My Issue

I have an issue with the Internet and boys. Separately the two are perfectly fine, but together, I can't control myself. It's not really that big of an issue, but I know that I should stop. I go on the Internet and start talking to guys that I find, and sometimes they become something more serious. I mean, I've met some great people through this, and a lot of the time there are guys just like me on the websites. That's what happens a lot within the teenage gay community. There are no options anywhere for us. As a straight person, you have half the school to choose from, but as a gay student, you have that one other gay guy who seems like a jerk and then you find out that he is but you talk to him anyways because you're lonely and you think that there is no one else out there and fear dying alone with cats... I've collected a lot of stories in that past seven months, and i wouldn't feel comfortable sharing them here. Anyway, as a gay guy if you go to the Internet and google a couple of easy phrases you can find a bunch of websites. I've had my fair share of unsafe encounters on the websites, but generally the fake people are pretty easy to spot, and I have a rule that I don't meet the person until I have seen his Facebook and have video chatted with him. I joined this new website that Grace told me about. It is interesting, but it is for older guys. I lied about my age just to try it out and see what'd happen. I like maturity, not necessarily in physical stuff, but of the mind. And older guys have that maturity more often than younger guys. I meet this guy, and I started to like him. And then we talked and I really started to like him. I started to imagine a life together with this guy, what we'd look like when we'd be old, and how we'd raise our children. I created an entire life for the two of us in my mind. Then I realized that I didn't know his name. I have issues. I realize this. Thank you for reading.

I had an idea.

I had an idea.
I was reading my old blog posts from a year ago, and I had the idea to respond to them. I remember that in elementary and middle school we used to do a bunch of projects where we'd write a letter to our older selves, but I don't remember my older-self ever actually getting any letter. My blog is my letter to my future self. And the future self is me right now, and what I am writing now is a letter to the even more future me. The internet is forever, and this blog, even if I don't touch it for thirty years, it will probably still be exactly where I left it, and that is the best letter to yourself, because one day I'll come back to this, and read all the stuff that I used to write, I'd be able to see how my mind used to function and how my views are so different now. When i come to believe something, I commit to that belief, and that has always been the way that I have done things, so my ideas don't change as much as they are added onto. For example I used to believe that living with inner peace was more important than happiness, and that could justify my quest to get rid of my emotions entirely, but I have since left the idea of trying to control my emotions, I believe in the same things, but not to the extreme that I used to, like I don't get angry very often, and it is hard to piss me off, and even if you do you hardly see it because of what I used to do. Before I wouldn't allow even the thought of anger enter my head, and now I do, but I let it flow through me, I let myself get angry, feel that emotion, but never hold onto it. It passes through me fast enough so that people don't have to witness me being upset. Things like that change about me, and the things like that are what I want my blog to record. I want to be able to see my evolution as a person, and revisit the old me.
I want to comment on my older blog posts someday in the future, and try to explain to my old self how their view is going to change, and then eventually, the even older me will comment on a blog post like this one, and we'd have a nice little conversation, spanning through the years.
Tomorrow I plan to continue to work on the scenes with Katherine, today I started, and I realized that I know very little about directing acting. Last year the only exposure with directing was the scene i did with Andrew, Grace, and Alison, which was probably one of the best experiences I had in STAC, because it was something that was genuinely fun for the entire time. We would go through it over and over again, and I was able to tell the actors anything I wanted to. Any thought that entered my mind I could just scream at them, and I miss that. Matt is much better at this than I am, he was with me as i was working with Emily and Peter. I get caught up in details a lot of the time, and I am ignoring the core of the issues that I'm having. I know what I want to see, but I have a difficulty in getting the actors to do understand what it is that I want, but I am learning and that's what matters. I the directing too literally, for example, today, there is a scene where Peter has to be disinterested in Emily, and he wasn't doing it the way I had imagined, and so I had little notes about how to change specific things to make it better, but Matt was able to get Peter to do it by giving direction that is much more broad and allowing him to understand the character better, and that is something that I want to learn how to do.
I miss a simplicity of life that I remember in middle school. Eight grade was a fantastic year for me, and most people hate middle school, but eight grade was incredible for me. That was the year that I truly "found" myself. I didn't discover everything about life in that moment, but eight grade mark when I first started to change everything about myself. I lost a tremendous amount of weight, and I started to question everything. It wasn't the most important year of my life, but it was the easiest and the first of the rest of my life. This is weird to say, but most of the gay teenagers I have been meeting are extremely mature, even the ones that I personally do not like. Finding a teen who is out of the closet nowadays isn't a child anymore. Or at least is less of one. We are a special breed of people because we have all been through so much shit, and we're not tougher than others, but most of us have stories. I was introduced to a kid that lives in Manhattan who was sent to gay treatment camp in the midwest, and who lives an extremely sad life, even though he is the son of an EXTREMELY wealthy business man. He is a total idiot, spoiled brat, and he dropped out of school and spends his days shopping with his friends and getting high on drugs that cost more than some the monthly salaries of some people I know. But even he is mature, he isn't a child anymore, that innocence was taken from him, and even though I can't stand him, there is no denying his maturity. He is an adult, or as much of an adult as he will ever get to be given the fact that he never has to worry about money for his entire life. Most gay people don't come out until they are in college, and now they are the awkward kids that you disregard as you walk through the halls. What I did, what any kid who is out does, is something that is extremely difficult at our age, because sexuality isn't something that set. I came out as gay when I still thought I was bisexual, and I had this misconception that if I came out as bi then no one would want to talk to me, because of the fear that I would be sexual attracted to them. A lot of the time, with the rest of the gays who don't come out, they don't have that dialogue in their heads. They refuse to even think about sex in some cases, so that they aren't hiding anything because they refuse to think about it.
There are two stages of being in the closet, the first is being in denial to yourself, by refusing to think of sex, or forcing yourself to think of the opposite sex, and then there is the next which is knowing who you are, but not telling anyone. I talk about wanting a boyfriend a lot, but recently that dialogue within my mind has slowed down, and so people come up to me and try and tell me about boys who they think are gay, and I tell them that I don't care. If a boy isn't out to himself, then he isn't dateable, and there is nothing you can do about that, and you're not going to wait, because you could find yourself waiting for a lifetime. And also people, especially my mother, like to tell me about all the "gay" news that they hear. The other day my mother was telling me about how our neighbor's daughter, who is the same age as my sister, is lesbian. She looks at me waiting for some sort of response, but I could honestly care less. I think that we should be spending less resources here to get things like gay marriage passed, and more effort in Africa, to feed the starving people, and stop the murdering. I am fine here. I really could care less about my own rights, when some people don't even have the right to live. Like the only gay issue that is worth addressing at this moment in time, is the murders of our people by governments and by individuals. Other than that nothing else matters right now. Nothing. Not my right to get married or anything like that. Not when people are being denied the right to life in parts of the world. I think it is great when a new gay marriage law is passed, but what I can't stand is when millions of dollars are spent when there are bigger problems that need to faced. The world doesn't think in the sense of "world" it thinks in the sense of "country". We care about the state of our own country above the state of any place else. I am totally okay with living with less if it means that a family in Kenya can have the same right to life that I do here. I am not saying that we shouldn't be pushing forward in these issues here, but the majority of our resources should be sent to fix the areas of the world where people are denied the most basic right of all, the right to live. This right is being taken away from people who didn't commit any crime, but we are punishing these people more harshly than our terrorists in some cases, and that is the worse injustice imaginable. Thanks for reading.

Scripts with a Kat

Scripts

Today Katherine and I worked on our scripts. We hasn't given it much thought when we started and the piece that we are making has started to evolve. I don't like the idea that we had at the beginning of writing scripts and then cutting them up and giving them to the actors, it seems cool for a moment but recently I have really disliked having to cut up scripts that I wrote to be spoken normally. I think Kat agrees with me and we have decided to put on the scenes more traditionally. We have three that we want to put on, and we've asked Andrew and Sabrina to help us, already giving them the scenes to memorize. As much as Katherine may disagree with what I am about to write, this is a teaching opportunity for me, and a learning experience for her. I taught her the method that I start writing when I don't know what to write, which is to start off a scene by setting up the characters and have them each be performing an action, and then once dialog starts, you start to discover within yourself, where you want your script to go. What we did is that we set up three scenes, each no more than two pages long, and each starting with the same introductory stage directions, two people sitting on a couch, one is nervous about something, bitting her nails, and the other calmly reading a book, and from there we created three totally different scenes. And from that we also decided to have Sabrina and Andrew act each character of the scenes, the same, so the plays have more of a reason to be presented together. I'm exciting to write theatre again, I missed it from last year, and I'm exciting working with someone because it makes the project feel more legitimate, and gives me more enthusiasm to continue to work on it, because if I dropped out of this now, I would be giving up on Katherine. I also plan to refilm my movie, and I don't know why it has taken so long, but I plan to get that done this week as well. For STAC night I want to have my movie done and this piece with Katherine prepared to present, and I think that it is all very doable, the scenes Kat and I have written aren't too hard to pull off, and after reading them today with Andrew and Sabrina, I am positive that all of this can be done, mostly because just them reading the scenes was already satisfactory acting and there would only be a couple of things that we'd have to rehearse. There is this one scene where the two are talking and then the lights go out and one of the characters gets raptured and I had an idea of leaving clothes behind and that could be a little work, but it is all doable. Katherine doesn't think in the same sense of doablitiy as I do, which I think might be a good thing, in my mind, if I can't actually pull it off in real life, then I don't bother working on it. Katherine was writing this movie script about fire breathing farm animals, and it sounded like a fun idea, but in my mind I am just thinking of ways to actually make it work, like buying stuffed animals and cutting out little pieces of red paper to look like fire. I have never written a movie or play script that I couldn't pull off, because my mind can't focus without that limitation. If you tell me to make a film about a rocket ship going to Mars, I would have it be a film about a rocket ship school going to Mars, and you never see outside a window. 

American Beauty

American Beauty 

This is a fantastic movie. It is rare that I watch a movie that has as much of an emotional impact on me personally. I don't ever cry because I feel bad for the characters, I would only ever cry when something makes me feel something. I haven't cried in months, and the tears that are falling from my face now aren't tears of sadness. The movie is sad, but it isn't. I am crying because of a happiness that is so perfect that I wish life could always be like this. I'm not giving a review of the movie, I'm not going to criticize it, and I honestly couldn't care about anyone's opinion on it, good or bad, because this movie is having an impact larger almost any movie I've seen.

Everything is beautiful. Even typing that makes me tear and I don't know why. I think it's because I believe it now. Everything is beautiful. Everything is beautiful. Even the shit on the street. People don't realize this, they get too caught up in their lives to realize that. They think that beauty can only exist in a painting or a model. I've spent the last half an hour starring at my hand. Every pore and  every tinny hair, all of it is fantastic. I feel it, I feel something right now that is so unexplainable that I wish someone could just tell me what it is I am feeling. All I know is that my life is perfect, even though lots of it seems shitty and pointless, life is perfection. I sound like I'm on drugs, but I'm not because I doubt any drug can make you feel the way I do right now.

I have discovered the secret to life. This movie that I saw is just reinforcing that discovery. The main character in the movie, his life sucks. His wife is cheating on him, his daughter hates him, and he is in love with his 15 year old daughter's friend. But he knows the secret, but it's more than just knowing it, it's feeling it. Me and him, we get it. Our lives can be crappy but we are still happy, we are still in perfection within our own lives. He dies, which isn't a spoiler by the way, the movies starts off with him saying that he'll die by the end, and when he dies he has accepted it, he had accepted his death and he didn't even realize he was about to die. I feel that way right now. If I were to die I couldn't be angry, I could think that I was too young and haven't experienced anything, because the happiness and perfection within my life at this moment, is enough to make me feel that if I left this world right now then I couldn't possibly be disappointed because life had already given me so much to be thankful for. I love life. I love being alive enough that I have already accepted my death. I can live the rest of my life in total happiness now. I can't fear death anymore because life is too perfect and it would feel like a sin to be alive forever. 

The universe is going to make my life shit, it does that to everyone. But the secret of life is to not let that get to you, it's to be able to view life as a wonderful and beautiful thing, it's to be able to see the beauty in the shit and admire everything about life. I've been living happy for six months now, and this movie just made me realize what I had already known. 

Life is beautiful, it is amazing. Never forget that. Ever single moment that you live is perfection, and if you can accept that, then you have won. 

Being Human

I am in serious pain right now. I got my braces off yesterday and I have been ordered to wear a retainer. The retainer hurts, but it isn't as bad as the braces felt after I got them tightened, but this pain is worse. It is a natural human reaction to avoid pain, and I have the opportunity to get rid of the pain very simply, all I have to do is pull out the retainer, and that's that. With the braces you don't have that option, so you just deal with the pain, but this is worse. I am being tortured on a physiological level. This retainer is testing my humanity, my ability to overcome the naturally human instinct to avoid pain. This situation I'm in reminds me of the flinch game that kids play. The idea is that if you flinch as someone is going to punch you then you end up getting a worse punishment, but that in essence is such an awful game. You are reward kids for not flinching, and punishing them for an instinct that comes naturally, and is actually useful in our lives. I flinch, and I am proud of that. I know that if some day a mugger tries to punch me, I can use my flinching ability to avoid the attack and run away. We, as a society, are trying to distance ourselves from our humanity, because it limits us from achieving all that we can, but without those limits, we'd all die. If you can deal with the pain in your mouth, then you can achieve more in dental science, and if you don't flinch, then you seem brave, and can reflect the idea that because of our advanced human societies, the natural instinct of flinching is no longer needed because of our dominance of the physical world. But at the same time there is a reason why we feel pain, and why we flinch. If pain wasn't uncomfortable, then we'd all kill ourselves accidentally, and if flinching didn't exist then we'd all be eaten by bears. I'm going to bed now, and am going to continue in my crusade to defy my humanity, because in the end of the day that is a part of being human, trying not to be.
Thank you for reading,
Julian Vargas

It's normal for people to observe others. We are constantly looking at each other, making judgements and creating opinions based on them, but it is rare that we can actually do this with ourselves. We rarely see ourselves for the people that we are. Sometimes when I am laying in bed I kind of detach myself from my body. I forget who I am because I am thinking about something so much bigger than myself, but that is the closest I've ever got to lot being me. The other day I was watching the footage from the day I spent filming randomness with Katherine and Matt that I talked about yesterday, and I realized that I am a weird kid. I was looking at all of he mannerisms that I have, and that I don't notice that I do. I was critiquing my whole essence and it was today, as I'm sitting in chemistry writing a blog post that I start to pay attention to everything I do. I started to imagine what if a camera was watching me judging me the same way that I was when I looked at myself on camera. I think I'm weird, and when I looked at myself I felt that I don't really know who I am. This is going to be a short post, I just a thought I'd type in between periods because there was nothing better to do.
I'm in Spanish class now. I've been noticing that I bite my pen a lot, I wonder if it looks weird when I do that. Other people do it and I don't notice it as something weird on them when they do it, but maybe I knaw on my pen, because I was chewing it pretty vigorously in math. I'm not trying to change myself, but today I'm just going to observe myself.
In social studies I realized that I don't talk much. I used to talk all the time in the past in social studies, I remember calling out all the answers and I felt so smart when I would, but now I don't anymore. I still know all the answers, but I don't get that satisfaction of answering a question correctly anymore. And I never had any questions, and if I did I would just answer it myself. So now I barely say a word in soc.

My Day with Kat

I worked on editing a movie with Katherine. Last week we had decided to film everything that we saw while with Matt. Most of it didn't make any sense but the idea is that we have an hour of footage to make something out of. There are actually a lot of good idea within what we shot. We have beginnings and endings to probably a dozen movies that could be made, and I think that what I want to do next is continue with an idea that we had within the hour. We have these wonderful shots of me and Matt bouncing a ball with each other and we talked about things. I like that idea a lot, two guys casually talking as they bounce a ball between each other. I want to re-film that, more cleanly but still being loose like we had originally done it. There are some great little pieces of dialog without the hour but if we tried to recreate that then it wouldn't have the natural feel that it had the first time. The issue with the first time was mainly that it was unclean and very rough. It we could get the same footage, but with more attention to quality, then we would have a great project. There was an hour of footage, and Katherine and I didn't watch it all, but I think that just having the footage is an amazing pool to get ideas from and keeping that with me can be extremely useful for me in my life. 

I've been watching a lot of Game of Thrones episodes and that is thanks to Katherine who has also been watching it. I had been on episode seven for over a month because I wasn't motivated enough to watch it, but now Katherine and I are at the same place in the show, so the next day we can yell about how much of a dick Joffrey is and how awesome dragons are. This motivation that I get from Katherine can be more than just in a tv show, she had become a huge part of my artistic community and I enjoy talking to her about my own artistic endeavors. And she talks to me so I would imagine that she views me in a similar way.