Once upon a time...

Once upon a time…
calculus hadn’t been discovered and dating didn’t exist.

Sure, we didn’t know as much about how the world worked and lots of marriages were ridden with pent-up tension, but isn’t that still the case today?
Maybe we know a little more than we did 500 years ago, but I don’t know how many normal-folk (modern day peasants, if you will) actually apply what they know. Whether it be with dating, calculus, or some other new fancy invention (like…hand sanitizer WHICH YOU SHOULD USE IF YOU DON’T).
Granted, I never actually took calculus so maybe I’m missing out on some could-have been application, but I still stick by my statement. Things pop up and boast of greater efficiency and productivity than ever before.
Do they help you?

Once upon a time…
a community meant something different. It meant physically and emotionally being there for each other. It meant living in a type of “togetherness” for an extended period of time. Maybe I just missed the boat and/or train for being part of such a community, but Facebook seems to be the main binding mechanism in our world. Rather than physically and emotionally binding us together though, it digitally binds us. And not necessarily together.
What does community mean to you today?

Once upon a time…
thoughts were simpler to express. Back in kindergarten, you were quite the daredevil if you threw some conjunctions into your sentence, let alone commas. You felt one feeling at a time and those feelings were divided into words like “sad,” “mad,” and “happy.” Nowadays I sometimes have to read sentences three times in order to find the stinkin’ verb because thoughts have been so convoluted with other useless words and punctuation. And then I wonder why I wrote such a long sentence.
And don’t even get me started about all the diction I’ve built up futilely trying to properly express my feelings. Because the more I learn, the more I feel and know that I just can’t express with any words. 

Once upon a time…
there was no such thing as a stupid movie or a bad book. As a child, pretty much everything that was animated captivated me. I didn’t even care if the plot didn’t make sense. The characters were more important than the story. And now we judge characters for their story and not for how their author created them. Which maybe isn’t a terrible thing. But are we so quick to point out the flaws in film, literature, and even people, that we fail to see the good?

Once upon a time…
this wouldn’t have been sense:


And now I can think of no better way to express my life.

Once upon a time…
everything meant something different.

Once upon today…
everything is still changing, but everything is the same. Dating and calculus still exist. We try to establish community but still feel lonely. Thoughts and ideas and emotions just get more complicated. Individuals still get lost in their own stories. And everything is still on fire.  



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