I'm glad you can't hear my stutter

Writing is one of the only ways I can sort out my thoughts completely. Dad reminds me when I tell him that I spoke up in class, "Did you use your filter?" And one of my friends told me ever so kindly that my "I guess I'm trying to say, it's like, I don't really know"s make my point seem less valid than it is. I wish I could help it but I can't. I already stress myself out trying to gather the right thoughts to make my point to worry about how confidently and concisely I am making said point.

Take tonight, for example. We had no class, just songs and quick little scripture readings interspersed. People shared some that they liked or were reminded of this week (or found at the last minute in the bibles provided) and all said little snippets of wisdom that I didn't really hear. I was Elsewhere, in my mind palace, brooding over a seedling of a thought planted at the beginning of the evening.

In my youth group, we talk about how a lot of the time we aren't "where we need to be" with God, and for some reason this got under my skin tonight. "Where we need to be" makes it sound like we're going somewhere or trying to find something. And God isn't a place or a state of mind to me. There have been times where we're singing, or I see something inspiring, or I've finally transferred that burning thought in me onto paper or this blog, where I feel right with Him. But time passes, and the feeling with it. Life continues on as it has before. Time, so temporary a thing, ticks on, one moment after the next and none together at once, and we age another second and another. So we, being temporal things, treat all things the same way. Sure, we make plans, but usually none too far in the future to account for the changes time will bring. We take moments to ourselves and spend them on others, money bartered for memories, wasted on unimportant matters.

God is not constrained by such a limited thing, however. He Is the Was and Will Be the I Am and holds no regard for petty verb tenses. Here we are, seeking the sense that we are right with Him, treating God as sand that slips between our fingers and must be scooped up again. We think that we are missing His exit on the freeway and need to make some turns to get back where we needed to be this whole time. But God is EveryWhere and EveryWhen. We needn't go back to find Him, He was there the whole time and will be forever and always.
I'm not certain of the exact verse I wanted to say then--had I not been so flustered, I probably would have said it was in Isaiah somewhere--but it's about how he it eternal. He won't leave us, He is a fortress and our strongest protector, etc.. It didn't really matter, I suppose. I embarrass myself so much over nothing...

Anyhow, back to the important stuff.

He won't slip by us. We don't have to look too hard to find Him because of His omnipresence. And it may not feel like we're doing what we need to be in how we grow in Him. But in the journey of growing to meet someone, it won't be instant. You don't set goals in becoming friends (at least, I hope you don't...), you just spend time with them and let time run its course. Patience and an open ear are all that's required to learn a good deal about a person. You build confidence and trust, ask more, do more with them. And before you realize it, they are a big part of your life and you can't imagine it without them. So it is with friendships, so it must be with God.

Maybe this is just me blowing things out of proportion as usual, but whenever I hear somebody tell me what I should be doing, I think they mean for me to do it right now, as soon as possible. Watch this show, draw this picture, start doing this, do this with me, I'll love you forev--GIVE ME A MOMENT TO BREATHe and tell myself that I don't need to and cannot possibly do it all!

(That is how it feels in my head. It's a confusing and frightening place. Don't come visit.)

It's the same thing with spiritual matters, sad to say. Except I'm even sadder when I cannot fulfill the request as soon as possible, because I worry that the state of my soul is in jeopardy and I'm being a bad example, bad preacher's daughter, bad person, all the rest. It's unrealistic and silly and totally unfair to myself, but hey, somebody's gotta do it, may as well be me. Tell me that I should maybe try to reach out more and tell people what I believe or invite them to church and I will quite literally worry myself sick and tearfully beg Him for forgiveness. So many thoughts bound about in my head and many of them are about the things I am not doing well enough. That I'm not where I need to be with school, my family, my friends, my God.

So I am glad that if all else fails, I have that constancy. I'll have protection and comfort no matter what, and grace for when I really do fail. I may not be perfect, but I am tied to perfection itself. And I am not always in that state of mind or feeling that warmth bubbling in my chest, but He is there regardless and He loves me. I may not always openly tell Him that I love Him back, nor He me, but we do. I am not the most devout. Even if I were to denounce all but myself and move to an abbey, I would still think myself inadequate in all likelihood. But this isn't about adequacy, something I struggle to understand even after accepting grace. This is about hearts and the desire to love the light. And that much, I can do. I just need to give myself some time.

I can't believe what I just said online

It's about one in the morning, and I've been working for around three hours on a Tumblr post, my 4,500th one.
If you want to read that monstrosity, here's the link: http://the-once-and-future-novelist.tumblr.com/post/57400341012/the-girl-in-fandom-world-skyvoice

But it's a little bit amazing to me. Even a few months ago, saying something like that would have been unthinkable. I'm worn out, but not shaky or nervous about who may see it or anything. Is this what they call courage? Or is it confidence? It feels a little more like peace. Even if nobody reads it, this certainly helped me because I had the chance to face some tough questions and put some of Dad's sermons into real life.

I feel...awesome.

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.

This is turning into a liveblog of my rampage through YouTube

A lighter, cut video to finish off. It's not a TED Talk, so I didn't title it as such.
And I did all of this while painting my nails.
It is 7:30 and I am really hungry so farewell.






No, I am not missing school! I'd be doing this anyway...

Sometimes I watch TED talks part deux

As a citizen of the internet, I feel that this needs more views. My overarching response is "feasfddsafbdfssad all of the yes are belong to you." And this was 2007, everybody. With the purchase of Tumblr this is becoming relevant again.

Sometimes I watch TED Talks

WARNING: It gets pretty graphic when the slideshow starts.

I can't even state the importance, relevance, coolness, awfulness, and Importance with a capital I of this. So I'll let it tell you.

Finding footnotes in this gray world of ours

I love reading the books in Dad's library. He highlights and leaves footnotes from his past readings, and sometimes I leave imprints of my own on its text. I opened up to The Great Divorce's preface, and it took only one page for things to be very, very relevant. It started with Philosophy Club and ended with an inked-in diagram.


For about five Fridays of this past semester, I attended what is called the Philosophy and Free Thought Club at my high school. It's a student-led group managed mainly by three senior guys and is mostly attended by the magnet students, which really can go without saying. I was interested for two main reasons used by my friends in convincing me to go:

1. It's a really cool club with good discussion and questions not a lot of people are willing to ask.
2. There's free tea and coffee.

They got me in with a debate on the afterlife and why humans believe in a life after death. I always drank both offered beverages, even when there was no sugar or milk.

It was a great club--I was able to get a word in every now and then and listen to a lot of intelligent people say their bits as well. The problem is that, whenever people would inevitably disagree with the discussion leader, he would argue the same point back to them as if opinion justified everything and made him right. One day he grilled me for my "black and white" way of thinking. I tried to explain my logic that if there was no absolute black or white, how could anything be definite? Without opposing ends of a spectrum there can be no gray in the first place.

This also came up in a personal conversation with a friend. She asked me suddenly, "What color is the world?"

I, being the literal thinker I am, replied, "Well, the world is blue and green and brown and white an--"

"Gray."

"Gray?"

"There is no good or evil, only gray."

This took me by surprise. She had her own faith. Different from mine, but still. Don't most religions abide to the idea that there is good and evil in the world? For if there wasn't, how could there be a right or wrong way to go? How could there be anything but the sameness of character and behavior? 

"Yes," I agreed, "the world is gray. It looks that way from a distance. But I think that it's like a printed magazine, where if you look close enough, you can see the individual spots of black and white that all come together to form this gray."

It may not have been said that calmly and eloquently, but let's pretend, shall we?

And tonight, after snatching another Lewis book from my father's massive library, I read into it and find this quote:

"[when speaking of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell] The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable 'either-or'; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and nearer and meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good." C. S. "Jack" Lewis, The Great Divorce.

Next to the road analogy Dad had drawn a set of lines all converging in the center. (Or is it centre?) Below it in quotes was a common phrase people who support all religions use, "all roads lead to God." What I never realized was that, to a certain extent, I may be making that assumption as well.

Christianity is the only religion I have ever known. I even go to the same sect. Church of Christ, whole life long, even in my dear mother's womb. I know what I believe and intend to grow within that belief in this time of waiting for the next chapter of my life. But I cannot assume that everyone else feels so deeply grounded when they go to their place of worship. All of my peers are different--I have one guy over here who will profess his non-belief in any god, but loves reading Lewis. I have another one who wants everything to be secular despite having a belief system, or at least a sense of one. I have the girl who will insist that nobody curse in her presence because of her faith--I admire her a lot. And then there is me. Nobody is surprised when they learn I'm Christian, at least. But the few times where I work up the ability to talk about my religion it's shot down rather quickly and openly criticized, and all I can do is say, "Well..." Maybe I lack courage, or maybe it's the situations I put myself into, but in comparison to many people I know, I think I feel fairly secure and sure of myself. And coming from me, a young teenage girl living in an era where the average psychiatric patient in the 1950's had less stress than I have now, that's saying something.

I cannot say for certain what will happen in the coming years. Not for my family, my friends, least of all me. But what I do know is that I have people I can count on in the crow's nest. I have the capability to be in the crow's nest for other people too, on certain things. And I know that I have deep passions about the world and the increasingly different branches of it, and that words are both my healer and my sword. I can turn to words I trust to heal and seek guidance, and use them to forge words of my own. A scythe to reap even more, a saber to cut through the dense undergrowth and reach sunlight, a rapier if necessary, or to heal the other lost ones.

On a different note, I also know that I really appreciate Jack's use of the semicolon.

I want to be good

First, read this post (and leave the song playing in another tab if you so wish).

Done reading?

I want to be a good musician. That's about all I can be with my level of skill. I don't want to be unaccessible or better than everyone else. I'm in actuality not that talented. I'm just playing because it's fun, I enjoy it, and I like paying homage to artists I enjoy by covering their songs. What people don't seem to understand when they see my art or read my stuff or hear me play is that I could go to college for art and still hear the same thing--"I'll never be as good as you." Sure you will! I strongly believe that anything can be taught or picked up if one so desires. But this comparing to someone else you know is silly. The most accomplished artist in the world and the six-year-old with a crayon both create for the same reason. They are compelled to express a viewpoint or an idea bumping around in the confines of their brain and have the means to do so. There really is nothing else to it. It's only when comparisons and feelings of inadequacy enter the picture that things get complicated.

Artists learn to get very good at selective hearing. If the criticism they receive is from someone who views art as "performance-based instruction" to put it in the terms of a poster that depressed me in an elementary school art room, or someone who really doesn't know better and just likes to point out things they find unpleasing to the eye, it goes in and out. That painting/drawing/sculpture/story/song wasn't meant to be pleasing to people. It was meant to express joy or frustration or greif or this burning, aching desire to stand up on a soapbox for a moment and say something of value to the artist. Art is an appeal to the soul.

So I don't need to be skilled. I don't need to blow people away with my words. The truth, even if spoken thousands of times in thousands of simple and complicated ways, will always be well-received. And if I do wind up blowing somebody away, all I hope is that they heard me, and for a moment, they saw me for who I was and were not afraid.
 

Conversation of the day

A dear friend: [When speaking about a challenge from another friend] Indeed, but it is unbefitting of a man to challenge a woman in sexist Victorian and Edwardian societies, as well as laws of etiquette!

Me: Well, my beloved friend, you are under a false assumption if you believe me to be a conventional woman.

List of things to remember

1. Stop trying to copy other artists'/authors'/musicians' styles and start creating your own, borrowing concepts and ideas from a little bit of everywhere. You have the potential to appear somewhat unique thanks to your wide pool of interests; take advantage of that!
2. That Spanish II assignment is due next week on Monday.
3. You don't have to experience everything you hear about. It's ok if you don't find the time to immerse yourself in yet another show or book or something. Cut yourself some slack.
4. Cut yourself some slack.
5. You have some Government vocabulary to study.
6. Cut yourself some slack (but not too much).
7. You think a lot. That's ok. But it's not ok to think yourself into headaches and states of immobile depression. So don't.
8. Your life is a project, yes. But it's not due tomorrow. It's due when you die. So take it slow if need be.
9. You have a four day weekend next week, so be sure to read Crazy Love like you've been wanting to.
10. You have excellent friends who appreciate you and your strange mannerisms. They try to make you blush, they poke fun at you for using big words and all that, but that's because they love you and feel comfortable enough with you to say those things. So reciprocate.
11. Think out loud, but only when you have a sympathetic audience. It's easier to avoid confusion that way.
12. You need to get enough sleep. It's important for both your physical and mental health.
13. Make plans for the future, but expect them to change.
14. If you want to do something unusual or different, go ahead. People won't actually care that much if you decide to wear or act different for a day.
15. And finally, you are a beautiful mess.

Attempt at freeform poetry número uno

She has become infatuated
with late mornings
and sunlight across faces
and the mysterious idea of not sleeping alone
the ghostly arm about her waist
the moments in which people are most human
(yawns
sighs
stretches
grunts
the five seconds of honest light)
the way hands look
curled around guitars
and other hands

and him--

the prayer that he will see her
the hoping that he will not and
the longing ache with no name.