ZuLou Lives Here

 

18-15n-77-30w:

http://18-15n-77-30w.tumblr.com: don’t know the source for this….

(via 18-15n-77-30w)

1 month ago 116 notes

18-15n-77-30w:

Jazmine Dominique

(via 18-15n-77-30w)

1 month ago 62 notes
14th
April
91 notes
Reblog

(via thepassionsoflustnoir)

1 month ago 91 notes

18-15n-77-30w:

Tat

(via thepassionsoflustnoir)

1 month ago 470 notes

fyeahcarlsagan:

Beautiful.

(via zizidur)

1 month ago 8,751 notes
14th
April
137 notes
Reblog
18-15n-77-30w: iam-melissa: Close your eyes. Inhale -Melissa Martinez 18° 15’ N, 77° 30’ W

18-15n-77-30w:

iam-melissa:

Close your eyes. Inhale -Melissa Martinez

18° 15’ N, 77° 30’ W

1 month ago 137 notes

(via official310)

1 month ago 9,058 notes

Pretense

Listening to Kendrick Lamar. One third of the way through a fifth of Ciroc. Borrowed a cigarette from a friend. My mother would never approve of this. Forgive me.

I recently made the rank of E-5. Military-minded people can relate. Previous to making this promotion, I had someone senior to me writing my evaluations, but apparently I’ve hit that stage in my career where I write my own eval, and my superiors just edit it as they see fit. There are two approaches a person can take with this situation. Either you are brutally honest, which is my nature 85% of thee time, or you gas yourself for your own benefit. Both of these have their pros. Being brutally honest allows for retrospect and true growth. Gassing yourself makes you look better than your peers in the long run. They also have their cons. Being brutally honest may taint the image you’ve been painting, out of the very human desire to put up pretenses. Gassing yourself will potentially take away your self-respect, and what do others respect for you matter when you can’t even muster up that sentiment for yourself? Naturally I want to take the honest route. As I said, its in my nature to do so. Instead, I ended gassing myself due to a very predictable paradox: I’m not the only E-5 in my command. ALL OF US write our own evals. And even though I tend to criticize myself, I also know that at the end of the day I’m an exceptional sailor. I need this point to be made, not just in relation to myself, but in relation to everyone else. They rank us. And the a lot of the other E-5s are not as brutally honest as me when they write their evals. They will put as many words in there as necessary to paint the desired picture of a perfect sailor. If I speak honestly, then I will pale in comparison to the fantasy sailors being depicted around me. In the act of self-preservation, I have to keep up this pretense, blow myself up to me more than I actually feel that I am. Forced to lie, just to prove that I deserve to be in the top rankings. This is not what I want. I’m staying afloat in a sea of lies, even as I drown in a pool of truth.
I need to make this relatable, How do I expect others to understand? I know. Facebook drives you to blow yourself up to epic proportions, portray yourself in ways that you fully know does not actually represent you. Thats not unique to Facebook. Or even Twitter, Tumblr or MySpace. That is community. The need to make yourself be perfect. The need to make your family seem perfect. Your society. Your religion. Your life. This is painfully obvious from our portrayal of what life and family should consist of: Hollywood. The Cosby Show, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and heroes in general. But you don’t need to. Do not let your essence wither away in the name of keeping up pretenses, don’t let that be your first sense of truth. Please , be stronger than me. I admire, NO, I absolutely adore those who care about nothing else but their own self-identity, because they have remembered the greatest gifts of being a child. And do not twist my words and think I call them childish. No. I call them pure. They are as pure as when they first arrived here, and thats the greatest trait of all, to be uninfluenced by influence. They are just themselves.
I won’t name them, because they will either feel championed or scrutinized, and generalizations will be made, and I don’t believe in those.

One half through the bottle of Ciroc. Wonder how long I’ll last.l

3 months ago

Friends

This next one should be a phone call, but my phone is off. Tsk tsk. I have a very good friend on my submarine, named Karim Cain. No, I feel comfortable enough to call him my brother, outside of physical resemblance. Our constant banter is a clear indiication that he fills the spot of the brother I never actually had. Sidenote: he was my mentor when I first got to the boat, and I still marvel over how he helped shape me into a carbon copy of him. Its not easy admitting that with arrogance either. What helps to ease that pain is that fact that I’m proud of it. Anyway, he’s leaving in about a month, and there have been multiple times that we’ve had that conversation so many friends have in this fast life. Will we keep in touch? Will we remember each other, be lifelong friends? Us being brutally honest people, the outcome is always grim. No, we will not be lifelong friends. We will not forever be in touch. We will think, and miss the camaraderie of the brotherhood, but we will move on with our lives. And we don’t say this out of laziness, but out of past experience. Cain is just the last of a long line of brothers that I’ve failed to keep in contact with, because I’ve been cursed with this sense of detachment that won’t allow me to hold on to friendship when it spans the globe. I’m a military brat, bred to be relocated at a second’s notice. As a child, even when I was too young to acknowledge it, I secretly knew this was what my future would consist of. I’ve experienced the pain of losing a friend far too often to consider it anything more than a papercut. This is what allows me to go out to sea and not worry myself sick about the world affairs, what drives my family crazy when I go weeks without calling them. They think its because I’m insensitive. I realize its because I’m desensitized. I lived in Africa for a year and some change with no one’s company but my grandmother and my uncle, how can you not expect me to adapt? This is what I’ve become, compassionate as ever but cold as ice when it matters most. I’m ashamed of my self-preservant ways.
This is dedicated to my long line of brothers who I have failed. Austin Israel Lewan Johnson, Chris Marquez, Corwon Curtis Martin, Steven Gifford, Fas D DreamChaser Bayoh, Zach Nottnott Cook, Brandon Cunningham, Joshua Pruitt, Dinero Melianno,

Zack Wood … the list goes on.
— at Alaska.

3 months ago

(via jmoor33)

3 months ago 7,391 notes
16th
February
1,672 notes
Reblog

(via tangiblesoul)

3 months ago 1,672 notes

Loner

Looking outside my window, I see the crisp, frosty Alaskan countryside. What a sight. Warm hotel room. Music setting the ambience. Ciroc plays devil’s advocate. Utterly alone. Loving it. Its a testament to my status as a loner that despite the fact I’ve been cut off from the world for weeks, the only company I crave is my own. There are many reasons to be alone, not many of them are positive, but here’s one for the self-proclaimed extroverts to consider: loneliness allows for complete control, or at least as complete as control can ever hope to be. Other people are wild factors, to some degree predictable, but not nearly enough for ease of mind. As I sit here in my warm hotel room in frosty Alaska, I know exactly where I stand in the world. I don’t have to wonder about anybody else’s actions but my own, and I’m very well in control of that, ain’t I? This is what it means to be ruler of your own domain. A saying comes to mind … “A king of a dungeon may be a king, but he still lives in a dungeon.” My answering argument is that he is still king! Its only when you start to thinking about your limits of influence that you begin to fall. Don’t trap yourself. This is what loners crave, the ability to control their destinies and surroundings, just like any other person who lives. The difference is that they’re willing to occasionally give up their own social life for that ability, while others don’t even consider it an option. When one thinks of it in that way, how can you not understand how someone can go without social interaction. Its obvious.

I end this one by saying that although I’ve been labelled as arrogant in the past, and rightfully so, I’m not arrogant enough to think that what I say is the truth. Its just speculation. More than that, its self-expression.

3 months ago

(via youngalbert)

3 months ago 1,563 notes
3 months ago 60,934 notes

Beauty

The deceptive nature of beauty … I want nothing to do with it. Its as manipulative as any sin could ever be. If you have it, consider yourself lucky, but be aware of the consequences of possessing it. If you don’t have it, allow yourself to realize the absurdity of basing life decisions on just that … beauty. Its so easy to sit down and write common sense, but to act out on it is completely different. Free will requires so much effort. There are so many things that control everyday decisions, the factors are innumerable. So why hark on beauty? Because … it pains me to see how superficial I can be. There’s so much more to a person than that, and even though I know that, and I’ve learnt to act out on that knowledge … it still makes me feel weak. I falter when I look at a picture of someone who is beautiful, but has long ago been deemed as untrustworthy, not for any single action, but for overall demeanor. Beauty will never save you again in my eyes, and in that aspect you lose. But the fact that I can’t look at you without feeling some sort of slight affection, thats the part where I lose. And I’m a sore loser.

In short, screw beauty. Never needed it before.

3 months ago