The Kite Runner

10 Beautiful Things

5. America

A friend asked me to help her choose a topic for a college essay. "I either write about academic accomplishments, a piece of music that inspired me, or how my culture affects me."

"Well," I said, "What is your culture?"

"It's America. My cultural background is full of fast food, fat people, bad politics, too much focus on Hollywood stars, and kids who have no education because they not only hate the standardized testing but they don't have the money to pay for college."

And I said, "But what about the good things? Hamburgers at 2 a.m. Yuppies who drink Starbucks while complaining about corporate takeover. Where else can you pass a guy through the primaries who thinks economic recovery means selling himself as a bobble head doll? I think that's our culture. It's being able to tell the president where to shove it on national television. It's being able to choose to go to college despite the wishes of your parents, your money problems, because if you work hard enough it will happen. It's the ability to choose who you marry and what you worship, if anything at all."

And it is beautiful to me because some people get screwed over but in the end, where a person ends up is a product of their starting point and their actions. I know of no other place where a girl may grow up saying, "Someday I will be the president."

The USA began as a bunch of misfits and pissed off religious followers. Is it any wonder the lady who said "I'm a witch" may become a governor? Is it such a leap to imagine a New York where a mosque of the religion followed by the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Centers, may someday stand not a block from that site?

All questions of morality and ethics aside, I find I can't disbelieve that such things can happen here. I believe anything can happen here. I grew up being told that those numbers and letters I memorized in school could some day lead me to the White House. Given effort, determination, and a bit of talent (if I was lucky), I could be a rock star, a housewife, a general, a president. And given that I believe in choice above anything else, it makes sense that America is beautiful to me.

"If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar" (Hosseini).

This I Believe

10 Beautiful Things

6. Choice

A week ago I was asked to write an essay on the topic "This I Believe". No other guidelines, no suggestions except a word count. 500-600 words. How, I asked, can a person possibly sum up their entire belief system in 600 words? Every day we wake up and do things according to what we believe. We write essays, take stances, think, all based on the things we hold to be true. For very religious people, perhaps this is easy. They can sum up their beliefs in one word, a name, really. But what about for those people who don't know what they believe? What about those people who never thought about it in words, only in feelings and actions?

Thinking about what I believe in was the hardest thing I've ever done. I believe in so many things. I believe in people, that no matter how horrible a situation might seem, someday it will not be so horrible. That things will always get better.

I believe in beauty found both on magazine covers, and in nature. I think the only real beauty is the one we ascribe to things, to people. I believe my mother is one of the most beautiful people in the world. I believe my best friends are the most beautiful people.

I have found that there is nothing a person cannot express in words, so long as she has the right words and the right approach. Some things can't be said straight out. That's why we have books, to lead us to revelations that would never be the same when said in plain words.

All these things make up a part of my system, my philosophy. I do not believe in a God but I believe in something that we won't ever understand, some web that lies beneath the surface that no one can see or feel. I believe in things I cannot understand, and things that I never want to. But all the same, is that the most important part of my system? The belief in the unknown?

I decided that no, my greatest belief has always been the cause of all these other things. The reason that I do not believe in God, the reason that I believe in words and the mysterious: choice.

I think one of the most beautiful things is the ability to choose. A painter chooses his colors, as a writer chooses her words. A politician chooses to sign the bill, and an activist chooses to boycott a product. In the end, the force behind all of these things--even the force that compels us to give up this force--is choice. There is nothing immortal except what we choose to make so. To me, that is beautiful.

"I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change. Armed with reason, he can see two sides and choose: He can be divinely wrong. I believe in man's right to be wrong" (Allison and Gediman 19-20).

7. All of the Above

When something disappears from your life, that is when you realize what it is worth. Even the small things have the potential to mean something and mess up a sacred routine. Driving to school with a cold, I realize how sad I am that I can no longer sing in my car. I enter my first class of the day and find myself a little less cheery than normal. When I argue with my parents before leaving my house, I sit in my European history class distraught instead of getting to talk about my favorite subject. Small things in the scheme of life but so is the first bite of salad for the girl who is overweight.

Last week was a hard one. Of the many things that made it melancholy, I injured my foot. I believe it is a metatarsal fracture. Whatever it is prevented me from a weeks worth of running and not being able to participate in two meets. Then, on Friday I got sick. I almost feel like this sickness resulted from my attitude. My Labor Day weekend was one spent in my bed with the occasionally Google search or book to keep me company.

Now, I'm not trying to complain. What was a great resultant of such mishaps was something I noticed yesterday. My foot was still throbbing but I buckled up and went to cross country practice. My passion for the sport needs to constantly be re-lit and yesterday with rain drizzling on everything and band practice right after, I wasn't quite in the mood for it.

I went though with hopes that maybe, I can still succeed this season. The mood was drastically different and following through on such hopes and expectations was harder than I thought it would be on this day.

Oh, the same people were there and most were their normal selves.

Except for a friend of mine. I hesitate to put any adjective like 'good' or 'great' friend in front of my description of our relationship. I don't really know anything about him except for his best time on the cross country course. I do know that he is quite the joker and every time I go to practice, he is always talking to everyone and having a good time. He actually would bother me occasionally with punch lines taken a little to far or the occasional personal bubble invasion.

Yet, there he was, sitting on floor with his head in his hands.

I felt uncomfortable without his normal exuberance and somehow - wrong.

I didn't know what to say to him.

I don't think I would know what to say to my best friend had that been her - let alone this guy I only knew in passing.

Then you notice the small things and wonder what the heck you are doing - sitting there in air conditioning with the chance to do something.

Then when you push everyone out it is quiet the thin line between getting angry at anyone coming in or getting sentimental because they cared.

But, if you tried to do something in kindness then so be it. No one will be angry at you because you tried.

Perhaps, you did something great for someone without even realizing it.

So, keep smiling because to me, that is beautiful.

Bless Me, Ultima

10 Beautiful Things

8. Falling asleep to the sound of rain

When I was a kid my parents would take us on family vacations. We left in the early morning to avoid traffic but I was never awake then. I remember my mother picking me up, wrapped in my blanket, and carrying me out to the car. I lay half-awake, my head pressed to the glass window, not seeing anything but darkness but hearing the movement all around me. My brothers climbing into their seats, toys clattering. My parents speaking in hushed voices and the ignition humming. Then the bump of the curb as we backed out of the driveway.

All these things lulled me to sleep. Then, a few hours later I would wake when the car pulled into a rest stop. While my parents led my brothers to the restrooms, I curled on the seat and listened to the quiet.

The best times were when I woke to a gray sky and a thousand droplets a fraction of an inch from my face. Just glass between the world and I. Sometimes I counted those drops and pretended each was a family like mine. The smaller ones were people all alone, but they eventually drifted into a larger drop and became a big family.

Other times I lazed between consciousness and sleep, listening to the rain hit the roof. It seemed endless and impossible that water should fall from the sky. With nothing to hold it up, no one to sprinkle the moisture onto the earth below, and still rain fell. Every time I fell asleep to the sound of rain, it felt like being cradled in the hands of a mystery. And I guess that's the only time I ever believed in a god, when there was no explanation for something so beautiful and it didn't seem to need an explanation. It just was.

"'There are many gods,' Cico whispered, 'gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards-but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones'" (Bless Me Ultima 237).

The Lovely Bones

10 Beautiful Things

9. Dry Leaves

There are no leaves in Arizona. There are stubby green things that yellow and fall off in a carpet of crackling wildfire-risk, but there are no leaves.

I think if everything in the world died and I was the only one left, I would miss leaves the most. On vacation to the East Coast in autumn, the trees were orange and red and yellow as if on fire. Then when the leaves fell, people walked on them. A leaf would become brown and wrinkled, desiccated, and shoes would crunch it into the pavement. Once it wasn't bright and golden, it was worthless. All the life was gone from it. There is nothing pretty about death.

And yet there are monuments to the dead. Great bronze statues immortalizing those who have gone before, who have done something that no one else did. Names, carved in neat lines into metal and stone. That is death, too. So why don't we shy away from it?

I remember freshman year of high school, the buses would stop at two schools. At the second, I sat in my seat staring out the window. All the trees along the side of the bus pick up lane shed their tiny green stubs at the same time. The gutters clogged with little bits of yellow from the flowers-that-aren't, to be swept away over the weekend. Then the dead things would fall again and the cycle repeated itself.

When there was wind, it picked up the leaves. They danced in eddies, sometimes falling, sometimes drifting away, somewhere else, somewhere not here. Even though they were dead, they went places. The world picked them up again.

Then in other places, where the trees dropped their leaves in great piles to wade through. Those leaves barely moved in the slightest breeze. A lot of those leaves are never picked up. They grow brown with age and disintegrate slowly until the winter snows cover them. When the snow clears again, they are gone. All things dead get buried eventually. No one remembers the leaves of the last autumn, only this one.

I think dry leaves are beautiful, strange as that may seem to those who acquaint beauty with glamour and makeup. But leaves on a tree are pretty, things to be smiled at and admired from afar. Dry leaves are ground beneath the soles of hundreds of shoes. Dry leaves are buried by snow and dry up in the sunshine. They become uninteresting and flat, slivers of the past trampled beneath the present. But they are broken up and become dirt and ash and fertilizer. We walk on dry leaves. We breathe them in. All the time we sweep them away into neat piles, we are creating order out of chaos. Life from the bones.

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it” (The Lovely Bones 320).

A Certain Slant of Light

10 Beautiful Things

10. Light.

I wake up to the blinds pulled shut and a dark, dark room. If I peer closely, I can see the outline of books against the far wall, and the faintest reflection on my computer screen. I wake in darkness, thin and fragile. The only light I see slips through cracks in the blinds, which are white and horizontal.

The light enters there. Morning sunshine is golden white, purer than the purest metal. Those fey strips of brightness are strangely lovely against the dark. They are neon letters written in a dead language, still alive and vibrant but unreadable. Someday perhaps I will understand what they say. Then, I know, I will have lived.

Slants of light decorate this strange Earth. In a prison cell in Somalia, the morning sun creeps through gritty bars. And a prisoner wakes in the darkness to watch the light. He doesn't know why it's so fascinating. The Sun has risen for millions of years, has cast all manner of rays on objects near and far, alive and dead. Yet this slant of light is special because it is his slant of light. The beautiful thing is not that the Sun is shining, but that the Sun is shining on these bars, in this place, on him. It is the loveliest thing he's ever seen. It is as delicate as hope.

Enter now the pink-bedecked bedroom of a five-year-old girl. Unicorns prance in wild lines across the walls, obscured by shadow. Her nightlight burnt out, plunging the room into darkness. And so she wakes with tentative blinks, wondering why there is no light to guide her, only the sunshine leaking beneath her floral curtains. It scares her. Her heart beats faster in an well-known rhythm. An ancient dance. Even as her mind registers fear, her eyes soak in the light. She doesn't know why it calls to her. It is a siren's song, these strips of piercing gold against the velvet dark.

Somewhere deep in the snowy mountains of Northern Europe, a thin woman wakes up late. She pushes up from the hard bed, resigned to the work ahead of her. Then she stops, her gaze caught on the sunshine creeping between boards in the wall. It is an ugly house she has, but it serves her well enough. Winters are spent hunched around a fire until only embers remain. Summers are spent chopping wood with callused hands. There is no time to waste staring at a trick of the light. But the way it shines carves pretty patterns on the wall, reminding her of all the things she dreamt of, until her dreams died beneath the weight of life. She is reminded of that weight every day. She never thought about her dreams until now, remembering what it feels like to plan and imagine a life beyond the constant cold and ache from work. The light stirs the shadows in her heart.

Light, that light, the light that throws away the dark of reality and reveals the truth nonetheless. Because that which is true is not always real. And from a little girl waking in a pink room to a prisoner watching the bars of his cells, they all feel the brush of light through the cobwebbed shadows.

A stir of brightness, a certain slant of light.

"Like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone" (A Certain Slant of Light).

Cherry Blossom Extract

I am constantly amazed by the progression of life. How one day, we are all best friends and then the next day a new routine sets in and we are no longer anything at all besides strangers passing at night.

It is also very curious how everyone loves each other but no one really likes one another.

I wore my track shirt to band last night, the one that says: "Don't do your best, do better than your best." If I was on the football turf with people that instead of trumpets and flutes wore spikes and throw discus, no one would have said anything. They understand the notion. Such is the world of track and field - numbers on scoreboards where milliseconds really do matter (at least in the sprints).

I kept getting comments from the band kids though. Not that they don't strive to do better than their best, but we aren't graded in any real way. We only have four categories to fluctuate in between and band is more of a team than I would consider track.

The comments I kept getting last night where along the lines of, "If you do better than your best, you have to do even better than that the next time and it will keep going and going! You'll never win!"

Exactly.

That is exactly how you win.

It was so easy to fall into routine at my shadowing. I would come in right when they opened and put my stuff down, talk about music and the differences between it and entertainment and what one I was truly working for. Then we'd lapse into a comfortable silence. Then, twenty hours later I'm not part of that routine anymore and it feels...fast as if I've gotten another grey hair or a wrinkle. I like both though, they make me feel distinguished.

Pride and Prejudice

Today I shadowed a lady at the International Student Center at a university. I met two girls from Kuwait. In the lobby while we waited, an Asian guy walks in. He stands around for a while, watching the sports broadcast on television. It was a soccer match between the PRK and AUS.

Then one of the girls looks over at him and asks, "PRK? What's that stand for?"

And everyone in the lobby sort of shrugs. I want to tell her it stands for the People's Republic of Korea, but then it would seem like I'd been eavesdropping. So I don't say anything.

The girl's sister says, "You're Korean, aren't you? Which do you support?"

It took me a moment to realize she meant, North or South Korea? And the guy replied, "South."

The girl said, "Of course."

And suddenly on the television, the camera pans out over the crowd. A big sign is displayed by one of the fans that reads, "Kim Jong-il thinks I'm at work". No one in the lobby says anything. I guess there wasn't any need.

Through the Trees

Most of my days for a couple years now have been pretty similar. I try to run daily and incorporate at least the smallest music into my life. I’ve lived in the same house for as long as I can remember. Right now, I’m in limbo between my junior year and my senior year. We’re getting a new band director and I’m drum major. The people I know, they’ve been with my for years.

Second semester junior year, so just a little bit ago, I did Fusion Indoor Percussion. I experienced a little taste of something outside of my home town.

I fell in love with music again.

It’s weird because I’m always writing about running or music it seems. That is what I’m made of though. Those are the things that have brought me to today and I like to say this a lot even though it is kind of silly: “Music has saved me in a lot of ways.” Running has given me something to strive for but let me tell you something, the first time I ever stood on that drum major podium, I cried. I’m more open about this now. I can hear my voice telling anyone who can listen and then I laugh, like it was a hilarious moment. It wasn’t but I look at that memory fondly. What I always forget to add is that one of the reasons I cried was because of the kindness that strangers showed me. I didn’t conduct in front of my marching band the first time - I got to conduct in front of a camp of other drum majors. All they said were words of encouragement.

I think that if you were to separate my life into categories and instead of chronological order, simply through them in a pot of frequencies, I would have spent most of my life with the schools I attended. There is a point where music and running over laps. Once a month each semester, twice a school year. Life gets hectic and I feel like I live in my car or at least, on the pavement of my high school. Not under blistering sun or anything but to face sunsets and sun rises. To sit with my music coming from headphones or my thoughts to fill voids.

And you know, I’ve changed.

Something is happening to me and I don’t know what.

No scratch that, I certainly know what is happening to me. Life is.

I just got back from a run. My feet are sore in weird spots and sweat is drying at the nape of my neck. The run wasn’t the fastest or farthest I have ever gone but it was a good one nonetheless. I thought about things. I haven’t really thought deeply like that in a while - it was refreshing as if all the dust blew away in the wind and now all that is left is a shiny lacquer finish.

Tomorrow morning, I leave for the United States Military Academy Summer Leaders Seminar. It is a week long experience for those competitive in a nomination and appointment to the academy to not only take the physical but to get a taste of what life as a cadet is.

I’m scared.

As in, I’ve never been more scared in my life for the safety of my future. It seems like tomorrow is the end of something and the birth of a completely new experience that I’m not ready for.

I think I’ll be okay and eventually I’ll be far past it but it just seems like everything is going to change.

I hate to steal Sara’s thunder but last night, I read The Five People You Meet in Heaven. It was incredible and it got me thinking. As I was running, trying to find a direction in my life, does it really matter? As long as I’ve got friends, I don’t think it does. I think it’s important for an individual to be happy and to look around as what they’ve already got.

No matter where I go in life, I think if we get to choose our heaven, mine would be the place behind my high school. After the neighborhood and past the cactus is a place made up of brush that turns green during the monsoons and yellow for the rest of the year. The trial is carved out of ATV tracks long before I ever discovered it. It is peaceful. It is also the closest I’ve ever come to that elusive ‘perfect run’.

Through the Trees - David Tolk

PS Sorry for taking so long to blog. I’ll have to double post this summer. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say anyway.

Handmaid's Tale

You sit there and you think about all the pieces that went missing. Like strings, the parts of the past connect back. Raise one hand and a million are caught on the delicate hairs of your arm. Spider's web.

Every day something is left behind. Even if it's just skin cells, or a chance of excitement, or an opportunity missed. Then the chances one takes leaves others unchosen, and those are webs, too. Until your skin droops and eyes grow weary and mind numb. Until you grow old and there is no part of you not weighed down by the sheer number of strings. All the choices and chances, conscious or otherwise, make a person old. Everyone grows old. That's why I don't believe in vampires. Vampires couldn't exist because they don't grow old, meaning they have no webs to weigh them down.

Then the web grows closer the tighter you shut your lips. The words gather up, build there, where no one can see. People walk around with secrets on their tongues like bittersweet candy. Some love it; love the thought that they know things no one else does. Some hate it, and spill the words on the ground like a wave of knowledge and gossip and secrets. The words sink in there. The earth eats them and where they encounter human skin, people eat them too. We live on words.

That's why censorship never works. People want to know. People always want to know, whether it's something damning or liberating or superfluous. Every bit of info is hoarded or discarded like bits of nuts packed away for winter. Only the best stick, because only the best weave their webs around us. We can't help what we hear. And what we hear draws strings, more strings. We want those strings, though they make us older and cynical or hurt. Because occasionally, the strings are pure. They hum a pleasant tune, a familiar song, in our ears when we think of them. While censorship saves us from the hard things, it keeps us from the good. So much nonsense to sift through, but it's all worth it to find one gorgeous golden strand and wrap it close around ourselves.

I couldn't live without speaking. Being able to speak and write make me more important than someone who cannot communicate, because I can contribute and we are judged by what we give and do. No vegetable was ever great. No procrastinator, no slacker, because the great ones always communicate the ideas and thoughts that strike us as great. The golden threads or the black ones, the pure that hum and hum in our minds or the evil ones that squeeze us tight. They affect us, the two, which is why we have beloved leaders and hated tyrants. They wrap webs around us of their making and our own.

Handmaid's Tale for Offred, who found a voice even when the web around her dragged her down. We live by what we do with what we've got.

The Great Gatsby

It's cliche and old-fashioned and unpopular but I really do love America. I think it's the one place where I could be a tattoo artist and chef and diplomat and no one would think twice. We're sort of made of those kinds of dreams; the ones that don't necessarily fit right. The ones that take sorting out and sometimes at the end they still don't fit, like chewed-on puzzle pieces shoved into place. But it's the ability to keep shoving, keep on going, that makes us different. It's the idea that if we shove hard enough, for long enough, someday those pieces will fall into place. No matter the pieces, the shape or size or vastness, they all will find a way to make a picture, a picture so wide and beautiful only we can see it--we, the individual--because it was always our dream to begin with no matter what outside forces mutilate it, no matter how it changes and withers over time, since in the end it was always originally our American Dream. And it always will be.

I think the things they should write on gravestones aren't dates or "Beloved" or "Father" but dreams. So when a stranger walks by the grave, they will stop to read each inscription and the person will mean as much to them as some distant relative who visits once a year. So that the person, whether they got their precious dream or not, will be remembered not for achievements but for intentions.

Which begs the question: what would your inscription read?

I believe in two American Dreams. I believe in the popular dream and the personal dream. The popular dream being what everyone thinks they should want: children, a good job, a nice car. The personal dream being a motorcycle, a silly tattoo, a one-night stand, a sailboat, a calm day, to survive a flood, to kiss a girl, to buy a mule and sell the house. The small goals that build and build, when taken individually mean little, but when stuck together with cement hope equates a skyscraper: a person.

Then we live and day by day the cement erodes from wind and rain and voices too loud and voices that won't speak anymore. Sometimes a tree crashes down and the building falls. Sometimes there are few cloudy days, sometimes there are nothing but cloudy days and the distant winter hope of a sun that never quite appears. For some, the dream is in every ray of sunshine, horded away and cherished. For others there is no such thing as sunlight.

What is my dream? I know it. I do. It lurks in me, behind every thought and word. It's there, right there in my chest where my soul is. It's in my eyes, but it never reaches my lips. If someone asked me what I want in life I'll say, "To live" because that's as far as I can define it. To live in a way no other has--that's a given. But to live in a way that at my deathbed I will not say "I did all I could" but I will say "Damn it, one more hour so I can finish this chapter." That's a life well lived.

I pray to the gods of dice that I get a decent roll. But I know if I don't I'll just roll again and again, even if I'm that one-hundred-billionth chance that never gets beyond a pair of ones. I know it because that's a part of my dream too. I will fail again and again and I will always try again, because it's my dream to try again and succeed. Everyone great has failed and tried again. More cement between the bricks, I say.

So when someone asks me what my dream is, "To live" is all they're getting, and maybe I'll point to my chest and say, "The soul wants what the soul wants".

I chose The Great Gatsby for Daisy. She's a ditz who fell out of love and in with money because she was too preoccupied reaching her dream to realize exactly what it was. Not money, or power, but Gatz. That moment when they realize they've given up the thing they want the most is terrible and poignant because it's true. True things always hurt and heal the most.

Mr.Brightside (Jacques Lu Cont Mix)

These days have been weird - out of the ordinary routine type of weird.

It’s 2:14 PM and I haven’t done much as all, I think I got out of the shower at 1:30 something where I used up the last of my Pineapple scented body wash that I got in Hawaii. Tomorrow is Monday which means back to school in a frenzy of AP tests and test taking and in my case - taping together math notebooks and writing a paper about socialist ideas that I may or may not agree with.

Today, like every Sunday, I visited the post secret website to view other people’s outcries that occasionally shadow my own inner feelings. I was struck by one from a professor that said he threw away all his student’s end of the year papers because the lack of originality.

I always wondered if reading the same prompt over and over again made a teacher angry or if they just were satisfied that the student was fitting into the lines and thus, eligible for the real world.

The first time I took my state’s state standard test for writing, I meet the standard, which is all you need to graduate, but I didn’t exceed which is what you need for a scholarship instate. I often wonder if it was because I decided to go out of the box. I knew I had a chance to retake it (and I did, and exceeded J) but I wondered what would happen if I just did something no one expected.

Apparently, I was coherent but no one was impressed by my ideas.

I think that made me sadder then actually having to retake the test. I wanted someone to be like, wow! How clever this was different then all 4085094 tests I just read!

Other tests, I’m not so lucky to try something different It’s a one time deal. I don’t know what they want from me.

Sometimes, I feel like school stifles creativity. If not for homework, would we be creating works of art - compositions inspired by endless sky instead of enclosed classrooms or ideas sprung up from city life instead of just reading about it.

It’s funny to think what changes you. A single second, a 15 year friendship, a voicemail, or a television show.

I went to speak to one of my teachers but he wasn’t there - a meeting was taking longer than he thought so instead I resolved to visit a teacher I’m not even sure likes me. He just continued doing what he was doing and I resolved to sit in the back and pull out some homework but really that was just for show.

I surveyed the classroom - all the walls were lined with colorful ‘things’ to be the most specific. There were cellular respiration diagrams drawn haphazardly with the markers that smell like fruit and diagrams of evolution. A photo of a butterfly changing for a striking cyan to a subdued orange color. It was hard to find the stark white brick behind it all. I realized, he was a good teacher, or at least a person. It wasn’t his fault I didn’t like him or visa versa, he was trying his best and I was trying mine most of the time anyway and sometimes, we all just have those kind of days.

Then we got to talking and maybe it was my imagination but we had said sorry for a few things without literally speaking such syllables.

So, my life got a little less hectic.

Teachers want to see you succeed and I think that if you realize this and keep this in mind, a lot of things make more sense and a lot of things become easier.

When I fill in bubbles and get assigned a number based on how well I did, I appreciate the genius of it all. It all is really such simplicity that makes our society run - how else can you evaluate so many minds? Perhaps, you do need to stick them in a room and explain to them some things and it’s a combination of good teachers, good luck, and good genes and that’s okay.

Maybe, I’m a socialist.

But, I wouldn’t want to discuss politics so close to dinner and words and titles can never even start to scratch the surface.

Then one day I was talking to someone and he didn’t believe you could ever get to know someone fully and completely, even over a lifetime.

What he said made me sad but I realized there was no cynical connotations and that nothing he said was sad at all simply fact. It would be said if we could know someone fully and completely. Then, they stop surprising us and it’s always good to live on your toes because then you’re a little closer to heaven.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwJZJ9GyqKQ

The Catcher in the Rye

I guess it started this morning when I woke up fifteen minutes before my alarm. Half day for AIMS testing. I'd never admit it out loud, but good thing there's standardized testing so I can sleep in 2 hours four days a year. Take that, state.

Then I went and paid $12.56 for coffee at Starbucks--one hot chocolate, one white mocha, one peppermint mocha. For me, P, and L. Forgot J. The other two paid me back.

My left arm sunburnt from sitting out in the Sun for 2 more hours waiting for classes to start. S wasn't there, so there weren't any cards to play 31 or Bullshit with. We sat there a while on the red bench and talked about nothing. It's amazing how much nothing there is to talk about. 2 hours' worth.

Classes started. I had TA--teaching assistant. Mrs. L doesn't like assigning work after testing, so she had each student sing the "Quadratic Song". Then they had to sing Happy Birthday to a girl in the class. Her face turned pink and she was shy. I laughed too hard.

Lunch was a similar waste. 40 more minutes spent staring at a tabletop in the hope that something exciting will happen. Maybe the fire alarm will go off--but no, that would mean going back into the Sun. My arm was turning redder by the minute. Maybe this would be the day some emo druggie kid takes out his self-hatred in the form of a gun and a bullet. That would be exciting. Anything would be fine. Anything at all.

4th, I learned how many people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. Then we watched color footage. A man watching the mushroom clouds called them beautiful. I guess they were, even if they peeled your flesh back.

More preparation for standardized testing in 6th. Signed up for the ACT again. Signed up for a test I care nothing for beyond the number it will assign to me, and I will prove faithful to. The number that categorizes me, so I read easy on paper. It's an important number.

I ate Chinese food with E, EA, LN, and P after school. The whole restaurant was empty but for us. The server folded napkins the whole time we ate sesame chicken and lo mein. He almost meant his smiles. I meant my laughs. It was a good time, if short. Maybe all the good times are short. Maybe, like death, they make things more precious, if bittersweet. Like the quote, "All great and precious things are lonely." I forget who said it. They were precious.

Then I find out from Facebook that N, my brother, dropped out of college, got kicked out of the house, and joined the Army. I register a complete and utter lack of surprise. We are the sum of our past and our intentions. He had neither. No one told me what he'd done, so I guess they aren't surprised any more than I. Never get so low as to be unsurprising. It's the worst thing.

I read a while. Then I got the urge to give away everything unnecessary in my room. I don't want these bracelets, or books I read once, or empty pens, or notebooks. I don't want the stuffed animals or awards or birthday cards. I'm not sure, but I don't think sentiment means much anymore. I don't want my emotions invested in tangible things. I think that makes them unchangeable. So I want to get rid of them, all of them, even the plastic cube puzzle and 8th grade painting. I don't want anyone to have the ones that matter the most, but the rest, they can take. I want someday to be able to stand up and lace up my sneakers and leave out the front door. I want to be able to walk down the street past the slumbering houses and it won't matter then, all the things I've left behind. There will be just pillows and pens left. I don't hold stock in pillows and pens.

The Catcher in the Rye, because anyone who's read it understands. And if you don't, you haven't really read it.

Shh

Dear Sara,

There is a lot of what we do that is formed from preconceptions of what we should do. I would never have done that if I didn’t think you or even he would do the same. But then, whoever I am thinking of at the moment doesn’t even do it so I get a little angry. Not like I want to throw that pretty floral vase against the wall or anything but angry like I want to just sit in the fetal position and get pissed off at he world.

What’s the opposite of cynical? Whatever word that is - it’s me.

Not that I’m mad at anything or anyone right now.

I’m just a little frustrated.

Remember when the rain used to come down and I had my best ideas. Well, I don’t. I haven’t had a creative twitch in such a long time and it is making me sick. Maybe, the only difference between now and then is that my ego has been deflated. When I used to write - type away in the morning hours before the sun rose - it felt good. I knew I was rambling but the thought were pure.

Now I feel stifled and every time I try to write all that comes out is colors of grey.

I also feel rather superficial.

When I speak of colors I lack sensory of feeling a pencil rattle against textured paper. Instead I see mannequin dolls lined up through out a concrete jungle. If I where to add color it would be the form of a scarf that everyone else is wearing instead of a splash of angry water color.

Alas, grey is my favorite color. Not quite black - a color that nothing shows up on but grey - the color of Atlantic coast beaches and a hazy Los Angeles morning. I like it because it made all the other colors glitter.

I don’t know why I’m writing angry. Am I writing angry? It certainly feels like it. I had a pretty good day today.

I listened to music and talked to friends.

But that’s it. I tried to write a poem to perform at a slam poetry shindig at my school but it was no good.

So, I’ve been working on some essays - fiction. Yet, they are going no where. My freshmen ramblings deciphering the meaning of ‘carpe diem’ sound more sincere then my recent skirmishes of real life - events that can’t be summed into two words of Latin descent.

Or any saying at all.

In all actuality, I should be riveted that the people I love the most can’t be summed up in one expectation.

Last year second semester, I came to school really early even though I didn’t have a zero hour so I could just think about things and sometimes a few people would sit next to me and we would never really say anything - it was just company.

But, one day the silence was too overpowering so we spoke about something. Obviously, not important things but what I remember was trying to find the words to describe something. I feel like I’m always searching for words but they’re just like the grey I love so much…a floating background color.

I settled on something like a tesseract. I think that’s what they’re called? It was in A Wrinkle in Time and how you traveled from dimension to dimension.

Well anyway, the words I chose that day were that people are like that and every time you learn something new about that person, they get another dimension so soon your best friend is multilateral but I digress because I don’t much understand math terms.

Speaking of math, I think it’s beautiful and yet I can’t bring myself to truly sit down and study it.

I was looking at an electronic version of a graph dealing with sin, cos, tan and all that jazz and how the circles unfurled themselves. It was quite mesmerizing.

Oh look, I managed to ramble and that was a very nice feeling and finally my fingers are slower than what’s going on in my head.

All things equal (what’s the Latin word for that? Ceritus pleribus? No…I hesitate to include such a guess at words, for all I know I could be saying F U! But, I‘m not) it does make me a bit crazed to know that once something becomes beautiful to me I stop understanding it. Perhaps, that’s what beauty is. Something so different that it blows your mind and all you can do is stop and stare.

Economics, the bane of my junior year existence, probably has some merit to it and yet these simple concepts continue to allude me.

I feel like caring about school is really superficial and picking the college you want to go to is the most selfish decision you can make. Not that it’s a bad thing - throw out your connotations!

But right now, superficial is feeling bad.

But I’m tired..

Well, indoor percussion is over and it’s sad but all good things must come to an end - besides…life is getting crazy. I’m kind of freaking out because I need track to end too since these coming up days are always hellish.

The end of school is so welcome and yet I distain it as it is when I must work harder than ever before.
Stupid letters on a paper.

Eh, perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow or today, depending on when you read this. I just really want a school day where I can sit and relax instead of consistently doing homework.

Next week, because of AIMS (which I finally got all figured out…CHS thought I didn’t exceed and I’m like…why do I have papers that say I do??? Way to fail…) we get a late in so our schedule is block period with Friday being full schedule. I hate full schedule on Monday…but if I finish all my homework over the weekend I get two days of relaxation since we are on block schedule.

That was confusing I’m sure.

I have a friend who does periods 1 - 4 at CHS and 5 - 6 at Empire. Seems like it would be rough because your classes don’t coincide with our schedule but I will be writing angry letters if they switch us to your schedule.

Full schedule hurts my back I have like 480450384 books but I guess if it means less homework I can invest in a chiropractor. Small price to pay for a normal circadian rhythm.

-Anne

Shh - Frou Frou

The Fountainhead

I had one of those moments today. The ones where you're just sitting looking at a person you've known forever, and you realize you don't know them at all.

It all has to do with seeing people. Some people you see as friends or family--familiar, right? And you don't think much of it. You meet them every day until the contours of their faces, the shape of their hands, becomes second nature. And somewhere along the line you stop thinking of them as people at all, just as parts of your life. Like their only purpose is to carry around with them--to school, to work, to bed--the part of you that you give out.

Then there are the people people. The ones you glimpse at the mall, on the street. You see them and think, "Wow that lady's hair is fake" or "He looks older than my dad". You think that they are all the same, these people. They are all a part of the invisible mask you label "society". And all those faces you file away under that category without a thought.

The strange moments, though--those are the ones when you realize that people are individuals. You look at a mouth and a nose and the hair you've seen for half a decade and they all look foreign. There's something there, in those eyes, that you can't recognize. Because you've never noticed it there before, or it's never been there before.

That's when you think, "Oh. She's a person. She's not a piece of me. She's not a part of a mask, a sequined bead stuck on, a wisp of feather. She's not a name, or a face. She's not the words that come out of her mouth or the tilt of her head or the curve of her handwriting. She's a person. She's real."

So much of what we see is sunk into our impressions. Glasses make an intellectual. Muscles make an athlete. Expensive clothing makes a snob. Blonde hair makes a bimbo.

I guess that's why we're so surprised when the unexpected happens. We don't expect unpredictability; that's why it sticks with us. That's why the aced calculus test for the goth girl bothers us. That's why the pettiness in a sweet boy makes us cringe.

The only thing to wonder is, if we are not the shape of our arms or the lisp in our voice, what are we? The arch of our foot? The light in our laugh? And why is it important, to be known as an individual? Why can't we be content as that bead or that feather on society's mask?

I sort of like the idea of selfishness. Like perhaps the "selfless" people are the ones who aren't people anymore, because they've given up the individual in favor of others. To serve others, perhaps, but to give oneself up nonetheless. Moderation, maybe? We can't be all one or the other, selfless or selfish, lest we forget ourselves, or we forget others. I think that's why the unexpected moments surprise us. When we look at a person, really look at them, and realize they have secrets too. They are selfish, they are selfless, they don't know who they are any more than we. Then our image of them is shattered. And some of us pick up the same pieces and fit them the same way. The goth girl is still goth. The kid with glasses is still smart. And the rest...? The rest are the slim few, the small percent, that fit the pieces a different way. The ones who realize their friends have a purpose in life beyond being their friends. Their parents are individuals. They are all "people", but they are not all the same people.

That's why I picked "The Fountainhead". It supports complete selfishness. And even though I disagree with that, at least it's not complete selflessness. Somewhere in between sounds about right.

Congratulations

Today, I ran at the University of Arizona for a varsity track meet. As a 2 miler, we got to run in the middle of the college meet. I freaked out! I also ran the fastest time I have ever run for 3200m. It felt amazing.

This is not my story. What was important - a couple events before and after my race. Before my race, I got to say hello to a girl who used to run track with me as hurdler. She was exactly what I remembered and so friendly - not afraid to say hello to us high school kids.

The other event happened while I was sitting on the bleachers watching the college girls run. I scanned the pack running the 5000m and saw a girl who used to run distance with me! She is a gorgeous girl and the best word to describe her is simply, cool. Really cool. She was always a fast runner and she was near the end of the pack but I was so happy for her!

I know she loves running.

I don't think I can convey what I want to convey here, so I'll move on.

When you meet someone, you remember their name and who they are but years from now - what's left?

I hope it is something good and exciting.

I remember a girl with long blonde hair who was my 'competition'. We were just like each other. One day, I stepped on the high school track for the first time. We were both in eighth grade and then we ran a warm up mile. I don't think I've ever ran that fast in my life. Keeping up with her was brutal but I didn't want to let her know how tired I was so I pushed and pushed.

As I sat in the car ride from my first time at the college track as a junior, I couldn't remember her name. Finally, as we exited the freeway, I remembered.

We both just wanted to be great.

Congratulations - We both made it.

I didn't see her at the track today. Last I heard she was very happy to have made the cheerleading team at the school down the road.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MknhYSj_w-I

Faustus

I don't think I believe in fate. It feels to me like an excuse, an explanation, the same way the gods of old were explanations for the weather and a baby's death. But now, instead of plugging the hole in our knowledge with gods, we fill the emptiness up with "fate".

It's the worst thing in the world, being responsible. Not only because you feel compelled to meet and exceed expectations, but because if you don't, nothing else matters. And then there are the people who feel no such obligation, who would rather enjoy their own life than improve the lives of others; and if someone says that's selfish, well, we're only human once. I think there is a lot I would give to be one of those people, but then I'm responsible, so if the choice were presented to me I'd do the responsible thing. In that way we choose our fate, and we say it is fate because we don't realize we've chosen it and we continue to choose it until we change or we die.

I guess you could say it was fate that things exist because without things there would be no fate, but what's that matter anyway? It's all rather pointless semantics, which is probably why I hate theoretical philosophy when it has no relevance or impact on anything modern. At the same time, I adore the question of coincidence vs. fate because while I don't believe in fate being preordained, I do believe in choosing fate. So while a baby's life isn't mapped out for her from the moment she's born, whether she is responsible or not becomes her fate. Like Faustus, we choose our damnation, whether that be to irresponsibility, hell, or just an early death. In this case, it's the path, not the destination. No matter what a person believes in, I think sometimes we have to put aside our fear of endings because there are more important things to us, to mortals, than the end, even if everything we do leads to it. It's how we get there, not where we end up.

Lovegood

I hope you never look back on your life and get sad.

I hope you never wish you were born to be someone else.

Isn't it weird how you'll be somewhere different in a couple of years. Or perhaps, you'll be in the very same place.

But it's okay.

Sometimes, I think the only reason faith exists or a believe that someone is guiding our hand is because it feels better.

and that's okay.

I've been dabbling in religion and ideas lately. I've given up Facebook for 40 days and even though I still finish my homework at the same rate, I do more interesting things and not worry about other people's gossip.

"Propaganda is putting thoughts in my head.
Sure, they know our days of childhood are dead."
http://www.myspace.com/ministryofmagicmusic

Dracula

6 Things About Everything

1. Such dreams! I remember when I was small, I had a wind-up box that played “Over the Rainbow”, and that was what I fell asleep to for 10 years. If anyone were to ask me, “What’s your theme song?” I wouldn’t have to think about it. Not pop, no Lady Gaga or Breaking Benjamin. Just the song that haunted my sleep so long the wind-up box became a wind-up person. As the first notes come my limbs get heavy and my eyelids droop. I shut them and suddenly there’s no such thing as a book of literary merit, or a grade, or failure. Perhaps that’s why we are so disenchanted, then, because we were always so enchanted to begin with. To fall into oblivion like clouds, like powdered snow, like “Over the Rainbow” and a pillow. That’s what we grow on. If we were vampires, we’d feed not on blood but on dreams.

2. Then I wake up. The pillow isn’t so soft, but it’s there, and it’s real. Not like the things I imagine, like movie clips pasted together, when I’m not thinking of real things. And it’s a true thing; that I never dream of anything I wish to dream about. But you can’t wish your subconscious into submission. That’s the reason it’s your subconscious, not your conscious. If we could control everything we imagine we’d never dream of zombies or darkness or glorious strange worlds. And then there would be no Dr. Seuss, no Final Fantasy, no World of Warcraft. No fiction, no insight, no words. As terrified as we are of things we can’t control, it’s no wonder we have such nightmares.

3. Words. Letters clumped together, hopefully in a pattern, more than often not. Sometimes the words make sentences. Sometimes the sentences make words. I Think Imagination Says Things Rarely Understood (by) Everyone. We can cheat a little. We all cheat a little. And sometimes when those sentences don’t make sense, they make the most sense. Just like when someone tells the truth, sometimes they aren’t telling the real truth. I think maybe there’s more truth in fiction than in any thick biography. Dead people have lessons to teach, but imaginary people teach the lessons we can’t learn from the dead. That’s why we put flowers on the graves, and go home and read a book. The dead teach us their mistakes, and books teach us our successes.

4. The regrets that weigh us down make us the lightest. Have you ever seen someone who’s never made a mistake? It’s quite irritating, actually. You glare a little, like you can’t help it, and they’re never your friend for that. Too perfect, you think. They’re too perfect to be real—they shouldn’t be real. They’re just characters, made-up people. But remember that the made-up people teach us something too. Most of the time, however, it turns out the perfect person is the one who just covers up their flaws a little better than the rest. You get to know them and it turns out they let their friend attempt to commit suicide. They got a B in PE. They don’t write in complete sentences, and they don’t have any lessons to teach and too many to learn. I want to meet a made-up person. I think they would be earthier than anyone who’s ever made a mistake. Treat regrets like balloons. The more you have, the less you can touch the ground. That’s guilt, I guess.

5. And truth be told (it always will), I’m heartily sick of the future and I’m especially sick of the past. I’m writing in a composition book and the teacher says, “Today we’re making plans for the future” and the entire class groans. Why? Because we hate the future. It’s even more uncertain than death. In fact it’s probably the antithesis of death because at least we know we’re going to die. We don’t know we’ll have a future. Which is why I’m sick of looking for it. If life were a corridor lined with doors, I’d spend my time looking behind every one for that inescapable yet elusive “future” of which I’m hearing so much. And the past is no better! We must learn from the past. This I know, from dead men. More so from the words of dead men, because no one cares for a corpse but everyone cares for the words of a corpse. Possibly we realize only words escape death, and only in the end when all people die will words die too. Until then they’re the constant; the past, the corpses, the words. Sometimes when I learn about history I just want to leave. I don’t want to spend my life avoiding mistakes. Yet at the same time it’s the only way to live where we don’t become those sad unearthly corpses.

6. “What do you believe in?” God help me if I ever say God. I believe in souls. If that means I believe in God, okay. If it means I’m a raging uneducated atheist, that’s okay too. But souls! There must be souls, I think. “I think, therefore I am”. What else can account for us? Us, people, greedy, sentimental, loving, hateful, people. I don’t believe in science when it comes to souls. Souls trump all. We exist, and we die, and perhaps there’s something left after death but perhaps there isn’t. It doesn’t matter because we have souls when we’re alive, and those souls spill out of us in everything. We gather things to us, in rooms, in books, in friends, that reflect our souls. And those who paint and those who write are all attempting to do the same thing: put into words some indescribable aspect of ourselves that we won’t ever be able to explain, but attempt and attempt nonetheless. It’s the effort in this case, not the success. Our souls don’t mind the effort, and won’t ever allow the success.

Dracula, because I think he had a soul too.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

It's a strange concept for some people, having a favorite person. But we do. There's always one person, or two people, who we love--yes--but we admire even more than we love. There's something about them you want to live up to, that makes you feel more worthy just by being with them. And while you don't want to disappoint them--anything but that--you give them something too. Even if they don't realize it, you give them a part of yourself to carry around. Call it your soul, call it emotional attachment; does it matter? No. It doesn't.

I think when you give someone a piece of you, you don't ever get it back. Maybe it regrows. Maybe it regenerates, and leaves behind a scar. In 50 years you'll still be rubbing that scar and remembering with your lips clenched shut.

Who was it that first commented on the depths to which we fall? Who was it that first handed off a piece of themselves? Who lost the first piece? Who had the first scar?

I've always wondered if we choose who we love. Whether it be conscious or unconscious, our hearts and minds in accordance or just one, in dreams. I used to think we didn't choose who to love, but now I don't think so. Even if logic says it's a bad idea, we choose to keep loving and that's part of why it hurts so much when we can't justify our love anymore. Because we know we choose it, and it hurts to be wrong as much as it hurts to feel shrivel the part that you gave away.

Does that mean love always turns out bad? Of course not. Just...sometimes. And sometimes that's all we need to keep choosing to love, the chance. We're big on chance, even bigger on happy endings. The thing is, one wrong choice and all the others seem sour. No matter that you caught a bad one; they're all bad for a while after that.

Why am I talking about love? Because in order to understand favorite people, you have to understand that you choose love and thus you choose your favorite person. No matter that your favorite person in the world is not necessarily the person you love the most. Just that they're trusted to be everything you want to be. Sometimes dreams die harder than love. Sometimes I guess they're one in the same.

The Picture of Dorian Gray: for Sibyl.

Life in Technicolor II

Run, run, run.
Then your lungs, they collapse
The sweat drips down your back
Into your eyes

Sweat is in your mouth
But your ears fill with words
“Look at that fat kid go!”
“Why does he even try?”

A slight falter in your stride,
But you don’t want to be fat.
So, you run.

Anyway, it’s fun.
The sweat that drips down your back
It is only there to protect you.

You.

---


She is pretty
She is blonde
Quite approachable!

She is patient
She is blissful
In need of a best friend!

She is not who you thought
She is dark
Anger fills your soul

Why can’t she be who you thought?

She is trusted
She is coveted
So you lie

Maybe then
She will be your best friend.




I wrote them without thinking at all.
Sara inspired me and I just felt it was the easiest way to explain the situations that are making me angry.
I've never written poetry outside of elementary school!

The Things We Carried

We live by bones
They hold us here
Our strange thoughts
Sleep; like wolves
Our fears the chains
Of a silver throne.

The weakest prey
On an absent god
Whose cries rouse
Hope; in silent hearts
Through silent lips
To bones we pray.

Hold us, mother
Let rest the dreams
Of hallowed halls
Departed; lay here
Sweet golden night
Beside our lover.

The words of lore
Lost much in time
The legends all but
Buried; hold still then
Quickly beating heart
That knows but war.

Our angels lost
On distant hills
The graves a marker
Still; bells ring joy
Ring love, our love
But six feet the cost.

Tired, hold up
A flag like weary
Men with voices like
Frayed red ends;
We are done with you now
Gather you close
Cast you aside
We bury ourselves
Not our bones.

Waking Up in Vegas

Life is pretty hectic sometimes and I’m pretty sure that’s true for everyone. In fact, I almost want to say that’s true for everyone. One might call it a universal truth.

The summer between my frosh year and sophomore year, I met a guy who was fairly intelligent and he said he would give $100 to anyone who could come up with a universal truth. I remember thinking really hard and I could not find one. I asked many of my friends and it was odd what people thought were universal truths.

What sticks out most in my mind is someone answered that a universal truth is that men have one less rib then woman. She was so confident. Sure, some people believe this but that is inherently a Christian belief and it was weird, perhaps a better word would be fascinating, that she did not know the end or start of her religion to life.

Perhaps because her religion was life?

I don’t know.

Most of the time I go through life knowing where each line stops and ends.

The same goes for politics as well. There are huge factions these days within the landscape of DC. The republicans versus the democrats. I strongly believe that you cannot create major social change without getting both parties on board. The democrats learned that the hard way.

The election of Scott Brown for one should have woken up so many Democrats and Republicans alike. He was elected in Massachusetts, a traditionally blue state. Though, still there exists people who don’t think the Scott Brown election means anything just that the Republicans are crazy.

Who’s right?

“Shut up and put your money where your mouth is, that’s what you get for waking up in Vegas.”

East of Eden

I live in a family of plodders.

We are like five poles of the same planet. One of us is patient and quietly opinionated. Another, loud and determined. Another, thoughtful and ambitious. One is absent, and missed. The last craves the rush, craves the world.

And yet there is a strange quality to these people that I don’t see in anyone else. I don’t see it in movies, at school, or in my friends. It’s as if genetics carried to me, to us, the ability to function under any circumstances. It’s like an innate knowledge that we’re human, we die. We mourn our dead but we don’t mourn forever.

One day my uncle died and all his sisters cried at his funeral. The next day they made lasagna and quietly packed up his belongings. The day after that, they took business calls and flew back home. And that is the process of grief in my family. There is no week-long hiatus. There is no grief counselor, no therapist, no crushing regret. It’s like we fear death the same as anyone else, but we’re made to accept it faster. We were scrubbing floors and cooking dinner when the plague swept over us. We were singing to the baby when our husbands died.

“We’re plodders,” my mom said. We take what we’re given and we use it. We see every day as a separate thing, removed from time. There is no such thing as a mental breakdown for us. It is only the morning, make coffee, go to school, learn to write. Our loves die and that’s okay because we did our best to save them; we can’t change everything. We can hardly change ourselves. That’s what it’s like living in a family of plodders. There is only one step of grief, and it’s the last.

I think that’s why I’m never going to see a therapist. I’m never going to sit on a couch while they ask me what I feel because we aren’t made like that, my family. We aren’t made to define ourselves because we know it’s impossible, and we’ll always get it wrong. There is nothing anyone can tell us about ourselves that we don’t already know, somehow.

It feels a lot like blindness, except we see too much. We look at people and they’re laid out for us; we understand them, but we can’t sympathize. We’ve never felt heart-wrenching grief; not for more than a day before our path clarifies and we fall face first into acceptance. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to not be stuck in your mourning. You move on, but it makes the lost a little less immortal.

And what I could say about immortality! What I could repeat and piece together from all those ideas! We could say immortality is living forever. Then we could say immortality is never living at all. It’s knowledge, it’s suffering, it’s death. We find eternity in death; isn’t immortality synonymous with eternity? Isn’t anything that lasts forever immortal? If so, if all we know—the entire span of our lives—is our definition of forever; are we not already immortal?

One of my favorite ideas is that words are immortal, because words don’t die. They change, sure, but all things that exist change somehow. Some things, some people, just change less.

Did I mention that my favorite phrase is “in the end”? Whose end? What end? Why, the end?

In my family we take our ends in small doses every day. That way when we come to the end of a road or a life or a book we take the grief and it’s not crippling. Our bones are hollow and in them we carry our ability to go on. That’s why this is called East of Eden (by John Steinbeck). Samuel hollowed his bones. His was a family of plodders.

Evacuate the Dancefloor

"Remember, this is what you love to do."

Have you ever found yourself caught somewhere? Between a hard place and an uncomfortable place, I think they call it? I don't mean literally of course, but that feeling you get that squeezes your chest or instead of productivity, you feel this compelling urge to sit on the floor not knowing what to do next.

It's not quite the feeling of jumping of a cliff or doing something scary.

I think it's different because when you jump of the cliff, your mind can still comfort itself by knowing that you don't really have to do it or it will only affect your life for a millisecond.

Yet, this feeling that I'm talking about consumes you - it eats you up inside.

Perhaps, you have the chance to avoid but that chance has long since fluttered away in the wind due to some other expectation of you.

So, you can't say no and you really don't want to say yes.

But you have to say yes.

That's when you throw yourself on the ground and pout. There are no tears, simply frustrating.

It isn't like I'm in any terrible plight right now. Don't worry about me. I just feel a sense of confusion. Like, I'm on the brink of something but not quite there yet and I'm afraid I'm going to fail but I know that everyone everywhere is afraid to fail at one point or another. Often times, it may be the accumulation of many different successes and failures.

Yet, I think I'm so close that's it's really irritating to have to make that last ditch sprint to the end using all you have left.

It's like in track: Often times, I feel as if I didn't try hard enough because my team mates will cross the finish line and collapse or throw up. There body is totally out of control. Yet, I cross the finish line perfectly fine. Sure I'm breathing hard, sweating, and maybe a little unstable, but I just walk away, perfectly fine.

That's when I get nervous.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's easy to envy the person who threw up until its your turn and you are pretty sure your breakfast 8 hours ago is going to end up in your hair.

That would certainly be unpleasant.

For all I know, my hormones are awry and making everything seem suspicious.

Procrastination is definitely going to be my downfall.

From another angle, life still goes on and its nice to have the fall back that I'll always have a chance to be somebody. I still can be like, Okay, world, listen up, here I am and I'm still alive and that is all that matters because if I'm still alive I can still do things.

And the things I do, they're infinite.

Perhaps, that's the scariest and this feeling is Mother Nature's way of saying, Ha! I'm getting you back!

Feeling infinite makes you feel smaller, in a sense. There are fifty million roads to choose from and if you stop moving because you're debating where to go, you're not making any progress anyway. Then lets say you trip and fall or you take the wrong turn, you're still going somewhere.

What's the worst that can happen, you die? Is that really so bad and anyways, it's not like you're Edward Cullen or anything. There is no infinite age. You are simply infinite but then you reach death and that's all we know until the next book comes out and even then, you're reading this book and you're reading through it so fast you skip over the little details that change you're reading comprehension and then you're lost again.

I don't know, I just always thought it was strange how people can take one path but still end up on someone's path. You'd think with so many choices, you'd never find anyone but then, of course you do because you're human and humans have special powers like that.

Finding other humans to interact with - that's a superpower and it's the best one to have.

Like I always say, pigeons are beautiful. There chest is like an old rainbow - slightly antique and very vintage. If you only say one pigeon in your whole life because of its rarity, you would be impressed and you'd stop to take a photo.

Yet, everyone you know has the human super power. Some have it less than others some have it more - you know what I speak of.

Perhaps, with a little elbow grease, you can push away from the hard place but then you'll just wind up in another spot with a rock pressing against your rib cage instead of your thigh but it's what you love to do, so it doesn't matter since the last page of the book we read before hand.

Poisonwood Bible

I’ve always been a big fan of endings. It seems like everyone these days is obsessed with starting new, with becoming another person, change, building, forgetting. Like a person who begins again is leaving behind something unutterable and inexplicable.

Me? I’ve always loved a good ending, because I think it says a lot more than a good beginning. People can say anything they want in the beginning but it’s who they are at the end that counts. And people who want to forget their ending are idiots because endings force us to start anew; there aren’t beginnings without ends. The fairy-tale nonsense we’re spoon-fed about books never ending, about lives never ending; it’s not true. Only the best things end, because only the best things are important enough to have an end.

That’s why I’m naming every single post after a book I’ve read. And not just any book, but a book of so-called “literary merit” (which is a ridiculous label considering it’s an opinion, but we choose our battles). I like to think the endings of those books are a lot like the endings we invent in our lives; not death, not really, but the times when we say “I want to be someone else”. Whether that signifies the start of a new time in our life or not, it’s an end, because the idea of change has been sown and we aren’t ever the same blissfully ignorant person we were before.

What better way, I thought, then to start a beginning with an end. At the risk of sounding patronizing, I think a little reality is a good thing for people (me included) who have been fed the strange, the harsh, the sugar-coated too long to realize that who we are in the end is more important than who we were in the beginning. I can honestly say I don’t write to be a reporter. I don’t write to tell people what to think, to communicate information they’ve never heard before. Perhaps tidbits they’ve never encountered, but certainly no world-shattering piece of privileged information. I don’t want to be one of those people who others read about and say, “Wow you’ve just managed to foist off your fanatical bull-headed opinions on me in less than five hundred words.”

Please, by all means, if I ever become that person, say so. The world doesn’t need another masked opinionated zealot. That’s one ending I don’t ever want to have.

That being said, I think I’ve just said more about myself in 409 words than I’ve ever managed to spit out on two dozen scholarship applications in five thousand words. I appreciate the subtlety, but by now anyone who reads this is probably thinking “Will she ever shut up?”

No, I will not shut up. That’s the thing about us opinionated-but-trying-not-to-be people. We don’t shut up, not when we’re 7 years old making stories about princesses killing dragons. Not when we’re 17 years old writing for a blog called “Strange Curry” because we know we’re worth more than the sum of our words. Isn’t that what people are always saying? We’re worth more, we’re always worth more, because we can string together the right letters to make the right sounds to convey the right meaning. And if we manage to slide in our thoughts like a needle, so much the better; we’re always worth more when we’re literate.

I’m almost 17 and I’m just waiting for the day someone calls me out at school for expressing myself a little too loudly, just so I can regurgitate the happy lessons we’re taught in kindergarten and smile when they ring a little too artificially. Does that make me cynical? I don’t think so. I think it just makes me a teenager.

Needless to say, I love school. I do. There are very few times I would rather be at school, but I still love it because when I fall asleep at night, if I’m not worrying about some friend drama or procrastinating on homework, there’s a strange feeling I get. Almost something close to happiness. The fact that I’ve been waiting for the end of high school for three years is beside the point.

Enough about me! More about…the other 99.9999timesinfinity% of the population who will not be reading the ramblings of two kids with dreams too big to stuff into little tiny words. The other kid being, of course, Anne, my Everything-I-Am-Not friend, as I call her in my mind. Athletic, occupationally ambitious, musically talented… Trust me, if I made a list my computer would crash from the massive space usage.

And so we come to a small end, like most ends. Like dead ends, and abrupt ends, and bookends (ha, ha). A small end like the end of a post and the end of each word that was written but may or may not be read. That kind of bittersweet conclusion, like at the end of a book. Which is probably why this post is called Poisonwood Bible (by Margaret Kingsolver). We all get what we want in the end, but it comes at such a price.