Quick Home Update

I am home and so glad to be so. I am surrounded by loud voices and (at times) ridiculous ideas, but I don't want to be anywhere else right now. I am so content to be sitting in bed, wrapped in a blanket, listening to music, surfing the net, and contemplating which book I'd like to read next. I've found that I have a bunch of the texts I need for next semester which means I don't need to spend as much on textbooks and have a little more fore other things (read: books). Borders apparently doesn't carry Descent into Hell in store. I'll probably buy it over the interwebs and have it sent to school along with the rest of my textbooks. Dear Lord, the mail people will hate me. Then again, I expect they hate everybody at the beginning of the semester when textbooks flood the post office. I do like online shopping, though it doesn't really beat the feeling of taking a book off a shelf and feeling the weight of it in your hands.

Anyway, I'm doing well and feeling loved. I'm resting/rested and still want to keep in touch with everyone.

Also, don't tell Erik, but I'll probably end up ordering another British ed. of Arcadia online and having it sent to school. ;-)

Stream of Consciousness

You are my scars. You remind me that the past is real. Within you I see the brokenness of the world. I see how much pain we cause ourselves. I see the way life kicks us around. I see injustice and disgrace and a lack of respect. I see the joy of life fading and a hopelessness beginning to pervade every inch of the world. The tears fall and water the weeds of discord and pain and Blake's poison tree scatters its shining fruit across the earth, spreading its spawn. And we tend it. We water it night and day with fears and tears and smiles and deceitful wiles and I become sick. I see and close my eyes because too many see and do nothing or refuse to see or cannot see at all. The bile rises and I want nothing more to do with this world, with these crazies and I see no way a glittering kingdom of gold and peace can be built on these fragmented ruins of humanity. I see not how God can come out of this. I watch the pain drip down and the blood cover the land. I bow my head and turn to walk away.

And I cannot. I never can. I am constantly called, constantly commanded. There is no rest for the strong because there are too many of the weak. And I am the strong. I am part of the two percent. I see and I watch and I grow more confident in what I can do and what I do do because I can. Because I should. I question everything to the point where my doubt overshadows my heart and my mind and my hands and then I push it all back and plunge into the depths where I have been called.And I swim and I kick and I tear and I bite and I breathe and I gasp because life is suffering and life is pain and there are too many people to look for and to save and to just be with. And there is so much of me that needs to be released that needs to be given that needs to be kept hidden and so much so much so much left to share and I kick and I fight and I bite and I scratch because I don't want anyone near me because I want to do it myself. In the darkness even allies look like enemies. In the darkness the medics touch your wounds and it stings and in rage you roar and get away and fight because you can't tell what they're going to do. There are those who know what they're doing and those who don't and some with finesse and some without and you fight with your friends and for your friends and against your friends and the pain never ends. There will always be so much and too much but it's what's commanded because the kingdom cannot rise out of this filth. Grace gets you far but to truly live what this life was made to be you constantly need to fight because it's like it's raining sludge and you are the windshield wiper. You clear what spaces you can, cutting down what poison trees you see, and sowing instead roses of strength, healing herbs, flowers of peace, and wood for the weapons of war. For we must cultivate and fight. We must be farmers and warriors. And none can do it alone. Men are given talents, some more than others. And we must use them. We may all be lovers and fighters, though our skills may lie more in one area than another. And so we continue living in pain and in suffering to open this world's eyes. To call it to more. Clear a space for the kingdom so it may come and cut down whatever stands in our way.

Dipping My Toe in John Donne

We went over John Donne in Brit Lit today. We talked at length about "The Canonization".

I need more time to think, but I love it. I think I might really like Donne. I am uncomfortable with the idea of a sexual love attributed to God, as in Sonnet 14, but for that particular sonnet, it works. It really gets across the intensity a conversion can have.

Here's the text to "The Canonization". I'll try to write more later.

The Canonization by John Donne

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five grey hairs, or ruin’d fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace,
Or the King’s real, or his stamped face
Contemplate, what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who’s injur’d by my love?
What merchant’s ships have my sighs drown’d?
Who says my tears have overflow’d his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canonized for love;

And thus invoke us: “You, whom reverend love
Made one another’s hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
"A pattern of your love!”

Busy Semester? Well, Michelle Passed her Crown of Over-Committedness to Me...

Let's start by going over the main points of summer:
Mayterm
Return to US: June 20th
Start of summer acting class: June 24th
End of summer acting class: July 30th
Hop on a plane to the Philippines: night of July 30th
Return to US and stay in SJ for two weeks then back to Westmont
And somewhere in the middle of all that I read 4 plays and 17 novels.

And that was my summer. My fall semester?
19 units
-Badminton
-Public Speaking
-Jewish-American Lit
-Brit Lit to 1800
-Romantic Lit
-Writer's Corner
Homework for 1st Week
PS: Read chapters 3 and 6 (quiz on Monday). Find an article and write a 1 minute speech about how it affected you, how you reacted to it, etc.
JAL: Read 60-70 pages of the novel per class session. Also, flip through the Idiot's Guide and pick the chapter you would like to present to the class.
BL: Textbook, read 1-20, 34-35, 35-49, 50-51, 51-54, 55. Also, 20-33, 57-58, 57-70.
RL: Read pages 3-99 in textbook.
WC: Read pages 3-25 in Sourcebook and chapters 1-3 in Sin and Syntax. Also, contact professors and set up times to talk to a freshman class about going to Writer's Corner.

All in all, I was assigned somewhat over 350 pages of reading this week (I don't know the amount of pages for the PS chapters or the S&S chapters).

I'm proud to say that I've finished them all... ON TIME. The good habits I began building this summer have carried over and I'm on fire. Also, the quote that's made most of my friends laugh so far:

"I'm not studying! I'm enjoying myself!"

And it's utterly true. I immerse myself in literature, and even the dense textbook readings that give me history and other such information are interesting to me because it frames the literature that I love. I can't imagine being anything but an English major at this point. And I actually owe a lot of it to Charlie.

Recently, Charlie showed me that one of his googledocs was named "The night I turned Clarmelia into a English major". We then reminisced about the night I helped him with a mythology paper, reading a poem out loud to him and trying to analyze it. He looked at me after I read and told me that when it came to poetry, literature, etc., that I use my "passionate voice". Embarrassed that I was in possession of such a thing, I kind of laughed it off, but then he asked me the question that brought me to where I am today. "How can you not be an English major?"

So I bit the bullet, told my parents that I didn't want to major in Philosophy and began to explore what I could do with an English major. I turned my back on dreams of becoming a lawyer (dreams I'd had since I was 5) and found that my love of literature and people could be combined in teaching.

And as I struggle with all my reading, trying to finish it all on time while actually grasping the material, I find that my present insanity is incredibly happy. I can't imagine doing anything but reading and analyzing literature for the rest of my life. :)

But still, I talked to my mother last night, and even she (who never thinks I'm busy enough) thinks I might be over-committing myself. Because I've pretty much committed to helping out on Sunday mornings at Montecito Covenant with Sunday School for 1st-4th graders. And I've been thinking about applying for babysitting for two hours every Tuesday morning. But my best friend the vampire asked me not to take the job. He offered to send 8 bucks a week instead. Lol. Love that guy.

So I've got a busy semester, but I feel like I'm thriving. I'm loving nearly every minute of it and I think I can handle it. I'll probably be cursing this post halfway through the semester, but for now, I'm riding a wave of literature high. =)

Update on My Summer Reading Quest

So it's the end of summer.... and I failed. I didn't even get through all the books I had checked out. Somewhere in the middle, I lost steam and stopped for a bit. I think it's because I didn't pepper my reading list with some happier material. I was rather depressed for a while after the first several books I read. And when I finally began to continue, the books I ended up reading weren't on my list. So here's what I did get through this summer. Don't worry; I've made note of recommendations and have added them to my life reading list.

Novels (in random order):
Zastrozzi by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Tess of the d'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Middlemarch by George Eliot
War in Heaven by Charles Williams
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Plays (I read these for my acting class this summer):
The Container by Clare Bayley
By the Skin of Our Teeth by Thorton Wilder
Anon(ymous) by Naomi Iizuka
Antigone by Jean Anouilh

So all in all it's been a an okay summer for my reading, though I wish I had buckled down more during that middle month where I didn't really read at all.

Connections. Relationships. Absence makes the...what?

I've never been good at keeping in touch with people. When I feel like I'm leaving one place, I tend to drop everything that reminds me of it, and move on. With my last year at Westmont fast approaching, suddenly, the problem faces me again and this time, conscious of it and a little more grown up, I wonder. I wonder if my pattern will continue or if I can finally break this.

There are a lot of reasons relationships die, fade, break off, etc. Sometimes the people just grow apart. Lifestyles change, personalities change. Sometimes it's betrayal, a broken promise, a forgotten or slipped secret, or a slow eating away at the heart of your connection. It can happen quickly or slowly. Sometimes you don't realize it's over until you wake up one day and find that you're surprised that they pop up in your newsfeed on facebook. You think back and begin to reminisce and realize that somewhere along the road, you lost that person. Sometimes you knew about it, felt the drifting happen little by little, but ignored it. Told yourself you'd do something about it later. Make a phone call. Send an email. Write a letter. You'd make it up to them. And then one day, it's too late and you figure that it's not worth it anymore anyway.

Worse, sometimes you do decide to make it up to them. In a fit of nostalgia and guilt, you write them a letter, you apologize for everything. You promise to be a better friend. You decide to become someone who doesn't break promises. But of course, you fail. You put things off again until there's suddenly nothing you can do but feel awful and stupid because you didn't follow through but you're afraid to apologize again because there's nothing to say. You've failed. What then?

Honestly? I don't know. I'm wondering and waiting and praying and hoping that a solution will appear. That God will give me wisdom and strength to do whatever should be done, even if that means saying goodbye and accepting that not everything gets resolved and living with the metaphorical open sore. There's more than one person I'd like to get back in touch with, but it's hard to know where to even begin. I feel like reaching out now will seem insincere, even without taking into account failure round 2. I expect Taylor Swift's "You're Not Sorry" to be their ringback tone, or at least playing in the background of this movie of life. Of course, underlying questions exist, such as: Am I worth another chance? Is it at all justifiable to put anyone in this situation again?

I don't expect things to be exactly the same. Trust fades because it's directly proportional to the strength of the relationship. I'm no longer someone who can ask for anything. But how do you start over? Can you start over? I don't know. I really don't. But I think I'm going to try. See if I can't build new friendships out of or on top of the crumbles left of old ones. Funny how you can see something that reminds you of someone you haven't spoken to in a while.

And all that leads into: what will happen when I leave Westmont? Will this same sad story repeat itself? Will I leave college and everything I had in it behind when I "move on" with my life? I like to think not. I've grown up since middle school, since high school. I'm more disciplined. I put more effort into my relationships than I ever have before and they've deepened and grown and taught me so much in the last three years. I'm not perfect, and still put off phone calls and emails and such, but I also spent a summer writing letters and seeing people and still managing to balance a class and getting through something like 16 novels.

Maybe it's something that just shouldn't be questioned. Maybe you should just take it and run, run and hold on and see where life takes you but never wonder if you'll accidentally drop a relationship. I'm not making any promises; I'm no good at them. But I will do my best to continue living my life and loving the people in my life, no matter how long they are in it. And do my best to maintain connections. Relationships.

May absence only make our hearts grow fonder.

There's Nothing Wrong with Being Happy

For the last few years I've been struggling with a certain part of my personality (not that I haven't been struggling with other things): the bubbly side.

I am loud and silly and crazy. I dance down the street, sing out loud, make funny faces, and say the most awkward things. Granted, a lot of the time, it's not on purpose, but still. I'm this happy, ridiculous person and while a lot of people like that side of me, it's also made me difficult to take seriously.

In high school, I became conscious of this and decided that this loud, crazy facade was imperative. I annoyed a lot of girls with insane amounts of energy at 7 in the morning. I used a bouncy, happy exterior to hide a lot of the pain and confusion I was feeling. High school was a really difficult time for me. I felt so awkward and alone a lot of the time, even though about halfway though I met some great people who became my friends. I was empty and at times, suicidal. At times when I felt I could be real, I allowed myself to be sad, allowed myself to be "serious".

A certain amount of that followed me to college. You can't wear a mask for that long (since I was 5, as far as I can remember) and not have it become a part of you. At least, I said it was part of a mask. I still say sometimes that being 5 is one of my coping mechanisms, but this summer, being focused on myself and my own growth, being focused on independence, I found this surprising fact: I am a naturally happy person.

There is a lot of pain and darkness in my past. There are a lot of horrible things that have happened to me and a lot of horrible things that I've done. I used to think that being this happy and crazy was a reaction to all those things and a way to hide all of it. This is true in part. But I've come to realize as well, that it is just a part of who I am. I am the girl who likes to dance around when nobody's watching, this dorky, bubbly, ridiculous person who wants the world to be as happy as she feels. When I look into the sky I'm overwhelmed by the beauty of a night sky or the brilliance of the colors in spring. I'm cynical and hard sometimes, but overall, I'm just a happy person...and I think that's okay. There's nothing wrong with seeing the beauty in the world. There's nothing wrong with trusting people and hoping for the best ...in moderation. I know this should go without saying, but I've only recently come to realize that I'm a generally happy person and I'm okay with that.