Let’s believe in things so we could talk about them and lie about them.

Let’s start a band and struggle to find our audience at first while leaving good enough pictures for the reunion tour 20 years later. Let’s feed our families with our day jobs that we promise we’d quit once we catch our big break. Let’s make our big break.

Let’s learn a new word everyday: stellify, recrudescence, concupiscence. Let’s find out what these words mean later.

Let’s wake up every morning and write rap lyrics.

Let’s spend on things we use everyday. Let’s buy a better pair of headphones that aren’t fake beats.

Let’s write because we’re afraid/anxious/amazed. Let’s make everyone else afraid/anxious/amazed because we write.

Let’s wish for better things because we deserve it.

Let’s start saving yesterday. Let’s divide our salary into savings, expenses and reward. Make the reward the largest percent.

Let’s play video games until the real world starts catching up.

Let’s listen to new music everyday. Sit still for a moment and wonder if you like the same things you liked 10 or 11 years ago.

Let’s drink until we have to crawl home at least once every two months.

Let’s forget we own a phone for a little while in the presence of company. Conversate.

Let’s open our eyes — really open them every day and take in the wonder and the strangeness and the beauty that the mundane has to offer. Cherish the mundane, and then take the exotic and make it the new mundane.

Let’s complain a little less and watch more cartoons. It’s good for the soul.

Let’s forget about calories every once in a while.

Let’s pronounce awhile, aH-wyl.

Let’s exorcise a bad habit today.

Let’s move on. Let’s push things forward. (Thanks to The Streets.)

Let’s eat cereal … at night. Or any kind of breakfast food.

Let’s tell a friend that we think they’re awesome, even if they’ve been a shitty friend lately.

Let’s try our best to start off blog drafts while drunk, and then finish them when we wake up later.

Inspired by Sunday’s rerun of the hoarders episode of National Geographic’s Taboo: am I a hoarder?

[Above] just a couple of things:

• Toy packaging – I have every single piece of cardboard back/packaging from every toy I have ever bought since I started collecting. They live in various places around the house. Mostly hidden. Unlike the living/breathing-clutter floors from the show.
• Souvenir shirts – Whenever I get handed a giveaway shirt: I just stuff it where I keep my clothes. Most of them I have never worn. After that picture was taken, I took them to get washed. (After which, I’ll probably stash them somewhere, only to have them get dirty again.)
• Cigarette tins – These are just a few things I keep. Not pictured: fancy (empty) cigarette boxes, lighters, matchboxes, etc.

These are just a few things I still have with me. Can I live without all of this clutter? Yeah. Will I get rid of it anytime soon? I really can’t tell.

The first step to correcting a problem is identifying that I have a problem. The first step in identifying a problem is deliberating whether a condition or status is a problem or not.

Is it a problem? Not at the moment, no. I think not anyway. Will I clean everything up? Not yet.

Memory / Trophy Aspect

Batman keeps souvenirs from his foiled foes as trophies. I think it’s his metrics in his war on crime. Trophies are great reminders of things you’ve accomplished and they serve as inspiration for you to do more. It’s a way of eating your fears. (yeh!) I did just compare myself to a fictional character and I’m trying to sell you on the idea that keeping clutter will remind me to be a better person.

Okay, clear the screen: if I had trophies instead, would it still be right to throw them away and forget about them?

I could pick up any of the packaging or receipt I have here and I could tell you a story. I could organize this clutter autobiographically.

Comfort / Procrastination Aspect

I like to keep packaging because I like knowing that I can box the items up again, make them look new. I have unopened books and toys and DVDs and glass sets meant to be given as gifts but I never got around to. What does that say about me as a person? (I wouldn’t rely on myself on the psychoanalysis.) Let’s neurosis.

Hoarder Aspect

Maybe I am a hoarder. I can’t pinpoint exactly what triggered/triggers it. Maybe I’ll devolve into the kind of hoarder they feature on television on shows about hoarders.

***

Here’s a nice article I read earlier which is related: The Many Reasons We Rely Upon Our Clutter

I had my last real cigarette over two months ago. I have decided to quit smoking. (again. only because I could.) I vaporize milligrams of nicotine daily to keep me from hulking out. (#sarapmagvape) Last time I tried to quit cold-turkey, I went berserker on a nurse who was going to give me an injection. Bad move. Nicotine plugs a hole in my brain that makes me cranky.

Let’s face it: smoking makes you cool. I have met some of the most interesting people while out on cigarette breaks. There’s this unspoken camaraderie when you’re out smoking — you all step out into a portion of the world for a little stress relief. It’s a nice way to get to know new officemates (if they smoke too, which means they’re cool), it’s a nice problem-solving tool, it’s better than an after-meal mint, it’s nice to get a nice fill of fresh air and then violate it with filthy, lung-tinged smoke or meet random people who might give you some weird, foreign cigarette. (Writing that down makes me want to light up. Also, sometimes it’s that in reverse: you might be the only smoker in a group, you have a cough and smoking makes you miserable or friends/random people will bum off you.)

Here are rationalizations why I quit:

• It doesn’t give me the kick it used to. The feel of that first-hit cough doesn’t come anymore.
• They don’t make ‘em like they used to. They killed off my favorite flavor in 2008. Last year, they killed off the one I replaced that with. Sobranies are stale when they make it here and are too expensive to sustain on a pack-per-day basis.
• Health reasons blah blah blah.

On the first month:

• My fingers aren’t yellow anymore and do not smell of smoke.
• I don’t wake up with smoke-breath.
• I probably lost my super-lung capacity and cannot hold my breath underwater for 20 minutes or so anymore.
• Food tasted better.
• QUIT ZITS NO ONE — TOLD ME. (my dermatologist says this is due to detox. years of toxins are making their way out of my body … through my face-pores —- WHY)

On the second month:

• I can take deeper breaths? Also, consider that I used to smoke while running (to work etc), so my lung capacity should be tripled.
• The cravings are less. I used to brave harsh weather just to get a cigarette.
• MY DETOX IS ALMOST OVER BYE QUIT ZITS HELLO RED MARKS.
• Weight gain! The money I would have spent on cigarettes, I used for take-out.

I asked my dermatologist: “if I hadn’t stopped smoking, would my skin be better (better as in better-than-now, without foresight of future better-ness)?” she said yes. My body has gotten so used to the substances that the sudden absence has disturbed the inner balance. Essentially, a game of Uno Stacko gone Jengga. The blocks have fallen and need reconstruction.

So, to summarize: if quitting cigarettes will make you look less cool, will kill a social outlet (smoking breaks) and lessen the chances of interesting occurrences in your life — what are the benefits again? Or does this non-smoking lifestyle take longer to get used to?

If you are a smoker now and value these precious things, I urge you: do not be a quitter. Or not. Or swear that it’s your last stick and then smoke again days/weeks later.

Dear sinners/saints: I might end up losing hrudu.com. My hold on the domain is about to expire — (it’s been nearly 3 years) and due to my amazing lack of foresight, you may all end up losing the privilege of reading through my catalog of tiny triumphs, the materialism, the obsession, the (not-so) secret shames and the occasional drunk entry.

Let’s make this short: I lack the ability to pay in internet moneys. (my card apparently doesn’t cut it, and stuffing coins down computer ports don’t really convert them into internet moneys)

I don’t need a lot — just enough to pay off the evils of staking a claim on your own name on the internet. (If I don’t do this now, I’ll lose the ability to reclaim it — which sorta sucks because the internet knows me better as hrudu.)

Let’s say I believe in you. I’ll ask you to believe that the internet needs just one more site to tell you things that I care about. (and let’s say I’ll believe that you believe me when I tell you that I believe that you’ll believe in me, or something like that) If you have internet coins to spare, I placed my virtual tip jar — the Donate button — on the side of the site, just below where I tell you who I am. Drop a few internet coins in there and I would gladly find a way to share a bottle of Coke with you.

Recently, some scientists claim to have “definitively” proven that time travel is impossible.

But why, science, why? I thought we were friends! I vouched for you!

I choose to believe.

“Photons can’t travel faster than the speed of light,” they say. I say that’s only one way of traveling through time. For my next trick, I will teach you how to time travel.

See, there’s a hidden city of time — one based on memory and geographical familiarity. The tallest skyscrapers and the daintiest little corners of the world are the tallest skyscrapers and daintiest little corners of the world where things happened to us. Finding allies in a smoking area underneath a tree with names carved on it. A first kiss. A first literal stab in the back. Unbearable teenage sexual tension in a room with glow-in-the-dark stars. That 50th bottle of Coke on the desk. Jumping out of school windows to escape that one class you really thought was boring but in hindsight thought you should’ve shown up more for.

These are fixed points in time that we may revisit by physically visiting the place, triggering memories by taking in the smell (the grit of it!), talking with personal ghosts (peoples from your past), listening to our “soundtrack” for a place/event, rummaging through souvenirs or trophies, looking at goosebump-inducing written recordings of how we felt at the time (if there are any) and revisiting old photographs. (which we do now, seconds after that digital thing has been taken. wew, future.)

We can relive people too: people of the broken-hearted variety relive exes all the time, until they stop being time travelers to the past and move on. It’s also worth noting that personalities and mannerisms have a memetic quality in them: we bring qualities of people from the past with us in the present when we do what they used to do and say things they said.

The arbitrary laws commonly attached to time travel like stepping on butterflies (and why, pray tell, would you go about stepping on butterflies? what do you have against them?) exist because of Einstein’s causality: the effect cannot exist without the cause. We can’t change things as they were; doing so would probably prevent you from becoming the sort of person who can travel in time via this method.

But what of the future, you ask, the one where we have lightsabers, where we smoke cigarettes that won’t give us cancer or the one where we have iPhones embedded in our eyes? It’s less about stepping into that specific timeline and more of projecting into it. When we say I’ll… go/do/have/become there/this/that, we are aiming to get into that future, moments at a time. Sometimes, it can be as simple as waking up and thinking, “I want a burger” — boom, lunchtime, you get a burger — now you get to live in a future (from the waking up perspective) with a future burger.

So don’t tell me time travel is impossible, science. I choose to believe.

***

Many, many years from now, in a future where the TARDIS or the DeLorean or future-time-tubes exist, I will look back at this post and get goose bumps. And cringe.

Are you awake? This is about to get weird:

Today is the 28th of May — in 585 BC, there was a solar eclipse. In 1985, Carey Mulligan was born. Not that these two events are related to today’s landmark occasion: today is the 5th year that we have been living in this house, aka the Batcave.

May 28, 2006 was a Sunday. I could still remember the paint fumes, trying to force myself to sleep on my non-bed, on that first night. Graduation was just a few days old then — no more allowance, no internet (yet) for my then-new computer, and I was looking for my first job.

It symbolized change, at least. (To note, we only moved across the street from where my grandmother lives.)

What did first moving in here entail? It meant not getting to buy CDs I liked because it was our first time (me and my cousins) to manage the bills. It meant staying at home alone (which I like) while one cousin went to school and the other went to work. It meant learning to clean up after ourselves — not that we did a good job at it back then nor does it mean we are any measure better at it today. It meant having a new window on the world, and seeing things differently. (This house has a second floor, lol)

It meant celebrating every single small thing like birthdays and getting jobs and Saturdays, only because we were keeping lines open — this whole “job” thing kept eating my friends and their time up.

It meant being able to foster runaways, weirdos, highschool friends who care and sometimes, their friends who don’t give a shit.

It meant being sick and having friends bring over Chile red apples and pizza, after having just turned 21.

Several pounds and jobs and computers later, here we are: a house furnished with the remains of fallen offices (we have a full-on office conference table several feet from where I am writing this) and other useful/useless junk we’ve amassed over our half-decade stay.

The question, really is: where will I be 5 more years from now. Will I still be here in this Batcave, or will I have established a new base of operations?

A stray dog bit me. Jokes on him though — he doesn’t know where I’ve been, or what’s in my bloodstream.

***

After a dog bite, you tend to find dog-cooking jokes a bit funnier:

***

There’s only so much you can learn from a dog bite — for one, not to let it happen again. Also, anti-rabies injections are expensive and often.

Happy Birthday, lola! I love you!

I’ve got an about.me page! Check it: http://about.me/hrudu/

It acts like a public social profile + personal analytics, which is AWESOME.