Ready, Set, BREAK

And just like that, as sure as the sun rises over the east and sets in the golden melted pools of western skies, I am done.  

One semester of grad school annihilated, two more to go.

Now on to one month of blessed rest.

Truth be told, I'm pretty proud of how this last semester passed.  Yes, moving here has been hard, and yes, I still had more annoying student habits than I wanted, but for the most part I was able to defeat the worst of my under-achieving demons.  True, my nasty procrastination habit is not completely gone. But I did kick it into submission about eighty percent of the time (the less said about that other twenty percent, the better).  Most importantly, I was able to finish finals with less stress and in a more timely fashion than ever before.  No last minute cramming for me this semester!  As an undergrad, I would usually frantically write my papers the morning they were due, finishing them with fifteen minutes to run to campus, print, and hand them in.  I am not lying when I say I was a lazy student.

So this is a pretty big deal.

This semester, every paper was finished at least by the night before class, and sometimes with a wider margin than that.  Let's check the timer and see how much time I granted myself, shall we?

Principles and Techniques of Journalism: 14.5 hours

Journalism Research: 18 hours

Arts Criticism: 29.5 hours

Media Law and Ethics: 66 hours

Might not seem like much, but to me that's solid progress.  Actual growth.  So eat that, all those people who stood up to violence or proved the Higgs boson particle or what have you.  I decreased my procrastination!  Victory is mine!

And now I can curl up and spend my break doing all those things I've wanted to do for weeks but have been delaying in favor of doing my work.  So over the next month, I'll be....

Reading these books:

Watching these TV shows:

And these movies:

And writing more on here (shameless plugging):

LIGHTBOX HEROES, a blog dedicated to reviewing new network TV shows.
Check us out at: lightboxheroes.weebly.com

I have a new project coming up.  Stay tuned.

And last but not least, doing LOTS of this:

Garfield is my spirit animal

Have a wonderful holiday season, dear world.  Enjoy the rest of this year.  I know I will.

Same As It Ever Was

So, yesterday was fun.  If the looming terror and guilt about this wretched place and my wretched reasons for being here hitting me in one fell swoop can be termed as fun.

The worst of it happened right before church, and I felt so bad for the Primary class I teach.  I wonder if those five-year-old boys noticed their teacher staring out the window in a catatonic state.   I can imagine it now: "Hey, Sister McCarrey, are you going to teach us about not taking the name of the Lord in vain?"  "There is no hope or justice in this world, little ones.  Only darkness and loneliness forever.  So give up now, because nothing good will ever happen to you, and the more you work for something the worse your life will be.  Leave me to my solitude, small creatures."

But in all honesty, I hit a wall yesterday.  I've basically decided where I want to end up, and what I want to be doing, and how to get there.  And now that I see a clearer picture of my future, a picture un-tinged by romanticized filters, I just want it NOW.  Don't care how.  Just now.  Except that's impossible.  The soonest I can get what I want is in a year.  That makes the youngest child in me want to scream and kick my feet (acceptable behavior?  I'm still weighing my options...).

But last night, after the weight of it all had dissolved into exhaustion and a tears-induced headache, I remembered something.  I remembered David Byrne.




I have listened to this song an embarrassing amount of times since last night.

It struck something.  This knot of frustration and anger that had been twisting inside of me just snapped.  TWANG.  Gone.

There's this moment, when Byrne is questioning different things, when he throws his fists in the air, shouting:

"You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong? 

You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?

Chills.  It's as if my entire experience was wrapped up in twenty-one words.  And suddenly, I was not alone.  This experience was not unique. Logically, I knew that.  I mean, it makes sense.  Everyone has difficulties, everyone has doubts. People have done this before.  And so will I.  And I know that.

But it felt good to have Talking Heads remind me of that.  It felt good to listen to David Byrne describing the slip underwater.  Joining the current, not to drown but to enter the constant stream and flow of humanity.  To know that this too will pass.

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down 

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground 

Into the blue again, after the money's gone 

Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground 

Into the blue again, into silent water 

Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground 

Letting the days go by, into silent water 

Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground 

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was 

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was 

Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us 

Time isn't holding us, time doesn't hold you back 

Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us 

Time isn't holding us... 

Letting the days go by, letting the days go by, letting the days go by, once in a lifetime  

Letting the days go by, letting the days go by, letting the days go by, once in a lifetime

2007 Freshman

I recently wrote a personal essay for one of my classes.  What originally started as a glimpse into strange way the LDS church views chastity (launching from an awkward canoe metaphor my first college bishop gave me) soon morphed into a short examination of how I first started to accept my body.  My body, which I actively hated throughout jr. high and high school.  It made me wonder if there really is any way to talk about body hate, body acceptance, and the role that romantic attention  plays in that without sounding like an angsty teenage girl.  Though I suppose, considering the name of this blog, angst would be appropriate.

Anyway, here it is.  I'm considering making this a series.  As Taylor rightly pointed out when he read this, there is so much more between that moment and the place I am now.  I actually do want to explore that in the future.  We'll see if I ever have time (or the lack of pride) to talk about those things.

                

Freshman year my roommate Allison, the adorable one with silky golden curls, attracted guys like butterflies over a corpse.  That summer she chose to date David, a ballroom dancer five years her senior.  At 23, he was almost disgustingly ancient.  He smelled too nice, dressed too well, and spiked his hair too perfectly.  I didn’t trust him.  One night Allison burst in to proudly show us the five finger-shaped bruises on her arm, trophies of a vigorous make-out session in the bushes below our apartment door.  I gaped at the marks, half-fascinated, half-confused.

As for me, I went on one date that summer, with my friend Derek.  It was a set-up, a scheme to help our friend Charlene, who had never been on a date.  We all went bowling.  We ate pizza.  I hugged him at the door—a step up from the high school dances of yore, where guys were lucky to get a high-five.  Other than that, I stayed aloof from boys.  I took the freedom of the summer for granted, playing with these roommates who were the first girls to accept me, wearing sweatpants to class and staying up late.

               

I started wearing T-shirts.

My button-up blouses were donated to thrift shops.  Gone were those shapeless bags meant to hide away my curves.  The bulge of my stomach and the more obvious bulges of my breasts had been covered by pastel sacks bought at mom-stores like Lane Bryant and Ann Taylor.  I could not be as pure and unsexed as the sticks I went to high school with, so my only choice was to mask my disgustingly womanly body.  But that mindset disappeared in college, where my roommates were tall, big-boned, short, fat, muscular, and yet still had gentlemen callers.  If they could show themselves, so could I.

That fall, after the girl group of summer had left me in the dust, I sat in a lonely apartment with two strangers.  They were Idaho beauty queens, the type that kept tiaras in their closet and left the apartment shrouded in the stink of cheap hair spray.  Sometimes they would don their sashes and model in the living room, parading about for the slew of boys that plagued our couches, man-children with popped collars, too much cologne, and pillows placed oh-so-precisely over their crotches.

I needed to get away from the loneliness, and found myself escaping home.  I would beg rides back to Davis County, or take the two-hour bus ride to my front door.  Weekends would be spent with my best friend Andy, driving around listening to music and talking.  I still wore T-shirts.  He wore them too.

               

One October night we sat on the lawn outside the church building by Main Street, looking up at my old friend Orion, debating about the movies that meant something to us.  The stars were bright.  I shivered.  The grass was a dusky silver in the midnight light.

               

“It might be warmer if we were closer together,” Andy said.

               

I looked at him, my lovely friend with the red afro and the freckled arms. My friend, whose typed-out words through desolate college nights had kept me going.  He looked at me.  Not my clothes, not my skin, not the carefully hidden curves.  I scooted towards him.  I was still shivering, but this time from excitement, from disbelief.  He merely took that as a cue to hold me tighter.

               

Two weeks later, we sat on his parent’s couch, tracing each other’s arms with our fingertips.  He encircled my wrist with his fingers, the middle and thumb over-lapping.  His hands were a mass of white skin and brown freckles, giant, rough, and warm.

               

“Your wrists.  They’re so small.”

               

He hesitantly lifted my wrist and kissed it.

               

I looked at my wrist.  It was bare.  It was warm and white, bisected with the thinnest blue lines of veins.  For the first time, I thought my body was beautiful.

Floating in the Dark, Temporary Scars

Clearly, I'm not always full of sunshine and rainbows about my move back east.

But Boston has one thing.

Nearly every night when I walk home in the oppressive dark, I look up.

And there, beyond the tree-lined edges of my view, are stars.

After almost two years without, stars are a welcome presence.  I've missed my friend Orion, and Cassiopeia's regal throne.  I see the chained Andromeda, and I feel free.

More than a Feeling

When Taylor and I were preparing to come to Boston, it was with the giddy excitement of children waiting for Christmas.  Look at all those brick buildings!  Look at how palpable the history is!  Look at the leaves, the seasons, the air, that crisp East Coast feeling we've created from books and songs and movies!

When we got to Boston, that blown-glass image shattered fairly quickly.  The apartment full of light and hope wasn't ready for us when we got there, and instead we were greeted with paint cans and drop cloths and an infestation of crickets.  We slept on an air mattress, dying in the heat, lost and confused in a city that was much further from our dream than we had realized.

That was two months ago, and while we've gotten our bearings a little, it's come at a cost.  The autumnal spirit here is as beautiful as we imagined, but we can't enjoy it.  School started quickly and fiercely, and my life has become a long line of T rides to the COM building and back to the little house in the suburbs, removed from the bustling, shining city of promise.  Taylor's life I can only imagine, after spending a month in a ridiculously oppressive work environment, and now returned to long, empty days in a long, empty apartment.

There are days where I love Boston.  Where I look at my "Why I Like it Here" list and feel calm, remembering the large rocks at my T station, the smushed, Irish-looking faces of Southies on the street, the bookstores and cobblestones and abundance of graveyards Downtown and in Cambridge, the trees that create tunnels of orange and red.

But far more often are the days when I think I won't ever stop hating myself for bringing us here.

Education is a terribly selfish thing.  When I was doing my undergrad, I used my selfishness like a badge of honor.  I would look at all those poor little engaged girls I knew with pity.  They were squandering a prime opportunity in their life. When else would you have an excuse to just be concerned with yourself?  When else can a person be wholly self-absorbed in their own learning and growth?

When I decided to go back to school, it was after I'd gotten married and had halfway tried on a career for size.  It seemed like the time to do this.  I had always wanted a masters, I felt like I had to give this writing thing a try, and it was now or never.  Taylor was more supportive than I could imagine, pushing me to make this decision for me and for me alone, assuring me that he would follow me anywhere and that our family would flourish wherever I chose to go.

I don't think he knew what that was implying.  I don't think either of us did.

He couldn't have seen the gut-wrenching loneliness that would occur.  While we knew moving was hard--the first time we moved to Seattle almost destroyed us--I think we thought we had grown.  We had each other now.  We knew how to work as a team.  We had qualifications and life would happen quickly.   Ha.  How naive.

Instead, I found myself regressing into the selfishness of schooling.  This grad school experience was a chance to redeem myself as a student.  It was a chance to finally push myself, to stop being lazy and see what happens when I exhaust all my potential.  Even though I'm studenting better than ever, the extreme soul-crushing guilt that I inflict upon myself when I don't live up to the impossible standard I'm aiming for is incredibly destructive.  It leads to a weariness and disappointment I couldn't have foreseen. And while I'm concentrating on how to school better, I can't ignore the fact that the house is in disarray, that I'm cooking dinner less, that I'm not being as caring and tender with Taylor's emotional needs.

Which makes me feel even worse.  Thinking about what I've done to Taylor.  I can't help but think about what life would be like if we stayed in Seattle.  Seattle, the gloomy, wonderful jewel of a city that we idiotically couldn't get away from fast enough.  If we were in Seattle right now, I would be teaching.  And I would probably be loving it.  If we were in Seattle, Taylor would have a job.  He'd be able to practice, he'd have spent the past two months making money and ticking off licensure hours, each week coming closer to the dream he's harbored.

Instead, I took us away from financial and job security, and dragged us across the country, to a place that might be breaking us.  That's a whole ton of guilt to be living with.  The dream of Boston has shattered, and now I'm wondering how to make the pieces fit together again.

Raging Writers

I am an incredibly spiteful person.  This might come as a shock (or not), but I'm stubborn.  Blame the Scot in me.

Thanks to this stubbornness, I've rage begun books several times.  I read The Fountainhead in high school just to beat one of my friends.  I knew full well that I hated the World According to Ayn Rand, but my friend Jeff was a true believer in Randism.  I read the book, finished it before him, and delighted in not only ruining plot points but also in ripping apart their flawed logic.

So yes.  I'm the most kind and benevolent person ever, obviously.

In college, I had to read Persuasion not once, but twice.  The first time I was still young and trying to do well in school.  The second time I had to read it because it was the only book we read all semester.  Really.  I've said it before, but I'll say it again--Persuasion is neither weighty nor interesting enough to study for four months straight.

Clearly, I'm no stranger to the unwilling reading.  I've had the experience of reading through sweat and willpower, forcing my way through a book despite repeated throwings of it across the room (aside from the mentioned offenders, Paradise and Herland can join this club).  But last night, for the first time I can remember, I rage quit a book.  I got through the first forty pages, I overlooked several instances of concern, but after a while it was just not worth my time.  So, officially entering the Not Worth My Brain Space arena, I present Hillary Jordan and her novel, When She Woke.

This book violated several of my cardinal sins.  It was unoriginal.  The writing was eye-gougingly awful.  She had no faith in her readers to make connections.  And it's dystopian, anti-religious themes were handled so overtly that they made a mockery of the genre.

When She Woke reads like a futuristic The Scarlet Letter.  Instead of having a baby out of wedlock, Hannah Pryce has an abortion.  In doing such, she commits the crimes of murder and premarital sex, actions that are among the highest of misdemeanors in a world where church and state have become synonymous.  Her punishment is having her skin dyed red, marking her as an abortionist murderer in an intolerant religious community.  She struggles to adjust to her new life, all the while pining after the married father of her child, pastor Aiden Dale.

First off, I do love a nice literary homage.  But I do not love being bludgeoned with a reference.  Doesn't Hannah Pryce look and sound a lot like Hester Prynne?  And Aiden Dale...hmm, that couldn't be a nod to Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, now could it?  Listen.  I'm all for being inspired by another work, and I'm all for wanting to pay tribute to it.  But there comes a point where laziness comes into play, and if a writer is so overtly naming characters and building situations around another novel, at some point they lose control  over their own writing.  The characters aren't theirs, and so the power the writer has over them is limited, making the text feel false and forced.

And a story that is limited by another work gets tedious.  Jordan was doomed from the start.  But it's as if she knew that she couldn't write a nuanced work, so she just threw up her hands and went for the most overt and simplistic storytelling possible.  Why let a reader guess character motivation when it can be bludgeoned over their head?  And let's not stop when the reader's soul is bleeding from the lack of subtlety.  Subtlety is hard.  It's so much easier to spell out actions and thoughts 20-40 times a page.  Besides, readers won't catch on to the depth of the story and how inspired it is unless there are quotes from Hawthorne and multiple references to how unwavering and judgmental the society is.

Which brings us to the religious commentary in the novel.  Even though I am a Christian, I am (gasp!) perfectly OK reading novels that criticize Christian society.  I'm a complete dystopian junkie, and that genre often uses a conservative, overly vigilant religious government as the instigator for loss of freedom.  And I get it.  On some level, I even agree with that ruling.  It's a gentle balance believing in a greater power and wanting to share it, versus believing in one chosen path and thinking that everyone, whether believer or not, needs to walk that way.  The prevalence of judgment is a danger when religion's focus goes from worship to the need to force standards on the populace.  And I believe that type of behavior isn't inherent in religion, but is a distinctly human trait.  People are fallible.  We are weak.  And in my mind, the best dystopian books point out those features.  The desire of man to want power.  Whether humanity is born good, or if goodness is a conscious choice.  The focus on the nature of man, not the nature of God, makes for a more interesting story.

And that is where When She Woke loses me.  The big bad is not a person, but is the Christian institution.  Jordan writes like a spurned lover, the book acting as a reactionary diatribe against religion as a whole.  I kept waiting for it to gain some shades of gray, waiting for the overblown preacher man to appear and take on the questionable (but enthralling) shades of religious fascism.  But no.  There was no hint towards nuance in the character of man.  It was the constant criticism of faith.  A constant stream of insistence that belief in God equals disdain for mankind and hatred in your heart.  Because clearly, the number one commandment is to hate without question and destroy all opposition.  Naturally.

Jordan's narrow focus was offensive, not just for me as a Christian but mostly for me as a writer.  As a lover of the written word and the power of story.  As someone capable of intelligence and discernment.  Critical thinking and examination doesn't mean one-note writing.  It means exploring possibilities, settling into the cracks and crannies of thought and human conscious.  The fact that When She Woke ignores sophistication in favor of freight train storytelling angered me.  The message was insulting, the writing was insufferable, and I can see no value in indulging the book further.

Across the room and into the reject pile it goes.

But Seriously, This Week

This Onion article* has it right.  This week is yet another time where my country has been put through the wringer.  Boston, my future town, in fear and upheaval.  A city-wide lockdown.  Rumors flying around, unsubstantiated claims.  Talking to twenty sixth-graders about current events has proven the existence of mob mentality, has been the face of the vulture media, desperate to feed on the flesh of sensationalism.  Might sound like overkill, but the amount of enjoyment these kids get out of telling a story that their uncle told them where this dark-skinned, accented guy was seen walking on rooftops and was taken into custody, well.  That kind of makes me ill.

And it's not just the kids.  It's the journalism this morning, the masses of people hankering for sound clips from estranged uncles and random classmates, touting high school students (who willingly say that they didn't know the suspects well!) as "friends of the suspects."  Networks bringing in terrorism experts--experts who, to their credit, have been trying to diffuse any shocking Al Qaeda and jihadist claims--just so that they can dedicate hours to discussing this intense Islamic plot.  It's more than depressing, it's frustrating.

Add that on top of events like the explosion at Waco, and the failure of the Senate to vote on gun control (not so much a because of the legislation not passing [even though come on], but because it exhibited the extent of our corrupt government, especially when you factor in quotes like this one from Richard Feldman), and you could say my faith in this nation has been shaken.  Suddenly, this world isn't a complex sphere full of sorrow and happiness, it's just a straight up scary place.

So yeah.  I spent most of this week feeling sad, and then indescribably angry, and now I'm just exhausted.

Just like the first article said, this week is done.  I'm done.

As a collective, can we agree to sit on the couch, cry, and watch happy videos until the world goes away?

Sounds good to me.

*Incredibly strong language.  Be ye warned, sensitive souls.  But if you like, the Onion has rocked it with their coverage this week.  Find all the Boston articles HERE.