Champaign Urbana's buzz magazine has a new site! Check it out here with a review I wrote of Youth Lagoon's Year of Hibernation:
Youth Lagoon's Year of Hibernation

Regret

I decided something, at least for today.

To claim to "regret nothing" is simply to excuse yourself from one of life's greatest punishments--guilt. It is to mask a burning pain.

To live without regret is to not hold yourself accountable. It is to avoid deserved pain, it is to not be honest with yourself.

Those who regret nothing because they always "learned something" are simply excusing themselves. Certainly, many times we need to error in actions to actually understand something. But many times, we do something we know we shouldn't do, and therein lies a weakness in character. Which is human. And so is regret.

And further, if we actually acknowledge error and feel badly about it, don't we better learn? Don't we more properly better ourselves? When we evade the feelings of guilt, aren't we more prone to repeating our mistakes?

So is deciding to not regret a product of self righteousness? Are we too great to have done something wrong enough to admit? Do we not deserve the pain of making a mistake? Are we too proud? Are we too scared to be a typical human, doing wrong and feeling the remorse?

Maybe at some point I'll decide that there is no such thing as "deserved pain." I'll probably disagree with all this completely. But for now, to learn from yourself and to grow and treat the world and yourself better, I think it is important to look at mistakes and have sorrow and remorse for them.

A Seed

If there is a seed, there is a seed.

If there is water, there is water

If there is sunlight and carbon dioxide, well then we have four concepts at hand.

By use of (in this case) the English language, we have given meaning to these letter combinations by deciding, with social norms, what can be considered proper characteristics for each of these words. We have sieved out, by popular majority, what will not exclusively comprise each of these four ideas. And we have thus constructed a relative idea about how many objects we are discussing. It is in the complexities of simply forming these four components of life that make clear how many deviations are to follow in what might be “growth.”

Human life—it is a mystery. Even in our discussion of it lies varying interpretations about the words within the competing meanings.

And we try to find meaning. We listen, we ignore, we speak, write, draw, we move. We try to understand, we mostly error. But in the rare occasion of understanding, we find the struggle’s worth.