An Argument for the Art of Letter Writing

Dear you,

How are you? No, really, tell the truth. Is the weather tolerable? Are you stressed out? Do you want to talk about it? You can talk to me, you know. I'm here.

I'm swell, thanks for asking. I'm busy, in a mostly good way. I'm excited, in general. It's probably going to rain all week but I'm fine with that. I'm happy. And I'm been thinking. About a lot of things. Like letter writing.

These days, it seems like the only people who write letters are the politically active and the unemployed. And me. For some reason, that disappoints me.What ever happened to longhand and stamps and waiting more than two seconds for your message to be delivered? It's not like people actually reply to emails promptly anyway, or at least not in my experience. What's so great about instantaneous communication?

Do you remember when you were younger, when you'd run outside, practically barefoot, to check the mail in the morning? You would lift up the flap or pull open the door of that promising mailbox and extract a letter, addressed to you! Maybe it was a birthday card from your grandmother or maybe it was your first bank statement but, hell, you could taste the happiness on your tongue as it radiated through you. Those moments were the highlight of your week and no one has ever been so excited about a paper cut.

Those days are gone, replaced with email, texting and Post It notes. 'Pen pal' is a foreign word to today's youngsters. Snail mail is nothing but a forgotten relic of a slower time, a way for technologically retarded people to get their phone bills.

Well I reject that reality and substitute my own.

Lately, I've been writing letters. It's not because I have a lot of time on my hands and it's not because I'm worried that technology will be the the downfall of civilization, though I won't negate that possibility either. Call me a Luddite if you will but I'm sticking to my opinion that letters make the world better.

Maybe I'm clinging to the past; maybe I should let the postal system slip through my fingers, let it fall into complete obscurity and obsolescence. But the piece of me that stores nostalgia in its fibers won't let go. In days of 'lol' and 'ttyl', I don't feel like abbreviating. I want to be thoughtful. I want to write slowly, with purpose. I want hand cramps and ink stains and the disgusting taste of envelope glue on my tongue.

Call me crazy but I'll continue to stick to this habit like stamps on envelopes. Letter writing feels good. You should try it.

Sincerely,
Alex

p.s. I feel like this letter needed a postscript in order to remain true to form. That's all.

A Retrospective

And some other stuff. Other stuff first:

1. I have openly been neglecting BEDA--I seriously prefer it in August, in hindsight.

2. Though I have kind of inadvertently been doing TEDA (Tumblr-EDA). Which is seriously less difficult than BEDA, because plagiarism is encouraged.

Some progressions in the life of Rena, April 2010-April 2011

(most of which are probably imaginary)

✴ I watch television a lot less.*

✴ The time I would have spent watching TV I spend on the Internet.**

✴ I'm more relaxed. (See bolded parenthetical statement.)

✴ Over the course of a year, I've gone from 14-going-on-12 to actually mentally 15, having stuck my foot even just slightly into the vast yet somewhat necessary cesspool of angst and self-realization. I feel. . .mature? (Says the jobless girl in pajamas at one on a Sunday morning. Whatever. It's a change.)

✴ I've adopted a hobby other people also have; listening to music. (By this I mean on a relatively frequent and independently chosen basis as opposed to only when I'm in my mom's car. Which explains my musical taste extremely well.)

It's 1:35 in the morning I can accomplish no task on the Internet without being distracted by tabs I'm sure I could think of more things so this post would be relevant but I should go to bed.

Footnotes:

* Save anything from England, also a change.

** Specifically why the title of this little section does not say "improvements" per se, just progressions.

day 7

This flawed haiku
is all you're getting, BEDA.
Suck it.

Thoughts From Places

Place 1: A car. More of a car. Almost 12 hours straight in a car.

At 3:15 on a Friday afternoon I stuffed myself into my best friend's mom's car. Already this wasn't quite the romanticized vision of roadtrippery I'd expected. I couldn't untwist my ankles for some time, because I was sharing my leg space with bags and bags of food, books, my sleeping bag, a cooler filled with equal parts Diet Pepsi and little syringes of medication, and another person. It was in this car that I spent the longest stretch of my life to date away from home. "Home" in this case being both people related to me, and my residence in suburban Illinois. Things I saw at 70 miles an hour ranged from beautiful (shale cliffs and rivers in Kentucky) to absurd (an field in Georgia with a lone black billboard proclaiming "HELL IS REAL") and back, but it never felt like I was in those places actually experiencing them. Places happened when the car stopped and I was disentangled from it, everything else fabrications and pictures.

Place 2: Disney World, Florida.

(Note that I'm skipping some places-- the parking lot of a Hardee's in the Indianapolis area, an interestingly graffitied gas station bathroom in Tennessee, the most rural part of Kentucky with scenery like a Tim Burton movie come to life--all stories for another day, children.)

Purportedly the happiest place on Earth, teeming with wide-eyed little kids, nostalgic parents, and cheerful employees whose pay (dependent upon their attitudes, I'm sure.) I'd pondered more than once. The first day I woke up around 7:30--always an early riser in strange settings. It seems like everyone is. (This may be some kind of evolutionary advantage. The unconscious ability to sense the foreign would come in handy.) It was raining. This is a contradiction in itself, people don't usually find happiness in rain, but we marched out, poncho-clad and determined to see magic.

Magic it was--the magic ability of a place to make its inhabitants 8 years old, its ability to strike conversations on a bus with people from Belgium and Georgia and everywhere else, its ability to make so many small things seem like magic--hot pastries,trespassing onto a purposeless stone table for picture opportunities, the way thousands of lights glint off rain after dark, everything and everyone spinning and screaming and constantly soundtracked by Disney music.

I'd never been more wet in my life for a longer amount of time (I caught a cold because of this, by the way. Funny how I had previously dismissed that as a myth. . .), and I'd never cared less. There were other days in other parks, but this blog is about the first and most vividly memorable, in the Magic Kingdom. There are some places 18 straight hours of rain can only enhance.

The "Real World" Myth

Brace yourselves, readers, for I am about to shatter some serious illusions. Ready? No, you're not. Or, at least, that's what the systems that define youth would tell you. Many would say that the purpose of public school is to prepare you for adult life, no scratch that, they're to prepare you for college or university which will then prepare you for adult life. Maybe. But does anyone realize that while they say they are giving you the tools you need to succeed, they are also building the shakiest support system they can imagine?* I know I'm throwing around some hefty accusations but somebody has to.

The phrase that I've heard so often, triggering various reactions from me as I've grown older, is "the real world." This is a classic fear tactic.


If I don't graduate high school, how will I ever be prepared for the real world?

At first, this idea confused me. What world have I been living in if not the real one? What's so unreal about my world? After that, I started to disagree. On my eighteenth birthday, I'm not going to open some mysterious door and transition to another realm of responsibility. If someone is going to push me into a "real world" after however many years of my life, bring it on. Until then, I'm going to continue living in *my* real world and cease preparations for the next one. And at this point, I'm a little angry.

Who are teachers and authority figures to belittle my world? Because that's what they're doing, even if no one realizes it. By waving some mystical "real world" over ours heads in which we have to take care of ourselves and deal with actual problems and face "reality" and issues beyond our comprehension, they have made our lives infinitely smaller. Frankly, I am sick of adults looking at teenagers and marginalizing us. I am tired of being seen as less when my opinions and problems are just as real as any other person's.

So this is me rejecting that arbitrary framework. No longer will I operate with the assumption that I have to prepare for a world of scarcity and imponderable challenges. I recognize that life isn't easy but I refuse to believe that I can't handle it.

I call for an education system that respects its students, a world where young people are not treated as invalids who aren't ready and can't possibly understand but as curious, naturally driver learners. I want to be treated like a person, not a teenager. I want to be thrown in over my head. I want to tackle problems that seem insurmountable. I want to put to rest this idea that our world is pretend and a little bit silly.

My world is just as real as yours. Thank you for respecting that.

*This isn't about teachers, mind you. I think teachers are great, though I haven't had a lot of personal connection with them. I'm talking about the system that teachers work within. The system, not the teachers, are where my accusations are aimed.

A Bloggomentary!

The Life of a Vita in the Wild: January -- April 1st, 2011

Observations of General Life

• I've been watching a lot of Doctor Who. A lot of Doctor Who. Often in lieu of, you know, homework. Thus far I've finished seasons 1 - 4 (that's the 9th and 10th Doctors, mind you) and I'm on Ep.9, I believe, of Seasons 5. I don't feel like getting into my whole Who history now (not that it's extensive or confusing, but still), so I will leave you with this general assessment: whilst the 11th Doctor grows on me every time I see him* and the 10th Doctor has a special place in my heart for being my (and so many others') first Doctor and for being great (it applies to both the character and the actor [i.e. David Tennant... if you didn't know, I'm judging you. Kidding. Sort of]), I don't think I've ever loved a fictional character in quite the same way that I've loved the 9th Doctor. I'm sorry Christopher Eccleston didn't stay for another season because I do think that he actually lives and breathes the role. It's hardly even acting at that point. He just is the Doctor.

Point A: Doctor Who truly is one of the greatest pieces of television ever. Point B: Be it pathetic or encouraging, Doctor Who has, I think done a great deal in restoring my faith that every little bit of help counts. You can't save everything; you probably can't change the nature of a species; perhaps you sometimes intervene where you shouldn't or your moral compass becomes slightly askew; but the important thing is that you sacrifice and that you try your very hardest to make your little 'corner of the world' the best that it can possibly be. So.

• Chicago and the One Acts. I've raved on, raved about these enough in the past. Essentially: my school put on Chicago; I worked on the show; it was awesome and fun times were had. Now we're doing the One Acts. Not quite so time-consuming. Not quite so fun. (Not awful -- just not exhilarating or anything.)

Eating Habits

• Increased consumption of (many, many) delicious, buttery, French pastries.
• Other food.
• Addendum: basically, any food I can get my hands on. I swear, if my body mass actually reflected the amount of food I shove into my body, I would be my own one-woman obesity epidemic.

School Environment

• A few posts below, I've already talked my feelings regarding school. If you would like more evidence of my slow descent into insanity: here are some inane ramblings on the college process and this slightly more intelligent annoyance at the regurgitation of books. Et cetera.
• As far as what I've actually been doing at school that's been keeping me remarkably busy: Internal Assessments, busy work, essays, books, textbooks, tests, upcoming AP & IB exams, and other fun -- if I was saying that word out loud the sarcasm would probably give you radiation poisoning** -- things that are associated with one's junior year of high school.

Apparent Future Plans

• BEDA. How could I miss our (wait for it) third anniversary? (Cue rainbow strobe lights and disco balls!) Is that too intimate? Does it matter? I think not. Curiously enough, despite having blogged on this blog for three years (well -- nearly, and if you don't count my suspicious recent absences) I've never been able to maintain a personal, independent, non-clingy girlfriend-esque blog of my own. I think I'll drag up the old Follow Alaska blog (that was a failed blogging experiment if I ever did fail at one***), so pop over there if you desire to fill your eyes and soul with more of the wonderful words that these fingers crank out. I'm hoping that this round of the old BEDA game will reunite me with my blogging Muse. As of late I've fallen into the habit of not blogging more than I have of blogging and, well, I can no longer let down this wide and expansive readership. You're welcome, each and every one of you. You. Are. Welcome.
• Hopefully learning how to drive. There has been about a four month stall on the whole "getting behind the steering wheel and driving the goddamn car" thing, so I need to do that. Thing is, I really want to get my license and drive, but driving around neighborhoods is so. boring.
• Summer? Vacation? What is that? As of yet, I don't know either. I'm hoping to hoof it over to a localish nonprofit organization and volunteer (read: save the world) but, as with all things, that plan has fallen into the void that is Procrastination. It will happen, though.
• Let's be spontaneous. Spontaneity is good. Spontaneity is fun. Not combustion, though. I image that would hurt.

*Sounds like some bacterial growth. Ugh.

**Who even knows how that would work.

***Which, uh, I did.