Employers are granted legal permission to pay their employees less than minimum wage, with tip compensation accounting for the additional amount. Any well meaning coffee shop will include their bakers, kitchen staff, and busboys in the tip pool as well. This means that the livelihoods of coffeeshop employees relies on a tip pool derived from 1 or 2 dollars on each cup of coffee. Yes, the numbers add up quick, but divided, they disappear.

Loving means taking the lump of who we are today and forgiving ourselves for what we did and didn’t do. Loving means tough work, and the beauty of the reward that follows.

Perhaps plastic bags were given to us strictly to teach us a lesson. That we cannot create what cannot easily be destroyed if it only is built for one-use in it’s lifetime. We must create things for the sake of function, durability, versatility, and beauty so that we can appreciate each thing as we use it.

There is no formula for love. There is no formula for how to be human. No guidebooks for what to eat, how to dress or who to be that transcends all people. There are no answers that guarantee happiness. This is what we call life.

I had landed back in the land that knew me more honestly and deeply than anywhere in the world, and yet I felt misunderstood. People often dismiss what they don’t understand, or dreams that they don’t believe to accomplish, or people who have lived a life different than their own.

I have developed a ritual of spending the first half-hour of my morning with myself. I’m not one to give advice, but if I were to suggest anything, this precious period of stillness and solitude does wonders for the reboot of the mind. Its not fancy.

I want a love that isn’t afraid of feeling. A love that breathes, and gives, and takes in equal doses. The kind of love that gives you goosebumps, and is so easy that its almost hard to talk about because you don’t want to jinx it

I am not sure if it is just coincidence or bad luck that the past 4 therapists I have tried to go to have been late, canceled, or simply forgotten about our appointments. Going to therapy at all was a challenge I took upon myself and accepted after finally witnessing the toll that the depth of my wild emotion was taking on my close relationships.

I had been so preoccupied with the variety of different me’s I could be that corresponded with whichever lover captured my interest, that I didn’t spend time defining my own. I followed my curiosity deeply, and was left with feelings of unsettledness and confusion as I lost interest and watched my partners lose interest in me. I see now why they interpreted my motives as “fake” though I still stand firm in my genuine curiosity and the truth I carried through all of my personas.