Ho, ho, ho.

It comes once a year and always heralds some kind of pretense. Familial loyalty when, more often, no one gets along. Cheer, when usually, families are lucky to pull the teenager from his fortress of solitude.

I can't be part of the pretenses anymore.

Not because it's impossible. I'm still a fairly decent actor, despite not having actually performed on a stage in a number of years. It's one of those things that never leaves you, like a virus you enjoy incubating, but this Christmas, too much has happened for me to really let myself fall under the nationwide spell.

We spend the holidays with my mother's sister-- my aunt, for those of you don't pick up on sarcastic hyperbole. It's a quiet affair, usually. We exchange gifts on Christmas Eve and then have a holiday dinner on Christmas Day. Polite chit-chat is exchanged before the wine fills everyone's cups, and then the passive aggression kicks into full gear. So, in summary, there are approximately 8 minutes of polite chit-chat.

Generally, I can dodge the verbal bullets my mother's sister's husband (my uncle, again, for the hyperbole impaired) shoots at me from across the room, but without that nice blanket of euphoric belonging, I started metaphorically bleeding, badly. That, or he was just really, really good with his aim this year.

Gems like:
"Yea. I can't wait to have grandkids. What about you, Cath? *looks at me* Oh. Right."
and
"I won't feel safe until Obama's out of office. Remember when everyone minded his and her own business? I wouldn't have liked the air force today, I don't think."
and
"Do you even know where the battery is in a car, Shawon? You know. The little black box with a red thing poking out of it when you open the hood? Oops, gave it away!"

sort of hit home. Then again, I wasn't visited by the wine fairy very often, either, so I didn't have that pasted-on haze only wine can provide.

Then the homey tour of the museum started. My cousins' beautiful artwork, all framed and hung up throughout the house, required a ten minute explanation and a thorough walk-through from their proud daddy. Praise and accolades aside, I learned all about how magnificent they are and how proud he is of their accomplishments. I was sincerely impressed, and I'm actually sorry about my reaction-- I was immediately turned off and wanted to leave.

Not because I disagree with him. Their art really is incredible, and I'm proud to call them my family. I wanted to leave because my parents don't do that. They can't. The writing I bring home and purposefully show to them is read, smiled at, and then dismissed because something more interesting is on TV. The portfolio I labored over for two grueling, agonizing years at the newspaper that I was immensely proud of was looked at and then summarily irrevocably lost. No, really. They still can't find it, and when I bring it up, they're annoyed by my gumption and my insinuation.

No hangings, no portfolios made, no copies made for their friends. Just a pat on the head and a "job well done." That's fine, actually. I'd rather that than nothing. I'd also sort of like some inkling of a memory to go along with their reading of my work, so when I ask them about my favorite poem, my question won't elicit raised eyebrows and a shared look of "uh oh, we're fucked." I'd also like to stop reminding them what my major is and what I want to do with it. It was cute the first time, on my birthday, but now all of the comedy has gone out of saying, "No, I'm not a literature major. No, I don't want to be a journalist. No, I don't think I'm going to grad school immediately." I won't even go into how difficult it is to refrain from sighing and walking away when the word "rhetoric" seems to be some foreign, never before heard Egyptian word when I've only been saying it for the past three years attached to the sentence "I want my Ph.D in Rhetoric."

I'm not feeling very merry today. I almost skipped out on the feast. Why? This will sound petty, but when I opened my gifts, I got two dress shirts (on sale for $10), two ties (also on sale), and an electric razor. My brother, whose interests don't extend much further than his xBox and... no, wait, that's it, got a shirt I'd love, some kind of handsfree headset for XBox live, a video game, new shoes, a new coat, and $100.

I spent in the neighborhood of $300 on them. They didn't understand why I was dumbfounded. At least they got my brother's interests right.

At least I know if I go today, Aunt Carol will defend me from my uncle when he will undoubtedly comment on the fact that I'm not wearing red (I'm wearing a nice seafoam green) and that my scarf is "too long."

Bah. Humbug. I hope your family doesn't make you feel estranged. Actually, that's another line of thought-- I spend a lot of my time dreading coming home, but this past semester had me dreading another day in Potsdam (loneliness is hard).

What do you do when you don't want to go home and don't want to go back to school?

"This living, this living, this living..."

It's been some time since I've tussled with the profound. I've discovered that ignoring the emotional baggage keeps me from having to really examine anything. You can't really see your reflection if you don't look in the mirror, after all, and what better way is there to get to know yourself than by grappling with the emotional overflow?

I won't bore anyone with the obvious cliches that come to mind about overlooking emotion. It's bad. We get it. No one needs another pamphlet or catch phrase to remind us that America is full of mentally and emotionally stunted media slaves.

Despite how ingrained this message has become, stunted I became, and it has been relatively hard for me to unpack it all. There are so many threads that lead to nowhere, so many neurons that hold secrets I've kept from myself that haven't been jolted in a few years. It's a miracle of biology that our minds can store so much information in such air-tight, microscopic proverbial vaults. And so, because I don't necessarily have the combinations to them all, I thought I'd go with a more direct approach.

I wound up a proverbial wrecking ball, downed a shot of tequila, and let the river of crap flow from my brain into nice, bulleted lists. I really like lists, you know-- they're a natural, easy way to remind us that things can still be orderly, even if the things we're categorizing are neon signs lighting up the safe, precious darkness we used to live in, with charming phrases like "You're lonely" and "It's your fault."

That's what they read at first, anyway. I saw last year come barreling out of me first. I tried to stop there, to figure out some method of damming up the torrent of backlogged emotions before I drowned in them, but once you break down this kind of mental structure, there's really no way to stop it except to hope to God there's a buoy nearby.

I have no buoys, which leads me to my next emotional outburst:

I'm admitting to myself that I'm lonely now. Yes, it's emo, and sure, so are a lot of other people, but I can't care about that. I acknowledge now that I have to stop worrying about being some paragon of mental health just because people expect me to be. I'm lonely, damn it, and if pop stars can make bank by telling gazillions of people their problems, I can write a sappy little blog post about it without feeling guilty (there's an underlying tone in this post, by the way-- it's borderline offensive, but it's mostly just bitterness and I regret any discomfort you might be experiencing [sort of]).

Loneliness is this thing that just grips on to people. It hugs them so hard that it's suffocating, but it's really the only constant people who are lonely know. It won't leave you for another man, it won't tell you you're too skinny or too "advanced," and it isn't worried about the imperceptible future. It's just there, always harrying you to cry and be weak. The strong survive without complaining about it, for a while. Then a year goes by without really knowing what a kiss feels like. Then another few months. Then...

Then the vaults start to leak and we nose around in them, hoping to find the root of the problem, when really, the root of the problem isn't in the loneliness itself. It's the inability to express oneself.

It's fear. I'm fourteen years old again, I just realized I was gay, and now I'm afraid I'll be alone forever because how can anyone possibly love a skinny gay man?





--- in the same breath, I'm able to tell myself that this feeling will pass. Either the vaults will close up and vanish again, taking most of the debris with them, or I'll actually work through the flooding (emotional evaporation works eventually, right?). I have an incredible support system of friends and family members, and all of them prefer me smiling to me sulking around the Union.

The bottom line is, I suppose, that I'm aware of the reason I'm not sleeping well anymore, and apparently, broadcasting this to the blogosphere is as good a method of coping as any. Bully for me.

Responsibility or compassion?

It's that thing in life we're all guaranteed to experience, in some form or another. Even if you aren't expected to work for yourself, you're still going to face some form of responsibility somehow. Dressing yourself, for example, can be considered an albeit minor responsibility. Since birth (like most of you, I'm sure), I've been programmed to accumulate -- and take pride in -- extra responsibilities.

When should I say no?

I'm cursed with an overwhelming compassion. It's bigger than I am and it is limitless in its reach. It doesn't matter if you've tortured me somehow; if you've encouraged me to fail; if you've helped people hurt me somehow. When you need a favor that I can deliver, I'll do what I can. I'll go against the better judgment of my more reasonable friends who know when to say that magic word I never really understood:

No. It's almost impossible for me to conceive what it means to say it. No. I can't even remember the last time I used it in reference to something someone asked of me. No.

I don't consider it a failing. Not really, anyway. Even now, when I'm goaded beyond what I can feasibly expect from my enormous work ethic, I don't think I'm failing myself. Because I'm afraid of what it will mean to fail other people.

Well now. There's a thought. Failing others. Is it possible to fail someone else if succeeding will hurt you? Chew that one over.

One sec. People are hovering outside the shop doors. Maybe when I start writing again, after the hordes dissipate, I'll have something more concrete to babble about.

2.5 hours later...

Back now. It's incredible the amount of emotional chaos that can happen in only a few hours.

I wasn't really able to ponder anything I was pondering while people were in here. A few people wanted prices on tattoos, on piercings, ideas for their child's birthday memorial piece, answers to why the shop is so empty, etc. I obliged with probably more bite than was necessary to most, if not all of, them. What can I say? I was having an existential crisis again. That waits for no man, woman or whatever's between.

When the trickle of customers slowed and people finally left altogether, I started catching up with a few people about my new mountain of problems. I mentioned them as my little stressors in my last entry-- they aren't really that little. Big enough, in fact, that after I had a nice, reassuring conversation with Lori, I let Sigur Ros sing me into my own dimension of turmoil, sat down in the middle of the shop, and cried for a solid three minutes. The song ended in almost perfect unison with my last heaving sob, and I stood up, brushed myself off, and went back to work.

"Work." I'm sitting here doing nothing still. I managed to edit Marshall's email, retyped it because I hate copying and pasting things like this, and did some more catch-up work on old facebook messages from dear friends. Now my memory of today is starting to blur.

A few more people strolled through the shop's door, right before I went to grab my approximately 32560346th slice of Sergi's pizza, and then I read Amanda Palmer's latest blog. Oh, and I stalked a few people via their various internet incarnations. It's crazy how out of the loop I've become. I remember being right there, absorbing all of the social goings-on and filing them into different categories of importance. Self-reflection means sacrificing my awareness of the things outside my immediate sphere of influence, I suppose.

Self-reflection. Here comes my looping, full-circle epiphany. I started writing this blog with the intention of expounding my beliefs in things like responsibility, tact and the melancholy that comes with neglecting everything else, with succumbing completely to the endless string of demands people can have of you if you let them.

Instead, I've come to the almost comical revelation that--

Interruption again. This time, it was a large man with a janitor's smock on who wanted a tattoo. I informed him that our artist is out of town for the weekend, but he'll be back on Tuesday. Actually, the conversation was more like:

Jack (the name on his janitor jumper): When can I schedule one?
Me: Well, you can you schedule an appointment for any time after Tuesday.
Jack: Tuesday? Alright.
He turned and started walking away.
Me: We open at 3 and close at 9.
Jack, without turning around: Thanks.
Me: No problem. Have a good day.
Jack, without turning around again: Yep.
Then, under his breath and to no one in particular, my new friend muttered something that sounded like "dumb fag," threw open the door, slammed it shut and left. Nice guy. I should have asked him to take a look at my toilet.

Anyway. Revelation. It's something most of you have already concluded, which makes it kind of silly that it takes me over-extending myself to the outer limits of my own strength and collapsing before I remember it: our first responsibility is to ourselves.

I don't have to feel anything but neutrality about the way Jack must be feeling (I wondered, in this string of thoughts, if he was having a bad day or if he had an abusive father or if he himself was gay and not really comfortable with it or if something bigger, something that exceeds the power of my imagination, happened and he needed to memorialize it). I don't have to worry about the woman who's crying on the park bench, and I'm not responsible for the bad things that happen to my friends and family, even if I'm there to witness them. I can still help, but I can also choose my battles based upon what I can handle and not by the way my broken fail-o-meter starts to buzz if I turn someone down.

I can spend my time for me sometimes, doing the things I want to do, without the threat of "feeling bad" if I say "no, I don't want to drink tonight, and please don't pressure me into it."

Anyway. I've written blogs like this before. Proof positive that history has a way of repeating itself. Or is it more an indication of how difficult it is to break our bad habits?

Is being too compassionate a bad habit?

I've wondered

The theme of my blogs tends toward the wonderment side of things. I ask the ether questions like "What happens when...?" and "Why do people do...?" This isn't an exception.

I've been teetering on the brink of a substantial meltdown. My truer confidants have been bearing with me as I belabor the melodrama of it all. The gist is:

To a writer, the idea that the act and art of writing, and writing eloquently, is no longer an easy thing of affluence has become a challenge is more than a little disturbing.

I'm experiencing a strange kind of block. When I used to be able to envision the way I wanted an essay or a post or a short story or a poem to be, from the beginning to the end, I'm lucky now if I can string together one or two sentences before I'm taxed to the point where continuing is impossible. It's draining to write now, especially when my expectations in myself appear to have taken the whole gym rat craze to heart.

Cue the existential wondering. What is causing me to second guess myself, literally every step of the way?

At first, I wondered if it was my new, in-depth look at this medium. I've started to take my linguistics classes seriously, using what Dr. Henry and Dr. Hersker introduced me to and running with it. Now, before I can really get my emotions aligned to begin whatever piece of prose I'm hoping to crank out, my focus lands, irrevocably, on my seemingly limitless word choices. Is this the right verb tense for this particular paragraph? Will it be more clear if I adjust the placement of this adverbial? The more I dug into the subject, the more "rules" I retained. Hmm. Thinking about it like this is starting to grind my writing gears and I haven't gotten close to the point of this post. Could be something to this theory.

My other theories are less structured. The second-most prevalent (would penultimate be more impressive here? who is my audience? stop it, shawon, stop. just write. just write) definition for my source of writer's angst comes from my inability to dial things back according to the aforementioned source of emotion.

Writers are emotional creatures. We utilize common vernaculars to elicit responses in our readers by knowing how to cater to different emotional responses. If you want someone to fall in love with you, you don't write about the bubonic plague in some poorly-written limerick (unless you're seducing a sadist). If you're trying to persuade people, writing with a purely academic tone won't necessarily do the trick. Therefore, writers usually a catalyst for emotional change, or at least, a halfway decent writer can convey his or her own emotions in a sentence or two. That seems to be one of my current problems.

I lost "it." The intangible thing that comprises all of the arts, but more specifically, the thing that rings as clear as a clarion bell in a person who knows, without any doubts at all, that he or she is meant to do something because it's just part of them. I had that "it" thing, the thing that made writing as easy as breathing, the thing that I've nurtured since before high school. The thing that I had before I knew I was gay. Before I knew what the world was really like. The thing that was so enmeshed in my person that it may as well have been coded genetically, and now, somehow, it feels... incomplete. Missing.

But not really missing. Even now, as I dust out my mental cogs and put endless quarters into the "insert talent here" slot, I can feel the old vibrations of talent, but, as with all complicated patterns, I also know that sometime today, when I'm feeling vulnerable or insecure about something, the entire spectrum of my personality will flicker a few times and then go out. Poof. It's like when people ask if a scream is heard in the middle of the woods if no one's there to hear it.

I hate that expression.

Another theory, and the one that my fellow writer friends keep throwing at me, is stress. Good, old-fashioned stressors are "dimming my rainbow," as it were. Can a rainbow ever be dim, though? Can a talent ever be ripped from someone's still-beating heart like this? Any time I've experienced some kind of writer's block, I can always somehow see what it is that's holding me back. I just can't always do something about it right away. I would realize that time, and time alone, is the necessary impetus for my successful recovery, but now... now it's all just me stumbling blindly through things.

I'll read through my old blog posts from high school, from past semesters--even posts on this very website--and I'm jealous of the writer who wrote them. I don't recognize my voice anymore. One of the same friends who I feel comfortable sharing most things with tells me that she remembers the assignments she had, sometimes, but that's it. That she doesn't ever really remember writing it all. We'd laugh at that and make fun of the professors who assigned them, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, "I do remember, though, or at least I used to be able to. Now I remember nothing."

I'm rebuilding myself slowly. I'm not necessarily sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Despite the absolute terror I feel when I can't write a decent poem or a short something--or even a halfway clever facebook status--I'm still forging ahead. I'm rereading old books and I'm cilnging to those brief moments, like this one, where a ghost of my abilities swells within my typing fingertips so that I can have some vestige of myself bubbling in my neurons for later, during the inevitable crash. I'm even forcing myself to deal with my stressors head on now, instead of evading the ones that cause me the most hurt.

It all sucks. I don't know if you've ever had to rebuild a personality, but it's hard work. My close friends keep telling me that I haven't really changed much. I hope that isn't the case. Through all of this, whatever this is, I hope that, when I reach the end and I'm comfortable with myself again, I'll have changed dramatically. Or a little. Changed enough to put things like this behind me once and for all so that I can start focusing on a career. Or Hell, so I can start focusing on bringing my grades back up to meet my astronomical expectations.

Hope. There's that word again. It seems to be one of my more prominent (ultimate? paramount? stop it) themes lately. Actually, screw lately. It's always one of my themes.

Dum spiro, spero. It should be one of my themes, especially now that I've had it permanently branded on my chest. It was originally supposed to be a reminder for occasions like these, and for all of the things I've trivialized as mere "stressors" because I don't really feel like sharing them with the world. I'm still breathing, so the rest is inevitable. Inevitability is another one of my recurring themes. Fancy that.

I'm reading through my old blogs...

Well, blog. I only ever kept a MySpace blog before I moved onto a paper journal, and then to this very website that you're perusing. After spending about 20 minutes reading through the first few paragraphs of many different entries, I've come to the conclusion that being an English major for the past 4 years really hasn't done anything to guide my writer's voice anywhere. In fact, nothing has really changed about my writing. At all. Go figure. Can I have a refund?

Anyway. Here's what I found that was interesting enough to repost (it was from a while ago, and I was very angsty, angry teenager [despite how well-dressed and like, lol, like... TOTALLY popular I was *hair flip*]):

------------------------

The art of manipulation
Thursday, December 01, 2005

So I'm sitting here sick and pondering. Already bad. But not half as bad as when I'd sit and ponder under the influence of something. Like that rotting reed smell when I open my sax case or the fumes I inhale at BOCES.

Manipulation fascinates me. When all the negativity that's usually aligned with manipulation is stripped from its definition, you're left with creation. People learn how to assert their quick wit and thus master the art of evincing results from their subjects without physical force. Ideally. When manipulation is put to force, it's called torture. Or worse, Stagecrew.

Right now, with simple words and innocent phrasing techniques, I could convince a lot of the dimly lit people that read my blogs that I'm leaving this place. That I'm biding my time before the flight leaves in Syracuse for Rockport, then onto a few more ports along the coast before I finally land in Australia to start a new life. That my postcards to all of my sympathetic friends will dominate the international postal service, and, maybe when the timing's right, I'll return home for a quick visit before shoving off again. That I'll miss everyone desperately, and I truly believe that I'll become the loving person that everyone's known once or twice, and leave behind this angry facade I carry so proudly. My goal is sympathy.

And how many people do you think would give it to me? Even after I post another few entries about bus tickets in Australia, and forwarded emails from the Embassy, saying it's A-OK for me to take up permanent residence?

It's harmless. And I'd have forced my friends to succumb to my will, craving the "Goodbye!"s and the "I'll miss you!"s. If I never left, I'd only obtain, "Thank God you're staying, I don't know what I'd do..."s. Everyone does it, and in most cases, they're being sincere. It isn't negative, as I mentioned above, but it's still the art of pre-understanding. The unconscious knows the emotions of its cohorts and can therefore play off them. I should know.

I do it all the time.

The hardest emotion to conquer is fear. I've been able to bedevil people into frenzies, lure people into lovetraps and mold personalities to my benefit, but I've never been able to strike fear in someone. Sure, I might've been able to rustle up some inconsequential, awe-inspiring respect that looks and feels like fear, but no one's ever chilled when I enter the room, or watches everything they say so as to not incur whatever wrath I can throw together.

Headache's here. It's been fun.

--------------------------

I really just think it's neat that I was thinking about rhetoric before I ever had any formal rhetorical training. It's destiny, I guess. I also guess that this means I can't really demand a refund.

Damn it.

The waiting game

In the 24 hours since the commencement ceremony ended, I've thought a lot about a few things.

First of all, good God it's warm. Potsdam's errant weather never ceases to amaze me. How we're all surviving here, despite the threat of pneumonia and bronchitis, I'll never know. We've probably built some superhuman tolerance to sudden weather changes, in which case-- bring on global warming. Insert sarcmark here.

I've also thought about our natural defenses against things like heat and emotions. When it's too hot, we struggle for a few minutes and then make atmospheric changes. We either physically remove a layer of clothing or utilize some method of cooling, like a pool or a cold shower, or we change the way the air itself feels with fans and air conditioners. In essence, we manipulate our surroundings until they're comparative to our personal preferences.

Emotionally, we do the same. If someone makes us sad when we do not want to be, we figure out some way to change the way we're feeling. We can be reproachful and vengeful, forcing our antagonists to feel what we're feeling. We can also change the way we're feeling, alleviating the sadness with different impetuses that make us happy. Music, for instance, or a change in scenery.

What happens when we don't have a grasp on any of it? It's easy to encourage people to take control of their situations, but what if these situations are formless? wispy? impossible to see?

The graduation of a few characters in my personal history meant various weighted things. I would no longer have to see them or endure their particular brand of torture, and I'm glad for that, but it also meant that I'll never see them again and I'll never be able to endure their particular brand of torture. It took me all weekend, a few pots of coffee, and some serious alone time to conclude that I was holding onto terrible memories because they were the last tangible connections I had with these people. They were the only things I had left that I could curl up in and feel some sense of familiarity, even though they were the starring roles in virtually every sleepless night.

I was waiting for this release. Now that the pressure is gone and the horrible sinking feeling I had during the ceremony is starting to dissipate, I've realized that the aforementioned emotional baggage was there the whole time, but it was masquerading as something else. I can finally see the situation that I need to change, and in being able to see it, I can finally--and utterly--fix things for myself.

I will miss him. God, I'll miss him. But it's time for him to be out of my life. There are so many things that I would like to say to him, but in the end, it's better that I don't. For his sake and for anyone else's sake who may be caught in the crossfire.

The point of this post was to elaborate on my theory about our natural defenses and how they're all linked, working on one another like the wellness continuum, but this is a good place to stop. When I'm not as mentally exhausted, I'll pick this topic back up and run with it again and see how far I get.

Just remember: never let anyone tell you what you're feeling. They're wrong. If you're upset about something, don't try to ignore. You'll be buried by the invisible tormentors in the end. That's how therapists make so much money, after all-- it takes a massiveass metaphorical shovel to dig through all the crap we let accumulate because it isn't vogue to deal with our problems.

Deal, people, and immediately. I waited a year too long.

I thought it was clever

I've been thinking about my major lately. Nothing overly deep (anything deeper than what I need to know for finals is life-threatening), but it led to this gem:

I don't really believe in absolutes, but I tend toward the affirmative. According to most, I'm not really a writer, either, because I'm not published. To them, I say: I am absolutely a writer, tending toward the rebellious.

You can't stop me. Nyah.

That's what I made my new Tumblr account's "about the author" section. It's a thought I've let jockey around my skull for a while.


I'm also pretty impressed with my Tumblr's title: (a)Muse in[g] Training

I wanted to use 'Prose Without a Cause' but I wasn't willing to deviate too far from the source. This blog has a place in my heart, after all, and I don't want to risk stressing it out. It's hard to stake claims there nowadays.

Oh yea. I'm using FeedBurner now, too-- I'm clueless about how it works, so if you're savy, lend me a hand? I'm sure it does more than just make RSS feeds easier for Tumblr to process.

"I'm not just someone's fallback plan!"

roared the sycophant.

I rant today about something that has plagued me, and probably you, since exploiting sexuality became the primary objective on everyone's mind. I'm not talking about sexual preference, stereotypes, gender roles or bigotry. That would be easier to dissect, actually, and I wouldn't be nearly as aggravated.

Sex is fun. Sex is useful. Sex is dangerous, can cause problems and it changes relationships forever. In a community of people where sex is in high demand but in short supply, it is only natural that people will become territorial about it. About who they are having sex with, about how many people they've managed to sleep with, and about how often they engage the act on a weekly (daily?) basis. I won't slip in the mud of sanctity or virtue for this particular post, though I do have opinions about both and how they relate to sex. Instead, I'm just musing about the carnal urges that usually instigate pain.

Let's face it-- while we're here in college, we aren't really looking for love. We're looking for someone who will let us rant to them about professors and assignments, someone who will be there when everyone else abandons us; we want a confidant and a partner in crime who will help us manage a hectic college lifestyle. We also want someone who we know will, undeniably and without any effort, put out when we want it.

So what's the big deal? We all fit into those categories somehow, whether we choose to believe it or not, and it's certainly attainable (I realize that I'm taking huge liberties with the royal we, so if you don't actually fit into these categories, bear with me. I'm making a point, I promise).

I'm not saying that I don't want these things, either, by writing about them in a quasi-negative tone. We all experience heartache and some kind of emotional distress about the end of a relationship at some point, so I'm not suggesting that I have some kind of special awareness that other people aren't privy to.

I am, however, suggesting that people may be cleaving to the things that sex governs -- like their loneliness, for instance -- too strongly.

This thing I'm talking about, this collegiate romance, is a very lucrative offer that we as a community of people have unofficially proposed. It's ingrained now in everything that we do. We dress up to go out so that we can attract someone. We don't sit with people in the dining centers if we know it might jeopardize the way someone we are trying to attract might perceive us. We're hurt when we're spurned by someone, but not when physical things -- like excessive drinking -- threaten us all the time.

And this is what we base our central thoughts around. The bigger picture orbits the immediacy of our desires, keeping us locked into modes of success (we're having sex) or failure (we are not having sex).

In the end, what is really accomplished? We still manage to get by (we're all still here, after all!) and we learn something about ourselves throughout our various dalliances, but I think we're losing something. It reminds me of Burke's terministic screens theory: when we make one decision, we're blocking all of the other possible outcomes forever.

What would happen if we chose to do something based on a relationship that has more longevity instead?

Silly battles over territory, wrongful accusations and inconsistency probably wouldn't make the cut. Besides-- conversations are a lot less risky.

"Any murder at all, of any sort, is a murder of hope, too."

It's fascinating what blood can do.

It pumps through us all and keeps our bodies well-oiled, as if we really are machines that require constant lubrication, and it is necessary to survive. In our self-sufficient factories (in all but fuel, anyway), we reproduce the blood that has died, and the cycle continues until the factory shuts down.

There are different kinds of blood at our bodies' disposal. White blood cells provide a natural defense against outsiders, a resistance that maintains order within the machine. They're responsible for seeking and destroying that which can harm us, and unless we have some kind of deficiency or malfunction, they are what we rely upon to ensure the cycle continues.

Red blood cells carry oxygen to and from the heart, pumping the essence of our lives throughout the machine. We breathe, but red blood is what makes our breath worthwhile.

It can also tell us when something is wrong. Blood is innately pure-- it's hard to infect something that is self-maintained, after all, especially if the infection has an opportunity to die when the short-lived blood cells die themselves.

Every now and then, though, something resists the cycle. It sits within our bloodstream, within our mechanical columns made out of arteries, veins and capillaries, and sets up its own defense.

It initializes a war that, try as they might, our white blood cells, our mercenaries, cannot defend against because it isn't a threat. Not to the blood, anyway. Our blood doesn't know to warn us that something wicked this way comes, so I can't hate it. I can just acknowledge that its trying to do its best, even if it sometimes has something terrible to report, because it is still performing well according to its primary directives. Wake up. Move out. Forge ahead. Die. Repeat.

It's not as toxic as outright poison, what sits in it, and it's entirely innocent. It makes sense that it would flow into the bloodstream, joining with what it knows. Maybe it was bored, this hub, and simply wanted to explore the rest of the battlefield. Slowly but surely, it's preparing to destabilize its base, departing for somewhere else that's more exciting, but it will never really know how devastating that tactical move will be for the war.

How will the blood know where to go if half of base camp is suddenly missing? Where will the mission directives be issued? I hope mission control told the lieutenants what to do if the base shuts down because the enemy's approaching. Mercurial and plotting, it glides beneath our radars, opportunistic and vindictive. So, so vindictive.

What will we do if the enemy is death? I'm not ready, so I hope mission control knows what it's doing.

Today's assignment-

Today's assignment from the Muse is actually a tip. I'll post it below:

Notice from the Department of Procrastination Prevention

The top-performing item in my store of procrastination-prevention equipment is the humble egg timer. I use a cheap wind-up model--you can literally hear it through my studio door--but after a minute or so I fail to notice the ticking. Set the timer for anywhere from the minimum to the maximum, open your laptop or writing pad, and play a game of Beat the Clock. Whether you set a modest goal of one sentence or an ambitious goal of one thousand words, chances are you'll have something underway by he time the dinger goes off.



Monica Wood, the author of the Muse, is pretty neat. She's a published author of a fair few fictional works, and she keeps a decently laid out homepage for our perusal:

www.monicawood.com

Take a look! While you do that, I'm going to try and sleep away my head cold.

Silence. There was no more screaming or thunder.

Write about something on the verge of collapsing.

"Cast off!" cried to the captain. His tattered coat whipped about his torso, held together by a series of leather straps and fraying thread. The coat matched the rest of his Navy vestments, fraying and barely recognizable as belonging to a commanding officer.

The ship lurched against the waves that grew steadily stronger with the coming darkness, claiming the skies with their watery majesty in a feat of pure natural energy before falling atop the ship's deck, reminding the crew that the ocean cannot be mastered.

The captain chanced a glance at the sopping wet group of people huddled near the doors to the hull, too proud to leave the deck yet too frightened to detach from the railings. 'They used to represent so much power,' he thought.

Another tidal wave battered the ship's already tenuous structure, forcing the crew and passengers to duck low or risk being thrown overboard. Muted shouting from the crew, drowned out by the deafening cacophony of the weather's superior screaming, never reached the captain's ears. He saw them crying out for help, but he realized, with a finality that he thought the fatally wounded must feel, that it wouldn't matter if he could hear them; no one was surviving this storm.

Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings and Queens... the world's finest leaders assembled on the captain's ship, hoping against the terrible odds that he could deliver them safely to the island. Each nation sent their last hopes, the people in whom they have placed their faith, to the captain with the understanding that, if humanity was to survive, it would be because he delivered these fierce individuals to the Land of Resurrection. As lightening, red and jagged, pierced the sky in violent arcs, the terror that stole the ferocity from their eyes proved to the captain that they aren't any better than the billions of people they left behind to die in the fires and earthquakes.

All at once, the ship rose into the air, carried by what romantics would call Poseidon's mighty fist, and fell.

Silence. There was no more screaming or thunder. The captain looked once to his right and then to his left as the ship fell, seemingly in slow motion, toward the water's surface. He looked at the leaders, weak and fragile, holding each other despite the wars they waged that brought about this apocalypse. If he had the time before the ship broke the surface, he would have spit at them.

The water engulfed the ship like a great maw. It was as if the kraken had been called to finish the job, to quell the fury of the Gods by ending the miserable lives of the people who angered them.

'The world is over now,' thought the captain as gallons of water filled his lungs.

Before his last thoughts were corrupted by the murky darkness, the captain saw the sky split wide open in a flash of heavenly light. He could feel the storms stop raging and the earth stop trembling, and he closed his eyes with a smile on his lips.

I don't believe in absolutes, but the only constant is change.

A good friend and fellow writer bought me The Pocket Muse 2, by Monica Wood, for my birthday. Each page is dedicated to something a writer can use to shake up, inspire or alter entirely his or her writing. Thus, I've decided to rededicate my blog to following the Muse daily, completing each assignment from cover-to-cover. I'll probably sneak in an update on my life now and then, but at least this way, I'll likely do it with more of my old (or new!) writing flair.

Without further ado...

Open an imaginary door. What do you see?

The door creaks open with a slow, repulsive resistance that sounds like all the horror movie expositions. You know the sound-- it's when the stupid heroine follows the bloody trail into a dark alleyway that leads to a single black door, forcing her to either turn back now and save herself or to keep forging ahead because her also-stupid boyfriend ran headlong into the fray in a burst of sheer masculinity (as if we didn't know he was tough already).

This door is different, however. If the heroine were to step inside, she wouldn't be assaulted by her newly-transformed lover. She'd see a world lit by blackened, wrought-iron sconces instead of street lights. She'd see a cobble-stoned path lined with neatly-trimmed shrubberies and inviting wooden benches spotted with smiling men and women and children, all wearing nice 18th century clothing.

She would realize that the door wasn't creaking with the Hollywood scare-tactic screeching that usually means imminent death or a long, suspenseful jogging sequence. It was creaking because the hinges were aged and our popular door greases don't exist in this world.

If she walked further down the path, she would smell the heavy scents of truly rural America -- long grasses, Evergreens, dust in the air -- but with something more. Instead of cologne and expensive perfumes emanating from the people-lined benches, the heroine would smell their joys and sorrows. Each person would share his or her life through the woman's olfactory senses, allowing her to interpret every nuance in its purest form.

One woman's essence would imprint a story of anguish on the heroine. Her husband, though sitting next to her, is planning to leave her to spare their family from his alcoholism.

A few benches down, another man's musky pheremones would send the heroine reeling from all the sins of the flesh that he had committed just one year ago, despite having just purchased a ring for his betrothed.

The bench people's presence would continue to infiltrate the heroine's scent recognition, allowing her to be made aware of their most private secrets, uninterrupted by sound or sight. Their rhetoric would still be masked by their immobility and their stoic uniformity, removing the heroine from that which makes us innately human-- having to interpret the world with the clogging-up of another human's influence.

If the heroine continued along the path, the benches she passed would inevitably become devoid of the statuesque chemical storybooks. She would be alone to process the information she had gathered from all of those perfect strangers, turning the cruelties and the pleasures around and around in her head, letting them mesh together to form a a conclusion that, in this world, the boundaries of pleasure and pain are married and that she alone could avoid becoming another frozen heartache or paralyzed gleeful romantic if she just kept walking, protecting her secret.

And then the door would slam shut behind her with a terrible clang. If she turned to run, she would know that the smell of those people would start to overrun her thoughts again, threatening to dismantle her carefully-constructed defense against this world.

Careful to control her emotions, she will instead walk forever along the cobble-stoned path, disallowing herself to sit and rest lest she become one of the sad majority, locked inside herself in a world that collects the self-absorbed.


-------

Tell me what you think!

Sometimes, it's OK to reset

I'm a Unitarian Universalist in my spare time.

Growing up Roman Catholic, I retained so much of my built-in guilt the church heaped upon us woe-begotten Christians, and when I think about how I never go to the UU church, I can't help but feel twangs of that same guilt. They assure me that there is no guilt within the sanctuary, and I smile blankly in thanks.

Alleviating that guilt commands that I do something in recompense. Not because I want to purify the cold, rotting feeling that guilt creates, but because, after almost every service, I am already compelled by the sermon to leap into social action. If I can somehow be part of the support system that keeps the UU banner waving, I will feel better about the years of neglect I unwittingly caused my new haven, and my Christian heart will stop quivering with anxiety.

Is it really guilt, though? I've noticed something about myself that never ceases to amaze me. So much so, in fact, that I'm surprised I haven't written about it yet.

I am a people-pleaser.

My peers (and by peers, lately I mean the SUNY Potsdam faculty and administration) repeat ad nauseum that I'm a leader, born and bred, and that my vigor comes from a good, sturdy ability to see a need and fill it. While that's all well and good, I would like to add more to that definition, with my own spin on the topic of "leadership" and how it applies to my life.

I am a people-pleaser.

I don't actually know if I'm ever really leading. I know that a certain amount of things must be done within the paper to get it out every week, so that's simple math. We all have the appropriate limbs and know-how to make the computers do what we'd like them to, so it's less so leadership and moreso appropriate guidance. As far as production is concerned, anyway.

The other stuff... the pens I bought through the paper, the constant praising emails, the office hours, the bright smiles when I see a writer or an editor in passing, the excessive, private emails of concern when I notice that someone isn't having a good day... that I cry when things aren't going well for an editor and that it hurts when an editor, whose skills I've cultivated, cuts me down are just par for the course.

I'm not really a leader any more than you. When I go to the UU church and feel that call to action, it's because I'm filled with a sense of dutiful caring that forces me to react lest I be one of the uncaring few.

I care, more than I should, but so did the boy in the sermon I just read that inspired this posting:

A boy was walking along the shoreline of an ocean after high tide, picking up and throwing beached fauna back into the water. A man who was observing this was puzzled and asked the boy how it mattered-- millions of them are washed ashore every day in various parts of the world. The boy picked up another fish, and throw...ing it back into the ocean, he said, "It mattered to that fish."

-Taken from my Facebook status.

I hope that we're all able to be like that boy someday. I don't think I would call him a leader, either, but I'd certainly call him a friend. A brother. A care-giver, a doctor. Maybe a philanthropist, or a social worker. When he grows up, of course, but then...

... how many of us still need to grow up? Not in the pejorative, "you need to grow up! nyah!" kind of grow up, but the kind of growing up that only true introspection can achieve.

Just think of how many fish that boy could have saved if the man helped, for instance.

Subtraction

Is love a phenomenon?

This semester has started differently from any other semester on record. I arrived full of ambition, but with all things that change, my vigor -- no, my active participation in -- school has been partially eclipsed by something else.

Mind my disclaimer: due to my infested sinus cavities, my ability to cohere thoughts together in a nice, progressive, linear format is, uh, not there. Sorry if it takes more effort to connect my dots. It'll all make sense, I promise.



When two people give each other that hidden thing, that essential fragment of the self that binds the rest together, a big change occurs. Not in the birds singing, love-bubbles popping, hippie-dippy sort of feel-good crap that romantic novels portray, but in the "ah, so this is love" sort of way (the other stuff happens sometimes, too). It's a good thing, and this entry will not try to destabilize that blanket opinion that most of us as warm-blooded humans share.

However, I AM going to try to illustrate what happens when that union disintegrates. If you're happily coupled, stop reading; I don't want to be responsible for any stressful revelations.

Worlds unite when two people "fall in love." Bear with my cliches, please- they're cliche for a reason, and in this instance, "worlds uniting" is a very appropriate (albeit nauseating) metaphor. Worlds really do unite. Two people become so intrinsically connected, socially, economically, mentally, physically, etc, that their entire worlds are, essentially, combined whether one of the worlds cares to admit it or not.

People are social creatures. Thus, our significant others will likely bring more people into the general mix of things. Though math isn't my strongest suit, I'm fairly comfortable in using the broad generalization that when two nations are combined, the population rises exponentially. The same is true of two people coming together in a relationship. Yes, relationships come and go, and no, the end of a relationship isn't the end of all things, but if you consider my math, it could be mean a minor period of readjustment. Or a full-on civil war. Either way, something will happen when the status quo is jeopardized.

And jeopardized it was.

It's been a few months. Ok, it's been half a year. I've struggled, I've mourned, I've gone through my annoying depression, and I think I've made it out unscathed. Except for this weird... eclipse. This inky darkness that lurks around every SUNY Potsdam corner.

I'm not afraid of running into people (that's just an irritating fact of life). It's just the lingering... solitude that feels weird. After becoming used to having a strong network of supporting friends, not really having that backbone every day is strange. It isn't unmanageable (I'm strong, independent and intelligent... I'm strong, independent and intelligent... blah blah blah mantra), but it's there. I don't really know how else to describe it.

I guess it'd be logical to equate it to that subtraction. One big world minus half (or some may even say 75%) equals a smaller world. Remember the other part of that list of potential connections? It isn't just new friends (or, strangely enough, old friends!) that become part of the separation.

I suppose the moral of my story is:

When walking arm-in-arm with your partner across campus, take care to remember that he or she isn't really the other half of you. Your world doesn't have to be halved if that arm isn't a support system someday.

My favorite professor says, over and over again, that everything we do is a "teaching/learning experience."

I learned that loneliness isn't the biggest stressor that comes with the aftermath. It's the unfamiliar stoicism that creeps into everything when you have to relearn how to walk around without that arm.

Hopefully reading this taught you something. As an aside, writing it helped dust away some of the mucous-born fog. Another helpful tip: when you're sick, keep writing anyway. When you finally aren't coughing away your mental clarity, having hacked through it will keep your wits whet-stone sharp (oh hey, alliteration!).

Who needs light?

"The light had gone out of her eyes. I looked and looked, but I couldn't find her."

- Janie Spar

There's something to this. Janie was referencing her friend who, because of society's negative grasp on her life, had been reduced to an apathetic husk of the proud-and-out lesbian she used to be. Every time they were together, the light, so to speak, that had burned so brightly behind her retinas, wasn't there at all when Janie looked for it.

Isn't that what happens when we're hurt? Of course, there's no true light blinking -- most of us aren't cyborgs -- but there's a real sense of self in our expression, in our body language... in our eyes.

They speak mor ethan we do sometimes. A wink can mean so many illicit things, but it can also mean 'It's alright. I know this hurts.' Eyes can narrow with anger or widen with surprise, they can glare angrily or gaze knowingly. They can offer comfort to an entire audience, and they can fill with tears to show that we're unhappy.

It's when they stop moving, though, that raises an alarm for our friends and family. It's when you smile with your mouth, but the smile never reaches your full expression of self. It's when your once-powerful, gentle and understanding way of seeing the world, brightly and without cynicism, becomes a stoic stare; when eyes become tools for seeing, and that's it.

I'm 22 today, and I hope that my eyes aren't just for seeing anymore.

Sickness is...

My friend is a nurse.

Well, she will be. She attends a relatively prestigious nursing school in Syracuse, NY, and I get to hear about all of the different interesting things they teach her about the care of the human body. For instance, did you know that there are classes (or at least class periods) in which the medical staff of America (and probably other countries [probably]) is taught how to cope with the deaths of its patients?

The body is a fragile paradox. We live to care for others, but caretakers die. We strive to selflessly better the world for future generations (most of us do, anyway), yet we're one of the only species that can work selfishly toward goals that help us. In the short amount of time that we get to breathe air, we spend an enormous percentage of it battling one another for such petty, insignificant reasons (I've already negated what I said about future generations... hello, paradox).


When we aren't attacking one another, we're malfunctioning. One cell will multiply too quickly, or the soft tissues in our brains will deteriorate, or our blood will stop clotting correctly, or the substances that should be helping us -- like peanuts, for example -- will trigger a deadly allergic reaction.

So which aspect of humanity defines us?

Are we creatures that struggle endlessly with one another for the betterment of mankind? Or are we really just broken computers, blinking and beeping until our own programs betray us?

Either way, I believe sickness is the real enemy and our doctors, nurses and various other medical attendants are the more precious to our world than we give them credit for. When the world stops screaming and the bombs are done falling, the real heroes are the people who, after having learned how to cope with the inevitable deaths of their charges, are sitting by someone's bedside, guiding them through the final shutdown procedure.

How come more of us don't know how to do what they do? Paradox.

Shower after thoughts

To avoid looking like a petulant child, let me clarify a few points-

- Smoking was stupid, and that was my fault. Peer pressure is lame, and I learned another very important life lesson-- about myself and about my friends who knowingly handed me the bowl.

- Being editor-in-chief is a choice, sure, but it's something I've locked myself into until I graduate. Yea, I can quit anytime. I can toss aside my three semesters of struggle, but that will also kiss my future goodbye. I don't crank out the paper every week because it's a fun hobby. I do it so I can build my resume into the biggest, brightest beacon for my someday-successful career. Therefore, when other staffers slack off, I don't have a choice but to pick up the pieces. My name, after all, is what people hear when I talk about my paper... and my name is what will follow me after the paper is just a distant memory.

- I am grumpy because I haven't had coffee yet and decided to think about this crap.

A hollow sense of being

The semester's off to a rocky start.

For those of you who don't know me, I have a quasi-severe allergic reaction to marijuana. Gasps, shock, disbelief and various other expressions of gaping wonder are not uncommon after I share that little secret, so I'll imagine a room full of people doing it at once. And scene.

So anyway, I smoked a week before school started. I started out fine. Then about two minutes into it, I was hallucinating, seeing time slow down and speed up, and started choking. The effects lasted all night long until my friend, graciously, scooped me up and took me back to her apartment (thanks, Renee!). For about two weeks later, I was suffering from anxiety attacks and the not-too-distant fear that my mind would never again be the same. Now we're week three into the semester-- simple math supposes that I've only just started feeling better, for those of you (like me) who would rather ANY kind of math be spelled out.

Status of Health: check

I'm the editor-in-chief of our school newspaper (I receive far fewer reactions from this bit of news than from the marijuana allergen...). My job requires that I work closely with people. Not as an editor should -- editing, revising, fixing general writing errors -- but as a philanthropist. Why? Because students are soft. In the year and a half that I've had to lead an organization that amasses 40+ people at its general staff meetings, I've come to the conclusion that, unless you've had to face some kind of serious hardship in your life (and I'm being very, very sarcastic), you aren't equipped to face the day head on.

Sure, I complain. I bitch. I threaten to quit. I get so overwhelmed with all of my various responsibilities that I sit alone sometimes and just cry it out until I feel better. And then I suck it up and move on. I don't have the option of not finishing my section. I don't get to shrug my shoulders and quit when the going gets tough. If people hate me on my staff, I just have to smile more and either convince them I'm still a good editor or ignore their behind-my-back comments.

Anyway, all of this is a precursor to: I've replaced 2 editor positions already and STILL have one more surprise section to layout, on top of running the paper. Rupert Murdoch is insane.

Status of Mental Health: check


I think it's deplorable that I'm even writing this here. I try to reserve my blog space for deep, insightful opinions (read: somewhere I can practice writing). However, I've also come up against my worst fear--

I have to do all of this alone. My friends are all filled with their own responsibilities and dramas, and my schedule just doesn't mesh anymore. It's an empty feeling I've never really experienced before, knowing that, though I'd love to sit down and hash it all out with someone, all I have is this blog and myself to tell me that I'm doing the right things.

And you, loyal readers. I don't suspect this post will stay public for very long.

Life's lessons

I had a really great time growing up. My life has always been filled with love- my parents' love, my friends' love, and even an estranged love for myself (it's there, buried beneath the perfectionism and the self-doubting).

Recently, however, I've been forced to endure a few of life's crueler lessons.

It's an imperceptible shift in the delicate balance of things. All of a sudden, I woke up to discover that nothing was the way it was yesterday, or a week ago. The people who I called my friends weren't really there anymore. The love I had for someone wasn't enough to keep the whole of things equalized. The balance wasn't just tipping anymore; it had tipped, and all of the comforts I amassed were gone.

It isn't sad. Not anymore, not really. It's just strange. I hate referencing old addages, but I never really considered what I had until it wasn't there anymore.

Didn't I, though? I remember waking up to the comfortable life thinking 'Man. I'm really lucky to have these people' virtually every day. I've had tons of conversations with other self-doubters and Negative Nancies before the shift, trying desperately to get them to see through my rose-colored glasses for a change. Then something took them.

Bitterness. Cynicism.

I called this shift a life lesson, and it is. I learned that nothing is ever truly stable. I also learned that happiness, like other emotions, can come and go, fleetingly. I also learned that friends, no matter what they say, will betray you (how much fun IS the house without me, guys?).

It's an unattractive lesson, and it's not really all that fun to write this, but it needed to be writ. For my own sake, I suppose.

Bitterness and cynicism. They're prevalent lately, despite what I may have written in previous blogs. Every time I see him smile, some malevolent hammer chips another piece of me away, and whenever the rest of them laugh together, I swear I can hear my own voice laughing with them. Distantly, though.

Maybe bitterness and cynicism are just precursors to... I don't know. Serenity and understanding? Growth? Sure. I'll go with that.


I'm just over tired, I guess. Good night.

Clever shorts

Sometimes I can't really say what I'm trying to say with long-winded posts. I also tend to think in complicated metaphors. The result of these two conflicting literary elements are clever little Facebook statuses. Here's a short list of some of my favorites, in no particular order:

Sometimes, all we can do is laugh. It's a joyous thing, laughter, and peels of it soak into our surroundings, generating mirth when it starts to rot, like all well-intentioned compost.

Hot chocolate is best when it's served without expectations. Our machines are broken, so let's just wait; not expecting, but hoping for the best.

I want to sleep a sleep so deep that the red woods are envious. Until my leaves, long and colorful, unfold, absorbing the sweetness of the heavens.

Romanticism ruined by anti-mainstream ideals?

Consider a movie with a really cheesy, romantic dialogue. The dreamboat male lead says something completely heart-tearing (thanks, Alanis, for that gem) to the female lead, and we hear her full-throated, slightly cautious response right before they throw caution to the wind and kiss.

Our reactions to this cliche scene aren't what I'm analyzing. Our reactions don't really matter; we can laugh because we're cynical, we can cry because we're emotional, we can have no response for a variety of reasons, et cetera. What matters in this analysis is how we perceive this kind of movie-made scenario outside of the theater.

How many times have your peers accused you of living your life like a movie? How many times have you accused people of living their lives like a movie? If we forget movies and move onto other avenues of popular media, we can stretch these questions to include the spectrum of popular TV show genres, and my point -- my rhetorical analysis of the situation -- remains the same:

What is wrong with "living life like a movie?"

Now, before you stick dynamite in my argument, let me plug up a few visible holes. For this analysis to work, we need to stick to the logical, entirely-possible genres of film or television; types of media that producers try to make as life-like as possible. Romance films, romantic comedies, realistic dramas- pretty much anything that COULD happen. Feel free to discount The Grudge and any of the Bourne movies and anything directed by Tim Burton.

I'm not advocating that we "throw caution to the wind," to quote my example, for every film-like situation that happens by. I'm suggesting that, because films are so enmeshed within our American lives, and because there is a palpable stigma against the "mainstream," we are losing the ability to recognize when some of these cheesy moments are entirely normal -- and not just imprints on our imaginations, courtesy of Hollywood.

Generations ago, when our ancestors lived on farms on other continents and when castles weren't just crumbling monuments tourists wandered through, moments from my example were entirely plausible. No one stopped themselves from enjoying a real life moment to giggle because it reminded them of The Notebook when the two lovebirds were caught making out in the rain.

Pull out a novel by Emily Bronte or William Makepeace Thackeray. Hell, even Marcell Proust had a few touch-and-go moments between his characters that would make cheesy romance directors think, "That'd be perfect for my love story!" These writers weren't influenced by a mainstream idea of what love is, and they weren't immediately accosted by their peers for writing about love cliches (Bronte may or may not have been a good example... but my point still stands).


Anyway. I could write an essay using popular magazines and newspaper clippings that snipe at romance for its cliche and Hollywood-made accoutrements, but instead, I'll wrap things up by hoping, praying, even, that if you're ever faced with a moment where your significant other leans in to tell you he loves you, or worse still, if your friends judge you for some of the "Julia Roberts-esque" things you do, that you go for it. Throw caution to the wind (cliche alert- this is, what? three times in one piece?) and let your life go where it will, movie similarity or no movie similarity.

It isn't our fault that Hollywood capitalized on real human emotion. We shouldn't let it marginalize what we're allowed to feel.

"Oh. It's going to be a quiet, slow-burning seethe. Disappointment."

(yes, I hunted through the 6th season to find that exact quote for this particular entry)

There are so few things on this planet that inspire this kind of feeling in me. Labor camps, pestilence, incurable diseases and like-sounding boy bands are low on the scale for the feeling I'm talking about.

It's that eruption of choked passion that bubbles to the surface despite days (months, even) of desperately holding it back. It's like a backfiring gun, causing a horrible backlash with all of its potential energy finally releasing without the wielder's input.

The initial invasion is an acidic one that slowly eats away at the hapless victim's insides until there's nothing left- just a congealed mass of once-working innards, weighing down on the lower extremities.

Just when the acid has had its fill, and you think there's nothing left of the anguish and the tyrannical pain, another wave of nausea sets in. Though unwelcome, we can't fault the nausea because it is our psyche's only coagulant. It is trying to stop the fountain of proverbial blood that just happens to be trickling merrily from our every proverbial orifice.

When it all finally stops, it's because we've gone to bed. We let our nightmares reset the torment so that the next morning is brighter and healthier than what can only be referred to as "The Moment;" the trigger that caused the gun to backfire; the Trojan Horse that allowed the horrors to invade our tranquility and shit all over it.

I guess that's one thing our nightmares are good for. They force us to stop holding things back, even while we sleep. They're the cold machines that drill holes in beaver dams for the shiny, plastic shopping malls that we all become when we're destroyed by culprits like love. Security. Infatuation. Happiness.

In keeping with my melodramatic analogies that poke fun at the industrial world, I'll part ways with my keyboard by saying this:

Sometimes I wish I could just let my nightmares terrorize me until mankind figures out how to remove silly, inefficient emotions like the ones I listed above. I would much rather be made of steel.

Serendipity

Serendipitously; the only way to look at life.

Each footfall we make is the result of a decision we've made. I could... wake up tomorrow and go to the store; clean my room; finally make up my mind about grad school. If you believe the maxim that, as privileged Americans, our only inhibitions are our own weaknesses, the world truly is wide open and waiting for any and all of our possible decisions. Something I have to remind myself daily is exactly that: my failures are my fault, and my missed chances can only be blamed on my lack of motivation.

But I digress.

Every decision we make has a positive or negative impact on our lives. Nothing we do is ever truly neutral in the schematics of fate. For instance, I could decide to make my journey to the store and find the perfect someone in the produce section, or I could plow through someone's yard and dismember a few garden gnomes. Simpler still, I could successfully buy the items I needed for whatever recipe I'm working on and accomplish some spectacular culinary feast... or, I could buy the items I needed and produce naught but baked sludge.

The series I just suggested is, of course, all speculation and isn't based upon fact (I would never produce baked sludge). However, it's all connected to the same decision, which is: wake up and go to the store.

Serendipity is defined as "the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way" by Mac Dictionary.

Negative outcomes are serendipitous. If our every decision yielded perfection, or something close to it, we would never learn anything. Referring back to my negative potential outcome (the gnome massacre), my decision to go to the store mixed with the mysteries of fate to produce a very unfortunate decision outcome. Having to pay for the damages, and the inevitable blow to my driver's ego, would not inspire happiness in me, but it's certainly beneficial. I would have learned how to contact the owners of the gnomes to repay them. I would have learned something new about my driving skills so that next time I make the decision to drive anywhere, gnomes across the globe will safer for my previous failure.


All of this is my playful way of saying that privileged Americans (there's that phrase again...) and people in general are always faced with the pitfalls of their decision-making. Even notably poor decisions are serendipitous for their learning value. One of my current mentors, Dr. Jennifer Richardson, constantly says, "It's a teaching-learning moment." She's on to something.

We are all suffering from something. Right now, while you're reading this, you're thinking about a decision you've made that didn't produce the results you hoped for. You're regretting something, despite how many of us repeat the mantra "there are no regrets" ad nauseum. And that's alright! Don't push the things you regret, or the decisions you've made that aren't perfect, aside. Don't actively force yourself to suffer more by dealing with them until they're "finished." They'll never be finished. They are part of you now.

Instead, I invite everyone to consider their decisions serendipitous (not a typo!). The good decisions are easy to understand because they provide our lives with positivity.

The "bad" decisions are going to be harder to understand, but that's just fine.