Metaphorical Roses and Life

So.. this isn't right, and I don't think it's wrong, but it's an opinion.  The beautiful- and terrible- thing about people is that we all have our own opinions.  And this causes a lot of conflict.  Sometimes I look at the world, and I think to myself "how the hell do people's brains work like this?"  But then I calm down and remind myself that my views may not necessarily be right either.  But anyway, the point of this post is to talk about how I live my life.

The funny thing about me is that I am very easily amused.  I find a lot of things to be hilarious, so I laugh a lot.  The tiniest of things have the ability to make my day, such as a funny joke, a silly prank played on a friend, an adorable song or poem, the list goes on and on.  Sometimes people ask me why I laugh at things that aren't really all that funny, or they give me weird looks when I'm having the time of my life reading a children's book- by myself.  My answer is that I enjoy the little things in life.  If you find joy in those, then life is good.

"I walk slow so I can smell the metaphorical roses of life"

Here's another thing about my life.  And about how I wanna run it.
Student Council elections came up, and I've decided not to run.  Why?  There's a bunch of reasons.
1- It frees up my lunch
2- We hardly do anything
3- I don't believe in it, and I don't want to support something I don't believe in.

I don't believe in it because the election process is basically a popularity contest.  Here's how it works:
People hang up posters with corny slogans like "If voting for me is wrong, don't be right!" with shiny bright colours and plaster these on every yellow tiled wall of the school.  The people running tell all their friends to vote for them, and then it's Friday and everyone votes for their friends.  No speeches, no campaign.  Just a bunch of pretty posters and it's won by whoever has the most friends.  Now personally, I don't see the success in that.  It's not a legitimate win, if you win you're not implementing anything other than school spirit, and I feel like Student Leadership should actually be making changes in the school.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against school spirit.  Or StuCo, but it's just not my style, and out of everything in my life, the thing I feel strongest about is doing what you want because you want to.  I was talking about this with a friend today, and this is how I basically outlined life.  I think the biggest thing with society is how it tries to make everyone conform to some sort of normative mold.  The media creates expectations, society upholds these expectations, and people, in order to fit in with society, bend into these expectations.  Here's the thing though- I don't want to be like that.  I want to adhere to my own values, my own idea of life.  And I know that this is hard to do in society, but I'm going to fight as hard as I possibly can to try to achieve this.  In my eyes, society works out like a big conveyor belt.  Everyone starts out as their own shape, some lump of deformed metal.  Time goes by, and the machine throws new obstacles at them.  It gets harder and harder to stay true to their original form as more things get thrown at them and slowly they become pounded down, rolled out and shoved into some little box.  Society beats the willpower, the dreams and goals out of people and forces them into a corral they disguise as "life".  But it's not really life.  "There's a difference between surviving and living" and that's not living. It's merely existing, and it's running through this maze society puts us through, with only some misperceived goal in mind.  No one pays attention to the journey anymore, because they can't afford to.  If you take the time to stop, and marvel at the everyday journey of life society will cut you down and overpower you.  But maybe, just maybe we can fight this.  If only someone took the time to find the beauty in these misshapen lumps of metal, unique and beautiful in their own way, maybe we could see that there are so many small treasures of life waiting to be found.  There is a hope for the future, and there is a way to look back on your life and realise that you never lost sight of your values.  You stayed true to yourself and the machine was unable to beat you down.  Those are the people worth admiring, and that's who I am going to be- now until forever.

          “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” 

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” 

― John Lennon 

Katherine Kiss Me- Franz Ferdinand
Make It Stop- Rise Against
Honey I Sure Miss You- Daniel Johnston
Did You Ever Doubt Yourself?- The Pharmacy
Get It Faster- Jimmy Eat World
Mr. Maker- The Kooks
Give Me Novacaine- Green Day
Bulletproof Heart- MCR
Death and All His Friends- Coldplay
Tubthumping-Chumbawamba