip about people and call itspeaking your truth, when you exhibit the same behaviors as people you claim to despise but somehow find ways to justify that behavior in yourself using skilled debate and footnotes, when you are adamant about showing love to the earth but terrible at showing it to other human beings, something aint right. You need to get on that.
2. Accept that racism/sexism/heterosexism/transphobia/ableism and all sorts of other really effed up stuff exists in the world. That we’re not making it up. And then accept that you are either part of the solution, or part of the problem. If you can’t list any concrete ways in which you are part of the solution (and, for the record, “Some of my best friends are black,” is not going to cut it), accept that you are part of the problem. And get on changing that.
3. Embrace your wrongness. Being wrong, knowing it, and holding that knowledge can be really powerful. Once you know you’re wrong, you can give up trying to win that argument and actually put your energy into listening, and maybe even learning something. Only dickheads and Republicans put energy into winning arguments when they know they’re wrong. Are you a dickhead? Are you a Republican?? What the fuck are you doing on this blog?!
4. Which leads me to…Give up being right. I have a friend who I kicked it with a lot a several years ago who would have an argument with someone (sometimes me) and get so wrapped up in how right she was that the friendship would suffer, and sometimes even end, because she couldn’t bear not having her rightness be acknowledged. She lost a lot of friends this way. The truth is, sometimes, you can be right or you can be friends. If you have to choose between the two, and your friendship means enough to you to be worth keeping, then there’s only one choice that makes sense. So get over yourself. K?
5. Take an emotional risk. I have known people who, in all the time I have spent with them, have never once taken an emotional risk. You know, people who only ask questions whose answers they already know so they don’t run the risk of being hurt by truths they can’t handle. Or people who never say I love you first. Or people who never say the thing that is at the back of their tongues, the thing that they are afraid will make them more vulnerable than they have ever been. I have been this person myself at times. Honestly, I have been this person many, many times. But I work on it every day.
6. Hold hands with someone. I think holding hands is one of the most vulnerable and connected things you can do with another person. Sometimes, if you lace your fingers with theirs, you can feel someone’s pulse in their hands. Go ahead. Feel someone’s pulse. Let them feel yours. It can be seriously liberating.
7. Create a boundary/respect a boundary. Creating boundaries is one way to let people know what you need. Respecting other people’s boundaries is one way to meet another person’s needs. The two go hand in hand. If you’re dynamite about setting boundaries and lax about respecting the boundaries of others, or vice versa, something’s off. I will admit that I have never been terrific at either of these things. But I’m much better than I used to be, and I’m working hard on both. What I’m working hardest on is understanding for myself the boundaries I’m setting and why I am setting them, where those needs are coming from, if they are real or just a way of controlling relationships and having the upper hand. If I’m just trying to get my way, without any regard for the needs of the people I claim to care about, that’s not real boundary-setting. That’s douchebaggery.
8. Separate what happened from your story about what happened. When I was six, I had the lead in my 2nd-grade class play and my mother didn’t come to the show. I was devastated and, as a six-year-old, I thought it meant that my mother didn’t love me enough. I grew up believing that. It became my story about my mother. Every time my mother did anything to disappoint me, every time she failed to show up in any way, it added truth to my story. Only it wasn’t truth. It was never truth. It was a story created by a wounded six-year-old. It took me 25 years to realize that. When I did, my life, my way of thinking about my mother and myself, my way of relating to everyone in my life changed. It didn’t make me perfect. I still behave sometimes in response to that story, with my mother and with everyone, but A LOT less than I used to. And when I do, I know what’s actually happening, I know it’s that story and not something real.
9. Check your ego. My ego is enormous, and I come ego-first into most difficult interactions. I used to think that my ego was there to protect me from things like rejection. But at some point I realized that it’s really there to protect itself from rejection. If in protecting itself it also happens to protect me, cool. But if what I need is different from what my ego needs, I’m fucked. Because my ego doesn’t really give a shit about what I need. That’s why it’s so necessary for me to put that bitch (my ego) in check. If we are constantly being protected from rejection, we miss out on a lot of life’s really important lessons.
10. Say you’re sorry. There’s someone out there who you wronged. You know it. You did effed up things, said really mean shit, lied, cheated, whatever. And you never apologized. At some point, you started regretting it. But you felt so much guilt, or so much time had passed, that you weren’t sure if you should go there, if you should bring it up again. Well, you should. If you want people to say they’re sorry when they hurt you, you better damn well be someone who says you’re sorry when you hurt other people. It’s not really that complicated.
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(Yes, I realize the grammatically correct phrasing is we queers. I’m doing a thing here, okay?)" Labels: life, mia mckenzie, truth 0 comments Tuesday, November 22, 2011 Y 4:00 AM It's been such a long time but it really hasn't. I feel like over the past couple of years I've tried to grow up perhaps too quickly because it's in my nature. I've always been way above my maturity but emotionally I don't think I have or sometimes feel like I haven't fully formed, like a cake when the inside is still not done yet the outside is golden brown. When I began having to think about my branding and public persona and the amount of things that I needed to hide because of credibility issues I began to lose control, and the worst part was that I inflicted the actions that I took in erasing some of the largest formative years of my life. I'm growing anxious day by day having to think about the fact that the memories of junior high, high school, the mundane everyday activities that made me laugh, the jokes that made me explode with laughter, the people who were super nice to me, their breath, their feelings, their presence, are escaping me. I can't cope with the idea that I can't remember anything or everything. I can't seem to cope the very tangible reality of having to forget things to make new memories in order to forget those in a couple of years until I grow old and forget about this very moment as I typed this out on my blog because I can't handle the very reality of deleting my myspace. Sure it sounds dumb, but it was my history and I deleted for no real good reason besides me trying to protect my brand, which is nothing but a facade that I try to convince everyone to believe. I think that just realizing how long the time has really gone is both scary and welcoming but mostly sad because everything that I've learned and have been taught leads to a path that leads directly to nothing. After the people that I love the most reach the final destination no one can ever feel the amount of sadness within me. They'll say that's life, they'll say it was okay and that maybe it was for the better but that's the reality of life. No one truly ever feels the impact of the situations that you feel, no words can seem to capture exactly what you feel and what's worse is that the laughter that emanated from my parents for all of my life will seize one day and that one day I will question that very memory. I will over think the tone of their laugh, over think when it occurred and mostly forget the amount of times that I heard during their lifetimes. All I will be left is with the concept of who they were as people, as an abstract memory of all the great things that they did for me. Not just my parents, but everyone else whom I love, and even though these are the realities of life somehow I can't manage to cope with them. I can't find comfort in knowing that once we die that's it. I can't handle the fact that while knowing how amazing the universe is in even granting us life to begin with, I can not handle with knowing that there is very little evidence that shows an afterlife where one day when we pass we'll be able to hold our parents, our friends, our siblings and everyone else who came across our lives that we love. And even though I won't feel my own death, the fact that I will have to deal with the emotions of having to cope with the passing of a love one scare me even more. I want to be here forever, I want to be able to remember it all, I want to hold my mothers hair and body, I want to have my dad shout talk forever, I want to have it all forever and never experience the feelings of loss. and while losing my myspace scares me because they carry the heaviest and most formative years that I've gone through, the fact of not remembering scares me the most. The fact that it all won't matter in a relatively short time, the fact that there is no way in the world I can stop myself from having to go through those things, and the fact that I don't have the ability to preserve any of the things I mentioned. It's so scary, it's so painful and yet we all have to do it... 0 comments Wednesday, October 5, 2011 Y 10:57 PM  Labels: life 0 comments Sunday, October 2, 2011 Y 1:20 AM Life's sad, life's tough, life's short, life's temporary, life's easily forgotten Labels: life 0 comments Wednesday, September 14, 2011 Y 1:07 PM
Labels: jorge cruz, life, monamiejorge 0 comments Thursday, August 25, 2011 Y 9:23 PM    Labels: life 0 comments |
about me, this blog. （ •́ .̫ •̀ ) "Jorge Cruz is a transgender avant-garde artist." - Wikipedia 👯 1/2 of WEARE18 🌚🌞🌝🌒 model 👝👡🌺 pop star 🎭🇬🇧 real life barbie✨🙍 BUY MY CLOTHES "...you're a conoisseur of all fine culture" - A. "The photographs are, at times, depressing. At other times, they are a celebration of the simple life." - Curated Magazine "You are such a dirty whore on the inside though, I love it." - Bibiana "Chicago photographer, Jorge Cruz, is, in my humble opinion, what photography is all about." - Aline Smithson, Lenscratch "i keep forgetting how cruel you are" -Chaenel "your words are harsh and insensitive" - Max "I think Jorge sees everything. He responds in excellent, funny, questioning ways. He is a fearless artist. I appreciate his insightfulness. It's all pretty transformative. He is a very sweet person too. Works really hard and can do so many good things! It's sort of mystifying." -Colleen Plumb " your allusions to fictional or historical characters escape me" - J'air "A distance that is elusive and covetous" - Land Magazine " u'd be like "mariam this is pathetic, cooler things happen to me when i pee" - Mariam "I do not agree with your lifestyle and how you choose to follow it" - Max "you have an ugly heart" - A. "you crazy enough girl" - Sir Nenis A highly curated, highly selective, highly high of stuff Links URB Vice Gabi Fresh FRONTLINE Gozamos Al Jazeera 3 Quarks Daily The Mainstreamer! All Lacquered Up Hipster Runoff Mon amie, Jorge Man Repeller Advanced Style Future Shipwreck pitchfork reviews reviews Archive •October 2010 •November 2010 •December 2010 •January 2011 •February 2011 •March 2011 •April 2011 •May 2011 •June 2011 •July 2011 •August 2011 •September 2011 •October 2011 •November 2011 •January 2012 •February 2012 •March 2012 •April 2012 •May 2012 •June 2012 •July 2012 •August 2012 •November 2012 •January 2013 •February 2013 •March 2013 •April 2013 •May 2013 •June 2013 •September 2013 •October 2013 •November 2013 •January 2014 •April 2014 •June 2014 •August 2014 •November 2014 •December 2014 •January 2015 •February 2015 •March 2015 •May 2015 •June 2015 •August 2015 •October 2015 •December 2015 •January 2016 •February 2016 •March 2016 •June 2016 •October 2016 •July 2018 
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