Musings at 10,000 feet

Written on my iPod.


Airplanes are amazing.
When I'm flying in one, I always try for a window seat so I can watch the plane leave the ground. Even when I'm not by the window, often I feel carefully to determine exactly when the roaring engines overcome gravity and the wheels lift from the pavement. And as the smudged window reveals more and more of the town below, whether small or large, smoggy and sprawling or shrouded in the shadow of the mountains behind it. As suspended billows of water take place of ant-like cars and minuscule steeples of churches, I am struck by the fervency of the human race. We are constantly seeking something in everything we do. Tenacity is an inherited trait of God's, I suppose. There is an intensity to everything, in the bigness of small things and the smallness of big things. And we are never totally satisfied with it all, craving something more substantial. It's like a part of us knows that we are mere ghosts.
It 's black outside and I know not where we are or if we're landing soon. But I know that I am doing something previously impossible not too long ago, and that I am still able to forget that I am ten thousand feet above the ground. Yet the plane lurches on the wind, and I am gripped by a primal terror that itches for solid earth and not the lurching carpet below my heels.
Hold on, there's a brilliant sunset out there. All that darkness was worth it!
My camera isn't very good. Psh. Oh well. I can see the city lights below. Thousands of people are out in the neon cacophony, having reckless fun and trying to get home and sleeping alone when they ought not be. They are seeking something and some of them will never find it. I may never find it. But I will get glimpses of it, reminders of what I was created to be. What we all were created to be. And I will hold onto those moments that awe me. The sunsets above the horizon, the faces of strangers meeting my eyes with that terrifying curiosity, an excellent story that moves me to tears and clutches my throat from within. I am both hugely tiny and minutely massive because of the goodness in me, but I am nothing more than a girl with a spotty face and wind blown hair because of the bad. I am between world much of the time, but I am going home to people who love me and show me parts of themselves that not everyone can see. And I am thankful.

TED Talks should come in threes

It's a long one, and there's many jokes inserted, and there's a long ramble or two, but he's very interesting and intelligent. I want to read one of these books.

I would like to meet this lady

So she's a little unusual. That's ok. She is highly insightful in the creative industry which I may want to enter if the Fates allow. Take her, and her idea, with a grain of salt.

Revenge of the TED Talks

This is delightful. He's very appealing, crisp speech and funny little coughing laugh. And he arouses a pertinent point. We are being educated like machines, but the gears are rusting. When I go to college for real and not for a short week, I will need to spend more time there than ever before to get a well-paying, parent-approved job. It's entirely likely that I will have to come back home, or that some of my older friends will come back home for a while because we simply can't enter this industrial-styled workforce as fast as we used to. Living as an artist should be easier than ever before, especially if we follow the philosophy of one musician whose Talk I will post in a moment. So why not encourage artistry? With all of the time we theoretically have thanks to our time consuming time saving technology, it should be plausible to live as a person built to create and evoke something inexplicable in others. There is a whole 90% of the human brain nobody can understand or map out. So let's allow ourselves to enter that realm and find soething so much greater than ourselves!
Creative living for the win!!

"We will all be stories someday"

I spend a lot of my time in stories. Thinking about created stories, dreaming up stories of my own, writing continuations or filling in gaps of stories I love. Tales take up much of my time.

Humans live and breathe stories because we love them. We want a good story. When we meet people we haven't seen for a while, we tell them stories. For example, my family would tell the same stories four or five times the past few weeks because we were catching up with relatives, and we'd listen to their stories as well. It's simply how we communicate. Sometimes we tell our own stories, sometimes we tell another person's stories, and sometimes we embellish a little bit to make the story sound better.

Stories also follow a similar pattern each time because of other reasons as well, reasons that go beyond this physical world and into our very makeup--and the ones who did the making. Ever notice that? When stories don't have an ending it enrages people because we crave closure. When there isn't one big final battle, one scene where good triumphs over evil, we start flipping tables because that's not what was supposed to happen! We don't want that to be how it all ends for us.

(Read Epic; it explains all of this in more detail.)

And what we forget is that we are living in our own stories composed of smaller scenes that are in themselves stories that all come together in a big smooshy story casserole to form the story we know as History. And even History isn't the biggest story of them all!

And we serve as minor characters in other people's lives, as they serve in ours. They may only be there for a moment, but still they exist, and have their own massively complicated story that we may never know in its entirety.

(You should hear how fast I'm typing! I get so excited talking about this!!)

Maybe I'm thinking about this because of my upcoming Worldview class on Epic. Or maybe it's because I'm seeing all the stories that created my family. Maybe I'm thinking about this because I'm wondering if I'll remember these parts of my story very clearly later on. Or maybe I'm just excited for the stories I'm staring to create on my own and hoping they'll turn out the way they are meant to be. I don't really know.

Stories!!

That quote up there, the title? That's a quote from the movie version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I cried. Oh, how I cried. Because Charlie's story was so very sad, and it could have ended horribly. But it didn't. And he looks at the happy old photographs and the people on the street and his best friends and himself and he knows that they are all living stories. And they cannot determine everything in how the story goes, but they can decide whether or not to take the situation handed them and work with it or let it end badly. And he chose to learn from his experiences, good and bad, and grab onto those moments where everything is understandable. Those infinite moments where there is no past or future to weigh anything down are what he will live for. Those moments where he can do anything.

Ahem.

Sorry about that. You know me, I'll go off sometimes on a long ramble...I'm a ramblebug. My wings are powered by thoughts. Bzzzzz.

Let's see how far I've come--2011 to 2013

Here's what my good art used to look like.

I shudder to see it now. But I do like the flowy hair on the bespectacled young male whose name I have forgotten. Kinda want to play with it...
Hey, I draw what I enjoy.

Here is what a quick sketch looks like now.

It took me 15-20 minutes. I still want some professional training, i.e., an art class for portraits or the like, but nonetheless I do see an improvement. I just recently obtained a set of watercolor pencils. Here is my experimentation with 100% dry:

Oh no, it's hung sideways...is that better or worse than upside-down?

Here we go, a quaint farmhouse sunset. The weather will be lovely tomorrow in this domestic scene.
(I promise, it looks better in person. All the more reason to come see my future galleries, because the scanned versions just...aren't the same.)

My humans have taken on a more humanish quality, but big noses and pronounced features keep them cartoonish enough to count as semi-realistic. Oh, how I long for anatomy skills like Miss Burge's, or a fun originality like Miss Meago's, but alas! I am more often than not clearly a novice and self-taught. Still, progress heartens me, and though paging through my old sketchbooks is at times painful, I am encouraged by how far I have come, and hopeful as for where I am to go next.

*~*~*~*

Shout-out to all of my friends: I am sorry that I am not always in cell phone range, and/or that I am terrible at staying in contact. But vacations are restorative times for me, where the pressure to always keep in touch in a twenty-first century timely fashion is lifted. If left to my own devices, I would do nothing but write letters to you personally and make posts on this blog and my Tumblog to show that I am indeed alive and kicking. Not many of you read this. In fact, I only know of one...but nonetheless I am communicating with you all here. Huh. I make very little sense sometimes. But with many companions on all corners of the internet and many ways to commune, I cannot possibly make sense. My head is spinning. I belong in another century. Adequacy in technology does not mean love for it. What I love about the internet is not its speed nor its silent pressure on my subconscious, it is the ability to access things and return to them later if I wish to do so. When romanticized in my head, it's like a massive library with new books always coming in. One can get lost so easily. I have buried myself in it and never wish to resurface.

I am sorry. The cost of my companionship is alternating silences and aching monologues. Signing out for the night.
Day. It's late evening but the sun is out.
Gah.

Thoughts from Places: Big Timber, MT

The first leg of my epic three-week separation from my own bed is nearly complete. My family, being the only Georgia branch of the combined married conglomerate, must take great pains to meet with our Oklahoma and Montana branches involving planes and automobiles, but unfortunately, trains are too costly to be included. 'Tis a pity, as trains are the way an independent teenaged girl ought to take trips, like Pollyanna. Or Katniss Everdeen.
But moving back to reality for just a moment: Allow me to meticulously break down the details of our trip, including its preparation but eliminating the irrelevant bits.

Preparations and Arrival
The packing of this excursion involved a very late Saturday night of riddling and fiddling and stuffing things into tiny places. With baggage fees being so very high and our needs as capitalistic
Americans away from our large, storage-filled house (that needs to redo its kitchen cabinets and fix up the master bath, according to its Mistress) so very great, packing involved leaving one suitcase in one place and taking the others. Three of our brave company ventured ahead on Sunday, my hair still damp from the baptistery. Journeying for a combined total of one day, we stopped for lunch on my mother's side of the family and ended the day on my father's. It's a dizzying experience. My brain tricked itself into thinking it was fine and tried to get some reading done, but alas, 'twas not to be.

All of the Fish Are Hiding from Us
The next two days were spent as an incomplete squadron as we awaited our fourth member to complete her duties and rejoin us. Fortunately, they were not dull, only somewhat frustrating. On an expedition to the top of the world--or as close as you can get around here--we prepared ourselves to come home hauling skinny fish in our creels once I'd learned how to clean them and nicked my fingers on hooks and knives. Gardiner Lake in the Beartooth Mountains often has them in abundance. But oddly, after climbing up ten thousand feet and slightly down in forty-two degrees of thin air and wind, there wasn't a bite. It was stark and beautiful as ever, though. There's a grandness that no photograph can grab nicely enough, at least not with the camera at our disposal. It seems, whenever we venture up and in, that the valley is our own, and devoid of others hiking it. The snow is not soiled by any footprints but our own. The tiny alpine flowers sway in the wind that is funneled by the high peaks to us alone. This isn't true forever, of course, but I'll gladly share it with the student we met who had some foxes tagged with GPS collars. He even had the scruffy stubble you need to qualify as somebody whom I would like to meet.
My father can tell you a lot about this state. He seems to know so well the places and things he loves best. Though Gardiner is technically in Wyoming, the whole range seems to lie between borders. In some places, three states are visible at once, but they all connect seamlessly and don't look any different from the other. For a moment, one can trick themselves into thinking that the development happening miles away hasn't happened yet. They are timeless, those mountains. In their great height and tranquility, it's easy to forget the rest of the world. I traded that for my father's voice breaking the silence every now and then. That, and the roll of impossibly paved highway below the truck. Our vantage point and quiet crackle of the old country radio station were better than any trout.

The Crew Is Completed
Mother arrived exhausted and didn't get used to the time change for days. It's tough on her every year. And the long drives to get everywhere don't perk us up at all. Six hours it took to travel from Big Timber to Swan Lake near Glacier Park. It's just below Alberta and can't get much more beautiful if it tried. The lake felt private despite the houses all round it. It was incredibly peaceful. Mountains framed the slate-gray waters, and the air was lightly fragranced with pine. The only complaints seemed to be about the iciness of the water and the multitudes of caterpillars underfoot. In the streets it's as if the caterpillar French Revolution is taking place, with the barricades of Paris broken and the bodies of the fallen strewn about. But that's only on the bill when we produce and direct my action-adventure-romance flick with Horatio and Carmela the caterpillars. They meet in Monte Carlo in an internet café. There's a lot of sports cars and a kidnapping ring involved. Release date is set for next May.
As I grew acquainted with some relatives more unfamiliar to me, my mind wandered to home and how it compares. There's a familiarity in attitudes and appearances. It was nice to see so many curly-haired, slightly sarcastic people who allow for large pauses in conversations while everyone thinks of something to say next. But there are some differences as well, like in noses. I don't have Italian nose that my dad, grandma, and many of my other relatives have. And the Southern vs. Northern accents are fun for a linguistics nut like me. Bahg and bayg is enough to send Mom and I into a fit of giggles. It's just too much fun finding things that natives don't! Lest I forget myself (which I often do), I'll end up saying abut rather than about.

The Next Best Thing to Going To the Alps
That's what I'm going to call Glacier for two reasons: one, it's mountainous and absolutely stunning; two, there are so many accents there it's enough to drive a girl batty.
We didn't see any mountain goats, which made me a little sad. But we did see wide expanses of craggy mountain and snowy peak and deep valley on a precarious stretch of road called Going To The Sun. It was lovely, but if I was completely honest, I feel that the desolate beauty of the Beartooth suits my taste a little more. However, I would most certainly return, as Dad plans to, because the lodge that we visited was so kind as to put in a reading room. Perhaps next year we can also get a rowboat.
And oh, the accents. So many, and so many languages, too. I would love to be a ranger and sign people into the park just so I could ask them where they were from. We met some Floridians with familiar accents, but that was just the start. I heard some thick Chinese? Korean? I'm scared to guess...let's just say Asian accents so I'm not incorrect. And I caught a snippet of a British accent but I couldn't find its owner which made me mad. And on the way to St. Mary's for lunch I heard a conversation in Russian and fangirled on the inside because I love that language for some reason. I blame Regina Spektor. And I heard some French? I think? Gah, it's hard to tell when I can't hide behind anonymity and a notebook in a café. And Canadians. Canadians everywhere. As far as the eye can see. I want to join them, with their wooly clothes and assumed politeness. Someday...

Conclusion
I love this place deeply. And as I drive through its vast openness, I think about our country and what it was built upon. Disconnected from free wifi and the news, I am reminded of a time when the West was intimidating and empty, as I ride through its intimidating emptiness. I am reminded of a time when things looked bleak, but the dream still thrived. And I came to the conclusion that cynicism comes with prosperity. When we have determined that things are good as they are, we fight to never let things change. But for others, who are ready to try anything, that would only keep them forever trapped in their despair. "Despair" in the richest, most comfortable people in the world. But happiness does not keep itself trapped in the trappings of capitalism and development. It can be found in anyone who knows what the truly important things are, and can appreciate where they are in history. If government grows more powerful, so be it. If it grows less powerful, so be it. If we lose everything, so be it. If we are no longer the best there is, so be it. I, at least, will try to remember what is truly important, and see that history is happening now and I was there for it. And that is so cool.

And now I, who got within forty miles of a residence of half of the Vlogbrothers, will sign off with this: DFTBA. Granny, I will see you on Thursday.