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