I Can't Handle My Feelings Ugh

HERE'S A WEIRD, FUNNY THOUGHT: FEELINGS SUCK. 

And I'm not just talking about a petty, "he's-kinda-cute" crush. I'm talking all-consuming, years-of-suppressing, blind-siding, I'm-starting-to-feel-pathetic kind of crush. 

18 years later and I'm still stuck in the same situation: never putting myself out there to reveal my true feelings and ending up just silently dying inside. Different person, same situation. Every. Time. My love life might as well be a freaking vacuum cleaner because it sucks. 

Why am I sitting here blogging about it when I can go ahead and profess my undying love? Truth is, I don't know. I'm a wuss, let's leave it at that.

I guess you can say it's my fault for always playing it safe by never taking a leap of faith, but you know what, it's for everybody's good. Why ruin a perfectly good friendship with feelings and potential misunderstandings when you can just play the role of a really good friend in his life and try not to chew glass when someone so much as flirts with him. It's simple, really.

There's this pretty ancient Taylor Swift song called "Invisible" and it's one of those songs that I just listen to and not feel anything because I couldn't quite relate to it. But now it approximately has 66 plays in the past 6 hours and I've cried approximately 6,000 tears (just kidding) (but it was a rough 6 hours).

Long story short, it's another tale of unrequited love -- which is now, also, my life. The fact that my stupid crush was not at all that likely to have a stupid crush made this whole stupid thing a lot easier because I didn't have anything to worry about. And it comes back biting me in the ass. 

Complacency!!!

I don't know how to navigate through these emotions. I'm not even allowed to have these emotions in the first place because I'm no one of significance whatsoever, but biology betrays me once again and my instincts tell me to either cry or eat cookies. So far I've done both.

But the point is: I'm torn between a) shrugging it off and just accepting the fact that okay, he likes somebody else (SOMEONE WHO'S NOT ME), or b) just completely abandoning my feelings.

Plan B is semi-in motion because I've realized that this is ultimately quite pointless. 

It's pointless if I'm never gonna act upon these feelings (unlikely) and it's pointless to wait around and see if he feels the same way about me and confesses before I do (even more unlikely).  

And honestly, this is all starting to feel a lot like high school to me which is bizarre because I'm technically an adult, and adults don't deal with their feelings by quietly pining over someone from a sizeable distance away.

It's fight or flight... and I'm choosing to fly away.

You could say it's the easy way out because it means never having to confront your feelings, but I'd like to say I'm being smart about this. Might take longer than I'm imagining, but still manageable. How hard can it be to get over a cute, smart, funny guy like him who's a complete pain in the ass but is still irresistible? Pffft. Pffffffffft.

And as for my love life: abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Dante Magazine

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I'm really pleased and amazed with our final magazine for our PUBLISH class turned out! For something that was crammed in the span of 2 weeks, I think our team did a pretty good job putting together this thing of beauty.

Janine's layout is really what brought everything together and despite the minimalistic approach to the design, I think this is where the whole "less is more" thing really applies. 

Dante is an art magazine and we intended it to be a creative outlet for the youth. It focuses on aesthetic and writing, which I really love. And for our first issue, we decided for it to revolve around the theme: The 7 Deadly Sins which inspired the name of the magazine -- Dante -- meaning Dante Alighieri, the author of Inferno.

Initially, we thought it seemed like such a heavy theme for a magazine. When you think of magazines, the first thing that comes to mind is either pop culture, high fashion, and the like, but we thought deviating from cookie-cutter ideas would be quite refreshing.

These are some of my favorite parts!

Flipping open the magazine and seeing an all-black spread sets the mood immediately. I was flipping out over how nice this will look if it were actually printed on glossies. So freakin' cool.

The contents of the magazine are basically short stories, proses, poems, photography, and art. Most of them we wrote ourselves, but we had to get contributors who could bring the magazine to life and provide us with good art.

This was a poem I wrote a year ago. I first wanted it to be published anonymously, but hey, if we're talking about expression and creative outlets, I might as well go for it, right?

One of my good friends, Adriel Tangoan, took this lovely image. I had to creep around his Tumblr account where he used to post most of his photography and I found this gem from a year ago!

The most interesting part of it was writing fictional short stories for the seven deadly sins. The theme was kinda tricky and the challenge was articulating emotions in a subtle way and let the story creep up on the reader. It was a lot of fun! Writing for envy and pride (admittedly two of the sins I'm most guilty of) made me cringe BADLY. I had to transform my "zone" into something dark and toxic. I hope that it worked? Haha!

I thoroughly enjoyed writing Walls. Guess I just have a knack for sad shit.

If you want to see more, you can view the entire magazine here!

It is accompanied by a website and I am incredibly proud to say that we own the domain! Weehoo! You can also check out the website here. It would be real lovely if you did!