14 Spot-On Quotes For Introverts

My second Thought Catalog article.  Link to site is here.

1.

Telling an introvert to go to a party is like telling a saint to go to Hell.

- Criss Jami, Killosophy

2.

There’s a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day.

– Lauren Morrill, Meant to Be

3.

Introverts treasure the close relationships they have stretched so much to make.

– Adam S. McHugh, Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture

4.

When introverts are in conflict with each other…it may require a map in order to follow all the silences, nonverbal cues and passive-aggressive behaviors!

– Adam S. McHugh

5.

The only problem with seeing people you know is that they know you.

- Brent Runyon, The Burn Journals

 6.

Inside was where she lived, physically and mentally. She resided in the horn of plenty of her own prodigious mind, fertilized by inexhaustible curiosity.

– Tim F. LaHaye, The Rising

7.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

- Steven Hawking

8.

I’ve been accused my whole life of being “too sensitive”. This actually kind of pisses me off, but maybe that’s just because I’m too sensitive.

– Sophia Dembling

9.

I was born as a forest, but I feel overwhelmed by all these trees.

- theladyfidgets

10.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

- Audrey Hepburn

11.

Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

- Rumi

12.

I think a lot, but I don’t say much.

- Anne Frank

13.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

- F. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 14.

Quiet is might. Solitude is strength. Introversion is power.

– Laurie Helgoe

           - J. A. Kind

27 Thoughts We All Have While Walking Up Steps

11. Are these steps or stairs?

22. What even is the difference?

33. Am I done yet?

44. I am going to have an asthma attack.

55. Where the hell is that second landing?

66. I need a break.

77. This is the hardest task I have yet had to accomplish.

88. How long have I been ascending?

99. I have got to be like 30 feet up.

110. I am losing oxygen.

111. My lungs are collapsing.

112. I can feel lung tissue in my stomach.

113. I’m going to fall.

114. I’m literally going to fall from stepping up things.

115. I’m going to trip.

116. Is anyone watching me?

117. Shit, people are watching.

118. Dammit, I always trip in front of people.

119. Hopefully it’s not (insert crush name).

220. Oh lord, my troubles.

221. Jesus, step!

222. Is it bad that I am more worried about falling up the steps than down them?

223. Falling up steps – I’m a gravity rebelling ascending youth.

224. A G.R.A.Y!

225. Talking about gray, I am addicted to the 50SOG “Crazy in Love.”

226. “Got me looking so-“

227. Dammit I fell up.

     - J. A. Kind

Bye Bye Birdie

           In the final chapter of The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, Morrison described Pecola as “ beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach-could not even see-but which filled the valleys of her mind” (204).  The substance of this sentence symbolizes that as a human, Pecola was given all the personal tools necessary for her to reach the daily blue coating of the stars.  She had intellect, emotions, and the physical components of the average human; nevertheless, she could not grasp her goal and obtain the “blue void” (204) that would assuage her pains.  For Pecola Breedlove was inhibited of success by all the components that formed the collection of actions and concepts around her – every aspect of Pecola’s life restricted her ability to obtain success.  It formed a life-consuming inability, a simplistic restriction that presented itself as groundedness.  In The Bluest Eye, Morrison explained “how,” not “why,” (2) this restriction was solidly composed.  Consequently, once this restriction had been buried “too deeply” (206), Morrison delved into the repercussions of the restriction on the pathetic child.  Pecola existed as a bird, and through her feathered meat cawing behind the meaning of this deformed symbolism, Toni Morrison plucked Pecola raw, therefore showing the bare life of a black girl in the 1940s. 

            In the continued symbolism of the final chapter, Pecola had wings.  However, she and “her ugliness” (205) were unable to use her bodily tools to achieve flight.  Pecola, “winged but grounded,” never became one with the “blue void” that stalked her mind like the prey she herself was (204).  Morrison purposely shrouded the cause of Pecola’s inability in ambiguity to underlying peck at the vast possibilities of reasons for Pecola’s suffering.  Pecola’s wings could have cracked and crumbled, loosely remaining hinged to her core, when “Cholly loved her,” when he “loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her” (206).  Pecola’s wings could have broken and bent as her father’s stiff member penetrated her and gave her life.  Perversion could have bred the inability to preform.  However, the cause of the effect that reflected itself in the inability could have additionally been due to the actual ground where Pecola’s talons scraped for “the thing [that society] assassinated” (206).  The earth itself could have deprived Pecola of flight.

            The year the “black dirt” (1) failed to produce the life once granted by its own perversion, the earth and its own soil, aborted their mission to “nurture certain fruit,” to germinate “certain seeds,” and to blossom “certain kinds of flowers” (206).  The world where Pecola remained grounded, refused to provide the certain necessities of further development and success from its very ground.  The earth disliked the ugly girl and the sooner it could rid its surface of the bulging imperfection, the better.  For with the eradication of the blemish, the natural world order would return – the comparisons to her “ugliness,” “inarticulateness,” “poverty,” and “frailty” (205) would fade into “the blue void” (204) and “the fantasy of [their] strength” (205) would remain just that, a fantasy.  Morrison created a physical world of hatred for Pecola.  This world deprecated development by honoring imagination, by ironically granting bird form to a flightless girl, and by cruelly creating blue eyes for an ignored individual.  The bird Pecola’s mind inhabited, was inhibited from flight, yet similarly repressed from pecking the ground for certain types of fruits, seeds, and flowers because those cultivated appendages of the earth never reached out from “among the garbage and the sunflowers” (206) to be able to be grabbed. 

            Only garbage and sunflowers discharged from the “edge of [the] town” (206).  However even if the fruits, seeds, and flowers of earth’s womb did survive following fertilization, Pecola would still be unable to clutch them.  Pecola no longer carried the trait, the ability, to seize; she was physically limp and mentally numb.  The physical components that once failed to distinguish Pecola from the society around her ironically vanished into the “blue void” (204) Pecola could not physically or mentally conceive.  For Pecola might have had wings and blue eyes but she was nonetheless categorized as the victim [who] had no right to live” (206).  Pecola socially died; she solely coalesced her buried feathers while “her head [jerked] to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear.”  She unknowingly deafened herself, and in so, retracted her position as a pureblooded amalgamation of live atoms, one that could resist the urge to grab the gifts of the earth.  However Pecola was no longer pureblooded.  She was a collection of hows and other perverse qualities – a canvas of splattered blood and love from the “wicked,” the “violent,” the “weak,” “the stupid,” and the “free” (206). 

            Pecola carried the eyes of a stranger, the physique of a bird, and the incestuous blood formed from the deposit of her father.  Pecola was a rag doll – unlike that of Shirley Temple, for Pecola was played with.  She was played with in the dirt and she was played with on the sofa.  She was played with in the kitchen and she was played with in the mirror.  She was manipulated, seen, yet habitually unheard.  She was known – known until her very substance metamorphosed into a bird of no melody; and in that instant, Morrison climactically reconstructed Pecola’s story into an allegory for many – Morrison manifested the silently chirped song of the black girl. 

      - J. A. Kind

To Vegetarians and Non-Vegetarians Alike

Yes, I love animals.  No, that does not mean I will make love to them. 

Consuming food breeds joy.  No seriously, few things more importantly won4derful (it’s a trend – literal translation: for in the wonder) than the consumption of food exist in this universe.  The pure orgasmic feeling of shoving pounds (or kilos – I don’t judge) of unadulterated, fatty food into the pie hole simply outweighs all other troubles and won4ders in life.

However, for me, in the past year and a half, this exhilarating feeling of ingestion has been littered with pricks and pines of judgmental questioning. 

I am a vegetarian – there, I said it.  However, as many times as I step out of my stereotypically veggie and fruit filled closet, humans seem to continuously bombard me with questions about my eating habits – or as I like to call them, my consumptiality. 

Unlike my sexuality, I decided the boundaries of my consumptiality.  Nevertheless, these decisions ooze of a personal, conscious stench.  A stench that I would have rather kept to myself, however unlike the unadulterated, fatty food that I shove into the growing abyss that is my pie hole, I cannot stuff my scented consumptiality into my bodily oblivion.  Instead I must shroud myself in the odor and engage in horrid interaction and conversation about the stink when other humans lean into my scented, consuming, gravitational pull. 

Once other humanoid life forms do fall in proximity, their immediate, oh-so-basic question blurts out from their mouths in a ratty, high pitched squeal.  “Why did you decide to not eat meat anymore?” Oh, the average manner in which they ask; they find it affirming yet I despise its ignorant disrespectfulness.  However, for me, the question does not reek of offensiveness as much as the fashion by which it was pondered and subsequently asked. 

THE BASICNESS – IT PAINFULLY KILLS A PART OF MY SOUL. (which if you think about it is even more offensive than any other action because one of the reasons I am not eating meat is because I don’t want to kill anything with a bunch of nerves, and the practice of not eating animals is the closest lifestyle I can live while attempting to reach this unobtainable ideal; but, then you go ahead and painfully kill part of me thus adding to my contribution to the tangible pain in this universe and that just isn’t nice)  Simply put, it hurts. 

People, please, please splatter and soak your questioning in simple, appropriate creativity.  Ask, in a non-squealing voice, “So, does meat give you the shits?”  That’s funny – I would actually laugh.  But don’t go overboard. 

I have actually had people smugly come up to me and crappily proclaim, “So, do you not eat animals because you have like a weird thing for them – you know, bestiality is wrong…” 

NO, I DIDN’T KNOW THAT.  WHO THE LA-DEE-FRICKEN-DAH KNEW THAT.

Wait, yeah, I stopped eating animals because I felt bad about digesting the egg-provider of the dove I was going to make love to that night.  I simply could not stroke her talons (so what, I can have a talon fetish – JOKING, Jesus, people, take a joke) while picturing the juicy tenderness of her mother’s wings.  It was too much, so instead I just told my dovey (get it) that I wasn’t in the mood because I had seen a dove killed earlier in the morning.  When she fell asleep, I wrote a poem about my angst and the first-world problems that arose from my engagement in both bestiality and vegetarianism.  That very limerick styled poem goes as follows:

I really want to find some love.

So I must get a messenger dove,

To send this here letter,

That’ll be read to get her,

Kidding – come bird, I speak of.

Oh to be a vegetarian. 

           - J. A. Kind 

My Small Plot of Cyberspace Expands

Recently, I been published on Teen Ink.  Click the links below to view my works:

http://www.teenink.com/poetry/free_verse/article/765711/polaroid/

http://www.teenink.com/poetry/free_verse/article/765473/Glass/

          - J. A. Kind