And I say way-hey-hey it's just an ordinary day...

    This is odd what I'm doing right now.  It's a little bit funny, this feeling inside. 

    You see, it's really February 16th in 2009.  I don't know if I even write in this blog anymore.  I mean, in 2012.  In May.  All I know is that, if my life continues on the path it's on now, I should have just finished my senior year at Calvin College, hopefully with a graduation.  But that's up in the air.  And, honestly, I don't care too much.  If I have to go back for another year, so be it.

    The following is a time capsule of my life thus far.

Name: Mary

Nick Names: Mamma Bird, Teragram, Heelz, Marizzle, Roomizzle...

Age: 19 1/6

Current Favorite's Playlist Includes:

Supermassive Black Hole

City of Delusion

The Winner Takes it All

You Know I Will

Ordinary Day

Wolf & Raven

We Don't Need Another Hero

WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING? I want to be reading Brave New World.  That's what I'm going to read in my oodles of free time...Other than that, I'm reading Plato's Republic, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."  In fact, I'm supposed to be reading that right now, but instead I'm blogging.

WHAT TIME IS IT NOW? 3:56 pm, Eastern Standard Time

WHAT'S ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? I don't use one.  The one that I don't use that I keep in my desk is covered in a black and white tessellation

FAVOURITE BOARD GAME? I haven't played it in a long time, but The Hobbit, or Clue.

FAVOURITE MAGAZINE? I don't really read those.  My Poli-Sci text book looks like a magazine, but I don't read it either.

BABIES? My puppies Star and Fudge.  Oh, I miss dem sooo much.

FAVOURITE SMELL? Ha, Head and Shoulders Citrus Blast.  That answer might look weird in three years.

WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD? That pit of your stomach feeling that hurts a lot and either means longing or regret.

FIRST THING YOU THINK OF IN THE MORNING? Snoooooze, baby.

HOW MANY RINGS BEFORE YOU ANSWER THE PHONE? Usually four or five.

FUTURE CHILD'S NAME? Boy - Liam or Corey or Ewan or Wyatt or Aaron.  Girl - I'm still working on it, but perhaps Ainsley.

FAVOURITE COLOUR? More like a color scheme, and that would be anything with blues and greens and blue greens.

WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT IN YOUR LIFE? Ideally it is establishing a rhythm and staying true to my goal priorities.  However, if I were to speak truthfully, I would say my boyfriend.

FAVOURITE FOOD! It's sad, but Grilled Cheese from Knollcrest Dining hall always makes my day beautiful.

IF YOU COULD PLAY AN INSTRUMENT, WHAT WOULD IT BE? Saxophone.  Again.  In my high school's Wind Symphony.  I miss that so much.

DO YOU LIKE TO DRIVE FAST? Only a little.  I'm usually perfectly happy with a mere five over.

SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL? If I weren't afraid of throwing it off my bed and suffocating my roommate.  That's entirely too possible at this juncture.  But it would be my Eeyore or Horsey.

WHAT TYPE WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? It wasn't mine per se, but it was a Toyota Camry.

WHO IS THE PERSON FROM YOUR PAST YOU WISH YOU COULD GO BACK AND TALK TO?  My grandfather, my mom's dad.  I don't remember him very well, but I want to get to know him more.  Either that or Alexander Stracken from the first grade.

FAVOURITE ALCOHOLIC DRINK? Bloody Mary.  I obviously don't drink too often.

DO YOU EAT THE STEMS OF BROCCOLI? Yes.  Is that avoidable?

IF YOU COULD HAVE ANY JOB YOU WANTED WHAT WOULD IT BE? A writer and a mother.  Which is incredibly ironic, because I can't imagine myself with children.  But not having to go into work would be awesome.  Teaching won't be such a bad compromise, I think.

EVER BEEN IN LOVE? I am right now :D

GLASS HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL? Full, my friend.  Always.

FAVOURITE MOVIE? Moulin Rouge, The Dark Knight, The Mission, Stardust, Lord of the Rings, oh my, there are so many.

DO YOU TYPE WITH YOUR FINGERS ON THE RIGHT KEYS? Dude, my QWERTY wpm is over 120.  Eat that.

WHAT'S UNDER YOUR BED? Genevieve.  She's napping.

WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST AMBITION? I don't know about ambition, but I have a dream to teach English in Germany...maybe.  If this German Minor thing pans out.

WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST WEAKNESS? I have a hard time believing what people say about me, unless of course it's bad.  I don't know if that's a self-esteem issue, or a selfish thing...

IF YOU COULD BUILD A HOUSE ANYWHERE WHERE WOULD IT BE? Either Ireland or New Zealand.  Would I hope to live in that house all the time once I am out of college?  Only if it were in Ireland and Ben could come with me.  Otherwise it would just be a summer home or something.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE ARTICLE OF CLOTHING? I just got this awesome shirt that says "How to Break Dance" and it's really comfortable and funny.  So maybe that.  But I also love my Calvin sweats and this black shirt I got at Old Navy.

BEACH, MOUNTAINS OR CITY? Mountains.  Or Beach.  Or City.  Crap.  Okay, right now, if I had to pick, I'd pick Beach, even if it had snow on it.   But in general, I love them all.

TECHNOLOGY OR ART? Art.  Fo shizz.

COMEDY OR HORROR? Depends on the further subcategories.  For instance, I'd never pick Dumb and Dumber over Ghost in the Darkness, but Stranger than Fiction is almost always better than 28 Days Later.

FAVOURITE PHYSICAL FEATURE OF THE OPPOSITE SEX? Probably the shoulders, forearms, and eyes.

FAVOURITE TIME OF DAY? Lunch time on MWF because there's a short little break where I don't have to do homework.  There aren't any real obligations for a whole hour.  Other than that, probably around 5:00.  I just like it.

THE LAST CD YOU BOUGHT? Sonata Arctica's "Unia"

WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE PLACE TO BE MASSAGED? Upper Back.  Oh, I could use one of those right now.

WHAT'S MOST IMPORTANT, STRONG IN MIND OR STRONG IN BODY? Mind.  If I were trying to be strong in body, I'd be quite the failure.

WHAT TIME DO YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING? 9:00 during the week.  Whenever I decide to on the weekends.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE KITCHEN ITEM? Toaster Oven!  I never noticed how much better it is than a toaster until I came to college and had to cook my bagel pizza in the microwave....

WHAT MAKES YOU REALLY ANGRY? Unhealthily stubborn people.

WHICH DO YOU PREFER, SPORTS CAR OR SUV? SUV.  But I don't particularly like either of them.  I'd much rather have a cute compact.  Yes, that's right, Cute.  I'd name him Corey.  Unless she were a Prius.  Then it's either Silas, Sirius, Beowulf, Chaucer, or Ginny.  I know, I know, only one of those is a girl's name...

DO YOU BELIEVE IN AFTERLIFE? Yes I do.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SEASON? Autumn, I'm pretty sure.  But I love Spring too.

IF YOU COULD HAVE ONE SUPER POWER, WHAT WOULD IT
BE? The ability to turn invisible whenever I wanted.  Or the ability to write real good.

DO YOU HAVE A TATTOO, WHAT IS IT? I do.  It's "all in" between to spades with crosses in them on the inside of my ankle.

CAN YOU JUGGLE? Only two things.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE DAY? Friday.  It's spectacular.  No obligation to do homework, and open house hours until 1:00!  Yah-heah!

WHICH DO YOU PREFER SUSHI OR HAMBURGER? Sushi, but that doesn't mean much, considering I don't eat red meat.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE SOAP? My Ruby Guava shower gel, but that's not soap.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE MEAL? Grilled Cheese and tomato soup!  Hooray!

IF YOU COULD TAKE A VACATION ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD
WHERE WOULD IT BE? Ireland or Scotland.  Or Germany would work too, I guess.

I wonder how much I've changed...

<3 spadeALLcross

So...what's next? [Me: Part V]

So now...the exciting part.  Where do I go from here?  What do all these changes mean to me, and how will they affect me?

Well, my desire to travel has opened up new avenues for me, but because I'm still a little cautious about, in my fervor for adventure, getting in over my head, I'm starting small.  I've wanted to visit Asia for years now, and now that I've been to England, which I thought was my first love, I feel like Asia is next.  I found a company that works with college students, recent graduates, and other like-minded people to install them as English teachers in China and Mongolia for a one- to two-year periods.  They also happen to do a summer camp program in the same countries for a shorter amount of time.  I checked my summer school schedule and my other engagements for next summer, and I found out that it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to take part in that sort of experience.  So...that's on my short-term dream list.

As I've been through the teachers' education program at Calvin, I've learned that I, like many upper-middle class white kids from the suburbs, struggle with stereotypes and prejudices, and I've seen how important it will be for me to break those down if I want to be an effective teacher.  So part of my goal in traveling to China is to immerse myself in another culture, to feel stereotyped, to need to defer to other people and lose myself in the attempt to assimilate.  I had a taste of that in England, and it was eye opening.  I don't think it's healthy to do that, to try to dis-identify with the parts of your life that made you who you are, but I do think it's what many classrooms ask students to do (even students of the racial and ethnic majorities) and I want to better understand the challenges in resisting that so that I can aid my students later on in life.

But I don't want to stop with China.  I want to start there because I'm fascinated by Eastern philosophy and cultures, so the actual transitions and logistics of living there may be more enjoyable for me.  But I want to then move to places I'm both less comfortable and less experienced.  There are other international teaching opportunities in Central America and Africa, and I would love the opportunity to get involved there.  I haven't found any available in the Middle East, but there may be other short-term options that I can look into.

Realistically, the timing is not great.  I don't actually have all the time in the world; I have a life in the US I'm excited about living, people I don't want to leave behind for so long, and a teaching certificate that will probably not get shinier the longer I'm away from the US school system.  So I'm definitely still working out the kinks in my plan.  But these are the things I'm excited about.

On a similar note, I don't believe that I can teach to American children without knowing more American children than I already do.  I want to get involved in US cultures and societies vastly different from the ones I grew up learning.  My school has what they call "living-learning residences" on and off campus.  In my freshman and sophomore years, I lived on the Honors floor, which was one of those communities.  There are other dorm floors like my old one--the creation care floor which is involved in environmentalism and the grass roots floor which is involved in social justice and racial and ethnic equality--and there are off-campus houses called Project Neighborhood houses, which are rooted in the community around Grand Rapids, especially the urban communities of downtown.  Many of the houses pair with churches or schools and the residents are required to get involved in those pairings through volunteer opportunities.  They are also "intentional" (a sort of Calvin buzzword) about creating community within each house, with house dinners and communal food...stuff like that.  More than simply six college students living in a house together and sometimes going out for pizza.  It can be really meaningful if the students want it to be, and that's something I think would benefit from.  (If only because I'm a kind of hopeless nerd and I need more social interaction if I ever want to function well in groups of people.)

I love where I'm living now and the people there, but I've been silently frustrated for a while now that my whole community will be changing after this year as so many of my friends graduate and get jobs and maybe even move away, while I'm left here, still in classes.  Not all of my friends are going to leave, certainly, but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of my close friends, including my boyfriend, went off to grad school and I was left to fend for myself.  Project neighborhood would keep me involved with people whether I liked it or not, which would be really helpful and maybe even necessary.  I don't know yet; I'm still thinking.

Basically, I just wanted to share that I have some new goals for my life, that my newfound desire to travel and my re-found desire for divinity has given me an excitement for worldly adventuring, from teaching overseas, to living in diverse and different communities, to branching out to people I don't know, to being a generally more open and inviting human being.  None of these things interested me (practically) in the slightest eight months ago.  Some of them haven't interested me for more than a couple days, some for more than a couple hours.  I wanted to share this with you because it's all thrilling to me, and I want to explore it.  As most of the people who read this blog are people I care about and who care about me, I really want to explore it with you most.  Even if you think I'm crazy, even if you're worried that I'm becoming someone you don't want to care about anymore, I want to hear from you if you have something to say.

Stay cool.  You're 2Good2Be4Gotten.  Don't ever change.  And all that stuff.

But really, just live your life.  In the best way you can think of.  If I were someone who tried to literally bless people, like a CRC minister, that's what I would leave you with.

Tune in next time when I'll talk about...maybe cheese.

<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

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

We gotta stop meeting like this, hun.

Another crazy dream, not as terrible as the last, but still kind of hard to stomach in places. Americans had been enslaved, I think by some European nations, and we had pretty much given up hope of ever being rescued, since we'd never been very nice to anyone but the Europeans, I guess. Anyway, there was a class system among the slaves, and one guy in his twenties or thirties had a lot of "money" that he had used to build himself a really nice hut that stayed out of the heat, and a little corral for his car. He had also used it to buy one of the slaves; I think it was Megan Dincher. He had her stay in his hut all day while everyone was working, because he was afraid of this other slave who was in love with her and might have tried to steal her.

Meanwhile, Ben Verhulst, Ben Niewenhuis, Carley, and I watched all of our friends die off one by one [in a weird movie-like montage] from a plague that the slaves were all prone to for some reason. We carried of J$ and Jasmine, Breems and Luke, some of my more remote high school friends, etc. And then the four of us were all relocated and we thought we'd never see each other again.

I got to hang out with all the old people and the little tykes, which was creepy, because this wrinkly old woman [whom I shared a sleeping bag with because the nights got really cold] was evidently a very...excited lesbian. Then, one day, while working, I came across Megan Dincher's prison hut, and saw that there was a guy trying to break into it. I went to go stop him, and found Ben, Ben, and Carley, as well as some more of my remote high school friends had already tried to stop him.

Eventually, we were all crammed into this little hut, and I some how figured out that it was this guy who was in love with Megan (though she did not reciprocate) who had bought her prison hut and everything, by giving Megan's owner all the money he needed.

We decided that instead of turning the one guy in, we'd all try to escape. Somehow we made it to South America in a matter of a couple hours of a train ride. But there was still slavery down there; there were training camps for children who would one day be old enough to be slaves. We got stuck in one of those; they were going to hold us there until one of the camp overseers could come and pick us up and take us back to the states. So we tunneled our way out of there, and discovered all these wonderful places, including a place where Chilean children chase penguins into ice caves. We were all really scared that someone would find us, so we were soaking up as much of the landscape as we could, since it was much more temperate in Chile than it was in America, where it had gotten unbearably hot.

Then my phone went off and I decided it was not a good idea to try to go back to sleep in a dystopian society.

Other than that, today went pretty well. I washed off my new bookcase, packed up my car, finger painted with Annabelle, showered, watched some Royal Pains with Dennis and my mom, watched the beginning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, ate dinner, then left Illinois. I listened to the tail end of The Prisoner of Azkaban and then switched to music for the last 45 minutes of the trip. Now I'm back in my Michigan room that smells like Thai Dragon Fruit or something like that. And I'm not dying of heat exhaustion. Life is good.

Goodnight, World.

<3 spadeALLcross

I need some sleep, I can't go on like this...

I've been having troubles staying asleep past five or six hours for the past few weeks, and the past couple of days it's been really catching up to me; I've been falling asleep at friends' houses, while using my computer, and even while eating. It hasn't been a whole lot of fun, so I decided when I got home last night, that I would try to catch up on all that "lost" (I went through most of the past school years on five to six hours of sleep a night without any problems, so I don't know why I can't now) sleep. I went to bed at 10:00ish and promised myself not to get out of bed until at least 9:00.

That failed. I woke up at 1:00 just long enough to look at the clock and roll my eyes. Then I woke up again at 5:30. If I had gotten up then, I would have gotten almost exactly 7 hours of sleep, and my body definitely wanted to get up then. My mind started churning about stuff I had to do today, expecting me to get up and start doing it. But I refused, and eventually, though it took a while, I got back to sleep.

Mistake. I had the worst dream of my entire life between 5:30 and 7:30 this morning.

In the dream, my mom and I went to a movie together. My mom had suggested we see it because she'd heard it was revolutionary film with a lot of really poignant social commentary, etc etc. (In real life, my mom would not recommend that kind of movie: if a movie is depressing, she doesn't want to see it. More and more, I'm finding that that is my view too. Revolutionize me with real life, don't make my escapism tragic) Anyway, so we went. But while we were watching the movie, we were in the movie. It was weird, and no one questioned it; dreams are like that.

In the movie, the US was going to war with Egypt for what ever reason, and the president had decided to fire a nuke at them. So, we fired one, and then everyone started preparations for someone to fire one back at us. The president went into his bunker and a bunch of people kind of stowed away with him (not the Vice President, oddly. He decided to stay above ground). My mom and I got into the bunker, somehow, and the First Lady showed us around, since she had been in charge of the décor.

For what ever reason, there were windows facing DC (which suddenly had rolling hills of open fields and camels...?) and holes in the ground to, as the First Lady said, "Let the smell out," whatever that meant. We were all milling about in the giant bunker, just kind of chilling. This part was funny; it felt like Dr. Strangelove a little bit; when dealing with the end of the world, all these people could do was fuss about the stylish curtains in the fallout shelters. While dreaming, I was thinking, yeah, this is quite the social commentary. Good movie, I thought. People should see how ignorant we all look.

Then the first bomb hit. We watched it out the window. For a dream full of surrealism and an American President of a different color, it got everything about nuclear warfare spot on. At least, the bomb that exploded maybe three miles away from the windows in our bunker acted exactly like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did, according to all the reports I've read. We watched from safety as the camels and random people who didn't have an in with the President were instantly incinerated, and the shockwaves tore at the landscape. Then the ground beneath us started to heat up, and (this part I'm not sure is realistic) the molten crust of the earth below the bunker started to boil and pop into the holes in the floor that the First Lady had been so proud of. There was a little boy there, I'm not sure who he was, but I grabbed him and he and I lay on the floor, my back to the lava pits that we were all too close to, me screaming in pain and promising him I would protect him. My mom got too close to one as it bubbled and popped and the skin on her arms...well it was gross. Then Ben's roommate, Luke Breems jumped into one of the holes. I'm...not sure why. Breems is probably one of the most sane people in that house he lives in...but it was a dream after all.

It was very gruesome, very vivid, and for a while, I forgot it was a movie. The President was scheming with his staffers on some way to escape the lava, and they recommended he lock himself away in the sub-bunker (that looked suspiciously like the fallout shelter from Blast From the Past) and he agreed to do so. Meanwhile, all the people who's started to burn alive were turning rapid, including the little boy in my arms, the First Lady, Breems, and my mother. I started yelling at my mom that I'd had enough, that I wanted to leave the theater, that I didn't care how revolutionary the rest of the movie was, I didn't want to see it or live through it. her eyes went wild and she bared her teeth at me and I started hitting her with pillows and trying to escape.

When I woke up, I started crying immediately and groggily made my way downstairs to my mom on the couch and started the slow process of forgetting the dream. But it's still as vivid to me now as it was when I was in it.

...

Aaaanyway...

After that whole fiasco, and while I battled the inevitable exhaustion that comes from waking up mid-REM-cycle, today was a full, fun day. I went out shopping with my mom, my aunt, and my niece: three generations of Rittenhouse women. We went to Meijer (yup...that's the fourth time this week) and then to the mall to visit the Apple store, f.y.e., Sam Goodie (or whatever...I wasn't there for that), and to let Annabelle play in their little play area.

Then we went home, put Annabelle down for a nap, and began watching the movie, Where the Heart Is, with Natalie Portman, among others. We didn't finish before my mom had to go to a party of a friend of hers who moved to Texas a while back, but is in town for a little while.

While she was gone, my aunt and I went to Barnes&Noble's, where I had an old gift card, and I bought far too many books...but they were all worth it. ... Hopefully. I really hate spending money, especially on books. It's all very counter intuitive, I know, because I love having books, and I love earning money so I can spend it. I struggle with the whole have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too thing. But boy, being around all those books, and holding them, carrying them around the store with me, smelling them, talking to them and about them to myself...it just put me in the best mood. And it smelled like fall outside; I love fall. I'm excited for when it decides to come and stay.

Then she and I went to Starbuck's, checked the air in my tires to discover that I may need to fill one of them up tomorrow, and came home. I played with Annabelle a bit, then put her down to bed, and my mom eventually got home in time for us to finish watching the movie. Very good movie; definitely recommend it. It's a chick-flick, but by no means a shallow, two-bit one.

Now I'm going to bed, with a full mind and sagging eyelids.

<3 spadeALLcross

If I close my eyes tonight...

I've been in a weird funk all day. This morning was great, when I woke up and was all well-rested and stuff, and it was even raining a little so the humidity wasn't as bad, and I even got to use my blanket for the first time since moving in. But then it went steadily downhill all day. My guess is that I was just lonely for most of the day, watching Psych by myself on usanetwork.com and waiting for the UPS guy/Ben to come.

Ben came first, and when he did, I got really tired all of a sudden. And then the UPS guy came, and I was hyper. Then we went to see Inception, but ended up going to a later show than we had anticipated, so we went to Meijer first (yes, I've been there every day this week except for Sunday...) to get some screws for Ben's foosball table. Then we saw the movie, and it was great. Again. Then I went home, ate some dinner, tried to watch The Guild, failed, and went over to Ben's, and ended up just watching Psych on TV. Only this time, Nelson was there, so it wasn't all bad. And then I fell asleep. Ben woke me up in time for the Colbert Report, but I fell asleep during that too.

Funk. Gah. Obnoxious. I really wanted and tried to be awake tonight. Failed.

Anyway. Tomorrow, I'm going to Calvin to pick up an employment slip, playing some Mario Kart with some friends, and then going home for the weekend. Then classes start on Tuesday.

Summer is officially over.

<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

Where are we? What the hell is going on?

Good day. Packed for camping, hung out with Molly, watched TV with my mom, babysat, and had a hard-but-necessary conversation with a person I care for very deeply. Now to bed, perchance to dream. But really, with my track record, not-dreaming would be okay too.

<3 spadeALLcross

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Can't get down, can't get level; when I'm up, I can't get down...

I barely slept at all last night. I had a lot on my mind, worrying about a lot of inane stuff that, of course, turned to nothing in the morning. I don't think I'm the only person I know whose sleep is so connected to her waking, but I'm the only person who will admit it. My dreams always have something to do with things going on in my life, be it video games I'm playing, things I'm worried about, something I was doing just before bed, and they often carry the same weighty emotions as those real life events. If I'm anxious or excited just before getting into bed, I often can't sleep, and when I do, I have very vivid and immediately recurring dreams of whatever is making me anxious or excited. Sounds pretty straightforward, but it feels really disruptive. I know a few people who have really odd dreams, but they never actually pertain to life, and they rarely ever have trouble sleeping because of their subconscious.

I sometimes wish I was like that. But then again, this is my superpower.

Anyway. Other than that, I learned how cashier's checks work today, and I saw Despicable Me today with my mom and Dennis. The more I think about it, the more I like it. It seemed kind of lame at first, and it is pretty predictable, but it's really cute, and Steve Carell is really good, I think.

Then I [kind of] made dinner. I started making dinner, and then Patrick took over the chicken because he likes grilling things, and my mom took over the macaroni and green beans, because she thought I was doing the chicken and she didn't want anything to explode. So...I set the table...? But it was good, so I don't care.

Tomorrow, to Radio Shack. Also, I think I'm watching Annabelle. Also, I hope I'm seeing Sorcerer's Apprentice. If not, then I shall see it another time.

Okay. Gone now.

<3 spadeALLcross

Mr. Sandman, come send me a dream

I have been having really vivid dreams lately. I'm still trying to remember the one I had early this morning, because it was a good one, whereas the other ones this week have all been nightmares. They wake me up and keep me from easily getting back to sleep. I'll look at the clock, hoping that it's late enough, close enough to the time I would have to get up anyway, that I can just start my day and not have to go to bed. And I've been going to bed later and later and avoiding naps even though I really need them because these dreams scare me, and I wake up unable to stop thinking about them.

The one I had on Monday was the first one I can remember, though I vaguely recall some frightening sleeping experiences over the weekend. Monday morning, I woke up at 3:00 and couldn't figure out why I had , except that maybe my decongestants were wearing off and I was having a hard time breathing. I feel asleep again eventually and had a dream where I was going around with my boyfriend and this other girl I know, following the destructive path of a serial larcenist. I think I've had this dream before, and in the dream I recognized what was going on and kept trying to be one step ahead of the guy. But all the stuff ended up getting stolen anyway, and the girl that was with me almost died because I'd brought attention to us and the larcenist was trying to stop us from catching him. He burned down my house, and I think my grandmother was still inside. I woke up at 6:30 with that thought in my head. I almost got up and started doing homework or something, but my body was still too tired to be on my side about that.

Then yesterday, I fell asleep reading for one of my classes, and I had a dream where I was in Arabia during the 1950s. I don't know if it was really supposed to be Saudi Arabia or somewhere in Africa; all I know is that it was called Arabia. I was captain of the guard, right hand man (because I was a man) to the Sultan. After WWII, they were planning some big reforms of policy, and the Sultan had me sit in on the meetings when he couldn't. The one meeting I vividly remember was talking about beginning a census in Arabia. The US had made the form template and had sent us a copy to approve, and most of the people in the meeting thought it was a bad idea. One guy asked, "Who's in command of Arabia? Is it Harry Truman? No, I don't think so. So why does he suddenly call the shots." It was then that I remembered some bit of intelligence that said someone was going to try to assassinate the Sultan, so I ran out of the meeting and to his chambers, but he was already dead, and his son, Aladdin (yes, that Alladin. Don't judge my subconscious stereotypes) had been taken from his crib. And I woke up to go to dinner wondering why I hadn't remembered the foul plot in time.

And what sucks most about this is that I remember these dreams really clearly. And the one I had this morning, which I remember being happy about because it wasn't scary or sad, I don't remember.

Also, I'm breaking out like crazy. I have five zits on my face right now, which is three more than I had this weekend and five more than I ever got through all of high school. I hope all of this is just a result of the stressful time of year, but just in case it has something to do with my diet, I've started being more conscious about what I eat.

But it's creeping me out/making me angry, and I would like it to stop. I keep snapping at people for no reason other than the fact that I don't sleep well, and I get into slumps where I can't focus on my work because I'm so tired. I usually love sleeping, but now it scares me.

Anyway, that's what's going on in my life right now.

<3 spadeALLcross

Oh my gosh. This is awsome.

I know some of you are going to think that I'm silly or stupid, or behind the times, but after my basic skills test today, I came back to my dorm to find people looking at this ModCloth fashion website with some awesome new winter stuff that I'm kind of drooling over, uncharacteristically. So if any of you are looking for something to get me for my birthday (wink wink) pretty much anything on this page would make me extremely happy.

<3 spadeALLcross

Ocean Mother

    My aunt lives in Westerly where the Atlantic is just a hike or a short drive away, and, though on this trip we're taking advantage of that less than we have in past years, I still am getting to see my one true love, and that makes me happy.

    I've been feeling a bit under the weather this whole trip, so I didn't get out to immerse myself in her embraces, so the two of us have been content playing a sort of far-away game with each other.  The game goes like this: she shows me her glories, and I sit back and feel small, overwhelmed, and amazed.

    There's nothing small about the ocean.  Even the microscopic life that lives there gathers together in large pools, and the tiniest grain of sand helps comprise the most unfathomable shorelines.  When the surf comes up to dance around my ankles, it looks like whipping cream, and I always sense a strangely honored feeling about myself when it decides to stick itself to me instead of washing back into the waves.

    But this year, the southern coast of New England is recovering from a hurricane that sailed too far off the shore to do any damage on the coast, but too close to allow safe sailing.  By the time anything reached our beach, Bill had taken the form of giant waves that kept surfers and swimmers at bay, but felt to me like my Mother was stretching out, like a cat, like she wanted to play or show off, and she refused to be interrupted.

I miss her whenever I leave her, but whenever we reunite, I feel like no time has passed, or ever will again.

<3 spadeALLcross

It's a love story; baby just say yes. Ohhhhh!

<3 spadeALLcross

All things end, so my friend, we, too, must be parted...

Well, a week from today, I will be in a Philosophy final, preparing to go home in less than four hours.  

I am very excited.  Naturally, though, I am also very sad.  It's weird how many "lasts" people have been talking about lately, even though none of us is actually leaving the school.  Well, except for Melwin, who transferred to UofM.  It feels like my senior year all over again, when people were always saying things like, "Oh gosh, this is the last time I'll ever eat in the cafeteria!" and "I'll never have another five-minute passing period again!"  But there are a lot of lasts now too, and they're all a little bittersweet.

However, I have a lot to look forward to this summer.  I'm going to try to make it the best summer yet, full of actual productivity as well as unprecedented levels of fun.  I'm usually not very endeavoring with my summers, and they end up getting away with me.  But I have a couple goals for the summer, which might make things better/easier.  

Wow.  I just spent a half hour away from the computer, having gotten rather distracted by packing up some of my stuff...Don't know where that came from.

Anyway.  

Yeah, so...bittersweet...yay summer...academic burnout...

Sums up my life.  

<3 spadeALLcross

We can't stay like this forever...

    Well, this has certainly been an interesting day.  One that I'll never forget.

    Let me start from the beginning.  I was supposed to start taking my Secondary Ed. classes this semester, but they were closed by the time I registered, so they told me to start taking them in the fall.  If I had been in EDUC 102 this semester like I was supposed to be, I would have known earlier that I had a preliminary departmental exam to take this week that would ultimately decide my aptitude as an instructor.  As it was, I found out on Monday when the "reminder" email was sent out to all the first-year education students.  After a powwow with some of my education friends, we all signed up to take the test yesterday morning at 8:00.  It was standardized scantron and we got our scores back over the internet this morning.  

    I failed.  Not just nerd-failing, not just didn't-meet-my-own-too-high-expectations failed.  I failed miserably.  I checked my score first thing after waking up, and then checked my email immediately afterwards to see that my education advisor had asked me to come in and see her later.  So I set up a meeting with her over my lunch break and prayed for the next two hours that there would be some way I could recover from this blow.

    During my first class of the day, American Government, we had guest speaker, a Calvin Alum, come in for about thirty minutes and talk to us about a political science mock-umentary mini-series starting next summer on NBC.  He said the show would be a cross between "The West Wing" and "The Office," and though I generally have a very low view on recycled television, the show actually sounded pretty interesting, both entertaining and informational.  He said it was going to be Hollywood's good-will service to America in trying to inform the public about how politics works as well has how current events are affecting everyday people.

    Luckily, that presentation took my mind off of my current program predicament and I was able to pay attention fully.  Otherwise this day would be much more of a heap than it is.  But more on that later....

    After class, I went straight to my advisor's office.  She explained to me the heart-wrenching news that the secondary education program does not take students who received as low a score as I did on the departmental entry exam.  She said that people who achieve my level of failure generally have psychological obstacles that would keep them from thriving in a teaching position, and that could endanger their students, in which case they believe that our vocation lays somewhere else.

    I was...a mess.  This cesspool of emotions from righteously angry (I am not a psychologically blocked, okay?) to considerably distraught.  Education has been my one dream for as long as I can remember.  And now I find out that I'm in no way qualified to even try it out.  I skipped my next class and tried to sleep off my depression.  It didn't work, really, because I kept waking up really sharply and bursting into tears.  

    That all lasted until about 1:00.  I gave up the nap as a bad job and got up to check my email again.  I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what I got.  

    The presenter from my Poli-sci class had emailed me over KnightVision (my school's internet networking thing) to tell me that my Brit-Lit Prof had given him my name.  He was looking for students who might be interested in internship positions in Calfornia with his new show over the summer.  He asked if we could meet before he left at the end of the day.  So we set up a conference at 2:30 as soon as I got out of class.

    So here's the final deal: God has closed a door and opened a window to a brighter world.  I can't even describe how thankful I am for the opportunity that I have been given.  I talked to Jared (the producer and director of the show) and ended up telling him the whole sad story about my exam debacle and subsequent lack of a major.  I told him that I didn't even know if college was going to be worth it if I couldn't get my teacher's certification.  It's a fear that's been running through my head for the past couple of days as I felt my future hanging in the balance, that, since all I've ever wanted to do was teach, now I won't be happy in any job.  

    But Jared then started explaining his plan to me, and, I must confess, I'm more excited about working for him on that set than I've ever been about anything before.  He said also that, through his trips to college campuses all over the country, he's found dozens of willing interns, and he could set me up with their information so we could all work together about finding housing in the area around the studio.  He and his wife have a good network of friends in LA who would all be willing to be host families for some of the students, though there would have to be an application process.  

    So I picked up an application.  

    And I asked Jared if there would be a possibility for me to be on set year-round, instead of just during this one summer.  He said that he hadn't thought of it, but that he'd definitely think about it, and that it could probably work out.  I'd probably have to work my way up with some effort into a paid position, but that would be even better.

    So my day went from awful to blessed in less than six hours.  

    I'm not saying that I'm definitely dropping out of Calvin, but I won't lie, I'm considering it deeply.  I think that Hollywood would be a great place to find my niche while trying to serve God.  And this show is such a good idea with such great motives.  Talk about engaging God's world; we'd be reforming a medium that has been using it's mass-communication efforts to manipulate the public for far too long.  I feel absolutely called to do this, and I'm so excited.

Wish me luck!  And pray for me!

<3 spadeALLcross

Hey, Mister Sandman, come bring me a dream

    Okay.  Forgive me for what is inevitably going to be a long post.  I had the weirdest REM patterns last night.

    Let's begin with the most frightening one.  I literally woke with a start and had to talk myself down from tears and lesser break downs.

    So I was sitting in a big room that, from its height, suggested that it was stationed in a tree, and was entirely made up of windows.  There were long tables stationed all over the room with no regard to feng shui, and there were upwards of a hundred students around my age sitting at them.  One of them was my brother who was leaning over and talking to the girl sitting next to him, trying to explain to her the virtue of his music career and how it affects his philosophies on life.

    Somewhere in the middle of the room stood my Religion Prof.   I may or may not have spoken about him in past posts.  He passed out our final exams and began to proctor.  However, there was a slight hitch (as I saw it, anyway.  No one else seemed to notice...): he was proctoring our Music History final, not our Bib Lit final.  Not only that, but it was the worst put together final I had ever experienced.  I can't really explain how incomprehensible the order of the question was.

    Anyway, he began playing the listening examples.  I didn't notice it at the time, but they were all from past tests and I hadn't re-studied them this time around, which was obviously a problem.  But also, he gave us little to no time to turn the considerable amount pages required to navigate to the questions that dealt with the particular listening example.  And then it turned out that we didn't have the full three hours generally allotted to a final exam, though I'm not sure why.  There were several pages that were photo-copied out of the glossary from our textbook with the answers whited out, but I didn't have time to finish them, because by the time he finally finished with the insane number of examples, it was time to turn in the test.  I looked over at Dennis, and he did not seem concerned at all, but I was freaking out.  

    I woke up scheming ways to get to my laptop that was across the room and would require maneuvering around several sleeping family members in order to check my grades online, but, as I said, I was able to talk myself into the realization that it had all just been a terrible, terrible, cruel dream.

    When I finally got back to sleep, there was an intense segue into the next dream, which also took place during finals week.  I was talking to my RA, who was very upset about having to stay at school the whole week, and we were walking through our dorm, which more resembled my church in its size, its parking lot, and the existence of its escalators and moving walkways (CLARIFICATION: My church does not have moving walkways, but if it did, many people would not be surprised.).  But anyway, somehow I got to my room, and my friend Ben was there, and we started talking or watching a movie or ignoring each other completely (that part was a little vague) and there came a knock on the door.

    The two people who stood before me when I opened that door are the biggest mystery of the dream.  Generally, no matter how far a dream breaks from reality, my subconscious is somehow able to identify its parts (for instance my dorm was my dorm, even if there was nothing about it that resembled my dorm).  However, these too people were completely unknown to me, even though I felt like I should know them, and at the time I dreamt them, I was unsurprised to see them there.  

    Well, anyway, they had shotguns.

    So these dream-trespassers were angry at Ben and I for some reason, so they tried to shoot us, but I somehow incapacitated them and managed to wrest one of the guns from their hands.  Evidently, though, I had not forestalled our impending doom enough so that we could take our time in figuring out what to do next.  We ran down the halls, and somehow got split up, which was evidently a good thing, because I ended up in some large auditorium (that doesn't exist in the real dorm, by the way) with a gun, and the two people found me.  

    Just a summation of who had been shot by now: I and the two mystery people had, but that did not impede our movement at all.  Also, somewhere between the anti-climactic chase scene and our arrival at the place where some mass shindig was occurring, the mystery girl was rendered innocent, and when campus safety caught us with our shotguns (somehow the girl had gotten a hold of my gun, though she didn't want it and hadn't planned on using it) I fought almost physically with them over her lack of involvement.  Also, as they carted me away, I asked if I could make a quick trip to the basement to say good bye to Ben and explain to him what happened.  Needless to say, that was not allowed, but I was genuinely p-ed off.  My subconscious can get pretty uppity pretty fast.

   I had another weird dream after that one, but I forget what made it so weird.  All I can remember about it now was that I went to Meijer to buy a bath towel.  

<3 spadeALLcross

All I want for Christmas is you...

    Peace.

    No really.  I mean it this time.

    People always say that.  "And Miss Georgia, if you could use the crown to bring one new thing to this world, what would it be."  "Wee-ell, Huneh, I'd breeng peace."

    But no.  I mean it.  Peace on Earth.  Peace of mind.  Peace.  

    And The Dark Knight on DVD.

    Okay, so the actual list is a work in progress, but you get the point.  I finally really appreciate the this part of the reason of the season, a trite little phrase that I hate saying, but it felt so relavent just there.

<3 spadeALLcross

And so the lion fell in love with the lamb...

    Part of me really hates that I just quoted Twilight as a blog post title...

    You know, relationships are weird.  If you think about it, when you define a relationship, you're giving that person a conditional definition.  "Cari's my best friend," "Dennis is my brother," "Reggie is my iPod."  It's a precarious and potentially temporary definition, in some cases.  I mean, with Cari, she's my best friend whether she returns the favor or not, and Dennis can't just up and stop being my brother.  But what about something like "Hannah is the person who drives me to Meijer when I run out of cream cheese"?  All it takes is one Meijer trip Hannah refuses to take me on, all it takes is one "No thanks; you're walking this time" and our relationship changes.  

    Defining people is a risky business, and sometimes is utterly unimportant and means nothing.  

    So why do we so often feel like we need to do it?

<3 spadeALLcross

And on the eighth day, God created Amazon.com. And He said, "Oh snap. Now that's what I call good."

    Last week was what I am referring to as "Library sans Library" week.  I was studying profusely for the three midterms and a test in five days, however the library is on the opposite side of campus from my dorm, so instead of ruining a good walk, I just fashioned myself a quiet habitat either in my room or the basement.  

    Last weekend was what I am referring to as "Screw 'em" weekend.  Don't get all gross on me; I just mean that I did absolutely nothing productive until Sunday night (something I've been trying to avoid in all my past weekends, but due to the stress of last week, I decided it would be permissible this once) and I splurged and spent money.  Online.  Thus the title of this post.

    Anyway.  This week is going to have a completely separate title: 

    "Mary is remembering herself" week.  I'm going to spend this week doing the things I loved to do before, the things I gave up when I came here because I made time for other things instead.   I need to find a balance between new Mary and old Mary.  

    Writing.  Reading.  Sleeping.  Actually caring about homework.  These are all things that have been tossed by the wayside.

    With you as my witness, I am returning these weapons to my arsenal as of right now.

Good night and good luck.

<3 spadeALLcross