It Ends With a Bye

I guess there isn't much to say.
It has been years since I found a source of happiness.
And while things were bad for some time. It is now that it ends.
With a simple and incredibly painful bye.
It is not that we are apart, or that we need to be apart. It is that there is nothing we could share in the future.
Love should be able to transcend all problems.
Yet love cannot get past the differences in love itself.
One would hope that love would find a way to enjoy a little bit.
But in order to heal, sometimes it must be thrown away.
There is no way for me to tell how much I will miss her. How much I wished we could do our plans together.
How much I regret the problems and the sad days.
How much I wished I was different, better suited to her.
How much I would just like to yell "stay with me".
It is hard to love, know the suffering there is in being together and having to choose not to be together.
Whoever said that love is all you need, was lucky in the type of love he/she had.
Maybe I was not meant to have this love.




It is sad when it ends.

But it is sadder when it ends with just a bye.

Extreme Blindness

Extreme Blindness
It is within human nature to try and defend what they care for.
When I say this, people usually think of the romanticized version of it: The people we love, family, spouse, friends and even people from the same nation.
But if you stop to look around, people are not restricted to that, I'd even say that they don't even consider love when they protect love. Bear with me, this gets tricky. People do what they do, with the general purpose of serving their own purposes, fulfilling their own self sense of value and interest. When people protect something they love, they don't do it out of protection, they do it to not lose the thing that gives them joy, love, pleasure, peace or whatever thing they are after.
People are selfish, and selfless acts are done only with the purpose of internal feeling of being better.

Now, no one is worse than anyone else just because their serve their own purposes... it is normal, more than anyone would admit.
But people are scared. Scared that something will take away things precious to them. And so they fight back... ever so more violent.
In the games industry, debates have been heating up. Stories about people overreacting are getting worse and worse, as if people were trying to top each other in the act of being jerks. Maybe some of them find fulfillment in doing so, someone has to in this vast world, but this has been increasing the pressure into this explosive mixture of a world. Threats are on levels that no one deserving the title of human would do.

Fear is a huge motivator, but fear is a blinding feeling. It clouds judgement. Not like anger that makes you take rash decisions you would regret latter. No... fear is more dangerous. Fear sways your beliefs, changes your actions to a point where there is no regret, there is this self impose justification. With that, even the worst ideas become interesting and self serving. That is when people get killed. That is when life changing decisions are made. Because people will justify ANY action done in fear.
Humans were not meant to experience fear for a prolonged period... fear should be an instant response to avoid danger. Anyone living on a constant looming threat would go insane. And that is how society has been developing so far.

Fear is the essence of how we live. We fear rejection, being alone, getting caught doing something not "normal", being judged, starving... losing the thing we like. That is how people will react so violently over something so stupid as an opinion about the games industry... fear, irrational, uncontrollable fear.
Now, I'm not here to talk about the games industry. That point is done. That fear is instilled.

I'm here to talk about a bigger beast. Politics.
You see, early in my life I thought that politics were about people with different visions of how to run the country trying to get the public's interest in their views. Latter I believed that they were all people trying to get the most money out of a country without doing any relative amount of work. Of course some places the politics are in constant trouble, facing the dangers of ruling an unstable country that could kill them if they did something upsetting. But some other places don't have that... in other places a politician is a person with so many benefits that it would be nearly unthinkable to get to them.

But now, looking at the state of what Brazil is facing with it's upcoming presidential election, I realized something else. The people debating, throwing their opinion around social medias with calls to rally together, with threats to abandon friendships, or even the way they act depressed because people they consider intelligent don't share their view.... that is a whole other thing... an even bigger beast.
I had discussion with my best friend. A healthy one as usual, for best friends would never have issues if they simply can't agree on the same view. There I discovered some interesting things. I would most likely consider myself a right wing oriented person, but he said that due to my opinions I would be considered left. Ok, whatever the label may be... I would still try to remain neutral, as is my belief that progress can only be achieve when you have an unbiased view of things.
Despite being left by his standards, if I were to choose a side, it would be right, and I asked him as being from the left to explain me the points and ideas. We have a similar views in many aspects, but we differ in how to approach them usually.
But what became interesting to me, was realizing that the more I saw his ideals the more I agreed with his points and at the same time the less I believed that any political group would ever care for what we believed is important.

It got me thinking. What is it that people want, and what is it that the politicians will do? As I saw the mountains of personal attacks thrown from side to side, the discussions, how people presented their stances, the more I realized that their arguments were not arguments. What everybody is doing, is justifying themselves.
They are not debating whether this candidate is better for the country because of this plan or that. They've chosen their side, they are simply rallying people, condemning others for not following their path. They are acting like people discussing religion.
They ARE discussing religion. Not the type of religion where people believe in deities. But the type of blind faith that puts them together with a cause. That faith that makes people consider those that are not fighting on my side are my enemies. That great dividing faith in something bigger than you, in a saviour, in the ideal of an almighty ruler that will punish those infidels and will make your life better.

Politics became something much more polarizing then before. People believe without questioning, and attack other people. And what is depressing is that I'm sure all politicians involved couldn't care less about the plights of the people, of the future of the nation. Like all humans, they care about their future, their chance to live the good life, no matter what cost.
And so it becomes about rallying people to your cause, not about showing you can provide a better future for the country, and to that end they pray on fear.
The fear of the people who got benefits of loosing their benefits, the fear of the people getting neglected to keep on being neglected, the fear of the rich losing their power, the fear of the poor suffering more and more.
All of this because the politicians themselves fear. The ones in power fear losing their power, the ones without fear never getting the power to serve their purposes. And so we are no longer discussing politics.
I'm witnessing the battle of blind people, millions of blind people fighting millions of blind people, moved exclusively by faith and fear.... faith in who they believe, and fear that they will lose something personal they can barely understand what it would be.
No one stopped to ask if the other side won, would it be that bad? Would anything really change? No, all they need is to search the internet for that thing they can say to justify themselves... no matter if it is a lie, a joke, or the utmost truth... it is a justification.

Politics became religion, and with the different faiths, personal ties were damaged.

We are lost in fear, and in our blindness, we will only hurt the people we should love.

By your side

I felt I was invincible.
That every pain was worth it.

I miss you.

There is nothing we can do. Now move out of the line.

That is how my trip to Disney started.
I got up at 4 am, after a 2 hour night sleep. But I was not really tired, I was too anxious about travelling.
I got to the airport around 5:30 am, and went on my way to the chekin for Virgin Australia. When I got there there was a very big line, and no one to provide instructions. After a few minutes lost understanding the deal about the form for leaving the country I got back to stay in line. There were only three attendants trying to get through all the passengers that were trying to check in.
A little over an hour I stood in line, behind a mom alone with a little girl and a baby boy, she was trying to see if there was a special line for her so that she didn't have to wait all that time while handling two energetic children. But no one was there to help her, the only attendant that appeared talked to her briefly and vanished for half an hour. Only when she got near the end of the line they opened a easy path for her to cut ahead of the few people in front of her. A few more minutes it was my turn to checkin.
Now, mind you, I never had any problems during checkin. It was always a simple process of asking the questions I had and handing the documents they asked me. So I was very surprised when after most things were given and all the questions were answered the man taking care of my checkin frowned and said that he had to check something up.
After a couple of minutes looking in the system he told me as bluntly as emotionless that I required a transit visa for Australia to board the plane, so he couldn't process my boarding pass, and this was around 1 hour before my flight. As my brain tryied to wave off all the implications of what he said, in favor of forming questions on what I could do he simply stared at me, barely blinking. After I asked what I could he said that I needed to get the visa, but since mine was a Brazilian passport I need a stamp from the embassy, as opposed to the eletronic visa that other countries' passport requires and can be obtained on the fly, but since it was a saturday I would need to wait for monday to go to the embassy. Then he handed my documents back and stood back as if waiting for me to leave the line.
I tried asking what else could be done, if he could check with immigration on australia to see if there was an alternative, but only said he could provide me a phone and I could try calling them on my own but it would have no effect. After a few minutes of me looking desperately looking for solutions, a supervisor showed up. Hoping that she would have the authority to provide a viable solution I tried explaining my situation again. She looked over the monitor that the attendant had open, and turned to me and said: "Yes, there is nothing that we can do, now please move out of the line" and she called for the next customer to take my place.
After being removed from the line I went to the Flight Center facility in the airport to try and sort out the mess that I was in and was never even warned by the person that booked my flight. There I had to wait an hour to be heard, as since my flight was leaving in an hour there was nothing that could be done fast enough to allow me to be on my flight, so I was not urgent. Understandable, but when you have an hour to wait around and think about the shitty situation you are in, the depression thends to sink in.
When the only lady working there got a moment to help me she looked over my situation and told me I'd have to wait until the manager of the store where I bought my ticket got there, and I could either go back to the city, or try working it out from there, but I'd have to wait around 2 more hours. And so I did.
I talked with him over the phone, trying to figure out a way to get me to USA without going through Australia. A lot of hours lost in this process and a lot of money spent that I didn't have, I got a ticket for 10 pm that same day. With an 8 hour connection wait in LA.
So after 40 hours inside airports and airplanes, with barely no sleep, I was very happy to arrive in Orlando.
But as the curse goes, my problems were not over.
My bag got checked by the TSA, and without having a TSA approved lock (I did not know those existed), my lock was broken into, and with a polite message the costs of it were NOT responsibility of the TSA. So -1 lock.
I got a glass shard inside my finger almost as soon as I got to the hotel.
My glasses broke on the second day there.
I had to deal with lots of issues money wise, not only my own, but also the others.
Stresses with people.
Parks closing early with nearly no warning.
Rides that I wanted to go on closed, or me arriving only after they closed.
My umbrella, that my father gave me, was lost.
The ticked that I requested an extra bag for on the way back AND payed for, did no go through, so I had to save some money to checkin a second bag. And a LOT more money to pay for the excess weight, despite the two combined being under the combined limit.
So of course my flight back had to have some issues. My first flight got delayed for one hour before departing due to paperwork. And I had to endure a Brazilian lady next to me complaining the whole trip. And and extra 30 minutes after we landed just waiting for a gate to open so we could taxi into it. But that is not bad... noooo. I can wait no problem, but my flight can't, so all these delays resulted in a missed connection and after long trips around terminals I got my flight booked for the following night, and since Delta was responsible for the delays, they gave me a cupon for a stay in a hotel, and after a lot of begging some meal vouchers because I didn't have enough money to eat.
And after all that, and of course the extra waiting I finally got back. I day latter than expected, so with lesse time to rest or organize my home or get food, but no other big issues, apart from a blown fuse in the transformer I use to charge my DS.

I'm just venting off at this point. It was a horrible experience. And despite the serious lessons learned, what I will take with is, NEVER TRAVEL WITH VIRGIN AUSTRALIA. And until I find enough reasons, I will avoid Australia as well, because been treated differently because of my country of origin, not my current country of residence, having to go through a different process than other that takes nearly a month to complete, and cost who knows how much, just to spend 2 hours waiting for a connecting flight is a fucking stupid jerkish move, and fuck anyone who does that. (Not that Brazilians don't deserve that sort of treatment, we do deserve all the flak, but I reserve my self the right to hate anyone who engages in this generalized sort of discrimination)

Never missed my routine this much.
But I still have to fix a lot of things that got messed up in my life, so no rest for the wicked.