The Paradoxical Commandments The Paradoxical Commandments by Dr. Kent M. Keith People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

Here’s what you will be told:

Find a man

Seek protection

The world is scary

Don’t go out

You are weak

Don’t care so much

They’re only animals

Don’t be so intense

Don’t cry so much

You can’t trust anyone

Don’t talk to strangers

People will take advantage of you

Close your legs

Girls aren’t good with:

Numbers

Facts

Making difficult decisions

Lifting things

Putting things together

International news

Flying planes

Being in charge.

If he rapes you, surrender,

You will get killed trying to defend yourself

Don’t travel alone

You are nothing without a man

Don’t make the first move,

Wait for him to notice you

Don’t be too loud

Follow the crowd

Obey the laws

Don’t know too much

Tone it down

Find someone rich

It’s how you look that matters,

Not what you think.

Here’s What I’m Telling You:

Everyone’s making everything up

There is no one in charge except for those Who pretend to be

No one is coming

No one is going to Rescue you

Mind-read your needs

Know your body better than you

Always fight back

Ask for it

Say you want it

Cherish your solitude

Take trains by yourself to places

You have never been

Sleep out under the stars

Learn how to drive a stick shift

Go so far away that you stop being afraid of Not coming back

Say no when you don’t want to do something

Say yes if your instincts are strong

Even if everyone around you disagrees

Decide whether you want to be liked or admired

Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out What you’re doing here

Believe in kissing

Fight for tenderness

Care as much as you do

Cry as much as you want

Insist the world be theater And love the drama

Take your time

Move as fast as you do

As long as it’s your speed.

Ask yourself these questions:

Why am I whispering when I have something to say?

Why am I adding a question mark at the end Of all my sentences?

Why am I apologizing every time I express my needs?

Why am I hunching over?

Starving myself when I love food?

Pretending it doesn’t mean that much to me?

Hurting myself when I mean to scream?

Why am I waiting

Whining

Pining

Fitting in?

You know the truth:

Sometimes it does hurt that much

Your mother wanted more than that

It’s easier to be mean than smart

But that isn’t who you are.” 

Eve Ensler

 

Ode to a Treehouse   

a poem my cousin Hannah wrote

deep in the backyard jungle
Just beyond my mother’s prized tomato plants and raspberry bushes
I brush shoulders past 4, 7, and 11 year old versions of myself
Scaling the rope ladder (carefully), an expert demonstration for those behind me
Wooden walls tinged green by moss and rot
Leafy, sky-high home of séances and first kisses
Billie Holiday is barely audible through the static of your old transistor radio
Echoes haunting a childhood paradise
Past laughter and whisper soft secrets
A thousand tedious afternoons of gin rummy and daisy chains
Sweet cakes and milkshakes
Daydream dalliance, dragonfly’s delight
Our last days as children
Painted on the inside of our skin
We lay on our backs
Stretched out like laundry on the line
Stargazing through the Plexiglas roof
You say
“In 100 years, no one will remember our names but they’ll still be looking at these same stars”

childhood

I miss being small and believing the world was

 an infinite universe of potential, when your little

 it’s like  no matter how terrible things can be you

 have  this undeniable imagination that gives you 

the ability to believe in magical things and this 

resilient naive optimism that all your dreams will 

come true when your older,

 It’s not until you actually grow up that you 

begin to realize that life is never as perfect as you

 imagined however nor is it as terrible as you had 

feared, rather a compilation of mundane moments that you cease to find the 

importance of until it’s too late and they’re nothing more than distant memories.

-Alicia Carey

                                                Having a coke with you

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.

-Frank O'Hara