New Blog!

Hello!
I know it’s been ages since I posted (years in fact) but for any of you still following along, I’ve started a new blog here on WordPress. I haven’t bought the domain name yet, so it’s a bit long: weshallhavespringagain.wordpress.com

Come! join me!

What is the what

Sometimes, when I’m stressed or emotional, I’ll  listen to Ke$ha. There is no logical reason for this. There’s just something kinda cathartic about the shallow lyrics, repetitive choruses, and the fact that each song is about 85% electronic. I don’t get it. It’s really embarrassing, and it’s not something I’d admit if put on the spot.

But this is what my life looks like right now…

Scene:  A girl sits alone on the floor of a typical suburban bedroom. She is surrounded by piles and piles of books, papers, binders, notebooks, and note-cards.  Colorful college brochures are scattered here and there, like wounded birds, half buried beneath dirty laundry and a smattering of glasses and bowls. In front of her is a computer that has seen better days. The girl herself is a haggard-looking 18 year old with a short pixie cut that looks more like a bird’s nest than hair.  She wears leggings, a crumpled t-shirt advertising some nerdy (yet vaguely mainstream) TV show, and over-the-ear headphones. She is seated criss-cross applesauce, and is shoveling chocolate pudding into her face. She is teary in a way that would make her mascara run, if she ever had the time or energy to figure out how to put on mascara (also if she wasn’t terrified of mascara, but that’s another story…).

Girl (crying and singing at the same time): “Stephen, why won’t you call me? I’m sitting here waiting. Why won’t you call me? Stephen, I’m feeling pathetic. I can’t take rejection. Why won’t you call me?”  (breaks into sobs, stops singing) Ke$ha’s right I am pathetic. I don’t even know who Stephen is, but he’ll never call. Why would he? I hate my life. Why am I such a loser?! (shovels more pudding into her mouth) Why would any college ever accept me, if Stephen won’t even call?!?

The girl stops, thinks for a moment, and shakes out of it.

What am I talking about??? I don’t even know any Stephens! I have like 5 papers to do before tomorrow. Come on! I’m an intelligent, independent woman. I’ve got this. Focus! I should just st0p listening to this cra…oh no (as she goes to click the mouse, the song changes. She bursts into ears again and starts singing) “I’m dancing with tears in my eyes, just fighting to get through the night. I’m losing it (cries harder) looosing it, loosing iit. With every move I die” (she stops singing, and wipes at her eyes)I can’t even…(sobs)

Lately,there has been a lot of Ke$ha in my play queue.

Better Late Then Never…

So, I was supposed to write a blog post for you guys while “the one who may be Juliet” was gone. But she’s back from her trip now, and I still haven’t written anything for you guys. So that’s what I’ll be doing for you today. I actually had a blog myself, but it was written by angsty 12-year-old me. Trust me, no one wants to see that. I only pray that Google heard my prayers and nuked it from the internet like I requested. Any who, I guess you could say this is me getting back on the ol’ blogging horse (although I’m actually just sitting here in my computer chair). However, there remains the small problem of I have no idea what I want to blog about. I could go back into my old blog for ideas, but that’s one grave I want to leave untouched.

I guess I could talk about the internet. It’s such a deeply ingrained part of my life that I can’t imagine what kind of person I would be without it. You see, like many people, I’m in a love-hate relationship with the internet. It was both my faithful companion into many lonely nights and my crippling addiction that prevented me from getting anything productive done. You are what you eat, and I’m the conglomeration of countless videos, images, blogs, articles, and god knows what else that you’ll find in your feeds. For better or for worse, I’m a child of the internet, and that both excites and scares me.

It’s fascinating really. What originally started as a government project for communicating instantaneously over long distances began one of the most important advances in technology since, well, the computer. It’s amazing that something so incredibly vital to our culture today was only created roughly 20 years ago. 20 YEARS! Did the car connect friends and families from around the world in the first 20 years of its creation? Did the telephone inspire millions upon millions of people to become content creators for other to enjoy?  Did the television become integrated into practically every piece of technology we use in its first 20 years? I don’t think so.

However, despite its astounding growth, the internet is merely a step in a long line of mans attempt to get closer to one another. Think about it: the car, the train, and eventually the plane, were created because we felt like we couldn’t get to each other fast enough. Eventually, physical transportation wasn’t fast enough, so we created the telephone and radio so we could talk to each other, even if we were thousands of miles away. Even then, our voices weren’t enough. We needed to be able to see one another, and our surroundings, so we created the television and the camera. Even after all of that, not enough people felt like they could create and send the message they wanted, so they invented the computer. And finally, despite the incredibly massive leaps in technology we had taken, people still wanted to be able to communicate and share any form of content they could possibly want, so we created the internet.

Now that it’s touched practically every part of civilized life in the time it takes a human to grow into their biological prime, I can’t imagine what’s in store for the future.

(To reward you for reading this, here’s a kitten with a mustache.)

What Even Is This?

“When you experience uncertainty, you are on the right path – so don’t give it up. You don’t need to have a complete and rigid idea of what you’ll be doing next week or next year, because if you have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen and you get rigidly attached to it, then you shut out the whole range of possibilities.”

– Deepak Chopra

  My world is shifting in so many ways. This isn’t a complaint, just a statement of fact. I’m a senior in high school AND in my second year of college.  Dynamics with old friends are completely different. There are new friends I never saw coming. And I doubt freshman me with her Jane Austen, braids, and mousy demeanor would even recognize senior me with her brazen attitude, pixie cut, and Walt Whitman.

I’m working through the agonizing process of deciding where to transfer. There’s one school in particular that interests me…and it’s on the other side of the country. Part of me feels like that’s a good thing. I feel ready to severe my old ties and start new ones, to find myself, to go in pursuit of my Great Perhaps. But quite recently, there have been some changes that have made me consider whether leaving is such a good idea. There’s an opportunity to share a house with friends, a good scholarship from a local school, and yes, there is a boy.

I’m at the point where movies like Lost in Translation and Reality Bites seem surprisingly relevant and watching the prom and graduation episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer make me cry. There are moments when I surprise myself with my maturity and others where I behave like a child. I think this is what they call growing up.

Hope you’ve had a great summer and good luck to those of you headed back to school (or already in classes!).

Things I Like Right This Very Now

1. Much Ado About Nothing- This is my favorite play by Shakespeare. I just love Benedict and Beatrice. Their dialogue back and forth is some of the best writing I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Beatrice is my dream role.  I’ve seen this version: and want to see this version because, you know, Tennant and Tate. ’nuff said.

 

2.

Where do I find this??? I want to order it in bulk!

3. “I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.”– What is the What by Dave Eggers

4. This interested me

5.

This is pretty much what I am like on a day to day basis. Gummy bears. Your argument is invalid.

6. I am just now being introduced into the marvelous world of Bob Dylan. It’s been fun. I think that so far, Blood On The Tracks is my favorite album. Not sure though. I’ll keep you posted.

7.  I love this video. Vintage VlogBrothers. Books, libraries, John Green, nerds, insults, Shakespeare… 🙂 If you’re not watching VlogBrothers, you might want to do something about that.

8. I watched the 3 final episodes of Community, a TV show that is one of the best things on American television (BBC ftw). They were brilliant. But then Dan Harmon announced his firing. What is Community without Harmon??? Especially since people have worked so hard to even have a season 4!

9. I love crossovers

10. And I leave you with this…

See ya soon!

Random Facts About Me

1. I’m allergic to coconut.
2. I’m incredibly impulsive
3. I tend to think out loud.
4. I hate to think of the idea of dying without having accomplished anything.
5. Although I like to believe I’m deep, I’m surprisingly shallow.
6. Sometimes, I just sit in my room eating sugar, watching fanvids, and crying.
7. People’s opinions matter far too much to me.
8.  I really don’t know where my life is going
9. I love blogging
10. This has been BEDA 2012

I only missed 5 days!

Some Quotes About Creating

These inspire me and, in lieu of yesterday’s post, I thought I’d share them with you :

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” -Kurt Vonnegut

”Creative blocks’ come from people’s life journeys. If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative. So I think a lot of times when people have “creative blocks” and I know my share of friends do as well if they’re at just some stuck point. They’re not sure what to do with their lives or their writing or their photography or their filmmaking or whatever it is that they’re doing. I think the best advice is you have to change your life up completely; to go on a trip, to go spend a year being of service. Be willing to take some major drastic action to get you out of your comfort zone and go inside, not outside.” -Rainn Wilson

“You may not be a Picasso or Mozart but you don’t have to be. Just create to create. Create to remind yourself you’re still alive. Make stuff to inspire others to make something too. Create to learn a bit more about yourself.”-Frederick Terral

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” -Joseph Chilton Pierce

” I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out
in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom
of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.” -Jack London’s Credo

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” -Bertrand Russell

“You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.” – D.C. Fontana

‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”-Jack Kerouac

When we tell stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problem was impossible. Instead, we skip straight to the breakthrough. We tell the happy ending first. The danger of this scenario is that the act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive.” – Jonah Lehrer

“Hank, it seems to me that one of the points of being alive is that we get to pay attention. We get to both participate in and observe this weird universe that is simultaneously, like, stunningly elegant and completely heartless.” – John Green

Festina Lente

So, I love the arts. I’m especially passionate about literary, performing, and visual arts. Literary arts are my life, and I’ve taken two terms of theater classes. I’m also volunteering with a local theater troupe. But my love for visual arts is a bit more complicated.

I was that kid in kindergarten who refused to color in class because it was “silly”. I haven’t taken a visual art class since middle school. And if you asked someone to describe me, I doubt the words “painter’, “artist” or “the next Van Gogh” would be used.

You see, unlike with theater or lit., I always considered myself bad at visual arts. I loved drawing and painting and shaping clay, but I hated to show my work to others for fear that it would fall short of some invisible standard. I wanted to be the best and I knew that I wasn’t the best at this.

Two things changed my mind, or at least, forced me to reconsider my perspective of what makes good art. The first was a painting of pumpkins I did as a make-up assignment for my middle-school art class. I had been sick and the teacher had told me to create a painting of whatever I wanted in order to get credit. So, I chose pumpkins.

Painting those pumpkins was the first time I felt like I was doing something that wasn’t too weird or bad or incomplete for others to see. And when I turned it in, I felt like da Vinci bestowing a second Mona Lisa.  Obviously it wasn’t, but it’s the first time I remember being proud of a piece of visual art.

The second was when I was doodling in my notebook one day, and my friend looked over and said, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. I wish I could draw like that.” I looked down at my doodle and then up my friend in surprise. I wasn’t working on anything spectacular. I was just drawing interesting lines over and over. And suddenly it dawned on me:

Art isn’t about perfection

In fact, one dictionary defines art simply as a work produced by skill and imagination.

What I was doing was legitimate art, even if it wasn’t likely you’d find in a museum.

My teacher has an expression she likes to use. “Festina lente”, or hurry slowly. I think that one phrase sums up my whole experience with art. It’s been about letting things happen and embracing opportunities. It’s knowing that I’m headed someplace, but still taking time to smell the roses. It’s about art for art’s sake and not in order to please an imaginary critic.

There’s my 5 cents worth. Don’t spend it all at one place! 😛

Things I Like*

*because I’m tired and lazy and hungry and I can’t have food until I’ve had some tests tomorrow morning.

1.

As a Whovian, I must say, we have the most adorable cast. I don’t care if you’re not a fan of Matt Smith or Karen Gillan. They’re just the cutest individuals alive!

2. I’m working on an abstract art project. This is what the inside of my head looks like:

Cy Twombly's Work Space

3. Speaking of art…

A palette…of CUPCAKES!!!! (Did I mention that I’m hungry? 😛 )

4. I read this great essay called How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham. It’s inspiring but still realistic. As someone who is still searching for her purpose in life (at least career-wise), it was amazingly comforting.

5.  Can I preface this by saying that I’m not a fan of Glee? I mean, if you like Glee, good for you! But it’s just not my thing. However, I am most definitely a fan of Darren Criss, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past. So, this cover of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” is something that I very much enjoyed. I like how the song is turned from being about lovers to being about two brothers who no longer get along. (I still like the original best, I think)

6. Guys, I made a human heart!

Yes, this has to do with the aforementioned art project.

7.  I cannot recommend Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman highly enough. It’s one of the best collections of poetry I’ve ever read. Not every piece is mind blowing, but oh so many are.

Like…

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Tell me if this is a normal person thing or just a weird me thing. I’m not really sure.

Do you guys ever fall in love with an idea? I mean, hardcore, heart in your mouth, butterflies in your stomach, nervous, sweaty in love with an idea?

Does it become some kind of driving force behind your thoughts, a kind of background music to your day? Is it something that you just can’t shake, something that seems to bubble up from inside of you? And, even though it’s crazy, you find that this idea is on par with food, water, and shelter when it comes to the list of things you need to survive?

It’s not being OCD. It’s not like being on some kind of maniac trip. It’s just this all-abiding passion for one singular idea.

No? Just me? Ok.

Sigh