yes or no?

"The justification of sacrifice, that your morality, propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love - the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men - this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

"As there can be causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

"Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you're incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant; not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgement; that true love transcends, forgives and surives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them - the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love - the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue - and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection."

-from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Art and Interpretation.

About a week ago I was sitting with my friend on this comfy couch at the Crown Casino looking at the sets of chandeliers across the tall ceiling. We shared one of those golden silences and it was broken when she asked me about my thoughts on an artist who took photos of naked teens and called it 'art'.

The pictures of the naked children were in a gallery in Italy but it was closed down before it opened. A minority of people expressed that it was pornography, rather than art and this uproar caused the artworks to be closeted from the public eye. These are my thoughts:

If a man walked into the gallery looking for art, he will find art. If a pervert walked into the gallery looking for pornography, he will find pornography. Art is, and always will be, based on interpretation. Coincidentally, about a week ago I flicked through quotes by dead people (something I do more than I should) and found a quote by Gloria Leonard, a porn actress. She said "the difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."
I think Ms. Leonard was making light of the perception of pornography and erotica when she said this because though everyone is looking at the same thing, it is often viewed with different angles.

The man who was second best.

Everyone loves the winner. He tries so hard and often is followed by a remarkable success story. Who deserves the winning trophy more than the winner himself? I don't have anything against winners, but the person who comes runner-up will always take my heart. The person who was known for trying and not succeeding and still manages to hold his head up high. He is proud, because he simply tried. He failed and he works harder. He loses but he isn't a loser. So to every runner-up in the world, be proud of not succeeding the first time, but never accepting failure, because it is you who keeps me going in the end. Thanks.

With age comes ignorance.

There is probably a 7 year old child who has experienced so much more than any one of us and will not know how to put it into words. There is probably an 80 year old man who was too scared to step outside of his house and experienced nothing, with nothing to teach because he was frightened to learn. There are people who think they know more than you, who have 'experienced more' just because of their status, their fame, their age especially. No one knows everything and no one can possibly judge how much someone else knows. If someone flunked school, does that mean they are unintelligent? Einstein didn't even make it through school and now he is and always will be one of the most well-known scientists of all time. When someone tells you, you're too young, you don't know, you'll find out one day; don't believe them. Grasp absolutely everything and learn from every moment. Even learn from the people who are too ignorant to know that curiosity and imagination are the tools used to seek discovery.

I believe the most smartest, hopeful and influential people are the onces who once were told they were crazy, stupid and unrealistic. As for me, I like reality, it's a nice place, I wouldn't live there though.

Short Fiction: "Cigarettes"

She lit a cigarette, sucked it in and as she exhaled the sickening scent gradually sapped her anger and left with the crisp autumn air. As her emotion escaped her she was stuck with the one person she hated most. Herself. Because facing herself was hard. It was better to have an inner demon of anger or despair to blame for such spontaneous outbursts, but when her peaking emotions were drained, there was nothing but a hollow woman leaning on a balcony watching the clouds silhouette the moon. Tonight she felt destined to be alone, there was no company the night could give her. Even the moon hid from her.

The mood of the past five minutes was gone. There was nothing. Her mind had stopped and her emotions extracted. But she knew this would not last. Inside the room lay the rest of her life that she had to face. She wanted to stay outside. It felt timeless. But as she tried to avoid her life, the re-commencement was inevitable. 

For one night she wanted nothing to do with anything. No ties. No duties. No jobs. Nothing that could lead to anything else. This is why she smoked cigarettes. The addictive drug that claimed lives, and willingly, it claimed her own. She wanted to be content in one moment. Constantly moving forward tired her and she merely wanted to stay in a single moment of her life and take it all in. Life was too fast for someone who only wanted to breathe.