Aya and Flounder

Mad Lib: Vacations

Mad Lib: Vacations

A vacation is when you take a trip to some sparkly place with your thick family. Usually you go to someplace that is near a tongue or up on a basketball. A good vacation place is one where you can ride moms or play rock, paper, scissors or go hunting for boats. I like to spend time singing or shitting. When parents go on vacation, they spend time eating three abacuses a day, and fathers play golf, and mothers sit around flirting. Last summer, my little brother fell in a keyboard and got poison apple tree all over his phalanges. My family is going to the girlfriend’s heart, and I will practice eating. Parents need vacations more than kids because parents are always very pungent and because they work 5 hours every day all year making enough sandwiches to pay for the vacation.

Flounder: Dear Aya, 

I feel that as far as I have come in my growth as a human being, allowing the feelings to come through is still a struggle. When we started talking about happiness, it came at a time when I feel in limbo with my feelings. What does being happy actually mean, and do we as humans ever achieve it?

Aya: You remember that song the nuns sang about Maria in the sound of music when they would commiserate on how much she did not follow the routine? 

Flounder: I do, very vividly, and though each had their opinions on Maria, they all considered the routine to be something to be achieved. Yet, to Maria, and in a way me, perhaps others as well, this seems like forced conformity. Is there something wrong with me wanting more than a routine?

Aya: Au contraire, nothing is wrong. There is merely a want and that want doesn’t have any play into how things could or should be going. Being happy is being human and when we are forced to be a square peg in a round hole, it honestly makes logical sense to feel unhappy. In the personal development, business and workout world, having a routine in a specific way gets results. Who doesn’t want results? Everyone wants results. Who doesn’t get results? People that do not follow the routine the exact way that would beget results that they want. So, with all that having been said, what type of routine do you want and what routine would get the results you want?

Flounder: Routine. What routine would I want? That is somewhat of a tough one, but I know writing is the path, it always has and will be, and at a deeper level, it is writing fiction FOR ME first. To get that routine, I would need to begin to focus on the here and now and what I can do to ensure I am writing for myself and not other people. Making connections with readers AND writers, and finally admitting that I need to learn to maximize social media no matter how much I hate the idea. I need to build my platform and stick to focusing on what I want, which is writing fiction and nothing else. I am all over the place, and it is scary at my age to be trying so hard to get the “routine” or, better said, “making my goal a reality.” Does that actually make sense?

Aya: It does. Sounds like what I went through this past weekend. The gravity of all the choices you have made over the course of the past 7-8 months is weighing in and you are feeling a mixed set of emotions about it all, as you as a human are wont to do. It feels like a contradiction to bemoan losses to the infrastructure you have built, but really, what is a loss? Inciting changes in the structure of your life you are building takes conscious effort and constant action-building to maintain. I was walking around town and looking at all the business fronts and cars going any which way. If people did not adhere to their own sphere of infrastructure, the fabric of society as we know it, would melt away and we would not have predictability or stability. Following routine allows some more predictability and stability. But in the whole world, we crave break from routine and spontaneity. What do you want, though?

Flounder: I want to be happy and healthy (two things I have not felt good about lately). I know it is on me to continue to work toward everything that will happen, but I think going about it alone is a factor that frightens me on several levels. The basic, being alone and not having someone to share with, and more complex that I don’t want to be in a relationship so that I am not alone. It has never been me. So where does that leave me? I am unsure whether there is anything wrong with that in a “good or bad” way. What do you wany, Aya?

Aya: I am more curious where a want comes from. All our wants are inspired or influenced from something that is not ours. So, I am not entirely sure.

Flounder: I feel less unsure about where wants come from, and perhaps that is the point. I don’t want to overthink the idea of wants because I can get lost and spiral into those things. I want happiness, but it feels elusive, so I need to do something about that, and I feel that when I am healthy again, it will be one less thing, but with my mental health, I will probably never achieve total healthiness, but there are things I can do to elevate the issues. I am unsure, but I do hope to find what it means to me. I feel we are all different in this pursuit of happiness, would you agree or disagree?

Aya: “My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” –Forrest Gump I LOL’d at our mad lib we made by the way. I think we are all on the same sinking ship. The thing is we “think” what happiness is. Happiness is not a thought. We are all in the sinking ship of happiness. The most happy moments are the unprovoked ones, the most spontaneous ones and the most simple ones. If right here, right now, you got everything you wanted, that begs the question, then what? I was speaking with my friend Cati today and she pulled a correlation – causation between being happy and not needing money but having it being a benefit, knowing basic expenses and then some, could be covered. Most of the moments, I believe, where we have all felt most happy, did not necessarily come from getting what we wanted. I think we are all the same. We strive to fracture our paths but really, we are all in the same place. What chocolates do you want from the chocolate box?

Flounder: First, the idea that we are all in the sinking ship of happiness actually helps me feel less alone, as for chocolates, if we never know what we are going to get, then I need to open that box and see what chocolates I get. I feel it is simple.

Aya: The new intellectualism is the oversophistry and monopolization upon humans’ constant sense of lack within. What if we stopped trying to fill it? What is the worst that would happen? Feeling restless from facing the lack within is what we run from. How can one sophisticate ignorance? By intellectualizing it. Everything is going to be okay. We are all walking around with our empty fill-in-the-blank mad libs desperately trying to complete our own when that is not how life works. This mad lib was hilarious because we did it together, and I had no clue what was in store. Maybe you feel afraid to hand the mad lib over to life after you have created your outline.

Flounder: The Mad lib today and the one earlier were good as you mentioned because we had no idea what it would say. I like that idea. I don’t have to know why I feel afraid. Life is scary. Life is real. I feel emotional right now because I am so afraid. To feel is scary, to let the emotions overwhelm me is scary. SO, I will be afraid and feel the feels. “That’s all I gotta say about that.”

• Flounder and Aya.