Todd came out and said, “Sorry about that.”
I said it didn’t matter, but you know what Todd said? He said, “I think it does matter. And I do care. So can you please tell me? Sometimes I think you underestimate me, Underwood. So just give me a chance, okay?”
So we went to The Good Earth for turkey burgers and Smoothies (Todd’s gym food) and I explained Jed to Todd. I think I do underestimate people. I don’t know why I keep these things cramped up inside me. And I think Todd is a friend to call me on it.

But I think that the books I really enjoy are the ones in which the characters realize, only in the end, what it was that they secretly wanted all along, but never knew. And maybe this is what life is really like.

Each of us lives dependent and bound by our individual knowledge and our awareness. All that is what we call reality. However, both, knowledge and awareness, are equivocal. One’s reality might be another’s illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies.

Extreme situations don’t change us, they reveal us. But the worst is when we can’t even see what we’ve allowed ourselves to become - or rather, we can’t see what parts of ourselves we’ve allowed to grow out of control. It can happen to anyone.

If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.

No matter how good things are, there will always be solitary nights you spend in your bedroom, in a car, or in a party full of your closest friends when it feels like the walls are caving in.

I can see all of my friends and
I break into empty buildings,
When the coast was clear,
With backpacks full of beer,
We’d throw our bottles from the rooftops
At this city-it looked endless.
Guess I still don’t see the difference
between real purpose and that urgent adolescence.

Crushes are fun. Or at least they’re supposed to be fun as long as you keep them that way. As long as you don’t get emotionally invested or fixated or keep imagining your reality to be what it is not – crushes are fun. But if you expect too much or feel too easily, you might end up with self-inflicted heart ache which just leaves you feeling empty-handed or just plain empty. And all of this for someone who never even promised you anything from the start.

We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of the world, but to the reality of other thinkers.