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

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

Why am I different? [Me: Part IV]

After all of these changes that have happened to me, where I was more or less a passive attender, at least to most of them, I knew that I had to start taking an active role in my own life.  So the next important step along my new path was reflected a little in my post from August, where I talked about addictions.  I didn't have a set agenda of "here are the things that I don't like about myself that I think I need to change otherwise my soul is doomed to eternal damnation," but at the same time, I knew that the way I was living my life was not compatible with what God wanted for me, and I wanted to change.

Why?  For people who aren't religious or are anti-religious, that's probably a pretty serious question.  I know that, for me, the question has cropped up more than once, "If God exists, loves me unconditionally, and made no mistakes when he made me, why would he want me to change who I was for him?"  And, similarly, I have been asked the question, "Why would you want to let God control your life with a list of dos and don'ts?"  I think I can answer in a way that we can mutually understand, even if we don't agree on the existence or importance of God.  Let me know if I'm wrong about that.

I think the answer to the first question is rather simple, but I say that as a Christian, so I may be wrong.  Humans essentially are animals with a more complex societal structure.  We have physical bodies that have physical and emotional needs, like food, water, sex, relationships, etc, like most animals do, but we also have dynamic cultural groups that help us determine the best and right ways to fill those needs.  Our parents, friends, teachers, random crickets and other societal buddies develop our conscience: they teach us, directly and indirectly, what foods are suitable to eat, how much water to use for what tasks, what kind of sex to have and when, what healthy or effective relationships look like, and so on.  Sometimes our animal instincts fight against our social structures: my mom tells me to eat my peas because she knows they're good for me, but I don't like peas, so it makes sense that I wouldn't eat them.  The USPS is socialized in order to reach more people, but I really just want to send my package quickly so I can go take care of other things.  My hormones wouldn't mind me having sex when I'm 13, but my body doesn't realize the harm that could befall it if I made that choice.

Christians believe that it is our complex societal structure was created as "the image of God"; it's the divinity in us, and literally what separates us from the animals.  Christians believe that, when functioning at top form, our societal structure should reflect God's perfect design for humanity.  So, in those moments when our physical and emotional needs fight against of social upbringing, it's kind of like a battle between our divinity and humanity.  What non-Christians call a conscience, Christians call the Holy Spirit.  God wanted us to be humans seeking divinity, which is why we were created with flaws that would force us to struggle against ourselves.  Everyone has internal struggles, and Christians don't even necessarily have more than non-Christians.  They're just sometimes of a different nature.

On to the second question.  While we don't want to completely disown our humanity, because it was given to us for a reason, we believe that God has a more holy call for us, one that does not always allow us to indulge in our physical and emotional desires.  Our faith tells us that God's plan is better than one we could make for ourselves, and that it will meet our physical and emotional needs, just not necessarily in manners or timeframes we expect.  In order to partake in God's perfect plan for our lives, we need the Holy Spirit to be in control of our humanity, so that we'll be in the right place at the right time, so to speak.  Christianity is not a list of rules you must follow in order to get into heaven, it's a description of the kind of person whose conscience controls their humanity in such a way that they are a perfect conduit of divinity traveling from God to earth.

Certainly, if you are not a Christian, you don't believe that God is something you want to deliver to the earth, but you have other things, agendas, goals you want to deliver to the world around you, and you probably believe that, in any situation, there are correct and incorrect ways of delivering those agendas.  It's the same thing, it's just that my agenda is God's.

In my post from early August, I talked about addictions and how they're present in places other than just illicit substances.  Overcoming addictions is one of the big parts of being a Christian: the first commandment is "God is the only God.  Worship no other idols."  Anything that I could put before God, hold higher on my priorities than following God's plan for me, is a sort of idol.  I need to eschew all other idols, because they distract me from my real goal.  So, over the summer, that's what I started to do.

That's a whole other post right there, and a bit of it is quite personal, so I'm not going to go into detail.  Plus, this post is already dragging on, and I'm quite pleasantly surprised you've willingly come this far.  All I really want to say on this point is that I am struggling daily with things I've never bothered to struggle with, simply because the struggle was too hard.  The struggle is exciting, though, and I'm really enjoying myself in what I swear is a completely non-masochistic way.  I just mean, at this stage in the game, I'm feeling immediate relief, and seeing that change is really energizing.  At some point, the immediacy of results will taper off and the excitement will be harder to find, but as this stage strengthens my resolve and my faith, I feel confident that I will be able to stick it through.  I'm not alone, after all: I believe in a God who will be with me through everything, who does not put me into situations and leave me there, and who doesn't let me get in over my head.

So this leads me up to this point.  In my next post, the probable conclusion to the "About Mary" mini-series I've been constructing, I'll talk about my goals for the future...which are really the only reason I started this whole blog project in the first place...way back in Freshman year.

Goodnight and goodluck.

<3 spadeALLcross

Who do I want to become? [Me: Part III]

Hey again.  See, I'm good at this keeping up now.  Don't get used to it.

Last post, I talked about how same in myself and lots of dark, depressing feelings forced me to change the way I look at my future.  I decided to take "the high road," if you want to be cliché about it.  I like to think of it more as the road personally mapped out for me specifically by God, a road that no one else can take.

The first step of that road was to get beyond the shameful experience that had brought me there.  Shame, guilt, fear...they're all very useful emotions and shouldn't be discounted or avoided simply because they're unpleasant, but they can cripple us if we let them.  So I had to let them go for now.  In order to do that, I had to begin again with my timeless mantra of "you're special, you're wonderful, you're perfect," but that wasn't going to work now.  I knew that I wasn't perfect, I knew that I had failed.  How could I be loved when I was a failure?  That's the opposite of what I've believed my whole life.

Almost immediately, I realized that love doesn't work that way.  Maybe I knew that before, but it had never meant to me then what it does now.  My mother and my brother especially, but others as well, showed me that I was special and perfect and important because I was loved, not the other way around.  It was their love that made me who I was.

But that's...not ideal.  My mother is an amazing woman and I wouldn't trade my brother for any other brother in the world, but they are just as flawed as I am.  There is a chance--slimmest of the slim, and I only believe this as a philosophical theory of general human nature, not of the love of these people--that something could cause them to stop loving me, and then where would I be?  Back exactly where I was.  I had to find a source of love that was beyond fault, beyond beginnings and endings, that was big enough to cushion me when I failed again, as I would, and strong enough to hold me when no one else would.

And there it was.  My new faith.

I've always believed in God's love, and I've always known in my head that I needed it.  But kind of like you can't describe to someone what it feels like to attempt to balance yourself on a bicycle, when that someone has never ridden one, I did know know what it felt like to believe I needed God's love.  Like I said, up until my realization of my own brokenness, I thought that I was good enough to be loved by God, not that God's love was constantly overcoming my not-good-enoughness.

Again, the transformation sounds like I went from point A to point A, when really it's just...really complicated.  I'm sure there's a lot of psychology or religious jargon that I could toss in here to help my explanation make sense, but I don't know the jargon, and I'm just hoping that there are enough people out there who have been where I was that they will just innately understand.  If you don't understand, please contact me and I can try again.  It's as important to me to learn how to articulate myself in this matter (I am training to be an English Teacher...so...) as it could possibly be for you to understand what I'm saying, so if you're interested enough, please let me know.

Thanks for sticking with me this far.  I hope you're getting something out of reading this as much as I am by writing it and processing it.  But really, if you have questions, concerns, etc., talk to me about them.

<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

Where do I think I'm going? [Me: Part 1]

Yup.  As per usual, as most of you expected, it has been a while since I last updated here.  That's not for lack of trying, believe me.  It's just that, between my list of goals I wanted to complete over the summer, my time spent unavoidably (if not welcomely) separated from my computer, the revision of my personal priorities, and the onset of school this week, every time I had something to blog about, I was convinced that there was some better use of my time elsewhere, and I was not often wrong.

The unfortunate consequence to this is that I now have a lot of stuff to say, while you have not developed some über stamina that would allow you to read it all in one sitting.  So consider this the first installment in a long line of get-to-know-Mary posts.  Because that's what they'll all have in common: "About Mary."

We'll start with the beginning.  These past eight months have been the most renewing months of my life.  They have been the most unstable, the most disappointing, the scariest, and the most wonderful time I have ever spent doing anything.  Throughout the four months I was in England, I became much more like the person I've always wanted to be; I became more confident in myself, less reliant on the affirmation of others, and more open and willing to try new things and take real risks.  I struggled, especially against myself, while I was there--I was homesick very often, out of my element with almost every step I took, and fully aware 98% of the time that I was less than perfect in many significant ways.  My semester abroad was not different or special in comparison to anyone else's semester abroad.  It changed me, certainly, like any new experience would, and it showed me who I really was, and sometimes that reflection made me cringe.  But I think that's what those sorts of programs are designed to do.  And if not, they still manage to more often than not, in my experience.

Fourish months removed from that time, I think I can safely say I've finally gotten around to processing it, and I think the most noticeable development it started in me was my newfound desire to travel.  I've always wanted to be a "world explorer," meeting new people and traveling to exciting places, just so I could see the world.  But now that I've had the smallest taste of that, and I know at least some of the downsides to that kind of an adventure, I feel like when I say, "I want to travel the world," I mean it now.  I know what's at stake, where I didn't before, but I also know what glorious things can happen as a result, and that prospect is exciting more to me than the fears are scary.

Then the summer started.  There was undeniable culture shock as I moved back to the US, even just from England (which is not all that different), and that experience further opened my eyes, showing me what I felt I needed to change about my lifestyle, that, in some cases, it just wasn't a choice anymore.  It's one thing to say something is important to you, it's another thing to realize that you simply cannot live your life without it.  My transition back to the states, back to things, relationships, and interests that once felt comfortable to me made me see more clearly which pieces of myself I needed to put the effort into preserving, and which pieces I needed to weed out.  The process is ongoing and challenging, but as I said, I simply can't stop.  I believe there are certain foundational pieces of my personality and my life that, if I neglected them simply because they were hard, I would be lying to myself about who I was, which would make my life hard to live anyway.  It's a lose-lose, in a [pessimistic] sense, but I think the intentional, challenging way is the more sustainable and rewarding way.

So that's where I was around the middle of June.  Tune in next time to hear about July.

<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

Today is Hufflepuff Day!

I have complained openly to many people about how I think Hufflepuff is the house for die Reste, the place where you go when you're not smart enough for Ravenclaw, not brave enough for Gryffindor, and not ambitious enough for Slytherin, but too wizard to stay home.

But, over the course of this past year, I've reread all of the books in a row, and I've learned something: Hufflepuffs are the activists.  The environmentalists, the inner-city teachers, the social workers.  They're hardworkers, and they're just and fair.  They'll do anything they can to stand up for a cause they believe in. And they probably will put two and two together fast enough to realize that it's smarter to live for a cause than to die for one if you can help it, unlike some Gryffindors.

Maybe I'm overblowing it.  They are all under 17, after all.  But they're not as bad as I made them out to be before.

Anyway, there aren't many Hufflepuffs I idolize (I didn't even swoon over Cedric.  Sorry.) and I had already picked Dumbledore to represent today, which is okay, because he's a headmaster: he can represent any of the houses.  Wild card.  Woo.

Caption: "In fact, being - forgive me - rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger."
Status: ‎"I would assume that you were going to offer me refreshment, but the evidence so far suggests that that would be optimistic to the point of foolishness."

I actually had a ton more quotes I wanted to find some way to use--

Well – it's just that you seem to be laboring under the delusion that I am going to – what is the phrase – 'Come quietly.' I am afraid I am not going to come quietly at all, Cornelius. I have absolutely no intention of being sent to Azkaban. I could break out, of course – but what a waste of time, and frankly, I can think of a whole host of things I would rather be doing.

"I am not worried, Harry," said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. "I am with you."

"What happened down in the dungeons between you and Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally the whole school knows."

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

And next, my outfit.

Hufflepuff is yellow and black.  So far, my least favorite color combination, but I still think it works pretty well.  The shirt is something from LOFT...or at least, that's what the tag says.  I bought if from a thrift store.  Shorts are black and from Primark.  Necklace is from Modcloth.  Jubilant expression is from me feeling awkward in front of a camera, trying to squish my whole body in there.

Tomorrow is the big day, guys.  The big day.  Good luck, God bless, and I'll see you when I see you.

<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

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

Here we are now, entertain us...

Sorry about the lack of post last week.  Aren't you glad I was moved enough by my church service to post twice the week before?

I've been keeping two journals for my entire trip: one imposed by myself (in order to facilitate the recollection of fond memories and because I find that I am less likely to let days slip away from me if I have to own up to my own listlessness at the end of the day by writing it down) and one imposed by my Calvin professor to prove that I'm learning something while here.

In both of these, I sometimes write very interesting things (if I do say so myself) so I think I'll put some here for your perusal.  That way you don't have to put up with another itemized list of my week's adventures, but can instead enjoy a magnified bit of my life from one or two days that I found important.

Enjoy!

25th February, 2011

Tonight at the Bratts’, we watched The Young Victoria. Its main focus is the romance between Victoria and Albert, their courtship and early marriage, and how Victoria overcame the trials of her childhood only with Albert’s help.

A lot of the movie romanticized a life that was quite a bit more depressing than Hollywood would like it to be—the industrial revolution in England was a heartrending time for the people, and Albert’s early death, and the early deaths of many of their children were nigh unbearable for Victoria herself. But from what I’ve learned, Victoria and Albert were at least very close to being as much in love as the movie portrays, and they probably had something very similar to the courtship shown in the movie.

To think about that made me wonder about relationships today and how everyone pushes for compatibility while Victoria and Albert met twice and exchanged tons of letters before they decided to get married. How could they have known how compatible they were?

Maybe we should all care more about finding someone we love and learning, through patience, faith, and practice, to love the parts of them that don’t quite mesh with our own. There’s a minimum of compatibility that needs to be reached, a happy medium that must be struck, but maybe searching for perfect every time is just selfish and, ultimately, unsatisfying. What is life, and also love, if it does not involve conflict and resolution, as well as constant reform?

26th February, 2011

We went to Fountains Abbey today, the ruins of the richest Abbey in England before the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. In the 19th century, the lord of the neighboring estate took up gardening to pass the time, made the beautiful water gardens that are there now, and his son bought the ruined abbey to complete the picturesque landscape.

It was a gorgeous, warm, sunny day, perfect for wandering the grounds, and I was completely swept up in the place. I climbed trees and rocks and up muddy embankments and tried to walk over waterfalls…it brought out so much of an old, lost version of myself that has been lying dormant since early in high school. The me of my childhood that loved camping for the sake of playing in dirt, and who wanted to sit on the bank of every river and dip her feet in. Fountains made me miss my old spring breaks spent in Eagle Rock, Missouri growing up. Some of my fondest memories come from those trips, when the leaves were first beginning to turn, and the sun would work to burn through the clouds each morning, having just enough energy afterwards to keep the day moderately warm.

I’m finding that a lot with travel in England; it is turning me into a new person; a more culturally aware person, but also a more self-aware person. A person who knows who she is and all of what she can be, and is seeking to reconcile those two beings. England has taught me a lot about the world and about myself, and the sunlight and water sounds at Fountains Abbey helped me to actually feel that for the first time.


10 March, 2011

Yesterday, Josh D, Abby, Gabe, and I went to All Saints Church just before their Ash Wednesday service to look into doing it for our upcoming museum reports. The church building itself was a bit smaller than St. T’s and the congregation was significantly smaller—however, this being a midweek and seasonal service, and with there being the option of an Ash Wednesday service later that night, there was no way of telling how large the actual full congregation would be.

We walked in to look around, and a man at the back of the church who was sitting, waiting for the service to begin noticed us with our cameras and notebooks, and just stood up and gave us a sort of impromptu tour, delineating for us the whole history of the building, from the Medieval times all the way up to a fire in the 1950s and the beginning of his own attendance, some fifty years ago.

That’s something I’m noticing in England, and I don’t know if it’s just me or of it’s an actual cultural difference: people seem to have a better grasp on history, especially the general history of their country dating back to antiquity, but also specific histories of important buildings and cultures within their country. I don’t know how true this is of the younger people (although my flatmate who’s from Colchester did learn about Boudica in primary school and recalled making a portrait of her out of macaroni noodles on paper) but many of the older people are able to recount events from the Medieval times and earlier, specific details about the Minster and even Eboracum. I don’t even know when my hometown was founded, and I often forget that the Articles of Confederation ever existed.

It seems counter intuitive that people whose country has millennia worth of history have less trouble recounting it than people whose country is less than three-hundred years old, but that is a trend I’ve been noticing.



In other news, I posted a new snidget today.  If you missed last weeks...don't worry about it.  Not much to see there.

Have a stupendous weekend.

<3 spadeALLcross

Interjections (Well!) show excitement (Oh!) or emotion (Hey!)...

I said I'd post every Friday, but I hope I didn't say I'd only post on Friday.  If did, I'm sorry; I lied.

This morning in Church, we digested Matthew 6:24-34 --

24“No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
Do Not Worry
25“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life^b?
28“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

--and the speaker (I don't yet know what all the different positions are in the Anglican church) made a point of reminding us that God considers each of us as his treasure, his most cherished piece of creation, and that we could never fathom how much love he has for us.  If we did know, we would never get the impulse to worry, because we would know that we were completely safe in his love. She pointed to several individuals in the audience, saying, "You are his treasured creation, more loved and important to him than you could know. And you.  And you."

I think it's a struggle for many, if not most people to remember this day to day.  We know we're not perfect, we know the worst parts of ourselves, and we see ourselves in a constantly revolving state of failure.  Sometimes it's hard enough for us to believe that the people in our lives who say they love us really do; we wonder if our parents would rather they hadn't had children, if our spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends are quietly growing more and more distant because they're not really in it anymore and just don't know how to say it, if our friends, roommates, siblings, cousins, would, at any given moment, rather be with someone else than with us.  And these people aren't in touch with a whole world made up of billions of people who are easily more interesting, hard working, beautiful, smart, and just better than us.  God is.  How could he love us this much?

But the point is he does.

However, he doesn't just love us.  He loves everyone.  He loves each person in the world (and throughout the universe, I feel safe in presuming) as much as he loves us.  He loves Mahatma Ghandi as much as he loves me, and he loves Mother Theresa as much as he loves me, but he also loves Paris Hilton as much as he loves me, he loves haters on YouTube as much as he loves me.  He even loves Hitler as much as he loves me.

That's something that I have troubles with, far more than with the "he loves me" bit.  Because even though I can't get to the 100% knowledge of his love, there are moments when I feel it, and aspects of my life that affirm it's truth.  But the knowledge of his love for everyone is less reflexive and self-evident, and more of a muscles that must be continuously flexed.

I'm putting this post here so that, some day, when the need arises, I can return to it and remember.

<3 spadeALLcross

The power is yours!

So, I'm taking a class this month about film noir, primarily those movies that came out the forties and fifties in America, but we'll be touching on neo noir and some foreign films as well with the same overarching themes.  Today, though, we watched Christmas in Connecticut, which, if you've ever seen it, you should know it's definitely not a noir film.  Ironically, it came out a yearish after Double Indemnity (which we watched in class yesterday), which is generally considered to be one of the archetypal noir films, and Barbara Stanwyk played the leading lady in both movies.

In both movies, Stanwyk played a woman who was weaving a web of deceit around her in order to better her own situation: either to be alone and rich and comfortable, or to have a mink coat and a job.  The parallels aren't perfect, but they are there, and it's kind of unsettling to think about them.

Because were it not for the bright lighting, happy music, all the stylistic differences, and the last ten or so minutes of the movie, Christmas in Connecticut could be a noir film.  Terrible things are going on, a flimsy lie is falling apart all over the place, people's livelihoods hang in the balance, and no one is in control, least of all the people who think they are.

Isn't that interesting?  A classical hollywood film so close to tripping over the line of the dark, painful hollywood tragedy, the noir.  But that's all classical film ever does...the conventions of the happy ending, the comical spin on ridiculous events, the tricks of light and sound...that's all that's keeping Meet the Parents from turning into a murder suicide.

In one style, people are considered to be generally good on the inside.  In the other style, they are considered totally depraved.  That's the fundamental difference: the way we look at the people, the way we're made to think about them and their lives and their motivations.  Are they good natured or cruel at heart?

My question to you, my dear readers, is does this apply to real life, too?  In what ways are the arguments between optimism and pessimism the same as the arguments between classical film and noir?  In what ways are they different?

<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

Coming Soon to an Internet Browser Near You

I'm going to quickly jot down a few ideas for winter-break posts so I don't forget them.

- Summation of NaNoWriMo Experience
- Book Review of Machine of Death
- Year in Review (? this is very iffy, as I'm not a huge fan of writing them, and I don't know that anyone actually reads them)
- Summation of my birthday experience
- Freak-out session about the coming Spring Semester
- rant about Hipsters

Stay Tuned!

<3 spadeALLcross

Lots-o-Huggin' Bear

Firstly, gotta clear something up about my NaNo calendar to the right there.  It says I didn't get to 1667 yesterday, but in fact, I got to 1703 by about 8:00 pm, but didn't have internet to post it, and when I did have internet, I forgot until I got home from work at 1:00 am this morning.

So I still only owe Ben $5.

On to other things.

I've been posting a ton of videos lately, and I'm sorry if that's messing with your browser, but I'm going to post one last one, and I'll wait until these other ones go away before posting any more.

I personally don't believe it's a good idea to make abortions illegal, because that won't make them stop, it will just force people to go through other, potentially more dangerous channels to get them, which would only be worse for both mother and child.  But I do believe that abortion is a terrible thing, and there are very few circumstances in which I can see the need at level with the cost.  Of course, my entire argument gets very convoluted when people bring up the idea of abortion as murder, because I can't get beyond the fact that it is, but I can't believe that it can be treated the same way.

Anyway, government shouldn't be the regulator, but some greater effort should be made to keep people from making this choice. The woman in this video has some points I don't agree with and is kind of kookie at points, but her story is amazing, and people like her, as well as people who support people like her, should be in charge of a privatized movement to end the demand for abortions.

Granted, she doesn't agree with me.  But that's neither here nor there, because we're probably never going to meet.


Gianna Jessen from LMF CAM on Vimeo.

<3 spadeALLcross

Clarification, Qualification, yadda yadda

I've gotten some comments in the past few days (readership?  what?) on my disillusioned-with-the-world post.  The comments were confusing me, so I went back and re-read that post, only to realize that I sounded way more depressed than I actually felt or am about this whole situation.

I'm not living in a down-on-myself way because I have this wealth of opportunities and overall happiness that most of the world does not have.  I'm living in a frustrated turmoil because figuring out how to use my gifts and wealth and privilege in the best and most efficient ways possible is very...well...frustrating.  I suddenly don't know what I want to do with my life.  I don't know what's important to me or what I'm best at, where I should be investing myself and how best to serve a world that needs me.

Long term, this could mean changing my career plans.  I'm considering dropping education as a major, taking some art classes and going into marketing and computer-aided design, because that's something I really love and am fairly good at, and it's something that could be useful for companies, not-for-profits, starving artists, etc.  I really get into that kind of work, and fears I have with it are actually considerably fewer than fears I have with teaching.

Because, let me tell you, the idea of molding young minds is looking less and less fun and more and more like no one should be trusted to do it.  It's too scary to me, to have that much power over lives.  But maybe I'm over-thinking the job and underestimating myself, so I really am still thinking and praying through all of this.

Short term, this revelation means I'm reevaluate the way I live my life day-to-day, specifically how I treat and interact with people.  I'm a very selfish person (I think I hide it well, so if you disagree with me, you will not be able to convince me) and I need to work on that, because it gets in the way of loving others.

And right now, "loving others" is suddenly the number-one priority in my life.  Doing for others, being there for others, giving myself away in order to get myself back, if that makes any sense.  I don't like who I am when I'm all about me.

I'm aware that this doesn't mean letting people walk all over me.  It's much more challenging than that; it involves a change of the heart, a change of priorities.  And that's what's really getting to me, what's giving me the hardest time.  That's what prompted me to write that post a couple days ago.

Last week was like taking the lens cap off a point-and-shoot digital camera; it took a while for the exposure settings to adjust to a functional level.  That last post was a summation of the blinding white and painful haze of realizing that my world is too comfortable.  This week, and many weeks, months, years to come, is the slow adjustment into a life the knowledge I've gained from that haze.

This post may worry some of you as much as the last did.  But if you love me, give me the benefit of the doubt.  And give me time.  If we had but the world enough, and time...

<3 spadeALLcross

EDIT:

I came up with an idea last week for my second tattoo...and I'm actually actively pursuing it.  (By actively, at this point, I mean I'm passively and slowly saving money for it.)  My drawing tablet appears to have bitten the proverbial dust, so this is obviously not a final rendering (also, it is not a very good example of my skills in computer-aided design...) but this is the general concept.  The final product will still be this simple, but with better lettering and, you know, straight lines.

It comes from something in Tim Russert's memoir, Big Russ & Me, wherein he writes a letter to his son, Luke, as an epilogue.  "Lukeman, along the way you'll hit some hurdles and experience some setbacks.  I will always be there for you, as Grandpa was for me.  But remember, while you are always, always loved, you are never, never entitled.  As Grandpa likes to say, 'The world doesn't owe you a favor.'"

This is huge to me, especially right now.  I'm just thinking about it, because permanently marking up your body is one of those things you don't just do for fun on the weekends, but I am thinking about it.