tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64621580351564794132024-03-05T04:39:08.922-05:00Considerable Setbacks"CATASTROPHE, CALAMITY, A CONSIDERABLE SETBACK!"--Berkeley Breathed, "A Wish for Wings that Work"Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-76432148147163822622018-01-02T01:59:00.001-05:002018-01-02T01:59:53.653-05:00Christmas DeconstructedWe've talked a lot about deconstruction this past year. Deconstructing what it means to be a man, a woman, a person in society, and so many concepts and traditions that have gone unquestioned or unexamined for so long. It's a necessary but hard and often painful process, and just one of many reasons why 2017 has been such a stressful year. Every day, there's something new to be worried or outraged about, or some new problem or issue that demands attention, and it's harder than ever just to make a living. Sometimes I think the motto for this year should be: 2017, Where Nothing is Certain and You're Always Angry.<br />
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Anyway, I've spent so much of the past few weeks just trying to untangle all the knots in my brain so I can finally relax, like how my mom used to spend hours combing the snarls out of my hair when I was a kid. Those knots came from lying in the pine straw building tiny stick houses for my plastic Pokemon, but these mental knots come from just being an adult in the United States during one of the strangest years on record, combined with natural tendencies toward anxiety. As a result, I've had a hard time feeling Christmas-y this December, but I've also learned more than ever about what actually brings me joy this time of year, versus what I'm "supposed" to enjoy. In many ways, this Christmas was similar to the one I experienced <a href="http://considerablesetbacksblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/finding-my-linus-on-true-meaning-of.html" target="_blank">four years ago</a>.<br />
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I'd sit down to watch Elf and soon my mind would wander off to whatever new thing was bothering me that day, instead of focusing on how freaking cute that little puffin in the opening credits is (I have a thing about puffins). I'd sniff a fir tree or drink some wassail and feel warmer inside for a moment, but no less unmotivated. However, holiday cheer still managed to make itself known in some less traditional, more unexpected ways this year. I felt more Christmas-y laughing over a beer at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant, or eating grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup in a church fellowship hall, than I did decorating my apartment. I couldn't afford much in the way of presents this year, so I didn't feel that jolly walking around the mall, but I did feel the spirit walking down the streets of Carrboro one evening singing carols with friends, despite it being 65 degrees, and seeing people come out on their porches to join in the face-to-face giving and receiving of joy without spending a dollar. Like warm weather, spending an afternoon rolling stuffed grape leaves is probably something most people in the U.S. don't associate with the holiday season either, but it wasn't until I dropped everything else for a moment to prepare this meal for people I loved that I finally felt some peace on Earth for a change (though it helped watching snow fall softly outside as I rolled). It was also snowing the day all but one of the people in my weekly song circle couldn't make it to our coffeeshop, but as my one friend and I quietly played Silent Night, with only a piano, our voices, and a 40-year-old guitar, the spirit of Christmas felt more alive in that moment than it had all December.<br />
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In this deconstruction of what the holiday season means to me, I learned that what I ultimately enjoy most about it, even when life tries its hardest to get in the way, is that it can be a chance to reclaim the intimacy slipping away from daily life, intimacy with our actions and with the people around us that brings us closer to God, to our communities, and to our humanity, the intimacy of a divine being sharing in mortal suffering. Keeping this sense of full presence in the world and with other people is one of many goals I have for 2018. As hard as it is to live in a time when so many definitions, including that of common decency, are changing or challenged, it's also exciting. We're being forced to take a good, hard look at society's flaws, but we're also figuring out how to fix them, and showing tremendous creativity in the process. 2017 was, in my opinion, a year of great art, especially cinema. May 2018 bring even greater awakenings and creations. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-11260884911799974702017-08-12T14:37:00.002-04:002017-08-12T14:37:29.902-04:00Two WolvesAt some point, you've probably heard the story of the Native American telling his grandson about the two wolves fighting inside each of us, one good and one evil, and how the wolf who wins will be the one you feed. There's a version of this fight going on in my life right now, and likely other lives as well, but it goes like this: one wolf is chasing me, trying to kill and eat me. The other wolf <i>is </i>me, and I'm running in circles, eating my own tail.<br />
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It takes a lot to fight the battles of the world and the battles in yourself at the same time. How do you fight injustice, oppression, and violence when you can barely squeeze out the energy to brush your teeth and go to work in the morning? At first I thought I might have clinical depression (I recently decided to give up caffeinated coffee when, after drinking an espresso milkshake, I heard a Cat Stevens song and cried for no reason), but now I'm unconvinced, because I'm not constantly unhappy or apathetic. It's just that I'm only happy when I'm allowed to be human. I was happy the other morning, eating yogurt as slowly as I wanted in the warm, sweet wind, and sitting in the soft grass at Duke Gardens, watching ducks paddle through the water and listening to people speak different languages--not understanding, but enjoying the sounds, the cadence. I was happy spending as long as I wanted tinkering with a poem by the ocean, and playing music with my friends after a good meal. And I was happy standing at an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway, sweaty and sun-browned after a weekend spent hauling my camera gear through gold mine tunnels and up log-cabined hills. Nothing beats feeling sunlight on your skin again after an antibiotic treatment leaves you so allergic to the sun that you can't walk outside for five minutes without a scarf around your ears. Nothing beats letting a sea of mountaintops swallow your problems for a moment, either.<br />
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The big problem right now is that carving out the time and space for being human requires saddling and reining in all the forces in my life, body, and mind that try to suffocate that time and space, and shifting destructive behavior patterns as old as my bones, all of which feels like training wild hogs to wait tables in a fine restaurant. It also requires being more faithful in my spiritual practice, which these forces also suffocate. But at this point, I can't even stick to a simple exercise routine because it involves getting up earlier than I'd like to, no matter how great it might feel in the long run. I've drunk the cultural kool-aid of instant gratification, and now I'm getting tired and nauseous trying to purge it from my system.<br />
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To me, "being human" doesn't just mean more leisure time--it means doing the things you exist to do, in the way you were meant to do them, and in a way that leaves the world better than you found it, not just the things that keep a roof over your head (if these are one and the same for you, congratulations!). It also means re-establishing yourself as more of a creator and less a consumer--cooking at least some of my own food rather than just buying frozen dinners all the time helps with this. Lastly, it means taking time to relieve the stress on our bodies caused by a society that's rapidly out-evolving them. No amount of company wellness days can change the fact that humans are not built to sit or stand by themselves in one place without sunlight for eight hours a day.<br />
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While I'm spinning in my circle figuring all of this out, the wolf outside stalks closer. The news is a game of "who hates whom today?" or "which volatile regime are we threatening today?" or "who thinks I'm not a person today?" or "whose skin color or religious garb was a death sentence today?" or "who tried to make a point with a bomb today?" or "who got shot or stabbed for doing the right thing today?" On one side, I'm being hit with the reality of just how much mental and physical energy it takes to practice what I preached two blog posts ago, and on the the other, the reality of living in revolutionary times. It's not quite as romantic as eighteenth century paintings, Les Miserables, or Rage Against the Machine might have you believe. I haven't lived through a literal revolution yet, but this dark weight in the air, and the tension of global affairs dripping into our daily lives, is enough to make me afraid of one.<br />
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Though I'm nowhere near breaking this circle yet, art and spirituality will probably be the two things that help me the most in doing so, especially in those moments when they blend together. I live for those moments. I never thought a church sermon and an episode of Welcome to Night Vale would perfectly compliment each other, but they did on this year's Easter weekend. The latter was a live performance of the podcast I saw in Durham on Good Friday, in which the incomparable Cecil Baldwin energized the audience at one point by stating that being "good" was an action, not just a passive state of being, an idea I've expressed before but often fail to live up to. Later, on Easter Sunday, the pastor of my church proclaimed that we live not in the old world, but in a new, post-Easter world, where love has won and will continue to win, no matter how long the struggle (I'm paraphrasing, of course, but this seemed to me the essence of what she said).<br />
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She gave a similarly thought-provoking sermon around Pentecost Sunday, examining the thoughts and emotions Jesus' disciples might have had after seeing their leader and hero ascend to Heaven and leave them to figure out where to go from there. It made me realize that, in a sense, people in my generation (millenials--you know, the people killing Applebee's in the holy name of avocado toast, or something) are having our own post-ascension moment right now, whether we're religious or not. Many of the heroes we grew up with, especially influential artists, are dying off, and we're gradually inheriting more and more of the world and becoming the captains of its cultures and progress. We're coming to grips with the responsibility of being our own heroes at a hostile, polarized point in history.<br />
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I don't know when I'll reach that moment where it feels like I'm actually going somewhere and making an impact instead of just spinning around while life keeps moving, but the best I can do right now is remind myself that we live in a world, however oppressive or violent, that like love, this too is possible.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-86390465705653280192017-02-18T00:04:00.000-05:002017-02-18T00:04:12.896-05:00The Guts of MercyI once read an Advent meditation from a Duke Divinity School professor on the Benedictus, the prophesy of Zechariah in the Bible's gospel of Luke. The professor explains that, rather than God's "tender mercy," a more literal translation of the text reads "the guts of mercy of our God." The memory of that phrase struck me hard this week. Lately our most primal emotions, our gut feelings, have been dug up, and now we're seeing the consequences poke their heads like earthworms through the surface, especially in America. Not all of these consequences are bad, though. You need worms to make rich soil. Also, they're fun to catch because they're slimy and wiggly, but that's beside the point. For me, the past few weeks' biggest lesson was that the most powerful acts of compassion are the most tangible, the ones that expose the <i>guts </i>of mercy: the courage, the labor, and the physical presence it often takes to be truly merciful.<br />
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One Saturday afternoon, on the heels of Donald Trump's executive order restricting entry into the U.S. from certain predominantly Muslim countries, I attended a gathering at my church that brought together Christians and Muslims from surrounding mosques. It was intended as a gesture of friendship and tolerance, but also a chance to discuss the differences and common ground between our two faiths. I left a plate of yogurt-covered dates on the food table (it was the best I could do--turns out I can't even make brownies without screwing up), and joined one of several small groups seated in circles around the room. There were no hashtags, no memes, no Internet trolls. Just people, eating and talking. We weren't looking at the balls of light and words and pixels that bounce off the screens of our various devices every day. We weren't typing fiery comments with trigger-happy fingers. We were looking into people's eyes and faces, and speaking with our voices. We had nothing to hide behind that would allow us to pretend that any of us weren't real people.<br />
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The most striking thing that came up in my group's discussion was the fact that many people who become radicalized and commit acts of terror or other crimes do so because they've been deprived of their most basic needs: food, shelter, companionship, a sense of belonging, etc. We especially focused on the subject of food and sharing meals, and how much power it has to bring people together for such a simple act. The conclusion was that perhaps the first step toward caring for others and encouraging peace is helping to meet those essential needs for health and survival. In other words, fight the violent instincts poisoning human politics and rhetoric by going for the guts--fulfilling the hunger, thirst, and lack of warmth that society ignores, closing the distance between people with the intimacy of face-to-face encounters. Mass communication is a powerful and necessary tool, but I believe it's only the beginning of resistance, and I doubt it will ever replace the reality of breaking bread together, or personally presenting a gift.<br />
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That morning, I had another experience that emphasized my first point. As an assignment for my job, I got video footage of the annual African American Cultural Celebration at the North Carolina Museum of History. It's a really impressive event overall, but my favorite part was definitely the opening procession, which paid tribute to the <a href="http://www.tryonpalace.org/jonkonnu" target="_blank">Jonkonnu</a> celebrations practiced by enslaved African Americans in North Carolina. It didn't celebrate "diversity" as an abstract concept preached in company training videos or slapped on a motivational poster. It was the beauty of diversity made manifest to the senses, in colors, singing, shouting, drumbeats. You couldn't look away from the joy, the power, and the pride being expressed. I had a somewhat similar experience that evening when I attended a friend's Chinese New Year party. I could write a whole post just about the food--the steaming hot pot full of greens and fish and beef, the mountains of dumplings we attempted to fold and pleat into neat little pockets. There were guests there from around the world, and by the end of the night, we were so full and satisfied that we couldn't have fought about anything even if we'd wanted to. The conversations that happened over the food brought their own kind of satisfaction. There are other recent experiences I could mention that would further the point, but they're highly personal and not quite ready to be shared here. Maybe someday. <br />
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Physical experiences outside our cultural bubbles and daily routines, face-to-face meetings, and the will to immerse ourselves in them--these are the guts of understanding, and the wind that pushes our sails further toward progress. <br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-38731272746215234812017-01-21T18:36:00.001-05:002017-01-21T18:36:42.050-05:00Declaring Independence<div style="margin: 0in;">
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"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."--Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail<br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my
environment to be a product of me."--Frank Costello, The Departed</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I'd originally planned a post for New Year's Day last year, but got caught
up in holiday festivities, and later the inevitable winter ennui oozing from
failed resolutions. This never surprises me, since January is a terrible time
for realizing hopes and dreams (and </span><a href="http://considerablesetbacksblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/february-when-bergman-eats-soggy-corn.html"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">February</span></a><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> is even worse). Also, 2016 turned out to be a tumultuous year, which goes without saying. In fact, 2015 was really one of the best years of my life, looking back on it. I suggest we take some advice from the trees
and start the new year on the vernal equinox, reserving winter for its intended
purposes of hibernation and excessive indulgence. Winter is not for huffing and
puffing on the treadmill at Planet Fitness--it's a second glass of port, a
third log on the fire, and a fortieth episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's the
season for perfecting your impersonation of a pupa beneath blankets, while the
trees wait silent and patient for March. If we listened to trees
more, I think the world would be a far better place. It's ironic that this post starts out with a call to laziness and ends with a call to action, but humans are nothing if not contradictory. Anyway, this post has
spent a long time gestating, so I'd better get on with it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Now, let the wild ramble start!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Sometimes I have to be reminded that I'm a person, not a machine who
gets in a car every day to go sit and churn out products while consuming other
products. We're far messier and less efficient than that, with strange needs
like space, sleep, and love. Still, it seems like the things a person produces
are often much more valued than the health and well-being of the person
themselves--for instance, think of how often people deprive themselves of
sufficient rest or exercise to study for a test or finish a project for work.
Anyway, these reminders of my "inefficient" humanity tend to come as
random headaches and muscle pains, insomnia, and a general boredom with the
world so strong that I step outside and sincerely wish that gravity no longer
existed. During these restless periods, I also tend to have the attention span
of a pinball machine, which leads to less writing, which leads to more
difficulty in coming up with clever metaphors to describe my foul temper that
arises from said lack of writing. Early this summer, all of these symptoms
reared their ugly heads at once after I'd spent several weeks neglecting my gym
membership and mostly sitting at a desk in front of a computer, thanks to an
unexpectedly tight project deadline.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Thankfully, I was offered a small moment to reclaim my personhood
in the form of a two-day trip to Lake Norman in June. I spent it letting my
skin drink in all the sunlight it desired, eating home-cooked food, communing
with friends, napping with a Bedlington Terrier in my lap, and swimming in the
cool water. It's interesting to swim in a place where instead of flat concrete,
your feet feel the squishy, pokey detritus of living things. At night I sat on
the dock, watching the languid recession of daylight and admiring the strange
silence of the lake. Even at my childhood home in the woods, I was used to the
subtle yet constant whoosh of traffic from Highway 15-501, but here, the
stillness of both water and air was rarely broken. I'd hear only an occasional
lap of water against a wood post, the creak of a beam, or my friend's voice as
we discussed far-off dreams. Over those two days, I slept better than I had in
weeks, and I came home with a new resolution: the needs of my body and spirit
will be held sacred above any job, project, assignment, or other worldly
pursuit. If I can't accommodate something
in my life without sacrificing some aspect of physical, mental, or spiritual
health, that thing will be let go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">This resolution is just one example in a long series of what I
call "personal declarations of independence." Others include the
declaration that I don't have to listen to any person who tells me what to do with
my body, that I'll never be silenced for being young or female, that I can view
my tendency to listen more than talk as a strength rather than a weakness, that
I don't have to tolerate anyone's disrespect, etc. As dust falls on our heads
from the world's shaking foundations, these assertions of our own power to grab
the wheel of the future and steer (both on personal and societal levels), and
to reclaim wildly evaporating freedoms and prizes of progress, become more
important than ever. Just the past year alone has reminded us that the
recognition of inalienable human rights never simply <i>happens</i> when
enough people have good thoughts or intentions. It must be constantly fought
for and defended.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">There's no doubt that the world is at war right now. People are
getting murdered in the streets for being the "wrong" color, the
"wrong" orientation, the "wrong" religion, in the
"wrong" occupation, for existing. Beautiful, ancient cities are being blown to
bits. Political campaigns and discussions have reduced themselves to glorified dodgeball games
with less maturity than a middle school gym class. And as all this has unfolded,
pundits on the right have been busy distracting us with fear-mongering about <a href="http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/10/nom-debuts-bathroom-attack-ad-north-carolina-gubernatorial-candidate/" target="_blank">bathrooms</a>, pundits on the left with complaints about "<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/26/looking-for-the-beach-boys-fifty-years-later/" target="_blank">beach privilege</a>." To be fair, it's much easier
to make a mountain out of a molehill than to actually summit a mountain, which
requires courage that whining about how you were "sweat-shamed" for
the pit stains on your shirt does not. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Yes, we are at war, but it's not a war between liberals and
conservatives, Christians and Muslims, black people and white people, etc. It's
a struggle between people who want to live their lives in peace while letting
others do the same, and people who won't be satisfied until the world is so
bent and broken that it finally fits their narrow ideals of perfection (to
be honest, I doubt even that would satisfy them). Some groups won't stop
until even history is twisted toward their will--we've had ISIS destroying
ancient artifacts in the Middle East, and we've had American school officials
wanting to revise history textbooks to suit their opinions. The allies in this
struggle are the European man and the Pakistani woman who'd rather discuss the
best way to cook lamb than slit each other's throats. They're the cisgender
woman and the transgender woman looking for the
right song in the hymnal. The cop who just wants to protect and serve, the
black man who just wants to get home. The creators, the doers: people who pour
their hearts into things they make with their own hands and their own minds and their own hearts,
whether it's a poem, a delicious meal, a well-built coffee table, people determined to be more than just products or consumers of their environments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Although doing something about a problem in society, rather than
just ranting about it or finding less intimidating "problems" to
focus on, seems like the obvious way to fix it, it's sometimes hard to figure
out exactly what to do. I don't know what to do about some of the
problems I listed. When someone commits a crime or passes legislation that
harms a certain group of people, I want to post a Facebook status or a tweet
showing support for my friends who are part of that group, but I usually end up
not doing it because it feels like it's not enough, like it's a lazy,
self-righteous thing to do (not saying that it is; it just feels that way sometimes). "Why waste time posting on the Internet when I could actually
be<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>doing<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>something to help fix this?"
I think to myself, but what can I do about it? One time, I decided to practice
what I preached by going to a protest, but I left frustrated. It wasn't as
well-attended as I'd hoped, and all it seemed to produce were a few angry motorists when we blocked traffic and a lot more spam emails in my
inbox. I got a similar feeling when I attended an anti-discrimination rally sponsored by a music festival, expecting hoards of angry artists demanding change, when it wound up being just a dozen or so people standing under a tent in the rain. I'm less cynical about protests after seeing the incredible turnout at the Women's Marches around the world today, especially since they finally seem to have a coherent platform, but I admit that I'm still a little skeptical of how much change they'll ultimately bring about. I also feel a sense of futility in writing letters to senators and representatives. Again, I hope
I'm proven wrong someday, but it seems like most of the time, politicians have
already made up their minds, and no amount of writing or phone calls will change them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">It can also be hard to create something useful or beautiful because it can require such intense focus and dedication. Artists have
more tools than ever these days, but we also </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">have so many distractions, and
hundreds of thousands of shouting voices breaking the media i</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">nto skinny, two-dimensional shards we call sound bites, tweets, etc. I recently read some of John Adams' letters and thought about what an arsenal of beauty and
venom the English language is, yet we're forced to limit so many of our thoughts to 120 characters. I push a few buttons, and my phone assaults me with so much light and
noise and bad news and so many unfounded opinions that my eyes burn looking at it. I've lost count of how many attempts I've made just to finish this stupid blog post in one sitting. Sometimes my mind feels less like a pinball machine and more like a pile of broken, disconnected chain links that I'm struggling to solder into something coherent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I don't have all the answers when it comes to mending a torn up world or a torn up mind, but as cliche as it sounds, I think it might be the little things that matter most. Look at a shirt where the arm meets the shoulder, and you might see hundreds of tiny stitches holding them together, without a single thread seeking recognition. Sometimes the threads are completely hidden under the hem, but their existence is manifest in what they bind together, which they do with humility and consistency. A friend once said that change happens person to person, and I think he's right. Building chains of kindness and honesty in our daily interactions, and committing to creating something beautiful and satisfying each day, no matter how small, may help save the world. Remembering to be humble in our work would also help. Too often, when someone says or does something hateful or ill-informed, the first response is to flip them off, create an inflammatory hashtag, or write</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> a snarky, holier-than-thou think piece (forgive any hypocrisy here). </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">However, humility doesn't equal passivity or silence. I think of humble activism as walking straight through a crowd of people who believe you are what's wrong with society and blame you for their struggles, sitting in their midst, and not moving, because America is your country too. It's looking after and defending your friends, even if your family constantly tells you they don't belong (and vice versa), leaving an extra seat at your table for someone who disagrees with you, standing and speaking when you're told to sit down and shut up, helping people less fortunate, asserting what you do know while acknowledging what you don't, refusing to look the other way when someone is in trouble, and never, ever forgetting that no matter how low society bows before the five-second video or the clickbait headline, every human we encounter is a web of experiences, genetics, and circumstances so intricate and complicated that they'll never completely fit inside our convenient categories and assumptions. The thing that's so deadly about over-generalization is that it expands like an umbrella over more and more people. If your enemy expands from "imperialists" to "Americans" to "the West," or from "terrorists" to "Muslims" to "immigrants," it just gives you an excuse to hurt more and more people. Again, person-to-person relationships help combat this. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">It's harder to hurt someone if you know their mother, if you've kvetched over bourbon on the porch, or if you know what their hands feel like on your face. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Another form of resistance is to defend your time with an iron fist, the time you need to think, create, learn, and sustain yourself, to be human. We need to be healthy to resist properly. For instance, I never check my work email outside of work; I ask coworkers and employers to call or text me instead if there's an emergency. I'm trying to figure out a workable creativity and workout schedule, and making my home a refuge from the distractions of social media. Also, I'm learning a martial art--what's the point of defending my time if I can't defend my life? Once you make this time, don't let anyone or anything take it away from you. Declare yourself independent of any forces that seek to do so. I know from experience how hard it is to make this time when you have multiple jobs, but even a little creativity is better than nothing. No matter how badly someone treats me, I can still come home and write and sing. The guy who yells "nice tits!" out his car window, or tells me that I belong only in the home and not at the polls or in positions of power because I'm a woman and therefore can't handle conflict or face the truth, will never make me put down my pen or guitar. If we keep working and creating in this way, showing that we'll never stop and never be moved. I believe we'll make those who try to tear us down look like they're just flinging themselves against brick walls. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I want to close this post by saying I'm sorry, for any times I've looked away instead of facing a problem, ignored a cry for help, kept silent when I should have spoken, jumped to unjust conclusions, or taken the easy way out instead of doing the right thing. I'll do better. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The truth is that I do hate conflict, but that's not an excuse anymore. I even have reservations about sharing this post because I'm afraid some people won't like it or might disagree with it, but trying to please everyone is suicidal. The "negative peace" Dr. King mentions in the quote at the beginning really isn't peace at all; it's a constant, simmering tension, but to people who aren't on the receiving end of injustice, it's often still more palatable than walking across the hot coals of conflict and disorder toward real peace on the other side. This can be true in personal as well as societal conflicts. People who are the targets of injustice, however, tread these coals every day. </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Rocking the boat is not in my nature, but I've learned that if you don't do so when the moment is right, the boat rocks you. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">To anyone who might need a port in the storm over the coming years: my door is always open. I'll have wine, tea, and a frayed 40-year-old arm chair waiting for you. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span> <span style="font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-39658505928129961122015-12-06T14:20:00.001-05:002016-07-07T15:27:38.388-04:00The Cold and Broken Hallelujah: Being Thankful for It AllIn the past, when writing on Thanksgiving, I've listed things that happened over the past year that I'm thankful for, looking back on fond memories and trying to point my perspective in a more positive direction. But honestly, this has been a tough year--for me, for many of my friends and family, and for much of the world. In fact, calling this year "tough" sounds like an insulting understatement. We need a word with more weight to describe the personal, national, and global tragedies in the 2015 calendar. We've seen explosions of gun violence, races and religions declaring war on each other, and the sudden deaths of loved ones. On a smaller scale, this year has seen financial trouble, lost relationships, and general dissatisfaction with life. I do have reasons for gratitude, like new friends, publications, and my own place to live, but when I try to acknowledge them, they tend to fall under the shadow of this year's more bitter experiences. As the new year approaches, I imagine a lot of us feel like wet dogs staggering through the door of a new house, panting and hoping for a warm fire after surviving the storm of 2015. <br />
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Though it may be harder to find specific things to be thankful for this year, the past eleven months have taught me so much about the act of being thankful itself. It really is a conscious act, not a passive state of being. It's something I have to remember to do, like picking up fallen bits of cereal from my kitchen floor, before they entice the ubiquitous ants in my hundred-year-old house. It's also a decision, a choice. I've been surprised lately by just how supple life can be in the hands of someone who makes decisions instead of just floating along on the currents of circumstance. My therapist once told me that faith itself is a decision.<br />
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I've also learned that being thankful is not the same as picking the marshmallows out of Lucky Charms (speaking of cereal!). It's not about looking for particular objects, people, or events in my life that meet my personal standards of happiness and ignoring everything else. What if nothing meets those standards at the moment? At its core, I think true thankfulness is the unconditional embracing of everything that comes our way, good or bad. It's leaning headlong into both joy and misery, instead of pretending one or the other doesn't exist. It's allowing ourselves to feel anything, and rejoicing in our emotional peaks and depths as signs of life intensely lived, like mountains and valleys in a landscape created with passion. I also think true thankfulness is one of the ultimate acts of faith--it requires trusting that not every question needs an answer, and that whatever we experience, good or bad, will somehow sand off our rough edges and give our stories more flavor. <br />
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Once again, Leonard Cohen captures this idea far better than I in this explanation of his most beloved song, "Hallelujah" (in case you were wondering, no, I'll probably never shut up about Leonard Cohen):<br />
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"The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say: 'Look, I don't understand a f*****g thing at all--Hallelujah!' That's the only moment that we live here fully as human beings."<br />
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I found this on a web page composed entirely of incredible Leonard Cohen quotes, and as you can imagine, this was my response when I first clicked the link:<br />
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The particular quote I mentioned rings especially true in a society where nobody can seem to admit they're wrong and so many conflicts seem irreconcilable, a society whose battle cry is "How dare you be human!" This year, it's clear that we're more bent on dehumanizing ourselves and each other than ever. We continue to ignore our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs in favor of increased "productivity" at work and increasingly detached relationships, and it feels like every evil force in the world is showing its face at once--hate, fear, ignorance, dishonesty, you name it. All the little social, political, and personal bombs we've planted over the years are finally blowing up.<br />
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Another favorite poet of mine (and Leonard Cohen's) is W.B. Yeats, and according to my father, Yeats believed history was cyclical rather than linear. I haven't done much research to verify that, but it's an interesting thought. If history followed a cycle, I sometimes think it would look something like a pendulum, and that this year would be one of the great downswings. On the bright side, that means it's about to swing upward, which makes me hopeful for next year. Hopefully, a day will come when enough people get so tired of all the warring and hating in the world that they all sit on the pendulum of history and weigh it down, stopping the violent swinging once and for all. Hopefully, my friends and I will step out of the furnace of this year as better and brighter people. But until then, all we can do as we keep struggling to change the world and ourselves is draw enough breath, however ragged, to throw back our heads and say "Hallelujah!" <br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-3261730309330855372015-09-19T18:24:00.002-04:002015-09-19T18:41:50.145-04:00End-of-Summer Brain Purge (for lack of a better title)As you know, I took a long hiatus from this blog over the summer. Though I have done a good deal of creating in these past few months (which flew by with the speed of an unladen African swallow), many things distracted me from writing in this blog, specifically. However, to say that this has simply been a "busy" summer feels so watered down and trivialized that it hurts. This summer, or this whole year, I should say, has been volcanic with change, triumphs and tragedies erupting with almost equal ferocity. It started when I moved from my Carrboro apartment to a room in a lovely historic house in Durham, but that's only the beginning.<br />
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I started writing this post at a bed and breakfast in Tryon, North Carolina, a small town in the foothills where F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. This makes sense because, despite its size, Tryon overflows with stories, strange and grand as the peaks surrounding it. Now, I'll attempt to tell at least part of the story of my summer--and the thoughts that sprang from it--in the following series of random journal entries:<br />
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1. The weekend before I moved to Durham at the beginning of June, Raisin, my dog of nine years, unexpectedly passed away. He didn't suffer much, but I can't say the same for myself. I spent the rest of that evening wandering between bars in Carrboro and Chapel Hill, texting my friends and struggling to convince myself that not everyone I loved would be wrenched from my life without warning. I know that sounds like a pretty dramatic reaction, but I've found that in a society where human love can be so painfully conditional, there's a special sadness that comes with losing a dog, who expects so little from you. The loss also struck an acute sense of my own mortality. I've been fortunate to not have a lot of loved ones die in my lifetime so far, but the few times it has happened, it's typically been swift and sudden. It's sharpened my awareness of life's brevity like an arrowhead. For this reason, I can't stand talking about things like how I'm going to save for retirement, or doing draining tasks like filling out tax forms and watching half-hour Youtube videos arguing why this movie is better than that movie, or Facebook (even though I still use it entirely too much). Probably half the things I do are fueled by the fear that I might never get to do those things again in my short lifetime.<br />
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Also, Raisin, even though you chewed up half my clothes and put a hole in my living room wall with your head, you were the most affectionate dog I ever knew. You were, and still are, greatly missed.<br />
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2. Last month, I bought a Johnny Cash album called "My Mother's Hymn Book." It's a collection of old hymns and gospel songs that literally came from his mother's hymn book, recorded late in Cash's life with only his voice and a single guitar. According to the liner notes, out of all his recorded albums, this one was his personal favorite. His deep, aged voice sounds like a tree with many rings, having weathered storm after storm, but yet, as one song goes, "shall not be moved." My favorite song on the album is "Softly and Tenderly," one of my grandfather's favorite hymns. I could almost imagine him singing it as I nearly fell asleep to it on my porch. I listened to the whole album again as I drove to Pittsboro the next day, and it made me tear up. I wondered if this would be happening had 2015 not been a year so fraught with difficulty. Would these songs sound half as beautiful to me if I hadn't tasted some of the hardship they've carried people through for so long? It made me realize that sometimes, we have to be ripped open for things to touch our hearts.<br />
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3. I can't express how much my heart goes out to the loved ones of the two journalists killed in the WDBJ shooting. Both had significant others in their lives, and knowing how difficult it is to find true love, I can't imagine how it feels to lose it like that. Whatever is broken in this world that pushes or enables people to cause tragedies like this, we've got to fix it. Now.<br />
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4. I think the secret to writing a story that doesn't insult or belittle a particular group of people, a story that isn't racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, etc., is to simply write well. A story that falls into these categories usually involves either lazy, ignorant writing, or had a malicious agenda to begin with. Good writing, on the other hand, naturally acknowledges the dignity and complexity of its subjects, no matter who they are. The greatest insult to a human being is to deny their complexity. People who are offended by good storytelling are just looking for something to get angry about.<br />
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5. This summer, I finally read <i>Steppenwolf</i>, and I really, really wish I could have a beer with Herman Hesse. I'd love to see what it's like to talk to someone whose brain is capable of producing something like the Magic Theater (I guess he'd have to be a madman only--haha). I'll discuss this reading experience in more detail in my next post.<br />
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6. Sometimes it feels like happiness, like writing or woodworking, is a craft. It must be practiced and developed, and it can't rely solely on things that can be taken away or disappear without warning. It also requires such intense faith, which has always been a challenge for me. Despite what some people might think, I'm a very physical person. I like things that I can see, hear, and touch, so it's hard to find "the substance of things hoped for," and the "evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1).<br />
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7. I've seen a lot of sentimental meme-type things on the Internet lately listing the qualities of an ideal boyfriend, things like "he hugs you from behind" or "gets you ice cream when you're on your period." That's cute and all, but these lists only scratch the surface. These are things anybody could do. However, they did get me thinking about how I would write such a list myself. I think my ideal boyfriend could be summed up in just two qualities: a. He makes me feel like life isn't a constant performance, like I can take off my mask, get off the stage, and just love him while being completely myself, without fear that being myself will drive him away, and b. He sees the "golden track" that runs through life, the thread of beauty and divinity Herman Hesse wrote about that weaves through the surface of every day living. Not only does he see this thread, he grabs it and doesn't let go, unraveling everything that hides it. He sees the light that gets through cracked things, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen's "Anthem." An additional desirable quality would be that he knows all the words to the Powdermilk Biscuit commercial from A Prairie Home Companion, including the part about Norwegian bachelor farmers. Maybe I should just find a nice Norwegian bachelor farmer.<br />
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8. Seeing a happy couple that's stayed together for a long time feels like looking at a postcard of the Italian Riviera. That warmth and security seems like such a foreign, yet inviting place, where you can throw off your coat and shoes, take a deep breath, and be human again. It also seems so far away and unattainable at times. Being in that place certainly wouldn't eliminate the troubles of life completely, but I'm sure living would be much easier having all that beauty right in front of you all the time.<br />
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9. The city of Durham has incredible character. So many of the buildings, from the Gothic stone castles of Duke's west campus to the churches and old tobacco factories, command the landscapes they inhabit instead of blending in. You can tell that history happened here.<br />
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10. This summer, I finally got up the courage to go and play guitar at a jam session/singalong by myself. The first time I'd gone, back in January, I'd been with someone, which helped me find the nerve to at least join in the singing. I continued going alone for a while after that when I lived in Carrboro, but I'd only sit and listen. Then, several months later, I came back and brought my guitar. I'd never played with other people before, so of course it was scary at first, but now I live for Saturday afternoons when I can go play and sing with such friendly people. It never ceases to make me feel better, partly because it's so self-affirming. I may go there alone now, but I go as a musician. <br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-86801291080690688212015-05-28T19:08:00.002-04:002015-05-28T19:15:50.904-04:00CrossroadsThe month of May, that intersection of spring and summer, always feels like a time for great change. Around this time last year, I was on my way to Charlotte to film a documentary for a few days, the first I'd ever produced for UNC-TV. In college, this month revolved around the last day of classes and graduation. In high school, it was the month of May Fest, which eventually became Senior Day or something like that. It was a day when upperclassmen got to spend the afternoon in the gym playing ping-pong, chatting on the bleachers, and crawling through an inflatable obstacle course (I'd be surprised if nobody lost their virginity in it). It doesn't sound that exciting, but I remember that, despite its usual musk of sweat and wood varnish, the air in the gym sparkled that day with this electric happiness. It could have been a charge from all the impending adulthood in the room. Summer was so close we could taste it, the peach juice and honeysuckle and the sweetness of the phrase "This is my life, and I'll do with it as I please." It could also have been the fact that I was in love. A few days earlier, as part of our studies of British poetry, my twelfth-grade English class wandered around a small field near the front parking lot, hidden by trees. We each had to pick a spot and write a poem of our own, somehow inspired by that spot, in the spirit of "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." I sat down in the grass and sought inspiration in the cool patches of clover around my legs, running my fingers through them and jotting down disjointed lines about reconnecting with nature, the circle of life, and other cliches. I couldn't concentrate on the ground because I kept looking up at the boy who would become my first boyfriend, wandering between trees with his notebook. If I'd known we wouldn't have to read our poems in class, I might have written something about his contemplative stare, or his cursive handwriting.<br />
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My point is that in the past, these crossroads that I've reached in late spring, from decisions about my life and career to new relationships, have generally been enjoyable experiences. However, I'm not sure "enjoyable" is the best word to describe the crossroads of this particular May. I wouldn't call it awful, but I would call it chaotic. It's exciting, but not in the most pleasant way. A few weeks ago, I saw a peony bush in bloom outside the building where I work. For the longest time, the fluffy, white flowers had only been fat buds, but they'd finally burst open that day. If peonies were sentient, I wonder if they'd know what was happening while they were still buds, or if they'd worry that they might always be buds, getting bigger but never flowering. While they waited in the closed darkness of their leaves, would they even be aware of the fact that they're plants, creating such beautiful flowers with only water and sunlight? This illustration of uncertainty basically describes my feelings right now. I like to think that all the considerable setbacks this year has started off with are part of my own personal and artistic budding period, and that plants just handle it a lot more gracefully. I've learned that I'm not as passionate about some of my pursuits as I thought I was, and that I'm very passionate about others that I didn't discover until recently, such as playing and writing songs. This can be both liberating and frightening, since discovering new passions tends to alter current life plans. But, as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, make a plan. Basically, I'm not quite as certain about what I want out of life as I was when I first graduated from college, and I'm also learning just how much effort it takes to create your own happiness instead of relying on other people to provide it for you. I'm not talking about material forms of happiness, like food or warm shelter, but a general sense of fulfillment and excitement about life. Forging that sense can be exhausting work. <br />
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Another cause of this anxiety is probably my recent adventure with online dating. I tried OkCupid for about two weeks before I started feeling like a nervous little kid in an amusement park--the kind who decides they're finally going to ride a roller coaster, but freaks out and wants off as they're getting strapped in. The immediacy and shallowness of it felt so unnatural. The site expected me to form an attraction to someone only by looking at a few pictures and their answers to two-dimensional, mostly yes or no questions. It felt like wandering around a car dealership with a pushy salesman. With rare exceptions, love is a gradual process for me. Plus, despite the fact that the site is for adults, the OkCupid copywriting staff seems to be composed of thirteen-year-old girls. I'd get emails saying things like "they're totally into you." Most of the compatibility questions, on the other hand, seem to have been written by thirteen-year-old boys. About three quarters of them are variations on "Do you like to be slapped/gagged/bitten/tied up/fish-slapped/drawn and quartered/stuck in a particle accelerator during sex?" The most interesting thing I found, however, is that most of the top matches I found were attractive in some way, but also had a single, crucial flaw that ruined any chance of a relationship. Examples:<br />
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1. A cute, wealthy guy who writes a you a sweet message and speaks fluent Russian, but is also probably a racist.<br />
2. A cute guy who loves music and spirituality, but discriminates against people with mental illnesses (he refused to date anyone who took antidepressants). I don't take them myself, but anyone who thinks taking medication for an illness makes you undateable will get nothing from me but a swift kick in the nether regions. <br />
3. A guy who's everything you want emotionally and intellectually, but doesn't attract you physically. This may be the worst case of all. Sometimes I wish I could just make myself be physically attracted to anybody. <br />
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Needless to say, I ultimately deleted my account, I applaud the people who manage to find love online, but it just isn't for me. Probably the most helpful piece of advice I can offer from my experience is to always perform what I call the "lightbulb test" on someone's dating profile. If you replace the word "man," "woman," "boyfriend," or "girlfriend" wherever it appears, and it makes perfect sense, then the person is probably a jerk. Example: "I'm not looking to replace my current [lightbulb] or obtain a second [lightbulb], but a backup would be swell." Also, on your own profile, please don't describe yourself as a "rad motherf****r."<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"> </span> </div>
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The really strange thing is that this personal turmoil has been happening during a major upswing in my TV career. I'm grateful for this, but also puzzled by the contrast between my life at work and my life outside it. Why is it so difficult to achieve success in both at the same time? Lately, my job has had me busier than ever, with more opportunities than ever, and people have complimented me on my achievements. However, this brings me to my second main point, which is that no matter how good other people's lives look on paper, many of us are still freaking out or don't know exactly what we're doing, and the acknowledgement of this shared internal messiness can be wonderfully unifying. I love learning about the struggles of great writers and artists, not because I enjoy other people's misery, but because it reminds me that they're still humans like us, no matter how lofty the heights their work might have set them upon. Frank Capra <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1521088/" target="_blank">panicked</a> after winning an Oscar for <i>It Happened One Night</i>. James Joyce's <a href="https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_chronicle_view/3160/printers_bookleggers_and_spicy_books_james_joyce_in_the_book_industry#NOTES" target="_blank">struggles</a> to get <i>Ulysses </i>published and distributed involved battling obscenity charges and sending banned books over the Canadian border stuffed down the front of a guy's pants (is that a literary classic, or are you just glad to see me?). Hopefully I'll never have to resort to such desperate measures to get my own art recognized, but if I did, like many of life's considerable setbacks, at least it would make a good story.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-3654498174763399762015-04-19T00:48:00.001-04:002015-04-19T00:48:47.049-04:00Rebirth<div class="MsoNormal">
The earth lives again, and everything is reproducing. The air sweetens and thickens with pollen, or love dust, as I like to call it. The trees glow
green in the sun, tulips explode from the ground, and we throw off our winter
coats—and perhaps a few inhibitions with them. I’m trying to be more connected
with nature by renewing myself with it, but it’s not easy. Change takes time,
and when you see days and years blowing away like March pear blossoms on April
wind, it’s easy to wonder what good it does to try to change. Making 2015 a satisfying
year of met goals and self-improvement is starting to feel like grabbing
handfuls of wind. You can’t hold onto time and make it move at your own pace. However,
though I may not be moving as quickly as time, I like to think I've at least
caught up with it enough to see its silhouette on the horizon. I finally got a
gym membership, I may have an opportunity for a promotion at work, and my
latest documentary seems to finally be coming together.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I spent last Saturday morning at Duke Gardens in Durham
taking pictures for said documentary, and the experience reminded me of how
many people, including myself, seem to be losing touch with the tangible world,
the sensory, primal, rooted world, things that exist outside the pretty patterns of
light and weightless communication we submit to everyday. So many of us no
longer seem to want or have time for real things that we can hold in our hands,
feel at our backs, or stand on and trust to support us. I think it's killing us. Just being out in sunlight, sweating and climbing over things to get a good shot made me feel better than I had all week. The click of my camera was the sound of machinery working, not a synthetic sound effect coming from my phone. I thought about something I read recently; I can't remember what it was exactly, but the author basically said that, despite being as evolved as we are, humans still crave the physical movement that comes so naturally to our fellow primates. I also thought about something the writer Allan Gurganus said when he visited my creative writing class: we are angels and animals, bodies with spirits. I had a similar feeling as I spent the rest of the afternoon conversing with friends--not through Facebook or texting, but actually speaking to them face-to-face. Something about being physically present with someone makes communicating a little more satisfying.<br />
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My attempts at connecting more with the real world, instead of getting too comfortable with the world in my head, are part of a much larger self-reinvention process. Sometimes it feels like how I imagine giving birth to a child might feel. Creating a new self, a physically and creatively fit, more articulate, more confident, more forgiving self, is so difficult, especially when everything around you is changing too. I envy the azalea bushes in my parents' yard; they make change look so effortless. One minute, they're brown and scraggly, bent over from a winter storm. Then, all of a sudden, they're bursting with flowers and color and bees. It's taken me so much longer to recover from the storms of last winter, both literal and figurative. I wish I could straighten my back and keep growing as easily as those plants. But no one ever got anything in life by wishing. Wishing too much can keep a person from living. There's a biblical verse in Proverbs that reads, "Forsake the foolish, and live, and go in the way of the wise." I think "foolish" can be interpreted as both foolish people and foolish behaviors or habits. I need to stop regretting or fantasizing about what my life could be or could have been, and live. We all do, even when living hurts. If I stretch hard enough toward the sun, maybe I'll flower someday.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-64701783797457080432015-04-02T12:56:00.002-04:002015-04-02T12:56:46.864-04:00Untangling: A Few Thoughts from the Outer Banks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I fear this blog is spiraling into a state of perpetual mourning. My last post, "Personal Damascus," is probably one of the saddest I've <br />
ever written, and part of me regrets writing it, therapeutic as it was. It was the product of an unusually stressful week at work, full of nine and ten hour days (don't get me wrong; I love my job). I also hadn't been sleeping well; changes in my schedule or environment seem to cause this problem. Finally, two of my roommates left for a few days, leaving the apartment somewhat lonely. All of these circumstances combined to form an emotional cluster bomb that I hope to not repeat. In the future, I'm thinking of expanding this blog to include book reviews and perhaps other things, in order to keep it from becoming "Considerable Self-Pity: The Blog Where Laura Rants About How Nobody Loves Her." I was looking back at some of my earlier writing and thought, "Remember when this blog used to be funny? Remember when it had badly drawn yet endearing cartoons?"<br />
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To help start this blog's long journey upward, here's some good news: all those long hours at work paid off when I finally finished my first segment for <i>NC Weekend</i> about Fair Game Beverage Company. You can watch it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dYd9sEVSLs" target="_blank">here</a>. Also, my documentary that aired on <i>Our State </i>last year, "Poems for Everyone," is being considered for a NETA award--fingers crossed (NETA=National Educational Telecommunications Association). Another cause for rejoicing is the fact that I'm writing this from an oceanfront condo on Hatteras Island. The sea joins the ranks of romance, religion, and the rest of nature as one of the greatest inspirations for writers. Here are just a few thoughts I've jotted down in the course of my stay here:<br />
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--This entire shoreline stands as a monument to the conflict between man's desire for security and nature's desire for constant change. Year after year, wind and surf try to reclaim the island, blowing sand over the roads and washing new inlets in the land, yet we keep building new bridges and clearing the sand away, watching the dunes grow higher and higher.<br />
--Why do people love the ocean so much? For one thing, it entices every one of the senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste through the food it provides (a mouthful of saltwater, on the other hand, is best left unexperienced). I think it also represents everything so many of us want out of jobs, relationships, life itself. It's constant, yet always changing, always moving. It's security without stagnation. We know it won't disappear while we sleep, yet we can never be completely sure what color it will be in the morning, or what shapes its waves will take.<br />
--I've seen just about every color of the ocean this week; it reflects the moody sky. It's a brilliant blue under clear skies, a placid green under clouds, and gunmetal gray in the early evening. Under just the right mix of clouds and sun, it's liquid silver.Under the moon, it's black with a crest of white light, like a path to the other side of the world. The Swedish have their own word for this moon-road: "mangata."<br />
--The sound of the sea is like breath, the rise and fall of waves like inhales and exhales.<br />
--Facebook is terrible. Why do we use it?<br />
--I like to plant my feet in the sand and just stand on the beach in the moonlight, pretending to be a wind-beaten fence post.<br />
--Two men fish by lamp light on the beach tonight, their poles stuck in the sand. One of them tries to untangle their line from some type of seaweed. My mind is like that fishing line. Whenever I try to reel it in, it gets caught in stray thoughts. Maybe this vacation will help me untangle it.<br />
--When the moon shines on bits of seashells, it looks like you're walking on the Milky Way.<br />
--You can see the entire circle of life and death on the beach. I've seen the bodies of sharks strewn on the shore among the empty shells of scallops, gulls pecking at their gills. I've seen young clams tunnel into the sand, digging for a chance at life beyond the sandpiper's beak. With great sadness I report that yesterday, I even found the mangled corpse of Spongebob Squarepants tumbling in the surf.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Knowing Spongebob was gone, I did feel less guilty about eating Mr. Krabs for dinner that night.</td></tr>
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I know I'll think of even more lines I could have put in this post once I hit "publish," but such is the nature of writing. For now, I'm going back down to the beach to see how many dogs I can pet (there seem to be a lot out there on this particular day), and hopefully I'll have more good news to follow.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-18141766363396838612015-03-16T10:18:00.001-04:002015-03-16T10:18:59.445-04:00Personal DamascusThis past Wednesday, I attended a church service where the preacher discussed the story of Saul and his journey to Damascus. In case you're unfamiliar with this Bible story, Saul is a persecutor of early Christians who lost his sight after an encounter with Jesus. In order to be healed, he has to travel to the city of Damascus while blind. He eventually makes it, is healed, and repents for his crimes, changing his name to Paul and becoming one of the most recognized figures of Christianity.<br />
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To be honest, I haven't been too friendly with God lately. At times, I've felt that instead of testing me to make me a better person, God has just been trying to turn me into more and more of a cynic. I know my tendency toward hopeless romanticism can sometimes be my downfall, but is it really necessary to crush every last trace of it? This growing pessimism is definitely becoming a problem regarding romantic relationships. Whenever I meet someone who interests me, a part of me thinks, "this is too good to be true," and every time I've thought this, that part has been right. So far, my fears about relationships have only been justified, and I wonder how many more years I'll have to wait before they're finally disproved. I've been told that each negative experience can be a good thing, that each failed relationship is a lesson learned, and in a sense, I know it's true, but it hurts so much to hear that. I think it's because this advice dehumanizes the person you lost and takes the life out of what you experienced with them, or at least that's what it feels like. You want so much to have a real and lasting connection with a person, to hear and see and feel them next to you, but instead they become just another "lesson learned"--not a person anymore, but a moment, a concept, a page in your life never quite turned. They've dissolved from a living person inhabiting your life into a wisp of wisdom. They still live somewhere in the clouds of your mind, but they've floated far above your fingers.<br />
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In the past, I've rarely complained about being single, despite various romantic misfortunes. In fact, for a time I thought being single was rather fun. I enjoyed the independence and the excitement of going out and meeting people. I'd hear other people bemoan their singleness and think: "What's the big deal? It's not so bad." But now I fully understand how they feel. It's like the line in that Janis Joplin song "Me and Bobby McGee": "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Why does it hurt so much more than it used to?<br />
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Anyway, back to the church service. The preacher, when discussing Saul's transformation from hopeless sinner to model Christian, essentially made the point that God's vision is infinitely vast compared to our own, and that He sees things about us and our future that we could never know. The preacher also emphasized that in order to become the person God wanted him to be, Saul had to undergo a complete and painful transformation: from someone able-bodied and politically powerful, to a sickly, blind man completely reliant on those around him. I do feel like this message spoke to me, but not in the deep, mighty, voice-of-God-like way you might expect. It felt more like a gentle nudge, or a tap on the shoulder. It wasn't life-changing, but felt like it could be the beginning of a long sequence of things that could ultimately be life-changing. I hope so. I want to believe this brokenness is supposed to make me a better person. I guess it already has, in a small way; I've been more creative since my last relationship ended than I've been in months. My job is offering more opportunities, I'm blogging regularly, and I even wrote a song. I just wish I weren't doing all these things to fend off loneliness and regret; it would be nice to always have the motivation to be creative for its own sake.<br />
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Tonight, I walked down to the pond near my house and saw the unusually clear sky. Stars glittered over the black water and lacy silhouettes of trees. Sometimes I wish the future were as clear as that sky. I hope there's a bright horizon up ahead that I'm just not tall enough to see. I hope I'm on the road to my own personal Damascus. <br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-75512734948926487892015-03-06T21:44:00.001-05:002015-03-13T21:18:19.956-04:00When Lives CollideLast Friday, I saw the film <i>Bagdad Cafe </i>(1987) for the first time, sitting with my laptop in the nook under the stairs in my apartment (the roommates call it the "Harry Potter corner," for obvious reasons). It's a wonderfully dark and intimate space for immersing yourself in the world of a movie. With this particular film, I was immersed in the American southwest, far away from the trees and snow of home. I won't describe all the details of <i>Bagdad Cafe, </i>other than the fact that it's a great film and you should see it, but it reminded me of the incredible things that can happen in life through unexpected encounters with strangers.<br />
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It's amazing to think about the possibilities that come with meeting someone new. You could be sitting on a bus, going to school or work as usual, or having a cup of coffee in some cafe in the middle of nowhere, when the seat next to you happens to be the only one left. The person who fills that seat might only converse for a moment and leave, but they could also change your life forever. They could lift and drag you to emotional heights and depths you haven't seen in years. They could break the chains on things you've bound, or they could make you question what you've always thought to be true. They could remain a part of your life forever, or they could suddenly vanish and leave you feeling lonely, thankful, or both. You really never know what can happen, and the mystery of it is thrilling and beautiful. I've had such encounters before, and even when they ultimately bring more sadness than joy, I'm still amazed that I could meet someone who would have such a big impact on my life by just being in the right place at the right time. I guess when you have thousands of small universes (aka humans) constantly running, rolling, and drifting down the streets of your town, they're bound to collide and cause incredible reactions. This explains my tendency to try to be in too many places at once--there are nights when I can't stand the idea of sitting at home because there's so much life outside. I love watching and experiencing these human collisions. They're what great stories are made of.<br />
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Unfortunately, tonight doesn't seem to be the night for life-altering experiences. You know money's tight when it's Friday night and you're sitting alone in your living room with sleeping guinea pigs and Guy Fieri instead of tearing up the town. On the bright side, I recently had some more writing published. This time, it's a <a href="https://clockworkcabaret.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/a-rousing-introduction-to-the-music-o-gears-by-laura-casteel/" target="_blank">review</a> of the wonderful Clockwork Cabaret podcast. Also, I obviously have guinea pigs now. Not only are they cute and cuddly, but the fact that rodents can have such nuanced personalities is unbelievable. Hopefully I'll have some more exciting adventures as the weekend progresses, but for now I'll settle for watching the tiny lights in the distance from my apartment deck, wondering who or what is out there waiting to change my life. <br />
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<i> </i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-73552586509304498622015-02-24T13:23:00.000-05:002015-02-24T13:23:52.674-05:00SnowI love snow. I know there's a lot to hate about it, especially if you live in Boston right now and have to use a bucket and a hockey stick stuck in a drift for a mailbox. I've also seen snow turn a typical rush hour commute into an exclusive sneak preview of Armageddon, but I still love it.<br />
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Snow purifies. It freezes the dirt on your car and melts it away in the sun. The best part is when it first starts to fall, when it cloaks the world with whiteness only nature can seem to achieve--there's a reason the old hymn goes "make me white as snow." With only the softest sound, it loosens the grip of everyday stress and pain for just a moment. Last week, I had to park my car a mile from my house and walk home just as the latest snowfall began, and something loosened in me as I trudged through the woods. The air thick with flakes, and tree limbs like the white legs of ancient spiders, revealed the holiness in everything. It was like watching manna fall from heaven, and it forced us all to slow down and take a breath. </div>
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This purifying weather perfectly symbolized the events of last week. I've finally moved into my new apartment, where the lights come on and the water runs because I earn the money that helps pay for them. It brings a wonderful sense of pride, despite the fact that I now see little dollar signs floating away every time I turn on a light. I feel like the master of my own tiny world and all its elements. It is tiny, indeed--perhaps, instead of the master of a small universe, I'm more like a monk in his cell. My mattress won't arrive for another two weeks, and I haven't had time to shop for a desk, so I've abandoned these vain delights and taken to sleeping and writing on the floor. This room really has its own kind of zen, which might be due to my roommates burning incense downstairs. However, it also has the feeling of a secluded tower, with its shape and upper story location. It's a humble, yet artistic space, where the only creature comfort currently allowed is that of self-expression. As the English saying goes, a change is as good as a rest, and hopefully this change will only improve my writing and musical pursuits further; I'm already halfway through writing my very first song, and currently beginning another short story. Maybe, now that I've untethered the balloon of my adult life from my childhood home, I can finally fill it with enough hot words to get it off the ground. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-37189730589967981112015-02-15T19:09:00.006-05:002015-03-06T21:47:37.033-05:00In Love with Everything<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">“To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”--Ray Bradbury</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">I've been thinking about this quote a lot this Valentine's season, and about love itself. Last week, I wrote about regret as a major motivation for my writing, specifically regret over miscommunication. It's become so clear over the past couple years that this is true. Almost everything I want to do with my life, from directing films to loving someone, requires being an exceptional communicator. So far, I've made incredible improvements in my ability to lead and interact with people effectively, making my thoughts known in a clear, firm manner while also respecting theirs--last year, I managed to produce a documentary that was broadcast to millions of homes, and this year my freelance career is quickly taking off. However, I've also made painful mistakes along the way, some of which have already cost me at least one relationship. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">But Ray Bradbury's blessing for writers, blazing with his usual vitality, reminds me of an even more powerful motivation for making art: being in love with everything, all the time. For a perfect description of this feeling, read Billy Collins' poem "Aimless Love." I know I've felt it before, and I wonder how many other writers and artists have too. It's a blessing to be so easily enamored with everyday things in that you seldom run out of creative material, but it can also be a curse in a number of ways. One is constant distraction--I've lost track of conversations because I was busy observing the movements of a person's eyes, the interesting shape of their nose, or a striking cloud formation behind them. Last night, I sat in a sports bar with over a dozen glaring TV screens, but the pretty swooping motion of car lights through the windows behind them was enough to distract me from whatever game was happening.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Perhaps another problem with being constantly in love with everything is that it makes finding romantic love more difficult. With your love spread over so many things, it makes sense that a person would have to be exceedingly incredible in order to stand out enough to catch your wayward attention. It's harder to find someone who shares what C.S. Lewis called "the same secret road" when your road is narrow and twists in all different directions.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">This Valentine's Day, I spent the evening with friends and had a good time, but toward the end of the night, I couldn't help but notice the visual bitterness of my surroundings. I felt like I'd been dropped into a scene from a story someone had written after a breakup. I sat with my companions at an outdoor table with a bulging ash tray (the "butt table," as we fittingly called it), drinking whiskey and pulling my hood up against the cold and wind. Couples walked hand-in-hand to the steakhouse next door, men wearing sport coats and women balancing on spiky heels, the antithesis of my muddy sneakers.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Fortunately, life is starting to look a lot better than a pair of muddy sneakers, slowly but surely. I'm moving into a lovely, quiet new home next weekend with roommates who like Jefferson Airplane and seem to get upset only when they miss King of the Hill. I also just wrapped shooting on my first independently produced NC Weekend feature at the wonderful Fair Game Beverage Company, though much of the credit goes to a great videographer and production assistant. But perhaps most importantly, I'm writing more than I have in months. It feels like pushing a crank wheel on an old machine and watching the rust and dirt flake off. I still haven't had any new publications yet, but for now, it just feels good to be pushing. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"> </span></span></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-40659279558457598642015-02-09T00:20:00.000-05:002015-02-09T00:20:07.666-05:00February: When Bergman Eats Soggy Corn FlakesI've never seen the point of February. It just feels like a filler month between January and March, a drunk Old Man Winter swinging his fists and cursing the coming spring. Maybe he regrets not quite conjuring enough blizzards this season; North Carolina has yet to see one. Or maybe he's depressed about global warming. Either way, there's an edge of sadness to February wind that leaves me feeling, as Leonard Cohen put it, "cold as a new razor blade."<br />
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For me, it's often around late January when things start to go wrong in the new year. It's the month my grandfather passed away, and when my childhood guinea pig went to the great bell pepper patch in the sky. However, at least January has a point; the year has to start somewhere. But by the time February arrives, I'm done with winter, ready for things to warm up and bloom and be hopeful again. I'm also not partial to Valentine's Day, though now that it seems cool to hate it, the contrarian in me almost wishes I liked it. I realized last Friday evening that the only thing I like about this month is a February sunset. Walking up Weaver Street in Carrboro, I saw rose and purple spilling through cracked clouds and spindly trees. It made the sky look raw and honest, and the buildings blush.<br />
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I looked down and saw the buttons on my coat hanging on by their worn threads, ready to drop off one by one like failed New Year's resolutions. The thought of failed resolutions led me to think about regret, and what makes it different from plain sadness. I'm beginning to wonder if regret is the most painful emotion in existence. It's one thing to experience sadness or loss, but also rest assured that you did everything you could to prevent it. For instance, it's easier to be rejected when you know you at least had the courage to tell someone you loved them. However, it's another thing when you're always wondering about what you could've done instead, or constantly replaying your mistakes in your mind. Regret is sadness with teeth. It's Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog sitting in their underwear, eating soggy corn flakes in an arctic cabin and listening to Nick Cave (I really, really wanted to make a cartoon of this, but my drawing skills just aren't there yet).<br />
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In a way, I think my desire to write is partially born of regret. My regrets often involve miscommunication, things I wish I would've said, not said, or said differently. I have a lot of trouble saying what I mean in person, but writing allows me to always articulate exactly what I think and feel, exactly how I want. It's a window to the real me. In fiction, I can create entire worlds with the sole purpose of expressing what I'm trying to say, every scenic detail and character gesture shining a light on my ideas. It makes writing a wonderfully freeing medium, this ability to reveal what so often gets lost in translation between thought and speech. In face-to-face communication, it's so easy for simple statements like "I love you," "I'm angry with you," "You're beautiful," "I appreciate you," or "Help me understand you" to get tangled in missed chances, misunderstandings, and poorly chosen words.<br />
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As I finish this post, I notice the world outside has thawed just a little, and small, green promises dot the branches of a few trees in my yard--change is coming. I'm listening to the song "Severance" by Dead Can Dance, and there's a great line in it that goes: "When all the leaves have fallen and turned to dust, will we remain entrenched within our ways?" I pray that, at the end of this new year, the answer is "no." <br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-12332611151740701812015-01-26T16:52:00.000-05:002015-01-27T16:24:45.902-05:00On Rabbits and RomanceLast Saturday, after one week of severe illness, and another week of more emotional upheaval than I've dealt with in years, I had a spiritual experience: I held a rabbit for the first time. It seemed strange that I would be overcome with emotion just by holding a little black fur ball against my chest, but I was. Of course, the rabbit was soft and cute and had beautiful eyes. See for yourself:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_R2vbbPcd7xMm5C7wLdG-JWseAS5F32cQyaBdb7zPlKi3lznlRiAfVk5PrOJptDpcw8fuz_QyD5Vo8RM-mp3A_EGiyBK2C9-abhjYPaB2Pj24Ici2ht2HgeupRVXgoLQtMytUOJhO5yNi/s1600/IMG_0752.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_R2vbbPcd7xMm5C7wLdG-JWseAS5F32cQyaBdb7zPlKi3lznlRiAfVk5PrOJptDpcw8fuz_QyD5Vo8RM-mp3A_EGiyBK2C9-abhjYPaB2Pj24Ici2ht2HgeupRVXgoLQtMytUOJhO5yNi/s1600/IMG_0752.JPG" height="222" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The bunny in question.<br />
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But there was more to it than that. For a brief moment, my relationship with this rabbit represented what I want so desperately in a romantic relationship, but have never quite found: to be loved simply for loving. I didn't have to change anything about myself to please the rabbit, or constantly worry that it would leap into someone else's arms unless I did whatever it wanted. I also never had to to worry that the rabbit would say one thing and mean another--that it would gaze at me adoringly, tell me it loved the way I petted its ears, and then bite me on the nose (the fact that animals can't talk is one of my favorite qualities of theirs). No, all I had to do to earn this rabbit's love was to hold it securely, touch it gently, speak softly, and not let go. In other words, all I had to do was love it. <br />
<br />
I know I'm reading way too much into this, but we all create narratives to comfort ourselves in hard times, so I think I'm only being human when I describe how meaningful it was to feel that rabbit's heartbeat relax and his nervous little body grow still, paws outstretched as if holding onto me. I wish things were that simple with humans and romance--earning another person's affection just by being myself, and treating them with love and respect, seems to be a less and less attainable goal each year. It's always so much more complicated than it needs to be.<br />
<br />
Why does finding love require slogging waist-deep through a swamp of anxiety, ulterior motives, and miscommunication? When did honesty become so difficult, both for me and for people I've loved?<br />
<br />
Why is being emotionally vulnerable no longer seen as a form of courage?<br />
<br />
Why can't sex be something people earn instead of take or buy? Why can't it arise from love and trust, instead of being pressured out of people with guilt and fear? When did it become a status symbol? When did it become a substitute for love, rather than a supplement? When did we start feeling so entitled to each others' bodies?<br />
<br />
Why do we take everything sacred, strip it of its beauty, and turn it into a commodity or a way to gain power?<br />
<br />
When did mutual sacrifice stop mattering in relationships?<br />
<br />
Why does asking these questions, or treating actions as if they have meaning and consequences, get a person labeled as immature, naive, or idealistic? When did acting like an adult become childish?<br />
<br />
These are just some of the things I've been asking myself over the past few days. Other people have implied that I believe what I do about love because I'm young and female, and that I'll likely outgrow my opinions. While I can't be sure that all of these opinions won't change with years and life experience, I can say right now that what I believe about love is firmer than ever, and I can prove that it's not just a matter of age or gender with the following quote (though I have many other examples as well):<br />
<br />
<b>“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”--C.S. Lewis, <i>God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics</i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>
C.S. Lewis, as an older man rather than a young woman, pretty much summed up exactly what I believe true love (not just mere attraction) to be in a single, beautiful sentence. Also read <i>The Four Loves </i>for more of his wisdom on the subject. In fact, I'd like to close this post with a wonderful quote from that particular book:<br />
<br />
<b>“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”--C.S. Lewis, <i>The Four Loves</i> </b><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-19758853711902917062014-11-25T16:50:00.000-05:002014-11-25T16:50:02.798-05:00Addicted to AngerI've had something on my chest for the past several months, but I've never quite found the words or the right time to say it. Today, however, I have no choice. The main reason I'm about to say this is the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri; the relevance (and ugliness) of the situation is forcing the words out of me. A more selfish reason is that if I don't put this idea down on paper right here, right now, it will most likely spoil the taste of my turkey on Thursday. So here goes:<br />
<br />
Anger is a dangerous drug.<br />
<br />
In small, well-managed doses, it can do a lot of good. Those little pulses of indignation pricking your fingers as you type an angry blog post, like the snap of a lighter, can start fires of change--shedding light on problems and moving others to help fix them. But if left unchecked, this anger burns away everything in its path: progress, relationships, the ability to think and make rational judgements. It can drive otherwise sane, intelligent people mad. You can ride anger into battle, but if you don't hold on, it'll throw you off and leave you for dead.<br />
<br />
This is old news, of course. Probably half the human race has already made this point in one way or another, in words more eloquent than anything I could express. But I say it again because in the past couple of years, I've seen this truth manifest itself in so many different layers of life that it's more vivid than ever. A group of political protesters outside my workplace waves angry signs, and the group across the street waves angry signs right back, all painted with various insults that only make the two groups more defensive. Two people try to talk on the phone, but neither can raise a concern without the other screaming at them. Instead of weighing different opinions, checking facts, and presenting an intelligent argument, a journalist winds up spewing biased, profanity-laden rage beneath a clickbait headline. Entire towns, even nations, are ravaged because some people are angry at other people.<br />
<br />
Nothing is solved in any of those situations, because unlike tempered, controlled anger, which can streamline pathways to justice with its call to action, uncontrolled anger paralyzes. It shuts down discussions and keeps people stagnant in a pit of chaos and hate. And on top of all that, if anger is a fire, reading social media posts can feel like drinking lighter fluid (fittingly, I've heard drinking lighter fluid can make you go blind). In a world that seems designed to keep us hooked on a rage high, I'm convinced that anger management is one of the greatest skills that can ever be taught.<br />
<br />
It won't solve the world's rage problem, but I'd still like to close this post with a proposal that we try to make this day remembered for something other than violence. If you have a quarrel with someone, try to examine and resolve it peacefully. If you've been meaning to do something kind for someone lately, do it now. Do something to broaden your perspective beyond your own tiny world. And, above all--when it comes to simple eloquence, you gotta hand it to Jesus--love your neighbor as yourself. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-51874093617549014732014-08-21T00:49:00.000-04:002014-08-23T22:11:59.737-04:00One Year Later (Or: Where I've Been)I think the reason I write, above all else, is to make myself believe things. Putting something on paper makes it more real and tangible. It becomes a thing that was actually created, no longer just a dream floating around in my head that no one else can see or feel. It's like watching a thought or sensation turn from a cloud of abstraction to a handful of substance you can squeeze or drop to the ground. Creating something other people can interact with also increases accountability and the drive to do better, at least in my experience.<br />
<br />
This why I write about myself a lot. It's been about one year, three months since I graduated from college, and sometimes I need to go back and jot down everything I've accomplished since then, in order to convince myself that I can keep going, keep getting better. So, I apologize in advance for the amount of horn-tooting soon to follow.<br />
<br />
The past year and a quarter hasn't been entirely glamorous. Many unflattering parts of my personality have been exposed, as if I've been playing strip poker with myself. I also accumulated six months' worth of meat and cheese on the bottoms of my shoes working at Harris Teeter. However, some of the more awesome things I've done include:<br />
<br />
-landing a job at UNC-TV through my own hard work<br />
-Producing my own segment for an Emmy-winning series (http://video.unctv.org/video/2365288554/)<br />
-gaining hands-on experience directing, producing, writing, negotiating, and maintaining a website<br />
-working at Trailblazer Studios in Raleigh<br />
-experiencing the true meaning of Christmas (see my last Christmas post)<br />
-getting to know the incredible city of Charlotte and some incredible people who live there<br />
-driving on some of the most dangerous roads in North Carolina without getting killed (including roads covered in ice, water, and legions of crazed Bon Jovi fans)<br />
-making new friends right in my hometown, one of whom is basically Jack Sparrow<br />
-having a story published in a magazine (http://www.thricefiction.com/)<br />
-working as a production assistant on a reality show<br />
-discovering great places to eat, drink, and write about in my area that I didn't even know were there<br />
-finally getting a haircut I love<br />
-going from playing a few chords on the guitar to playing whole songs<br />
-buying a ticket to Dragon Con<br />
-trying venison (it was really good...sorry Bambi)<br />
-going to a real, honest to goodness pig pickin' where we ate a whole dang pig<br />
-seeing Ralph Stanley, Robert Randolph, Joe Pug, and Tinariwen in concert<br />
-seeing a capybara in person<br />
-getting a hug from Scott Myers of <a href="http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/" target="_blank">Go Into the Story</a><br />
<br />
Maybe I can actually take all my crazy, ridiculous, dangerous dreams and hammer them into a reality someday. Stay tuned later this week for a new post with less back-patting, I promise.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-50347245577962013392014-02-14T23:51:00.000-05:002014-02-14T23:51:45.726-05:00Things My Dog Loves (That Most Humans Don't)I could've written some ironic, cynical commentary on the holiday known as Valentine's Day, but instead, something possessed me to write about my dog, Raisintoast (Raisin for short). Maybe it's because dogs have a lot to teach us about love. They lay their heads in your lap no matter who you voted for in the last election, or whether you like cheese in your grits or not. They see past the dividers and recognize the love-needing human in all of us.<br />
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As much as I admire a dog's capacity to love, there are some things they love that I just can't imagine loving myself. This especially applies to Raisin. I'll never understand why Raisin loves the following:<br />
<br />
1. Eating socks, gloves, and charcoal out of the fireplace. He likes his food smoked, apparently.<br />
2. Chewing on a beef bone that he found on the roadside, dropped, and found again in the snow several months later.<br />
3. Trying to bury said bone in the carpet by scratching and scratching and scratching and scratching, no matter how many times I remind him that this is physically impossible.<br />
4. Swallowing ice cubes whole.<br />
5. Eating roadkill whole (I don't let him do this, he just always manages to get it when I'm not looking).<br />
6. Humping blankets, sofa cushions, dog beds, chair legs, my brother's leg, and the air. Despite having been neutered.<br />
7. Knocking newspapers out of people's hands (actually, this sounds kinda fun).<br />
8. Barking at no one except my friend Gray.<br />
9. Biting a branch off a Christmas tree.<br />
10. Stealing potholders.<br />
11. Dropping neat little piles of dog food on my pillow, and sometimes on my face.<br />
12. Shamelessly displaying his "nether regions" for all to admire. If he were a person, he'd probably be arrested for doing so.<br />
13. Licking himself. All of himself.<br />
14. Stuffing his face with big mouthfuls of snow.<br />
15. Sleeping in positions that would probably break a person's neck.<br />
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Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to run down a busy street and slap the newspapers out of people's hands.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Raisin with "Ashley" the hippo.</td></tr>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-77180958791996749612014-02-10T20:10:00.000-05:002014-03-01T21:31:10.964-05:00It's Easy to Assume...I wanted to start posting every Friday, but last weekend, I just couldn't think of anything to write about. It's weird. I always have something to say about something, but this time I didn't feel compelled to write any of it down. I just wanted to exist for a while without commentary. I did, however, make a doodle inspired by last week's post:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The call me Flame Nose!</td></tr>
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Speaking of last week's post, there is one thing I wanted to add to it. On my list of things to do in your 20s, 30s, or life in general, I forgot to include another tip that came from the Relevant magazine article I mentioned: have real opinions based on facts and not just something you "heard somewhere." It's sort of a paraphrased version, but I thought it was an excellent point. Then I got to thinking about how much work it takes to actually be well-informed. No information source can be trusted at first glance, especially on the Internet, where the bull-to-fact ratio is more disproportionate than ever. You have to fact-check, and then fact-check the fact-checkers (say that five times fast). You need to do a ton of research to have a well-informed opinion about almost everything, which may be partially to blame for all the uninformed opinions buzzing about the comments sections. It's so much easier to assume than to figure something out for real.<br />
<br />
And then I thought of something else: many of us seem afraid of uncertainty. We'd rather just assume and take a side on an issue without really thinking it through, or avoid discussing it altogether, because we're afraid of saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." You see it all the time, in debates and in public speaking: the speaker is asked a difficult question, and instead of admitting that they're not sure about the answer, they dance around the question by giving a confused, wishy-washy response instead. To me, it's a far greater sign of courage to admit uncertainty than to pretend you know the answer, but I shouldn't be the one talking here. When someone at work asks me if I know how to do something that I don't, it's sometimes tempting to pretend that I know what I'm doing, because I'm afraid of looking like an idiot if I don't.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, all this thinking forced me to confront the staggering amount of effort needed to obtain almost everything you need to be a happy, functioning adult. Even being happy often requires actively ignoring the negative while seeking the positive things in life, and don't let a greeting card tell you that's easy, because it's not. It makes me wonder where in the world we got that phrase, "good things come to those who wait," when good things don't "come" at all. They have to be found. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-55412858634471721702014-01-31T23:28:00.003-05:002014-01-31T23:28:25.590-05:0012 Things to Do in Your 20s (Alternate Title: Seriously Why am I Writing This?)I often write to pull myself out of a crisis, but starting this post actually sent me spiraling into one. Lately, I've been seeing tons of Buzzfeed-style posts floating around the web with titles like "23 Things to Do Before You Get Engaged" or "20 Things to Do in Your 20s." Usually, these posts rocket me into a righteous rage. Some of the activities listed are things only rich people can do, like buying a Macbook, traveling across Europe, or "having sex in dirty hostels," as one writer suggested. The few people I know who spent any length of time in Europe in their 20s either had rich parents or sold all their possessions first, and when you finally catch an STD in one of those dirty hostels, you'd better have health insurance. Other popular activities include things that just make you look like a selfish child ("be selfish" is one that I actually saw in a real post). It seemed to me that my 20s could be about so much more than just YOLO-ing around, that they could actually be a time for tremendous self-improvement and world-changing. I felt that doing things like "dating two people at once," "accomplishing a Pinterest project," and "hanging out naked in front of a window" (again, actual things from a real post) would be wasting a time in my life when I have more power than ever before. I can take action and deal with the consequences of those actions in my own way. I'm no longer a "minor." If I wanna participate in a medical research study that will either cure my insomnia or turn my nose into a flamethrower every time I sneeze, I get to sign the paperwork, not mom and dad. I also believe there are plenty of ways to enjoy life and embrace the moment without ruining all consecutive moments thereafter, or making people want to slap you with a herring Monty Python-style until your stench of immaturity is replaced with an even fishier odor.<br />
<br />
Instead of fish-slapping my fellow authors, I decided to release my contempt in a way that wouldn't result in assault charges--and quite an embarrassing police blotter entry. I set out to write my own "20 Things to Do in Your 20s" post. It was gonna be one of the greatest speeches to ever grace a soapbox. My whole generation would quake in its Converses. However, before I even finished the first paragraph, I realized something: I have no business writing this.<br />
<br />
For starters, I'm no expert on self-improvement. The following cartoon illustrates my failure to keep that healthy eating resolution:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is why I shouldn't get candy for Christmas anymore.</td></tr>
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Also, I can't honestly tell people what to do in their 20s because I'm in my 20s. The thing about decades is that you don't notice their defining characteristics until you're in a new decade. I never truly began to notice what exactly made the 2000s what they were until the 2010s. And even then, decades are never as strictly defined as we pretend they are, the way they blend into each other. For instance, the 60s weren't an entire 10 years of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. <i>Leave It to Beaver </i>was on until '63! Personally, I think it would've been a much more compelling show had it ended with little Theodore Cleaver rejecting his idealized upbringing, hopping in a stolen Thunderbird with Larry Mondello, and riding off into the desert to found one of the greatest rock groups in history.<br />
<br />
One by one, those all-too-familiar feelings of inadequacy reared their ugly heads, starting with "you don't know anything," followed by "you haven't even done half the things on this list, idiot!" I almost didn't finish this post, but in the end I decided to keep writing despite the self-loathing curling around my soul. However, even though it's in second person, I wrote it as more of a set of goals for myself than a sermon for my fellow millenials. In fact, I'm really the person I'm talking to the whole time. So here it is, re-titled, and feel free to follow or reject the advice therein. Or laugh at it. Or rant in your own blog post about how wrong it is.<br />
<br />
12 Things to Do in Your 20s, 30s, or Life in General That I Haven't Necessarily Done Yet but Hope to Do Someday (I decided 12 things was enough, and it's my favorite number):<br />
<br />
1. Learn to talk (again).<br />
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It's a good idea, especially when you're first entering the work force, to critically listen to yourself. How many times do you say "like" per sentence? How many memes do you reference per sentence? Can you leave a competent-sounding voicemail? Now is a great time to examine how your speech might be affecting your professional image, especially in an age where people's verbal capacities are getting more and more atrophied. With texting and Facebooking and other ways to avoid actually speaking, more people seem afraid of talking than usual. I know because I've gotten this way. Give me a pen, I can make you cry. Give me a mic, and I get tongue-tied. It's like my brain and my speech are disconnected; they can't function at the same time. And it's worsened over the years. So my advice is to practice and get comfortable with speaking, even when you'd rather write. Call someone instead of texting them. Also, back to memes for a second. If there's one way to get people to not take you seriously as an adult, it's referring to your job as "such quota. very income. wow." Memes can be fun sometimes, but don't make a habit of them. It's cooler to be able to speak creatively without the help of the Internet.<br />
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2. Practice honesty.<br />
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Sometimes we keep secrets or tell small fibs to avoid hurting people, and on rare occasions, it's the best thing to do. But secrets often have a way of revealing themselves later in nasty ways, like Taco Bell. Therefore, like Taco Bell, you should avoid them whenever possible. Also, being honest with people shows respect. It means you see them as fellow adults who can handle the truth, though not necessarily Taco Bell.<br />
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3. Be unapologetically yourself, yet willing to change.<br />
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The species that survives is the one that evolves, and the plant that bears fruit is the one that is cultivated. I shouldn't talk about plants, considering I've killed almost every one I've attempted to grow.<br />
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4. Learn to have a conversation with an 18-year-old or an 80-year-old.<br />
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This is actually a version of something I found in a similar list article from Relevant magazine, which I actually agreed with quite a bit. I especially agreed with this particular advice, because so much knowledge and life experience opens up when you can have a meaningful conversation with someone different from you. In fact, I've often had more fun hanging out with 40 and 50-year-old men from work than with other 22-year-old women. <br />
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5. Be clear, firm, and direct.<br />
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Speaking of guys from work, this advice came from a colleague. Notice it doesn't say "be a jerk," just "clear, firm, and direct." This can apply to every type of communication in every aspect of life.<br />
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6. Recognize when and when not to listen to your parents.<br />
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This one can be complicated. I think you should always at least hear your parents out, but once you reach adulthood, your decisions are ultimately yours and yours alone. Yes, they've seen decades and history that you haven't, and they may have better musical taste than you, but they're not gods. They're humans, just like you, and you've also had experiences that they haven't. The challenge is to be willing to consider their wisdom, yet stand firm in your own decision-making abilities.<br />
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7. Learn to drive a manual transmission car, if possible.<br />
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It'll help you in emergencies if you can pop the clutch, it'll discourage you from using your cell phone while driving (you need two hands), and you'll feel like one of the cool guys on a cop show. Plus, only true rugged individualists drive sticks. Automatics are for sheeple.<br />
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8. Have relationships (and not just romantic ones).<br />
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There's a tendency in our modern world to only experience the surface or parts of things, to detach ourselves from life. Instead, have relationships, which require <i>investments</i>. Have a relationship with the world around you. Take a walk, and instead of playing with your phone every five seconds or sticking your earbuds in, invest your senses in what's happening, what you can see, hear, feel, talk to, think about. Attach yourself to life. Dream, but don't make dreams your master, to paraphrase Kipling. Invest in the people in your life. Don't just ask your significant other what they did at work today. Ask them what they think about life, the universe, and everything. Give them your time, which we all know is a very valuable gift. Do the same in your spiritual life.<br />
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9. Buy a Crock Pot.<br />
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It'll serve you in much more satisfying ways than a Macbook.<br />
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10. Forgive.<br />
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I've had problems with forgiveness. Sometimes it feels like forgiveness is the same as justification, so when I say to someone "I forgive you," it feels like I'm actually saying "I totally understand why you were awful to me, and I'm okay with what you did." But forgiveness isn't about justifying what someone did, or pretending that it wasn't an awful thing. It's just letting go, and not stressing under a burden of hate for that person. On a related note, another good skill besides forgiving is being able to both make and break connections with people and places. Don't be afraid to invest, but if your investment isn't returned, just load up your trusty mule, move on down the trail, and know that you'll find somewhere, someone, or something else you can share yourself with.<br />
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11. Explore the place you grew up in.<br />
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Once you start going out on your own more often, you might discover some cool things and places about your hometown you didn't even know were there. I started going to a coffee shop in my hometown that I couldn't visit on my own before I had a car, and wound up making some delightful new friends to knit and use politically incorrect humor with.<br />
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12. Take responsibility instead of blaming others.<br />
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"So go ahead and get mad at God, point your fingers at your dad and ask Santa Claus..."--Atmosphere, "Puppets"<br />
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This may be one of the hardest things of all. In the words of the same colleague I quoted earlier, you have to make the life you want for yourself. No one else can do it for you, and blaming people for your hardships will get you nowhere. Many of us millenials have come out of a broken educational system into a broken world, but that doesn't change this fact. It's hard to make the life you want for yourself. I'm struggling just to get going, to change little things like what I eat and how much time I spend on Facebook. But little things build big things.<br />
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I'd like to conclude this bacchanalia of verbiage with a link to a TED talk from Lizzie Velasquez, a woman who's doing some pretty incredible things in her 20s: <br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c62Aqdlzvqk">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c62Aqdlzvqk</a><br />
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To anyone else who's trying to make the life they want: good luck, and godspeed.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-451049456311444052014-01-06T21:53:00.003-05:002014-01-06T21:53:59.184-05:00Finding My Linus: On the True Meaning of ChristmasThe week after Thanksgiving, I saw a movie where a man almost gets his fingers broken trying to convince a woman to put a plastic snowman on her roof. Later, this same woman chases after a processed Christmas ham like a starving dingo let loose in a supermarket. It was supposed to be a comedy.<br />
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The strangest and saddest thing about it was that the characters never really stopped to ask themselves <i>why. </i>Why do people go crazy preserving traditions that don't serve any purpose other than making people miserable? Why do we act like animals every December? What does it all <i>mean</i>? </div>
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The answer is nothing. So much of we do at Christmas means nothing, I realized when I asked myself these questions this year. It's as if celebrating the birth of Jesus, being thankful, and reconnecting with the spiritual side of life wasn't enough (correction: wasn't <i>profitable</i> enough), so we threw in a bunch of other pointless crap that didn't need to be there. This was the first Christmas in my 22 years that the pointlessness of said crap truly showed its ugly self. I got sick of all the overplayed holiday songs, including "The Christmas Waltz":</div>
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"Santa's on his way/He's filled his sleigh/With <i>things</i>, things for you and for me..."</div>
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The emphasis on "things" made me nauseous. Not even Frank Sinatra could make me ignore it. And don't get me started on "The Chipmunk Song":</div>
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"Christmas, Christmastime is here/Time for toys and time for cheer</div>
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We've been good, but we can't last/Hurry Christmas, hurry fast..."</div>
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No, it wasn't the Chipmunks' squeaky voices that made me want to punch my radio. It was the fact that they based their moral decisions on the promise of material gain. I always knew chipmunks were the greediest of rodents, the way they stuff their faces.<br />
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It wasn't just the music, either. I never liked the mawkish milquetoast that passes for Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel, but this year I hated them more than usual. They seemed like the cinematic equivalent of Pop Tarts: flat, identical pieces of cardboard dropping off an assembly line, wrapped up in shiny advertisements. I couldn't stand the way they oversimplified life, how they made it look so easy for people to change or always do the right thing, how everybody was white. They made the complications and difficulty of real life all the more apparent.<br />
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Advertisements were also worse this year. One night, I watched another movie that was taped in 1998, when I was seven years old. The 90s commercials were so much less obnoxious than today's, and there seemed to be fewer of them. They were short, sweet, and to the point. They simply said "please buy our product; it works," instead of screeching "BUY THIS STUFF AND ALL THE OTHER STUFF" over loud dance-pop jingles and equally loud graphics. I literally teared up when I saw an old commercial for a Gameboy Color. Aside from this year's ads themselves was the fact that Black Friday tried to bleed into Thanksgiving Day. My friend called Black Friday a "blight upon humanity," but it's more like a suspension of humanity. For one brief moment, people feel it's okay to claw someone's face over a printer (that actually happened to someone).<br />
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Even some of the things I normally enjoyed about Christmas lost some of their luster in 2013. I didn't feel like building a gingerbread house, and the mall decorations didn't sparkle quite as much as before. An exception was the Charlie Brown Christmas special, which I enjoyed more than ever, probably because I felt like Charlie Brown. I didn't feel the way I was supposed to feel. Sometimes I could even hear smooth jazz playing when I vented about my problems. I needed a Linus to remind me of what Christmas was all about. <br />
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My Linus came in the form of small moments of kindness, joy, and forgiveness. The light in a friend's eyes when they receive an unexpected present (granted, it's easy to light up most people's eyes with free booze, but still). The discovery that another friend isn't angry with you, even when you thought you wronged them and felt soul-crushingly guilty for it. The feeling of slipping a bill through the slot in a Salvation Army bucket. And, finally, hearing Silent Night sung over a guitar, the simple sound embracing a Christmas Eve congregation, faces softened in candlelight. A <i>silent </i>night. What a beautiful thing.<br />
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Basically, I didn't find joy in the typical things this Christmas, but I did in more spiritual things. The symbolism of Jesus being born in such a simple, threadbare environment, and the ultimate act of forgiveness He would come to represent, stood out more than ever. Overall, I think this temporary depression led to a change for the better, which makes me wonder if my other emotional ups and downs could do the same. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-85805334721706817382013-11-28T19:14:00.002-05:002013-11-28T19:14:25.959-05:00The Considerable Setbacks Thanksgiving Special (Or: 6 Things for Which I'm Thankful)I know I'm a little late for this, but I got tagged in one of those little number game posts on Facebook (the kind where you list facts about yourself), so I've decided to finally participate through this blog post. I got the number six. However, simply listing interesting facts is far too mainstream, I say over the sound of a Black Keys record and PBR swirling in the can. Instead, I'm putting a little holiday spin on this game by writing down six things I'm thankful for this year, in no particular order.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"I liked stuffing back when it was called 'dressing'."</td></tr>
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Six Things for Which I'm Thankful (notice how I didn't end that with a preposition? NOTICE IT!):</div>
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1. My new pixie haircut. Back in August, I finally took the plunge and got a good chunk of my hair whacked off (enough to fill two buckets, actually). For the first time in my life, I have a look that really feels like "me." And now Jennifer Lawrence and Kristin Chenoweth are copying me, because they wanna be cool too. </div>
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2. The fact that I've really grown a pair this year--as much as a lady can, anyway. I can drive a car decently without feeling like Death is giving me a wedgie every time I leave the driveway. I took a huge risk by accepting a production assistant job in Raleigh on a show for the DIY network; this involved putting my minimum wage job on the line, getting up at 4 a.m. for the long drive to Raleigh, braving the storm of Bon Jovi concert traffic on my steel horse, and working for two twelve-hour days on four hours of sleep as the only female on set. While on my period. Basically, I wanted something, and instead of giving up and letting it go, I stood up and ran it down.</div>
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3. Speaking of jobs, next week I will no longer be a lowly deli associate, but an associate producer for an Emmy-winning TV series. I'm especially grateful for this job because it came from a situation that I thought was bad at first, but turned out to be good. Last summer, I wanted to do an internship in film or television, but it had to be within commuting distance since I couldn't afford a car or an apartment, and I also couldn't afford to pay summer tuition, which many internships require (you pay to work instead of getting paid. I know, it's screwed up). Because of this, UNC-TV's internship was literally the only one I could do. Not only did they let me work for them, but they also introduced me to David Hardy, co-producer of Our State and my new boss, whose faith in my abilities has given me more confidence as a media professional than I've had in a long time. I'm also grateful to Morgan Potts, my other new producer-boss, for also trusting me enough with their beautiful program to hire me.<br />
4. Parents who use words like "fortuitous" in everyday conversation. Seriously though, they're the ones who read to me as a kid and insisted on talking to me as if I were an adult, and I don't think I'd be as good a writer without them.<br />
5. I know I say this every year, but, my friends. Every time I write one of these little tributes I sound like a drunk person (I love you guys...just...so much...you are the BEST *laughs and sloshes wine on someone's shirt*). But really, you guys are the best. Everywhere I ramble, I seem to have the good fortune of always befriending the most interesting, intelligent, hilarious, and nicest people around. <br />
6. Anybody who does nice things for people. I love seeing even small justices done in a world full of injustice. Also, in a world of lies and ulterior motives, I'm grateful for anyone who does these things with honesty and genuine kindness. Really, any kind of self-sacrifice is something to be thankful for. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-65255750755786291182013-10-28T22:05:00.003-04:002013-10-28T22:05:59.563-04:00The Auditory Pizza: A Musing on MusicIf you think of the human lifespan, or even just thought, as a chain of experiences, it seems like modern society is bent on breaking this chain into smaller and smaller isolated links. Everything is so fragmented. It's hard to lose yourself in the world of a good TV show when, every 5 minutes, a commercial reminds you that if you drive a Toyota Corolla, crowds of people in color-coordinated suits will dance to terrible electro-pop wherever you go (sometimes you just have to marvel at the sheer ridiculousness of everyday things). Even as I write, I feel like my attention span has been pulled into tiny pieces, tumbling off in all different directions. There's always something keeping my eyes from the screen, my thoughts from the words, and my hands from the keyboard. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sorry for the terrible image quality. I still can't use my scanner, so this is an iPod photo. Thanks Obama.</td></tr>
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Sometimes I think this fragmented culture keeps us from fully appreciating musical albums as complete works. I love iTunes when I want to download a couple hit songs from an album that doesn't interest me otherwise. For instance, I'm not a big Macklemore fan, but you bet I was whistling "Thrift Shop" when I found that dapper velvet vest for 3 bucks on the second hand rack. However, I wonder if this form of buying music discourages people from listening to entire albums from beginning to end, as they're often meant to be enjoyed.<br />
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I thought about this while driving home from work one night. I listened to the entire Demon Days album by Gorillaz, and it had been a long time since I'd listened to the whole thing in one go. Most of the time, the individual songs just pop up here and there while my iPod is in shuffle mode, kinda like random memories that flash in your mind when you least expect them (like when you have a glass of milk and remember the time you ate a blade of grass when you were seven because you wanted to see what it felt like to be a cow). Anyway, after I got home, I felt like I'd experienced each song on Demon Days in a different way from before, as parts of a complete work of art, and the effect was beautiful and eye-opening. It was like eating the whole pizza, instead of just an olive or a bacon bit. It makes you think about why the tracks were arranged the way they were, and allows you to appreciate the way one song blends into another. Plus, it helped that it was a Demon Days kind of night: the air was cool, and the black sky was overcast, but the clouds were just thin enough so that you could barely see the moon's ghostly figure.<br />
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Another thing I realized that night is the importance of listening to an album through a real stereo system rather than earbuds. It's another example of experiences getting smaller and more isolated. Listening through tiny headphones is nothing compared to hearing a song spill into the atmosphere from a good set of speakers. This way, it doesn't just go into your ears; it fills the space around you.<br />
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ONE MORE THING (in the words of Uncle): as great as the iTunes preview feature is, it also takes away some of the suspense and excitement of buying and album you've never heard at all before. The other day, I was at Barnes and Noble, and I came across a CD of Nina Simone love songs. I was already somewhat familiar with Nina Simone (who doesn't love I Put a Spell on You?), but I'd never heard any of these covers before. I knew it had to be at least a pretty good album, but I still felt the excitement of taking a leap of faith and buying an album I'd hadn't previewed (maybe "pre-listened" is a better term). Fortunately, it turned out to be incredible--the actual title is Nina Simone for Lovers if you wanna pick it up yourself. It's also more of an event, buying a CD or record. You make a special trip to the record store or mailbox with a pleasant anticipation, rather than the instant gratification of downloading something.<br />
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I'm gonna wrap this post up and drag up the energy to write some more things, but I recommend going out and getting an album that looks good, but that you've never heard before. It can be pretty fun. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-34676698135132242742013-10-10T12:54:00.000-04:002013-10-10T12:54:26.127-04:00Google Poetics: Japanese StyleThe little blobs of weirdness scattered about the Internet amaze me. The other day, I was looking for a certain online magazine, but accidentally typed in the wrong URL. Instead, I wound up on a Japanese web page that appeared to be an advertisement for some sort of hair removal treatment. I figured this out after using Google Translate on the whole page, which produced something that read sometimes like a lost Yoko Ono song, others like the time your random freshman year roommate came home from a party to which you weren't invited and, while still in a Jagerbomb haze, decided it would be a smashing time to try his hand at erotic slam poetry before vomiting on your carpet. The following is a compilation of some of the most oddly poetic and downright strange lines of this translation:<br />
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The sea is only reputation and surprise answer to wealth.<br />
Generation of summer delivery.<br />
Assent to heat and diet.<br />
Only fashionable circle and eye line<br />
even in the human and the world<br />
The whitening of wear and judgment of the famous weapon<br />
Inevitability!<br />
think the athletic manly whitening cream<br />
a pack of pants just published<br />
mono awkward scheduled safety.<br />
The obsession in permanent razor from the battery in the bikini<br />
Even idol carefully selected.<br />
popular restaurant in pain<br />
how about a diet oxygen from pubic hair<br />
athletic manly yen cream white beauty I care.<br />
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Ladies, get your man what he really wants for Christmas this year: athletic manly yen cream. And while you're at it, treat yourself to a battery-powered bikini (not for use in water).Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6462158035156479413.post-55848880669145855402013-09-29T17:21:00.000-04:002013-09-29T17:21:22.048-04:00Life Outside the School Calendar Humans are unique animals in many ways. We buy blue things for boys and pink things for girls.We stare at boxes shooting light at us (my dog still doesn't understand this. Why would we watch TV when we could be playing with him?). We text (one of the perks of opposable thumbs). We also go to school. In fact, we let school mess with the innermost gears of our mental clocks. Anyone who's experienced June elation or September blues can attest to this. Summer always begins somewhere around June 20th, but as soon as that last school bell rings, guess what? It's summer. Insisting that it's not might earn you a playground beating. Also, what about that beautiful period from mid-August to mid-September, when the air is crisp but not chilly? Never mind the fact that everything is still pretty green and your neighborhood pool is still open. It's fall, which means homework and schedules and people telling you how to spend your time again. Just hearing those things probably makes your soul ache.<br />
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One of the most interesting things I've faced since graduating college is learning how to "live with the seasons" again. For a lot of people, fall began August 25th, but for me, it began September 22nd at 4:44 p.m. with the equinox. My whole outlook on seasonal changes has pretty much gone from this:<br />
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You know it's fall when:<br />
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<li>Stores run back-to-school commercials with creepily stylish/excited children.</li>
<li>You wonder if you can get one more year out of your beat-up notebook with The Who logo on it. </li>
<li>Your procrastination on that summer reading list catches up with you. Now you have to go on a 3-day Puritan binge with The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter.</li>
<li>You feel guilty for not finishing your summer bucket list. Reading Anna Karenina and building the Taj Mahal out of index cards will have to wait until next summer. </li>
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To this:<br />
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You know it's fall when:<br />
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<li>Not having air conditioning doesn't make you felonious anymore.</li>
<li>Breathing feels like taking a cool drink (for an idea of North Carolina summers, imagine a hot, wet towel being thrown at your face every time you walk outside).</li>
<li>You don't have to give your dog medicated heat rash baths anymore (I'll miss having him smell like oatmeal conditioner though).</li>
<li>The moon is brighter.</li>
<li>You smell the pumpkin cookies you bought and the smoke from other people's fires as you drive home from the store.</li>
<li>Halloween Oreos (this is by far my favorite).</li>
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However, it still pains me a little to see summer go, even though it makes no difference in my work schedule whatsoever. I know people who graduated years ago and still get sad when late August roles around. For as much educating as it claims to do, school really screws with your psyche as well. Let's not let it ruin this lovely time of year completely.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09187410861176309596noreply@blogger.com0