I sure am excellent at pickingthewrongtimetoblog

Okay, so I have to leave to go to lunch in T-8 minutes, but I've been wanting to put some thoughts down here for a while, and I'd rather spend 8 minutes freaking out about my too-slow typing wpm and doing something semi-productive than sitting here watching the guy next to me in the library lab fill out job applications.

[January]

1. Three-year anniversaries are evidently the ones where the neurotic girlfriend learns how to stop being neurotic about an anniversary.  It was great.
2. I can snowboard for a whole day without sucking!  I cannot, however, snowboard for a whole day and then do anything the next day without pain.  That's my next, perhaps unachievable, goal.
3. I could actually be a history teacher and not hate it.  Good news.

 [February]

1. "But why thy odour matcheth not thy show,
      The solve is this, that thou dost common grow."
2. Trying to learn how to be a healthy, active person in this world often translates to spending a lot of time around people who hate their bodies.  I am fighting an uphill battle with my 30-Day Shred DVD...in all manners of speaking.

I don't want to see your perfectly toned stomach, Jillian Michaels. 
Please stop working so hard to show it to me. 
I see what you're trying to do...but I'd really rather not, thanks.

1. I found sticky notes with cute dogs on them.  My life is a brighter place.
2. "Up Top!" "Gross me right out."  I love my once and future roommates.
3. Sheldon really does cure all ills.

[March]

1. Just finished reading "Children and Peak Oil: An Opportunity in Crisis" by Tranter and Sharpe and it is currently changing the way I think about raising children.  I love it and am scared by it at the same time, but it gives me profound hope for both myself and any children I may someday have.

By segregating our children in to parks and "children only" areas, we are teaching them that they are not apart of the adult community.

 

1. March just started; don't hate me for not thinking more quickly.

I swear I had more, but 8 minutes are up.

<3 spadeALLcross

Who am I? [Me: Part II]

So, last poast, I talked about January through June.  This week, I'm going to talk about July through...well...July.  It was a very complex month for me, even outside of Harry Potter.  And it started out with a bang.

At the end of June, events transpired that threw all of this over-time development, all of my personal growth and goals into sharp relief, and I got my first real dose of self-induced shame.  And this is where both disaster struck and the light at the end of the tunnel appeared.  Let me 'splain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.


All my life, I've been told that I was special, that I was great, that the world could tell me that I was flawed, tell me that I had no merit, but that none of that mattered because I was loved in a way that I should never forget.  My mother instilled this belief in me for years, and it was reaffirmed by my Church and my brand of Christianity (which primarily revolved around "God loves me, he's gone to great lengths to show me that, and his love for me is all that matters.").  The only thing wrong with this belief was that I thought (completely subconsciously, in unchangeable ways) that I was loved because I was special, because I was great, and that when the world told me I was flawed and had no merit, the world was unquestionably wrong on all counts.  That is a very dangerous worldview, and at the end of June, I realized how dangerous it had made me as a person.

I'm not going to tell you, Internet, what happened in June, because it's not important to this conversation.  But essentially, I finally did something that, in my mind, was "bad" enough to make me feel ashamed.  Really ashamed.  Not the shame that I've felt before because someone is telling me I should, like when, in junior high and high school, I felt like I was fat and was ashamed that I wasn't able to lose weight and wear clothes like other girls did.  Not the shame I feel when my standards are too high, like when I wanted to take AP physics even though I had no designs for a scientific career or any need to sweat through an entire year of a killer class, and when doing so would hurt me in the other subjects I actually excelled at and wanted to better understand.  Not shame that is in anyway connected with an outside source or something beyond my control.  Shame that I had done something seriously wrong, and now I had to live with the consequences.  Shame that no one I told about my situation would have any reason to feel pity for me; I had brought this upon myself.

Whether what I did was actually as bad as I thought it was at the time, I can't say.  Whether the worst punishment I could have reasonably deserved for it was anything life shattering or shame-worthy, I don't know.  What's important is what I felt in that moment, because that's what changed everything.

The "you're special, you're great, don't ever change" mantra that had been playing on repeat for my whole life sort of skipped for a moment.  Suddenly, I looked at my life, my faith, my relationships, and everything I did and thought and said in a completely new way.  And it was not refreshing.  What I saw was brokenness, complacency, and a dangerous habit of doing what I want because I want to, and then expecting things to work out in my favor regardless.  Most of my life had been shame-free, and it was only this one instance that made me see things this way, but I saw laid out ahead of me two paths branching out from one decision: either I could take my situation seriously and really reflect on what it meant to me and how I wanted to proceed, which would probably involve pain and loneliness and challenges I felt unprepared for, or I could pay the minimum penalty and revert back to comfort and safety where things were exactly where I expected them to be and I could count on my instincts to see me through.

The first path didn't lead out very far.  I couldn't see the whole way down.  But kind of like a real road on a really foggy night, when you can see the glow of the street lights even though you can't see what they're falling on, I could see the satisfaction in that road.  I could see spots of darkness, but I saw a comfort that went beyond the shallowness of my previous comforts.  More than just making myself happy and trying to get to oases of pleasure, walking down that first road would create oases where there were none, would find comfort in places I didn't think it existed, and would end with the happiest, most satisfying destination I could have, though I don't yet know what that is.

I could see farther down the second path, but then it too turned foggy, even foggier than the first path.  It looked easy and familiar, not much different than the path I was walking down already.  But the streetlights were not welcoming.  If I had screwed up already, (and such a small screw up had affected me this much), I was bound to do it again, and there was a huge chance that it would be worse in the subsequent times.  There was no guaranteed warmth down this road and no assumption of a happy ending.  That didn't mean there wasn't one, but just that I wasn't as sure of it.

It sounds cheesy with all the analogies.  But I guess describing my self-reflection during this time is like trying to describe a dream.  Since dream worlds are not the same as the real world, you have to change some details to make the dream explicable.  Since my mind works differently than yours, I have to make analogies to help you understand.  It wasn't cheesy at all when I went through it.  It was very real and actually very scary.  But my decision was easy.  Of course I took the first road.

So that where I was in July.  Tune in next time for the continuation of my journey, which concludes summer.

<3 spadeALLcross

I am not a doctor...and I don't play one on TV

(This post is not written by an expert in anything.  These are opinions and theories based on experience, not facts based on evidence.  If you have a problem with anything said here, please begin a discussion, as I would rather be convinced that my theories are wrong than have someone think they're wrong and not tell me.)

So, it's 6:21 am CDT, and I am awake.  This is an anomaly: do not be fooled into thinking I am a morning person.  No, I'm waiting for the registration to open pottermore.com.  There's been a window of about a half hour every day since Sunday, and the windows will officially close for a few months after Saturday, so I've dedicated the early mornings of the past couple days to waiting around for my opportunity to register for the site.

Yesterday was the first day I purposefully woke up early.  I got to the site, found the clue, realized I didn't have my copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban, where the answer to the clue could be found, so defaulted and used the audiobook, since iTunes just happened to be open.  (If I had had to open iTunes, it would have taken about five full minutes, if not more, and I think I would have imploded due to the building pressure.) I solved the clue, got to the website where the quill was supposed to be, and couldn't find it.  Registration had closed.  So I shrugged wistfully, yawned, and went back to sleep.

On Sunday, registration opened at 3 am in my time zone, on Monday, it opened at 4 am, and on Tuesday it opened at 5 am.  So, I set my alarm this morning for a little before six and hopped online to wait around.  Well...obviously, since it's 6:27 now, the trend has changed.  It irks me a little and I find it unsettling that whoever is in charge of this website is making the fans jump through so many hoops to get to it.  If it's just because they want the most dedicated fans to get on the site for this early registration dry run, I can maybe understand that, although I must point out that "Harry Potter Fan" does not directly translate to "Internet-Savvy, Scavenger-Hunt Extraordinaire" and that there are probably people getting on to Pottermore who were more intrigued by the process of getting there than they will be by the website.  But if the reason for the manipulations comes from the fact that, Harry Potter being what it is to so many people, this is one fan base who would put up with almost anything, and this sort of registration process is more fun for the people in charge...that's just sick and they should stop.  People are staying up egregiously late in some time zones, or waking up entirely too early, skiving off summer school or work...seems wrong to me.  Dumbledore wouldn't let this happen.


Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about really.

In the excess time that I've been awake when pottermore hasn't been open (it's 6:35 now) I've been browsing the internet.  It started on twitter where, since I'm following Pottermorefans, I was already sitting waiting for some news, perhaps on why regsitration wasn't open yet.  I perused the past tweets, the @replies, etc, and I noticed a fervent energy present in every bit of the online conversations that revolved around this twitter account.  People excited for pottermore opening, people preparing for each clue by quizzing themselves with similar clues they've made up themselves, people speculating about how access to the site is actually going to work, people sharing stories about the ridiculous things they've done for Harry Potter in the past, comparing Houses, etc.  To some degree, it reminded me of the sort of energy I always felt at Harry Potter midnight showings, the energy that kept me coming back to the cinema every year, even though I didn't like the movies anymore.

But I started following links, and looking at other Harry Potter fandom things, and I remembered a book I saw for sale called Dear Mr. Potter which is filled with letters from people to Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling, telling them their stories about how Harry Potter made their life better in some way.  A lot of them were touching, some were similar to mine, but a few of them sort of scared me in a way, and I stopped wanting to read them.

I've been called a nerd on several occasions, it feels like my mom calls me an "addict" every time I do anything for more than an hour for two days in a row (right now, this includes my obsession with ST:VOY), and I've gotten numerous questioning looks and scoffs, and even the odd demoralizing attack on my sanity from people who think I get "too" into things.  Most of the time, these things are fandoms like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Twilight, and others.  A few people have made fun of my T-shirt collection, but that's rare (because my t-shirt collection is universally awesome).  Some people say I'm too Christian, too, but that's a different matter from my perspective, if not from theirs.

Harry Potter is different, because it is the one series I constantly return to.  With others, I go through phases: I don't feel the same awe when I watch the Lord of the Rings movies as I did when I was in Junior High, I don't wish Lt. Commander Data were a non-fictional artificial lifeform anymore, and I certainly hate Bella Swan and her entire creepy family.  But I've always loved Harry Potter, from the time I read the first book to the moment the credits rolled on the eighth movie, a timeline of almost fifteen years, my love for the series has developed from a phase-based infatuation into a sort of foundational love.  Harry Potter is definitely a part of my life, and I'm sure I wouldn't be the same person if I hadn't read it.  This is not true of all the other fandoms I've been a part of, including Twilight, Star Trek, Eragon, or The Matrix: take those experiences away, and the change in my character and person would be minimal.

The other fandom that captured my heart so thoroughly was The Lord of the Rings.  I was in fifth or sixth grade when the first movie came out, and it took me a year to read the first book, but after that and until I got into high school, I was beyond obsessed.  But it was not the same kind of obsession I had with Harry Potter.  2001, the year the movie came out, was a pretty hard year for me.  It was a pretty hard year for the country, which certainly contributed to my year sucking.  2002 and 2003 were not much better.  For this period of three years, I didn't have very many friends, my family life was more complicated and painful than I was used to, and I was doing terribly in school.  The only thing that was going right, I thought, was The Lord of the Rings.  Between reading the books, watching the movies, and obsessing over the details of both, I could easily occupy my mind with things other than my own life, and for the most part, that's exactly what I did for three years.  I checked out of reality for the better part of Junior High, forgoing relationships with people around me, a better understanding of myself, and a first-hand knowledge of the world because there were things in my life that upset me and The Lord of the Rings allowed me to get away from them.

Sure, I turned out all right in the end, and yes, being a "fan" doesn't necessarily mean you're an escapist, and no, escapism is not always the same as hard drugs: sometimes it's just a coping mechanism, an outlet to plug in and recharge, and none of that scares me or bothers me.  But reading some of those letters to Rowling and hearing the way those people were talking about the series as if it "saved" them from their terrible lives because they were able to read it long enough to wait out their problems and not have to deal with them every day...it feels dangerous to me.

Dumbledore himself said, "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."  Wishing Hogwarts is real, that you had friends like Hermione or Luna, that you could be a part of something special and important like Dumbledore's Army, that makes sense and I imagine is a natural response to a series that garnered so much love and attention for so long by so many.  But I think that believing the books changed your life when all that happened was that you lived them instead of it is just incorrect.  If thirteen years of your life you dwelled on Harry Potter, hoping it was real, living as if it was, and skipping out on what was actually happening around you, even if it was too terrible for you to live with, the series did not save you: it allowed you to lose thirteen years of your life that you will never get back.

I'm pretty sure I'm reading more into those letters than is there, since even my bout of living outside reality wasn't that deep or detrimental.  But I wanted to voice my opinions about escapism, I guess, because I do think it's dangerous, and I do believe it's similar to, if not the same as an addiction.  Some addictions are obviously unhealthy, and the family and friends of the user notice the signs and urge the user to seek help.  Some addictions are less noticable, either because they are easily hidden (pornography and x-rated romance novels, anorexia and bulimia, etc) or because they are socially acceptable (caffeine, nicotine, etc).  Some are more physically damaging than others (heroine, alcohol, etc) while some are more emotionally or psychologically damaging than others (eating disorders).

But all addictions are the same in that they give the addict a crutch to get through life, and the longer a person uses the crutch, the more the rest of their faculties atrophy due to lack of use or dependence.  A person can become addicted to anything if they let that thing control their desires, dictate how they spend their time, or keep them from doing other things they used to enjoy or taking care of their responsibilities.  The phrase "The more _____ you own, the more your _____ owns you" is not just a pithy attack on materialism.  When someone goes camping and goes through television withdrawal, it's not just a useful metaphor.  I'm not a psychologist, but in my personal experience, if there's anything in your life that you do regularly often without thinking, or because you "can't help yourself," or because you think it makes your life easier/simpler/better, you're forming a habit, and habits can easily become addictions.

The Lord of the Rings was my addiction.  It didn't kill me, and I don't even necessarily regret it, but I do sometimes wonder what would have been different about my Junior High and high school experience if I had had a more healthy relationship with the books and movies.  The difference, from what I can tell, is in the control.  If you honestly determine when, where, and how you do something, if you really can stop any time, then you're in control.  The moment you start feeling like you have to, like you can't afford not to, like it would be too hard to not do something, things start getting scary.

Aaaand I just went to the pottermore blog and realized that I didn't have to wake up until 22 minutes ago (it's 8:22 now) because they announced that registration would open sometime between 2 pm and 6 pm BST.  Ugh.  Obviously, I'm an example of an Internet-Idiot Harry Potter fan.  But evidently, those in charge of pottermore don't really want me anyway.

I'm going back to bed.  I hope I didn't offend anybody, but if I did, please tell me why.  I'm just postulating throughout all of this: as I said, I'm not a psychologist and most of my experience with addiction diseases is second-hand, so I am not an expert.

If, though, you think there are things that control you more than you'd like them to, my amateur suggestion would be to tell someone you believe can help you: not necessarily a friend or family member, but someone you think will have the wisdom and guts to help you work through it.  A counsellor, a mentor, a religious leader, a teacher...someone who either knows you or would know how to help you with your situation.

<3 spadeALLcross

EDIT: Wow...this post takes quite the journey. Probably reads a little strangely. I should edit it at some point, and I probably will later.

The time has come, [the Walrus said]...

It's been a few days since I saw HP 7.2, and I now feel solid enough in my opinion of it to review it.  Not in-depth, as I don't think anyone who reads this blog really cares about the play-by-play of a movie they could easily watch themselves, but at least enough to discuss the parts that struck me the most.

WARNING: Spoiler City up in hurr.

I walked into the theater last November for the midnight showing of HP 7.1 with very low expectations.  I've been to every midnight showing of a Harry Potter movie since Prisoner of Azkaban as a tradition, but have never actually liked the movies.  But after HP 7.1 was over, I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised by its quality.  The filmmakers had definitely made choices that I didn't understand, like not including the invisibility cloak, rushing through an introduction of Bill Weasley, and skipping over so much of Harry's Dumbledore-related angst.  But the movie did a much better job than its predecessors of staying true to the depth, vision, and feeling of the book.  Things were dark, scary, and hopeless, and the comic relief came in short bursts of smiles before nail-biting drama struck again.

So Thursday night, my expectations were high for a Harry Potter film for the first time in seven years.  And when the credits rolled, I was less disappointed than I could have been. I think the movie did as good a job adapting the book as it could have, given the circumstances.  Ending a series beloved by so many people and trying to include all of the bits that audience would expect--"The Prince's Tale," Molly-Bellatrix dueling scene, Neville's defeat of Nagini, many of the priceless bits of dialogue sprinkled throughout, etc.--while still creating an enjoyable movie that wasn't absolute Hell to sit through is a task that I do not envy.

Because the job was such a hard one, I'm quite happy with the way the movie turned out.  It does, however, solidify in my mind that the books outstrip the films in every way that counts.

The movie didn't really include anything about the Hallows at all.  It registered their existence and sort of nodded to the fact that Harry possessed all three by the end of the war for Hogwarts, but it didn't show the struggle that Dumbledore had faced, like so many others within and -out of fiction have faced, throughout his life of trying to use them to overcome death.  Dumbledore's ascension to the position of Hogwarts' Headmaster and decline of the position of Minister of Magic was hardly mentioned, if at all.  Harry's choice not to try to beat Voldemort to Dumbledore's tomb and take the Elder wand didn't happen.  Voldemort's fear of death was downplayed in favor of his fear of defeat.  These choices changed the entire point of the Harry Potter story.  The saga went from a relatable tale of young people overcoming internal and external obstacles by learning to think for themselves while still relying on others, a tale of friendship and bravery, of unity and mutual respect, of trusts lost and regained, to a coming-of-age story that no one can ever identify with, since it's set in a fictional world whose struggles are nothing like ours.

In the first book and movie, Quirrell/Voldemort says, "There is no Good and Evil; there is only power and those too weak to seek it."  This is the theme of the Deathly Hallows; the internal battle between action and inaction, the conscious decisions Harry, Dumbledore, and Voldemort each make in their separate quests to "win," and each person's individual definition of what "winning" means.

All three of them have different relationships and responses to power.  Voldemort obviously desires to increase his own power.  As a child and a student he uses his innately strong magical power to bully and coerce those around him, to make them see how strong he was, to make others see how week they were.  He also hones his social power to ensnare people who have more actual authority than he does in order to use their power to his advantage.  But the only reason he wants any of this power is his fear of death.  He fears the unknown that comes after death, and he spends most of his life ensuring that he will never have to face it.  It is his search for ways to overcome death that brought so much of his power, and once he believes he has achieved immortality, he knows that he is better, stronger, smarter than everyone else in the world, including Dumbledore.  Because, if anyone else were as talented and as driven as he was, they would have created horcruxes as well, they would have done the things he had done, because death was something everyone feared.  How could they not?  He could not see any other way of approaching the power he had discovered.  He could not see why anyone would not want to live forever.  What was the point of a whole and pure soul if it could be destroyed?

Meanwhile, Dumbledore also desires power his whole life.  Similar to Voldemort, he sharpens his magic and knowledge from a young age.  Perhaps it is Dumbledore's habit of (born out of his opportunities for) relying on other people that allow him to have friends at school who then keep him from becoming the lone-ranger that Voldemort is.  Maybe Dumbledore's quest is more for knowledge and study than it is for power.  But for whatever reason, Albus gets through school without attempting to take over the world.  However, once school is over and his mother's death forces him to settle back in at home to take care of his younger brother and sister, he feels trapped in an inferior life.  His belief that he could do more with his talents, should be allowed to move forward, fuels his friendship with Grindelwald, someone who agrees with Albus that he was made for better things.  Maybe Gelert has a more straightforward desire for power for the sake of power than Dumbledore does, but Dumbledore, blinded by love and a feeling of partnership he probably didn't feel with anyone else and isn't getting from anyone in his broken family, dares to dream with Grindelwald.

Dumbledore's crippling fear that made him seek power wasn't death, but stagnation, discomfort, and intellectual restraints.  Where Voldemort wanted the horcruxes primarily to ensure his eternal existence and only secondarily used the power he had gained from making them to subjugate those he thought were weaker than him, Dumbledore and Grindelwald wanted the Hallows primarily to place their superior intelligence and talent rightly on top where it belong, and only secondarily to allow themselves to live forever.

Albus is shocked out of his desire for power by the loss of his brother, sister, and best friend/boyfriend in one fell blow, and for a while, his fear overshadows  his guilt.  His grief over his lost loved ones and his knowledge that he is at least partly responsible keeps him from grabbing power where he can. But that fear of discomfort is something he struggles with his entire life, between desiring power over other, lesser people, as he exhibits when he borrows the cloak from James Potter, and wanting power over his grief, as he demonstrates by attempting to bring Ariana and his parents back from the dead with the resurrection stone. But he is always disgusted by his relationship to power, which is why the Elder wand is safe with him. He doesn't trust himself, and he doesn't trust the wand, so he remains headmaster of Hogwarts and keeps his own power and the wand's in check.

Unlike Dumbledore and Voldemort, Harry does not want power. All his life he is powerless, alone, and mistreated, much like Voldemort, but at school, he gains friends and fame, like Dumbledore. His fame does not treat him well; it makes him as many enemies as friends, and it gives him as many problems as solutions. Some of his fame is based on his own talent, and some of his success comes from skill, but he knows that an equal, if not greater amount comes from luck, chance, and the providence of others, and between this knowledge and the pains his fame gives him, he doesn't get as big a head as he could. Instead of focusing on overpowering others, he genuinely tries his best to do what he thinks is right. What he thinks is right is not always the most intelligent course of action, but he is only a teenager, and he is often dealing with the complex power schemes and magic of adults much stronger and smarter than he is. He knows that he isn't good enough to do everything by himself, but he also knows that doing something was too important to leave entirely to someone else. He is the perfect combination of Voldemort and Dumbledore, of relying on himself and relying on others, of choosing to act and choosing to wait, of having a will to live without putting it above everything else. If he has a crippling fear, it is that he was not worth dying for: that his parents and his friends loved him too much and for no reason. Instead of driving him to take power wherever he can find it, his fear dives him to be the best person possible, fighting for the best causes he finds.  His fear makes him constantly reevaluate his actions and his goals, to know himself...something Dumbledore learned too late, and Voldemort never learned at all. Because of this, he gets all three Hallows and learns what it really means to be Master of Death. Not to live forever, but to embrace the inevitable end, to know that it's coming, and to not fight it once it arrives.

So many themes regarding life and what it means to be human float in and out of Harry Potter: persistence in the face of overwhelming adversity, unlikely forgiveness, the importance of friendship, the need for humility, and so on and so forth.  A lot of them feel cliché when said aloud, which is probably why people call Harry Potter fans "nerds."  The story is a coming-of-age adventure; how could it not be with a group of adolescents as the protagonists? But its fan base is proof that its characters and plots speak to more than just adolescents and that the series is more than a mere didactic fairy tale about the ideal human being.

The major overarching theme of the whole series is not cliché or nerdy, but a real question that people ask themselves constantly, whether they take note of it or not.  The theme is expressed in that striking quote of Quirrell's: "There is no Good and Evil; there is only power and those too week to seek it." The question Harry Potter asks is whether Good seeks power, and whether not seeking power is a weakness. Harry, Dumbledore, and Voldemort represent three case studies in dealing with power that can show us our own feelings about the subject.

But the movies do not focus on that aspect of the books. It makes sense that they wouldn't: in order to do so, all of the movies would have had to have been much longer and probably would have included more scenes of exposition and talking than of action and excitement, and that's not exactly what a movie is best at. As it is, the movies portray a good story about children becoming adults and overcoming the obstacles their parents and mentors could not.

So, while I certainly can't say I love the movies as much as I love the books, I'm not surprised or upset by their inability to match up with each other. When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey, and when I drink water, I drink water.

And I'm sad that Harry Potter is officially over, but I can't afford to care too much for too long.  Everyone has different experiences with literature, and I have confidence in mine and shouldn't worry for anyone else's, since I can't control it anyway.

Here's to you, Harry. And here's to many happy years of your own immortality, one you gained without Hallows, without Horcruxes.

Now...if only Hogwarts were real...

<3 spadeALlcross

Okay, so I've decided...

...that there are actually a few things that I want to say about Paris yesterday.  Psych!

- There have been several times since coming to France where I have picked up my camera and seriously contemplated taking a picture in order to capture the smells around me.  It's unfortunate that smell-o-vision and it's accompanying camcorders don't yet exist...and it's quite apparent to me now why France is renown for its perfumes.

- The toilettes in Britain are different from those in America, and the toilettes are still more different.  The on ein our hotel here waits for you to tell it when to stop flushing, which is both convenient and probably inefficient.

- We walked, delighted to be unencumbered by our heavy rucksacks, all the way north from our hotel to he Eiffel Tower and took tons of pictures with it together.  Lea's floormates back in York told her they wanted her to take lots of "cheesy" pictures for them, so we've been careful to do so.  We walked under the tower to go see the Triumphal Arch, and as we did, we saw dozens of people selling plastic Eiffel Towers and other really weird souvenirs (including this one wind-up man on a bike; his mouth opened and closed and his eyes rolled around...very creepy, France, very creepy).  Every five feet, someone was selling something.  It made me sad to realize how so much of Paris is not really for Parisians anymore.  That thought made me wonder how much more enjoyable tourism would have been a hundred or 150 years ago, when a tour of the world (or at least of Europe) was almost requisite for upperclass people in countries like England.  Without the same number of hard core capitalists around all the main attractions, how much more wonderful might the experiences of seeing those places have been?

- When we'd crossed the river and were looking at a war memorial or something, one of the men selling cheap souvenirs that was near us walked by us twice and said "very sexy" under his breath to us.  I didn't look at him, and we just walked on as if nothing had happened, but i have to say, I was pretty upset.  In fact, I was surprised by how upset I was.  I wished I had slapped him, which doesn't seem like me.  I know many men aren't like that and wouldn't do that, and even though most of the men in Paris I've come into contact with have been equally or in similar ways disgusting, I know that there must be lots of men in Paris who don't treat all women like objects to be succinctly reviewed in three words or less.  But I wanted to punish this guy.  I thought in retrospect that maybe if I had reacted forcefully to him, he wouldn't be as keen to treat other girls like that, or maybe he'd see that women don't always let men do whatever they want.  More likely, I suppose, I would have just pissed him off and all Hell would have broken loose, right there in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

Like I said, I'm not sure why I got as upset as I did--I've been harassed like that all my life by people I do and do not know, I've watched men run their eyes all over me on the street like it's their right to get whatever pleasure out of me they want.  And strictly speaking, as far as the staring goes, I can't really stop them, so I suppose it is their right.  And other men in my life have done worse.  But this one tower-selling man...I wanted him to feel the weight of his actions like I never have with anyone else.  Don't know why, but it obviously had a profound affect on me.

- Paris, like the walkways around Chateau de Chenonceau, was extremely dusty.  By the end of the day, my feet around my sandal straps and Lea's tights around her shoes were very dusty from our extensive walking.  Paris was not very grassy, except in the ample gardens of a Palais or in some of the other city parks.  There was also a lot of construction, and all the trees and bushes were flowering and stuff, so between the dust, the bits of wood and such, and the buds and bugs flying everywhere, Lea and I managed to keep getting little things in our eyes.  All the time.  Sometimes we couldn't get them out for minutes at a time.  Very strange.  Very uncomfortable.

- I've sen lots of people and a couple models in ads, and a few people in cartoons here in Frane with very prominent gaps between their two front teeth.  I wonder if that's a style here, and if so, why?

- For an early lunch that ended up lasting us all day, we stopped in at a bakery and sandwich place.  lea got a ham sandwich and a pain au chocolat, and I blundered miserably through ordering something that might have been called a foussache or something (basically a really long piece of flatbread with melted cheese, herbs, olives, and mushrooms on it).  It was a horrible experience, not knowing enough of the language to tell the woman what I wanted, or to be able to understand her when she asked me if I wanted it heated.  I was mortified by it, mostly because I really am ashamed that my only real language is English.  And because I hate to perpetuate bad stereotypes about Americans.

So that is Paris more in full.  Hope you enjoyed it.

<3 spadeALLcross

-

I walked around Paris for an entire day...in shorts and sandals, what's more.

Okay, so today was Paris. It was the quintessential Paris day; we saw everything that everyone else sees (excepting the inside of the Museé de Louvre, or whatever, but that is on the schedule for tomorrow) but we did it at our own pace and had a fantastic time. I really enjoyed it. I'm covered from head to foot in an extra layer of dust now…but c'est la vie. You can't win 'em all.

So, since I don't have to throw those mundane details at you, I'll expound on some of my more internal experiences of the past few days.

Those of you who watch my snidgets on YouTube know that I'm all about culture shock. And I swear I didn't even know the word until I came to a country that doesn't speak my language or have any desire to try. The people are [generally] lovely and friendly and many of them do speak enough English for our conversations to be relatively painless, but we're on their turf, and when there is an issue with the language barrier, I'm likely to think of it as "our fault," rather than theirs, which is an acute and new feeling.

But I've found that barrier to be a useful protection as well. Lea and I will often speak to each other in English in public about things we would normally wait to say until we're in private company. Not rude or mean things, but when we're uncomfortable with a situation, or when we think some French thing is strange, or something like that. This didn't really happen much in Paris today because of the percentage of people around us who also spoke French, but on the trains and in Tours, I at least felt much less likely to be overheard and understood.

This, naturally, is a double-edge sword, as those people here who speak other languages can do the same thing right back to us. There was that group of boys on the train to Paris last night who made kissy noises at us and talked about us to each other without bothering to keep quiet about it, and some men at a cash register in one of the shops we went into today talked to a colleague, laughing about "Americans" as he dealt with our custom.

It's funny how, within my culture shock, I've begun to cling shamelessly to pieces of France that are somehow connected to America, or even to Britain in order to feel more comfortable. I saw a bagpiper today in a manner very similar to one I saw in London a few weeks ago, and I felt so happy being able to hear his music for hundreds of meters around as it carried over the river. And yesterday in the taxi to the train station, the driver (who spoke very little English) was listening to French radio and randomly, "I've Had the Time of My Life" (the original, from Dirty Dancing, not the Black Eyed Peas version) came on, and I was moved in spite of myself. I'm not even a huge fan of that song, but just hearing it settled me down a bit.

However, being blatantly slapped in the face by my own nationality does not have the same effect. When we were visiting Chateau de Chenonceau, we sat near a large group of American high school students on the train, and we saw them later at the site. I found myself wanting to separate myself from them (although this might have been because they were being a bit obnoxious) and I even once slipped into speaking German when I was standing near them and trying to point out something to Lea. This was embarrassing.

In general, France has managed to bring out the worst in me. It has made me passive, paranoid, proud, prejudiced, and all sorts of other p-related Jane-Austen-y negatives. I hope that at least my noticing them has had some reversing affect, and that maybe I can prevent them from continuing or growing.

Some interesting Etimological tidbits that France has brought to my attention:

- the word for "tip" as in what you add to a bill in a restaurant or on cab fare in both French and German translates directly to "drink money." Where did this idea come from? My hypothesis is that, back in the day (whenever the day was that the word for "tip" was born) the tip was the money you gave someone when you benefited enough from their services that you wanted to reward them with money to go out drinking. As I have limited internet access, I can't verify this for a while. If you would like to do so and let me know the results of your research, please let me know in the comments section.

- the French word for pomegranate is "grenade." Did this come before or after the English word for the hand-held explosive, and did it influence it at all? Because pomegranates are about the same size as grenades, as I recall, and they can be explosively juicy…

- the French word for honey moon is directly translated to "moon of honey." Where did this idea come from? Why do we call the period after a wedding a honeymoon? Did it start in France and work its way out after English and French had split up, perhaps due to the supposition that French is the most romantic of the Romance languages, or did the word come from before the two languages were separate and so just follow so many other words over to English? Do other languages call it the equivalent thing? (The German word for honeymoon is "Flitterwochen" a compound of the word "wochen" which means week, and "flitter," which I'm not sure means anything—it's not included in my pocket German/English dictionary, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.)

That's all for now. I'm mostly caught up. We'll see if I can easily wore the rest of these pre-written bullet points into future posts.

<3 spadeALLcross

Bienvenue!

Bonjour!

Long time no see, eh, comrades?  Sorry about that.  Life got in the way of the internet for a while there.  I'm sure you understand the experience.

Obviously, I've had a very full plate the past couple weeks; I had a term paper due, my boyfriend came to visit me, I had another term paper due, and, most excitingly, Easter Break began!  The English take three weeks off at Christmas and three weeks off at Easter (which explains so much about why students actually went home for the Easter holidays at Hogwarts...) so, starting after classes let out on April 8th, we all got three weeks entirely to ourselves.

Last week, my mom and brother came and we toured Scotland a bit.  I had a blast, and I can't believe how fast the week went.  In summation, the Scottish Highlands are by far the most beautiful and natural place I've ever seen, (all the wonders of the Rockies without the altitude and dry weather) and I definitely want to go back, while Glasgow leaves something to be desired, and Edinburgh is a wallet-sucker, albeit a lovely one.  I loved having people visit me, and it was great to show my family around to all the places I've been before, as well as experiencing new places alongside them.

Mom and Patrick left Sunday morning from Manchester, and I immediately returned to York to pack and prepare for the next leg of my Easter adventure: a ten-day excursion with my friend Lea (from Calvin) to France and Germany, followed by a four-day stint in London with the Calvin group.

We left York this morning at 10:29, and, after a bit of tubing and training and planing, we arrived in Tours, France, at 5:15 (all local times, of course).  We hadn't realized that the airport in Tours was so small that it didn't even have an ATM...but luckily, we managed to get a taxi driver who sympathized with our plight and took us to our Hostel by way of a "commercial center" (mall) with a cash machine inside.  (I'm sure he had a healthy dose of personal gain in this bit of assistance, but without his help, we'd probably still be at that airport, penniless and tired, so I'm going to pretend I don't care that he might  have been stealing money from us).

By the time we had checked into our Hostel and walked back to the mall (the closest edible civilization, as our hostel is in Chambray-les-Tours, a sort of suburb far to the south of Tours) and found cold pasta in a supermarket there.  Yum.

Since then, we've been planning our trip to some Chateau tomorrow and watching French period dramas and dubbed British and American television, including Jurassic Park 2, The Closer, and the BBC Merlin.

As my journal is running low on pages, I might update this blog more often for these next couple of weeks, just so I can get everything down that I want to.

I had so much more to write, but I am les tired.

<3 spadeALLcross

Rain that ever-loving stuff down on me.

This week was a massive catch-up week, so I did absolutely nothing exciting.  We went to Lincoln last Saturday, which was beautiful, especially the cathedral there, so I'll put pictures up of that later.

I'm a part of a GR writing group that has a blog, and it was my turn to write for that this week, so I think I'll share my post with you, too, as I have nothing else interesting to say.

---

It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that once someone has decided to consider themselves a writer—whether or not they're any good, whether or not they have any faith in their talent—their life as a casual observer is over.

When I was in early elementary school, I read books by the truckload. I've never been a quick reader, but at least when I was a kid, enjoying books came easy—all a book had to do to make me happy was have characters, a plot, and a puppy on the front cover. I don't remember most of the books I read before sixth grade, probably because they were all about the same, both in my mind, and on the page.

But I do remember the fateful day in sixth grade, during free-reading hour, when I took my book (some nameless member of that series with the adventurous alliteration…Dolphins after Daybreak, or whatever) up to my teacher and pointed to line about halfway down the page.

"Mrs. Rydquist," I said (yeah…that was a mouthful for a kid with a lisp and remedial rubber bands in her mouth) "what does this word mean?"

She picked her glasses up off her chest where they had been resting on her considerable bosom and slid them up the bridge of her nose. "Connectio…Oh, oh, that's just a typo, Mary. The word is supposed to be 'connection,' but you see, they've accidentally left the 'n' off." She smiled at me and let her glasses fall back onto their king-sized bed before going back to stapling things to the bulletin board.

In that moment, the core of my very humanity was rocked. Books could have mistakes?

Very soon after that, I began seeing the mistakes everywhere; it started, of course, with spelling and grammar, simple things that irked me, but didn't necessarily deter me from continuing to read the book. But then, in the summer after seventh grade when I started writing my first book, things began to go downhill.

Once I started to get a taste of the sort of choices authors have when writing books or short stories or poems or what have you, I started noticing every choice that an author made that I didn't like. This character should have been a boy, this bit of dialogue is about three chapters too early, this expository paragraph is totally contrived and I hate it! I hate it all!

Alright, so "hate" is a strong word. Nevertheless, after I became a writer, enjoying stories became a chore. I entered in to every reading wary of the potential monsters of mediocrity that I might face there, knowing that any second, the author would make a glaring mistake that would render the story impassible to my perfectionist brain. Gone were the days when I could sit down with a book and plow through it, not noticing the places where the story deviated from my ideals.

Thankfully, my "ideals" are not perched so high in the clouds as to keep me from reading anything but Encyclopedias for the rest of my life. But there have been whole series I've had to stop reading halfway through because of a crippling frustration that the author should have written some key element differently. The Halfblood Chronicles by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey, for one. The Dune Saga, for another. Books that I wanted to enjoy, stories I found fascinating, but enjoyment and fascination that was cut short…simply because I am a writer. It's not a hat I can put on and take off on a whim. It's something I always am, for better or worse.

The loss of my ability to casually read of book and stories (and watch movies, for that matter) was not all that my life as a writer took away from me either. Since taking up the bardic pen, I've had to give up the peace and quiet of good old American individualism, as well. Suddenly I've got to get into everyone else's business: every person I meet is a character, every bit of odd rubbish I see on the ground has an epic behind it, and every crazy dream I have I have after eating too much pork for dinner needs to be written down before it's lost to the ages, because it was inspiring and that sort of thing doesn't grow on trees.

Has this ever happened to you: Your friend (probably only kind of your friend…no one really close) is going through a messy break-up, or maybe there's an illness in the family, or maybe they're looking for a new job. You know there are questions you shouldn't ask—"Do you know how many times he's had sex with her, or is it just a ballpark estimate?" or "Will your aunt have to sell drugs to pay the medical bills?" or "Are you quitting because you're a racist and your old boss was Mexican?"—but a huge part of you is dying to ask so bad, because you're sure there's a good story there.

Or even more awkward, something bad is happening to you—you realize in your final year of med school that all you ever really wanted to do was be a concert pianist, or maybe you find out your brother really was adopted, just like you'd been teasing him for twenty years—and, in order to sort out your thoughts or just because you're a venter, you write about it. But the thing you write develops from a static memoir into exciting fiction, and you can't let go of the story, even though you know you're offending all of your friends and family by writing it.

Maybe I'm alone in this. My [non-writer] friends have often told me that I get too involved in movies and books and in the stuff I write, that it doesn't get this messy for anyone else they know. And the funny thing is that I really wouldn't want it any other way. I love how much energy I can get from watching a good film, or how fired up I get after a really bad one. I love how, when I go back and read those really long venting stories, I get excited and confused all over again, like I can relive parts of my life. I've always thought that the times I've most felt like a writer were the times I've most felt alive.

What about you?

When has being a writer really sucked for you?
If you could snag the copyrights to any story—book, movie, short story, poem, etc.—what would it be, and what would you do to it?
Do you have any journal entries that turned into stories you couldn't put down? What are you doing with those stories now?

Have a great week!

---

<3 spadeALLcross

How much is that doggy in the window?

Happy Friday, World!

This week has been a blur...I don't really know where it went.  But there were some definite highlights, so I'll just hit those up and let you go on your way.

Saturday, as I mentioned before, we went to Cambridge with the York St. John University international department.  We met up with Paul Chaplin, my RA from last year, who's been living there for five months, and he showed us around.  It was a great day, even though it was raining and freezing and I was wearing precisely the wrong shoes for walking around (I'd woken up five minutes after I was supposed to leave to catch the bus, thanks to my alarm clock being analogue and in Roman numerals...).

Sunday was church at St. Thomas with St. Maurice.  I love that church so much.  I wish I could take it with me back to the states.

After church five of us went to the Bratts' house for Sunday dinner/lunch.  So much food.  So much delicious food.  And I love those people.  Such a good day.

A little while after that was tea and toast (a fortnightly tradition at St. T's) which was mostly inhabited by Calvin students, but it was great to talk to everyone about their spring break plans, and talk to Stephen, Laura, and Hannah, who go to St. T's and organized the event.  Stephen used to work on the railways before he became a vicar, I guess, and he has some great stories about the old steam trains (including the Hogwarts Express!  He rode the real thing!) and is generally just a great and funny guy.

Monday, we went to Leeds.  [Insert excitement here.]  It was fun, but I'm kind of sick of talking about it. We saw the Royal Armoury Museum and the Leeds Art Museum, which were fun to see in conjunction with each other, because there was some interesting overlap between the wartime exhibits in the art museum and the parallel exhibits in the Royal Armoury.  And both were free.  Brilliant.

Tuesday...Wednesday...

Thursday! (This one's a long one...)
A bunch of us went to the National Railway Museum on Tuesday to ride the Hogwarts Express (just the engine was available, since the cars are just regular steam-engine cars, as I understand it), and while we were there, we saw that they had actors dressed up as Harry, Hagrid, and Dumbledore.  We didn't manage to get pictures with them, and some people had to leave to be on time for a meeting, so we left without any bounty.

But Lea and I weren't done trying.  We went back Thursday morning specifically to get pictures with Harry.  That's right; it's a half-hour walk one-way, plus we didn't know how long we'd have to wait for him...you only wish you were this hard core of a fan...of HP impersonators...

We got there around 10:30 because we knew that he would be in the 11:00 magic show and we didn't know if he'd be available for that first bit.  Turns out he wasn't, so Lea and I just hung around awkwardly, making jokes about how awkward we felt because this whole NRM wizard week was meant for primary school children on half-term holiday, and there we were, 19 and 21 years old, more excited about this than those kids, just because we wanted to take a picture with a guy who marginally resembled the guy who plays Harry Potter in the movies.

[The Magic show was awful.  Totally bastardized all the HP themes, made a fool out of Dumbledore, and made up all sorts of lies about Hogwarts and Muggle-Magic relations.  Very not okay.]  Then, after the show, the actors said they'd be right back to take pictures with people.  This was around 11:20.  From 11:25 to 12:00, we stalked Harry. Hard core (parkour! almost...).

[When they came back, Dumbledore was first, and he sot of knocked over the rope line around the little stage right next to where Lea and I were standing--everyone else had left--and he looked at us and said, "That's the Domino theory for you.  Except worse."  It was funny, but his voice was kind of creepy...]  Harry Came out eventually, and we just stared at him. Neither of us had the guts to ask him for a picture, so we were just staring.  [He asked if we were using "Muggle image capturing devices." Wtf?  Harry was raised by muggles.  He knows what cameras are...] He told Lea she looked like a Weasley.  Then he walked into the throng of children that had swarmed up behind us.  Lea and I, kicking ourselves for not being Gryffindors, followed him as best we could.  After a few moments, though, they said they had to go to the other end of the museum.  So they cut through the narrow path through the diner that stood in the middle of the room between Queen Victoria's train and a train marked "Winston Churchill" (whether it was his or not, I do not know).

The crowd of children was following them, so Lea and I made to cut around the diner.  As Harry Cut in front of us, he looked at us and said, "There are two girls who look just like you back there."  We started cracking up.  I felt so silly, but it was such a good feeling to laugh at myself for doing something stupid because of a book I've loved for half of my life.  I don't know how to explain it...

We walked around the side of the diner, which had half walls with frosted glass at the top that were just at the right height to make it look like we were trying to be sneaky.  We probably looked like such creepers as we kept perfect pace with Harry.  Once we got to the end, they started taking pictures again, and we tried to get in, but were too cowradly.  After a moment, they started working their way back through the diner, so we walked around again, crossed paths yet again, and got funny looks from Harry and Dumbledore.  Once they reached the platform stage thing again, they climbed up and started posing. So dumb.  Weird looking, too.  Like synchronized slow-motion disco.

Then finally, as they made to walk outside, Lea and I both, at least, managed to yell, "Harry!  Can we get pictures?" He said, "Sure, just follow us."  So we did.

Out into the sunlight, onto the platform of the Hogwarts express, where we finally got our pictures.  There were still crowds trying to get pictures with them, but Harry pointed at us and said, "These girls have been following us for a long time."  Facepalm.  As I took Lea's picture, Dumbledore asked her, "Where are you from?"

"Michigan."

"Oh, that's a long way to travel by broomstick."

Best. Morning. Ever.

Later that night, I made scrumptious homemade mac and cheese using real cheeses, mushrooms, onions, garlic, oregano...ahhhh.  There's some left over that I'm having for dinner.  I'm exited about that.

And last thing...I cut my own hair.  Below is my demonstration of what it looks like.

Tomorrow, we're going to Fountains Abbey and Ripon.  And next Thursday, Katri's coming!

There is so much to love about this world.  Being this far away from the people and things that I care about, from everything that's familiar, and watching other people's lives unfold without me while I sit in England, feeling like I'm not doing enough to experience the culture...there have been a lot of downer times.  With everything awful that's been going on in the world recently, in New Zealand, Libya, Egypt, and daily awfulness that happens everywhere, it's been so easy to see the terrible.  Life has never been a squeefest.  But this trip is teaching me to appreciate the little things, like the sheer ridiculosity that happens when you cut your own hair, because sometimes they're all you've got.

Granted, England, Harry Potter, Katri's visit, and macaroni leftovers are no little things.  We can't forget those, either.

Tell me how your life is!  This blog is all about me, but I don't want my life to be all about me.  Email me!  Facebook me!  Skype me!  Send me a link to your blog!  I want to know what is going on in your lives, too.

<3 spadeALLcross

I refuse to stuff stockings.

I am now going to proceed to do none of the things that I promised I would do.
Don't worry; there's still time.

What I want to talk about now is some random Christmas and family stuff.

I love my family.  I love each and every one of the whole lot.  We're spread out around the country, and I love that, because it makes every meet-up a destination-vacation, without even trying.  Getting together to see family is never just an afternoon's worth of an ordeal.  We span days, sometimes weeks, and we always inevitably see too much of each other for our own collective good, but I personally never get sick of anyone.  That's all the old-folks' jobs.

That's another interesting piece of revelation I've recently had about my family.  We're all pretty old, and we've all been old.  Now, I guess I should clarify that when I say, "we" and "old," I mean them in the most general senses: I am not old, nor would I really call most of my family "old," but when we get together, so much of the conversations revolve around "us" being "old" and how none of us can stand it.

My aunts and my mother complain about their faces getting wrinkly, my cousins and I complain about college being harder than high school and how we don't want to become adults.  My uncles and father complain about how they can't hear or see (well, no, they complain that everyone talks so quietly and writes so small) and my sisters complain that their children are growing up.

My question is this: is there ever a moment after our seventh birthdays when we're content to be swept along in the progression of time?  Holding on to our childhoods, fearing the discomforts of what's to come...or, like when we're kids, wishing we were older, with big-kid privileges?

Or, better question: is there a way that a person can just learn to be happy where they are, knowing that they aren't going anywhere faster than sixty-seconds in a minute, and that's how it's always going to be?  I feel like, after the hustle to get to college and the scramble to feel like an adult, I've reached a point where I'm getting sick of looking ahead, and bored of watching my back.  I know there were high times and hard times in the past, and I know there are more of both to come.  I don't think dwelling on either of those eras of my life is very productive for the moment in which I am actually living.

I firmly believe I'm only as old as I want to be.  (Of course, you're going to tell me that that's because I'm 21).  My body may deteriorate slowly, and I may not be able to do the things I used to, and I may not enjoy them.  But every phase of life can be full of excitement and...well, life.  Sometimes, I'll see it immediately, and other times you might have to look around a bit.

Insecurity about your age is one of the worst kinds of insecurity, since it is the hardest to even pretend to control.  When you're insecure about your body weight, you can eat healthier or exercise.  When you're insecure about your singing voice, you can take lessons, or lip sync.  When you're insecure because you're too old or too young, you can't change to improve your confidence--you'll only act more foolish if you try--so you end up worrying about it constantly.  Why not work to let it go?

That turned into a rant.  Scwhoops.

But anyway, back to my family and Christmas.  We're not all together this year, which is upsetting, I think, to everyone.  For some of us, this year has been full of pains and fears, and we wish we could have each other to bring us out of them.  For others of us, it's been a really great year, and we want to get together to celebrate.  But for all of us, our desire to be with family this year is not being wholly fulfilled, as we're all celebrating Christmas in our own abodes around the country.

It almost doesn't feel like Christmas because of that.  I'm scared it will be just like any other day.

But I get to see my brothers, my aunts, my uncle, my mom, my niece, my sisters and their families, my grandmother, and her caretaker.  It will be a full room tomorrow, as we gather around the tree, opening presents.

You know, I hate the commercialization of Christmas, and I refuse to buy meaningless gifts for people just because 'tis the season, but there really is something...strangely magical about sitting together with hoards of family, opening gifts and stockings, and eating eggs and sausage.

I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes.


<3 spadeALLcross

Word of the Week: Penultimate

I've seen this word around more often, I think, than I've ever seen it before...considering I don't think I've ever seen it before.  It was on the NaNoWriMo homepage this week, as this is the fourth and last full week of the month of reckless noveling abandon.  It was on a friend's blog in reference to the release of the seventh Harry Potter movie into theaters last weekend.

And it was in my life, as this is the penultimate semester before I finally venture across the pond to Europe.

And as I wrote the penultimate essays for many of my classes that require gigantor final essays.

And as fall made its penultimate attempt to stay alive yesterday, before finally giving way to freezing temperatures and a snowy forecast for today and tomorrow.

I actually have no idea if I used "penultimate" correctly in any of those contexts, as I haven't yet bothered to look up its exact definition and am relying entirely on context clues, which are sketchy at best in this situation.

Forgive me.  It was so delicious, so sweet, and so...long.  And I am sesquipedalian in nature.

Tune in next week for: Sesquipedalian, and oldie, but a goodie.

<3 spadeALLcross

EDIT: "penultimate" means "second to last."  So I was wrong.  Quite wrong.  About all of this.

I couldn't possibly fit my big stuffed Eeyore through the eye of a needle...but I can't just leave him behind, either. He and I have spent fewer nights apart than my mother and I have...

This week has been hitting me over the head.  In general, it was one of the longest weeks I've had in a very long time: the days dragged on and there seemed to be no respite, except for Thursday, which was glorious, but also tumultuous for its own unique reasons.  More specifically, though, this week seemed to have an agenda.

It's like, Sunday said to last Saturday, "Hey, if you could go back, get the buddies together, and get one message through to this kid, what would it be?" and Saturday told Sunday, and Sunday--a more enterprising Sunday than I generally have--found a way to rally the troops, and this week has been themed.

And it all boils down to this: I don't deserve anything that I have.  Nothing.  80% of the world lives on less that $10 a day.  I just got a pay check of eight times that, and most of it went into savings, because I don't have to live on that.  I bought a Prius this summer with money that I didn't work for, I'm living in a house that I don't pay for, and half the books I own are technically someone else's.

But it's not just about money.  I don't deserve the life that I have.  I don't have any debilitating illnesses, any massive emotional trauma, anything that stops me in my tracks and I have to shovel myself off the floor before I can continue my life.  I don't have half the emotional strength of some of my friends, and yet the amazing force of will that they have is often not even enough to deal with their problems--problems to which I cannot relate.

I've never really had to work for anything my entire life.  This isn't news to me or anything, I've known it for a very long time.  I'm privileged beyond belief, but I've just now, this week, several. times. over. gotten a glimpse at just how far beyond belief.

And it's not fair.  As much as I wish I could give everything away and make everything equal, that's not actually possible.  And I can't honestly say that I wish that at all, because I like my life and I like my money and happiness and crap.

This week has just been a steady realization of my own pointlessness as a human being.

Okay...wow.  That sounded way more depressing and angsty than I meant it to...but I'm leaving it there, because that's what it feels like.  It's a gaping hole, an empty pain in my chest.  It's a consistent thing that makes it very hard to feel good about anything.

But I don't think it's the end of the story, either.  I mean, being depressed about how awesome my life is and wallowing in my relative wealth in both wealth and status would only make matters worse.  The problem is, I don't know where to take this revelation.  Sitting with it and rolling it around in my hands over and over again each day is fruitless and demoralizing; it won't get me anywhere.  But I can't see an avenue through which I can satisfy my urge to fix something. 

It's sad.  I approach problems, conversations, friendships, workshops, Bible studies, naptimes, lunch breaks...everything with the intention of fixing whatever is broken.  And here is the brokenness to end all brokenness, and naturally, this is not a problem within my range of fixing.  This is so far beyond me.

And whoever is reading this, saying the whole, "Give it up to God; let Him take care of it, because He can do everything," in their heads, I want you to not speak.  Because that's not an answer, and you know it.  It's a dodge.  If God wanted us to wait around on him to fix everything himself, Martin Luther would have said, "Corrupt church?  Meh." and Jesus would have built houses for a living.  God works through people, not around them.

Basically...I feel like the past 20 years of my life have been a festival of Mary.  I'd like to get past that now, finally.  Start new.

Dear World,


Mary has had her own inflated sense of self and purpose erased from her memory.  Please never mention their relationship to her again.


Thank you,
<3 spadeALLcross

But really...what is with all the breastfeeding?

I've seen an increase of bumperstickers, billboards, and television commercials advertising the advantages of breastfeeding and promoting public nursing (an infinite degree of increase, at that, since I now see some where I before saw none).  I personally don't want to watch people nurse their kids in restaurants, but I also realize I can just turn away if it makes me uncomfortable, so I'm generally okay with it, but when did this become such a huge deal?  I just don't understand the sudden urgency.

Also, I think I found out today that most American and Canadian men are circumcised.  When was someone going to mention that to me?

Probably never, and I should probably thank them for that....

One other, less "reproductive and progeny-related organs" thing that I've noticed recently: my desire to be a good friend often hampers my desire to be a good friend.

Let me 'splain.


Sometimes, my friends will be very disappointed by something going on in their life--it will make them sad, angry, frustrated, etc.  They will tell me about it, and I will do my best to comfort them.  Then we will both move on with our lives, and time will pass.  At some later time, I will remember them telling me about the aforementioned disappointing thing, and I will wonder if it has gotten less disappointing, or if they're still struggling with it.  However, most of the time, I decide not to ask them about it, because I'm afraid that, if it is still disappointing or they haven't yet gotten over that initial disappointment, talking to me will make them sadder about it and I will ruin their day, or if they're not still struggling with it, reminding them that they once were and that it once disappointed them so badly that they felt compelled to talk to me about it will also make them sad and ruin their day.

Examples always make things better.

Let's pretend I had a friend named Yvaine.  I love that name, so I wish I did have a friend named Yvaine, but I don't so it's safe to tell a story about her.  She has a boyfriend (to whom, for the sake of fun and adventure, I will arbitrarily give the name Roland) and they have always seemed happy to me, though I subconsciously assume that they have their ups and downs like most relationships.  One day, out of the blue, Yvaine tells me, "Roland almost broke up with me yesterday."  I, surprised both by the out-of-the-blueness of the statement as well as its contents, respond, "Oh?  Why is that?"  Yvaine responds, telling me that they disagreed on a fundamental matter, and Roland would have rather have ended the relationship over it than tried to work it out.

A few days pass. I wonder, "Are Yvaine and Roland on better terms now?  Or are things still rocky?"  But I don't want to ask, both because of the above reasons, but also because, in this case, it might seem like I'm prying if I ask.

Am I just being stupid?  Should I just ask?

<3 spadeALLcross

P.S. Happy Autumn!

You can settle for less in ordinary life...

This week started with a shazam of sorts.

Monday morning, I had my first "observation" for my education class.  I need 15 hours of this observation for the semester, where I go to a local high school, sit in on my assigned class, and apply the theory I've learned thus far to the students and teachers I see in this setting.

This observation was scheduled for 7:50 to 10:00.  AM.  Yes.  It was ugly and disgusting, and I was dreading it.  Sure, I looked forward to the experience, the opportunity to finally get into a classroom, but waking up that early?  Yeah, no good.

The service-learning department set us up with willing local teachers based mostly on our schedules, though some consideration was taken for grade and subject preferences.  I asked for junior high, because I've been considering that as an option, so I'd like to get some experience with it.  That didn't work out, though, so I was placed in an AP English class at a public high school downtown.

I observed two classes because the girl who carpooled with me was going to observe the second class, so I just stuck around and added to my notes.  I can't describe how...useless I felt.  Not just because, for the first time in my life, I was in a classroom where I had no specific role in what was going on, but because those classes were completely beyond my realm of understanding.

It made me realize, I think for the first time, the breadth of what I'm trying to accomplish by becoming a teacher.  I'm going to be taking children I do not know and possibly will never understand or be able to relate to, and trying to teach them things that may or may not mean anything to them, and I'll have to work around and through all the darknesses in my own soul, as well as theirs, and everyone in my classroom is going to be vulnerable, whether they know it or not.

This all felt a lot more radical and shattering on Monday.  That that day was nearly 22 hours long didn't help my mental state by the end of it all.

I've always known I've been pretty sheltered all my life, either by my own volition, or through the insulation of my high school, my circle of friends, my hometown, etc.  But it hasn't before occurred to me on such a frightening scale that that shelter is going to severely hinder my ability to be more than just an instructor to the students I teach.

...

I still have three years to work through all this, though, so I'm not going to give up hope entirely.  But suddenly, teaching seems more like a challenge than a calling.

I had more to say, but I've spent too much time updating this thing.  I have homework to do and a nap to take.

<3 spadeALLcross

Busy day of nothingness...

Did a few odds-and-endsie sort of stuff, then visited my old floor where my two friends are the RAs, helped 'em make decorations. Including this awesome one that I'm really [unhealthily] jazzed about:

See, every consecutively linear combination of three is a cause&effect story. They all make sense to me, though I'll admit that most of them are quite...elaborate. But I want it to be like those inkblot things where people create their own stories as they find them, and I want to know what stories they come up with...

So if you're reading this and you can see that picture, please post your stories in the comments! Please please please! I don't care if I don't know you; I am inordinately excited about this.

Then I came home, did some dishes, found out that I'm getting my own room, and am now about to go to sleep on the couch.

<3 spadeALLcross

Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture.

I woke up with "She's Leaving Home" stuck in my head. That's oddly specific, Brain. Way to make me feel like a champ.

Also, I found out that some woman named Jessica Somethingorother gives my phone number to all the people she doesn't want to call her.

- Last fall, a creeper guy left a voicemail on my phone once, telling me that it was great to meet me at the bar the other night, and he thought I was really great and wouldn't I please give him a ring, now that I had his number, and that he was really sorry about the incident with his sister. He called me Jessica.

- A few weeks ago, I picked up a call that was from a number I didn't recognize, but my phone told me the area code was from Colorado, so I figured I might be related to the person on the other end. As it turns out, I probably wasn't; she was an elderly [and hard of hearing] woman trying to find her stolen car...and looking for Jessica to see if she knew where it was.

- Then this morning, I picked up an 800 number I didn't recognize thinking it might be my bank. Nope. A collection agency looking for Jessica Somethingorother.

And it all clicked; I don't know who this Jessica is, but she's got a sordid past littered with creepy men she doesn't want to talk to and misdemeanors and debt she doesn't want to deal with, so she's shuffing it all off on me. Well, thanks but no thanks, Jessica: I don't want your cast-offs, especially if they come with blind dates, interest, and/or jail time.

Drove to Michigan. Listened to HP3. Good times had by all. Moved my stuff into the house, but kind of just left it everywhere. Went to Meijer, ate dinner, and am now doing nothing of import...just chillin' on Ben's computer while he washes dishes.

Tomorrow I have some stuff I should get done...don't have my list here though, so I can't share it with you yet.

Sponsors are a mile or so away at my house, while I'm here at Ben's.

<3 spadeALLcross

What are you betting on? Your good looks?

Today was a packing day, but I really didn't do much. I got some stuff pulled together that needed to get pulled together, and then I started having computer problems, so I took Sampson to the doctor (aka the Genius Bar at the Apple store).

I told the guy that I was having problem with my permissions, especially those of the files in my /system/library folder. He told me that they could have gotten corrupted during one of the updates to my OS (switching from Tiger to Leopard, and then to Snow Leopard) or in all the rearranging I've done with my accounts over the years. He tells me I should probably do a clean wipe of my machine and just reload all my personal files from my back up. This was something I was prepared for, so it didn't bug me out too much.

But then he ran a diagnostic or repair or some tomfoolery on my hard drive from Disk Utility, having booted up my computer from an external hard drive. "Whup, this doesn't look too good. Looks like your hard drive is...how you say...dubious." That's right, he literally said "how you say." I cringed at the thought of replacing my hard drive, considering how much that would cost, and I figured that I would just talk him out of doing the repair today and walk on eggshells for a few months until I got enough money to buy a new hard drive.

"But hey," nice Genius Apple store man said, "your top case [the keyboard, track pad, and palm rests] is pretty cracked and smudged and gross. That's covered by some Apple guaranteed value wemakesureourhardwarelookslikegoldsopeoplegetjealouswhentheydon'thaveit program, so even though your warantee expired a few months ago, I can replace the top case for you."

That's great, monkey man, but if my hard drive's frying itself to death inside that top case, what does it matter?

"Aaaand, while I've got it opened up, I can just slip a new hard drive in there for you."

Deadpan.

"Aaaand it turns out we don't make 80 GB hard drives anymore. I'll just have to give you the 160 GB one."

Bug eyes.

"And how much will this cost me, ChainsmokingsleevetattoomanwhoImaynowwanttomarry?"

*wink* "Just don't tell anyone."

So here I am, posting it on the internet. I won't tell you which store I went to, or which guy it was, but yes, I will tell you that my computer is twice its size and looks good as new. I hope the permissions are fixed; I haven't actually figured out a way to test that yet.

Tonight, after that whole fiasco, and after I went through and reloaded all my applications and drivers and such, Dennis and I went to Blockbuster and bought a few movies, then came home and watched Brothers Bloom, which is quite enjoyable, in case you didn't know.

Tomorrow, I watch Annabelle, clean up my room, and finish packing for good. I should probably shower in there somewhere, too.

And now a word from our sponsors.

<3 spadeALLcross

Wikipedia keeps me from feeling awkward...and facilitates much laughter.

This morning, I woke up from a weird dream that combined my high school teachers, my youth-group retreats, my college friends, and my family camping trips, and decided to look up that paper that Mr. Schaefer had been talking about. I also reread a letter I had written to myself in his class, that I have a feeling he's not going to send me like he promised to.

I also found out what lavaliering is, and that my roommate from Freshman year just experienced it...and I laughed pretty hard, which, in retrospect, was a mean thing to do. I just cannot take greek life seriously. I'm sorry. Everything I read about related to the traditions and practices of sororities and fraternities sounds cult-ish and really silly, and the idea that people live their lives for such traditions and practices seems...pathetic. I understand, and even to some degree envy the greek concepts of community living and lifelong friendship, but only when they're at the ideal, which I'm guessing is not often. My parents both belong(ed?) to greek societies, and a ton of my friends do, and I can't say I've ever heard a horror story, but lavaliering? Seriously? You have turned a piece of jewelry--created to commemorate the relationship between a king and his mistress--into a verb, and that makes you happy?

"The Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity's inaugural lavaliering was held by Charles Stewart Jr., during which he presented his letters to Erika Rae Antisdale, member of the Chi Omega female fraternity. Historians of the American collegiate Greek system have noted this particular lavaliering as a "landmark achievement in modern Greek Life, the reverberations of which shall be evident on college campuses nationwide for generations to come."^[1]"

Yes. Oh my...I feel the reverberations in my very bones. My soul is rocked by your letters, Charles Stewart. I'm glad you and Miss Antisdale had a serious relationship that might have even led to engagement or marriage. I wonder...did they even end up getting married? How many lavalier-ers actually get passed that stage in their relationship? It would be an interesting thing to research...if I cared enough.

Now, my old roommate and her boyfriend, as I recall, are pretty serious, and I would actually be surprised if they didn't get married, so this isn't all that ridiculous to me. However...why go through all those dumb motions? I mean, engagement and even marriage to a certain degree, are social constructs that people structure their emotional lives around, which can be dangerous: Why hasn't my boyfriend proposed to me yet? Maybe he doesn't really love me, maybe he doesn't think we're serious enough, maybe he doesn't feel the gravity of our love for each other the way I do. My wife and I are married; shouldn't we be happy all the time? Shouldn't we always want to be together?

Why create yet another reason to freak out? Why hasn't my boyfriend given me his pin? Why doesn't my girlfriend want to get pearled?

Anyway...that was kind of a high-horse thing, wasn't it? Sorry...

Also, while being nostalgic this morning and going through old Fremd papers, I found a "story" I wrote for my Creative Comp class first semester of senior year. I don't know why, but I enjoyed it, and when I read it, I made a mental note to post it here. So I will.

Yellow Dandielion from Ohio

“But airplanes are beautiful, too,” he called up to me from the ground. “The sun shines off their wings and the pictures on their tails can sometimes be really pretty.”

I hung limply from the bar, concentrating on the next one, just a foot beyond my hands, barely out of reach. “Yeah, I guess,” I said, though I wasn’t really paying attention. I was much more focused on the challenge that stretched out before me.

“So then you like airplanes as much as birds?” he asked, bobbing up and down on his toes. I rolled my eyes: he did this whenever he was excited, and that annoyed me.

“No. I still like birds more,” I said, probably just to disappoint him.

“But Mary,—”

Before he could finish his sentence, the whistle blew, signaling that we had to go back to class. Defeated, I dropped from the monkey bars and shuffled off next to Eugene, who continued a well-worn rant about the superiority of machines and science over art and nature. I rarely paid attention to those anymore. In fact, I had begun to not pay attention to Eugene at all much anymore.

When we got back to the small room, Miss Deligio had us sit in a clump by the whiteboard, where she had written a sentence:

“All stories have characters, actions, and settings."

She asked Ashley to read it aloud, and while she did, I turned to Eugene, who was sitting next to me, like he always did, and said, “That looks like ‘Ch-aracter.’”

Of course, Eugene, being the outspoken nerd that he was, put his hand to his mouth and said loudly, over Ashley’s timid, first-grader voice, “That word looks like ‘Ch-aracter.’”

“Eugene,” Miss Deligio said with a dark look, “please raise your hand when you want to talk, and wait until I call on you.”

He shrugged. “I still agree with you,” he whispered to me. Then, narrowing his eyes, he asked, “Why are you blushing, Mary?”

“Nothing,” I said, hiding my face. I couldn’t help but be embarrassed for him, and for myself.

Most of that year was spent with me feeling embarrassed for Eugene, actually. He was socially awkward (though, at the time, I didn’t know what either of those words meant) and I was one of his only friends.

“It isn’t a flood,” he said. “If it were a flood, the basement would be all wet.”

In retrospect, I suppose it wasn’t a good idea to invite Eugene over to my house: he and my brothers didn’t get along very well.

“It is a flood,” Dennis said with all of his eleven-year-old empathy. “Do you hear those sirens? That means we’re all going to die.”

“We are not going to die!” Eugene said in a frenzy, jumping up and down and flailing his arms everywhere, almost smacking Patrick in the nose. I buried my face in my hands.

“Don’t worry about it, Eugene,” I said quietly. “They’re just trying to scare—”

“You’re not going to die, Mary,” he said, still looking at the prepubescent bullies towering over him. “I promise.”

“Well, whatever, but I’m going to go to higher ground,” Dennis said, walking towards the stairs. “Come on Patrick.” Patrick, sniggering, followed.

Eugene was absent from school a lot. When I’d ask him why, he said it was because he was always tired and him mom didn’t want him to get sick. I kind of resented him for it, because if I told my mom that I was tired and that I didn’t want to get sick, she would have sent me off to school anyway with only a reminder to drink lots of water. When he was gone, though, I was free to spend time with my other friends.

Like Mark, the boy I was going to marry.

Mark and I were meant to be. He collected beanie babies, just like me, and I had a dog, just like him. He liked to play kickball at recess, just like me, and my favorite color was green, just like him. We’d play with K’nex in his basement and share stories about Star Wars on the bus rides to and from school. In the long history of this world, there have never been two people more destined for each other.

Sadly for me, Mark was a rather dense boy, and had his eyes on my best friend, the aforementioned Ashley. I tried not to let it show that I was jealous, but I think I blew my cover when I cried for ten minutes after intercepting a letter Ashley wrote professing her love to Mark. To this day, our friendship is tainted.

With Mark “out of the way” so to speak, Eugene had a new spring in his step. That Eugene had hated Mark had never been much of a secret. Now that I was spending less and less time with my ex-fiancé, Eugene took it upon himself to fill the void with exciting adventures pretending to break the sound barrier on the playground. He came to school more often so that he could draw me pictures of underwater turbines in the sandbox and try to teach me how to make dye out of dandelion petals.

“You need two stones,” he said, diving under the Yellow and Green Thing where thousands of pebbles waited. “You use one big one to collect the dye that you make by rubbing a smaller one against the flower.” He demonstrated for me and showed me the piddly color that resulted from his efforts. It didn’t look to me like it could dye anything, but I didn’t tell him. We sat under that plastic play set during recess for an entire week just making yellow juice that would dry up every day.

But I didn’t complain, because, as much as I try to play off Eugene as the lone nerd in our dynamic-duo, I’ve come to realize that I can’t escape the fact that I had fun. Every ridiculous day he and I spent making purposeless, pus-like nonsense. Every stupid knock-knock joke he told. Every weird game we ever made up and played together. I had fun.

Which is probably why Eugene was taken aback when I stopped paying any attention to him at all. That was when James came.

James was from Texas. He was tall and had a funny accent, and I only have two distinct memories of him.

“What’re you makin’?” he asked me one day when it was too cold for us to go outside for recess. “Looks like fun.”

“It’s a town for Dragons.” Heaven help me, I had just seen Dragonheart and had cried my poor, innocent eyes out. “Do you want to help?”

And in one sentence, James replaced both Mark and Eugene. “Yeah, I do!”

After that, no matter the weather, and even if we were the only ones in the room besides the teacher, James and I stayed inside for recess and played with our paper dragons in their paper school and paper houses. There was a small contingent of students, The Dragon club, that stayed with us sometimes, but he and I were always there.

Eugene stayed most of the time, but after a while, he stopped playing with us and would just sit at a table and watch us from afar. I remember looking over at him and seeing the most malicious look on his face.

Then, just before school let out, James invited most of the class to his birthday party. It was the first (and last) time I went to Chuckie Cheese’s. I remember I had gotten him a figurine of a dragon that lit up and could be attached to a key chain. Eugene was there and had gotten him a book about leaves, but didn’t look to happy about it.

The rest of my first-grade year is fuzzy after that: I can only remember three things that happened.

“Will you marry me, Mary?” was one of them. It was shortly followed by, “I’m moving to Ohio and if you don’t marry me, we’ll probably never see each other ever again.”

Which was followed by our entire class going to our teacher’s wedding over the summer. Eugene wasn’t there. I hadn’t married him. I haven’t seen or heard from him in ten years.

But I hardly think that matters anymore. Ideally, I think we all wish that we could keep all of our friends forever, but reality dictates that we make concessions, choose one thing over the other, even if one or both of those “things” is a person that means a lot to us. Eugene and I were pretty amazing friends, even though, looking back at him, I can’t help but think of him as an outlandish, troubled child. Ten years ago, when asked to list the people I thought had made a huge impact on my life, he wouldn’t have been on it. But I’ve come a long way in that ten years and have forgotten a lot of things, but I haven’t forgotten Eugene. That has to mean something.

asdf

I don't know why that struck a chord with me this morning. But it did.

What else did I do today? I cleaned my dog, dyed my hair (schwoops! the wrong color, but whatever) watched A Knight's Tale which is much funnier now that I have a cursory knowledge of all things Chaucer, watched TNG, watched The Princess and the Frog, which was much more delightful than I had thought it would be, watched The West Wing, and did nothing really productive besides that. The only things that were really on my list were dying my hair and washing Fudge. Got those done at least.

Tomorrow =

Church

Family hang-out time

Minimal packing, but some nonetheless

At this point, I really wish I weren't going back to school on Wednesday. This, too, shall pass. I'm not just not in a good, stable emotional place right now, I guess. Meh, it happens. I'm pretty apathetic about everything else in my life.

And I really can't wait to see some people. I'm just not too excited about leaving the ones I've got.

<3 spadeALLcross