No Secrets: A Paperless Journal

Can you IMAGINE Being  Unapologetic  Energetic   Never overly-sympathetic    Confident     Conscious       In-line     Out-of-line     Ahead of your time    Pragmatic   Artistic   Wrap-around and  Altruistic… All at the same time? Maybe one day, and you could be Better than fine. 

“Hell, but cold,” “The Most Depressing City in America,” and simply “Binghamton :(“ are all ways I have heard the town in which I grew up being described. Most people, especially young people, who live here, claim they can’t wait to leave. Binghamton is often pointed to as a boring city with humdrum towns, subpar suburbs and nothing to do. A friend from downstate recently told me that “If you're from Binghamton, you lie, and if you say you’re from Binghamton, you're lying.” Honestly, I get it. We don’t get a lot of sun and it’s raining probably half of the time, so it’s easy to look at life through dreary glasses. But still, I wonder how many of these claims actually hold water, and if Binghamton is so bad in the first place. So, this is me, trying to make myself like this place a little bit more: An Ariel View of Downtown from the Susquehanna River. By Rick DeGraw. 1. We’re Not That Depressed There is this myth that Binghamton is the saddest town in the US o...

June is LGBT Pride Month, so I figured it would be more than apropos to share my own "coming out" story as a gay individual. Now, I say "coming out" in quotations because it was more of a slow, wistful slither for me. I didn't want to be gay. I even didn't know that people could be gay until I started hearing it as an insult. Needless to say, for me, coming out to myself was enormously more difficult than to others. A lot of us feel this way.  Growing up, I had this complex that most gay guys do; You convince yourself you are attracted to girls because you think they're pretty, you like their fashion sense and honestly that's all you've ever been taught. Your friends talk about all the girls they like so you assume you're having the same feelings. But the truth is, you don't like girls, you want to be their best friend. I had this mindset well into middle school and was brainwashed to think that one day, I would grow up and marry a gi...

So, I just completed my first year of community college in an Associates program for Human Services. Cool. I just found out tonight actually that I obtained a 4.0 GPA for both semesters. Also cool. I guess doing well in school is easier when you actually care about the stuff they teach you, and now I do, for the most part. I love learning about people and how we interact and communicate and how we can learn and grow from one another. Y'know, all that shit.  That being said, you know what I don't care about? Physical sciences. They are just so permanent, so black and white, so cold. So, me being me and not knowing how to foster my own development, when my advisor sat me down and made me chose a lab science last semester, I chose Astronomy. I'm serious. I had the option of biology. I loved biology in high school! But, I heard astronomy was easy and I thought I would end up appreciating it (or something).  Boy, was I wrong. I marched into the first lecture the first day ...

The 'about' section of this blog reads "I started a paper journal three years ago and ruined my life," or something. What I mean by that isn't that I actually wrecked my life, but that once I started my journal, I couldn't stop. I became obsessed with journaling. It became a therapeutic daily ritual, and as a scrappy high school student with few friends, that's exactly what I needed. As the years dragged on and I became wrapped up in falling in love and college and finally graduating high school, and all those wonderful things, I sort of fell out of the habit that was so sacred to me. Of course, I still wrote a quick poem or paragraph here and there, but nothing like the utterly long-winded stream of psycho-babble I had developed the year before.  Fast forward a few months to me preparing for college. I was cleaning out my closet and discovered my journal, dubbed "The Real Book" from two years before. Reading back the entries was both cringe-i...