A treatise on nuking enemy planets, or why you should limit your children’s exposure to science fiction during their formative years

Basically that incredibly long, unnecessary title is just referring to the dream I had this afternoon during my unintentionally three-hour-long nap. (When I say “unintentionally,” what I mean is I set my alarm for an hour, knowing full and well I would just turn it off and sleep until I was good and ready to get up.) I dreamed—if you haven’t already guessed—that I was part of a rebel group—this particular theme constitutes a good 90% of my remembered dream life—and that I was the pilot of one of two fighter jets, or whatever you call them when they’re really awesome and Star Warsian, who dropped nuclear bombs on one of the enemy’s strongholds, effectively destroying the entire surface of the planet. We then flew off to join the fleet in outer space, where the dream quickly devolved to an intergalactic soap opera in which everyone was falling in love with each other and I was trying to keep things under control.

The funny thing is, I dreamed this twice—the first time, my fighter jet crashed after launching the nuke. I didn’t like this, so I started the dream over, ending up in the huge hormonal slush that became the rebel fleet.

And the moral of this story is… make sure your children do not grow up to be extreme nerds who gobbled up Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and a thousand other much-lesser-known science fiction and fantasy novels during their early childhood, forever warping the way their brains work and the fashion in which they perceive reality.

Although not really, because it is rather fun to blow up an entire planet without even the first consequence, and then be on your merry way as if nothing more conspicuous had happened than, say, pouring Drain-O on a particularly stubborn garden weed.

Today I looked out the window and saw, in the fading afternoon light, five or six absolutely gigantic spiderweb threads floating across the parking lot, probably thirty feet long, drifting across a backdrop of lit-up red-and-yellow-and-green autumnal trees. It was strange, that there should be so many at once, and secondly that I should open the blinds at exactly that moment, because I waited a good two or three minutes more for more unbelievably huge spiderweb threads to come, but not another one appeared. Strange, and lucky, if you can call it luck, and not blessing, just a small piece of chocolate God tucked under your pillow.

Or some other weird metaphor like that.

Chicken Little Is No Longer Necessary

We went skating tonight, and… and…

I LEARNED TO SKATE BACKWARDS!

So I am super-awesome now, right? Right? Hello, anyone out there? Anyone…?

Anyway… *cough* … The Bible test I thought I was going to fail ended up being kick-butt easy, so I am pretty sure I aced it. The essay part ran screaming, naked and bleeding from my presence when I got done with it. You might have even called it inspired (ha!). 

I’ve been reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (see original exposition on this book here) and one quote really stuck out to me today. So I’m sharing….

“… we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another.”

For Anne Lamott, the issue is that people will read your writing if you are “able to shed some light on this”… “this” being the whole issue of what-the-crap-are-we-supposed-to-do-now-that-our-bodies-are-embedded-with-cerulean-shards-of-sky? She also goes on to say that if writers can make their readers laugh while reading, it’s even more meaningful.

Well, I really like the quote, and I think it describes the human situation pretty beautifully, but… but…. It’s such a high calling. Do I have anything worthwhile to say? Sometimes I feel like my characters do—particularly Astra and Thomas, though of late I’m not sure the story I’m forcing them into is the right story (in fact, I’m fairly certain that, 74 hard-fought pages of single-spaced Times New Roman 12 font later, I’ve been going about it completely wrongly)—but do I? I guess as long as my characters do it’s okay… but will I be able to communicate it?

I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll keep blogging, getting about twenty visits a day if I’m lucky (and I absolutely LOVE you guys for reading!), hopefully (though probably not) making my readers laugh and maybe (even more doubtfully) giving them some sort of insight at least into the shallow end of life, and studying when I have time. Jeez.

I’m back, with lots of randomness as usual.

Facebook fast is over. Whew. Not much of a desire to repeat that process unnecessarily. Despite undoubtedly beautiful intentions on the part of our dear teacher, I didn’t feel that a week without Facebook did much good. Everyone else was still sending SuperPoke hugs and lol-jk-omg wallposts, so the level and quality of Actual Human Interaction didn’t really increase.

Also (Celia dearest, this is for you), my unintentional blog fast has come to an end as well. I didn’t mean to not write—I’ve just been extremely busy, like you don’t even know (my new favorite phrase).

Saw a rendition of Les Mis last night. Without a doubt, this play is my absolute most favoritest musical—the music itself, the complicated plot, the involved characters…. All come together to create a truly incredible piece of theatrical literature. Honestly, I liked the version I saw in Birmingham back during February (at least I think it was February; second semester senior year still seems like a sort of ugly, hazy blur of please-powers-that-be-get-me-out-of-here-and-let-me-remember-as-little-of-this-as-possible… a wish that really didn’t work out so well); the acting was better, and the directing, but still—it’s hard to ruin something as amazingly well-written as Les Mis when you have at least a little talent. (Though I am still wondering what was going on with the gels… those are the plastic sheets that go in front of the lights to color them…. There were some pretty interesting designs—and not in a good way.)

Oh—and I almost forgot the best part of the entire Les Mis event. First, we were barely on time for the show because of a great deal of confusion involving hunger, getting stuck on the wrong side of the river in Little Rock and not being able to find a bridge to take us back over, and finally finding the restaurant we had spotted at the very beginning of the ordeal, ordering there, and not getting our food until five minutes until eight. (If you guessed that the show started at eight… you would be correct.) So we barely got there on time… or really didn’t, considering that Charlene and I rushed back to the car with all the (uneaten) food in to-go boxes while Larkin and Julia ran to get to their seats before the doors closed. Luckily, the two of us were able to get in thanks to the very nice lady who snuck us into our seats during the you-forgot-the-candlesticks-I-gave-you-too scene. THEN we barely made it back for curfew. But we had an adventure. (And we decided during the waiting-for-the-dinner-that-we-ended-up-eating-on-the-way-back-to-Searcy sequence that if we didn’t make it, we would go clubbing instead, so either way, it would have worked out.)

I almost got kicked out of Harding today. Something about not turning in a proof of immunization form. I’m rolling my eyes, right?

Confused about life… mostly about how to straighten out the knots in the rats nest of backlogged emotion that keeps surfacing, like a nasty rodent carcass (haha, you know you are loving that simile, don’t even deny it) in a stagnant swamp. Lololololololol. Lolz. Lawl. I crack myself up. (Seriously. I do.)

“Violet Hill” by Coldplay is an awesome song. Do listen to it.

Ultimate frisbee scrimmage at Hendrix on Sunday. Can you say O.O? Nervous to say the least. Panicking to say the most. Not so much about losing… I would be okay with that, although I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really want to win… but more about disappointing the older members of the team. That could make for a really awkward ride home if, say, I drop the disc and Hendrix scores the winning point….  (Yes. This is my nightmare. Argh.)

Speaking of dreams-ish, I had the strangest one last night. I dreamed I was pregnant, but not in the normal way. I’m not really sure how I got pregnant… yeah, yeah, I know how MOST people get pregnant, but it wasn’t important here. Anyway, there were several babies inside of me, at least seven or eight, and they didn’t look like infants—they looked like fist-sized crosses between sort-of-fetuses and clots of blood (awesome). When I went into labor (help!), one of the girls on the frisbee team started talking me through it, telling me to breathe and push….  Weirdest feeling in the world, having mutant babies (poor Bella). 

Well……. I’m going to go engage in some serious, real-live human interaction (okay, Michael Wright? I’m doing my assignment for realz now!), so adios, sianara, au revoir, etc.

Oh…. check out this blog. Hilarious. Here’s a preview:

And this connected one, though slightly blasphemous.  And also…. If you haven’t seen it, please watch “Step Up.” I’m going to marry the male lead. For serious.

Oh and also…. Here is the link to the blog of a friend. Much love to you all if you click and read—and even more love if you actually listen to what she has to say.

I’d Like Some Archetypes, and Some Fluff on the Side, Please (what this post essentially is)

On occasion, I want to write a serious post, without my usual sarcasm and annoyance with the stupidity of the world included in its contents.  Tonight, I want to write one of these serious posts, so… I will.  (Pretend this little prelude doesn’t exist, okay?  I just felt like I need to warn you that this might be a little different.)

……………

Throughout literary history, various archetypes have appeared in the writings of hundreds and thousands of stories across cultures, across time periods, across geographic space.  Countless times one finds the damsel in distress, the fall from grace, the quest for forbidden knowledge, the apparently evil character who turns out to be good.  Another archetype lies, or swims, rather, in the pool of enlightenment. Oftentimes moments of truth either appear from the depths of or occur in the near vicinity of some sort of special pool of water.  You see it in Lord of the Rings when Frodo is in the forest of Lothlorien; you see it in the various pools in and around Jerusalem in the Gospels; you see it in the Lady of the Lake from which King Arthur draws Excalibur.

Back in fifth and sixth grade, I had my own archetypal pool in the grand masterpiece of a story I was working on at the time.  (The story involved me turning into a dragon and being whisked away to another universe.  Yes, you heard me right….)  In this story, a garden existed in our own world that only “special” people (like me) could enter at night; the garden was surrounded by a hedge only penetrable to those allowed to get in, and half of the garden was a forest of universe-ancient trees and the other half was a sweeping field of silver-green grass (silver green, I think, because the moon was always shining since I could only find the garden at night).  Where the forest and the grassy field met, you found the pool, an unknowably deep, perfectly circular pool of still, black water holding the reverse image of the sky above, spangled with stars.  And sometimes, when you looked into the pool, you would have visions–of past, present, or future, just depending, I guess, on the mood of the pool, or the universe’s intentions for you at that point.

(I also think that, somewhere during the story line, a mermaid emerges out of the pool.  But honestly that’s irrelevant.  So let’s continue.)

I abandoned that story a long time ago, but nonetheless, of all the things I’ve written, I think it’s the one that’s made the greatest impression on me, rather than me making the impression on it.  So sometimes, my unconscious climbs out of my window, stumbles blindly through the woods, climbs through a convenient hole in the hedge that never seems to be in the same place, makes her way to the pool on the edge of that ancient forest, and stands there, staring into the unfathomably dark waters.  The visions don’t come easily, and most of the time, I just manage to catch the echoes of phrases and sentences and imagery, rising up out of the murkier places in my mind.

And tonight I am standing above the pool, hearing these same echoes.  It’s a strange feeling, looking down into the pool, into your soul, this way, seeing those little points of reflected light from stars billions and trillions of miles away, swimming in so much blackness.  I wonder which will win, the darkness or the light, or neither, or both, and what that victory will eventually look like, and whether I will be satisfied, and if all the messed-up parts of me will finally manage to reconcile.  

I don’t know.

…………

On a much lighter tone….  In tonight’s episode of Charlene and Kellum’s Endless Attempts to Drive Our R.A. Insane, we managed to lock ourselves out of our room.  Lovely.

Also, I’ve resolved to talk to the-boy-with-the-beautiful-eyes-at-ultimate-frisbee tomorrow even if it kills me.  I’m going to have an ovary transplant and just DO IT.  No more being shy.  Introversion be dam…aged.  I’m gonna do it.

Pamela Anderson and Black Holes (Aren’t They the Same Thing?)

Abraham Lincoln dreamed his death before the day he was shot.

Once, my friend had a dream he was making out with Pamela Anderson.  Then he woke up… and he was kissing his dog, who was licking his face.

When I was in fourth grade, I dreamed I was a mermaid.  All of a sudden, I felt warm water flowing between my legs, and then I remembered–mermaids don’t have legs.  I woke up and I had wet the bed.

Another of my friends had a dream about “a horse-janitor named Herman who managed to gain access to the neverlife.”

Dreams are weird.

………

So, the world is going to end tomorrow.  Here is the short blog about it: Xenophilia.

A few thoughts about this fact:

1.  I’m not going to do my homework now; it’s not going to matter this time tomorrow, anyway.

2.  I’m slightly (slightly) sad that I never got completely rip-roaring drunk.  Not really to know what it feels like, but just to know how I would act if I was rip-roaring drunk.  I’ve always wondered that.

3.  I’m never going to get good at ultimate frisbee.  Sad day.

4.  If, as the above blog suggests, we actually do emerge in another universe through a white hole, I seriously hope the laws of physics are different there.  As in, one can eat as much chocolate as one desires without getting fat, one can fly without being in outer space, and the publishing world is much easier to penetrate.

A Few Mentionable Links

First of all, I found a WordPress poem today that I actually liked.  For those of you who know me, I’m an unashamed word-snob, so when I find something that actually gains my approval, I feel like it’s worth sharing. So here’s the link: For Grey.

Also, I’m sure a lot of you have heard of PostSecret, but I’m posting (haha) the link anyway, because, for one, I’m slightly addicted, and two, I think it’s important for us to see that the rest of the world has just as many flaws and screwed-up parts of them as each of us do.  So here’s the link to the official PostSecret website.  (And just in case you don’t know what PostSecret is, here’s a link explaining the project: What It Be.)

Lastly, in 1962, two psychologists released what has come to be known as the Myers-Briggs personality test, based on the research and theories of eminent early-1900s Carl Jung, a student of Sigmund Freud. (Yeah, you know that sentence sounded fancy and academic.  Don’t deny it.)  The results are extremely accurate as the test is both valid (measuring what it is designed to measure) and reliable (producing the same results every time; I’ve taken it three different times with about six months in between each time, and I’ve always gotten the same answer).  (Am I frantically trying to memorize terms for my psychology test tomorrow by using vocabulary words in my blog?  No…. of course not….  And I’m certainly not using too many parentheses.)  So, take the test and then post your results here!  

I’m an INFJ, in case anyone was wondering.  You can read the personality synopsis here.  It’s actually pretty accurate, strangely enough, as I usually don’t set a lot of store into those tests.  But if you want to get a quick glimpse into my personality, abandon all hope ye who enter here then that’s a good way to do so without (hopefully) being terrified beyond all chance of regaining sanity. Kinda like reading the back cover of a book, I suppose.

I Wanted to Give this Post a Cool Title But I Couldn’t Think of One

I’m officially a poet now.

Why?  Well, let us consider a particular list of poets, including Dante, Yeats, Petrarch, and certainly innumerable other less well-known names.  What do all of these diverse writers have in common?  

They loved from afar.

Haha, dramatic, right?  And obviously I’m being over-dramatic, something I consider to be a personal skill—that’s why you should never believe my Facebook statuses if they say anything more incredible than “I love ultimate frisbee” or “I am sore all over from ultimate frisbee” or “I just played three hours of ultimate frisbee in the pouring rain.”  And “love” is such a dramatic word, too, and even I don’t want to be that dramatic….  What I am trying to get at, though, is that I think the boy at ultimate frisbee has beautiful eyes, is very cute, and… and… like I’ve said before, I can’t discover in me the ovarian fortitude to speak to him.

So, I am officially a poet, because I’m hiding behind a veneer of words typed up on a screen rather than actually doing anything.  Yes!

Oh, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the question what is poetry the last few days, somewhat in conjunction with my Communications and Critical Thinking class—thanks to Michael Wright (Professor Wright?  Mr. Wright?  Wait…. hey!), now I’m thinking critically all the freaking time.  *brain dies*  Ah-hem… anyway, I didn’t come up with much on my own, but I did find this quote on the Internet that I thought was quite pointful.  (And no, “pointful” is not a word, but I’ve been using it for several years now because I don’t know what word should actually go there.)

Most people ignore most poetry

because

most poetry ignores most people.

-Adrian Mitchell

Although I’m still trying to get to the bottom of the meaning of this quote—and don’t most quotes have oceans of meaning behind them, anyway?—I think the basic bare-bones interpretation of this could lie in the fact that poetry makes sense to so few people, and that so few people really have time to dig their fingernails and teeth and burrow down into poems, therefore the poems never really speak to them.  I myself can’t say that I do this very much—but what would the result be if every morning, everyone had to read a poem?  Really read it, I mean.  Interesting thought, anyway.

Funnily enough, the post I made several weeks ago about not being able to write a poem to finish my trilogy of summer poems has gotten the most search engine hits.  Apparently everyone wants to read poems about the end of the summer.  Ironically, I didn’t post the poem because I haven’t written it—I was just talking about how I wanted to—and even if I had, it wouldn’t have had anything to do with summer, because the other two don’t either.  Anyway, I at least have a vague idea of what I want to do for it.  So that’s exciting… to me, anyway.

Last night, I went to the Josh Gracin and Lady Antebellum concert in the Benson.  Right, a COUNTRY MUSIC CONCERT.  Oh, the horror!  Yeah… my thoughts, too.  But it actually wasn’t that bad.  The first band that played—what do they call those, openers?—were pretty awful, but I really liked Lady Antebellum and Josh Gracin was at least decent.  I went to expand my horizons, and I think I succeeded, at least partly.  I’ll never be a country music fa-reak, but maybe I don’t have to hate it.

Also, I wanted to post THIS LINK because I thought it was pretty random and creative—hopefully you guys will like it too.

As a last note, Charlene found a funny, slightly offensive quote that I wanted to share with the world:

Girls are like parking spaces.  All the good ones are taken, and the rest are handicapped.

Well, I’m not sure what I think about being considered handicapped, but considering some of the dumb things I do (all of which, I am pretty sure, Miguel knows about and was probably hiding in the bushes to see), it’s probably true.

And now I’m off… to throw frisbee.  Imagine that.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

On my way to kinesiology class this afternoon, I heard a lot of banging and hammering and other construction-related noises, paired with a bunch of animal noises.  As this was quite unusual, I followed the source of the commotion.  Rounding the Benson, I found myself face-to-face with a short, robed, bearded man holding a couple of snakes and a rabbit, directing while his three sons, all similar to him in dress and appearance, worked on building what can only be described as, well, an ark.

Obviously none of this actually happened.  What did happen was soaked jeans, soaked backpack, frizzy hair, blown-out umbrella, and mostly, lots and lots and lots of rain.  (And being late to class, as usual, because Communications and Critical Thinking is a) on the other side of campus and b) quite prone to running over and c) because I left my umbrella in the classroom and had to run back for it.)

So, in a way, I kind of miss good old drought-parched Alabama.  Because it never rained there.  When rain-drenched Searcy and bloated Gustav mix, you get… you get… wet.  Very wet.

Of Vocation and Potential Fathers for My Children

College student.

Wait—me?  Seriously?  You’ve got to be joking.

Oh well, I guess you’re not.

Anyway, apart from that little spiel (which, in case you were wondering, was totally and completely pointless), I love college.  I love college spelled this way: CoLlEgE; or this way: cOlLeDgE; or any other completely illegible way you can think of.  I’m positive that classes are harder at a lot of other schools… but I don’t really mind that they aren’t hard.  For once, I actually care about the material; it’s interesting and relevant and not pointlessly difficult like a lot of my high school experience.  I have an entire class basically centering around where I want to go in my life—how cool is that?  (… How much more pointful is that that Theory of Knowledge, also known as the Ultimate Waste of My Time.)  

And that doesn’t even begin to skim the shallows of the oceanic reason why I am already happy and can anticipate actually remaining happy.  Most of it centers around the people.  People who are extremely friendly, nice, and genuinely care about you.  People who invite you to come watch Heroes Season 2 in their room although they only met you that day.  People who will talk to you if you sit next to them at lunch even if you’ve never met them before.  People who invite you to play ultimate frisbee.  People who are… human.

Side note: Ultimate frisbee is amazing.  Someone predicted I would fall in love my first semester… and I have.  With ultimate frisbee.  I am actually going to be on the TEAM.  Incroyable. 

…….

What is vocation?  In our textbook for the Communication and Critical Thinking class (which as far as I gather is a fancy way to say really-fun-and-significant-class), the author defines it as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  Basically, I suppose, something that makes you extremely happy (more on that word in a moment) but also serves the world.  More specifically, you are serving the world in a capacity unique to yourself by fulfilling a need to which you alone are exactly fitted.  And my question is… what is my vocation?  

(And when I say “happy,” I don’t necessarily mean that smiling-warm-fuzzy feeling that you get from being “in love” or receiving a paycheck or playing with puppies.  I mean more the knowledge, rather than the feeling, that you are giving your all to something meaningful and fulfilling.)

Thankfully I don’t have to answer it right now, but I at least want to start thinking about it.  And completely accidentally, in the middle of the day, part of what I want my life to include hit me.  If I had been standing up, I probably would have staggered.

Psychology class.  Slightly bored, not as bad as last class period.  Professor rambling on about women being most beautiful when they are pregnant and other things that were borderline sexist but I’m not paying enough attention to be sure.  Half the class doesn’t know who Ivan Pavlov is.  (Great.  I’m in Arkansas.) Basically, all my thoughts in incomplete sentences of halfway giving-a-blah.  And then, just thrown in with all the rest of the discussion material, the professor says something about children being abused by their parents and how horrible that is.

Why is this significant?  Yes, I live on planet Earth in the country of America, and therefore I have heard horror stories about child abuse for most of my life.  But for some reason, I suddenly knew beyond any twinge of unsurety that I want to have children.  I’ve always somewhat considered it a matter of course, should I get married, but to actually want it—totally new.  Suddenly, I want a family one day.  Not now, obviously—ultimate frisbee is way to much fun to have to quit so I can feed some squalling newborn—but definitely one day.  

……….

On a somewhat less serious note (but only somewhat!), I have decided that I want Peter Petrelli to father my children.  Not Milo Ventimiglia, although I am sure he is wonderful, but Peter, straight from the show.  I think I’ve already discussed this is previous posts… but i just wanted to reiterate, so there is no confusion. Here is another picture.  In case you didn’t see the others.  In case you wanted to see more.

Yay!

………..

I dreamed that I got to hug both Edward and Jacob the other night.  But when I hugged Jacob, I octopus-hugged him (arms and legs… yeah, slightly embarrassing… but wonderful enough to be worth sharing 😛 ) and told him I loved him the absolute most.  Take that, Renesmee, you stupid little death baby.  My name might be weird but it is at least not gay like yours!  Just to reiterate, I hate Breaking Dawn… and a lot of it is because of you!

Anyway… ah-hem… more picture 🙂  The other person who is going to father my children….  *looks around sheepishly*  *or wolfishly?*

I wuv mah lil (OK, bigg) werewolf buddie ^_^

Moving (Like Into College, Or If You Are A Bug, Into My Hair)

I am officially in college now.  Classes have not started yet, and I still have to pay my room and board, but since I have my books and my dorm room is all pretty, I figure it still counts.

Today, I was walking across campus and out of the corner of my eye, I saw this enormous flying bug—I pretty much think it was a prehistoric monster insect of some sort (although logically I know it was just a locust).  Anyway, one second I was watching it zooming around being all like I’M-A-BIG-BIG-BUG and then it was like INCOMING and I felt it connect with my head.

Not cool.

(In case you don’t know, my hair is somewhat akin to a bush—very curly, very red, and very acceptable to bugs as living quarters, apparently.  Once I found a worm in it… a day after going fishing.  It was dead but… still.  Not pleasant.)

But other than that…. I am having fun.  When classes start and campus life gets into a normal rhythm, that will make things a lot better—right now, it’s a little awkward-small-talk-ish but once there are regular activities and just normal class stuff, things will get into a good swing.  Basically, I think I am going to be happy here.

This post is kinda short and pointless maybe… haha.  But I am tired and fixing to go to bed.  So that’s okay.

Before I go, I wanted to share this blog….  It is just a good “life” sort of blog, refreshingly and cleverly well-written.