Get thee to a nunnery upon thy weak hams!

Apologies for the random title (or not, because I enjoy it quite a bit). I’ve recently re-read Hamlet for my British Lit class. Which sort of leads into the point of this.

I haven’t been writing much on here, it’s true, but in all actuality I have been writing quite a bit, both for school and (sort of) for myself. The second classification of my writing might not actually be considered writing by many because I’m mostly writing stories with characters that already exist (yes, I’m talking about fanfiction), a notion which I think is complete and utter bollocks, preposterity, what have you. And apparently preposterity is not a word, but that also helps me shimmy into the point of my writing this.

I’m already in love with words. I have been for ages (as I believe I’ve mentioned a time or two before), but recently I’ve begun falling for language itself. I adore the way it twists and changes, I adore the differences between spoken and written grammar, the ability to create words that don’t exist but that are readily understandable (preposterity, for instance, though perhaps that’s only understandable to me because I’ve gotten not a wink of sleep). I’m hardly an expert on language, incredibly far from it in fact, but I’m desperate to learn more about it. In my British Lit class we read a few bits of stories in Old English, and I’m captivated with how vastly the English language has transformed itself. Somehow it went from a liquidy yet harsh and very outrightly Germanic/French conglomeration of words to this, which admittedly is still quite the linguistic smorgasbord but now very classifiable as, simply, English. 

And so now I am faced with the overpowering want to yet again study something that will likely not supply me with a stable career. I want to write, I want to cook, and I want to scrutinize syntax. What, oh what, shall I do?

Spinning Yarn

I need to start spinning yarn more often. Not fluffly soft thready yarn, but knitted word yarn. In plainer speech I really should be writing more, on here and in my notebooks and just in general really. I feel bad when I look at the empty pages of my multitudes of notebooks. I am an incredibly unfaithful writer. 

So perhaps in a month or so, once the new quarter of college begins and I (hopefully) have a bit less of a workload, I’ll attempt the 100 themes writing challenge for the third time. Or maybe I’ll make one for myself.

Although I have been collaborating with a friend, and so I guess I really have been writing quite a lot, but that’s going to come to an end eventually and I really don’t want my words to go stale. So that’s the plan. Writing it here as a reminder and because I really should update more often.

Well, it’s been a while

I haven’t really kept up with this. I suppose I’ll just do a little run-down of things that have popped up in my life lately.

I started college this week. I already like it better than high school – the professors seem much more honest somehow. And my Philosophy of Religion class is definitely very interesting.

On a much less academic level I’ve (fairly) recently fallen into an obsession with BBC’s modern day adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. It’s 3 hour-and-a-half episodes long and you should watch it. And then re-watch it. And then watch it 8 times and memorize multiple scenes by heart.

I’m also unfortunately out of a job, mostly due to my horrendous transportation schedule. I arrive at the college around 9ish every. Single. Day. At the earliest my classes begin at 11, so that’s not quite cool. And then most days I get home at 5:30, when my latest class gets out at 2:35. Damn living in the middle of shit-stain crack-head nowhere, where the buses only run to a couple times a day. At least it gives me a peaceful place to study, I suppose.

Oh. And I’m 18 in seven days. Woooooo.

I love watching people make music.

It is one of the most beautiful things in the world. I love watching people who pluck at strings yet do so much more – not just making noise, but melodies that penetrate the air and reverberate under my skin, raising a goosebump for every note. I love watching their eyes fall shut and their brows furrow, their bodies sway to the tune that they are pouring out.

When they breathe, it looks to me as if they are inhaling the sounds.

Seeing their absolute absorption, feeling the effects of their passions – it has triggered a need within me. My fingers are burning, fumbling over this keyboard in the wish that it were something more beautiful. They need strings. They need song.

I must make music.

Look Up

Sometimes I go outside in the deep of the night and I flick my eyes up just once and see a disappointing scant spattering of dull stars. Other nights I look up more than once and every time the stars multiply until a billion burn my eyes and as I stare I lose myself and I do not cry for help, no! From my very core I cry for more of this searching feeling of infinite tininess, of this sudden knowledge that really ought to knock me off my feet but instead roots me to where I stand that I am here now, that I exist just as fully as those stars and yet I am nothing. But even compared to blasting solar flares my desperate little bursts of air are still signs of burning life; we humans like stars turn cold in the end, though some lives will burst and suck others in with a black hole legacy that for ages will be felt and seen by fleshy particles of a speck of dust floating in the light from a not-so-special star in a wee galaxy of other bits of dust that zoom along at breakneck speed past things that we may never see, culminating in a permanent mystery that is what drives my eyes up and through the first layer of stars that only pulse to find the ones that spastically flash fast and make me consider not the future and past but the existence of those stars and I, at a whole so close but at a glance so far, so similar in life and death. Then I stop and find my breath, pull myself back to the ground but leave a piece of my mind to always float around the stars that pop and fade but till I fade remain caught in one night’s drawn out gaze.

Red-Bummed Buzzer

Today I was walking to the bank and my sister and I saw a bee on this little stone bridge. We were expecting it to buzz away when we walked by but it stayed there, stalking about in tight little circles. “It’s dancing!” My sister said. And so it was, its measured figure-eights a biological map for its hive-mates.

We trudged along through the soupy, humid air, chastising ourselves for not taking a picture. It was quite a pretty fuzzy little bumblebee, with a strange reddish bum that I’ve never seen the likes of before. Then again, most of my experience with bees involves madly dashing away from them in a jerky and embarrassing fashion. Anyways, we arrived at the bank and I cashed my check and deposited most of the monies (except for a nice little hunk which is being used, at this very moment, to purchase Pokemon Black. Ah, pokemon, you rule my wallet.)  As we left the delicious coolness of the building, my sister wondered whether or not the bee would still be dancing when we crossed the bridge again. “It probably flew away already,” I said, effectively dashing her hopes.

We approached the concrete bridge, with its wannabe graffiti and strangely placed poles, and witnessed a family of five very blonde people crossing over. A little girl smiled gleefully as she hefted a strollerfull of plastic baby, and of course, being the pessimist that I sometimes am, I said that the bee had probably gotten crushed if it had stuck around. And lo an behold, halfway across the bridge we encountered a mangled yellow body, its legs waving feebly in the heavy air. My sister frowned. “Should I put it out of its misery?” She asked, and I nodded. Into the air flew her chunky flip flop, and quickly she ended the suffering of that poor little bee.

But then, just as we were about to step onto the sidewalk, there was our little red-bummed friend, flopped onto his back but very much alive. The other bee, I realized, had been much too yellow. And so with a gentle breath we set him onto his pollen-laden legs, and he stumbled about before settling back into his perfectly executed, geographical figure-eights.

I’m Feeling Incredibly Hopeful

Lately I’ve been finding more and more people who are willing to talk to me about important things. About the world and change and humanity, about love and words and life. I think that at this point in time I am at my happiest and my saddest, my saddest because I am finally realizing all that ails the world and its inhabitants, happiest because I am not alone, because people exist who can with their sounded thoughts make my heart soar with weightless hope, past the physical and into the realm of initiative where I feel like I can do something, we can do something.

To change, to heal, to create and to revive – I realize that I need these people, because they help me gather my thoughts and if I didn’t have them to put my words to they would sit in my head and stagnate, and that can never happen, no, no, no, I want my words to flourish! I want them to evolve, to move my hand and to move others.

Oh, I am so very sad. I am so very happy. I love people. With all our wreckage and smog and pasts, with all our dreams and grins and futures, I love us.

I even love people I don’t know. I love Stephen Fry, he is a great man. I love this guy –> http://www.youtube.com/user/Blade376 for what he is doing with his Universal Solutions Project and you should watch his videos because he is good and his plan is fantastical yet at once fully achievable. I love people who are no longer here, like Sylvia Plath though I’ve only just begun to read her stunningly crafted works, and Oscar Wilde who wrote The Portrait of Dorian Grey which is quite good and you should read it.

If you are reading this, I love you. If you are not reading this, what the poo, I still love you.

Tongues

I wish, sometimes,

that my tongue was

sharp and precise;

carving words into

blank air canvases

with ease.

But then, I find,

a tongue that is

heavy moving and

a little dull

relies on the

mind to guide it,

while a tongue with a

razor edge may slip,

unbidden,

from its sheath.

Revolution of the Mind

I’ve been feeling rather philosophical lately. I’ve been drawing conclusions about things that have long dug at my mind.

Last night some of my best friends came over for our “Rapture” Party. We were supposed to watch Doctor Who and do some crazy end of the world crap, but then one of my friends had to go home. So instead my other friend, me, and my brother ended up involved in one of the deepest and most fulfilling conversations of my life.

It started with music. We were listening to Tool, and if I might geek out for a moment, Tool is utterly brilliant. Their music is tear-worthy, and the way they utilize words as instruments themselves just astounds me. It was those words that plunged us into our adventurous conversation.

We talked about society. How we are all manufactured to fit into a tidy little mold, under the pretense that we are doing what we are meant to be doing. Going to school, to college, getting a job, paying bills, bills, bills, raising a family to do the same, retiring, and ultimately dying. When you look at it, and truly think about it, we spend all of our lives trying to get to a monotonous stability.

Society will judge you on how you reach your monotony. People will look at your GPA and from that, make an assessment of your intelligence. Intellect and booksmarts do not often keep the same company. My friend was saying how you can talk to someone in the oh-so-prestigious Honors Society, and their conversation doesn’t run deeper than the superficial. Many people seem to hold in their minds that the judgments of our teachers on our intelligence is absolute, that a rubric can determine our worth. The problem is that school, for many of us, lacks passion and motivation. As I said in my last post, what if I don’t want to pour my efforts into their classes? Certainly some of the subject matter is interesting. Biology and chemistry are astounding, but the rote-learning method of high school puts an incredible damper on learning almost anything, and the narrow spectrum of subjects puts us all in a rut that we must learn to climb out of.

Due to the fact that this was, indeed, a “Rapture” party, the conversation took the inevitable turn into religion. I don’t believe in any god. I do acknowledge that for many the thought of a god and an afterlife is comforting, but, scientific evidence aside, I cannot and will not ever be able to accept a god that would condemn me to eternal torture due to my skepticism. Some people will assume that we who do not look forward to an afterlife must be incredibly depressed, but it’s just the opposite. For the religious, much of their lives are spent working towards an unlikely salvation; but for me, my life is spent working for now. For my happiness. That may sound selfish, but I don’t think that the word “selfish” should get as much negativity as it does. We are all selfish. Trying to get into Heaven is selfish. It is buried in our instincts to put ourselves above others. But I am not only concerned with my own happiness; I am concerned with the happiness of the many people that I love as well. Not believing in an afterlife only serves to motivate me to make the most out of my life that I possibly can.

(this is an incredibly disorganized post, but meh. No matter.) We sat outside in the dark and talked about how hopeless it can seem. How impossible it feels to escape the template that has been set in place for us. We talked about how things need to change. How we need a revolution. Look at our world. The government is regulating what goes on in women’s bodies, it is regulating who is allowed to fall in love with who, and it is representing not The People, but the rich and the mega-corporations. It is the time for change. None of us knows quite how, but at the very least we, a group of barely-adults, are able to recognize these problems. Recognition is the first step to solving these issues. And so perhaps we need to make as many people aware as possible, to have more deep, shiver-inducing conversations. But some people just won’t listen. My brother and my friend are about the only people who have so openly communicated in this way with me, and when i have tried to talk this way with some of my other friends, all I got was blank stares.

Our conversation covered much, much more than what I mentioned here, but I fear that if I try to add any more it will come out sloppier than what I’ve already written, so I’d like to say that I’m not going to stop trying to get others to think.. I won’t stop talking. I don’t know how helpful this post is, but hopefully it will get you thinking as well, and kick-start your own conversations that might evolve into speeches that might reach the ears of millions and, because dreaming big is good, billions. Please, please, please let me know if my rambling inspires you, and tell me how it inspires you, and perhaps someday soon we can take that inspiration and turn it into action.

I’ve Decided

Just now I decided many things for my future. I decided that when I have kids we will not celebrate some man’s supposed zombification by stuffing ourselves with overly-processed chicken butt treats.

I have decided that we will not celebrate said man’s birth by waiting in huge lines of screaming people to get some object that will later be tossed away. Christmas is douche. I’d rather surprise my family with gifts throughout the year BECAUSE I LOVE THEM. Not because some girl went all teenmom and had a shitfit and claimed to be a virgin.

I have decided that my children will watch a lot of animal planet and the discovery channel and national geographic because those channels are fabulous and interesting and they were my favorites when I was a kid. They will also watch invader zim, and the first season of pokemon. But only the first.

I have decided that before I even have kids I’m going to finish up school and I’m going to make sure as fuck that I get out of it doing something I love. Maybe I’ll be a translator or a dietitian or – oh how I dream – a writer! And then I’m going to travel around Europe. Perhaps I’ll backpack it. Yes, I’ll backpack through Europe and I hopehopehope I’ll move there.

Then I’ll fall in love with someone fantastic and beautiful and we’ll have late night talks when the stars are all out but no moon, and we’ll drink hot tea in the morning and sometimes we’ll get into arguments because I love to argue but everything will always turn out fine.

We’ll have kids, maybe we’ll have one kid and adopt another one and we’ll love them so so much. We won’t sneak veggies into their food because we’ll teach them that veggies are nommy. We won’t hide things from them and we’ll have real conversations with them and they will be the best children ever.

We’ll all change the world, in some way. We’ll recycle. We’ll compost. We’ll find worthwhile movements and we will do our best to make a difference. I’m not completely sure how yet, but we will.

I’ve decided all of these things. Maybe they won’t happen precisely that way, but I will try my hardest to make those wishes and hopes and dreams come true because that is my purpose in life, to do what I want and what makes me and the people I love happy..