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.