emo

(I wrote this a long time but never published it - it fits in just before "emo emo emo" written in 2009.  It now looks like I just wrote it.  Do not be deceived.)


There was about an hour today when I was feeling very emo, and then I got over it.

In other news, I've been thinking about God and religion and faith a lot more than usual lately. I don't know what to think or feel anymore . . . I want to go to church and worship God and feel like I don't have any doubts or concerns about what I'm doing or where I'm going, but I have some issues. Faith in God is a huge, blind leap over a dark chasm; it used to feel like settling down into a soft meadow, like coming home. But in the midst of my doubt, I somehow still feel like God is a constant and something that will always tint the way I act or think or feel. So how much of faith is repetition and how much of it is a divine gift?

Asking these questions, I feel like a heathen or like I'm breaking rules - setting a bad example, even.

When I was younger, I thought about God in a more methodical way. There were rules. You either accepted God and followed the path or you didn't. Believers are descended from the tribes of the faithful; generations of people fallen away from truth represent mere seconds among millenia. The truth is all I've wanted. Why does everything seem to be a test? I want to know the truth. What is going on here? What are we doing? Are we all merely earth and ash? Are we more than that? Or is it a product of our biology, our brains?

My sister has severe depression because she produces little to none of a chemical that is essential to experiencing happiness and avoiding fixation which produces isolation and anxiety. Without medication and/or daily concentration, she can not know what it is like to free from anxiety and sadness. Who is to say that a combination of chemical reactions is responsible for our feelings of certainty or happiness or faith? The moments in life when we give thanks to God for his mercy or his grace, who is to say that a series of coincidences didn't bring about a positive outcome?

I certainly feel better when I am dutiful for duty's sake, and when I hold a simple, unquestioning faith, but I become less and less capable of this. Yesterday I was reading something about faith, and I realized that it sounded like something written hundreds of years ago, something I would criticize or cast aside as being superstitious or primitive, even.

I probably shouldn't post this, but I have been wondering if other people have been feeling this way, too.

my home

When I was a little girl, I lived in a somewhat little house with my little family which consisted of my mom, my dad, and my sister.  We lived on a little street and we had a little back yard and a little swing set, slide, and gymnastics rings for flipping in circles until we were dizzy.  When I think about my perception of the world at the time, it seems like a little bubble - I lived in a place where most things were the same a lot of the time and I had a very good childhood.  So much so that sometimes I wonder if I even just made it up.  My mom showed me how to make things, and my dad showed me how to explore, and I used to spend entire Saturdays playing hide and seek and trying to get my swing to fly high enough to launch me into the sky.  All of the neighborhood kids kept hiding and seeking and playing tag and hopscotch until the street lamps came on and our moms called us home.

I've just been watching the movie Away We Go and the last scene when Verona and Burt go to Verona's childhood home and decide to make it their own, it kind of makes me wish I could go back to my old house.  The crazy thing is that I have actually driven past there a handful of times since we moved, but it isn't really the same place.  Everything was small because I lived in my bubble, but everything was big because it was all I knew.  Now, the house is just a building that people have changed in ways I hate, and where people have chopped down the pine trees that shaded me in August when the sun was too hot.

as the days keep turning into night

Sometimes I have a lot to say and others I do not.  I suppose the past few weeks would fall under the "mysteriously (or not so mysteriously) quiet" category.

Today I had a great day - I spent some time in Dublin and really enjoyed the hot weather, sunshine, and a delicious steak (all before four o'clock!).  I also made a new friend:

Leatherlips (Doesn't this kind of look like a sphinx, just the head?)

This is Leatherlips, a Wyandot chief who lived in Dublin at the end of his life.  He was put to death by tomahawk - apparently a great deal of animosity came between him and Tenskwatawa (Tecumseh's brother) because he worked with white settlers.  He was called many things, but Leatherlips was for keeping his word.  I like that.

family trees swaying in the wind

I wouldn't like to say that I lack follow-through, but I might say that I become excited about a lot of ideas and attempt to at least look into a variety of projects in life.  For instance, there may come a day when I sit down and actually begin my formal Esperanto lessons.

In the meantime, I have spent a couple of years pondering some sort of family tree / family history project.  I already did something like this on a small scale in middle school, and it was a disaster.  I basically put hours upon hours of work into the thing, complete with pictures and everything.  My teacher took a glance at each project and gave everyone an "A" without much consideration.  I was p***ed and shoved the booklet into the back of my closet and haven't touched it since.

It has been about ten years and I feel ready to move forward from that experience by pursuing a more detailed investigation of my family which I can then make into a kind of book and give to various relatives as a gift.  I knew immediately that mostly everyone would probably be repulsed by this sort of gift, as nearly all of my relatives are in one way or another completely insane.  But whose family isn't plagued by such things?  So I plan to proceed.  I am certain that this report will be done in as humorous a tone as possible, so as to lighten the burden of the past.  I'm also hoping that it will help to mend disagreements between certain clan members.  Because laughter, they say, is the best medicine.  I shall just slip a nice, thin, 500 page document under everyone's door, and they will be able to marvel, as I surely will, at the need for a fun ending.  We are capable of this fun ending.  I feel it.

I started this family tree by hand, but my hand tires easily, so I switched to making an online family tree.  The other benefit is that I don't have to tape a new sheet of 8.5" by 11" to the edge of the tree when I run out of room every five minutes.

There is one thing I have learned about making a family tree, and it is this:  It's difficult.  I can't remember anything!  I seriously had to give myself a good five minutes to recall my own great-grandmother's name.  My own flesh and blood!  I knew the woman.  But I didn't call her Mabel.  I called her Grandma.  And on it goes.  Also, I am familiar with the fact that my great-great-grandmother on my mom's mom's dad's side came from Germany . . . but I had no idea that her name was Roschide.  But was this her first name or her surname? It's impossible to tell with all of these exotic names!  This is quickly becoming a group project in my mind . . . I imagine us crouching around documents spread out on my grandparents' Persian rugs, sipping lemonade.  We trade hilarious stories.  The eight of us who still enjoy remnants of brain activity remember why we, the "normal" ones, have isolated ourselves from the rest of the family and enjoyed a peaceful existence.  We recommit ourselves to enjoy each other's minor eccentricities and, by golly, we pour ourselves another glass of lemonade, rejoicing in the lack of alcoholism in the room!

In the throws of my imagined Reawakening of the Great Family Fun Times, I compose a brief and witty email to the elite eight informing them of my family tree project.  I ask them, humbly, for tidbits of basic information.  I plead my ignorance of the family lore.  I note my plans to be in town early next week.  I even include amusing references to The Borg.

The email sent, I recognize how insanely wrong I was to even consider this project.  First off, I must now actually complete the project, which delays further my plans to learn Esperanto.  Secondly, I expect very little interest in participation.  Third, I am currently experiencing a flashback of this past Thanksgiving, where my sarcasm and overall humor was lost on pretty much everybody.  This isn't a sophistication issue (because let's face it, everyone there was probably much more sophisticated than me), it was probably more of a miscommunication issue.

So now everyone's got an email sitting in their inbox with a 1:00am time stamp from crazy me, asking for confirmation of births, marriages, and deaths, which is pretty typical I suppose.  I guess it just goes to show that my years-old logic continues to prove itself infallible:  Do not think after 10:00pm.  Save all emails as drafts.  Go to bed.

i once was Lost . . .

 . . . you know the rest.

ALERT: Minor spoilers including vague description of the last scene of the series in this post.

I will try to write this without crying too much.  I was finally able to view The End of Lost today, and it was extraordinary.  Not perfect, but how could it be?  Not all of our questions were answered.  I still do not know why "daynjah surrounds this baybee" (he seemed about as dangerous as any baby, really).  But I don't really care, so this means - for me - that The End was quite a success.

I wish that I could share some of my thoughts on Lost in a poetic manner.  I left official commentary (as I never commentate officially on any subject matter anyhow) to the professionals, because to be honest, Lost is an incredibly intelligent show.  And whilst I consider myself a moderately intelligent person, I would rather just leave the show as is and allow every viewer to value his or her own experience for what it is.  Also, it's difficult remembering all of those pesky details sometimes.  I encourage everyone to give the series a shot, but only if done so properly and from the beginning.  No cheating.  No long breaks between episodes.  Pay a respectful amount of attention to the plot, let yourself sink into some Island magic, and you will not regret it.

If you want a terribly well-written and detailed synopsis of any episode of Lost, I highly recommend Doc Jensen's column on the Entertainment Weekly website.  I would like to specifically recommend reading Part One of his recap on the series finale.  His thoughts are pretty much on-par with my own.  Whilst I feared the various cop out endings which played out in my mind galore over the past few weeks, and whilst up until today I seriously doubted a quality ending, I am so happy with the way the writers chose to end Lost.  I wish that it could have been extended for one more season to give some things more thought and attention, but as it is I am satisfied.

We ended the show the way we began, with Jack in the jungle.  The simplicity of him laying down to die and Vincent calmly joining him in the brush, the closing of his eyes . . . it was a poem.  Pure and simple.  This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

Indeed.  Where are my tissues?

one word:

Strongblackcoffee.
Sent from my BlackBerry Smartphone provided by Alltel

stories

Today, out of nowhere, I suddenly thought of my ballet teacher of many many moons ago.  Was her name Julia?  Or perhaps Claire?  She had beautiful, long, dark blonde hair wrapped in a loose bun, and she always wore soft colors - lavender, pink, powder blue - with white tights.  She was enchanting and I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

She was probably around seventeen years old, but that was adult enough to me at the time.  I loved watching the home videos she brought with her sometimes, capturing her in Swan Lake or the Nutcracker, the dreamy and obvious ballets - the antitheses of the vulgar "modern" dance I had discovered in World of Dance, a large book of gorgeous photographs I discovered at Media Play whilst enjoying the classical music they used to play on Saturday mornings before everyone mysteriously started (Or started mysteriously? De rien.) shopping at Barnes & Noble.  I was an old child.

We began every dance class properly, with our routine stretching.  To fill the silence, my teacher usually asked one of us to tell a story.  The other girls in our small group would give short, dull descriptions of a recent trip to the zoo or to Southwyck Mall.  My classmates had already caught on that it was often cooler to be nonchalant about everything than to be overly enthusiastic about something.  I didn't fully appreciate this subtlety for another ten years and I was a strange combination of shy yet obnoxious, so when my teacher asked me for a story, I delivered with gusto.  It came to be that as we all gathered neatly in a circle and stretched our as-yet tiny limbs every week, the girls would ask me for another story, preferring to listen.

After a few years of this with roughly the same group of petites danseuses, our young teacher left us.  I remember one day shortly thereafter sitting on my family's front porch, reading the letter she wrote me.  She (what was her name?) had used pale pink stationary with a scented, hot pink gel pen.  I rarely received mail unless it was my birthday or a holiday, and I kept the letter for a long time.  It had said that she was sad to be moving and would miss all of the girls.  She would also miss the beginning of each class, which she had come to think of as the time for "Olivia's stories."  Without realizing it, I had become obsessed with the idea of telling stories.

I'm not sure why this is.  Maybe it's all the reading.  I think partly, though, it must be the need to understand people and to connect with them on some level.  Telling a story yourself or asking someone to tell you one, you quickly discover whether you have similar (or in some cases, wildly dissenting) senses of humor.

Side note:  Probably the best sources of material for stories, I suddenly realize, are dreams.  Not "I have a dream" dreams, but REM, drool-on-the-pillow dreams, hence my recent post of that description.  I mean, come on . . . that was a great dream.  But I apologize if I bother you with too many dream-tales which I discover (too late) to be almost impossible to recreate outside of my head.

These days I am no longer dancing on Tuesday nights, Southwyck Mall has been torn down, I shop at Barnes & Noble (though if Media Play were still around, I would so be there), and I wear more black than pastels.  But I still, quite obviously, love to trade stories.

travel by night

I haven't watched a lot of television this week and the weather is not wonderful, so I decided to flip on the tube for a bit.  What channel do I immediately seek for my viewing pleasure?  Well, the History Channel, of course!  And has the HC disappointed me?  Of course not.  Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed is currently screening and I am happy to let it wash over me as I relate to you my latest triumph in life.

A few months back I came across some high-brow online literature concerning the lucid dream.  Of course, I began to interview my various friends and acquaintances to compare experiences, because while I have dreamt lucidly a handful of times, I instantly awoke as soon as I became cognizant of my dreaming, unable to return to the Land of Nod.  There exist a variety of cultures which greatly value dreams and believe that they are real, spiritual travel outside the body.  Others use their dreams to help them parse out their waking lives.  I, for one, think that dreams are simply our brains trying to find something to do while we are resting.  This doesn't mean that dreams cannot be interesting or have a great impact on us, however.  I myself have had many memorable and powerful dreams.

Lucid dreaming seems to me to be a very powerful experience, but not something one can necessarily undertake like any other hobby.  Or so I thought!  I discovered a list of techniques one may apply throughout the day to ensure the possibility of dreaming lucidly through the night, as well as advice for what to avoid in your lucid dreaming experience.  I am unwilling to attempt the majority of these suggestions as they seem excessive.  However, I began to simply say to myself every night before bed I will have a lucid dream.  I will dream lucidly.  I will have a lucid dream.  etc, etc, etc about five times.  I only did this for about two weeks until I forgot all about it.

Fast forward a couple of months to this past Sunday night.  I wish I had written about the dream earlier, because I am starting to forget.  What I do remember is that I became aware of flying with a group of people on a mid-sized airplane, possibly a Gulfstream IV business jet.  But seriously.  

We were experiencing some mechanical malfunction, and it was clear that we had no choice but to jump from the plane.  We were first flying over water, and then a vast green landscape.  I was wearing my parachute, and after weighing my fear, decided to jump into the bright blue sky.  As I fell faster and faster toward the ground along with the other passengers, the blue sky turned grey, then deep black and I was able to see the stars.  I landed in the green hills safely, and I was alone.

Suddenly I was in a great white cathedral in the midst of a ceremony, but instead of watching I simply walked among the people who were there, and it seemed like hours that I visited each row, not talking to anyone but recognizing that they were there.  I dropped something on the ground, at which point I knelt down to retrieve it.  The scene changed again and I was looking into, and then came to be inside of, a green and fragrant forest.  The trees were older than any person, large, and knotted into the ground.  It was damp and humid.  I became lucid, and heard someone speaking some phrase over and over again, but I could not tell what it was that was being said.  I wanted to hear her, and I also wanted to try to move through my dream before the scene changed again.  All I could do, though, was continue listening to the voice that sounded more and more like myself.  My mind still in the green forest, my physical hand reached to touch my lips and I found that it was me who was speaking to my own self, through to the dream.  I am dreaming.  I am dreaming.  I am dreaming.  I was aware of being awake in my dream and in my bed at the same time, but after another moment I was completely awake and aware of my physical body.

I was such a strange experience!  It is really difficult to describe the lucid part.  I was in two places for a period of time;  I wasn't able to control the dream, but I was able to have two different sensory experiences at once.  It was like being suspended between two worlds.  I don't know if I will ever have a lucid dream again, but this one was interesting enough to me that I don't care.  Has anyone else ever had a powerful dream?  Is there one dream you've had that stands out in your memory?  Was/is it recurring?  Add to the comments if you are able to share, because I'm genuinely curious.

Enough mumbo jumbo.