"Are you always this articulate?" -Meg

I don’t particularly enjoy talking about myself, but they say to write what you know, and just about the only subject I feel qualified enough to say I know anything about, is myself. Sure I’ve read enough mandatory classics in high school to fake literacy, sure I’ve watched enough food network to feign culinary skill, and of course there is the plethora of nonsense I’ve learned from my avid TLC watching. But that’s the thing about multimedia these days, there’s an app, TV channel, radio station, and or magazine for everything. We can fake our way through any conversation these days, as long as you’re able to articulate your bull shit properly.

But I’m tired of bull shit. Really I am. Hence, these self indulgent ramblings, manifestations of the tangled mess that is the derailed locomotion of my thoughts.

Unfortunately, we are swimming in BS every second of any given occasion, and there is simply nothing that can be done about it. You see, above all else the virtue I respect and aspire to live by is honesty. The truth is the most valuable substance on this earth. There was a time when I would rather have one hundred truths over one million dollars.

Well not exactly, that itself is a lie simply to convey how much I love the truth. I’m a college student, I would much rather have one million dollars because I can barely afford my frozen pizzas (I actually have no culinary skill to speak of whatsoever). But let’s ignore the irony and press on. Thanks.

I seem to have just illustrated my own point, what can we just take at face value these days? Nothing. And even when someone is being honest, to their best ability, the truth at the end of the day is just as subjective as Coke or Pepsi.

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a planet named Pluto. It was the ninth planet orbiting the sun, until that fateful day it was downgraded and is planetdom rejected. FACT.

Once upon a time there was a great beast known as the Brontosaurus that trudged through lagoons until a scientist in Chicago realized that the wrong skulls had been placed on it’s skeletons for years and that Bronto was actually a Apatosaurus who much rather preferred keeping his feet dry if he could. FACT.

What is a steadfast truth today will thirty years from now be classified as utterly ridiculous.

Truth is not impermeable like I once thought it was, and is subject to change with our own perspectives.

This past March some girlfriends and I went up to Vancouver for spring break. We were together the whole time, but due to a few free rounds from our friendly neighborhood barkeep, each returned with very different versions of just what exactly happened that week. Although I can tell you that I know for a fact, without a shadow of a doubt that, I am right, and you are wrong, the truth is lost. And as long as I tell you my version first, who are you to question its accuracy?

Jonathan Safran Foer said “Nothing is beautiful and true.”

When I read this quote for the first time in Everything is Illuminated, it broke my heart. I’m about two decades old and I have yet to have experienced actual heart break, but this quote has come near closest to producing that effect.

It broke my heart because I used to believe in the truth. I believed in the truth like some believe in religion. I believed that all things in the universe all chain of events, all misfortunes and blessings, were all in some cosmic attempt to uncover the truth. Even if it was painful and cutting, even if it made you cry and wish you were dead, I believed that I would rather hear the ugly truth, over any other sound.

And that’s when I realized right there, it’s called the UGLY truth. No one ever claimed that the truth was or could be beautiful. The notion that it was this pure and lovely saving grace was a delusion that I’d imagined all on my own.

But what is so great about beauty anyway? I’ve had enough of it.

I’m throwing out my vanities, my bullshit, my make believe.

I’m trading them in for raw, disfigured, ugly truth.

But over time my truth may waiver.

But my truth is my own and I will do my best to tell it.

Maybe what matters most isn’t that we hit the nail exactly on the head. Real truth, is in my opinion unattainable, but what matters most is that we try.

Try your best to live honestly. Who are we trying to impress? Why do I need to know about poems and cooking, and science, and cars? You know your stuff, I’ll know mine.

Let’s cut the shit. We all have so much we can learn from one another, if we would just stop and listen, and be open to the thousands of different truths that there are.

What is right for me is not right for you, and I’m not claiming that it is or that I know better or that you don’t know anything. I live a great deal of my life coasting on a wave of neutrality bordering on indifference.

The truth, I am learning, is not a hard and fast fact like I once believed it to be. What is true right now will not be true ten, twenty, thirty years from now, and perhaps what matters most is simply that we are open to the possibility of truth.