Exploring, pt 2: flowers

Yeah, I know this reads like a (pretty boring) story. Trust me, it's just a setup for later installments where I actually discuss this stuff.

When we got to the UU church, the first thing we both noticed was the abundance of brochures, pamphlets and posters, all about things like gay marriage, global warming, religious tolerance, feeding the homeless, protesting the war, etc. He was immediately wowed. “This is nothing like my church. It’s not political at all.” I wasn’t as shocked as he was since my church encourages social action and calls us to live and work in love, but I immediately noticed a difference. It wasn’t that they were asking their members to do these things, but that it was presented as the purpose and calling of the church. It’s missing a part, I thought – we do live and work in love and tolerance because we follow the example of Christ and because we’re driven by His love to emulate him. At the UU, it felt instead like there was an attitude of “this is simply what we do, what we’re here for.” They’d sort of skipped a step, I felt. This would become the theme of the day – him seeing it as radically different from his church, me seeing it as very similar to mine, but missing something pretty important.

We looked around at the pamphlets and bulletin boards, where a flyer for a gay men’s beach day prompted another “wow, this is NOT what I’m used to” from him. We found a big poster explaining the tenets of the UU church and I thought, again, “hey, this is exactly what I believe…except plus God.” We left the edges of the lobby for the center, where there was a used cookbook sale and a table of cookies and coffee. There was a sign by the coffee telling you that if you didn’t bring your own mug, you were to use one of the communal mugs available on the table to be eco-friendly and not use a disposable cup. It reminded me of Valley View. We stood around the cookies talking to each other and feeling a little awkward until they rang a big bell, signaling the beginning of the service. We filed in, picking up songbooks and service programs.

The church service started, like most, with announcements. The first one was a call for volunteers to teach the children’s youth group and it was sung (awkwardly and adorably) by a volunteer committee, to the tune of Dancing Queen with the words replaced. Again, he leaned over and said “our announcements are NOT like this.” The rest of the announcements were more ordinary – people at the mike talking about a game night, a feed-the-homeless campaign, etc. Then the service started with a choir song about spring followed by a song from the songbook. It’s a traditional hymn, though there was no mention of God, Jesus, Heaven, salvation, sin, etc. and it was about spring and flowers. Instead of being accompanied by an organist and a choir, though, music was provided by a bluegrass quartet. I was totally into it – it was fun and personable and entertaining, though I thought the faith aspect was kind of missing. It was mostly about being together as a congregation, not “under God” but just with each other, all singing with our fellow humans. He seemed less into it, and I remembered him talking about how much he liked the traditional hymns. I noted how interesting it was, that the person who throws herself into the Christian faith is thrilled to see it re-invented to be more approachable, while the person who doesn’t believe in it seemed disappointed to see it moving away from tradition.

The service was all over the place from there, much like the one other UU service I’ve been to with a friend from home. It was mother’s day, so three adults performed “I Love You The Purplest,” a children’s book about motherhood and siblings. The Reverend, a woman named Claire, read a poem. The bluegrass band led us through a few more songs, all worded and looking like hymns, but with the only religious reference being the phrase “God’s vision growing” as a reference to people and elements of nature. There was a responsively read prayer addressed to the “Infinite Spirit of Life.” A few people spoke (including the Reverend again) about love, motherhood, and spring. Instead of taking communion, there was something called a flower communion (which they apparently don’t do every week) where everyone had been asked to bring a flower to the service and during communion everyone went up and took one that they liked. We hadn’t brought flowers, so we weren’t going to go up, but we were encouraged to, and so we did. Mine were purple, his smelled really bizarre.

After the service we went back out into the lobby and stood by the cookies talking to an older couple (side note: they asked us how we met and so now two elderly Unitarian Universalists from Towson know about HvZ). We hung around for a few more minutes, then left. As soon as we were out the door we were racing to ask each other: “well, thoughts?”

Exploring, pt. 1: frogs

This isn't fiction, it's straight-up journalism, memoir, whatever you want to call it. This part reads like a narrative, but it's a setup for the later parts where I'll get into more CI-esque stuff, like an analysis of what I thought and all that.

“I swear there’s a frog in there,” I said, leaning over the back of the bench we were sitting on and pointing to the ground, covered in leafy vines and grasses.

“There are no frogs. Trust me, I know this place. Not enough water. If you want to see frogs, sometime I’ll show you where there are frogs at Goucher.”

It didn’t seem at the time like there wasn’t enough water to support amphibian life. We had taken shelter under a gazebo on the Hopkins campus because it was raining, and it was the jerky motions of the leaves under the falling drops that kept catching my eye and convincing me there were frogs. He’d driven us to Hopkins after we had dessert and we’d spent the rest of the evening sitting under the gazebo talking. By midnight we’d been talking for over an hour about faith, with me interrupting multiple times to insist that I’d seen a frog. We swapped stories - mine first, then his, which turned out to be almost the exact opposite of mine, in a mirror-image sort of way rather than an antagonistic one. I was fascinated. It wasn’t a perspective I’d ever encountered before.

He didn’t consider himself a believer, though he didn’t have the angrily exasperated edge that most atheists I know have. He willingly conceded that religion and religious communities have a place in our world and do a lot of people good. The admission that certain people use faith to hurt themselves or others wasn’t followed by the conclusion that faith was therefore wrong all the time or for everyone. There was no adamant rejection of the principles of faith and no refusal to have anything to do with religion. When discussing his transition into a nonbeliever, he said it was the realization that “sitting on a bench is really no different from praying on a bench, except maybe that your eyes are closed,” but there was no value judgment that said praying on a bench was stupid, damaging or inferior to sitting on a bench, just that he didn’t see or feel a difference. It’s hard to summarize here for two reasons – one, it would require me to recall almost completely a conversation that lasted over an hour and two, I don’t know how much was shared in confidence – so I’m presenting the impression that I got, not retelling what he said to me.

A few days later he said he wanted to get brunch on Sunday morning but thought we should “bump into each other” sometime before that. I figured some great plan was being set in motion but I really had no idea what his scheme was. We met up Saturday evening and he asked what I wanted to do. I demanded that he show me where the frogs were, so we walked through the woods to a small pond I didn’t know existed. When we walked up, talking loudly, at least six frogs jumped from the bank into the water. I was thrilled. I spent some time stalking around the bank trying to catch one but gave up because I wasn’t wearing the right shoes and was recovering from pinkeye so I couldn’t see anything in the fading light.

We sat down on two rusted folding chairs overlooking the pond and I asked what, exactly, we were doing out there.

“I thought we ought to talk about what to do tomorrow morning,” he said. “What do you think?”

I was about to say I thought we were just going to brunch, when he pulled some papers from his pocket and said, “because I thought,” he flicked open the folded papers with a flourish, “we could go to church.” I took a few seconds to admire his delivery before what he had said actually registered.

“What?”

He held out the printed papers towards me. He’d researched some churches in the area and had printouts from their websites. “We were talking about it the other night, and we’re both interested, and I figured we’d, you know, just go check one out together.” He suggested one in particular because we’d passed it on our way to the movies the previous week and I’d admired the building. I vetoed it, though, because it was Baptist and in my experience Baptist churches are associated with everything I dislike about interpreted Christianity. That left us with a Unitarian Universalist church and a Methodist one, which he said was just like the church he was raised in and used to.

We talked for a while about our options. He went through the Methodist program and talked about the doxology and hymns and other elements. I’ve been to a few services like that, but at my church at home things are radically different. Instead of hymns we sing contemporary worship and there’s an emphasis on a personal relationship with God, so there’s no recited prayer and things are very casual. He told me that he likes the routine and the tradition because things get comfortable and familiar, and that’s what he enjoyed at church. I said I didn’t understand the appeal.

“There’s no relationship in that,” I told him. “You’re not connecting. I’m sitting here, with you, and I’m saying whatever comes to my mind, whatever I feel like saying right now. I’m not reading from a book of Things To Say To Boys You’re Sitting By Ponds With.”

He laughed at that. “That’s a great title for a story.” After some deliberation, we picked the UU one, since it would be different for both of us. "Alright, I'll pick you up tomorrow at 10:30."

Going To College Makes Your Siblings Less Tolerable!

When I got to Mink Hollow, my brother greeted me with a “hey” and then almost immediately launched into complaints. He’s failing Spanish because he hates his teacher, and so Mom and Dad won’t let him get his license. “It’s her fault,” he says, that he can’t get his license. “It’s not even a big deal to get it – you turn 16, you get to drive. That’s just how it is. It’s not even a big deal to just get a car – it’s only a big deal to get a new fancy car. If you get an old car, everyone’s like “oh, that sucks.” Mom and Dad just don’t get it.”

The degree of bratty entitlement in those few statements floors me. I’ve been reflecting these last few weeks on whether or not I’ll come home “different,” and I didn’t really feel like college changed me until I had this conversation.

Alex blames his teacher for his failure in the class, insisting that if she wasn’t so nasty, he would have passed. I’ve met people here who really struggle with the traditional educational model, but when they have difficulty, they take responsibility for it. They then take action – giving up a night of sleep, going to tutoring, asking for help. I don’t hear my friends blame the world or other people for giving them something they don’t want to handle.

Alex thinks he’s privileged just by virtue of existing. The world owes him things, he thinks, that he shouldn’t have to earn. Here, a lot of my friends worry about tuition costs and have to really watch the way they spend their money. They work jobs with terrible hours that they hate, but they never say things like “you graduate high school, you get to go to college. That’s just how it is.”

And when it comes to cars, Alex takes for granted that he should be able to drive himself anywhere he wants. Other people don’t. Here, we schedule trips around when other people can take us, we learn to navigate the city buses, and we deal with it when we have to walk somewhere. On the other hand, people with cars recognize that they’re privileged and are humble and generous about it, doing things like driving me to the train station so I can go see my dying grandpa and jumpstarting their car in the rain because I need a doctor.

I should note that, especially when it comes to driving and cars, Phoenix culture is a bit different. It’s tougher on your social life to not have a car or a license than it is in an eastern city – but I didn’t get my license until after graduation and I managed, even though my boyfriend lived 45 minutes away and my best friend more than 15. This ought to be a lesson to Alex in how to choose your friends. If people are giving you a hard time for not having a new, fancy car, you have bigger problems than not being able to drive: you’re spending your time with losers. My friends here recognize elitism, judgment and materialism when they see it, and take action to avoid it.

hiatus time...

http://companionablesniffles.tumblr.com/

Treehouse pt. 2

[Piece removed because it sucked and I am working on it. I left the first half up because it sucks less and don't want to raze this whole blog just because I'm suddenly more self-conscious.]

Treehouse pt. 1

(Was trying to pull off a sort of Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas deal where serious philosophy comes across smoothly in some broken-sage character's dialogue, but it turns out I'm not really Tom Robbins, and this came out a little heavy-handed. Still, I'm proud of the narrative voice. It's a longer piece, so part 2 will come next week.)

Two months after my tenth birthday, my older brother Max was in a car accident. He was driving, but everyone said it wasn’t his fault. His best friend Eli died. Max didn’t. Instead, he climbed a tree and never came down. He took with him a case of Gatorade, his pocketknife, his sleeping bag, and a carton of Ramen noodles.

That night we ate dinner without him. I called him inside, but he wouldn’t come down. My father said he just needed some time. My mother sent me out with a plate of food for Max. He didn’t want it. I was glad because the rope ladder is hard enough to climb without balancing a plate. It’s just a long rope with big knots that my dad tied in it. He glued the leftover rope to a sign for the treehouse that says “Max and Duncan’s Tree.” There was no more rope to make it say “treehouse.” Mom said she’d call a counselor in the morning.

The next morning was a Saturday. Mom didn’t call a counselor. She slept late. I watched cartoons until lunchtime because Max wasn’t around to kick me off the TV to play his video games. In the treehouse he was still sleeping in his blue sleeping bag we take on camping trips. In the middle of the night I switched rooms and slept in his bed to see what it felt like.

Mom wanted Max to come down for church the next day, but he didn’t. She took me instead, and we prayed for him. All the time we were in church I wished I was up in the tree with Max, pretending to be a monkey, but when we got home, she wouldn’t let me go up there. I promised I’d come back, but she put in a movie and told me to watch it instead. For dinner Mom made Max’s favorite. Dad climbed the ladder with the plate that time and left it on the platform.

When I woke up the day after that there was a policeman in our backyard. He was talking to Max, but the ladder was pulled up so nobody could get into the tree. “You have to go to school,” the officer said. “It’s the law.” Max looked mad and he didn’t come down. I wanted to stay home with Max and the policeman, but when the bus came I had to go to school.

When I came home Max was still in the treehouse and the policeman had left. I went outside and asked Max if it was really against the law to be in a tree instead of at school. “You know what else is against the law?” Max said. “Drunk driving.” He was right.

One night at dinner Dad said not to bring out any more food, because by then Max should have come down and we weren’t doing him any favors by letting his behavior continue. “He needs to eat,” Mom said. “All he has is Ramen, but no way to heat water. What is he going to do?” I knew, because Max taught me how to make Ramen without water by mashing up the noodles before opening the bag and shaking in the powder. Mom said she’d call a counselor again. Dad said he didn’t think they made house calls. After that nobody said anything, and nobody climbed the rope with food.

Max kept eating Ramen and not coming down. More policemen came to the house but they didn’t do anything except talk to Max, or talk to Mom and Dad. None of them talked to me. “He’ll run out sometime,” my dad said, “and when he comes down, we’ll get him help.” Max wasn’t going to run out, though, because he was already getting help. When I got up to get a drink of water at night I saw him in the pantry taking more stuff.

I never told on him, but they figured it out. Dad wanted to change the locks, but Mom said we were not locking our son out of his own house. Dad said the tree was Max’s house now. We didn’t get new locks, but Dad got a new room. He started sleeping in Max’s bed.

The next time we ate dinner, Mom said we might as well take him a hot meal as long as he was going to keep taking food and staying up there. She made him a plate, only Dad wouldn’t take it and she can’t climb the ladder. “Go outside to your brother,” she told me, “and tell him to come down and get his dinner.”

He wouldn’t let the ladder down, so I brought it back inside. “I never should have built the boys that damn treehouse,” my father said.

Mom threw his dinner out, saying, “I never should have cooked this.”

I didn’t have anything I made to blame Max’s leaving on, so I said, “Max never should have been in that crash.” This made my mother cry.

Sometimes, when Dad was gone, Mom would leave clean clothes, or more ramen, or toothpaste, or other things that moms bring, at the bottom of the rope. I put some of my comic books, but they didn’t disappear overnight like some of the other stuff. I took them back, except for one that had gotten mud on it. That one I left outside so he could remember me. His room was missing some of his big chapter books, though, and blank notebooks that were supposed to be for school. I didn’t know what he was writing in them because he wasn’t going to school anymore.

Wax

(This is a poem. I am not very good at poetry. I will be performing at my school's next poetry slam, and after that, I'll put up the slam poems. But not before.)

She was in his hands

But she was not putty

She was not clay.

Instead, melted wax

Dripping, burning

Sticking, flaking

Malleable for moments

Edges quick to harden

And as she cooled

She held the mark

Of every touch

A reshaped recording

Of every ridged fingerprint.

The Opposite Of True Love Is As Follows: REALITY!

(Title taken from "We Are All Accelerated Readers" by Los Campesinos. We were making chocolate-covered Ritz cookies. My brother spilled some peppermint extract on the table, it smelled incredibly strong, and I thought I'd do a character-sketch of a girl who wears some sort of extract instead of perfume. I think Elea is the type of girl who would pose for a Vice photo shoot.)

Her name was Eleanor, but she went by Elea, pronounced “Ella,” and she was very patient with anyone who mis-spelled or mis-pronounced it, which was everyone. Instead of perfume she wore a finger pad’s worth of vanilla extract behind each ear. Her underwear never matched – one day, a red satin bra with green and white polka-dotted panties; the next, a brown sports bra with rainbow striped boy-shorts. All of her shirts had sleeves that were too long and she let them scrunch and slouch at her wrists, looking as soft and comfortable as extra puppy-dog skin.

We met in a coffee shop. I was waiting for my decaf-with-room-for-cream and overheard her gently explaining the spelling of her name. It was a routine I would become very familiar with. When her drink came up, the call was “One medium lemonade for El-ee-uh!” and she sighed, smiled, and took her drink. In her hand was a small cup with a scoop of bright orange sherbet, which she dumped into the lemonade. My coffee was already sitting on the counter, steaming away its heat, while I stood mesmerized by her process. Fingers painted with dull chocolate-colored polish held a straw that stirred the ice and lemonade and sherbet, jangling the ice and plastic and mixing the orange and yellow with smearing swirls like baby dragon flames. She lifted the cup to her lips and drank, following with a catlike sound of pleasure I’d never heard outside the bedroom before.

“I think your coffee is ready.”

“Oh! Yeah.” I grabbed my drink and pointed to the name scribbled in marker under the rim. “Dan. Never have to explain that one. I got lucky, I guess.”

She giggled and took another sip of her drink. “I don’t mind spelling for people. People never really ask others to understand them, which I think is sad. We could all know a little more about someone else.”

“Oh.” I had no response, so I gestured over to the condiment bar. “I, uh, need, some cream.”

She followed me and watched me dilute my coffee into something looking less like a beverage and more like a dusty mud puddle. “Well, since we already know each other’s names, I guess we should introduce ourselves another way. I’m Elea, and I love zombie movies and baby javelinas.” She reached out her hand.

“I’m Dan, and I, uh, love Marvel comics and lemon cake.”

We shook hands. Hers was cold from holding her lemonade. “I think you’re forgetting something,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m Dan,” she prompted me, “and I love Marvel comics, lemon cake, and I’d love to take you out to dinner sometime.”

“Oh! Yes – I’m Dan and I love - I’d love to take you out for dinner,” I repeated.

Elea put a hand, covered halfway by a drooping sleeve, into her purse and pulled out a tiny pencil like the ones used to score mini golf games. She wrote her phone number on my cup, right under my name.

That Saturday we went out for Greek food at a little place by my apartment. Three weeks later I showed up at her place with Dawn of the Dead and an orange-sherbet-lemonade. She answered the door in a robe, untied and hanging open to reveal a black lace bra and turquoise panties with a silver bow. Even the robe had too-long sleeves and only her fingertips peeked out. 

I'm not even going to try go after "douchebag"...

The other day I saw a boy on campus drop his phone, watch it bounce off the sidewalk, and exclaim “balls!” It struck me as weird, because if you think about it, he’s saying “I am comparing an unfortunate circumstance to a part of my anatomy!” Most people have issues when a word that they identify with is used as a negative – “gay,” for example. But there’s a large difference in the attitudes regarding such language across the genders, and I’m not sure why. 

Most girls I know bristle at derogatory phrases that use our gender/sex as an insult – to show ineptitude at sports is to “play like a girl,” to be without courage is to “pussy out,” and we can’t forget the (still very offensive) c-word. We don’t like to see our bodies or our identities used against other people, with the implication that to be us is to be inferior. 

Boys, on the other hand, seem entirely comfortable translating masculine nouns into negatives, like “dick” and “prick” and “balls,” none of which elicit the reaction that different words for female anatomy might produce. Why? 

One theory put forward by some male friends is that boys are socially indoctrinated to see themselves as the less sexualized gender – women are beautiful and desired, while men are not constantly pursued the same way females are. Men are more likely to accept negative comparisons to their sexuality because it is already portrayed in other spheres as less attractive and wanted. 

Another theory, more endorsed by the girls I talked to, is that we are more sensitive to hints of oppression because we more sharply experience it daily. We are easily threatened by sexism because we are accustomed to a world in which we tend to come under attack just for being women, and so we are less inclined to allow any sort of unflattering associations with our gender lest they make us more vulnerable than we already are. This may be comparable to how racist terms for black people are highly offensive, while white people don’t usually respond as strongly to slurs for them. 

It could also be that female-centered language is more specific. To say that someone “is acting like a girl” directly attributes whatever bad behavior they are engaging in to all of womanhood. Conversely, to say that same person is being a “dick” does not as strongly link the penis to bad behavior. It’s only semantics, but it does highlight a difference between the two sets of terms.

What do you guys think? Are girls being hypersensitive, and should we ignore anti-female language with the realization that negative masculine terms don’t seem to be hurting men, and that language only means what we allow it to mean? Or, do we have a responsibility to raise the male sexuality up to the standard of ours, to reframe them as beautiful and admired, and thus to eliminate all negatively gendered (male and female) terms from our vocabulary? Or are things okay the way they are now, with anti-male terms socially accepted by both genders, but anti-female ones less so?

Watching

(Not much to say about this one. Some of you may have seen this already, as it's an older piece, but it hasn't made it onto CI yet. Some of the word repetition I don't like, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. I don't know how I feel about the main character - sympathetically lonely or terrifyingly narcissistic?) 

Everyone around her started turning on their heaters, but she kept wearing her t-shirts, letting the air bite fresh and sharp all down her arms, the crisp cool swishing between the fabric and her warm skin. She felt most alive this way; exposed, chilled. It intensified the experience of existence, a little tug at the peaceful border between her and the air she moved in. She felt it in her movements, a smooth turn opening a door, a quick hand brushing her hair back. It amped up her beautiful moments – the times she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror under perfect light, her gaze just so – found herself a goddess. The moments she wished someone was following her with a camera or a lustful gaze. Wasted, unseen moments of beauty and grace. 

Sometimes, between the moments, when other people caught her looking her worst, human, she wanted to shout and tell everyone that they just missed the moment; that what they had seen wasn’t really her. She knew they would love her, want her, need her, if only they saw those moments. She wished she had a photo album of those moments recorded. Here’s me stepping out of the shower, here’s my reflection in a bus window, here’s me closing my closet door. She would flip the pages and they would see her, intimately, in her perfection, and they would know her and love her and give her what she deserved, for all those moments. The cold jolted those moments, imbued them with a rapid and anxious power, like caffeine. She was a heroine, a goddess of beauty and of war. She was what every man saw in his magazines and wanted. 

In the cold she could feel those moments inside her – her skin was alive, reminding her. Sometimes in the summer it fell asleep under the warm air and she forgot her moments, forgot her value. But the cold kept the sense alert. She never lost a moment in the cold. So while everyone else stayed wrapped in their air and their skin that slept and grew too lazy to find their moments, she lived among hers. Winter brought a deep longing, then, as she ached for an audience. Every kiss of the cold air brushed her with a realization of her perfection but left behind the frustration of loneliness, like the smell of a lover on the bedsheets. 

He would be so lucky, she knew. One day she would turn around after folding a shirt or taking a drink to see him standing there. I saw that, he would say. I watch your fingers when you turn on a light. I see how your hair glows when headlights go by. I’ve seen your ankle sliding gently into those brown shoes. I hear your voice when it hits that note in your favorite song. He would reach out and hold her waist and she would stand in his arms, admired, worshipped, a museum Venus. His eyes like mirrors, she would stare through them back at herself in his gaze. Watch me, she’d whisper, and he would. 

Donnie Darko, I don't care about your dog

We die alone. It’s a phrase thrown around by teenage nihilists, armchair philosophers, and anything ever that’s tried to be “edgy” or “dark.”  Variations include “we all die alone,” and “you will die alone.” 

When you really think about it, the deep truth to that statement is more of a “duh.” We as humans exist as individual entities and so when we die, we will be the only one going where we are going, the only one in our dying body and mind. We will be finally separate from everyone and everything we have ever known, as none of it will be relevant in death and nothing can save us from our own mortality. So, we die alone. 

It sounds pretty awful until you start to wonder what exactly separates death from anything else we’ll ever experience. The answer is: absolutely nothing. We not only die alone, but we live alone, we love alone, we think alone, and we are even born alone. Each of us is trapped inside of ourselves, locked away from the deep connection that could be seen as the antidote to loneliness. We are not telepathic, nor are we parts of a collective hive-mind. There is no way to directly hook up one human’s subjectivity to another’s. Thoughts and feelings must be processed into and diluted by language in order to be shared. Every one of us is pasting ourselves into a “translate into:” box in an effort to be known by others, and we all know that when something is translated, parts of it change or are lost. 

We die alone because it is an experience that cannot be shared, just like existing. The powerlessness of others to stop or redirect our deaths is similarly reflected in life. While other humans may contribute to our comfort and bring us joy, they have no real control over our lives. Each of us is an autonomous individual, and while another person can attempt to coerce, guide, or intimidate us, we alone control our choices. No one has any power over our life that they do not have over our death. 

The only reason we react so negatively to the concept of a solo death is the connotations we have attached to both the ideas of death and isolation. We fear separation from other human beings in a real sense, as we are able to connect on certain levels, and the absence of that connection is dangerous, painful and unnerving. We must realize, though, that that connection is also available at the moment of death – we can still love and be loved, we can still converse, we can still coexist. But what we cannot achieve in death, we also cannot achieve in life. If people stopped living in denial of our isolation in life, our isolation in death would cease to matter to us at all.  All we can do is strive in life to come as close as we can to complete togetherness, accept that we cannot truly make it there, and understand that no part of our human existence is more limited or demanding than any other part.

Generation Zero

[Piece removed because it was awful]

Post-9/11

“Post-9/11 mindset” was a term that started getting thrown around Sept. 12, 2001. I was eleven at the time, and a lot of the talk was about how my generation would be affected by the change in national perspective. I couldn’t have cared less, and as I grew into young adulthood in the only world I’d ever known, the term continued to sound like a meaningless buzzword used by pundits to try and easily explain away everything happening around us. It then appeared as an excuse to infringe upon our civil liberties, and my apathy toward the term turned into vitriol. I thought it was an overblown, meaningless term that gained popularity because it was an easy excuse for any behvaior. It wasn’t until I went to a baseball game with my grandparents the week before I started at Goucher that I accepted the reality of the different generational perspectives. 

We got to the stadium and they wouldn’t let us into our seats, saying that there was a “suspicious package” left unattended that they needed to investigate. We were stuck sitting downstairs in the little health center until the area was cleared. My grandparents were concerned and wondered why, if there was a possible bomb, the entire place wasn’t being evacuated. I, more used to the hypervigilance of our times, was nonchalant and told them “it’s probably a bag of potato chips or something. They don’t really think it’s a bomb, they just have to follow protocol because it could be.” They didn’t understand how everyone was so calmly accepting the paradoxical assumption that “it’s not a bomb, but it might be,” but I come from a high school that evacuates into the parking lot for bomb threats and I’ve never been to a mall, airport or concert venue that didn’t request that we report “suspicious or unattended bags.” 

It gets more complicated than that, however. Fear turned into annoyance and my grandfather didn’t understand what was taking so long. I told them “they can’t just go poke it and see if it explodes,” and I was prepared to patiently wait for the situation to be cleared up. It’s easier for me to conceive of the possibility of such an act of public violence, because they happen today in schools and trains and other places. I’m also used to waits like this, and I anticipate the possibility of one every time I set foot in a public place. It was interesting to me how I was much less upset about having to wait even though I was less concerned about the actual threat, while my grandparents were more afraid but also more impatient. 

Conclusion: there is something to the “post-9/11 mindset” and it’s much more complex than just being afraid of terrorists or feeling desensitized to the threat. I see the world differently than older generations. To me, the threat of random civilian bombings or shootings is real and I take it for granted that it’s a risk we take by existing in this society. I also expect to deal with the necessary reactions to this threat, even though I know that the majority of the time, the alarm is false. 

My grandparents seem to see it as more black-and-white: either there is a threat and we should be very frightened, or there is not a threat and we should not be inconvenienced. Our generation inhabits a grey area where the threat of terrorism is almost a Shroedinger’s cat scenario – it may and may not exist simultaneously, and we must always act according to this dual possibility, refusing to allow ourselves to react as if it was certainly present but also preparing ourselves for its possible presence. Oh, and remember my theory on the cause of the panic? We found out later a cameraman had left his lunch in the wrong place.

What You Do - Letter of Instruction

(I wrote this during the second semester of my senior year of high school. I was waiting to get out of that life, to finish and be in college, and this is a prose-poem of sorts where I was trying to capture that desperate apathy and the feeling that existence at the time was just a holding pattern, a pointless intermission while waiting for purpose and joy. It's supposed to read like a list of commands, hence all the action verbs at the beginnings of the sentences.)

What do you do with a day? What do you do with a day after you’ve given up on it, postponed the revolution for another twenty-four hours, resigned yourself to the waiting? What do you do until? 

Wake up to screaming red numbers, far too early, your last memory of slimy, heavy thoughts pushing into sleep. Slam the screaming off and hit the lights, glance over the whiteboard list of things you need to do and fight the flitting panic with a sigh and an excuse. Feel time sliding forward with you along for the ride and wonder why you bother steering when everything is already headed somewhere. Stand under the hot water and step out, feeling no cleaner, no newer, than before. Leave before the mirror clears from the steam, no concern for looks. Feed the cat, grab a drink, make sure you have your glasses and phone. Scribble down an essay you forgot to do, chew on the pen. Your teeth hurt. 

Ride to school, watch the memorized route through the window, a memorized voice in your ear. Meet with a teacher, settle into the undefined roles, familiar but vague, somewhat codependent, aloof. Rubber stamp on your sheet. Done. Walk to class, sit outside on the linoleum, edit a junior’s paper, think about sitcoms, wonder about the future of your highlighters. 

Class starts. Answer questions about a poem. Decide to read the poem again, realize you like the poem more, and understand it less, than the College Board wants to allow. Think about Echo and Narcissus and mothers and romanticized notions of pain. Write a note to the best friend, check your phone for no reason. 

Move, new class. Cradle a fetal pig in non-latex gloved hands. Picture your brain light up with neurotransmitters, reactions, nurturing instinct. Mentally cite research studies, the “aww” factor, the “cuddle chemical”. Want to protect but instead slice and cut and poke and examine. Stand there awed and fascinated and horrified and revolted at it, pink and helpless and soft and curled. Worry about transfer when a misplaced scalpel catches on your hand. Clean up with a queasy stomach.

Move. Ask in broken Spanish for permission to leave without a pass. Leave. Hand out questionnaires to freshmen, get lost in the apathy and the ignorance. You don’t understand. Visit an old teacher, miss her, miss her class, wonder why she doesn’t teach everything. 

Move. Notice a bloody finger. Confusion, then the memory of the scalpel. Announce the situation nonchalantly, all worry gone. Sanitize for the benefit of those watching. Wonder what may have transferred, do not care. Take notes on Soviet leaders, scowl at your handwriting. 

Go to lunch. Don’t feel well. Stand in the sun, warm up, talk to your friends, feel the memory of the round face push against hunger. Walk inside, stand in line, try to eat an egg roll. Stand in line, offer up your ID. Get handed a box. Move outside, into the sun, eyes stinging. Open the box, check against the receipt, find everything in place: announcements, labels, envelopes, nonsense etiquette explanations, “put one inside the other”. Try to feel giddy, knowing this makes graduation a reality, but only check off one responsibility and add another. 

Move inside from the sun, “do your eyes feel weird?” Substitute, roll call, a name you keep forgetting you have. Stretch on the floor, watch the documentary on the projector screen. Glance at the couple cuddling behind you, try to settle on an appropriate level of jealousy. Watch. Get caught up in revolution, in youth, in romance, and even though you know it’s coming, you are blindsided when it falls apart. Try to fit the pieces in your mind; revolution defies definition. Feel like crying but decide against it for the sake of those nearby. Instead ball up your fists, feign numbness, resolve to join the fight once you can find it. 

Move. Give up quickly. Ignore the teacher at the board, bury yourself in what you can do. Edit junior papers and block out everything else. Leave.

I'm Home!

I'm back at Goucher, hooray! I'm adjusting the update schedule to allow for thrice-weekly updates without clumping things together. Updates will be as follows:

Sundays - fiction pieces!

Wednesdays - Wednesday is declared Stuff I Like To Do But Am Not Very Good At day. There'll be mostly slam poetry, provided I like it and continue slamming. If I don't have slam poetry, I'll put up photography, doodles, charts, or something. 

Fridays - essays!

So stay tuned. I also might clean up the site layout because I really don't like how messy it looks sometimes. 

I'd also like to ask for a quick favor here - I'd like to know exactly what sort of audience I have at this point (whether it's mostly my original AZ IB readers or if you all gave up on me and it's now generally Goucher kids) as well as how many of you there are. This will inform future online projects, so if you'd kindly comment with who you are (or at least where you're from, if anonymity is your bag), it would be much appreciated.

On Juicy Gossip

On Music Tastes

Songs referenced here are "Said The Spider To The Fly" by the Paper Chase, and "Two Cups Of Tea" by Star Fucking Hipsters.

Things To Occupy You Over Break #6: Stores

Lollyphile

They make absinthe, maple bacon and wasabi-ginger lollipops. No one will be "hard to shop for" after you discover this place. 

Etsy

The site itself is the world's most searchable anything ever - search by color, style, price, date, whatever. It makes Google look like the Dewey Decimal System. But the content is what's even more awesome - handcrafted everything, from bags and clothes to paper products to food to toys to whatever. You can even advertise customized things or request something with their "alchemy" tool. My favorite section is "geekery" - check out the jewelry, the steampunk and molecular stuff is awesome.

Woot! Shirts

If you've seen someone with a superawesome, not-cliche'd shirt, chances are good it was a Woot! purchase. Their stuff is irreverent and intelligent, and the way the shop is set up - a daily Woot! only available for one day, plus the ongoing derbies - adds excitement and suspense. Yes, they've made online t-shirt shopping exciting and suspenseful. If only they wrote calc books too. Also, reading their job applications/descriptions makes me want to work for them.

Rise Up!

I first found Rise Up! apparel in a store in Moab, a town where Mormons and hippies coexist peacefully. The profits go to charities that help children in third-world countries, which I think is pretty neat.

Teach The Controversy

No, it's not the Discovery Institute's gift shop. It's more t-shirts. If you think conspiracy theories, fundamentalist Bible interpretations, or old-fashioned superstitions are amusing, you'll love these. They also sell SCIENCE! shirts too, which are awesome as well.

StitchPixie

I really wanted a cityscape messenger bag for my laptop case, but the price was a little out of my range. Still, her stuff is fantastic (sperm and ovum coin pouch? YES.) 

A little side note about American Apparel: A lot of independent t-shirt online stores print on AA stuff. I know some people refuse to buy AA because of Dov Charney's reputation for being a total skeeze, and I understand not wanting to fund such skeezery, but I am torn. AA is sweatshop-free, and their special brand of worker-mistreatment must be viewed as more "voluntary". With Charney's reputation so public, anyone who works there anyway has made a choice to enter that environment, whether or not I think that environment should exist or be tolerated to begin with. So by linking these stores, I am not supporting the AA boycott, because I prefer sexist treatment of voluntary employees to sweatshop labor. I will, however, take this opportunity to say I do not condone Charney's behavior. I also don't like their ads.

WOCAM, Inc. update

Causes for optimism in the new year:

Public Health Protection Act

Proposed legislation to end drug advertising. Sign the petition here. I'm keeping an eye on this act, expect updates. Studies have found that drug advertising can have a negative effect on consumers and patients - it's been linked to issues like overprescription and patients being prescribed more expensive drugs for no reason.

Eli Lilly's "whisteblower" case heading toward a $1.4 million settlement

Eli Lilly illegally marketed the antipsychotic Zyprexa for unauthorized uses and to patients especially at-risk for the side effects. No summary I could give would properly describe just how enraging and wrong many of their actions were, so read the article. It also says that most of the major drug companies are facing similar charges, which means that finally someone is holding them accountable and exposing their dangers.

New code bans "reminder gifts" branded with drug logos for doctors

While this isn't a law, it's a new code from PRhMA that's notably more strict than previous codes and is anticipatory of new legislation that would legally mirror the professional code. Read a shorter article here.

On Reactions To Ignorance

Things To Occupy You Over Break #5: Miscellaneous

bash.org

A community controlled site full of funny things said in IRC chat. Will leave you wishing some people were your new best friend and others would never go near the internet again. Contains racism, profanity, and other not-nice things.

best of craigslist

The most ridiculous, bizarre, clueless, or hilarious things posted to craigslist. The game is trying to figure out whether some of them are serious (for your sanity, you will inevitably end up convincing yourself that they are not.)

Photoshop Disasters

Some of these make me laugh out loud. What happens when the blind, underpaid and overworked attempt to use photoshop.

Mary Ellen Mark photography

Photoessays and photo projects. Under "books" you can learn about a locked mental ward for women in the 1970s, a school for special-needs kids in Iceland, and Indian prostitutes. 

Passive Aggressive Notes

Hell is other people, and our generation's Book of Revelation is this collection of angry, aggressive, passive, or obnoxious notes.

Go Fug Yourself

I'm not into fashion, but the things Bai Ling wears just make me happy. Other people, with more money than you or me, go out in public like this. And we care. Oh, humanity.

1001 Journals

People keep journals (personal, traveling, or community) and then post them on the site. They're fascinating.

Graphjam

Graphs about things we're all aware of. Half are song lyrics or other pop culture references. Similar to indexed, which I've already linked here, but more juvenile.

The Comics Curmudgeon

Mainstream newspaper comics kind of suck. This blog making fun of them is written by that guy who was the kid in your class making snide comments about the lame videos you always had to watch. It's like MST3K for comics.

On Appropriate Hair Lengths For Girls

Things To Occupy You Over Break #4: Non-Serial Webcomics

These are non-serial webcomics, meaning each one is funny or understandable on its own. Some of them have consistent themes or jokes and you might gain something by reading beginning-to-end, but it's not necessary.

XKCD

All of you already read this, but it needs to be here anyway. The definitive webcomic on all things geeky, nerdy, or awesome. Sometimes it is also about sex.

Wondermark

David Malki! has taken old art and recontextualized it to make one of the least self-important, most hilarious things on the web. Some of them still make me laugh out loud even though I know them by heart.

Dinosaur Comics

Yes, guys, it's the same pictures over and over. You either get it or you don't.

A Softer World

The kind of thing that makes you wonder why you didn't come up with the idea, then realize you could never do exactly what they do. It's a bittersweet, bizarre, intelligent sort of thing that leaves you feeling very human and wanting to express that in a similarly beautiful way.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

If you ever need to remind yourself that you are a bad person, read this. It is so not funny, but it is hilarious. It is so wrong but it feels so right.

The Pain

Often hopeless, dirty, explicit, or all three, it's a political cartoon drawn by a guy from Baltimore who seems like he would be fun to hang out with. What can be funnier or more interesting than the cartoons themselves are his blog-like "Artist's Statements."

Citrus Soldier

Another "why didn't I think of that?" sort of idea. Norman wrote a program to pull random photos off Flickr, then he puts funny captions on them. They are awesome and funny and proof that us young people won't necessarily use the internet just to coordinate suicides or look at porn, but sometimes to find photos of other people and write silly things about them.

Surviving The World

A grad student writes things on a chalkboard, then takes photos of them. They are wise and amusing.

Greek Riots

Random update time! Whee!

In December, Greek riot police shot a 15 year old and now anarchist groups based in Greek cities are violently retaliating. It's a story not many of us have heard about, and I think it's interesting (both the lack of coverage and the situation itself) because you rarely see such organized and focused anarchist activity in America and when you do, it's portrayed as mindlessly violent and never sympathetically. But the way the Greek situation is playing out is a little different - note how the police seem to recognize that they have to walk a line too and respect the protesters (before all this started the anarchists had a "fortress" area of a city where police avoided, and the police aren't allowed onto some of the university campuses). Reports have the Prime Minister responding to the protesters by committing to a fight against social injustice and possibly "reshuffling" the government to move away from its current conservatism. (Compare this to the claim that public horror at the 1968 DNC riots was a large factor in Nixon's election.) The policeman who shot the boy is being charged with murder and held in prison while some other higher-ups in charge of the police offered resignations.

Also note how and where this is being reported - Google "Greek Riots" and the first two links you get to current reporting are the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor - it's not exactly a big story in mainstream American reporting. Here's the story:

"The Big Picture" News in Photographs report

On The Greek Riots blog updated "from the streets" by anti-police protesters

BBC News reporting (look in the right side menu for more articles, photos, and videos)

And for kicks and giggles, check out the Fox News report, which includes quotes from the Socialist party, which is in opposition to the current Prime Minister, saying that the country "is no longer being governed." It seems to more strongly condemn the Greek government for not cracking down harder on the protesters and regaining control - because, you know, when people rise up against a government and demand change, the government's responsibility is to make them sit down and be quiet. It also quotes from the policeman's defense lawyer, saying that the ("not yet complete") ballistics report "proves irrefutably" that the fatal shot was a "ricochet" and that the death was therefore not the officer's fault.

Keep in mind that the protesters have big issues with the current government and the police, and I'm not saying that police or government sentiment in response to the riots is anything close to utopian - I'm just pointing out subtle differences between this situation and how it might play out differently here in America.

On Being A Brand Whore (or, "if you're wearing sweatpants, get off my blog!")

Things To Occupy You Over Break #3: Serial Webcomics

These are all serial strips, meaning they have storylines that require the strips to be read in order. In some cases this will take a very long time, since the archives go back years. I've linked the main page of each of them, so to start reading, click "first strip" or go to "archives" and start at the earliest. Treat them like novels - if you have to leave partway through, just bookmark the strip you're at and start again from there.

Something*Positive

This strip isn't for everybody. It starts with an abortion joke and the black humor never lets up. That said, it's one of my absolute favorites, because the characters are well-developed and the punchlines are always hilarious but still feel like dialogue. R.K. Milholland does a great job wrapping up each arc while maintaining a consistent mood and canon. If it's your thing, you'll be captivated by the immense amount of archives, so be careful. If it's not, you'll be bummed out by the misanthropy. Give it a shot, and you'll know soon enough whether you're a fan.

Questionable Content

There's not much to this strip but it's consistently lovable and a lot of them are pretty funny. It's one of the most popular serial webcomics out there (or it's the one with the most vocal or social fans). It's a character-driven story about a bunch of 20-something hipsters who are all really neurotic. I like the art.

College Roomies From Hell!!!

This starts out FANTASTIC and gets kinda awful, but for a long time it was a big influence on my character writing. The world and the characters are incredibly engaging and reading all of the archives will be very satisfying until you get to about mid-2007, at which point it kind of jumps the shark. But the beginning is very worth it.

Friendly Hostility

Two boys grow up as best friends, then fall in love - but the comic is not about a "gay relationship" but rather, just a relationship. The chemistry between Fox and Collin is unique and the rest of the characters are great as well. It's quirky, funny, sweet, strange, and tied with Something*Positive for my favorite strip. 

Pictures for Sad Children

I can't decide if this goes under Serial or not, so I put it here because I'd recommend reading it from beginning to end. It has a very strange vibe to it and some of you might hate it, but I think it exposes some little sliver of our humanity that is very often ignored. It sometimes addresses the themes of madness and faith (my two favorite themes, yay) from a really different, gentle and interesting angle.

Octopus Pie

If QC took itself less seriously and did more drugs, it would be Octopus Pie. Some of the arcs are rather forgettable, but the reality of the characters never wanes (even when they seem like they should feel like caricatures) and they're all lovable all the time, even though you know you'd hate them in real life.

Zombie Hunters

At first glance, it's the comic equivalent of every zombie movie ever. But the art is fantastic, and if you poke around the site you see that the artist has put an immense amount of planning and effort into creating that world. It has a very LotR feel - an encyclopedic creation of a fantasy reality that doesn't overpower the main story but enriches it. 

On Loving Our Non-Hetero Friends