Raving Persuasions

What if I'm secretly an ostrich, what then?

2012-02-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

I'm being courted, in a sense. In the really Victorian-era sense, with all the interacting parties putting on their best faces and acting polite towards one another to prevent even the slightest suspicion that they are in any way unsuitable.

By colleges, not people. (Well, yes, people, deans and directors and whomever else puts their name at the bottom of a piece of paper, all claiming personal interest. Some I've committed to memory for no explicable reason--Todd Rhinehart, Karen Schrum, Marc Harding, Jessica Eads--my own little group of suitors.)

It's weird, this whole process: kind of exciting and ego-boosting and wanderlust-inspiring and overwhelming and just a fuckton of mail to sort through. At the end of emails and letters, they all say to keep in touch or something like that, like we're buddies already. I'm pretty sure it's someone's (possibly not the person whose name is in the closing) job to insert my name into the opening paragraph about how exceptional I am and how much potential I show and how the educational institution would love to have me and then click send. Or they've got computers doing that, I don't know.

I play my part too, not exactly keeping in touch with all my new dean friends, but mailing in cards for brochures or logging in to the school's website, being engaged and studious. Being the lovely person full of potential that the letter was meant for. There are things I'm not telling them: that I'm not really well-rounded, that I haven't shaved my legs in over a month, that I have no sense of direction, that I entertain myself by lip-synching Disney songs, alone, apropos of nothing, at midnight, and most definitely that I'm terrified they'll all hate and reject me and I won't be good enough to get into any college at all. These don't seem like college-bound-person traits. There are things they're not telling me either, though: that the showers are mildewy and the English professors have distractingly unkept facial hair and things like that, I'm sure. We'll learn these things about each other eventually.

I should go to bed.

It's not that I don't care, it's just that I don't care

2012-02-10T17:25:00.000-08:00

I have this persistent habit of destroying things.

I don't mean that as some depressing metaphor. I just can't keep anything in pristine condition. I crumple and rip the edges of papers; I fold parts of pages of books; I'm more effective than a paper shredder when it comes to disposable cups. I don't know why I do it; I just can't stop myself. I think that somewhere in the back of my mind it all just relates back to how for a person who has so many things I am hardly at all sentimental about my actual physical possessions.

When my computer hard drive crashed in September last year, and me being me didn't back up half the files on my computer, I instantly lost virtually all of my pictures and files from my middle school years. Such is my attitude now that everything's gone digital; I hardly ever print anything out, and unless it exists somewhere on the internet, it makes its lonely home on my computer, and maybe a flash drive, if I don't get too lazy. You'd think that I'd be really upset about losing all these fond memories from my relative youth. But what upset me more than losing all of these files was that when my laptop was rebooted with an empty new hard drive, the dock from my desktop was missing. Never mind that I easily downloaded it from the Dell website later, when I turned on my laptop and it was missing, I burst into tears.

Yeah, that small outburst was just my release of my frustration over my computer dying in the first place, but the whole thing is just reflective of how I am sort of aggressively unsentimental about most material things. That is not to say that I live a life free from materialism or that I don't care about anything I own -- because there are certainly some things that I would be really upset to lose, and god help me on the day that I become too poor/financially independent from my parents to afford, like, new slipper boots -- but I just sort of have an implicit just-let-it-go attitude towards most things I own. I don't let the physical things replace the memories I have associated with them -- my memories, the ones that really matter to me, are meaningful to me without a physical token to represent them -- so I guess I'm just not that bothered when the actual thing goes missing.

(And, okay, when you lose a whole bunch of stuff, it makes the few remaining pieces from that collection all the more special. I have a few pictures and such from middle school and I think that ultimately those show more about me than the hundred crappy ones that I took with our old digital camera when I was 13. It's annoying but also sort of peaceful to start from scratch.)

That's also why the copy of TFioS that I'm annotating is the signed copy that was signed actually-in-person by John and Hank. I have two copies, and the other one I want to keep clean for lending out to people, and I didn't really want to get a third copy just for annotating... so I was like what the heck, it's just a book, and books are all about the interaction between the text and the reader, so I will write all over this goddamn signed copy because it's not the signatures and the pristine pages that make this book special, it's what I take from it.

I kind of like that attitude, to be honest. I figure all things in this world are some kind of fleeting (even memories, really, when you get into the whole memory reconstruction thing), so why bother getting so upset about the inevitable?

thoughts from places: Tour de Nerdfighting

2012-01-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

I know I'm not the only person in the world to claim to not possess the talent of making friends. This social awkwardness seems to plague more individuals than myself, I realize that, but I want to share with you a three part breakthrough I had last night which starts with a road trip.

On Saturday, my family and two friends piled into a rental car and headed south. After forgetting the tickets and realizing this fact as the border guard handed back our passports, we drove five hours to Portland with no tickets and the hope that we could reprint them somewhere before the show the next day. (spoiler: we did. It turned out fine. Yay.)

It's a dalek, you guys. A DALEK!

Portland is an excellent city. I haven't had enough experience there to accurately describe its loveliness but I will say that if an opportunity ever floats by you to visit, I encourage you to seize it. The architecture is delightful, the food is amazing and there's something about the feel of the place--enhanced by signs featuring sci fi beings instructing you to not block the sidewalks and rainbow umbrellas wherever you look--that makes you want to stay and explore.

We took the bus to the theater on Sunday. It was raining and there was a line that snaked down the sidewalk and around the building. There were also so many really awesome t-shirts. I talked to the people next to us in line a bit and then went hunting for a massive umbrella that was sure to make us many friends with its vastness. This plan did not work out due to the fact that it stopped raining but, before it stopped, I heroically held the umbrella over the carts loaded with TFIOS copies as they ferried the books down the line and received some cheering. Let me just say there was a lot of cheering in that line, despite the precipitation. There was also a lot of people telling other people that their stuff was really awesome, mostly because there was a lot of really awesome stuff and it's easier to be vocal about that in the kind of space that was created there. It was just so comfortable and excited and connected and caring.

The show was fun. John is brilliant and Hank is hilarious and their collective energy was entirely captivating. The signing process went very smoothly and I was only mildly embarrassed when I stumbled over basically telling John that his books mean a lot to me. I had some solid eye contact with Hank and then we were shuffled along which was fine.

Adorableness does not completely diminish the creep factor.

The next day, we drove to Seattle, took pictures with the world's largest and arguably creepiest bridge troll and then made our way to the Seattle tour stop. I pretty much immediately struck up a conversation with the people next to us in line, some of whom were vaguely familiar to me. As it turns out a couple of them were of Bizarre Fruit fame*.

And it was just so natural and not forced and we started to play Apples to Apples which lasted only one round before we were moved into the bookstore but was still pretty great. I exchanged info with one of the girls and we went to find seats**.

After the show, I was leaving the washroom when I looked up and recognized justmargaret whose tumblr and youtube I follow and, without even thinking about it, I just walked over and started talking to her. I can't explain the thought process because it doesn't make any sense to me in retrospect. I completely surprised myself with the lack of doubt and total and immediate commitment. I just strode across the bathroom to where she was waiting in line and said something along the lines of hi, I watch your youtube videos and your blog is my favourite part of tumblr and I'm sorry for obnoxiously liking practically everything you post. It was almost like reuniting with a friend who didn't actually know me and the whole thing was so surreal I can't capture it with words.

Proceeding that, I had an extended fangirl moment as I explained the encounter to my friends, blushing in excess, and they looked at me and asked, "Who is Margaret?"***

The last guy I met was named Eli. He came up and gave me a high five after seeing my 'YA SAVES' tshirt and so I followed him when he ran away from me and we started chatting. He'd been at the Maureen Johnson event I went to and actually lives very close to me. It was also kind of strange, in a fantastic way. I made a note on his annotated copy of Paper Towns and it was all very swell.

I left with usernames and this feeling of satisfaction that was hardly even related to being in close proximity with the Green brothers. (I didn't actually get to go up to the signing table in Seattle because the security was really tight and we had to leave early because of the two hour drive home. I didn't mind.) I tried not to fall asleep on the way home and then was so ridiculously tired that I couldn't fall asleep when I got into bed, all of the events of the weekend swirling around in my head.

It's absurd when you meet people in person whose tumblogs or videos you follow avidly. It's strange being forced to wrap your head around the fact that people are just people, whether or not they have an online following. It's weird to hear John talk about his severe social anxiety and how he has to pretend we're not there to be able to function on stage. It's odd to be in a place where there are so many nerds that the very idea of being self conscious doesn't even cross your awareness.

And I mean all that in the very best way.

*which was featured on the vlogbrothers' Nerd Factor

**which ended up being in the front row. Not sure how that happened but it was really cool.

***eventually they figured it out because I had previously told them all to follow her on tumblr.

Well, according to Erikson I'm doing alright for myself

2012-01-28T22:57:00.000-08:00

(Background: Psychology references, anyone? Going on the assumption that people do not generally read ahead in textbooks for fun--Erikson categorized human life and success into 8 stages, each with a question to answer and a challenge to overcome, in the form of [good trait] vs. [bad trait] to be added to the personality based on whether or not said challenge was met.

Ages 13-21 are based on Identity vs. Role Confusion. What's interesting about the question ("who am I?"/"what can I be?") is that's it's arguably the most philosophical and the the only non-yes-or-no question of all the stages. This is why teen angst is a thing, methinks. But anyway, the main issues include developing a stance on politics and sexual identity. I'm going to muse a bit on the latter.)

Okay, so, just generally, gender is a socially constructed concept and I personally think the gender binary is kind of bullshit, and I regret that inserting phrases like "socially constructed concept" and "gender binary" makes my point inevitably sound a little (or a lot, judge as you will) pretentious.

I don't particularly know if I'm exactly straight. I don't know if I'm bisexual, either. I don't know if I'm pansexual or just lonely or what. The reason this is a difficult question to assess is because, of course, I have had no experience with. . . anything. Like, should a female human with a pulse and in my general age range express a desire to spend time with me in an even vaguely romantic context, and I felt a reciprocal such desire, I wouldn't refuse. (As in heterosexual relationships. Why should I limit myself to strictly dating people based on the compatibility of our genitals? Why should anybody? No one is attracted to everyone of the opposite sex, no one is attracted to everyone of the same sex. I don't know. I'll stop my filthy hippie ideology for now.) How much of this is my desire to be wanted, and how much is my rejection of conventional sexuality? Ehh, some and some. I will freely acknowledge the attractiveness in people, and since attractiveness is subjective, it can be said that I find select females attractive. But do I want to be Emma Watson (as an example) or know her or date or her or crawl into bed with her? It's quite a spectrum. I've been speaking in hypotheticals for most of the last paragraph, anyway.

I also think I might be a transvestite. (Play this song at your leisure. ;))* I've never tried it because there are no suitable male clothes lying around my house. Basically I dress like this. I don't aspire to dress like a male version of this (which wouldn't be hard), but in terms of formal wear, I'd much prefer wearing this** to, say, this. Matter of preference, etc. I don't want to literally be a man or even pass as one, but suits are both more aesthetically pleasing and confidence-boosting to me than other forms of clothing. I realize that the dress in that last picture isn't even what some people would classify as formal, except maybe for the fact that it's black. Some girls wear dresses to school all the time; I consider myself overdressed for my mandatory job of learning if I'm wearing black pants that day.

This is a bit more personal than my usual blogs lately (because I've barely been blogging, whoops), but I guess I've done it so this will be out on the interwebs, and maybe someone using Google to try and define their identity will find this and know there's someone in the same boat.

Footnotes:

* Also featuring about half a minute of sheer gems of dialogue. This isn't the junior chamber of commerce, Brad!

** Ahem, minus the gun. I'm using iStockPhoto, cut me some slack.

Yay, books

2012-01-21T21:37:00.000-08:00

Carrying books around is considered a marker of intellect, or being an introvert, leading to long, wish-fulfilling schlock urging guys to "date a girl who reads"--insinuating that girls who read are inherently more datable, not taking into account any of said girl's other personality traits, and/or that girls who "don't" read (even though it's almost literally impossible to get through life without reading at all, the literacy rate in the US is 99.3% or something, etc) aren't worthy of the reader's attention. This was meant to appeal to me and people like me, the readers. But it just dawned on me that that's kind of a shitty thing to perpetuate.

Okay, so aside from that paragraph being little more than an extremely run on sentence, I actually had a point to make in this blog (I was reminded of a Tumblr post that I reblogged a long time ago and got sidetracked, c'est la vie), going back to carrying books around. I finished TFiOS in a day. In the week or so since then, I still keep it in my bag like a homesick kindergartner who brings their favorite stuffed dog to school. I'll pull it out, open to a random page, and read for a few moments when I can find nothing else to do but still want to look busy. Looking busy is an old and valuable tactic I crafted in freshman year, when I wanted to sit alone at lunch without being approached by people. Not really a sociable maneuver, but it worked.

Just knowing that TFiOS (or any book--I will be practical about it and keep books that are assigned for English with me for this purpose, but this week was a special occasion) is within arms' reach is comforting in a way, going back to the kindergartner-and-stuffed-animal example. This is just a more sophisticated version of that, with the bonus of creating an air of scholarly demureness. I realize this was not actually about TFiOS itself, but I can't quite do it/my opinion of it justice coherently. Anyone else want to try before me?

so in love

2012-01-15T23:09:00.000-08:00

My life is so ridiculously full right now. There are letters and TFioS and endless mugs of hot chocolate. There is hand holding and hugging and a fair amount of cuddling. There is road trip planning and games of Uno and just the right amount of cheese. My smile is nearly perpetual and the number of winks per day is dramatically on the rise--even if most of those winks are directed at my own reflection. ;)

These past two weeks of January have been pretty excellent. I just feel so good that I almost can't believe it. I don't trust myself enough for this to last. But, god, I hope it does.

Just felt like sharing. I wish you both the best of Januarys.

2012-01-04T23:30:00.000-08:00

I have so much to say and yet nothing to write and it's like it's all stuck somewhere on the way from my brain to my fingertips. Sometimes I let myself forget that the internet is a place where anyone can hear you and that you shouldn't just say everything you want to--even if it feels good at the time to purge the words, watch them spill out onto your screen.

I'm way too melancholy for my own good. Maybe I just need to get back into situations where I like myself. I miss not feeling like a crazy person half the time. I think I'll sort that shit out tomorrow.

Simple Things and Beauty Queens

2012-01-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

(Or, The First Lurve Blog of 2012!)

This post comes to you in two vaguely related parts.

Thing 1: I just kind of want my life to be this song is that really so much to ask.

It's cuter than my usual tastes in sentiment and musicality, but (beyond admitting that) I'm not going to apologize for wanting a relationship like the one described in the lyrics. What I want is to be in love without the beginning processes of falling in love, the "Jesus-Christ-are-my-eyebrows-the-correct-shape-am-I-breathing-at-the-correct-pace-I-just-want-to-stare-at-your-face-without-being-creepy-and-overt-about-it"-stage. I speak from extremely little experience, (Remember this tidbit of blog? We are in the same Spanish class. Everything was going swimmingly until (~~December 1st~~) I was informed that he has a girlfriend now. And then I was (only slightly unreasonably) upset about that for around two weeks. To date, this one human being is the only person to have inspired in me such girlish mental frothing, during and after our quasi-flirtation. I hated myself for it in those two weeks, having prided myself on not frothing over much of anything, least of all a guy.) but this seems to be a prerequisite for behaving like a normal person around someone you hope to attract. (Or it's an unfortunate presence of YA novel cliches in my life.)

Basically, I want to skip the awkward uncomfortable bits (especially when the frothing turns out to be for naught) and settle painlessly into the creamy, fluffy-clouds-of-nougat center that is adorable contentment.

Thing 2: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray (references things but contains nothing that is necessarily a spoiler.* You should read it if you haven't already. End PSA.)

In the book, Adina goes through pretty much the same Frothing Dilemma I had. I granted myself 0.0 license to Be Frothy**, and once it went over that 0.0 came the Sense of Conflicting Self Loathing but Not Stopping because I Like His Everything.***

On an unrelated (and probably almost contradictory) point, I present a paraphrased quote:

"They [society, corporate marketing, etc] make it so hard for us to love ourselves."****

To which I say: really? Blaming society is tres en l'mode***** for disillusioned youth, but to play devil's advocate, I have to say: it's also kinda your fault for giving a shit what society thinks.****** Until the advent of literal mind control, you can just choose not to give a shit, which is part of the conclusion the titular queens come to. Unless you want to argue that society makes you care about society's opinion of you, which is, also to quote the book, "one more meta than I like."

Regardless, the above quote and similar opinions on Tumblr got me thinking. I'm really in a minority on this front. I do, for the most part, cliched as it is, love myself. (For the sake of avoiding the cliche, "accept" myself really is more accurate.) I'm fine with the fact that I'm not perfect mentally or physically, but I'll admit I'm not a troll (either sense of the word). Moreover, I've never ascribed my various character flaws to simply having a vagina. Maybe they are and I'm deluded in the opposite direction. Maybe I've repressed memories for the sake of making a point. Maybe I'm just lucky to have fallen into a non-traditional-gender-roles family from birth, with supportive parents, supplemented nowadays with bunches of kickass forwarding-thinking-people on the internet. Maybe it's just the perfect storm. Fingers crossed this type of upbringing becomes less rare, like with this awesome little kid.

But I see plenty of evidence that it's not. Pieces of paper written on in Sharpie and posted on Tumblr with thousands of notes saying stuff like, "I wish I was good enough.", "I'll never be yours.", and it's horrible and I wish people didn't think like that, but as we've discussed, mind control is currently impossible. Sigh.

* Okay, maybe except this: disabled-maybe-pansexual-Illinoisan chick gets shit done. REPRESENT. (I'm heavily biased in this footnote, read it for the other awesome characterizations too hey hey what what.)

** I clearly can't do adjectives right now, so have an extended my-brain-as-a-Starbucks-beverage metaphor.

*** Look At All the Random Capitalization someone Please Stop Me.

**** I'm going to add, "as girls" to the end, implied based on the usage of "ourselves". The book does eventually delve into "not every issue is attached to being female and guys are festering holes of insecurities too sometimes", but not at the point in question.

***** a.) Excuse my mangled French.
b.) I've probably done this in my head, and can't promise I won't again. I'm making not giving a shit sound way easier than it is. But for now I'm in an empowered sort of mood. I include my less-enlightened past and/or future self in the general "you".

****** re: "loving yourself". Please give all the shits you deem necessary re: legal procedures and such.

Now that I've noticed that footnotes can be made a smaller font size (thanks Alex!), I feel like this gives me permission to add them in copious amounts. I hope you've enjoyed reading them.

I started this at 4:30am so... beware

2012-01-01T05:31:00.000-08:00

Don't blame me for being incoherent. Blame yourself for not residing inside my head at 5 o'clock in the morning on January 1st.
What? Did I just say that? It's staying. Obviously.

1) What did you do in 2011 that you had never done before?
Sheesh. A ton. I lived in a house with no older sisters and took a 14 hour bus trip all by myself. I got my license. I learned a shitload about colonialism which has made me a far more radical person that I ever thought I'd be. I had what I will call a legitimate crush--well, more than one, I suppose. I STARTED WATCHING DOCTOR WHO!!!!! (Vita...). Also tumblr.

2) Did you keep your New Year's Resolutions?
I only really had one which was to be more patient--vague and unhelpful. But I really can't say if I'm more patient than I was 365 days ago. I like to think I am but I'm probably not, at least not by a wide margin.

3) What countries did you visit in 2011?
Basically nowhere. I mean, I went to the States more than once but America is practically Canada anyway (BLASPHEMOUS-ANTI-NATIONALIST-CRAZINESS). Shhhh.

4) What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Cuddling. Not that I particularly lacked it in 2011 but there's always room for more. ;) Also, hugs.

5) What dates will remain etched upon your memory and why?
January 4th is when my older sisters went away on planes for extended periods of time. May 17th is when I passed my driving exam. July 15th. Harry fucking Potter. December 26th/27th. Yeah.
Actually, I'm remembering a lot of my December as days. Such as, this happened on a Thursday and that happened on a Monday and so on. I'm not sure why, exactly, it's just something I've noticed myself doing.

6) Biggest achievement?
Not murdering anyone with a vehicle? Or anything else, really. I don't actually know. I don't think I'm a person that actively "achieves" things.

7) Biggest failure?
Likewise, I don't think of myself as someone who has failures. Or maybe I'm just really good at repressing my memories. I suppose I've pretty effectively failed at imagining complexly people who don't ask for what they want and then complain about not getting it later on. I'm working on that.

8) Best thing someone ~~bought~~made for you in 2011?
A TARDIS. I kid you not.

9) Where did most of your money go?
Chai tea lattes and sweaters. I like to buy sweaters. I'm trying to stop.

10) What song will always remind you of 2011?
Tik Tok Together. If you have not heard this, I don't even know what to say.

11) How did you spend Christmas? (or, y'know, whatever holiday you celebrate)
Moping and watching movies and texting and YouTubing. And then dinner was nice and delicious. And then more moping, unfortunately. Chocolate egg cake! Let's move on.

12) Did you fall in love in 2011?
Define 'fall in love.' But yeah, maybe, I think so. Maybe. I don't know. :)

13) What was the best book you read in 2011?
The Piper's Son by Melina Marchetta. Honourable mentions go to Hold Still by Nina LaCour, Irma Voute by Miriam Toews and A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson.
I'm so glad I have GoodReads for situations like this.

14) Greatest musical discovery?
I don't even know. I've been rediscovering a lot of stuff.

15) What did you do on your birthday and how old did you turn?
I remember the day after my birthday ridiculously clearly but the memory of the actual day I turned seventeen is evading me. It was a Tuesday, I know that much.

16) What is one thing that would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Make out sessions. No, but seriously... I think if I had figured out that being authentic was more important than trying to make everyone happy earlier. Or maybe if everyone else did more dishes.

17) What kept you sane?
Tumblr, the vlogbrothers, Gilmore Girls, my family. Donnie (hi).

18) Who did you miss?
My friend Alana, who has spent Christmas in Florida. She's coming back soon, though, so that's good.

19) Best thing you ate?
ALL OF THE THINGS! Probably Nelson food, though. Or this amazing panini I had in Calgary. Cranberry, apple, brie, SO GOOD. I love food.

20) What lessons did you learn in 2011?
a) If you're going to tell someone important things, don't chicken out and only go halfway there. Seriously. Just person up and say what you need to say.
b) As I kind of said, authenticity is something I've realized I value intensely. Sometimes that means quitting. Quitting is actually not always a bad thing. Who knew?
c) I think an important thing I learned is that I'm going to be okay. I used to get incredibly sad and think I was never going to feel anything but this forever but at some point I figured out that things do get better and just because I feel crappy now, doesn't mean I will tomorrow. The way I phrased that makes it sound like I don't get sad anymore. I totally do. More than I'd like. But I'm tying to focus on the moments when I'm incandescently happy and work from there.
d) Final lesson (at least that I am going to scribe here): Do your fucking dishes. Like actually. Here is some news: no one else wants to. Take responsibility for yourself. Make good choices.

Was going to make this a vlog, but I'm even lazier

2011-12-31T14:38:00.000-08:00

Answers:

1) Took an AP class, rode across the country in a car for ~4 days, Tumblrd, got in a car accident. . .quite an exciting list of things.

2) Didn't even make them to begin with.

3) 'Murrica the beautiful.

4) More confidence, more of a voice, peace of mind regarding my future, a paying job, TFiOS, and a guitar. (whoohoo materialism!)

5) January 8th (see #1)

6) Ehhhhh. . . performing poetry I'd written in front of a group of people and not having things thrown at me?

7) Panic-stricken inability to drive a car and subsequent refusal to try again after Driver's Ed ended.

8) *Not "for me" but it wound up in my possession* My duvet, which is fantastically warm and constructed out of solidified tears of joy from angels and. . . I just like it a lot.

9) Didn't keep track (hooray money-managment skills!), but probably books or iTunes (because I'm a GOOD PERSON and buy music legally).

10) EX: 1 (for exemplary memeness, and if you haven't guessed it correctly Tumblr taught you nothing this year and you should be ashamed of yourself.), 2 (because reasons, mostly inside joke related), 3 (was actually on the radio a lot which is the traditional answer to this question)

11) Eating food, spending time with relatives, arguing with racist/sexist relatives, more eating, and intensely competitive games.

12) With Flight of the Conchords! :DDDD (with persons, strictly speaking, no.)

13) Bumped, Tales of the Madman Underground, Angela's Ashes, The Name of the Star. . .

14) Horrifically unfair question which I refuse to answer on moral grounds such as that 2011 was possibly the biggest year to date of "me caring about music at all" so that every discovery was equally great etc etc. . . but for the sake of survey completion, also Flight of the Conchords.

15) Went to school, came home and ate cake (on the day itself, anyway); 16.

16) See anything in #4.

17) I prefer to think I kept sane of my own accord, but probably Tumblr, other people, music in general.

18) No one for a notably extended amount of time, luckily.

19) EVERYTHING. ALL THE THINGS. Um, "authentic" red beans and rice. (via Disneyworld, shhh.)

20) Tumblr is the best thing on the internet known to mankind; it's extremely unlikely that everyone hates me and I shouldn't assume that (more reinforced than learned).

Because I'm lazy

2011-12-30T19:57:00.000-08:00

End of the Year Survey

If you want to answer them yourself:

Questions:
1) What did you do in 2011 that you had never done before?
2) Did you keep your New Year's Resolutions?
3) What countries did you visit in 2011?
4) What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
5) What dates will remain etched upon your memory and why?
6) Biggest achievement?
7) Biggest failure?
8) Best thing someone bought for you in 2011?
9) Where did most of your money go?
10) What song will always remind you of 2011?
11) How did you spend Christmas? (or, y'know, whatever holiday you celebrate)
12) Did you fall in love in 2011?
13) What was the best book you read in 2011?
14) Greatest musical discovery?
15) What did you do on your birthday and how old did you turn?
16) What is one thing that would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
17) What kept you sane?
18) Who did you miss?
19) Best thing you ate?
20) What lessons did you learn in 2011?

Look at all the italics

2011-12-27T17:21:00.000-08:00

Everyone experiences the same basic human emotions, but it's really how we deal with/express them that makes communication hard. I, for instance, tend to leave things in draft blog posts (my last actual one was nearly two weeks ago. er. Belated merry Christmas and that jazz.) or type out extremely lengthy notes and musings to myself that will never see the outside of my head or my hard drive. I withdraw. A lot. I withdraw from the internet even, reduced to lurking and maybe a picture of cute otters on Tumblr.

In response to Alex's (currently) most recent post, I feel like it illustrates a lot of the differences between us. I'm not saying this is good or bad or anything, just different.

Firstly, I didn't particularly care for Catcher in the Rye. Holden's narration is alright for, say, a blog, (if 50s prep school kids had blogs) but is off-putting in an entire novel. But more the problem I have with it is just my reaction to all the feels that Holden expresses in the book. I am not Holden. I'd never (I'm tempted to say "whine" here, but I recognize my own bias...) be that open about the aforementioned all the feels. I certainly didn't cry when I read it nor did I care about other people who had.

I have a different example that kind of illustrates what I want to say better.

A verse from a blatantly anti-suicide song*:

"Oh no, love, you're not alone.

No matter what or who you've been

No matter when or where you've seen

All the knives seem to lacerate your brain

I've had my share, I'll help you with the pain

You are not alone."

Which is a wonderful message, and if it helps anyone I invite them to take their own personal meaning out of it, help is oftimes necessary and should be sought in the form of people instead of songs etc etc, but when I first listened to it (when the knives were metaphorically lacerating my brain), I kind of raged against it. I wanted to be alone. I didn't want to be encouraged by or connected to anything. Which is kind of what Catcher in the Rye did to me. I refused to relate to it.

What I have connected to recently though--initially in a really self-pitying way that has gradually (in three days**) turned more uplifting--is Eagle vs. Shark. (I text-posted a bit about the self-pitying on Tumblr. Tumblr is good for things like that.) While I was drawn to it because it seemed in the vein of Juno and Napoleon Dynamite and suchlike cinematic indie fluffiness I hold dear to my heart, I wound up really emotionally invested*** in the characters and their fictional relationships. I didn't care about connecting to other (real) people's histories; I loved that the atmosphere of it was so personal, so close that viewing it seemed a little voyeuristic (which is kind of a given, considering that major hunks of plot take place in a two-person tent). Nothing existed but the characters and me, the only person watching them.

My reaction to this particular film (one of many media portrayals of Romantically Entwined Socially Awkward People--made by Socially Awkward People, for Socially Awkward People.) was viscerally horrible. My thought process (resulting either from my inability or unwillingness to separate Fiction from Real Life) was along the lines of "God, look at them. Even these two awkward nerds with intensely dysfunctional backgrounds can find love, and I can't. I can't even do quirky-indie-film-romance right, let alone real-serious-romance. This is undeniable proof that I'm going to die alone." But the female lead's--Lily's--optimism was infectious to me. At a different point in time I may have found it sickening, but not right now, and I'm embracing it.

This movie is not proof that I'm going to die alone. It's not "real" proof of anything, strictly speaking, except that good dramatic-romantic-comedies still exist. While I've come to realize that my success (present or future) as a person can't be determined by comparing my life to those of fictional people, fictional representations of hope and humanity can still be valid. Which is basically what I've been looking for, in any context. That's the important thing, whether found in classic literature or hipstery foreign films. There's nothing selfish about that.

* Ironically (?) called Rock 'n' Roll Suicide.

** I've literally watched it three times in three days. Between the hours of midnight and two o'clock when Tumblr starts getting slow, I'll shove it in the slot in my computer and focus intently on one thing for 88 straight minutes, which is something else I haven't been doing a lot. (It's probably a bit more selfish/lazy to rely on a movie for comfort instead of a book. There's a lot less effort involved in watching something on film, and it also allows for mindless consumption of candy.) The repetition, the familiarity has become weirdly soothing, knowing the end doesn't spoil it, "You're a bitch, and you're going to die of diabetes." has not once failed to make me laugh, without caring that diabetes is not a laughing matter and so on and soforth. I don't know why I even re-watched it (wanting to wallow in self-loathing more because for some inexplicable reason I'm a sadist? Probably.), considering that my initial reaction should have stopped me, but I'm glad I did.

*** Such a scary phrase. I've been avoiding it lately. (I can't tell if this is a conscious effort or mere happenstance.) Gosh, so much italics in this post. So many titles. So much emphasis.

so, hey, um...

2011-12-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

I might be completely off my rocker crazy but I think that the three of us should all go to Leaky Con this summer because it is somewhat conveniently placed in Chicago and it would be 100% awesome.

And no, I did not spend the last hour researching transport. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Thoughts??

p.s. okay, yeah, it's possible I'm just creating hypothetical summer plans to cheer myself up because I had a somewhat less than utterly fantastic day. Is there anything wrong with that, I ask you?

Dishes and dissecting gender roles

2011-12-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

[As a disclaimer even though disclaimers are usually unnecessary/eventually undermined: I respect both of my parents. They both work incredibly hard. Neither of them are radical, but they're both pretty progressive people. None of this is meant as a slight against either of them.]

This afternoon and evening, my mom and I spent most of the day cleaning the house to get ready for our Christmas guests tomorrow (well, she spent most of the day cleaning; I spent most of it alternately cleaning and shirking my responsibilities to go on Tumblr) while my dad went to work and then to church. This fact preyed on my mind as I was drying off our decorative kitchen china, newly liberated from thick layers of dust. It annoyed me. I don't especially mind doing household chores. I just question why I have to do them.

Yes, that sounds incredibly bratty. I understand that as the child of the household -- and also just a decent person who tries not to be an active burden on other people -- chores are expected of me. And that's fine! It makes sense. What I mean is why I, as a girl, get stuck with the drying dishes and setting tables.

In my case, it's easily explainable. I don't have any brothers, so any chores for the offspring would of course have to fall to a girl. I really mean this in a broader context: why is it that women in general still get stuck with the domestic work while men work outside of the home?

This is not a revolutionary perspective, I realize, nor has the thought failed to occur to me before. I bring it up because it directly relates to my parents and how conflicted I feel about their established roles in our family. Both of my parents work paying jobs and both of them work around the house. But the dynamic is still undeniably traditional: my dad makes the most money (though my mom gets the health benefits -- thanks, public school system) and my mom does a definite majority of the laundry, cooking, and so on. My mom also works a job that she is ridiculously overqualified for (it requires some college classes; she has a master's degree).

Now I hesitate to criticize this for two reasons: firstly, because I do believe that the true liberation of gender roles means that it has to be okay for people to choose to perform their traditional gender roles as long as it is truly a choice. Secondly, my mom genuinely loves her job and says that she ultimately is glad that she didn't stay in her first profession, speech therapy.

And that's great. But it pisses me off that this is still the trend. Why do women have to be the ones to sacrifice the professional jobs to stay home and raise the children?

Yeah, this is changing. Yeah, there are a lot more single parents, parents who both work, and stay-at-home dads. But overall, it's still the mothers who make the career sacrifice, mothers who have the double role as the keeper of the home and a career professional. Again, this isn't inherently bad. I think it's when it's part of a whole culture -- and it is -- when it's a problem.

I guess it's difficult to criticize my parents because I look up to both of them a lot, and I know them both pretty well, so I can explain away a lot of things that I might see as flaws in other people's relationships. So maybe part of this is a lack of failure on my part to imagine other people's relationships complexly. But I think that it also needs to be looked at from a broader perspective: when so many people choose to fulfill the same gender roles, doesn't that by default screw over all the people who reject those roles?

Mostly all this aimless, conflicted annoyance on my part has only made me sure of one thing: I most definitely do not want the same type of dynamic that my family has right now. I might want to get married, I might want kids, but I simply can't see myself ever wanting to sacrifice a career for that lifestyle. I want everyone in my family to be equal.

Parenthood is a totally noble path, don't get me wrong. It's just when so many people "choose" to do the same thing, I have to wonder how much of a "choice" it really is.

------

Anyway, on that cheerful note, Merry Christmas! (I believe you both celebrate it, Alex & Rena.) I sincerely hope that you all have a wonderful holiday.

library copies of the catcher in the rye

2011-12-18T21:13:00.000-08:00

I decided the other day that I need to reread The Catcher in the Rye. I was on tumblr, as I will be, and saw a picture that made me yearn for Holden's story in a way that I never have. It just seems so imperative that I read it at this exact point in my life.

I had a spare afternoon on Friday, so I went out to this tree that I like to climb and sat there for a while. There's this weird feeling where you're sitting in a tree and you can see people passing and you wonder if they see you. On Friday, I didn't feel that way because there was no one passing through the park. It was like I was utterly alone, sitting in that tree.

But not lonely--and that's an important distinction. When I say that I've been identifying with Holden Caulfield a lot in the past few ~~daysweeks~~months, I don't mean it in a 'I'm standing in a phone booth with absolutely no one to call who I want to talk to and wants to talk to me.' Luckily, I have people to call. The way that I'm associating with Holden is more of a 'What happens to the ducks when the pond freezes over?' type of way.

Eventually, I hopped out of the tree and went to the library, in search of The Catcher in the Rye. They didn't have it in, unfortunately, so I put it on hold and headed up to the bookstore. My mom, upon hearing about my journey, proffered a copy of the book and I held it. The pages we neat and the spine wasn't cracked and I just stared at it for a while. Eventually, I put it back on the shelf and and walked out and my mom didn't understand why I didn't buy it, being a person who sells books and buys books and doesn't see why you should wait for a library hold when the book you want to read could be yours for 6.99. But I have my reasons.

You see, library books... they have history. When I check out The Catcher in the Rye from the library and the front cover is bent and some of the pages are folded at the corners and there's even some underlined passages or a scribbled note in the margins, I know it's been a piece of someone else's story. I can imagine someone sitting alone in their living room in a comfy chair and being swallowed up by Holden's tale. I can see the book clutched in someone else's hand as they lie in bed one morning or sit at the back of the bus or in the corner of Starbucks on their lunch break. I can imagine that this very copy of this book has changed someone's life.

And as I was walking home from the bookstore, empty handed, I couldn't help thinking that maybe that's selfish of me. Maybe it's selfish to want preexisting history instead of starting fresh and making my own, buying a new copy and highlighting my own paragraphs. Then again, I never claimed I wasn't selfish.

It all reminded me of this quote from my favourite book which I'm about to totally take out of context but here it is: "These people have history and I crave history."*

I crave not being the only person to cry on a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. So I'll wait for my library copy, thanks.

*Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

i just... i just have a lot of feelings

2011-12-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

It's like we can't be sad unless we need to take medication to get better. Or like there can't be something wrong with us unless it's diagnosed. Or maybe it's that there's nothing wrong with us, not really, just that we've fallen out of this common paradigm -- or what we thought was the common paradigm -- and can't find our way back in (symptoms: feelings of alienation, loss, helplessness, and hopelessness).

It's like going from moping around in a blue mood to watching a doctor scrawl "depression" on a prescription form changes something fundamental about our feelings.

Or it's like thinking we're broken and need to be fixed. It's like thinking that changing location will change you, but then you get scared that maybe you're the thing that's wrong. Not wrong. Just a jigsaw piece when everyone else is part of the slide puzzle. Maybe you're the missing square.

It's like you don't want to insult the medical profession or people with weird chemical levels in their brains but sometimes you want to be recognized too. Sometimes you want to be called crazy so somebody can fix you and you don't have to think about it anymore. Sometimes you think maybe that makes you a sheep. At least sheep are warm. You think you probably aren't important enough, though. Some people have real problems.

Can't I be scared without having a phobia? Can't I be unsure without being questioning? Can't I be sad without being depressed? It's like we have to compartmentalize ourselves, tick off down the checklist, stick a label on our foreheads before we can be serious when we say we have problems. How can you tell who has the Crazy chemical levels and who's just figured out that brilliant secret that everything is meaningless? Since when is everyone a doctor?

I don't know. I say that a lot but I really don't know. I don't like complaining all the time but I don't like being apologetic about it either. What I really want is to just be happy but it seems like that's a difficult state to be in, for the default to be reasonably content. I think my median line is too far down the list.

Regional loyalty

2011-12-15T17:26:00.000-08:00

~~I've been more absent than usual from the internet today/lately. I slept until around 4 pm, actually. Feels good man. I missed a lot of the p4a hullaballoo but it was worth it. Today is a day of necessary unwinding. I present a daft post I wrote a few days ago:~~

I will mock and continually express my massive dislike for my hometown*, that is, the 40,000-people-40-churches-and-tea-and-olive-oil-and-smoothie-shops-and-sports-obsessed-high-school seemingly idyllic slice of purgatory. If I were not a minor and the people I love and need for support weren't here, I'd move in a heartbeat.

BUT.

I love the city.

("the city" being a vastly differing term depending on where the nearest large city is relative to the speaker's current location. My "the city" happens to be Chicago, where I claim to be from for internet-ease and am from in spirit/actual birth.)

I love its memetically horrible sports teams. I love the food. I love its perfect amount of distance. I love that it's familiar to me but not too familiar. I love Millennium Park and its crazyass architecture everywhere. I love having been to places in John Hughes films. I love that it feels like 100 different places depending on where you are. I love the museums and the zoo and that sort of third-grade-field-trip stuff. I love that its university's mascot is a motherfucking phoenix:

There's some other stuff I probably left out. It's not much of a blog post, this love letter to a place.

* public library exempt due to high concentration of awesome.
** ultimate dream for the foreseeable future is to go here, the eighth best university in the country or thereabouts. What kind of fucking standards am I setting for myself? This is more a note to myself, to say, if you, a-couple-weeks-into-the-future-self, are reading this, do something pertaining to your higher education over break, for fuck's sakes.***
*** I swear quite a bit at myself when I'm talking to myself. It's just one of those times.

Half formed opinions that will probably haunt me later

2011-12-14T18:45:00.000-08:00

I've been having a heated argument on Facebook with a fellow Nerdfighter about LGBTQ* rights. It's insane to me how some people are still opposed to them. In fact, a definite majority of people world-wide oppose LGBTQ* rights, which is terrifying. There are a lot of terrifying things happening right now. I think most of them stem from a basic fear of anything different and a profound lack of respect that people hold for each other.

Tangent.

Said argument has somewhat liberated me, though. I am confident in certain things now that I probably knew before but didn't put into practice: primarily that apologizing for certain viewpoints is a harmful concession. That being polite is no excuse for a prejudiced attitude. That I refuse to apologize for refusing to accept prejudice as a valid difference in opinion, regardless of how nice the other person is.

Which leads me to this: the thing is, when you meet homophobic people, or racist people, or people who hold some undesirable quality, it's almost more jarring when they're also nice. There are plenty of people in my life who hold harmful opinions about things about a multitude of political issues who are on the whole lovely people. Over the internet, or anywhere with a pretense of anonymity, it's easy to write people off as "homophobic" and assume that they are bad people. But in real life, it's entirely possible that I would grow to like a person and then discover their harmful opinion. I don't think that negates the good things about them. I think it's a reminder, more than anything, of how our society mandates so much of our attitudes towards everything. How is that generally lovely people can believe such an awful thing? I won't say brainwashing. I will say... it sucks.

I will also say that I love Margaret Atwood's poetry. Granted, I've read a grand total of two of her poems so far. But they were a good two.

Also -- Alex -- sorry for stealing your day? I know you said you're feelin' Wednesdays. I am feelin' Wednesday today too. Bitches get stuff done.

Mr. Pizza Guy

2011-12-07T22:24:00.001-08:00

I live in suburbia. It's kind of slowly killing me and I'm strongly contemplating leaving. But my story is about pizza.

Ordering pizza is a skill that I have yet to perfect. I'm not sure why I have an aversion to calling strangers on the phone. I don't remember the first time I dialed and ordered a pizza but it was probably a pretty intimidating event. I'm getting better now and practice helps. What has not helped is this relatively new idea of ordering pizza online.

The Dominos website is laid out in a seemingly easy to interpret fashion. You've got the menu, you've got coupons and then there's the order online tab. It's kind of neat the first time you try it; you check all the boxes for the toppings you want and it arranges it visually for you. If you're not already hungry, it's fun.

For the event in question, I was at a friend's for book club. My friend also lives in suburbia but farther away from the centre--where streetlights are few and driveways far apart.

I opened the website and started building the pizzas, one of which was intensely complicated. After ordering about ten of the special lava cakes, I went to the payment page and, surprise, you can't order online for anything over $50. Thanks Dominos, thanks for informing me BEFORE I spent fifteen minutes crafting the amazing pizzas that I would like to consume sooner rather than later. THANK YOU.

By the time I had called them on the phone and repeated the order verbally, the book club members were getting peckish. Forty five minutes later, we were more than ready for pizza.

From the layout of the games room we were sitting in, we could see flashes of cars passing between the hedges in front of the house. When a small car drove by the driveway extremely slowly, we sent delegates out to retrieve the pizzas.

I can't tell you the next part of this story firsthand. I stayed inside. What I was told is that my two friends ran outside and saw the pizza guy walking up the driveway of the house across the street. The followed him and, in desperation, one of them called out, "Hey Mr. Pizza Guy!"

They brought back the pizzas and lava cakes in triumph and I couldn't stop laughing at the cry for Mr. Pizza Guy's attention. When you think about it, what else can you yell when your pizzas are being delivered to your neighbours? What more is there to say than, "Hey Mr. Pizza Guy!"? I really don't know.

As it turned out, the pizzas weren't what I ordered. I'm not saying we stole the neighbours' pizza, just that the woman on the phone misunderstood what things I wanted on each half of the pizza and put it all on the same half. I chalked it up to more ordering experience and ate my delicious and chocolaty lava cake.

***

I think I'll blog on Wednesdays, to start. I'm not sure why but I'm feeling a strong affinity for Wednesday. Apart from that, maybe we can just have some days up for grabs, for kind of spontaneous blogging? This could give us a bit more freedom to write whenever we want and it could also result in no one ever blogging on those days. Thoughts?

weird life stuff that happens (eloquent title is eloquent)

2011-12-04T22:52:00.001-08:00

I broke three mugs today. This was after I discovered that my favourite sweater shrank (grammar? anyone?) in the wash. And I don't even know what happened. It wasn't pretty.

My life feels kind of soap opera-ish right now. I'm not super comfortable spilling this all over the blog because it's the internet. But use your imagination/fill in the blanks with your own dramatic problems.

It just seems like an excess of drama, like someone else's life but it isn't. I don't know what to say, don't know why I even started talking about it. I guess I'm just trying to make sense of my flip out after breaking things this afternoon. It wasn't really about the mugs is what I'm saying.

I do this thing where I kind of suck in all the emotions that I sense around me and store them in my body. It's like empathy on acid and sometimes it's literally painful. So I'm rereading Jellicoe Road and going for walks and climbing trees and trying to take care of myself.

And on that note, I was wondering if anyone wanted to switch blogging days with me. It's cool if not, I can try Wednesday or something but I feel like I'm in a rut and I keep forgetting to blog or pushing it away and I genuinely enjoy the time I spend writing to you guys.

What do you say? I understand if you guys feel possessive of your days. It's been over two years of Thursday and Sunday being "my days" but I feel like I want to mix it up, at least for the month, to see if it shakes me out of my habits. Are you with me?

RP goes multi-media and multi-platform

2011-12-03T20:55:00.001-08:00

I posted this on Tumblr earlier (juxtaposed between posts about nipples--such is my DEPTH) but if Vita can do it, so can I. :P (And I don't want to reply to comments with a screenshot.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OPoZfXoPupM

Summary:

Juh-if.
David Bowie: for people who like ALL the genres! (Or BBC crime shows!)
INTERNET FOREVER. (You guys know I include you/Nerdfighteria in my "the internet makes life better" point, don't you?)

In those two list items I just managed to reference the same Hyperbole and a Half post twice. Kill ALL the memes!

Additionally, Alex and I have been having discussion on Tumblr re: my ability to phrase things and preconceived vocal notions. (I find your judgment flattering, because I don't really phrase things as much as stick words between "uh", "like", "um yeah", and sighs that are also laughs and pauses.) But apparently my voice is pleasing to other people! I could work as a newscaster or recite audiobooks for a living. Call me, John. You could have a real 16 year old girl saying, "and then I took off my bra.". . . actually, I wouldn't be able to say that without laughing. So, no.

Life During History, and Graphic Romance in YA

2011-11-29T18:26:00.001-08:00

Book review, huzzah!

I just finished Life: An Exploded Diagram, by Mal Peet. Basic premise follows:

Boy meets girl.
Boy and girl are of radically different class backgrounds.
It's 1960s England so this is super important to the adults and it's Romeo and Juliettish. (The main character's savvy best friend points this out early on. I liked that guy, and this book could've used more of him.)
Boy and girl sneak around and make out a lot.
The Cuban Missile Crisis just happens to be going on.

It's presented in a sort of zigzagged, out of order way. (Lots of asides about Kennedy and Khrushchev and the construction of various types of planes. Also, entire chapters switch from third to first person, which I didn't particularly like, and most of the dialogue is written in a thiiiiiick accent. Sort of like Hagrid, if Hagrid was speaking for 85% of an entire novel.)

Nevertheless, it brings up some interesting points. Like how not everything set in "historical times" has to really deal with the history going on. People live normal lives through, in this case, the imminent threat of nuclear warfare. The characters are teenagers, so they have a license to not care, and they're written that way. It's realistic, which I appreciate. (When have "current affairs" ever interfered with the personal lives of horny teens, really?)

Also, it gets about yay *flimsy gesture of measurement with hands* smutty. I don't know if it was all supposed to be arousing or artistic or solely for the sake of imagery or what. I'm not personally morally opposed or disturbed by it, nor am I all hot and flustered at the very prospect of smut, as the depraved SMeyer fan might be. I just found some of the lengthy paragraphs about the "ivory curvature of her breast" and how "they kissed as if they were running out of oxygen" (paraphrased examples) kind of tedious. (Overall, though, 6.5/10. Rating things makes them seem so much more official, doesn't it?)

Thoughts on "romantic" scenes in general?

"Hugo"

2011-11-25T22:01:00.000-08:00

(I'm going to be a cheapskate and post this review of "Hugo" that I just wrote on Tumblr immediately before realizing that I could have just written it here. Still, this film was good enough that I will review it in all the places!)

I went to see “Hugo” today with my parents. My mom works at an elementary school library and thus reads a crapton of children’s books, so I feel she is somewhat qualified to tell you (through me) that The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the book on which the film is (closely) based, is a really excellent book. Although you can certainly see “Hugo” without reading the book first (my dad hasn’t read it but still liked the movie), I definitely recommend reading it first. The book is really cool because it’s sort of hyper-illustrated; the pictures don’t just illustrate the words, they actually add to the story itself. Watching the film after reading the book is definitely worth it because you can actually see pictures from the book come to life on screen and it makes the film even more stunning.

Like, let me just start off by telling you that it was so visually beautiful. I’m still not an outright fan of 3D, but watching “Hugo,” I kept seeing a glimmer of hope for 3D as something that can actually positively add to a film rather than just being an annoying and pointless special effect just for kicks. Though it would have been gorgeous without 3D, the times when it really stood out was when old black-and-white photos, illustrations, and silent films suddenly gained more depth. The whole movie, seriously, was just so beautiful — enough for me to clearly notice, and I most definitely am not a movie buff.

And it has to be said that it made me tear up quite a few times as well. Okay, guys, I think I actually prefer children’s/family films when they’re done well. Like, they just somehow manage to push all the right emotional buttons. (Pixar, guys, PIXAR.) “Hugo” focuses a lot on family, though not at all in a cheesy way, and it’s just sad and happy and a lot of FEELS all at the same time.

Basically, I am no film reviewer, but “Hugo” was fucking awesome and you best get yourself to the library/bookstore/movie theater ASAP.

Thanksgiving angst

2011-11-24T21:53:00.001-08:00

I kind of hate Thanksgiving for being a symbol of colonization and binge eating. I mean, not to rain on the parade. Maybe I should have waited until next week or something, but it's relevant to a lot of people today, so excuse my angst.

Colonization sucks. I wish I could be a bit more eloquent about it but anger makes it hard to elaborate. John mentioned something in his FIFA video regarding Amsterdam about how the Dutch are very aware that their wealth is built on an a foundation of exploitation whereas (I'm going to add North) Americans do not. The fact that we* are living here means that entire cultures had to be suppressed and assimilated.

That's shitty. I think that's all I had to say. It's easy to forget all of this, or never even think about it in the first place, when the family come around and we sit around a table and smile and argue and eat amazing food. It's way easier to ignore the fact that we are making our lives on arguably stolen land. But I think we need to have it on our consciousness everyday--especially days like Thanksgiving and that one named after (that shithead) Columbus.

So there. I said it. Thanksgiving, as beautiful as the idea of giving thanks is, makes me angry. Resume the pie eating and merry making.

*and by we, I mean European settlers.

A Cat-related epiphany

2011-11-23T20:24:00.001-08:00

Cats are a lot like people. People who like cats, I assume, like cats for this quality. I don't.

Half the time, I barely like people*, who have the ability to communicate with me and offer me sympathy/food. So a furry animal that embodies only the fickle enigmas of humanity without the more redeeming qualities tends to be annoying to me.

I'm not writing off an entire species here. Out of the maybe dozen or so cats I've had to be around via friends and relatives, the cat whom I like the most is the one I've known since she was a kitten (and thus adorable, and used to being around new people constantly, without the distrust and inherent bitterness of adult-catdom). She's sweet to me, because she knows me, and I've given her no reason to dislike me in any way. This is a perfectly reasonable basis for a relationship, in human terms.

Also speaking in human terms, then, I know I really shouldn't be so indignant about the fact that the majority of cats I know just don't like me. I just don't like some people I know, why should it be any different because there's an interspecies gap? Maybe only one cat I've ever come across hasn't had a naturally shitty disposition. But a dozen is a comparatively small sampling of every cat in the world. Of a dozen random people, how many of them would have an immediately sunshiny demeanor? Probably one.

In contrast, dogs are very much not like people, or are at least the rare "immediately sunshiny" type of person. My family had dogs when I was younger, so maybe I just send out better vibes or something. But after five seconds of crossing paths with someone walking their dog on the street or being in the house of someone who has a dog, literally all of them are eager and excited and friendly, which I reciprocate.** I admire this quality. Possibly because it's just so un-human, in a good way.

I don't know what I'm saying or trying to prove anymore. Happy Thursday, Alex. Happy Thanksgiving, Vita.

* Am I exaggerating here? I don't really know, to be honest.
** I am very guilty of stupid animal voice.

*** All this talk about cats is reminding me of this video.

books and movies and uncreative blog titles

2011-11-21T21:56:00.001-08:00

I was about to skip out yet again but then I realized that if I have time to procrastinate for an hour doing nothing besides scrolling through Tumblr and watching the latest episode of Parks and Recreation, I certainly have time to lay down the homework that "I am doing" and hang out at the old R & P blog again.

Hey guys. What's up? You've grown! Looking good. Etc.

There are five films that are coming out soon -- or soon-ish, as in within the next year or so -- that have reminded me of Hank's whole "Read it 1st" campaign. The Hunger Games, The Great Gatsby, Hugo (The Invention of Hugo Cabret in book form), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and The Hobbit.

Let's be upfront here: I am a book lover. And yes, while I acknowledge that films are a category of art unto themselves, I doubt I'll ever be able to get over my own personal feeling that the book is better. This isn't a set rule, of course; there are most definitely film adaptations that have surpassed their literary brethren. And there are plenty more that are equally as good as the book, if the two forms are even comparable; Tim Burton's spin on Alice in Wonderland lacked the strong plot or emotional punch-to-the-gut that I'd hoped for, but it was so delightful to look at -- pretty colors -- and that specific quality is impossible to experience through the pages of a book.

Still, books are where I lose myself and subsequently find myself again. I get them. I know the things they do to entice me but I'm still not immune to their charms. And yeah, the remake of The Great Gatsby will surely be an entertaining movie whether it veers on the side of awesome or of awesomely terrible, but it's a totally different experience from reading the book. You lose the narration; you lose the paragraph breaks. You gain something else, yeah, but you're modifying the medium entirely -- it's just different.

Which is why I need to get off the internet more and actually read these books before the film versions come out, with the exception of The Hunger Games. You know that I didn't really like the first book (enough to stay away from the other two), but oh man, the trailer gave me the shivers. Obviously I can't say for sure until I've seen the movie, but it seems to me that The Hunger Games is better suited for a movie than a book, at least to me. I wonder if that's why I didn't like it while reading it, because I couldn't get into the style of writing, because it seemed too cinematic for my taste. I just think it's really cool and weird and awesome how changing the medium through which a story is told so drastically affects the story itself.

it snowed earlier

2011-11-17T22:38:00.001-08:00

In other news, I'm going camping this weekend. What? Yeah.

I don't know why I do these things to myself. Honestly, last month, it seemed like a good idea to go camping this weekend. Well, maybe not a *good* idea but a *fine* idea. But now that it is tomorrow, and I have been outside recently, I am abundantly aware that I am going to freeze and I can't help but be comforted by the fact that at least then I won't have the opportunity of failing NaNoWriMo.

Speaking of which, does anyone want to take a stab at why NaNoWriMo is so freaking hard for me this year? I can only assume it's because I'm writing last year's story and it is way more difficult to write a story which you've already written 50,000 words of (and cut 30,000) than to start fresh.

I did write 3,000 words today which was comforting. I'm now halfway through and only two days behind. And hopefully I will find the inspiration to write this weekend when my fingers are freezing off and I don't want to leave my sleeping bag.

It's going to be fun! Yeah! Woohoo.
...I have to go pack. See you on Sunday, provided I make it until then.

stealing your Monday - more book reviewing!

2011-11-14T23:31:00.001-08:00

When I got to work this morning and realized it was Monday and yesterday had been Sunday and I forgot to blog, I was pretty disappointed. I almost felt a little cheated. I guess I dropped the ball a little. But here I am. Surprise!

I will now be reviewing a book, because this is a good trend that I like. I haven't been reading a ton lately* but I did finish Perfect by Ellen Hopkins last week.

Oh my god, Ellen Hopkins is the coolest. Are you guys** familiar with Ellen Hopkins (apart from the fact that she is cited as a prime example in any one of those "YA fiction is depraved and sinister and EVIL because of REASONS" articles)? Basically, she writes one word titled books in verse about teen-ish characters who face scary and real issues in their lives. The three I've read were roughly centered around life in a mental hospital (Impulse), teenage prostitution (Tricks) and (most recently) the pressure to achieve perfection (Perfect).

I feel like I have to write a short note about format because it is a little unusual. These books are written in verse.
I remember a conversation I had with a couple friends when I was reading Impulse. I was raving because it was so different and amazing and gritty and true and then it popped up that it was written in verse, yeah, like poetry. I had a couple friends just brush it off, saying it would bug them and they can't read books like that.
As much as I try to be respectful of things like that, it bothered me. Once you give it a chance and get into the flow of it, reading a book in verse is no different than reading a book with multiple narrators or that is written in present tense. What I'm trying to say is that, for the most part, you get used to it. So if you don't want to try new things, whatever, that's your deal. I just wish everyone would quit hiding behind excuses and clinging to normalcy. /end rant>

Poetry amazes me. The fact that this book contains a fraction of the words of any of the others on my shelf just strikes me with awe. There's just so much going on, not just emotion but plot, and there's a beautiful mix of simplicity and complexity in the pages. A lot of the times when I'm writing, I think I'm being too terse and then I look at Perfect and think, nope, fewer words is not necessarily better--on the contrary, a lot of times less is more.

On the negative side, sometimes multi-narrator books irritate me. Not only can it come across as fractured and jumpy but I feel like as soon as you start to get into what's happening with one character, you get yanked out and inserted in the next person's story. Having said that, I think Hopkins does this juggling trick as gracefully as possible and the array of characters does seem to serve her purpose.

I feel like Perfect captured a lot of the pressures of being a young adult today. There's a lot of really powerful and raw emotion in here and it came across really well done. I also feel exceedingly lucky when I read these books where 4 out of 5 parents are loading on the expectations, practically crippling their kids, and mine are like, "Yeah, do what you want, kid. Be happy."

It's sad. There's so many tough situations out there and no shortage of teenagers dealing with them. The book left off on a couple different notes, with some of the characters (okay, one) moving towards their dreams and future happiness and some stuck in the same rut of eating disorders and steroid use. I guess it's realistic but it's also challenging. I know everybody doesn't always get better, that there's no such thing as a simple cure, and maybe the lingering hope should be enough but it's just not.

I really enjoyed it, regardless. Perfect (and the rest of Ellen Hopkins's books for that matter) gets a recommendation that I don't think I can narrow down. For those who want to read a slightly hopeful but ultimately realistic portrayal of demented societal and parental pressures and stigmas on young people? For whoever thinks poetry isn't for them? I don't know. Read it if you want and let me know what you think if you do.

I'm off to bed. Best wishes!

*c'mon, guys, it's NaNoWriMo. What did you expect? (Oh I can't use that as an excuse because I haven't written anything in 3 days? Shhh.)
**sometimes I find myself haunted with longing for the English language to develop a plural form of the word 'you.' LEXICAL GAPS SUCK!

The Name of What Star? A Good Star!

2011-11-12T23:27:00.000-08:00

The Name of the Star Review

Can this month be national (and by national I mean "Raving Persuasions") book review month? In all seriousness, I'd be all behind my own suggestion if it wasn't for the fact that most of my reviews in No(Yes!)vember would consist of Stalin and French Resistance historical books, which I don't think most people would be inclined to pick up for a bit of easy reading. Still, I've been reading a lot more lately (hooray) so I hope you don't mind if a few more book reviews pop up from me. You can't stop me.

To preface this, a small note about my relation to Young Adult literature: As much as I enjoy a wide range of books, as much as I like reading more challenging books or books written in new styles (new to me, at least) or books that generally expand my worldview, sometimes I just really need to sit down with a solidly written YA book of a familiar style. Not to degrade YA as a category -- there are tons of genuinely good YA books -- but I find them on the whole to be the most accessible category of book; the ones I read most of pure enjoyment and comfort. So it's always excellent when you stumble across an interesting, fresh, yet easy to read YA book that allows you to simply engage in a good story without much effort.

As it fit all of the requirements, I loved The Name of the Star.

See, as much as I adore Maureen Johnson, her books have never been my favorite. I've enjoyed them well enough, but they've fallen a little flat for me -- they didn't have anything about them that made me go from liking to loving them. This time, however, though it wasn't a flawless book (not that any book ever is), there was so much good stuff in it that I just couldn't stop reading, and am now a little bit weepy at the thought of having to wait -- how long? too long, whatever the date is -- for the next two to be published.

One of the strong points of the book was its plot. The basic idea is that Rory, an American teenager, moves to London to go to school just as somebody begins to recreate the Jack the Ripper murders, and -- of course -- ends up getting involved. Simple enough, but plenty of possibilities to work with. Another one of Johnson's supernatural books comes to mind, Devilish, which I think provides an apt contrast between a supernatural book done well and a supernatural book that tried too hard. Whereas in Devilish, I spent the entire book feeling slightly confused and thus the impact of the ending was totally lost on me -- plus I didn't feel any strong emotion towards the characters -- in The Name of the Star, the plot was wisely chiseled down until it had one strong focus. That really helped to keep me engaged.

The other thing I really loved about The Name of the Star were the characters. (I'm such a sucker for books with good characters, I swear.) Again, this time around, I actually really loved the characters. They were relatable enough, flawed but not annoying, funny, developed... Rory was an apt main character. Though at times a bit insensitive to her roommate's personality, I thought, she was generally a cool-seeming person.

The creepiness of this book seemed to directly correlate to what time of day I read it. In the middle of the afternoon, it was (at times) one part creepy and two parts entertaining/intriguing, but I had to haul ass out of my kitchen a few times around midnight because I started getting freaked out about all that open space (relative to my nice, safe, serial-killer-proof bed, of course). It certainly wasn't terrifying or on the same level as "proper," traditional-style ghost stories, but the level of scary was relatable and believable. Though Rory did suffer from the same "how are you so calm I would literally be having a heart attack in your position" level-headed demeanor around the scary bits that is so common among protagonists who need to move the story forward. Ah well. It didn't detract from anything.

Aside from a few minor things -- two of the characters practically disappeared from the second half of the book, which was understandable but a shame -- the most grating flaw in the book was their method for dispelling ghosts. Much like the sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who (minus the latter's earned and affectionate history), their method involved a seemingly simplistic piece of equipment that conveniently does very complicated work without ever explaining how or why. It subsequently aided in making the culprit's motivation behind the murders substantially less satisfying and thrilling than it ought to have been.

Still, The Name of the Star was ultimately a success if not a masterpiece. I thoroughly enjoyed it and can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy!

Another Book Review (of a different sort)

2011-11-12T19:50:00.001-08:00

Unlike Vita, I have no qualms about blogging about books I've had to read for school. Because of the all-consuming nature of the public school system, as of right now I haven't been reading for pleasure much. Less than I want to, at least. Remember I talked about reviewing this book I hated, about THE YOUTH and THE INTERNET?* The time is now, grab your popcorn.

That book is Born Digital, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. I picked it because I thought the cover was clever, which is something I deeply regret now. Basically, it's 375 pages of trying to define, analyze, and condemn internet culture and all us young whippersnappers who are so infatuated with it. It's a book for the lonely, confused, elderly masses. Those who have had zero exposure to technology in the past 25 years, and/or who have no contact with anyone born after 1985, who could have explained the entire premise of BD in five minutes and a few example Google searches.

Maybe it's just my problem with nonfiction in general--I literally had to force myself to read it, it was so goddamn dry and dull*--or maybe I'm just biased because I'm a Digital Native.***

The best comparison I can up with for this is March of the Penguins. I'm assuming you've seen it. It's cute and well-intentioned, but it boils down to many, many minutes of "The penguins are walking. It is cold." This gets tedious and repetitive very quickly. There are occasional tidbits--where the penguins all merrily slide on the ice or get chased by a badass seal--that make the audience sit up and pay attention, or chuckle slightly. But then it's back to the penguins standing around in the snow.

I lied, I can think of another comparison: it's like reading a book on skydiving. You can read about it all you want, you might think you've perfected your skydiving technique based solely on the knowledge you've obtained from this large, academic book, but after all that it would probably serve you better to just go skydiving for yourself. There are some things, some experiences, that books cannot hope to capture.

I mean, it does its job, giving a nice primer on all things internetty and what we're doing with it--good and bad, pedophilic and political--but it's just not interesting. But it tries so hard. I just kind of want to pat these two fifty year old men on the head. Again, feel free to cite my position as a snobby, young digitally literate person for whom next-to-none of the information provided was new or helpful or relevant as the reason I find this so unappealing, but that's what I thought about it.

* I'm actually writing this blog-review as a means of procrastination from the assigned review I'm going to have to turn in for a grade. THE INTERNET HAS CORRUPTED ME BEYOND REPAIR IT'S GIVEN ME A SHORTENED ATTENTION SPAN OH BLOODY NO. (*end sarcastic rant*) In all seriousness, at a point I had to stop caring so much about why I disliked this book, and treat it as An Exercise In Plodding Through Walls of Boring Text, training me for whatever godforsaken tests I'll be subjected to in the near future/The Actual Future Where I Will Have A Job That Involves Reading Things.

** Not all nonfiction has to be like this, that's not what I'm saying. But well-written, captivating nonfiction, I gather, is hard to write and more based on the particular reader's subject of interest than anything.

*** If you're one for drinking games, (though I hope you aren't, really) take a shot every time you read the words "those born digital", "Digital Natives" or "young Americans". You will be in the hospital halfway through the second chapter. Learn some synonyms, guys.

The rare occasion where I've pined for another sequel and gotten my wish

2011-11-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

SISTERHOOD EVERLASTING.

IS A BOOK THAT EXISTS.

This pleases me.

I suppose I should back up a bit. Did you guys ever read the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series? (If yes, I hope you realize my excitement, because all of them were/are fan-frigging-tastic. If no, I urge you to read them while the genre of "Teenage friends go on adventures and develop romantic relationships" is still relevant and appealing to you.)

The book is about the Sisterhood as adults, and everything beyond that that I could possibly say is spoilers. Aside from that it is as good if not better than the previous four. And that's saying something, considering how obsessed I was with the series when I was younger. Looking back, I probably read the first one when I was about nine or ten (lol pretentious child), when being fifteen seemed so far away, and I convinced myself that by that time I would have collected a perfect, quirky group of soul sisters with whom to share clothing.* Having this standard of ideal-teen-friendship-and-summer-exploits set up for me at that age, though, made my own teenagerdom seem pretty dull. By my fourteenth birthday or so I realized my life was not meant to be these (fictional) books incarnate. In some small way, I've always regretted that. I know it's just the media I surround(ed) myself with--that which tells my these years of my life are somehow incomplete if I don't kiss boys under the stars, travel the world, drink at parties, sneak out of the house with my own girl-gang, go on road trips, etc--that has caused this disappointment. But the point is still valid: how much of this is constructed fantasy and how much of it is just my teenage life being subpar?

Anyway, back to why this book is great. I love that these characters exist canonically as mature women. Except for this and the epilogue to Harry Potter, this hardly ever happens. Adulthood makes any set of fictional people seem so much more real. Their lives are no longer confined to a certain span of documented years, the rest of them left to be vaguely defined in the minds of curious readers or by (often kind of crappy) fanfiction. There's closure. (But, as a sidenote, the book ends openly. There could be a sequel to this one and I'd be happy. Yes, there is the argument that this would be beating a dead horse, milking the dry cow of franchise for the sake of $$$, but I have a feeling it wouldn't. There's more to be said without it reaching that point.)

And now I want to read them all again, for the nostalgia. T'were simpler times.

*Minus the fact that we have nothing tangible between us, maybe this blog is like the sisterhood I yearned for at ten. The Sisterhood of the Non-traveling Blog. (Starring Vita as Bee, Alex as Lena, and me as Tibby? All we need is a feisty yet sensitive Latina to round it out. ;))

i suck at titles but sucking is good, right?

2011-11-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

There's this post I want to write about human nature and how it's all just a bullshit myth that we've totally bought into in order to feel we're inadequate but first I have to read a pamphlet that someone gave me. So... there's something to look forward to.

In other news, you've probably noticed it's November. Additionally, if you follow me on tumblr, you've probably been victim to my nanowrimo agonizing. I also just realized that I'm insanely insensitive to people who don't do nano due to lack of time. This is due to the fact that I have a lot of time, as much as I try to convince myself otherwise. When nanowrimo rolls around, I am all about the writing. It consumes a lot of time and I don't think about it because it gives me something to actually be doing. I used to brush off people who don't do nano for time strain reasons but no longer!

This has been short but I want to watch the last episode in season two of Doctor Who*. I've heard it sad (understatement? We shall SEE!). I am prepared with my tissues.
Best wishes!

*I know, I know--I watch television shows slowly. I'm savouring. Get over it.

Meeting MJ

2011-10-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

Need I say it? Maureen Johnson is freaking awesome. She is the physical embodiment of her online presence. Like, I hardly need to describe my experience because if you read her Twitter timeline, you can practically feel it.

Me and MJ
(this is misleading and we're probably the same height
but I was wearing high heeled boots)

I'm going tell you about it anyway but I just wanted to preface this with the fact that yesterday was textbook MJ. I could not have imagined it better.

I convoyed to the site with five friends and we were behind my schedule when we arrived at 10:30. For a 2 o'clock event. And there was no one there. After some mild deliberation, we left, bound for Value Village to do some Halloween shopping.

When we came back at 12, there was still no one there that we could see. There were some people hanging out in Starbucks who appeared like they could have been there for the event but still no line and Chapters seemed rather ambivalent about the whole deal. Soon, they seemed to realize that there was a thing happening and started setting up some chairs and a podium in a corner of the teen section. Naturally, my people snagged the front row, though this was a little intimidating. I started trying to nudge the podium farther away with my toe but it wasn't actually that bad. Maureen didn't stand behind the podium the whole time. Sometimes she stood beside it; sometimes she jumped over the audience to check out the extension pack of Settlers of Catan she'd never seen before; sometimes she got very close to sitting in my sister's lap.

You can't tell how close it was from this picture
but trust me, it was CLOSE.

It was great, you know. I'm not going to go over every detail because that might get boring. The easiest and possibly truest way to describe what Maureen did is rambled. She told us her events were pretty much exclusively q&a except a special brand of question and answer in which someone asks a questions and she rambles and answers a different question until she has forgotten the original question and then asks to be reminded of the question and then ignores it some more and then asks for another question that she can ignore. It's a pretty entertaining process.

After the questions ran out and several audience members had proffered gifts in the form of nanaimo bars and maple syrup, we all shuffled over to stand in line for the signing part. There were pictures and Sharpies and high fives and then we left. I'm slightly ashamed to say I didn't get anything signed to our blog--it only occurred to me later. Maybe the next one of us that crosses paths with the woman who threw us in the way of each other can get her to sign a badge that we can upload and stick in our sidebar. That would be cool.

I wish you guys had been there. It was jokes.

p.s. Can we all go to VidCon, please??? PLEEEEEEASE?

At least education taught me how to write these words

2011-10-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I am posting this on Saturday and changing the date so it looks like Friday because I want to blog this week. Also, you should know that 90% of the time when I don't blog on Fridays it's because I go to sleep at 6pm, mostly by accident. One could say that I should just write blog posts earlier, but what do you think I am, a non-procrastinator? And yes, most of the time on Fridays I do just go to sleep early because I'm really friggin' tired; take your judgement elsewhere/I don't have any friends. Is this my way of apologizing for temporarily abandoning you, blog readers? I choose not to answer that mostly because I like to pretend that I have an aura of je ne sais quoi.

[CUE PART OF POST THAT ACTUALLY HAS SOME PARTIALLY COHERENT IMPORTANCE]

"If we wish to change the system of education in the U.S. -- in the world -- then we must now devise a concrete, sustainable alternative to the current model. We must define all of our goals. We must acknowledge what is good and what is bad and how fundamental is the flaw. How can we come up with a system for education so radically different, one that creates divergent rather than convergent thinking, halls less rigid than those of academia, without reverting back to the abysmal quality of education, equality, and life of the pre-Industrial Revolution eras? If we agree that standardized tests are bad, how so? Are they bad in the absolute or only unfit for some and what to replace them with? How to ensure good education with fewer regulations? Are we talking about changing the system of education or an entire culture?"

I wrote the above yesterday afternoon while sitting in my Physics class, rather than actually paying attention, which perhaps demonstrates one of the fundamental flaws of public education: more often than not, it is painfully boring. Another fundamental flaw: I'm only taking said Physics class because it is a commonly recommended class for polishing your schedule for college applications. To me, taking classes for college is as equally bad as a class that teaches to the test. That's not learning for the sake of learning; that's learning -- or more likely, memorizing and forgetting -- for the sole sake of advancing in the academic system. It's not like Physics is an unimportant class either; it's only an honors class, so obviously it's not all there is to know about the laws of the universe, but it theoretically should teach students about how the universe works on a very basic level. Surely that ought to be a better incentive to take the class -- how fucking crazy is it that people actually have discovered shit about why we don't fall of the face of the Earth as it's revolving?! -- but I doubt it's a common one.

It was also inspired by this video, which mirrors how I feel about the majority of inspiring quotes: they sound really nice, but when you get right down to it, they either are so broad that they are pragmatically impossible to follow, or they aren't actually saying much. What the lecturer says makes sense -- and I don't know if there was another part to his speech that was not included in that video -- but he offers no solution, at least not a practical one, and that bothers me. I agree with a lot of what he says -- not everyone is intelligent in the same way; lots of people get left behind because of programs like "No Child Left Behind" -- but how can we fix that? There are certainly ways in the modern U.S. to be successful without being "book smart" (or at least without following the typical school/college/career path) -- the arts immediately come to mind -- but those are perhaps more risky options liable to fail, and ones that many people can't follow either.

Allow me to present my own life as an example. I am not happy with the college/career path, but I also don't have any talents that would allow me to bypass that step and still be successful (as in, get paid to do something I love). I don't say that disparagingly; I say it bluntly. I'm not stupid or talentless, but I am not especially good at acting, writing, painting, singing, performing, and while I like many of them, I do not love any of those things enough to work at them hard enough to get to the point where I am really awesome at them. Additionally, while there are many things about school that I simply cannot stand, there are points that I enjoy. In an almost complete turn-around from last year, I once again genuinely enjoy my English class, and there are a few other classes that I like. Yet none of those classes are in subjects that I would want to pursue as a career. Another example: this year I'm taking Calculus with Applications: the first math class in a long time that moves slowly enough that I actually understand what's going on, and thus don't absolutely dread going to it every day (not to say that I actually like it), yet it's below-level Calculus about which it is easy to make disparaging comments. What's left? Pursue a career in something that is marketable and widely considered to be "good" -- business, a science -- but that I'm not good at and for the most part hate because I simply can't understand it -- or go off and self-study a tiny little niche of literature that has no relevance to the world other than that it makes me happy? And what right do I have to demand options for a job that is both decently paid and enjoyable to me when so many people in the world have almost no choice whatsoever in what they do for a career? I would hate to get a stereotypical "office job," but there are so many people who can't avoid them. Why should I get to pursue a dream career over them?

I don't have answers. I do have a whole lot more questions. I don't know what to do about this problem. And while I know that there are people who search for real alternatives to our current education system, I wish there to be more. It's been the time for a while now to stop inventing new tests and address the real, fundamental flaws of public education: but that means that a lot of people are going to have to battle it out on a very basic level.

[RECOMMENCE INCOHERENCE/TOMFOOLERY]

P.s. Some of us who are getting to meet Maureen Johnson today should have fun. (Oh god. This passive-aggressive... jealousy? pent-up anger?... is strangling my normally semi-nice personality. OH GOD SOMEONE HELP ME FKGRARBBLEGARRBLELaksjfassssssssah... I AM SO JEALOUS ALL OF YOU ARE GOING TO DIE) [Sweet baby Jesus, 10:45 on a Saturday morning and I'm already delirious]) Really, though, I am happy for you, Alex. I'm actually pretty excited for this; I hope you don't mind that I'm going to temporarily be living vicariously through you, like a desperate little puppy who... is... desperate? No, really, it's so cool that one of us is going to get to meet MJ (hopefully that will eventually be all of us, but we have to start somewhere, yes yes). Kind of crazy that we have her to thank for this entire blog. Well, not really -- we're the ones who created it, not her, to give credit where it's due -- but she's the reason we met in the first place which is fucking crazy! Yet awesome.
Okay, I think this is getting out of hand. Let me leave you with something semi-sane: I hope meeting Maureen Johnson is really awesome, Alex!

"they call it an existential crisis for a reason"

2011-10-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I'm doing. That's a lie. A more accurate statement is I don't know where my life is going and I have no idea how to figure it out and it's making me a bit anxious or ansty or just lame.

Hmmm. Like, I do stuff. Sometimes. I read novels and make pumpkin pies and drink chai tea lattes and protest economic injustice. But a lot of the time, I don't do much. I tumbl[e?]; I sleep in; I... read novels. I almost wish I went to school because then my idle activities would be working towards something, even if it was just matriculation.

Maybe I don't have to know right now. That's nice, comforting, to think I don't have to have a plan or goals or whatever. But also worrying, you know? "What's the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?"*

I need a goal. This is one of the main reasons I decided to do NaNoWriMo this year, albeit in a way not endorsed by NaNoWriMo.

Anyway, I'm just drowning in a bit of self-pity because I am kind of awful at relationships and communication in general and my life doesn't appear to be moving me towards anything, or at least not at a discernible rate. When I think about it, I'm a pretty horrible Hufflepuff. I'm much too self serving and lazy.

I should get on with it. Finish my book (Irma Voth by Miriam Toews--really enjoying it), get some sleep. I'll keep you guys posted on my encounter with Maureen Johnson. And I'm curious: what are you guys being for Halloween?

dftba.

*from An Abundance of Katherines by John Green.

Sometimes I forget that everyone has access to the same internet...

2011-10-25T17:56:00.000-07:00

(That could turn out to be the beginning of a pretty sordid sentence, but it's not what it sounds like.)

Today was the first meeting of "The Harry Potter Club".* A lot of people turned up, including a handful of acquaintances I'd grouped under the loose category of, "I don't know you all that well but you seem like a nice person", who were suddenly expressing interest in the same thing I was. A raucous, if nerdy, time was had by all. AVPM was quoted. The HPA and Pottermore were discussed verbally instead of through keystrokes. Hufflepuff was lamented, jokingly.

As it turns out, there are people who like things I associate with the faceless hive of *the internet* who happen to be flesh-and-blood humans I go to school with. Today, for some reason, this struck me as strange. Call it the first rule of Fight Club/Tumblr/what-have-you, but *the internet* and *real life*, have, so far as I've been a part of them both, been separate circles. Especially considering I've never been to VidCon or anything that blatantly converges the two. Sure, there's Facebook for that, but some strange, pleasant coincidence lies in finding out that the majority of our collective appreciation of a series of books has led to the same things online, and that everyone in attendance has such a level of devotion to said books (and a level of internet-savvy...) to seek these things out. I don't really know, there's just something genuine about internet-fandom that I enjoyed seeing overlap into *real life*.

I've seen this genuineness turn sour a bit--and call me an elitist if you think I deserve it--via a few people who just seem to be trying too hard to integrate internet references into everyday conversation. Eg: "Me gusta."-- pronounced "mee gusta". (*Slight rant* This doesn't even have anything to do with the meme reference, if you had a basic grasp of the Spanish language you'd know the e is short.) And use of "You are such a n00b." as an insult. Maybe there's irony in these types of things that I'm not exactly getting, but it falls flat as a means of communication outside of *the internet*, and it wasn't even that clever on *the internet* to begin with.

* "That's just to not confuse the freshman, we're calling it Dumbledore's Army."

books that make you angry

2011-10-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

I'm almost certain I'm not alone in sometimes getting frustrated with a book. Either the main character is too whiny or the author keeps hinting at something but never actually gives you the information. If you read a variety of books, I'm going to assume you've felt this way before.

I started reading As Simple As Snow a couple weeks ago. I was enjoying it, too. I saw a few parallels between this book and Looking for Alaska* which was interesting. Then I stopped reading for a couple days, got sick and started a three day volunteering gig that took up a lot of time and energy. Not a lot of reading time. Today, I stayed in bed and decided to finish it. Which I did.

I suppose there's an important part of this story I should add. It's a mystery, of sorts, about a girl who disappears, leaving a dress laid out next to a hole in a frozen river. Here's a review from the beginning of the book:

"As Simple As Snow is one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. Galloway draws you into another world, and you'll be wholly involved from the opening line, with its blunt force. He awakens all our curiosities and then satisfies them, so that the only question left unanswered is how long it'll be until he gives us something else to read." -Kaye Gibbons, author of Divining Women

My problem with the end of this book, it would follow, is that it proved that last sentence to be complete and utter bullshit.

Immediately, the ending coloured my entire experience of the book. I don't feel like I can look at it objectively anymore. And it's not that I can't tolerate a couple loose ends when I read a book--I can. I was just left totally alone, wondering what happened and feeling stupid for not being able to figure it out. It seems like this book is one of those ones that makes more sense the second time you read it but I doubt I could bring myself to go back and start again. Then again, maybe that was the point. Maybe I was supposed to be angry and there's a subtle honesty to it because we don't always figure things out in reality. Sometimes we just have to keep moving on, not knowing if the teacher murdered her or if she was sleeping with that main footballer turned Goth guy or if she ran away or jumped in the river or what.

I'm still mad that Kaye Gibbons lied to me but I'm sure I'll live and the book suffered no damage since I didn't actually throw it at the wall, no matter how much I wanted to.

In other news, I want to go to Vidcon. More immediately though, Maureen Johnson is coming to town and I will be seeing her this Saturday! Needless to say, I'm excited.

*probably because the reason I bought it was because John Green said it was a piece of his inspiration for LFA.

Evolutionarily, I'd be dead.

2011-10-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about evolution. I don't really know why, but thinking about it has made me realize, we should all pretty much be dead. (Er, not so much "dead" as "nonexistent", but for the sake of drama let's just keep it worded that way.)

Or we would be, if we were all still breeding for physical fitness exclusively. Eg: I am nearsighted, this gene must have started somewhere--prehistorically--and yet I exist as a nearsighted person. One of my ancestors may not have had the visual prowess to keenly spot all the hungry animals lurking about in those days, but compensated for it, somehow, and ended up not dying long enough to pass on their impairment.

Sheer luck could be a factor here, but that such slight genetic imperfections are relatively common in our species points to the fact that somewhere along the line, we started breeding for intelligence, too; possibly more so than mammoth-outrunning-abilities. Good move, species.

I don't even know if I'm making an interesting point or a modicum of sense. But, speaking on a literally fucking huge scale, it's comforting to know that we've progressed a whole hell of a lot, that we're a complex species capable of doing all this awesome shit. *arms spread out in an all-encompassing gesture*

So, so what if my hypothetical ideal mate hypothetically wouldn't produce offspring with me who would have enough excess fat and muscle tissue on them to survive the next famine? Generally speaking, this is not a thing that I should be concerned with, and I'm relatively secure in my attraction to males who happen to be pallid and visually impaired, not from any particular survival standpoint, but because I am a judge of personality and character. Most people are. Coming from primates, this is a kind of cool thing, to say the least.

I don't know where I'm going with this, honestly, and I don't know how to reach any sort of logical or entertaining conclusion, so I'm just going to end this post here. Auf wiedersehen!

"Lola and the Boy Next Door" Review

2011-10-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THIS BOOK SPOILERS SPOILERS OKAY

Despite the unhappy tears I shed inside whenever I look at the title and cover of Stephenie Perkins' two books -- they do such a disservice to the stories inside; I never in a million years would have picked up Anna and the French Kiss had it not been recommended to me by John Green (well, not personally) and a million other people (I suppose thus negating the million years) -- she really does know how to write a good romance story.

Lola and the Boy Next Door was cute, it was funny, and it does nothing to give real-life boys a boost, if you know what I'm saying. It definitely convinced me that I should continue to make an exception for "chick lit" when it comes to Stephanie Perkins.*

However, what kind of reviewer would I be if I didn't skip over the good parts and go straight to the critiques? (Oh, a normal one, you say? Shut up.)

Problems:

- The conflict. The reason why she was initially so wary of Cricket seemed way overblown. I get the feeling that this could conceivably cause a huge rift in the friendship of a teenager, and I'm sure if I were in that situation I would feel the same way, but when you're reading about it, you're just like, really? That's why his house causes you painful palpitations of the heart? Maybe it's just because I'm not one for believing in "ONE TRUE LOVE," but man, it would have been nice if there had been, you know, an actual interesting reason for their estrangement. It wasn't too big a deal as the book progressed, but it was sort of off-putting in the beginning part. Points for not dragging out the "mystery" of their estrangement for too long, though.

- Max. It was a little hard to put up with Lola fawning over him since you knew they were obviously going to break up -- I think their relationship went on for too long. It seemed to serve as one of the main tensions in the story, but I feel that a lot of time was wasted with him when it could have been spent better developing the Lola/Cricket relationship, which seemed a tad bit superficial, to be honest. Also, like, Max is a jerk (though I guess that was pretty clearly emphasized in the book)... The age difference started feeling weirder towards the end. Yuck.

- Repetitive plot. I suppose this is why I normally avoid fluffy romance literature. You could totally see where this book was going... and I guess it's the sort of book that you read more for the content than the ending, since it's predictable and easygoing, but I still would like to have had something with a bit more oomph, something a bit less of the "quirky, unpopularish main girl gets the dreamboat" plot to every teenager romcom ever.

- Andy, Nathan, & Norah. I don't have gay parents, so I can't speak from experience on this one, so don't take this as an absolute truth (as if you would anyway, right?). The gay parents thing was fine, but I felt like having Norah there kind of undermined them. Now, the book is not focused on the gay parents, but I assume that at least part of what Perkins was going for was the assimilation of LGBT characters into normal contexts, which is cool, but I think having Norah there sort of made it seem like you do need a mom after all. It's just that Norah ended up becoming closer to them, and mentioning how she couldn't take credit for Lola, and how Norah sometimes slightly corrected Andy and Nathan's parenting styles. It's not that these aren't legitimate actions for the character, and maybe these are things that happen to some gay parents in real life; it just felt a little weird to include Norah doing them, as if the actual parents couldn't totally handle Lola on their own. I know that wasn't the intention and I don't think it was a huge deal, but I could have done without her.

- The too-perfect boy. Cricket is great, sure, and I liked him, but I felt he wasn't super developed, other than being ~the nice perfect boy.~ Even that was okay; it was mostly just that he never got mad at Lola, really, or anything. Like, fine, that's cool, but maybe it's my rejection of the one true love thing, but it just felt a little too fantasy-world-romance for me.

- Lola's costumes. I just couldn't get over them. I'm sorry. She was a likeable enough character, but I couldn't help but cry a little whenever she donned a wig. Crazy outfits I can deal with, but wigs just don't do it for me. Superficial, I know. And sort of important to the character... still. However, I did appreciate how she didn't stop it with her outfits at the end to show character growth.

Despite these flaws, I sped through the book faster than AATFK, even though I like the first book a lot more. Don't get me wrong, it was still an enjoyable read, and there's certainly nothing wrong with allowing yourself to escape into the semi-plausible fluffy romantic world of a girl your age. I did snort from laughter quite a few times; it's definitely entertaining. However, it lacked the depth that AATFK had -- not that either was a difficult read, but I felt an ability to relate to Anna, to feel that her hemming-and-hawing with St Clair was plausibly understandable and still good. Although in both it was obvious that they were going to get together, I feel that in AATFK, it was altogether more realistic, and thus overall better. I don't mean to compare the books so much, but since they're fairly similar in style, I definitely feel that AATFK was executed a lot more successfully. Still, if you liked AATFK, I certainly recommend Lola and the Boy Next Door as well!

*a) Obligatory "'Chick lit' is a stupid term" reminder. Probably I should just come up with another way to describe such books.
b) I say that as if I have actual rules as to what I read. I don't -- excluding my vow to myself that I will never read Nicholas Sparks for any reason other than so that I can validly criticize his books.

I don't even know

2011-10-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

I have to work tomorrow. Oh, Mondays...

Today was good. I watched Doctor Who and washed dishes and made spontaneous pie from my leftover pie crust dough. And I tumbled, of course.

Can this blog just be a tribute to Doctor Who, tumblr and pie? Let's be serious, what else does one need in one's life? Lazy Sundays for the win.

I'm not sure what it is about Doctor Who. I can't nail down a prescribed number of bullet points as to why I enjoy it so. I'm not really into aliens. I can get into time travel as much as the next person but it's not the most thrilling concept I think about. But I like the show. I like David Tennant and Billie Piper and their chemistry. I like the British-ness of it, the quirky humour and excellent accents.

I don't know. It's nice to fall in love with something new.

Villains who aren't villains

2011-10-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

I always seem to identify with -- or at least sympathize with -- disagreeable characters in books. Emma Bovary, Hamlet, Hedda Gabler, Holden Caulfield... Not in situation or in severity but in some fundamental feeling of dissatisfaction and offsetting wrongness with our way of life. I suppose one could contribute a lot of this feeling to the act of growing up, since that's when we're all meant to become adults and realize how harsh the world really is -- disillusionment comes with the territory.

I find myself wondering why I sympathize with these characters so strongly and how valid my empathy actually is. Like, how much of my defense of their character is based on the actual text of the novel? How much is it that I simply identify with the character and don't wish to criticize or condemn my own reflected thoughts or actions? I'm currently rereading Madame Bovary not only because I read it a month and a half ago and the details are starting to slip and I need to know if for school but also because I want to know if I'm rationalizing my defense of Emma based on what Flaubert actually writes or if I'm just projecting her situation to suit my own opinions. I overtly despise playing the victim, but I certainly believe that I subconsciously do it all the time. It's good to check myself.

I definitely think it's primarily the personal connection somebody, somewhere has with literature that keeps books alive so long. There's something markedly magnificent that in the fictional world I should identify more with a half-orphaned, vengeful prince from the sixteenth century than a sixteen year old girl living in the U.S. Sometimes I probably do accidentally victimize myself or try to make my life seem more tragic than it actually is, just so I can have a legitimate reason to feel sorry for myself. Still, more often than not, characters who don't fit into their community's definition of "proper" or "moral" or even "sane" have something valuable to say about the state of that community, whether or not we agree and even whether or not the character realizes they're saying it. Maybe that's one of the reasons why the "darker" characters are often the most interesting. I guess the only way to find out is to keep reading.

Haven't done a list in a while, let's do that.

2011-10-11T19:29:00.000-07:00

Things I have done today:

School. Oh. School. If every period were one minute longer it'd be illegal, have I ever told you guys that about my crazy district?
Ran a mile in 11:28 (which is a middle-of-the-road exertion of my own abilities...)
Halfheartedly reviewed for the PSAT, even though it is the test that will DETERMINE MY FUTURE, so they would have us believe. I don't believe in cramming, it's a "standardized" test, meaning we should all know these things already, if I stress about it the night before I will most probably do worse, etc.
Learned that if I do well enough on the PSAT, with my "expected major", I could be sent to Social Sciences Camp in NY over the summer. Cool.
Rediscovered my love for mozzarella cheese and all that it chooses to be.
Considered doing a blog post about this book I am reading that is a scathing/utterly misinformed study of the largely scary topic (to adults) of TEENAGERS ON THE INTERNET.
Realized I am not done with the book and therefore should not be judging it/that I do not have the time at present to construct the sort of response this book deserves.
Read for fun for the first time in a week or two.
Blogged and slept and other inevitable near-future-y things.

choosing the labyrinth

2011-10-06T23:59:00.000-07:00

I feel like I haven't talk about what's going on with me for a while and for that reason--and also because it's almost midnight and I'm tired--I am going to refresh you all on the happenings of my life.

I just finished rereading Looking for Alaska which I started last week in honour of banned books week. I love John Green. Today, I started The Name of the Star, Maureen Johnson's new novel. So far, it is enjoyable. Next on my list, in no particular order are The Accordionist's Son, As Simple As Snow and Madam Bovary (thanks for the reccomendation, Vita).

I love reading so much. Sometimes it boggles my mind that more people don't read. Like, 1., how would I ever learn things if I didn't read books and also, 2., how would I ever figure out that I'm not the only person in the world who is sometimes afraid and sad and lonely and having a hard time making decisions. I would be so much worse off without books.

Which brings me to my novel. I've been working on it in the past week, not changing much but working up to it. This is partially because I need a project and partially because a friend is reading it, piece by piece. I think I just have to write more. I'm not planning on participating in NaNoWriMo in the traditional way--even though it's SO tempting*--but I may draft my own National Novel Finishing Month. We'll see.
Writing is hard. Rewarding, but difficult.

I've been working a bit. I don't know. Not much is new on that front. Let's move on.

Thanksgiving (I guess I should say Canadian Thanksgiving) is this weekend. Also, Girl Guide cookie selling. I can honestly say I'm more excited for the former. I want to make pumpkin pie and roasted beets.

Speaking of food, I've been kind of healthy lately. Biking a few times a week; eating somewhat balanced meals... which is to say a lot of salad. I think I should start taking some vitamins and get into a consistent exercise routine but apart from that, I feel pretty good. Also, I should have a sleep schedule with some form of regularity. WHY IS IT MIDNIGHT ALREADY?

I tried to get an internship at a local bike shop but it's the offseason and thus not a very good time. I've been playing guitar and, when not playing guitar, lying on my bed listening to music and feeling so much. I am beginning to realize more succinctly the profound impact of music on my life. Every day, I am more grateful for how alive I can feel, just from listening to a song. And it's not just feeling alive, there's also sadness and happiness and brokenness and completeness and connectedness.

Books and music make my life livable. People, too. I shouldn't undervalue people.

I don't know. Sometimes I'm sad and listless and purposeless and full of ennui. I ask myself why I should do anything to justify the fact that I do nothing. And when people ask me what I'm doing with my time or how I am, sometimes I choose to lie because, to quote someone I admire, "the truth resists simplicity." But that's life, right? There's good times and bad times and I choose the labyrinth just like I choose to forgive and I choose to believe it'll get better. And sometimes I'm so incandescently happy and somehow it evens out.

That's probably more than enough for tonight. How are you guys doing?

*I don't know what it is about NaNoWriMo but I have such a good time doing it, even if I'm angsting half the month.

What's that they say about an infinite number of monkeys locked in a room with an infinite amount of typewriters?

2011-10-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

I can press keys and form words. Someone is going to read these words. At some point this assurance kind of dropped off into complacency for me, too. I mean, nine posts between us in a 30 day month, guys, we're all better than that, non? It's not that I don't want to do this anymore. Definitely not. When the process of pressing keys and forming words becomes so much of my "job" (aka school), it's not the first thing I turn to for entertainment/expression/relaxation/whatever we started this thingamablog for in the first place. This blog has become--stagnant? Formulaic? A chore? At least, something we can all agree (look, three consecutive posts!), needs to be changed. If the Zombie Apocalypse doesn't come this month, let the Renewed-Blogging-Effort-Revolution commence. I'm in.*

* NEVER MIND the fact that this post was little more than a poorly-organized paragraph.

Motivation?

2011-10-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

So I guess I've had writer's block recently. On a blog, of all things.

Lately -- well, for the past several months -- I've been feeling like my two options are either to talk about school -- boring -- or not blog at all -- more boring -- which leads me to wonder why, in some ways, this whole blogging thing was easier in 2009 when I first started. I suppose it wasn't easier, exactly; I put more effort in on a consistent basis and felt more like I had to prove myself, whereas now I'm in a bit of a state of complacency -- I think we all are -- where we know we probably should blog twice a week but if we don't, it's not a big deal, and it will start no feuds or total wars. But I feel that I certainly had more to talk about, in 2009, other than just repeating the same mantra: "I went to school, and everything sucks, and I'm going to sleep now, goodbye."

Maybe it's the addition of a crapton of stress. Maybe being a post-exams second semester senior is a ball of fun, but right now being a senior freaking sucks. It's not just that I have a crapton of work to do or that basically everyone in my school annoys me more and more with every passing day; it's that I have to seriously consider my future... and I don't know how this goes for most other students in my position, but I'm not satisfied with the whole "finish high school and go to college" deal. I've been undergoing some several-month-long crisis of self, of being, where I question not only what I want to do -- wholly undecided -- but why I should do anything at all, and why anyone does anything at all, and feeling like I have to attempt to fit myself into a box of "living in the moment" or "appreciating my time on Earth" or whatever it is that non-religious people tell themselves in order to add meaning to their pragmatically commonplace lives, only trying to live within those perimeters totally does not work for me.

Ahh. There I go again with the complaining. I should probably stop that.

Speaking of audiences, though, it's both a motivator and a -- an opposite-of-a-motivator to know that you will probably appreciate what I am saying to some small degree, even if I am just complaining about my life, because you know me and thus my complaining about my life is marginally more interesting than a total stranger complaining about their life. If another total stranger stumbled into this blog from elsewhere on the internet, would they find my posts very interesting? Probably not, at least not a good portion of them. To a rather large extent, perhaps more so as time goes by, I feel like this blog is a bit of a open letter-writing project between the three of us -- me, Alex, and Rena -- that anyone is welcome to read. On the one hand, it fosters a sort of cozy nook on the internet where I can say pretty much whatever I want, however I want, and somebody will listen and think about it. On the other hand, it provides a bit of a lax standard. Alex, you said that having a built-in (albeit tiny) audience inspires you to put in more effort. I feel that that I've reached the point where it's almost the opposite for me -- I don't feel the need to impress friends, I suppose. I don't say that in a disparaging way -- just that I know that you probably won't hate me if I piece together some bullet-pointed rant about my day and then leave without even checking for spelling. But while I do appreciate the close-knit atmosphere here (god, I sound so cheesy), I do feel bad about not holding myself to a higher standard. I don't feel awful if I miss a few days when I'm meant to post a blog, but I do feel bad when my blog post, once I get around to writing it, is nothing special, nothing worth waiting for. I'm going to change that.

audience

2011-10-02T22:38:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about letters lately. Today, I wrote one and a half because according the Barbara Addler, letters make the word a better place. She said that at the first (and possibly best) Freewrite class this year and continued that writing letters, especially for self proclaimed writers, is a good exercise. If you think about it, letter writing is the art of focusing on your audience and giving them what they want to hear.

Two things have inspired my letter musings. The first is somewhat blatant: I recently received a letter from a friend. The second is a bit farther away from my point: my sister told me that she preferred reading my posts on my personal blog, The Corner Notes.

Her comment struck me as odd, not just because I blog here somewhat regularly but because I hold myself to a slightly higher standard on RP(for the most part). I feel a certain responsibility to give you guys something of merit to read. Knowing that I have two readers locked down is also somewhat encouraging.

And so I started to analyse the differences. Here, I write a bit more opinion-y stuff; there I randomly post poetry. Here, I write as if I'm speaking to the two of you; there, I write as if I'm... talking to myself? No, that's wrong. Talking to the internet? Not really. Talking to my "readers"? I guess but I don't even know who they are because I get very few comments and Google Analytics can only say so much.

I realized, to bring it rather abruptly back around, the difference is audience.

As cool as it is to have other people reading this, the people I'm writing to in my mind are you too, Rena and Vita. Whereas on my other blog I kind of just sporadically publish whatever crazy thing I want, my posts on Raving Persuasions have a few more trends. I won't lie, a lot of the time I'm grasping for topics like a desperate bingo caller pulls numbers out of a revolving bin. But on some level, I stick to topics I think the two of you are interested in. Even when I don't consciously think about it, I'm trying to write what you want to read.

Here's a theory: maybe Rachel prefers my personal blog because this one is almost exclusive. Maybe she enjoys randomness and the audience being a seemingly empty internet. Maybe she just likes the layout better.

It doesn't really matter. I'm not about to randomly change the way I blog. Still, I think it's intriguing to think about audience and the subtle ways we tweak our messages and themes to suit the different people we think we're interfacing with.

I don't even know. Readers, if you're out there?* Do you feel like weighing in on this?

*this is a very Corner Notes-esque thing to say.

Pottermore, finally and gloriously.

2011-09-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

After waiting, through days of watching friends and acquaintances receive their emails, posting screencaps of their wands, expressing disappointment or glee in their houses, through a not-unsubstantial bit of raging over the beta quality and obviously high demand, I'm in.

Straight facts: Chestnut with unicorn core, ten inches, unyielding; Ravenclaw.

Opinions and things: Ravenclaw or not, I was still as giddy as a small child on Christmas during the sorting, and I answered them all in about 10 seconds to ensure I didn't deliberate on them and thus rig it one way or the other. Because, you know, this is/was serious stuff. I'm saying that facetiously now, but it was, in a way. After the giddy sort of random omnipotent magic of Santa/Christmas has faded, how often does that feeling return to us? Pottermore sparked it again. And if that's silly, I don't care. What the especially overly zealous and bitter Tumblrfolk should realize is, firstly, this is a website and thus does not have any real impact on your life, etc. But because it's a website, specifically designed to evoke the "reality" of the Harry Potter world for eleven year olds and any of us who seek to relive our childhoods in some way, I say, just embrace it. Instead of scorning Jo Rowling/whatever mathematical algorithm placed you in Slytherin when you are without doubt a Gryffindor, have fun.

(Vita, what's your username again? Alex posted hers awhile ago, and I somewhat remember yours as being SnidgetOwl??)

And now I should sleep. Possibly expect edits to this, I don't know.

after A Series of Unfortunate Absences

2011-09-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

I like children's books.

Admittedly, I can't always resist the temptation to skip the long, silly, rhyming names of characters in easy-reader picture books when I read them out loud for the young'uns. Children's novels, though, or stories, or really anything with a solid plot -- they're seriously underrated.

Reviewers tend to treat them with a slightly condescending tone. I realize that children, despite our desperate attempts to romanticize childhood and wholeheartedly accept their underdeveloped brains as beacons of truth in the world while simultaneously ignoring the vast majority of what they have to say, have not lived as widely as adults and thus need slightly easier, simpler stories. This is not a shameful fact, nor a reason for condescension.

Have you realized how funny a lot of kids' books are? And morbid and politically incorrect half the time, as well. Anyone who has read anything by Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket can attest to that. I think that children's books are some of the best for those who want to love reading for entertainment again. Removed, to some degree, is the temptation to analyze every detail, every theme. Simply relax and enjoy the dry wit, the engaging characters, the intriguing plot, everything that made you love reading before you got smart.

Thoughts from Places: Nelson, BC

2011-09-22T22:38:00.000-07:00

Before we went, when I'd tell people I was going to Nelson, they would usually say, "Do you have family there?" I would pause, reflect and, if it was someone I didn't really want to talk to, I'd lie and say yes. If I cared about the person, I'd explain why we were actually going. But the reasons sounded flat even before they left my mouth.

We just wanted to see the place. My distance ed school is based there and we'd heard good things. Pretty much every person I talked to about this town of 10,000 in the mountains would respond in one of two ways:

"Nelson? Where's that?" OR
"You're going to Nelson?! That's so cool. I love it there. It's such a rad little town.", etc.

Maybe hearing rumours of its inherent charm isn't enough to get a lot of families to embark on a nine hour drive but it was enough for us. Since childhood, my family has been one of roadtrips. We're part nomad, I'm convinced of it.*

On September 10th, we set off on our journey, winding along mountains and camping along rivers until we got to Nelson on Tuesday. We stayed at a hostel there. The place was characterized by creaky floorboards and excessively large keys. Naturally, we loved it.

The thing about Nelson, geographically speaking, is that it is right next to a lake in the mountains. And it is largely a hill. So that's a bit... challenging. But aside from my whining about walking up hills, it's a pretty grand set-up.

For the two nights we were there, I mostly hung out in the lobby reading but when I did venture outside, it was delightful. There's some really amazing restaurants and shops and the farmers' market on Wednesday morning was lovely. There's something that's harder to describe, too. Something about the way people smile at you when you pass them on the street and how everywhere you look there's something to do with social justice, environmentalism or just plain awesomeness.

It really got me wondering about setting. I feel like as a writer, I put a lot of emphasis on place. I'm not even that good about writing convincing settings**. I do think about them, though. I was really comfortable in Nelson and it is somewhere I could potentially see myself. The actual idea of leaving is scary, of course, but the possibility is only slightly daunting.

"It's so hard to leave--until you do. And then it's the easiest goddamned thing in the world" -Paper Towns, John Green

I've been rolling around that quote in my mind for weeks now and I can't push it away. Anyway, as my wise sister said, "I think I could be happy anywhere."

*And you know we're purportedly 70% water? Yeah, I'm pretty sure my family is at least 40% tea. That's called unschooler science
**Both of my novels are set where I live because I am just that unimaginative.

If this is what marriage is, it's pretty adorable.

2011-09-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in so long I forgot Blogger was reformatted like this. My logic is based on the fact that, if I'm procrastinating on a writing assignment, and I also blog during that period of procrastination, I could be doing the assignment, so in the interest of avoiding schoolwork and my own guilt, this blog has fallen by le wayside. Lo siento.*

Okay, this has melted my little icy (and jaded and stony) heart.

If marriage entails being silly and making stupid jokes and making toilet brushes British-accented puppets, then I really, truly, do want to be married. It's not just these things, it's the fact that they're comfortable enough with each other to do them, and statements of affection for each other need not be more complex than, "Thank you for being married to me. I like it."

I don't particularly know why I'm even discussing this at length. You might be thinking to yourself, "Yeah, that's marriage, big deal." but seeing people in love (actual, comfortable, marriagey adulty love as opposed to short-term marshmallowy teenage love), makes me feel all warm and fuzzy deep in my grinch-sized soul hole.

At the risk of becoming another cynical statistic, I have to say, I think this craving for "marriagey, adulty love"** is because when I did see it, I wasn't exactly taking notes. I didn't get to see my flesh-and-blood parents flirt/be loving married adults during my pubescent formative years.*** Which, if I'm free to place blame here, some study (not citing source tsk tsk) suggests is why I/other kids of divorced parentage tend to be socially/romantically awkward. Because flirting is a magical learned skill that people pick up from their parents relationship or something (again, boo un-cited claims).

Footnotes:

* Side: I'm going to have to conduct a phone conversation with the sister of my aunt's friend's friend (i.e a complete stranger) entirely in Spanish, and I'm dying a little. Granted, it will be easy questions like, "How is your sister doing? Which room is she in?", and so on (and not flirting, which is related and aforementioned in my struggle with this language).

** Such a way with words I have, if I do say so myself.

*** I will admit that I'm lucky to have parents that are still stupid and jokey and amicable towards each other regardless of marital status.

more Hogwarts house philosophizing

2011-09-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, shut up with the house angst, Alex, it's not even real. Butnoseriously, I've had a lot of time to think about this and think about it I have.

Now, if you care, which I don't completely understand why you would but-it's-okay-that-I-don't-understand-you-I've-read-Paper-Towns-it's-all-good, but if you do read on. If you don't--and know in your heart that I don't particularly blame you--here is a pretty picture of Nelson, British Columbia, a town which was the destination of a family road trip this past week. I am silently composing a blog post about this unspeakably rad little city in the mountains but I'm letting it stew before I unleash it. Maybe Thursday? Don't hold your breath. It's unhealthy.

Let's get on with it then, shall we?

On paper, I see how I come across as rather Huffleypuffly. I have all that friendship, loyalty, quiet strength thing going on. I'm kind when I want to be and hardworking when I need to be and many multiple choice quizes have pointed me in the direction of Helga Hufflepuff's noble house. And that's fantastic. Power to the Puffs.

But, says that tiny voice in my head, I associate way more with a couple of Gryffindors than I ever have with any Hufflepuffs. Yeah, sure, that could be because most main characters in Harry Potter favour scarlet and gold--that's where JKR puts the focus and most developmet. I see that. AND, as I was reading on Pottermore yesterday, these two Gryffindors in particular that I recognize myself in were two of the closest to being "hatstalls" in Harry's year.

And maybe that's the point of this seemingly pointless exercise. Isn't that what J.K. Rowling is saying when Dumbledore voices the thought that maybe we sort too soon. And if we sort too soon, than we stereotype too soon as well. Because Hufflepuffs are not leftovers and Slytherin's are not all evil. Let's just do ourselves and each other a favour and admit that we're all a bit hatstall-y.

I think bravery is important and I may not always do the courageous thing but I'm trying, just like Neville. Sometimes, I freak out and run away and stress out about things that don't need to be stressed. But you can be sure that on some level I'm trying to keep calm and logical, like Hermione.

I have no idea where I stand on the matter of relevancy and value and meaning of this whole debacle. And no matter how many hats tell me Hufflepuff like it's that easy, I will be a self proclaimed, hatstalling Gryffinhuffleclaw.*

On another note, whilst on vacation I read approximately four books each of which was enjoyable in it's own right. Of these books, I must recommend A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson. This book is unlike most of the things I read but in the most enchanting and whimsical way. It's a story that is so magical and perfectly pieced together that it was impossible not to adore it.

I'm building a reading list for myself tomorrow, including, I hope, some decent non-fiction along with the usual fictitious subjects. Any recommendations?

*I don't think I have any Slytherin qualities, and that's NOT because I have a high opinion of myself and think Slytherins are scummy.

jumblymumbly

2011-09-12T20:00:00.000-07:00

I have many Thoughts. It is a constant quest of mine to search for a good topic for a blog post. What is too specific to a certain interest, what is too much whining, what is too political or too much of a downer. Subtract all those things and you've either got a decent blog post or no ideas at all. Sometimes it feels like the latter a lot more than the former.

At any rate, I have Things To Do -- got sidetracked from them by a broken fridge and subsequent, family-wide, frantic eating of perishable food items; never quite got back on track -- and it is nearly 11 p.m. and I am sleepy so the time has come to be decisive.

I wasn't going to talk about 9/11. Well, I was going to and then I was not going to but my other option involves a lot more thinking and I have less time for that now so we are going back to 9/11. Which I realize many people wouldn't appreciate me viewing as a fallback option but I think that's even maybe a good thing. Because one day not too long from now it's going to be another Pearl Harbor and we're only going to be vicariously sad through our grandparents. And that's okay, that's good, because we can't keep feeling the same emotion to the same intensity forever or our brains would fizzle out and we would be gray-faced zombies walking around, too worn out for tears. And I'd rather save my tears for when the occasion really calls for them.

And I guess I'm not really going to talk about 9/11, not exactly. It is, after all, September 12.

What I am going to talk about is perspective, or something like that.

Because that's really important.

Because losing 2,985+ people in virtually one go is horrible for the U.S. And it's horrible for anyone. But in many places it's also a lot more routine.

And while I don't think nationalism is actually a bad thing, or more to the point it is an undeniably present thing regardless of whether or not it is good or bad, because I share to some degree the same culture and hardships and frustration and decisions that other Americans share which I can't say is true of much of the world to the same degree, so I can forgive feeling swept away by national solidarity, but all that separates me from Mexico or Canada is some land and imaginary lines and highway tolls and then another toy fence and another imaginary border. And all that separates me from Iraq is some water and some land and some people and some guns. And even though I may not elect a nationalistic Iraqi as the president of This Country -- were that allowed by our paper document of laws and rules -- and while we may see the world too differently to be friends as we each are right now I still don't want that Iraqi to die or lose their family or feel fear. I don't wish that on anyone except maybe Hitler and a few others and they're either dead or will go that way eventually.

All the world needs, other than a better distribution of food and a better environmental policy, is more empathy. Because if you really, truly have empathy, you will never invade a country for your own gain and you will never bomb a country out of hate and you will never kill a person except maybe out of self-defense or by accident.

On Emotional Maturity

2011-09-06T16:49:00.000-07:00

(I'm just going to go ahead and say this is an update blog. I'm alive, if that's all you're going to skim this for. ;))

Aside from my recent abhorrence of writing for fun (ex: this whole shebang), things are going okay. It's weird.

1. I hardly ever expect things to be going smoothly. If things ever seem that way, I assume that things are going so horribly my mind has collapsed and has gone into completely-not-giving-a-shit mode to protect itself.

2. When I do finally convince myself that things are not totally falling to shit, "okay" is never good enough. "Okay" is mind-numbing routine.

For right now, at least, it's not been like that. I've accepted that on a day to day basis there will end up being unexpected crap parts and equally unexpected good parts. It used to be that I would have these preconceived notions about days being good vs. bad based on assorted tasks/activities to be completed within that 24 hour period and my corresponding dread/excitement about those things.

Have I reached the peak of mental nirvana known as maturity by not getting so consumed in the quality of my everyday experiences, or does this acceptance prove that I'm just as apathetic as ever? Am I being an adult (kind of), or am I completely delusional?*

* "or am I completely delusional?" is, as always, a viable option, and must be considered when asking any introspective rhetorical question.

community

2011-09-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

It's one of those words that get bandied around a ton. Yet it wasn't until this past July that someone asked me to tangify* it.

I was sitting there in class with my two discussion buddies, coming up with some decent responses. Well, it's a group of people that are connected to each other in some way and they provide support and solidarity to each other and the group as a whole. It sounded good and when the two minutes was up, I was pretty pleased to turn back to the larger group and give our report.

Then our facilitator started to say his idea of the word. He prefaced it with the fact that he's disagreed with people on this before and that he's open to alternative opinions. He then said that he believed a community had to be grounded in a physical location, preferable a small one.

Everyone in that room sat in silence for a fraction of a moment and that thought rolled around in my mind. What immediately came to mind was Nerdfighteria but I tried to keep myself open and not shut his words down on the spot.

He went on to say that the word community is so commonplace that people confuse the meaning. And the things it is used to describe are definitely relevant and important, but he believes that community is not the right word for them.

Now, this facilitator, by the name of Matt Hern, is someone I really admire. He's a very cool guy and I agree with his opinions on many accounts. But after a while I decided that I disagreed on this matter and that actually felt really great. Months later, I'm still savouring that feeling. Maturity, maybe.

I'm not writing this to seek consolation or disagreement. It's the internet, there's tons of those things everywhere. I guess I just wanted to acknowledge that, though over and over I've been let bias rule my thoughts and actions, this one time I did the best I could to evaluate from a different side before solidifying my opinion. I'm seeing it as a personal triumph.

Maybe community is a word that's thrown around too much. But who can say that the support and connection that I've felt on the internet and specifically through Nerdfighteria isn't as really as the solidarity I've felt through my next door neighbours? Community might not be the right word for some people but it's the right word for me.

I'm going to sleep now. I'm not sure if this blog is classified as a community but I'm glad to be a part of whatever this little group of three is. :)

*Not a word, huh? I'll give you scwiggly lines, Blogger. Don't test me!

my Hogwarts house issues

2011-09-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

I was going to blog about saggy pants in Florida today which is something I heard about on the radio yesterday and am incensed by. But I have something, that, while perhaps not more pressing than the constriction of rights and freedoms, is perhaps more pertinent to this blog today.

I have a confession and it is that I am prejudiced against Hufflepuffs. I'm trying to work through my issues quietly before I am faced with the Pottermore sorting and the possibility of becoming a Hufflepuff. But it is hard. I can't help thinking that I'd rather be a Slytherin because I'd rather be seen as evil than stupid. I need to get over this. It's only a seven question quiz sorting me into a fictional school house. Why does it matter?

Yet the fact that I have such a big deal with being associated with Hufflepuffs (no matter how many great Hufflepuffs there are, including the majority of my friends) hopefully will keep me away from Hufflepuffs. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I feel like Hufflepuffs are a lot more mellow about their image rather than freaking out about this kind of thing.

Alright. Blog has been written about problems involving fiction. I think I can move on now. Equal opportunity house love! Let the go-with-the-flow part of my attitude take over.

*whispers* Not Hufflepuff. Not Hufflepuff.

Actually, now that I've written this, or maybe just from thinking about it all day, I feel like I'm ceasing to care. At this very second, all the energy that I've been spending over not wanting to be a Hufflepuff is seeping out of me. It's weird. Maybe I'm tired.

Now that I'm over this, can my Pottermore email please come? Please?

thisisnotanupdateblog

2011-08-29T20:41:00.000-07:00

Hey guys! I apologize for all my blogs being such shit lately. That's the problem with sticking to a schedule, I suppose; it forces you to occasionally (or, uh, not-so-occasionally) post mediocre content. On the other hand, if I didn't have a schedule, I'd probably blog about twice a year because of my sheer disorganization. Hopefully I'll be back to my brilliant* self later this week.

- I got on to Pottermore today! I won't spoil anything for you, but it's really cool. It's definitely still in Beta mode (like, it's really well done, but there is definitely some room for improvement) but it's gorgeous, informative, fun, and I can definitely see it being an excellent companion to Sorcerer's Stone -- it would be so cool to use Pottermore for SS and read SS at the same time. I got sorted into Ravenclaw -- I was sort of expecting it, and I'm quite happy, especially with the description that followed -- and my wand is hawthorne and phoenix feather, fourteen and a half inches, slightly yielding. Funny how easy it is to memorize your own wand, even if it's virtual. I haven't finished yet, but I will soon. The whole site is just really cool; I can't wait until you guys get on it too!

- I started school today. Sigh. I will probably blog about it Friday once I get my thoughts together -- but to put it mildly, although I have some cool teachers, I hate -- nay, loathe -- school, nearly every single aspect of it, and really don't know how I'm going to last another year.

Anyway, I've got to head off to bed. Hope you're doing well!

*subjective

The Help

2011-08-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

"The Help is fiction, by and large. Still, as I wrote it, ... I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person.

"What I am sure about is this: I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960's. I don't think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman's paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital to our humanity. In The Help there is one line that I truly prize:

"Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought."

-from the author's note at the end of The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Here's what I think, rather simply put: The Help is a beautiful novel. It's a truly meaningful story and masterfully written, in my opinion. It's an important book.

And when I say that, I am simultaneously acknowledging my juxtaposition to this book, that I am an educated seventeen year old Canadian of European descent living in a predominantly white, largely upper-middle class town. I am recognizing that this story that I've just finished reading is just that, a story. Though set in a very real time and place, The Help is fiction and should be treated as such.

It is controversial for this author to have written this book, as I came to pretty firmly believe after a Skype conversation with Vita. Maybe Stockett crossed a line. Maybe she shouldn't have. But I've thought about this, compared it to other stories that have been written and I've started to think that crossing those lines is kind of important. Because, as said in the book, those lines really only exist in our heads.

I'm not saying that to belittle racial differences and push aside atrocities that have been committed in the past. I'm only saying it because we can't let those lines rule over us. Even though we can never imagine each other perfectly, we still need to try. This is a theme I saw as much in The Help as in Paper Towns. We need to try and we need to get it wrong and we need a safe space to be able to do that. Because the second we give up trying to imagine what it's like to be another human being, that is the second the hate and prejudice creeps back up behind us to take the small amount of control we had.

I enjoyed reading The Help. As much as it's a story about Jackson, Mississippi in the 60's, it's a story about love and strength and courage and solidarity and friendship. It's about sameness and difference and, overall, it's just a really good story.

I recommend it highly and I welcome your disagreements with any of what I've said here. I'm learning how to deal with being wrong and this is just another instance where I probably am. And that's okay with me.

News from my hometown

2011-08-27T16:32:00.000-07:00

I don't feel like talking about my life today, but I do feel like procrastinating! So, news:

The college in my town is the first/only in the country to ask about sexual orientation on their application, and if applicants say that they identify as being GBLT, they might get scholarships for it.

Yay? Nay? I can't speak for anyone this would effect, but I don't see the point in another label (in addition to race/whatever else) being part of the college application process, especially when it seems like all the members of the GBLT community really want is acceptance and not really to be singled out even if it is for something positive like diversity/scholarship $$.

There's also the issue of diversity for diversity's sake here. There are 20+ churches in a town with 4o,ooo-ish people, and there's a bible study group at my (public) school. The townsfolk are as conservative as any town in the forward-thinking, nice suburban North would admit to being, and I can't help but thinking this is a ploy to better their reputation/attract any semblance of a gay community.

This isn't to bash the school itself, it's supposedly great for academia/student life and what-have-you (which is a shame considering that, whatever I do with my life, I just want to get the heck out of this general area), and the theater is supposedly haunted. Neat-o.

So, there you go. Vita, I hope where you are doesn't get ravaged by Hurricane Irene; Alex, how goes things in Canada?

This is a happy title to supplement an unhappy post! :)

2011-08-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

"I AM IN A RAGE. THIS IS THE MADDEST I'VE EVER BEEN."

Everything is stupid and I hate it and I don't want to blog and I don't want to do homework and I don't want to practice guitar and I don't want to go to school and literally all I want to do is sleep and watch TV shows that make me feel better about my life and read the billions of books I have in my room that I haven't read yet and eat and not leave my bedroom for the next two months.

So. Bullet points, let's go.

- Still not quite sold on Torchwood. Definitely warming up to it, quite like the characters, but still sort of feel like it's a less lovable Doctor Who. Sticking with it mostly because I hear Season 3 is really good. Except I already know who dies, which is a bummer. I mean, it should still be alright, because I don't know how or when and the Season 2 finale of Doctor Who was one of the first episodes I ever watched and it still made me cry my eyes out the second time I saw it, but it's still a little disappointing. That's the problem with watching shows after they've been on air for a while: spoilers are everywhere. Still, the Cybermen and Daleks still freak me the fuck out whenever I see them. Even though they have been used so many times. You always know those episodes are going to be ugly. Oh man.

- This is where I would complain if I had less self control.

- I don't want Hurricane Irene to come here because I don't want people to die and shit but if it just wants to selectively shut off the power for all the schools in my county that'd be really nice. Thanks weather, you got my back (jk you shut off my power at the most inconvenient times which to be fair is more because Pepco is bad at being a power company than your fault).

- I have to go do homework and shit. Read and outline an entire book in two days, let's do this.

grammar and an obnoxious metaphor

2011-08-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

I am not really a grammar nerd. The whole 'your vs. you're' thing annoys me as much as the next Nerdfighter and I had a childhood phase of correcting people when they said that-annoying-grammar-mistake-that-I-can't-seem-to-remember but, in the long run, grammar isn't a passion of mine. It's kind of that thing in the back of my mind that I think about sometimes and laugh about on Facebook.

So on Tuesday, when my mom brought up in conversation how it annoys her when my sisters and I* say "me and you" instead of "you and I", I was a little irritated. When I think about it, having my grammar or pronunciation corrected--unless I specifically asked for it--is always a little irritating, especially when it's such a pointless correction because it's obviously clear what I was trying to say and your automatic interruption/correction is only making me self conscious. Thanks for that.

I sat there for a moment, opening and closing my mouth before I responded. Because, excuse me for the apparent apathy, I just don't care.** I explained that, for me, it wasn't a clarity issue and so that pretty much negated its argument for grammatical importance. In my opinion, grammar and punctuation are there to be the traffic rules and road signs of language. They're important, even crucial, to civilization and communication getting along smoothly, yet sometimes there are some pointless rules out there. To ride this metaphor a little further, let's say there's a stop sign without any reason, intersection or safety need in the middle of nowhere? No, that doesn't work. Okay, say there's two merge signs that look different, but convey the same message. One of them is technically right but they both achieve the same thing and are widely recognized, provided you know how to read them. But one of them is wrong.
Metaphors are sometimes confusing. Why do I try? *existential crisis* *gets on with life*

In the end, my mom owned the issue and we moved on with our lives. Or maybe she's still holding a grudge, it's hard to say. Regardless, it got me thinking about grammar and, then lo and behold, effyeahnerdfighters posted a John Green quite with the subject of grammar very soon after this debacle. Here it is:

"The point of grammar is to facilitate clear and precise communication, to make language reflect thought and intention as closely as possible. On that front, a lot of colloquial bad grammar is actually good grammar. I think focusing on grammar for grammar's sake is a mistake."

See Mom? John Green agrees me. Or at least I've think. Based on the lack of context, I'd decided to see it that way. Taking-quotes-out-of-context-to-serve-your-point for the WIN.

*Haha. See what I did there? Okay, so it only make sense at the end.**
**Only in writing this blog does it occur to me that this blog existing means I care.
***Are you one of those people that reads the footnotes as they appear in the blog or ignores them, gets to the bottom and is confused? Polls! Seriously, I want to know.

Skip to the end, there's nyan.

2011-08-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

This is a story about the girl who cried "Hah."

Much like the story of the boy who cried wolf, there is a moral. (I'm going to spoil it straight out and tell you that the moral is the same as the original; that there are some things that should not be joked about, and once the joking goes past a certain point, no one will believe you.)

The girl was conflicted--her anxious, very possibly obsessive-compulsive temperament clashed on multiple occasions with her desire not to draw attention to herself or raise her family's concerns. Said family was a well-meaning bunch, who taught her from a young age that humor can make the best of a bad situation, that everyone's life needs a little levity. This is good in theory. However, this lead to the girl repeatedly saying, "Oh, I'm so OCD about that. Heh." in a nonchalant manner when her truly irritating behaviors came to light around them.

One situation in particular has come up, and made itself a well-loved punchline at the dinner table: The girl dislikes being touched. Not for fear of contamination, just the sensation of being touched and the texture of another person's skin on her own. Any such sensation must immediately be counterbalanced by seven quick scrapes of the girl's fingernails against her own skin. This isn't as bad as it sounds; the compulsion only presents itself as being necessary when her bare skin is touched, and she will accept gestures involving physical skin-to-skin contact in appropriate situations, including high-fives and as comfort when she is ill or in pain.

As a sort of taunt, though, she is occasionally, unacceptably, lightly stroked on the arm or face without reason. Most people would consider this an invasion or annoyance of some sort, but would probably not flinch or jump with a small whine as she does, fighting the urge to start clawing at the touched spot.

It is unpleasant, and only one flavor of the girl's compulsions, but because the most forceful way the girl can express her desire for this game to stop is, "Ajsldjslakfl stoooop. I'm so OCD about that." It continues.

The girl who cried hah has made herself a punchline, all possible plausibility removed from meaningless repetitions of "I'm so OCD about that."

(Said girl also refers to herself in the third person. This blog post was too intense for her to even bear you reading without some kind of humorous conclusion--strengthening what she has revealed in this story--so she leaves you cowardly with smooth jazz nyan cat.)

Don't be a dick about things

2011-08-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

Oh man, I better make this snappy as I'm intending to read the entirety of Death in Venice by midnight. 58 more pages if you don't count the three that I'm going to have to go back and reread because I have absolutely no idea what Thomas Mann was jabbering on about!

Perhaps that was disrespectful as the concepts I managed to glean from those pages were that the main character (Aschenbach) in this novella spent his entire life searching for honor as a writer and, that, uh, heroes are born of weakness? Yeah, I've got nothing. All I know is that it seemed a bit meta, since it could easily be Thomas Mann's opinions superimposed on Aschenbach's opinions, and that it introduced a whole bunch of ideas about youth and passion and art that I don't want to think about but will have to contemplate at some point anyway. Once I figure out what Mann was saying.

This endeavor to finish my English work before I go to sleep (somewhat of a lofty goal, but I figure if I don't do it now I'll end up dragging it out over the next week and I got shit to do) has left me thinking about how difficult it is to dislike a book deemed "classic" or "masterful." (I s'pose the same goes for other forms or art, but as I know little to nothing about paintings and films, I usually limit my opinions to "pretty," "entertaining," or "stupid" anyway.) In order to announce your distaste for such a novel, you'd better have several essays written on why you didn't like it, or else you'll get accused of "not appreciating" or, more annoyingly, "not understanding" the text.

I don't mean to nullify the work that English professors around the globe have spent hours on, proving all the ways that various books are (all, simultaneously, somehow) the most brilliant things in the history of the world, but just because I haven't dedicated years of my life to analyzing English literature doesn't mean that my opinions are unwarranted. For example, last year I had to read Heart of Darkness. I despised it. It's one of those books that I can appreciate as having historical significance; for example, it was relatively not-racist (at least railing against colonialism) for the late 19th/early 20 centuries and it was apparently one of the first novels of its style (the name of which I forget and, conveniently, don't really care about). These are things that I can objectively say are merits of the book. Beyond that, however, I don't think it's well written (it's far too dense, for one thing), I find the subject boring (which admittedly is not the author's fault), all of its 'morals' or 'themes' are ones which, living in 21st century America, I have already read in countless (more enjoyable) other books. It's not at all a plot or character-driven novel and I don't believe its themes or writing validate that decision. There are certainly individual sentences that are well crafted, but altogether I don't think it's a good book. And people really get super indignant about that.

I guess I just want to say that we're all entitled to our opinions, and don't be dick about defending your favorite things. Also, as whoever wrote that song said, "it's okay to not like things but don't be a dick about it," which really are quite good words to live by.

Anyways, I've 4/5 more of this story to read (suffer through? That may be premature; it's got 58 more pages to capture my attention), so laters!

what I want to be

2011-08-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

If I was normal...* I would be entering my last year of high school next month. It would mean a lot of things that, because of my situation, it doesn't, but most relevant to me is that at some point a few people want to know what I'm doing next year (and for the rest of my life), nosy buggers.

For all of this year, I didn't know, and I'd say that. I guess I had a bit of an idea (that idea being more of the same) but nothing concrete. This summer, it's been slowly coming together.

So here is the great unveiling, my friends, not that it's really been a secret up until now. Actually, this may be a little anticlimactic because, well, I want to do a bit of everything.

I can see this future conversation taking place between myself and, say, a friend's parent who doesn't REALLY care but feels as if they should ask the question all the same.

Ambiguous grown-up: So Alex, what are you planning on doing next year?
Alex: Well, I'm not getting super focused on any one thing. I'm looking into becoming a bike mechanic and I'm still working on my most recent novel, of course. I'm volunteering in a non-profit coffeeshop, if they ever call me back and in the community wherever I'm needed. I keep trying to learn more about vegetable gardening. Oh and I'll probably still be a part time grocery clerk. Also: TRAVEL!!!
AGU: You're not going to be at school?
Alex: Meh, I don't know. Could happen eventually. It might be cool to take an ESL teaching certificate or maybe do the library technician program. We'll see how the rest of it goes.

There you go. Those are my plans for this year: 1.Bicycle mechanics, 2. Novel writing, 3. Travel.

More of the same, really.

*hehehe. That could literally go ANYWHERE.

Don't console me. I'm not fishing for compliments, I swear.

2011-08-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

I only signed up for Creative Writing because I didn't want to take any sort of painting or drawing class. I burn myself and everything I touch when cooking. Study hall doesn't earn me any graduation credit. I don't aspire to be a mechanic or an engineer. So I chose Creative Writing.

I realize I should be grateful that my upper-middle-class high school even offers all these classes, but I'm starting to regret my choice. I've always fancied myself a writer, and I don't want to shatter that illusion. Fiction I can do half-well, and I've been conditioned to write complex critical and persuasive essays. But the first unit is creative nonfiction, and I'm scared. Scared I'm going to have to reveal how dull my life really is, how I haven't sucked the marrow out of life enough to have any stories worth retelling (I'm too young and too timid), scared that even if I find a suitable topic, my writing will be horrible.

Yes, I've seen this video. But I feel that's really more about writing fiction (that time will come, I will then have similar anxiety. . .). What in hell am I supposed to write about when we were prompted to write 13 short pieces on 13 experiences that were extremely happy, sad, frightening, difficult? Newsflash: This is my life. I spend it in my room, listening to music, reading, and writing. Not writing writing much, either. Writing blogs and tumblr posts. Having an elaborate typed conversation with the inside of my computer to keep my mental health in check. Making half assed passes at my novel. I'm not good at finishing things. (Theoretically, these should ultimately be helping me to improve my craft. But this class is different. Someone is going to have to see this, read it, judge it. Do not want. In the passages I submit, I can't swear or reference memes or use excessive parentheses or just let sentences trail off. Do not want.)

Sure, I occasionally venture out into the real world to get an "education", interact with people, eat. But I'm happiest where I am right now. I'm content, but contentment doesn't lend itself to well-defined, well-described moments. It's a routine state of being and I try to keep it that way. It's my life. Maybe it's dull on the surface, but it's really all I can handle.

Now please excuse me while I go scour previous blog posts for suitable material. (It's not plagiarism if I take it from myself, right?)

I live a lively life

2011-08-19T20:27:00.001-07:00

First things first: ALEX! VISIT ME. Then pick me up so I can road-trip with you. Our final destination (no, not death. See, I know pop culture references!) would pose an inconvenient problem as we only live the span of a continent apart, but I'd just teleport back home. Or something.

Secondly... oh God, I don't know what to blog about. This is the problem with doing absolutely nothing with my life. My options are either to complain (something I do enough of during the school year), write about something meaningful that I can contemplate without leaving my computer (nope, I've got nothing), or blog about the non-events in my entirely uneventful life.

...Today, I did some French homework and made some tentative plans to see Fright Night with my sister! (I say "tentative plans." In real life, I mean that I suggested we go see Fright Night sometime and she replied, "Maybe, but I was going to just get it on DVD and fast forward through the scary parts." I assume she meant "fast forward to the David Tennant parts." For shame.)

I've decided that I might actually start posting videos on Youtube. Not vlogs, really, 'cause I have none of the appropriate qualities for being a vlogger. I have actual ideas but the problem with my ideas is that, first of all, they always look and sound better in my head and also I totally lack the motivation to do anything. For example, I've been meaning to learn the harmonica for 6 months and despite having a lovely, fairly nice one, I've yet to start. It doesn't help that somebody is always home besides me and it's a sort of loud instrument to practice when you're just beginning. I've decided that since I'm going to absolutely hate this school year, I need as many distractions outside of school as possible, and Youtube seems like a fatal attraction (I'm just knocking these references out of the park today, aren't I?) for disillusioned youth.

I'd better go and do more of my neglected summer work, so I leave you with this suggestion: watch "Sherlock" on BBC (and by BBC I mean the internet). I totally just fangirled about it with a friend. It is legitimately one of the best shows on television (of course, I think that all of the shows I watch are some of the best of television, because I only watch about four shows).

in which I follow a trend and talk crushes

2011-08-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

I didn't realize that I'd never had a crush until I had what I would refer to as a 'real one.' As a preteen/early teen, I'd see my preference of one boy over the other as a crush but now I would describe that as an inclination or desperate attempt at normalcy. Then came a boy-less mid-teen period. Cue fantasy relationships projected on one rare commonly reoccurring boy figure. And then comes the start of my job last September, wherein coworker relationships with teen boys ensue and I am left somewhat dejected at the sorely lacking (in my eyes) apparent sample of my male peers.

And here's where the cliches kick in because I didn't realize what I'd been missing until it smacked me in the face and suddenly I was smiling at the thought of him and swooning over things that weren't just his hair. I was crazy in like, not with his hottness but with his very person and how I felt around him and how he seemed to care about me and like me as well. It was strange, too, because I was completely and utterly aware of how absurd I was being. My giddiness was consciously acknowledged and accepted--hell, embraced. It felt really good. If nothing else, I'm glad of the journal entries and memories I have from those weeks of self-indulgent crushing.

Now is the time to note the past tense and think, "What happened?" And I'll indulge you with that question because it's relatively simple: reality. Reality happened.

You see, it's not enough to be a romantic 17-year-old girl who reads too much and wishes she was a character in one of her favourite novels; that same girl has to be somewhat delusional when it comes to real-life relationships and those delusions have to eventually crash down around her.

That might be a tad dramatic. It was a bit lower key, perhaps, than delusions crashing down around me. I mean, I won't lie; there was in-car-with-friends-driving-to-Dairy-Queen-ranting. There was confusion and disappointment and hurt. Maybe a little anger. Understanding. Acceptance.

But it was a good experience. Something to write about. Something to angst over. Another chapter in my story. The trouble is that being friends with this person has recently been very difficult for me due to the small fact that he won't respond to my emails and doesn't seem to want anything to do with me despite the fact that six weeks ago he wrote that he loved being around me and wanted to know everything about me, even the insignificant things.

So I think I'll just do what I normally do in these situations which is write an honest letter which I may or may not send with my guts spilled all over it and go from there. And then maybe I'll look for the next boy I feel I can get emotionally attached to and wait until he one day deserts me.

I. Am. So. Dramatic.

p.s. Life update: This week has been good. I bought a capo and a dress that I then altered. I also slept on a trampoline in someone else's sleeping bag which was fun. And just tonight, I saw a free production of As You Like It in a park, which was thoroughly enjoyable. Tomorrow is the book club I am hosting and Saturday and Sunday, I am working. Then, because it's not exciting enough yet, I'm going to be watching all the Star Wars movies for the first time in a suicide marathon.
p.p.s. Beware: I'm planning a cross-continent road trip with my sisters next year and want to visit you both. You've been warned. (probably taking place in late spring-early summer period.) And yes, I am for real.

Vita, it's like we share a brain. (Online slumber party part 2)

2011-08-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

I was, honestly, considering writing about this before I read your post, and now you've convinced me I can because it's more like commiseration now instead of awkward unprompted soul-bearing.

I also experienced my first "real" crush about a year and a half ago. (Still practically a spinster when it comes to school age mind-romance.) He was in my Spanish class* freshman year, let's call him Atticus.** I developed a friendly, do-you-know-what-the-past-subjective-of-ser-is sort of relationship with him and his friend, Guillermo. This past year, Guillermo and I reunited with him on the bus for a Spanish field trip. More awkwardly quiet friendliness throughout.*** Guillermo (ever the sarcasm-er and general semi-dick) tells me the next day that Atticus likes me. I don't question him, letting this statement stew in probable-but-not-certain mutual likedom. Stupid move.

During this year and a half I also developed a "safer" crush, i.e, The Completely Godlike Unobtainable Founder of a Band. (not the school band, a Band.) (He shall be called Lars.) Whether or not this was to subconsciously take my mind off The Obtainable If I Tried remains to be seen. The more I thought about it, though, I liked Lars in an "I greatly appreciate your general beauty and singing ability" way and not the more complex "I would really like to engage in intelligent conversation with you over hot chocolate, with occasional sarcastic jokes and/or Doctor Who quotes" way I liked (still like) Atticus.

To complicate matters, Atticus was my best female friend's (because everyone else got a codename and I know she'd want one, heretofore referred to as Stella.) childhood neighbor and friend (childhood as in way before I met either of them), his mom and her mom are best friends, her mom has unofficially adopted me. His mom and I are friends through them, and recently (ie yesterday), the four of us drove up to Wisconsin to have an actual girl-to-girl, secret-bearing slumber party. At night the conversation drifted to the subject of romance, especially the romantic histories of the two of us who are single. Cue my paranoid "Are you bringing this up because you can sense I like your son?" glances at his mother. Stella knows all about this whole situation and I'm sure she found it hilarious.****

(Un?)-Fortunately, there's a 96% chance Guillermo, Atticus and I will be placed in the same Spanish class AGAIN. (Also, his mom might be my brother's special ed aid. But that's cool. She's a genuinely nice lady, but I really don't want to admit to her that I've liked her--equally socially awkward--son for a year and a half of my young life. I have a feeling she'd be happy about it and try to set us up.)

* Honors level. I never thought I'd say this, but it's really, really attractive to me that he's in more honors and AP classes than I am. (Looks don't hurt either, but primarily, he's a socially awkward nerd--and I do not mean that in an insulting way--so my mental attraction to him is high. Even better, in a twisted way, he's in the highest level courses for subjects I can barely understand, like precalc. But that might just be my respect and awe for people who can do math, because I still struggle to multiply two-digit numbers in my head.)

** I codename people what I want.

*** Guillermo suggested we'd make a cute couple. Fuck you, Guillermo.

**** I don't know if you've found this or read it but in case you are, I'm glad my misery entertained you, bitch.

This is too long to have a title; I don't want to make you read more

2011-08-15T13:38:00.001-07:00

Tonight, blog readers, snuggle down into your sleeping bags because we're going back to a middle school slumber party.

I'm going to tell you about my first crush.*

Guys. Stop giggling. This is, like, serious.

I'm not sure I should even post this on here because it's a tiny bit personal and embarrassing but people have done more embarrassing things on the internet in the past, so why not.

I didn't develop my first real crush on a boy until the beginning of junior year, when I was 16, almost a year ago. (So I'm a 17 year old eighth grader, let's move on.)

This is the sort of secret that causes people to freak out a little bit, wondering what's wrong with you and if you are secretly asexual or developmentally challenged or something, which is not the case. I've liked boys for a while, I just would look around at the ones I knew and imagine kissing them and getting really grossed out, not by the act of kissing, but at thought of kissing them individually. It's not that they're all really disgusting people or anything, it's just... you don't like kissing people you don't want to kiss, you know? Picture Cher from "Clueless:" "Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie."

I suppose this comes across as weird because a lot of my friends seem a little incomplete if they don't have a guy to obsess over. It's not like they are a bunch of clingy weirdos who revolve their whole lives around boys, but it's like a hobby, a small distraction from school. I don't feel the need to do that. Maybe it's because I tend rather to look for deeper relationships. It's not like I want to marry the boy I like; I don't stray to the other end of the scale where I need a promise of eternal commitment to go out with someone. But I figure, if your first date is virtually guaranteed to be awkward, it might as well be with someone you actually like not just in a romantic way because they're cute but also as a person. Otherwise it hardly seems worth it, other than for the sake of a funny story.

Let's backtrack a little to my first, shall we call it, fake crush.

So when I was in third grade. Gangly kid, new glasses, on the brink of ceasing to be cute. I guess it was around the time when a lot of girls start getting the idea that they should have a boyfriend because I started getting a little worried that I didn't like any boy like that. So I looked around the classroom and decided that if I had to like a boy then Mike** would be the best candidate. I didn't know him very well, but he wore glasses, and in my limited experience with him wasn't too obnoxious. So poor, unsuspecting Mike became my first pseudo-crush.

I don't think he deserves much sympathy for this because as far as I can remember I didn't do anything about it. I was fairly shy back then. I think it was just so I could have a fallback option if the topic ever came up in conversation, which I don't remember it doing.

You see how serious this crush business is.

Let's go back a year further to second grade.

This was at the peak of the girl-boy wars during recess. Did you ever play them? If not, let me explain. Basically, all the second grade boys declare war on all the second grade girls. There's not much of a point to this game. Essentially it involves chasing each other around and guarding your own territory and occasionally being told off by the recess patrol when they realize that you are not just playing a friendly game of tag.

Well, I was informed by a few friends and random other second graders that a certain boy liked me.*** I still don't know if this was actually true, but it seems to have been confirmed by a few people over the years, and at any rate the accuracy of the statement is somewhat irrelevant. This drove me to stay inside during recess helping out around the classroom for at least a week, like the cowardly human I have been since birth, until at long last some girl pestered me into going outside and talking to him.

We crossed over into the boys' territory after being harassed by some of his friends until I met up with him. I can't remember what happened exactly. I know it was uneventful. We just sort of looked at each other and then I left.

Mark one down for failed normal human interaction.

Let's fast forward to about seven months ago. Keep in mind that I am still a lameass today. Basically, this guy I know kind of sort of asked me out (I know that if any of my friends from off the internet are reading this they're probably going to be angry at me for not telling them right about now, but, calm down, people, let me finish). Which was okay. Except then he texted me twice and I just ignored them. I mean, didn't even open the text messages because I didn't want to look ignored. Which is not a good strategy for dealing with people and is also quite a bitchy thing to do, although I wasn't trying to be bitchy, I was just... bad at dealing with things. Anyway it's come to the point where I still feel really bad about but I feel like too much time has gone by for me to apologize without making it more awkward, so on the off chance that he is reading this, I'm really sorry and talk to me about it sometime because I'm fine with talking about it in person, I just don't want to be the one to bring it up. Thanks.

What I am trying to say by all this, other than that I have never been quite normal, is that I am somewhat of an awkward, curl-up-in-my-shell-rather-than-deal-with-the-world sort of person sometimes, which is certainly a rather large flaw of mine, but doesn't make me a lunatic. And I also would like to say that have you tried being a teenage girl who doesn't have a crush on a boy? Because your friends will never believe that you don't to the point where you may feel driven to make one up so they'll stop distrusting you. So the fact that I actually like somebody for an extended period of time is sort of monumental for me. Of course I haven't done anything about it (other than the surface fear of rejection we all experience, it's sort of a long, depressing story why) but I will. I will.

I mean, that's what I say now.

*I'm not going to name any names because the internet can sometimes be smaller than we think and circuitously lead certain mentioned people to this blog and that would be awkward for me.

**I'm just going to go ahead and use his real name here despite my previous statement about not naming any names because it's a common name and on the off chance he reads this (I still know him today, albeit very casually) : Hey Mike, how's it going? I would like to assure you that I don't still "like" like you today. I think you're a cool person and all but I was eight at the time and probably more awkward than I am now, so please don't think that I am at this very moment plotting to jump your bones. Thanks! Hope you're having a nice summer!

***We're not going to use his real name because I still know him today too, and, well, let's just say that while I haven't talked to him in probably two years, if I did, we wouldn't exactly be the best of friends.

FURNITURE REARRANGEMENT…

2011-08-14T23:41:00.000-07:00

...is the freaking best.

So. Much. Fun.

Speaking of enjoying things, you know how, as a kid, (and hey, maybe this still goes on in school, how would I know?) when you were trying to figure out what you wanted to be as a grown-up, you’d get the advice to pick something you really liked or were really good at.* And I seriously thought about it, I really did. Maybe I’ll move furniture around when I grow up. People get paid for that shit, right? Interior decorating? (Okay, so I didn’t say “shit” in italics as a child, but you get the point.)

But on the whole, I decided against it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I liked thinking I’d do something a smidge more meaningful with my life than redoing rich people’s kitchens. Maybe I just didn’t want to turn the act of pushing my bed around my room into a career and potentially taking all the joy out of it for myself.

And again I take more happiness from my Schroedinger's cat way of living* because if I don't decide what I want to be, then I can be both everything and nothing at the same time.

*As a side note, how many kids do you think actually stick to that elementary school dream?

**Maybe I'm missing the point of the whole Shroedinger's cat thing but living out of context can be fun, too.

Casual Knowledge

2011-08-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

I have a casual knowledge of a lot of things.

Art history
How to play guitar
Sign language
How to do HTML
How to sew
Astronomy

. . .among other things.

This knowledge goes just a bit deeper than general common knowledge but not deep enough to really do me any good. But instead of focusing myself on learning and accumulating absolute expertise about one or two things, I collect samplings of things. This is a particularly futile effort when it comes to skills (I don't even own a guitar), but I still do it. Especially in the summer, when Google and Wikipedia and a few hours are available to me, I just pick something and research it, pretending I will go back and research deeper and/or apply what they've taught me. I pretend like I'm setting myself up to form a hobby and then abandon it by day's end. I know this base-level knowledge about things is pretty much what everyone achieves through the course of their life, but I started thinking about this today, and it concerns me that I accept these things as knowledge but I have no real, consuming, fountain-of-knowledge-supplemented-by-application passions.*

Maybe this stems from my college major confusion--that I don't want to/can't choose a subject that I'm going to settle down with and learn the shit out of for four years. It could be argued that these smatterings of knowledge are useful and will serve to make me a well-rounded person, but aside from HTML and sewing, none of the things listed could serve a purpose in reality unless I were on some sort of game show.

What do you guys think? Would you rather your knowledge be shallow and wide or narrow and deep?**

* Aimlessly browsing the internet/reading excluded.

** It's been such a long time since I ended a post with a question. . . Is it time to bring it back?

Three Vaguely Controversial Thoughts, One Blog Post

2011-08-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

Thought the First

I've recently come to appreciate rap more as a genre of music. In the whitest possible way of describing it, it's basically like slam poetry set to music. The more I listen to it, the more I appreciate it, even if I don't actually like the music of that many rap artists.

But here's the thing: as much as I avoid identifying race where it's irrelevant, it's no secret that rappers are predominantly black. Yet my limited knowledge of rap revolves around Watsky, Eminem, and Snoop Dogg. It's a tiny sample size, yes, but it's still 2/3 white where the entire genre is 3/4 black.

I don't make it a point to make sure that my interests are racially diverse, but see my problem?

*insert profound statement about veiled racism and self-induced pseudo-segregation in modern society*

Thought the Second

Speaking of race, does "The Help" strike anyone as a little...patronizing? An enforcement of "white do-gooderism," as one review put it. I haven't seen the movie or read the book so I can't judge it yet. But from the trailer, at the very least, it seemed uncomfortably like another episode of "Save Us, Motivated Underdog White Girl!" It seems like it'll turn out to be more about Emma Stone's character becoming empowered and the savior of the black help rather than an actually progressive story.

I don't deny that it was essential that at least some white people were on board with the civil rights movement, nor that it's an incredibly good thing to be white and not racist (or any race and not racist, let's be real). But it smells like just another story where the white girl is the true hero rather than the black people being heroes in their own right. You know, a feel-good movie for white people who think they're really progressive.

Still, I don't know for sure, since I haven't seen it yet (I doubt I'll read the book, to be honest).

Thought the Third

I've been thinking about all the stupid stuff on the internet and how entertaining it is. I admit that I find it hilarious and a little bit charming how much people are entertained by stupid stuff, like nyan cat. But the more I think about it, the more I question if it is really an okay thing to be so obsessed with stupid things.

No denying the internet serves many other uses than just cats with bowties and videos of people falling over. And I don't think there's anything wrong with low quality entertainment; not everything in life has to be intelligent, profound, and/or serious. Still, the amount of time I spend watching dumb videos and being entertained by stupid little things is worrisome. I'm legitimately worried that it's hurting my intelligence, my ability to think sharply, and definitely my attention span.

So should I cut back? Should I not worry about it? At some level it is worrying that we can be so entertained by the same basic level of thing that would entertain a two year old.

I don't think it's just a happy sign that we're all children inside. I really don't.

Public Schooler Problems

2011-08-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

So I managed to catch a cold despite having been outside only briefly in the past 2 days. The whole "fresh air" thing might not be a conspiracy. . . Or it's allergies, I don't know. This says something about my overall level of activity, though.

I've also managed to turn myself pretty functionally nocturnal, which will be absolute hell to reverse. (Some days I go to bed at the time I have to get up for school.) My attention span is completely shot (I couldn't even finish this blog post without opening Tumblr), and for some reason, right before school starts I'm always afraid I will have forgotten every single thing that I learned last year. This is highly improbable and the first month is going to be review anyway, but that doesn't mean I'm not absolutely terrified that the first day of AP English Language and Composition (such a long, scary name. . .) we will be asked to write a large and complex essay in 48 minutes and I will be staring at a blank piece of paper going "WAIT OH FUCK HOW DO I REFUTE THINGS AGAIN?" and possibly pass out. Nevermind that the first day in particular everyone is lulled into a false sense of security by the handing out of syllabi and cheerful "getting to know you" hoo-hah.

At this point I should sign off and go to bed, seeing that I need to venture outdoors and accomplish tasks at a timely hour.*

* I will sign off, but the chances of my actually going to bed are slim.

At some point, you have to step back and consider our priorities

2011-08-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

This isn't meant to make light of the riots in/near London...

But shit happens all the time. Like all the time. Like so much bad stuff happens in the world.

And you're insensitive because you don't cry over something bad happening in another first-world country.

Like, okay, I get that it's scary to see things fall to shit in first-world countries, because hey, if the rich, powerful countries are losing their grip, a) what's going to become of the lesser countries, and b) ARE THE TERRORISTS GOING TO WIN?!??!!11 And, of course, my fellow non-immigrant* first-worlders are probably more likely to have friends in a fellow first-world country as opposed to a country with no internet connection, so of course you're scared for your friends.

But while nothing excuses stupidity like the rioters in London, objectively, we should feel sorrier for, like, the people in Somalia dying of starvation than we do for the people in London who have lost their businesses.

Make no mistake, I do feel incredibly sorry for people whose homes, businesses, communities have been burned and looted. And while I can't blame the rioters for being angry, nothing short of gigantic, miserable excuses for human beings would participate in the riots right now. Looting and burning is not productive or a way to make yourself heard; it's not even a protest; it's selfishness and stupidity and just bad. Lots of bad.

Still, there are thousands of people being robbed or kidnapped or enslaved or raped or murdered or killed by disease or driven to starvation daily.

And what do we focus on instead?

We feel outraged when a mother apparently gets away with killing her daughter. We devote news broadcast after news broadcast to finding missing children. News outlets run what feel like 24 hour tribute reels when celebrities die. When we don't especially care about all of that, we're apparently being 'insensitive.'

Excuse me, I can't hear you over the deafening sound of Other World Suck.

*We're all immigrants, yes yes, but I mean, like, the recent immigrants.

Mixed Feelings on Everyday People

2011-08-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

In my life, I have lot of misunderstandings and communication issues and general screw-ups in relation to interfacing with other people. Shocker, I know. When these sorts of things take place, it's really easy for me to retreat back inside and think, I really hate people.

Then come the brighter days when a comment will reach me in a certain fashion and rather than get angry, I can take a step back and evaluate. I'll metaphorically tilt my head and think, People are so incredibly fascinating.

Today was a bit of both. I got angry and then felt bad for it. I ranted and then wondered what part of the story I was missing. I made some hasty statements and then amended them. And that, my friends, feels like growth.

I'm not at a point where people don't bother me and I'm not in complete control. Maybe I never will be. But it's nice to know I'm pointed in that direction. I'm conscious and thoughtful, if not totally on top of every stray thought and feeling. Seems progress-y to me and I'm happy about it.

p.s. Pottermore! w00t! Me: sparksfelicis142. See you there.

In Which : Rena is narcissistic and conflicted and muses

2011-08-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

By this time tomorrow, my hair will be short. Really short. The shortest it's been for about three years, anyway.* My hair and I have a complex relationship, and I suppose it's a bit immature of me to decide it's better to just hack it all off rather than put effort into managing it. I have a habit of twirling it absently around my finger** and/or wrapping it around my neck like a beloved yet flexible pet or a large, fluffy scarf. Lately, because it's hot out, my hair spends most of its time perched on top of my head looking disheveled. (When let out of its restraints, it falls to the middle of my spine, more or less.) Maybe I'm making an impulsive decision and will wish it back during the winter. This remains to be seen.

I'm doing this before school starts*** as a sort of signifier of things. Of change. I'm not shallow enough to believe that because of some quality time with a pair of scissors and the arbitrary beginning of another year of my formal education I can emerge as a beautiful butterfly, but I'm going to make an effort. (There's that word again.) An effort to break the chains of my self-constructed and self-imposed awkwardness, an effort to enjoy even the non-academic aspects of school. My hair has little-to-no role in this change, but it is perhaps a universal symbol of female empowerment****, of starting anew and being reassured that some changes aren't permanent, that hair grows back and I can always go back to being comfortably awkward if the effort is unbearable.

* I've discussed this on Tumblr but can't find the link for it.

** I'll be getting it cut too short to have much to twirl, which is a good thing because it's a pointless habit really, and I'm trying to stop.

*** T-minus 11 days, holy crap.

**** Unless you're Justin Bieber, I'd venture to guess that hair cuts are not an emotional matter for those of the male persuasion. Whereas I've had many opinions from my female relatives regarding my choice, varying from my mom urging me to cut it extremely short ("Like Emma Stone's? Er, no, Watson's--is now." She seems to have forgotten the Great "getting bangs will make me look like Hermione"-Regret of 2003-2005.) to my grandma's pleas to keep it long. My head, my rules, guys.

Volunteering, Shmolunteering

2011-08-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of kind of personal hurdles (some of which I've posted about on here) that have made me come to this forthcoming realization. Long story short, I've been looking for something that I can do, knowing that it makes a positive impact on people's lives, with as much hands-on involvement (i.e. preferably not the office components to jobs) and with little political worry as possible. I don't want to have to constantly think about whether what I'm doing is truly beneficial or if it's really more harmful than helpful. I kind of wanted to be a firefighter, either volunteer or professional (I know, you would never look at me and think, "Wow, what bulging muscles and a heart of steel; that girl is such a potential firefighter!"), but obviously I can't do that right now and I doubt I will in the future either. I've decided that being an EMT is something I might seriously want to do. I don't think I'd do it as a profession but I am seriously considering becoming a volunteer EMT. I can't do it this year without dying/dropping Drama (seriously, I want to do a lot more with my life, but I also have accepted that I have to do what I can manage, not what other people can manage. It's hard enough for me to balance school with the activities I do now; I know I can do more, but there's no way I personally would be able to balance being a volunteer EMT with school) but I am very seriously considering trying it out in college and beyond.

Someone suggested doing a ride-along in an ambulance which I think is an excellent idea. I definitely should see what it's actually like before getting my heart set on doing it. I think it would be a huge shock to initially see seriously hurt/bloody/dying/dead people but it's also one that I think (and hope) I can manage. But we'll see.

In the meantime, I've started looking for a lot more volunteer things again. I want to volunteer at a nature center (god, my family will laugh at me for hours on end when they hear that one) but I have a serious aversion to bugs (which I really want to get over), so that may not work out.

13 minutes, BTAWIA

2011-08-04T23:56:00.000-07:00

Hey, BTAWIA: Just so you know, you will not beat me.

Let's talk about today.
Today, I did not want to get out of bed, but I did. I went to teach English slang to Japanese exchange students. These are the third group of students I've taught. I'm getting pretty pro, I must say.
After school, I went to America with my mom, sister and her friend to see a movie. It was about how ethanol does not deserve its bad reputation. I am still iffy on the matter. Corn freaks me out. Still, it was a generally well done documentary (entitled Freedom, in case you were wondering) and I applaud the effort.

Now let's talk about relationships.
They're hard. Like, constantly challenging and difficult. And I love it and thrive on it but sometimes I really do not like people. But all of the time I love some people. There's a tenuous balance there that I love to focus on.

Tomorrow, I'm hitting up Science World! It's going to be fantastic. I can just tell.
Oh, other exciting news, I got into Pottermore! When I found out it was a million people, I lost a bit of excitement (my exclusivity issue appears again) but I'm still really looking forward to it.

Vita: I hope you come to UBC and that all the (financial, among other) issues work themselves out.
Rena: You need to get yourself on Skype, girl. Pronto.

BTAWIA

2011-08-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

Also known as "Blog Twice a Week in August."

Alex suggested this and I latched onto it. I'm not really up for doing BEDA -- the original Ning seems to be over and I rarely blog independently of this and I can't find the motivation to start -- but I resolve to post every Monday and Friday on this blog in August. I propose we all take a short trip back to 2009, when we always posted on schedule and were perhaps disproportionately ashamed to miss a day.

That said, I have little of consequence to say today.

But hey, sometimes that's okay. Every blog has its update posts, right?

I'll come back to you on Friday with something brilliant to convey. For now, I'll just leave you with a little anecdote about the awesomeness of Nerdfighters: basically, I've been Skype calling other Nerdfighters in my area (this is based on a Facebook group for local Nerdfighters... sometimes Facebook actually does have its uses) until the wee hours of the morning while we wait for the Pottermore clue to be released. I wasn't too excited about getting to Pottermore early, as I posted on Tumblr (and have since deleted. What a hypocrite), but when the second day's clue appeared on the website at about 5 a.m. Sunday morning, my heart started pounding like crazy, I almost couldn't double-check the right answer in the book because I was trying to flip through it so fast, I was whisper-swearing as the other Nerdfighters on the call hurriedly relayed that the site wasn't working on Google Chrome, and felt such a sense of victory when I finally registered for Pottermore. Guys, I don't know why I was so down about it before. Now I can't wait for the site to open. But it's just really fun, laughing my ass off at 3 in the morning while trying not to wake up my family, talking about the most random crap with other Nerdfighters, reading aloud from the books... guys, I love Nerdfighters. Also, we three need to Skype call sometime. It's so much fun.

Harry Potter & Philosophy

2011-07-31T22:21:00.000-07:00

It's been a week and a half since I saw the last Harry Potter movie and I'm still failing to feel any sense of nostalgia or even closure. Am I the only one?

I was talking to two non-Harry Potter people (Muggles?) today about whether you could find philosophy in any movie and Harry Potter in particular. First, I came up with the topic of free will vs. determinism, particularly starting in Order of the Phoenix with Harry learning about the prophecy. There's all these questions raised of whether Harry ever had a choice in the matter of killing Voldemort, which leads to questioning whether any of us have a choice in any given situation. Are we just reacting to past events and dealing with things in the way we've adopted and adapted from our life experiences?

I'm not about to outline all the interesting frameworks J.K. Rowling presents for thinking about these questions--that might take a while--what I wanted to say was how interesting it is to talk to people rationally about Harry Potter when they are obviously not as invested as we are.

It's like trying to explain unschooling to a hardcore conventional educator; they might humour you, depending on their personality and temperament, but they won't truly get it, and maybe they can't. And maybe it's better that way.

On one hand, I want this magic to be shared, for everyone to feel like I've felt. On the other, I have this idea that it's never going to be the same for other people and that exclusivity makes it more special. As much as I want to believe that 'there is no them, only facets of us'* sometimes I feel like there has to be an outside for there to be an inside. I'm working on questioning that belief, I am, but for now, I'm going to continue loving Harry Potter with the other people that do and smiling knowingly (though as non-condescendingly as possible) at those who don't.

Now I just need to make time to reread the entire series. Maybe that will jump-start the nostalgic palpitations.

* John Green, not sure how close to his quote that is.

On being awkward, pre-internet.

2011-07-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

As I was watching the VidCon stream an hour ago, listening to George Watsky talk about not momentarily crowd-surfing at a Sum41 concert sometime in 2003, and how the internet has provided hundreds of thousands of awkward nerds with access to a brilliant and thriving creative community, in which he could finally crowd-surf with no feelings of self-consciousness, I started thinking. About what it would be like to be an awkward nerd in 2003, or 1963, or any period in time that isn't the very near past, and how fortunate I am to be living right now.

It's no secret that everyone is awkward for at least some of their adolescence (or the majority of it), and presumably this has been going on since virtually the beginning of time. Speaking as the person I am (i.e, maybe I'm exaggerating but this is only because I can't imagine myself with the influence of the internet removed), I don't know how I'd be progressing through my (increasingly) awkward years if I were 16 in 1963.

Because I enjoy the mid 20th century like other people might enjoy golfing or fantasy novels, I'd like to think I know enough about 1963 to accurately place myself in it. Most of America was still pretty damn racist, and the women's rights/gay rights/hippie movement wasn't in full force yet. Maybe my parents would have raised me so that my personality would be different, but mostly I'm picturing a lot of time spent at libraries and record stores and with adults scolding me for not being overtly feminine. And it's not exactly my idea of a good time. I'd definitely be protesting like hell as a legal adult in the latter half of the decade, but the requisite awkward years seem just that, awkward.

I realize I would probably attach myself to whatever subculture presented itself to me--beatniks most likely. But that's just that: a subculture. A(n admittedly close-knit) group of people, looked down upon by the majority so that they feel compelled to isolate themselves into small minority groups instead of demanding acceptance by the general public. Whereas now, via the internet and whatever else has made nerds bolder over the years, we can demand that acceptance. I can publicly declare my love of Harry Potter and Doctor Who and old bands and fattening food and liberal politics and so forth. I could tell you I'm naked right now. (Which, for the sake of accuracy, I am not currently. But I could be and that's what counts.)

**Note: I subscribe(d) to a particularly romanticized version of the years 1950 through about 1979, the earlier half heavily shaped by Grease and the general old-timey rock'n'rollness about the era. As a twelve year old who thought she was cool for liking non-contemporary music, I even repeatedly expressed my desire to be alive then. I am officially (as officially as a blog post can be) taking that back for reasons mentioned above. Also because that's kind of hipstery and pretentious, but, live and learn, what can you do.**

I like my books like I like my men. . .

2011-07-26T15:48:00.000-07:00

. . .naked.

("my men", in the hypothetical sense, not the actual. This little clarification definitely distracts from the incredibly hooking title and opening, but oh well.)

On the rare occasion I splurge on hardcover books (instead of waiting for a year until they come out in paperback and are thus cheaper, or pulling the ultimate cheapskate move and waiting until they're at the library. . .), once I've read the plot summary on the inside cover and the reviews on the back cover and whatever pretty picture occupies the front cover, I really see no use in the glossy paper jacket that encompasses the book itself.

I have quite a few of them tucked away*, in case I am struck by the glory of the cover art once again and feel the need to admire it on its own, but once I've purchased the book, it no longer has a purpose. The book doesn't need to advertise itself to me anymore, reading it with the jacket attached is often annoyingly slippery (especially in the awkward positions I usually read) and requires extra care to ensure that I don't rip it or bend it in any way (making them not exactly ideal for carelessly shoving into a bag or backpack. . .), and I love the minimalistic sense of the book without it. The smooth cardboard, simply embossed with metallic lettering on the cover and spine. . . there's a real proper private library quality to them. The way I picture a cozy room in a large house in the English countryside, possibly a fireplace, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with books, each with a few dignified cracks in the binding from multiple readings instead of a crumpled and faded slip of paper covering them.

I honestly have no idea the point I'm trying to convey here; maybe I'm just being overly romantic.

* Including the jackets from the last two Harry Potter books. In moments of weakness I've considered buying the other five in hardcover, however unreasonable this may be, just to do this to them and to have a complete set of one binding or the other. (Though it would definitely be more practical, if I did do this, to buy the last two in paperback.)

Was writing this on my list of things to do?

2011-07-25T21:08:00.001-07:00

Hey! What's a picture of me doing on here? This isn't Tumblr!

To the left of me is a long list of books that I plan on reading. I intend to cross them off as a I finish each one to give me a sense of accomplishment. To the right is an bullet-pointed plan of the rest of my summer, containing such helpful and detailed plans such as "running" and "job?"

I like lists. They're encouraging; a scribbled out phrase to remind you that you have, indeed, done something with your day/year/life. The problem is that I very rarely stick to my lists. Once they're written, I already feel like I've accomplished something: I have a schedule, so of course I have time to watch just one or twenty more clips of JKR interviews... The satisfaction is worth it, though. A totally completed to-do list? Rare perfection.

Really rare, though. I have... let me count... seven variations of to-do lists saved on Word, each with increasingly desperate titles ("To Do,""To do this summer," "TO DO!!"). Opening them up, I appear to have totally completed about... zero of them. My life is a sham. However, I am currently power-reading through Madame Bovary -- a book that I find strangely yet thoroughly relatable, given that a fair number of people who read it apparently hate the main character -- so perhaps I have found my motivation after all. I find that suddenly realizing you're about to start your last year of high school and will be a legal adult in friggin' less than a year is a pretty good wake-up call.

Emotional growth in 4 years? Preposterous!

2011-07-19T21:56:00.000-07:00

I have a story:

At the release of Deathly Hallows, my mom picked up my pre-ordered copy without me. I don't know how or why I allowed this to happen, but it did. She was asked if Snape was good or evil, and, being clueless, answered that he was good. I wound up with the book and a sticker that said "Trust Snape".* I was furious. At first my anger was directed towards my mom, insisting she should have called me and asked my personal opinion so as to ensure accuracy. (Even though she didn't know a sticker depended on her answer... oh, faulty 12 year old logic.) Then, being a really indignant little shit about the whole ordeal, I defaced the sticker itself. (Very ineffectively; blue pen on glossy purple paper doesn't show well, for future reference.) At the end of my graffiti spree, it read something like "don't ever disTrust Snape (not)", which, although a confusing triple negative, still worked.

**It still amazes me that the proposed trust of a fictional character's fictional actions cold have inspired so much rage in me, regardless of if it was juvenile and impotent. I like to think I've mellowed out considerably.**

Surprisingly, (I'm sure my 12 year old self would hate me for this) the only time I cried during the movie was The Prince's Tale. I've seen the movie twice, and this has happened twice. (three times on Friday, many more times after that. I have a feeling this is going to be a recurring thing.) Maybe I've developed sympathy for Snape and am sorry for being an indignant little shit years ago (sound like anyone else?), maybe Alan Rickman is the actor's equivalent of God Almighty, maybe that part is just fucking sad.

Regarding my reaction to the rest of the film, though, I only really have a lasting, overarching problem with the cinematography/directing choices, I don't know if I'm using the term correctly. Certain epic moments were not given proper epicness, while certain scenes that would have benefited from an intimate shot were filmed on a grand scale. The battle was shot using jump cuts to all the deaths and action and Fred died crumpled in a corner alone and Percy wasn't in it at all. Raaaage. But this is a pretty slim paragraph of complaints, all in all.

Maybe it's because my sense of humor has matured, too, but this was probably the funniest HP movie, by virtue of all the tension-breaking non-sequiters and Voldemort hugging Draco/shoving Bellatrix/laughing/basically doing anything. Oh, and Voldy's head on the aborted fetus-looking thing. Nasty, but it made me giggle inappropriately. It looked like it was covered in tomato sauce. Also: did it look like Snape was wearing excessive amounts of eyeshadow? Like, not in attempt to make his eyes look more sunken or nearer death or anything, Snape was just rocking the smoky eye for no apparent reason. Discuss!

* Did all the bookstores do this? Which did you guys choose (/would you have chosen if asked the question before reading DH)?

Books and Breasts

2011-07-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

An Abandoned Career Goal

I write poorly. I write opinions well, I think, and factual information provided I understand it, and even essays when I care about the subject material. As far as fiction goes, though, I just don't have the talent. Some of this is because I haven't written anything fictional for a good, long while. I've always been better at, and better enjoyed, writing short poetic snippets (not to be confused with actual poetry) -- I still wouldn't call them good, but they're alright. I suck at coming up with, and following through, plots. I can't write realistic dialogue to save anyone's life. It would be a disservice to publish my (largely nonexistent) work: the book world needs more thoroughly engaging stories, more diversity, more varying perspectives, more good books -- not more bullshitted monstrosities that glorify the concept of "sad for the sake of being sad" or just feel forced and awkward to read.

It's a bit of a shame because fiction books are one of my favorite things in the entire world and it's been a dream of mine for a long, long while to write something that would inspire the same feelings in other people as the ones I feel when I read something terrific. Yet I'm not broken up over this because I have come to face that I simply don't enjoy writing plots and characters. I'm proud of the end product, not because it's good, but because I finished. It's not tragedy that I'll probably never be a published author, though, because I doubt I would enjoy the work required to get to the point of publishing a book. I don't have that real passion and need to write something down in order to validate it. Within the last year I decided that I would only ever try to publish a book if I wrote something that I needed to write and something that I needed to share with other people. I don't want to try to become an author for the sake of becoming an author. I'll leave that up to the really talented writer folks and make up the difference in my own life by doing something I'm good at and something I enjoy and spend loads of my free time reading and discussing books and other written works. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

In Defense of Breasts

Dear World,

Where I live, summers are hot. Summers are humid. Stepping outside for a few minutes will lull you into the persistent desire to drop down where you're standing and lapse into a nap/coma until the sun burns you into little strips of human bacon. Walking somewhere, or doing any other form of physical activity, is certainly possible, but uncomfortable when wearing lots of clothing. I for one do not enjoy the feeling of sweat sticking my shirt to my back or slowly coming to feel like a cotton tank top has somehow transformed itself into a bearskin coat. I would also like to point out that the bras I typically wear under my shirt are usually less revealing than the majority of bikinis people now wear, which consist largely of the hopes and dreams of horny teenage boys. Also, my male counterparts can remove their shirts in many (though not all) situations pretty guilt-free, and to be honest, a select few of them have larger breasts than I do -- and they don't even have to wear bras! So if I want to take off my shirt while walking down the street because I'm about to die of heat and sweat, please don't act like I'm a) a slut, b) doing it for attention, c) more liable to get raped and thus put stress on the city budget by asking for a rape kit, or d) have no right to 'expose the pure, innocent children to such a horrific site.' The first three options are, well, not options because they mean that you're a sexist asshole. The last option is a moot point because these knockers have evolved for the sole purpose of feeding any future children I may have, so if they're too risque for your kids to see, what were you thinking, exposing your infants to such sexual objects every time they were hungry?! For shame, breast-feeding parent! For shame!

So I address this in particular to my county:

You live in the same place that I do. Perhaps through some lucky genetic mutation, you need 105 degree weather to even begin perspiring. I, however, do not have such a superpower. Please allow me to whip off my shirt in the middle of the summer without looking at me like I'm a skank. Also don't arrest me for public indecency, because I don't know anything about lawsuits or how the police system works, but if I had money, I would sue your ass.

Love, Vita.

P.s. I haven't actually walked around in public with my shirt off before. But I have wanted to. A lot. I'm too much of a coward to do it by myself in the present climate, but I think if I ever get extraordinarily overheated and have someone else to do it with, I would. Fuck all the haters, if I don't care if my bra is showing, you shouldn't either.

I love Harry Potter as much as Melissa Anelli,

2011-07-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

and so do most Potter fans. Melissa (the webmistress of The Leaky Cauldron, author of Harry, a History, and all-around Potter fandom star) is arguably one of the biggest Potter fans ever, as far as her work within the fandom goes. She undeniably really freaking loves Harry Potter. And yet I feel that many Potter fans around the world, ranging in age by probably eighty years, can all accurately claim to love the book as much as the key player in Pottercast, LeakyCon, and God knows what else. Most of us love the books second only to JK Rowling herself, who must harbor a love for the books akin to her own child. That's one of the incredibly awesome things about Harry Potter: when you love it, you really love it. I'm not alone in saying that I have never read or experienced anything that has been so thoroughly inviting, believable, heart-wrenching, enviable, beautiful, and real as the Harry Potter books. From the ten year olds who are well on their way to becoming full-fledged Potterheads to the most prominent members of the fandom, I really don't think anyone can truthfully claim to love Harry Potter more than any other fan.

With that love explosion out of the way, let's get down to business.* As I'm the one of us who happens to be blogging on the official North American (?) release date of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2", I feel that I owe it to you to discuss the movie and Harry Potter in general. Plus it's the only thought occupying my brain right now. So here we go.

If you're interested in my initial/insane reaction to the movie, you can find it here. There are spoilers (as there will be in this post)! I still feel the same way although perhaps in a slightly more calm, less sleep deprived frame of mind.

To sum it up, the final movie disappointed me. It was a fine Harry Potter movie and was there an eighth book or part 3 or something I probably would have been satisfied if not overly enthusiastic. However, given that it's the last ever Harry Potter film (save a remake in 50 years), it fell flat for me. There was no cathartic moment, no real feeling that Voldemort -- the overarching link of the whole movie and book series -- had finally come to an end. Instead of putting more emotion into the final minutes of the film, they went for overdone special effects. I get that it's a blockbuster and a bigger fight scene is more cinematically appealing or whatever, but takes away so much for Voldemort to be jumping off cliffs and chasing around Harry instead of that quick end that he deserves. I suppose the death of Voldemort disappointed me so much because it implied that Voldemort was still more than a mortal: mortal men don't disintegrate into disgusting flecks of human grist when they get AK'd; they simply die. The whole point is that no longer hiding behind his Horcruxes, Voldemort is a mortal man, driven not by far superior talent or superhuman powers but by his own evil, selfish ambition to control life and death -- something that no one can truly master. I would have liked to see the directors go for the simple and deliberate route of death rather than the drawn-out, convoluted duel. Followed by the (annoyingly lacking in the actual film) cheers and screams and cries of the watching crowd, I honestly think that moment of Voldemort's final downfall would have been much more poignant, and I don't just say that as a book-devoted Harry Potter fan.

...And then, as I rushed out of the theater at two thirty in the morning so that my sister's friend could speed home and get a whisper of sleep before her 9 a.m. job, half-laughing and half-shouting with two of my friends, my sister, and her friend about the ridiculous flaws in the movie, I realized that I'm not too sad about this last movie coming out after all because it's finally set in that it's not really ending.

That's one of the benefits, I suppose, of centering my whole love-of-the-boy-wizard around the books. It's always been about the books. Not about the movies, not about the Harry Potter themed events, just about the books. The book Harry Potter is the real Harry Potter. Since I haven't been heavily involved in the fandom, when I rushed out of the theater last night, I wasn't leaving behind the end of anything. Sure, I'll miss the few wrock concerts I've been to and the opportunity to go to more, and yes, it'll be sad to see some of my favorite internet personalities move on from publicly ravishing Harry Potter and Dumbledore, but with the release of this last movie, I'm not really leaving behind an era of my life. I'm not marking the end of Harry Potter themed events with my friends like many people who have been heavily involved in the fandom. I have lots of friends who love Harry Potter just as much as I do, of course, but they're my friends independently of Harry Potter, by which I mean I would be friends with them regardless.

Most of the sadness I feel from the "end of Harry Potter" (heavy quotation marks; note indication of skepticism) comes from the people within the fandom itself, this resolute chant that their "childhood is ending." For me, though, not much is ending at all. My love for Harry Potter is centered solely around these seven books that already reside at my house any time I want to revisit them. I've enjoyed the movies but they're not what I love about Harry Potter:

I realize now that the end of Deathly Hallows is so tremendously moving because of every single little nuance leading up to the battle and during the battle and, yes, even after the battle. I didn't cry during the book because Harry talks to his family (both the blood related and friend created kind) and walks through the forest to his death; I cried because of how JK Rowling wrote that scene, how much more depth it gives to this already wonderfully complex character, and that simply couldn't translate to the big screen for me. The highs of the movie -- namely, the downfall of Voldemort -- simply weren't high enough for me and the lows -- Harry dying, the Prince's Tale -- could never hope to capture the emotions I feel towards the real characters. I like the movie trio a lot, but they've always, always, always been the movie trio, not the real trio, to me.

In my mind, Harry Potter: the Movies and Harry Potter: the Books fall into two distinct, only superficially overlapping, circles. The events of both are almost the same. Some of the characters overlap: if I were to offer anybody serious evidence that Hogwarts is real and the books are simply an elaborate cover story, I would direct them to Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman to prove that nobody can act that convincingly and perfectly. A sort of guilt settled on me yesterday morning for not loving this last movie, because I know how much everyone has worked to make it perfect. It's the "end of an era," everyone says! Surely, to validate my existence as a Harry Potter fan, I should have walked out of the theater in tears! Nay, I should have broken down during the opening title sequence! I shouldn't have been able to roll my tear-free eyes at my friend during the movie final battle itself! Now, though, I am guilt free and infected with only the slightest bit of remorse that I didn't cry and I don't feel depressed. Slight masochist that I am, I would like to be able to have a sort of "mine is bigger than yours" comparison/duel with other fans about how many buckets of tears I shed during the movie. Feeling less love for the movie makes me feel a bit like the grumpy stick in the mud.

But you know what? I am a book girl, through and through. I enjoy the Harry Potter movies, but they're not really Harry Potter. And I can't control when I cry: the (spoiler!) cat dying in "Ramona and Beezus" unexpectedly got me sniffling and fighting to keep my tears within my tear ducts. The (double spoiler!) death of an adorable character in "The Princess and the Frog" had me battling to keep my crying silent in a theater full of four year olds and their moms. But the death of movie Fred just made me quite calmly think, "Well, this is depressing." Do you know, I believe that the expectation that I would cry actually kept me from feeling really cut up over this movie. So I like my tragedy to be unexpected and free from pressure. Sue me.

I'll likely even appreciate this film once I lower my expectations and realize that I should never again expect the movie to be the book -- which I haven't done for previous movies but as this is the last ever I really expected to feel and love it more. My favorite Potter movies are by far the first two even after all this time because they're the ones that capture the spirit of Harry Potter the best, if not every single detail -- they're the ones about friendship and a young, brave boy proving himself against evil -- they're the ones that balance dark and light -- and I think they're able to do so because those two books aren't as complex but it's still an impressive feat that I appreciate so much. At any rate, I'm looking forward to many future 20+ hour complete Potter marathons -- supplemented, I'm sure, by a hearty conclusion that the books are better.

* To defeat... well, you know who. (See what I did there?!)

I am a mature young adult; I will be unsupervised, at night, in costume

2011-07-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

(Alright, so this will be the c-c-c-combo breaker of the chain of deep and thoughtful posts. But isn't that how it always is?)

First, a sigh of relief on my part, as I only just recently obtained my ticket for the midnight premiere*, after being completely convinced they would have sold out by now. I'm really not the best person at planning ahead, even for important things.

Anyway, this whole business got me thinking. As with the last two movies, I was planning (there's that word again) to go with a group. Then they backed out of it, both having to get up for summer school in the morning and being incapable of working on very few hours of sleep.** But instead of sulking and backing out of the chance to traipse around in a costume in the wee hours of the morning and to go to my first midnight premiere ever for the last Harry Potter movie ever and to truly enjoy myself, I went ahead and got the ticket. I am going alone and I'm going to have fun if it kills me or another innocent bystander in the process. I feel like this is a mature decision, even if I'm not deciding to do a conventionally mature thing. I don't need the acceptance or safety of a group to have fun. This is kind of a momentous decision, in its own weird way.

* I got permission to go sometime in mid-May (my mother is very much a supporter of midnight movies, based on her experiences with them back when they were entertainment for delinquent subculture children instead of profitable nerd fanbases), but the actual physical admission is recent.

** Unlike moi. It's strange I consider the ability to handle sleep deprivation well a skill, but in a way it is.

Stressy McStresspants

2011-07-11T23:14:00.000-07:00

It hit me this afternoon how much school-related work I actually have to do this summer. (There's a lot of other stuff I have to do too, but that's not my concern right now.) School doesn't start again for nearly one and a half months, but I am absolutely dreading the start of it. As it's my senior year, I guess I'm supposed to be excited for it, but I'm not in the slightest. There's only about one and a half classes (one of them's only a semester long) out of seven that I'm remotely looking forward to. They do a bad job of making up for the other five and a half classes that I'm about ready to impale myself on a spit with a roasting pig rather than attend. Add that to all the extra work I have to do for the IB program and it's not shaping up to be a fun time. I can't figure out if I regret doing IB or if I'm just fed up with school in general and am transferring that resentment over to the IB program specifically; either way, I am totally unenthused about academia.

It's less the schoolwork for actual school that briefly stunned me, though; it's the work I have to do to get ready for applying to college. I'm a bit excited to actually apply for college. I hear it's stressful and I feel absolutely behind and clueless on the whole process -- I swear, I do not know how my classmates and their parents know so much about the college process; I have an older sister in college and I still have no idea what they're talking about half the time -- and I have concerns about college itself, but filling out the applications feels like a major milestone. It's the first serious step I'll take towards seriously deciding on a serious post-high school plan. That's awesome -- and I do mean that in its awe-inspiring definition rather than in the slang sense.

In some ways, college seems like a buffer period for middle and upper class American kids. Living on your own without really living on your own; graduating school and yet still going to school; summer vacations and low-paying jobs and internships; the knowledge that your parents' house is still available to you as a permanent residence. It also seems to be a place where kids go to figure out what they want to do with their lives. That's one of the reasons why I'm a bit apprehensive towards this whole college phenomenon. I really dislike school right now -- a lot more than I did in sophomore year or previously. What if I get to college and I don't like school any better? And I feel like such a jerk to go to college just to figure out what I want to do; it seems like such a privileged waste of money to spend two years waffling about, trying to decide if I want to major in European art history from 1800-1882 or the effects of the Roman civilization on modern warfare.* I did seriously consider taking a gap year after high school, but I'm worried that if I do that, I'll end up just wasting a year doing stupid things I don't care about and that it'll be totally unproductive and unhelpful. Be it a fact or just a belief that's been pounded through my head for the past fifteen years, I do feel like going to college will ultimately expand my options in life, especially given that I don't plan on eking out a living on pure talent alone.**

Basically, I'm at a total loss as to what I want to do and even, in the more practical sense, what I should do. Not to turn this little worry session into a philosophical rambling, but since I really believe that this life is the only one I'll ever have, I don't want to waste it. The two goals of anyone's life should be to make a positive impact on the world and to simply be happy (hence the satisfaction post on Friday). I want to do both of those things... it's just the 'getting there' part that's hella*** difficult.

Talking about school in the middle of the summer sucks; I try to avoid doing it. I already complain enough during the school year and I don't want it to ruin my summer. It's one of those things that gets worse the longer it sits silently festering, though, so I'm getting this school angst out here in the hope that it will bother me less in the near future.

*Neither of these are actual options on the grounds that I'm deeply uninterested in both topics and also I don't think they're real majors.

**Mostly because I don't have any talents that are good enough that anybody would feel remotely inclined to pay me for the privilege of experiencing.

***I really should stop typing that; I don't live in California...or anywhere people say that...

Selfish happiness is still happiness. The selfishness is debatable.

2011-07-08T22:23:00.001-07:00

Do you ever snuggle under the covers and think, simply think, about what would make you truly happy? Forget instant gratification. Forget your short-term goals. Forget, even, the perfect 'dream' life. Just think about what would make you entirely content from the ideal level of comfort of the sole of your foot to the complex, needy consciousness in your brain.

Me, I don't have the specifics down. Images flash to mind, sure. My future house changes. Morphs from a seaside cottage in Maine to an apartment in a lively, small, Scottish town. Sometimes I'm with a long-term boyfriend/cohort banging out music on pots and pans and raspy vocals, despite my considerable lack of most musical ability. Or else I'm scuttling around some remote, unidentified territory, helping install clean water wells and making friends with the local toddlers. Problem is, though, I don't know what I want to do with my life. Every career option has a fatal flaw. Sometimes I see my own fatal flaw beating me as a second heart.

I think I know what I want.

I want to make connections to other people. To start a family in more ways than one. To be totally satisfied with the people closest to me, but still be open to meeting new people, really getting to know them. For me, at least, the central part of my happiness is making sure that I have those connections to people that will always bring everything else into perspective. It's so easy to look at the world and only see the bad and the hopeless. Making connections, real connections, to people, people you can always depend on, that's what makes living worth the trouble.

That's not the only thing that would make me happy. I want a job or career or whatever you want to call it that means something to me. It has to be something I enjoy or else something I feel is truly important. I want to have an exciting life so that when I'm an elderly lady I won't look back at all the things I regret not doing. I don't ever want to be filled with regrets from my past because my future can always be better. But the key to being really happy, to me, is finding people who I totally love and who love me back. And yeah, for me, that probably means at some point getting married and having kids. Perhaps this doesn't seem ambitious enough in an age of budding female power players and when everyone is hopping about, ready to change the world. I've realized, though, that what should make you happy doesn't really matter -- it's what actually does make you happy that's relevant. Perhaps I should feel totally gratified by saving a life or helping a community. But I don't. That's not to say that doing things for the greater good is unimportant or unsatisfying, but my happiness is a lot more personal. There's no use in doing things to make everyone else's lives better if you are perpetually unsatisfied. Being selfless is necessary. Being a little selfish is necessary, too.

It's fascinating how easily people make friends. Yes, there are plenty of socially awkward people or shy people or just unlikable people who feel quite friendless. Yet you're only friends with the people you're friends with because you happened to meet them. There was no fate involved. It's simply random chance. You live somewhere that places you in the same school with some other people and some of those some other people become your friends. If you had lived across the country the same thing would have happened but with different people. When you meet somebody by more proactive means, such as over the internet because you share similar interests, it's still pretty damn random that you should meet. There are probably hundreds or thousands of people who share those same interests. But you didn't meet them. You met this one person. Really, the world is just absolutely brimming with potential new friends, if only you could meet them all.

So much of who we are is defined by everyone around us. Nobody is really independent. In the midst of all this striving to 'find myself' and 'follow my dreams' and 'become my own person,' I don't want to forget that, at any given time, the best part of my life will always be the people who are there to join me.

why this blogging thing?

2011-07-07T18:16:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to start this.

I had a conversation with a couple people earlier (vague conversation is vague). We were planning a philosophy gathering/discussion thing, anyway, not the point. I started talking about my blogging life which has become somewhat stagnant in the past couple months and one of these two people asked me why I blogged.

And I sat there staring, with a quizzical look in my eye, trying to figure it out. Since then, in an attempt to be more thoughtful and critical, I've actually tried to think about this a lot lately. Why blog in a public space when an email could do the same basic functions of three people communicating random and not so random moments of life and fascination and feelings from frustration to anticipation? What does this platform have to offer us, other than some self indulgent feeling of significance?

It's quite possible I'm being overly cynical about this and that there is value to this public space where we post all these fleeting thoughts but could someone help me out here? What do you get out of this being a blog, rather than three people emailing each other several times a week?

Philosophy can be so consuming. Once it gets a hold of you, you can't escape until you've examined every detail of your existence. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just that it can shake a lot of foundations which can be exhausting to constantly deal with.

Yeah.

Re: Harry Potter; also, tears.

2011-07-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

Aggggh same let us weep together.

In a way, I feel like this whole thing follows the 5 stages of grief model pretty well:

1. Denial: (circa Nov. 2010) "It's not really ending. July is forever away from now!"

2. Anger: "How dare they end shfsdjkslsrrrr how dare they to rip my childhood away from me."

3. Bargaining: "Dear JK Rowling: BOOK. EIGHT. *repeat as chant ad infinitum* PS: Pretty please with sugar and cherries and sprinkles and chocolate frogs on top. Signed, Everyone."

4. Depression: "It's the end of an era; this will be the last time that *fill in long list of HP-related moments*; please excuse me if I whimper at the thought."

5. Acceptance: Coming soon to a theater near you.

Looking back on the half of my life I've spent with these books and movies and this community, the way they've shaped me is almost indescribable. If I hadn't read Harry Potter (or seen the movies; let's assume for the sake of fictionality that I live under a very large rock), I wouldn't be a Nerdfighter. I wouldn't have the same best friend IRL. I wouldn't aspire to be a novelist. I wouldn't be blogging about this right now. Speaking as the person I am, I can't really imagine what I'd be like.

When I was in the second grade, before I had even read the books, my music teacher had a "guess this tune" game with our class. She played Hedwig's Theme on piano, just the first eight notes or so. Everyone else knew what it was, but that's beside the point. Those eight notes were so hauntingly beautiful, and I was struck by them in the way a piece of music hadn't touched me before nor do I think one has ever since. There's something intriguing, inviting, magical about them. And in two weeks I'm probably going to tear up whenever I hear them. That's something strange to think about. When, after I see the last film, am I going to hear them again? In ten years will I see someone on a bus who has it as their ringtone? And will I meet their gaze for a second, sharing a knowing look of nostalgia between strangers?

I probably will.

Harry Potter; also, tears

2011-07-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

Thus far my summer has been a bit of a failure as far as excitement/productivity goes. On the bright side, a surplus of down time has allowed me to fling myself headfirst into the throes of Harry Potter.

As suggested by that choice noun in the previous sentence, this is potentially not actually a good thing. I've done a lot of wallowing about, bemoaning that I was too young to really join the Harry Potter fandom during its height and now that I'm older and actually follow my own interests (hello, vortex of superficiality and/or conformity that was middle school) and am allowed to do stuff by myself it's all dying down and it's too late for everything and my life sucks. I've also been listening to a lot of wizard rock, which makes me more depressed, due to its acute ability to prick just about every emotional bubble in my soul. Ministry of Magic is especially good for that. In brief, immersing myself in Harry Potter over the last week or so has made me never want to be alone ever again -- which is an unfortunate thing to feel during the summer when everyone you like has wildly different schedules.

...This was going to be a lot longer and have a point to it, but I'm currently curled up in the corner, listening to my favorite wrock songs and feeling like crying. Which, really, is a point in itself. S'laters.

Oh, and happy Canada Day, to our valued Canadian member!

The Unifying Power of Noodles

2011-06-28T20:36:00.001-07:00

Noodles are awesome. Almost every country in the world has its own uses for noodles. Notably Asian countries and Italy, but hey. We have noodles shaped like Scooby Doo characters and slathered in artificially orangish cheese sauce.* I don't exactly know where I'm going with this but if you happen to be browsing the draft posts (or just reading this as is because I am lazy but also have some kind of blogging complex wherein the fact that I haven't blogged here properly in over a week is significant to me...), I guess it's that there's something comforting about the fact that one thing we have in common, on an international scale, is something as basic as noodles. I realize the placement of this post after Vita's eloquent and kind of horrifying one might detract something from it, but hey.

* Canadians actually buy more Kraft brand mac & cheese dinner than those of us in the US do.

All I want is to eat some real food

2011-06-27T21:09:00.000-07:00

This really freaks me out. Does this really freak anyone else out?

I was going to attempt to write an eloquent and persuasive post about the horrors of the modern food industry, but let me instead share with you an entry I wrote in my journal a few hours ago:

I'm watching the documentary "Food Inc," part of which I watched in Enviro this year. It's so disgusting how food is made in the U.S. I hate how even though you're told to eat more fruits + veggies, even THOSE are usually genetically modified + filled w/pesticides. Like, as a recent convert to vegetarianism, I've noticed that it's a lot easier to stop eating meat when I think about how DISGUSTING the meat industry is. Forget about the ethical issue of animals being TOTALLY abused for a second (even though that's sad) and just think about how STUPID this is. People get sick, e. coli, allergies, from this crap AND NOBODY CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT! The animals get sick AND ARE JUST FED ANTIBIOTICS AND WASHED "CLEAN" WITH AMMONIA + SOLD ANYWAY! THAT IS SO FUCKING UNSANITARY! AND PEOPLE STILL REFUSE TO ADMIT HOW TERRIBLE OUR FOOD SYSTEM IS! I just think that it's so unfair that ALL of us pay the price for people being dumbasses and not caring about their health, and then for companies totally exploiting that. I just don't think that it should have to be a BATTLE to eat healthily.

Perhaps in other countries as well, and certainly within the U.S., people tend to follow capitalism with almost religious devotion. While the well-trained American within me definitely thinks that capitalism is the best economic system, there comes a point where you have to step back and realize that a totally "free market" is not worth totally screwing over everybody except for the companies that have monopolies on the market. Get some regulations up on that shit.

The problem that I have with genetically modified food and industrial food is not that it exists. To parallel, I am not overly concerned with fast food and junk food: I know it's bad for me and I tend to avoid eating it (fast food, that is. Still working on junk food), but other people are free to eat it if they wish, especially since they probably already know it's bad for them. The difference, however, is that there are plenty of alternatives to eating fast food and junk food. There are very, very few alternatives in the U.S. to eating industrial food. The most obvious is organic food, but that is legitimately more expensive, and I can't ask my parents to only buy organic food when I'm not even the one who has to pay for it.

One of the saddest parts of Food Inc. is an interview with a family in California. The mom talks about how she feels guilty for feeding her kids with Happy Meals but, as she points out, she can get a full meal for the price of a few vegetables at the supermarket. Her husband, who drives trucks as a main source of income, relies on two relatively expensive medications to keep healthy and so to keep his job, so the family has to choose between keeping the father relatively healthy on his medication or on keeping the whole family healthy through a better diet. There is no reason that people should have to make those kinds of choices. There is no reason that fast food should cost less than nutritious, healthy food. The actual reason for the skewed prices, which are to some extent beyond my knowledge of economics, revolves around the massive food companies, which are subsidized by the federal government. Organic farmers are not only not subsidized by the government, but they also have to pay extra costs to certify and then label that their food is organic. These massive food companies don't even have to label that their food is genetically modified! How insane is that?

I'm just saying: Republicans preach about family values. Making sure your family doesn't get sick from the food they eat is a pretty goddamn strong component to keeping together that family. Democrats are all about social justice. Holding companies responsible for completely destroying the integrity of our food, not to mention the integrity of smaller farmers and factory workers, sounds pretty socially just to me. The only people who don't possibly benefit from a mass upheaval of the food industry is the people who own the food companies. Unfortunately, they wield an absolutely astounding amount of power, among consumers, among the farmers who provide them with raw materials, even among the government and its regulatory agencies.

The other extremely disturbing thing about this whole food mess is the stigma around people who push for better food. By writing this post and having this perspective on food, I would probably be classified as a "foodie." Let me clarify, I am not in favor of depriving people of all the food that they love, nor do I intend to belittle my friends every time they order a hamburger. What I want is to be able to eat natural, healthy food at reasonable prices, and for the government to do their job and actually regulate the safety of food, rather than bending to the interests of the food companies. Yet people have this intense opposition to "health nuts," and I don't understand why. Sure, it's annoying to having people criticize your food choices all the time. But why on earth would you be opposed to making the food you eat healthier and safer? Nobody is going to come and snatch your cookies and pizzas and candy bars away from you. All I want is the knowledge that biting into a tomato isn't going to increase my chance of getting cancer and that my future kids won't develop food allergies and health problems from ingredients that have no business being in children's food.

I really, really, really, really recommend seeing "Food. Inc" if you haven't already. You should really also watch the TED talk I mentioned earlier. Opponents talk about skewed science, misrepresented facts, but I think what we have here is an issue of common sense and basic health. It's true that the issue isn't totally black and white. There are arguments in favor of genetically modified foods, most centering around increased food production -- the problem is, these potentially beneficial aspects of food modification are truly not used to better the lives of the hungry, but for the sole purpose of driving up profits, at the sake of the health and integrity of huge percentages of our food. It really should not be a challenge to find genuinely healthy food. Nobody should have to sacrifice their health -- short-term and long-term -- just to avoid starvation and placate the gigantic monster that is the food industry.

that's life ;)

2011-06-26T22:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, days pass and it's busy and I am a horrible email correspondent but I can still look at it all and think, "That's life," and smile. Most of the time. Other days, I look at the magnificently terrifying pile of messages in my inbox and want to sob.

But that's life.

Some Sundays, I wake up and think, "I'm going to write a terrific blog today," and then I have plans of father-daughter breakfasts and walks and family solitary reading and I get home and have to sort through some emails first and by the time I get around to blogging my eyes are strained and tired and I want to close them and sleep.

So hi. How are you today? Are you okay? Is life good, in general? I'll see you on Thursday but, just so you know, I'm working so I may be tired which is why I sometimes miss our supposedly biweekly chats. But I'll try to be there because it's important to me. I hope you understand. I'm pretty sure you do.

Bye now.

Blurring the Lines

2011-06-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

So, Vita's blog post is actually extremely relevant to my life right now. To such a degree that it warrants a blog post at least partially in response to it.

Backstory: I was (and still am) a quirky, nervous sort of child. I had the "typical" fears of the dark, of bees, of needles. The base and unavoidable things like pain and the unknown. And also oddly specific ones like overhead lighting fixtures falling, and my family dying via ~fill in gruesome method of the day~. Over the course of a few years I developed a collection of superstitious/ritualistic behaviors* to prevent these things, which I followed religiously and without question.

The "without question" part has changed, (obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this. It's been a while since I've started this post, and it's beginning to strike me as vastly uninteresting. Sorry, y'all. This isn't necessarily one that's meant to provoke intense discussion. You can comment if you want, but this is mostly for the purpose of me venting.) and I've been using the all-knowing wonder of Dr. Google to sort out what is normal-yet-unnecessary superstition and what is actual obsessive compulsion. Through it, I've kind of accepted the fact that I have some form of OCD. OCD is such a variable mental illness, though, anyone with the ability to stretch their imagination can see themselves fitting the symptoms. Maybe I am trying too hard. Even though I'll be the first person to recognize these things are irrational (and also annoying as fuck), to the point where a professional opinion seems like a good idea.

This is another can of worms in itself, though, because my mother believes mental health disorders (and the treatment thereof) are largely hokum**, making the already awkward conversation of, "Hey, mom, I suspect a problem with my overall mental state and would feel better about the whole situation if it was evaluated by someone with a degree instead of the internet." way more awkward, because what I see as a legitimate concern she sees as nothing, a normal emotion turned into an imaginary condition developed to sell drugs. Le sigh.***

Footnotes!

* I'm not going to bore you with the details; suffice to say they involve arbitrary and repetitious things like touching doorknobs and mostly interfere with my sleeping habits.

** As a result of several books about how drug companies are manufacturing huge buckets of pills and lies.

*** I don't know about whoever else may be reading this far, but I'm slightly uncomfortable with the utter seriousness of this post. Here, have a video of a cat. :D

Phobophilia

2011-06-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

So here's how it is: people have a desire to be special. People also tend to look for sympathy. Put them together and you have a large subgroup of people who want to be special by having problems. This, I think, leads to a lot of people who exaggerate their problems even to themselves, leading them to think that they have some kind of mental or other disorder, when in actuality all they have is a few too many problems or perhaps a deep-seated boredom and a need for some attention. Understandable.

This less than groundbreaking discovery comes to you by way of an introspective discovery I made about myself tonight. Since forever, I have had an irrational disgust with clusters of small things -- insect/animal eggs on leaves, groups of white mushrooms, a lotus pod, magnified cellular structures -- which I just found out is called "trypophobia" and something that other people suffer from as well. This lead me to read an article about it, at which point I realized that I don't have trypophobia, but rather its watered-down cousin. I really do get grossed out by that sort of thing, but that's as far as it goes. I don't get itchy, I don't freak out and cry -- I just shiver a little bit, feel grossed out, and look away. A couple of minutes later, I realized further that I had been trying to make myself fit the symptoms, as if I wanted to have the phobia. Which I then realized (I was quite insightful tonight) that I did sort of want to have the phobia. It feels like the kind of thing that you can whip out as a party trick. When other people comment on disliking dogs or hating clowns, you can upstage them all by saying, "Yeah, well, I throw up every time I see groups of small holes," at which point everyone (presumably) feels sorry for you and you are the special snowflake of the night.

Of course, anyone thinking rationally would never wish to have a phobia. When you're scared of something -- really, truly, irrationally scared -- your life gets a lot harder. Imagine if I had a severe case of trypophbia: I'd start crying every time I saw a bowl of blueberries. I'd never be able to watch nature documentaries. It would suck. What people want, I think, is not the problem but the consequence: the sympathy, the recognition of a unique difficulty.

The closest thing I have to a phobia, really, is probably quite common, and is the physical aversion I have to insects larger than a gnat or very small fly, especially when indoors. Flying bugs, scuttling beetles, silverfish that inconveniently rest on the ceiling of small rooms -- I simply cannot force myself to get close to them, and when in close proximity to them (especially by myself), my heart starts racing and I get hot and sweaty (gross, I know). An aforementioned silverfish shows up fairly regularly my bathroom ceiling and inconveniences me for a good five minutes as I debate how to proceed. Sometimes I cover with a tissue the head of an old hobby horse and smush it from a reasonable distance, but even that takes effort as I force myself to stab at the bug. One time late at night, I saw a possibly dead silverfish on the side of the hallway connecting the bedrooms to the kitchen and I stood deliberating for a good ten minutes in four by eight foot space while trying to risk sprinting past it to get a cup from the kitchen under which I could then trap the silverfish. Still, I don't know if this counts as a phobia. It's inconvenient and persistent, true, but the independent idea of insects doesn't gross me out and I actually enjoy looking at magnified pictures of them. Now that I think about it, I think that my not-trypophobia and fear of insects are slight related. Disgustingly, when I'm trying to get rid of a bug, I can't help but imagine it flying into my ear and laying eggs or something nauseating like that.

Perhaps tellingly, my aversion to insects is a fear (if not quite a phobia) that I sincerely wish I could rid myself of. I know it's stupid, and it's certainly annoying to be petrified by a harmless organism a thousandth (or smaller) of my size, but the message doesn't quite translate to my limbs. This is probably far too narrow a statement, but I feel that the desire to rid oneself of a problem is often a defining line between the genuinely afflicted and those hungry for attention. I would guess that most people with real depression, a real broken leg, real phobias, and so forth desperately wish that they didn't have those, while the rest of us know we shouldn't want them, but sort of kind of sometimes do.

Today

2011-06-19T23:07:00.000-07:00

It's four minutes until 11 and my eyes are not wanting to show me the world anymore but I'm still upright and in the end, that's what counts. Right?

Right?

This week is staring me in the face and its cold demeanor and general fullness is a bit intimidating. Tomorrow, I will be cleaning and teaching a friend how to ride a bike and talking about the future of my community. That's a full schedule. Then Tuesday is Value Village and work and I just realized something. This isn't interesting.

I have this weird thing going on in my brain lately where I literally question everything. Like, if someone says that coconuts are bad, I will actually ask myself what that even means, how one determines the definition of the words 'bad' and 'coconut' and then whether it even matters. You know what's one that gets me? Fair.

What is fair? Is it everyone getting the same resources and opportunities? Is it everyone contributing equal shares or is it everyone contributing what they can or is it people receiving resources and opportunities based on what they contribute? Are we obligated to help people out when they're less fortunate than us? Why?

I don't know if I'm playing Devil's advocate or simply looking critically at the basis of the principles I live my life by. Either way, it's kind of groundbreaking.

And you may be able to tell that I'm tired and everything is seeming far more profound than it actually is. So I will sign off. Goodnight. But what's good?

A Stupid Argument

2011-06-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

Belatedly in honor of Flag Day (lolflagday) or very early in honor of the Fourth of July or perhaps just in honor of reasonable patriotism at any time of the year, I would like to present a defense of the American (U.S.-ian, if you will) National Anthem. Perhaps it is just in the Washington Post, which for all its respectability tends to publish rather incendiary editorials, but last month -- or perhaps earlier; around the time when Christina Aguilera apparently forgot the words to the anthem whilst singing it -- out poured a vocal group of people railing against the National Anthem. "It's too hard to sing!" they roared, "It glorifies violence!" "It's outdated and wasn't even that good to begin with!" others insisted.

Of course they're entitled to their opinions. Yet they annoy me because they tend to be the nit-picky types who fancy themselves to be clever although they are mostly just obnoxious. And, you know, I may not get paid for this and I may not have thousands of subscribers but I am still going to rebut their argument, gosh darn it. This will be short as it's a stupid debate to begin with and thus does not require much thought:

Firstly, people rarely sing the National Anthem. They tend to shout it. Go to any sporting event and you will see this is true. The people who have to actually sing the anthem are people who are supposed to be good at singing already; thus, the difficulty of the song -- which isn't even that difficult, if you don't add on all the annoying bells and whistles, which everyone does but nobody should -- should not pose a problem. Secondly, the American public generally does not have a problem with the anthem. I admit that I feel a swell of patriotic pride whenever I hear it played, especially when I'm with a large group of fellow Americans (or, really, anybody who likes the USA enough to stand around and listen to the anthem), and I suspect that most of my fellow citizens feel the same way. Also, like, good luck trying to change it -- you're definitely, absolutely going to get shot down as a devil-worshiping America-hating fascist. (Don't worry that the insult doesn't make sense. People just like to get angry.) Thirdly, maybe it's not the best song ever written, but it's a hell of a lot better than many of the state anthems. Take Maryland for example, whose state anthem is essentially a southern-sympathizing, anti-north, pro-slavery Civil War relic. It's not so much the fact that it was made the state song that's the problem... it's that it was made the state song in 1939. And nobody has changed it since then -- in fact, there's opposition to altering the lyrics on the basis of 'preserving state history.' Right, because the state song -- which nobody even knows, may I point out -- is the most important place to preserve the racist history of a state that never even joined the Confederacy. Oh, Maryland.

(I feel sometimes that I come across as super pro-American on this blog, which isn't really true in my general life. This is mostly because whilst I normally freely admit the many flaws in the workings of my home country, I still feel quite an affinity for it, and the annoyance at hearing people going on and on and on about how terrible the USA as if all other countries are perfect builds up over time and eventually provokes me to the point where I am driven to post a rant about it over here. Lucky you!)

P.s. I'm not well versed in the national anthems of other countries, but I must admit that I love "God Save the Queen" (or King) despite the fact that I'm quite indifferent towards the British monarchy. I quite like the Canadian anthem as well. Let song unite us all, etc. etc.

I Seriously Do Not Understand the Concept of Flag Day

2011-06-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Vita!

(Also, it's U.S. Flag Day. Paaaartaaaay.)*

A lot of countries have a holiday commemorating the first use of their current flag, but I just don't get it. Disregarding its position as a kind of lackluster, in-name-only holiday, I don't even see the real point of it. As opposed to, say, Arbor Day. I can appreciate the driving force behind Arbor Day even though I usually neglect celebrating it.

It is commonly agreed that the flag is a symbol of the country, and also patriotism, in a metaphorical sense. It's not like a bomb-wielding anarchist is just going to take that day off in observance, so maybe it's a chance for the average-level patriots to step up their game? But hardly anyone does. Why, then, do we need a specific holiday on which to be patriotic?** It's like a cycle of Congressional pointlessness. Perhaps, Vita, (living in what I assume to be a more concentrated area of patriotism), or Alex (living in a country with different attitudes towards patriotism altogether), you guys can enlighten me on this/add to my musings.

Or you can tell me I'm being an overly analytical spoilsport, whatever you want.

Footnotes:

* Whenever I abbreviate US, I always read it as the pronoun. Which is a.) grammatically incorrect and b.) kind of an interesting way of illustrating our Pocahontisian (here I know I could use some technical foreign policy term, and I choose to make a Disney reference. Deal with it.) "us or them" mentality.

** Or another holiday, if you count independence day.

Even more parts!

2011-06-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

Part One

Tomorrow is my birthday. I have never been a huge birthday enthusiast. Especially around my family, I have a longstanding trend of shying away from all the attention. I guess I just never feel like I do anything to deserve the presents and stuff. It's not like I hate myself, I just think that the way my family treats me is a gift in itself. That sounds super cheesy, but it's true. I've fought with my family before but not for extended periods of time and even though I definitely don't tell them everything we've always been close, although not in a hang-out-all-the-time, best-friendy sort of way, just in an easy-going do-your-own-thing sort of fashion. I don't know how to explain it. My birthday just feels awkward. To me, my birthday is like any other day except there's this pressure for me to be overly happy and have the most fun I've had all year. And it rarely is the most fun I've had all year because fun things happen spontaneously and randomly and there's rarely a date when I expect something to be a certain level of awesome and then it turns out to perfectly match that level of awesome, for better or for worse.

I sound inappropriately grumpy. This doesn't even apply to my friends. Generally, a perfect birthday for me would be for people to tell me happy birthday and then for a group of us to go do fun things that involve me (obviously) but don't revolve around me (hence my aversion to birthday parties for myself -- also I'm too lazy to plan them). That, coincidentally, is what I'm planning on doing tomorrow (I'm going to the National Zoo after taking a math exam that I don't much care about), so I think it should be a good time.

Part Two

There isn't really a need for more parts, but who am I to break the trend? Let's talk about more fun things. I just beat Angry Birds on Google Chrome. Lordy but is that game addicting.

No. That's not interesting. What is interesting, however, is the coming release of Deathly Hallows part 2. Anyone else planning on a reread of the series before the film premieres? TV has been eating away at my heartstrings recently, and while I certainly do enjoy a bit of weeping over fictional characters in any form, I need to rekindle the old literary flame. And I may as well start with what is (in my opinion) the best book series of all time.

~Angry Birds break~

Part Three

What to say, what to say. Anyone else feeling the need for a light internet cleanse this summer? I'm planning on getting out of the house and doing things. The need for actual material to blog about is not a minor factor in this decision. Internet, I banish thee! Temporarily. At some point in the near future.

Peace. Got to go "study" for math. Oh, school...