On Disappointments

Disappointment. The best way to close out the year, amiright?

One of the biggest lessons I've had to learn as I grow up is how to accept being disappointed. As children, when we don't get the things we want, we kick and scream and pout, or sulk, or grow defensive and churlish and refuse to share our toys. Sometimes I think adults act the same way, or at least we wish we could! But part of growing up is about facing that twisting, gut-wrenching pain and refusing to let it control us.

Some things are harder to stomach than others, I admit. When a job opportunity falls through, or when you don't quite manage the GPA you'd hoped for... those are hard, but in the end, it's one more step towards your eventual future. As a senior, I'm struggling with the reality of my economic situation: namely, that I'll be starting from practically nothing once I graduate. I will have to swallow my pride and accept the fact that I'll have to rely on my family for support, both financially and in my living arrangements. I'll be holding a diploma in my hand, but I won't quite be free from reliance on others to keep me on my feet. Don't get me wrong - I'm infinitely grateful for that support, and I know a lot of people don't have that blessing. But then I look at my little brother, whose mechanical engineering and/or physics degree will open manifold doors to financial stability.

Me, I got a Bachelor's in art. I'm looking forward to the cardboard box.

Joking aside, those disappointments can sometimes be easier to handle than others. At least I know I'll have a roof over my head and a skill set that will get me places, as long as I'm willing to dig in and work my butt off (spoiler alert: I am). Other disappointments - cultural, social, etc. - can strike harder blows. For instance, a story you cherished since childhood, that helped shape your creative aesthetic, that guided you to a very specific dream and desire for the future, being completely butchered in cinematic form. That hurts. Yes, it's "just a movie" (whatever that means). Yes, it had its good moments. But was it really too much to ask to expect a little less mind-numbing violence and orc-slaying?

Yes, I'm talking about The Hobbit. Don't judge me. Or do judge me, if you like, but swallow this first: movies are important. All cinema, blockbusters and indie films alike, have a place in the vast web of the human storytelling, a past-time I've devoted my life to in many ways. And it's not just a past-time, either. It's the gauge by which we measure human culture and creativity, a way to reimagine and comprehend a world that is often incomprehensible. Through the filter of stories, we can look back on our history and catch a glimmer of what the lives of our ancestors looked like. King Arthur and Robin Hood; the Epic of Gilgamesh; the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm; all of it is the recorded history of a world we've never seen, a world imagined by our predecessors and laid over the "real" world like The Wizard of Oz painted over with Technicolor. In the words of J.R.R. Tolkien,

"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"

I remember when I first heard that they were making a movie of The Hobbit. I'd grown up on it, and on The Lord of the Rings (and, eventually, the films). I was a freshman in college, working late at night on a project for Foundations of Digital Media when I saw the news article online. I walked back to my dorm feeling as if I walked among the stars. I was so excited I was shaking. It took me hours to fall asleep, mostly because I was trawling the internet for any and all evidence of potential cast lists and scraps of pre-production information. If Jesus himself had returned for the Second Coming, I don't think I could have been more frantically thrilled.

Oh, sweet childhood. The innocence of youth. The first blush, the naivete, the ignorance. They say that the anticipation of something is usually better than the thing itself, and I have to say that in this case, it was completely true. I attended the midnight premier of An Unexpected Journey the as a junior fresh out of fall semester finals, with two people I barely knew at the time (but have since become some of my dearest friends.) It wasn't perfect, I admitted, but what book-based movie ever is? The LotR films were fantastic, but even they had their flaws. I ignored the naysayers that claimed Jackson was in it for the money (three films out of one little book, but hey, he was using Unfinished Tales, right?), and just enjoyed the high.

It was probably all the anticipation that made my first viewing of The Desolation of Smaug such a flop. Looking back, I'm not sure what I was expecting; but endless, poorly-cut action scenes and about five full minutes of Bilbo screen-time wasn't it. (Isn't it called The Hobbit? I'd almost forgotten what Martin Freeman's face looked like by the end of the movie.)

So I was pretty miserable. My only consolation was that they had at least managed to cram one decent female character into a storyline populated with exactly zero. When a character that wasn't even in the original text saves the film adaptation, you know something's not quite right.

Suffice to say, it was a hard pill to swallow, but I've learned from my mistakes. No one should be elevated to godlike status, regardless of their position. I'd hoped, given the evidence of his previous work with The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson and his associates would be able to produce a fine piece of filmography that would revive my childhood memories of sitting at Dad's knee while he read aloud to us about Gollum's Cave, the treacherous paths of Mirkwood, and barrels out of bond. That didn't happen. But, you know, sometimes you don't get what you want. Sometimes you don't get lady dwarves (because really, if it's so hard to tell the difference between their men and women, I'm sure it's not impossible that some of Thorin's Company could have been female); sometimes you don't get a gentle giant who serves up mead and honey on bread with willing good cheer; sometimes you don't get to see Bilbo Baggins dancing around the forest, invisible, singing silly songs to madden the giant spiders. Sometimes you just have to make do.

Sometimes, you have to do the work yourself.

As a part of the wider online community, I can say with great confidence that a generation - my generation - is growing into its own. A generation made of writers and thinkers and artists who are tired of the same-old ways of Hollywood and our sexist, racist, homophobic cultural norms. These creative young people are the novelists and actors and film directors of the next few decades, and I am thrilled and fiercely proud to be one of them. Maybe The Hobbit movies aren't all I hoped they would be, but even Tolkien himself is not the end-all and be-all of good fantasy literature.

So, a toast: here's to strong female characters that are not reduced to a trope; here's to queer characters that don't exist purely for comedic purposes; here's to characters of color that overcome whitewashing in film. Here's a toast not to the new year, but to the next ten years, the next twenty. May they see a revolution sweep over our cultural norms and the storytelling of our modern world.

Why I Support LGBTQA* Rights

I know I just said this is a personal blog, a place to talk about myself in all my self-absorbed glory (ha), but I figure certain issues and topics are very important to me, and play a role in who I am as a person. So that's my rationalization. Yesterday, October 11, was National Coming Out Day - the twenty-fifth anniversary of it, in fact. Coming out as in, coming out of the closet. Coming out as in, "I identify this way, this is who I am, and if you don't like it, feel free to leave me alone." It's a sore subject in America at the moment, especially in the circles I run in. The conservative Christian circles, that is. But regardless of how many friends or how much respect I may lose, I still want to celebrate the 25th anniversary of National Coming Out Day by saying that I support "gay rights" (the more common colloquial term, and less of a mouthful than Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer-Asexual-Etc.) wholeheartedly, unashamedly, and regardless of my religious upbringing.

But first, a disclaimer: for me, gay rights - whether marriage, or adoption, or simply the right to walk down the street holding hands and not be harassed for it - is not a religious issue, but a social one. Feel free to tear apart the theology on that one. I know it's not the done thing to separate our faith and the rest of our lives like some neat little compartmentalized box, but note that I said it's not a religious issue, not that it isn't an issue of faith. BUT I'm already off-topic. Bottom line is, I'm not here to talk about my theological views of homosexuality. I'm here to talk about why I support it, from a social standpoint.

And having said that, I'm going to totally talk about it: the reason why I started even thinking about supporting gay rights, which is directly related to religious organizations. Yep. I support gay rights because of the Church - gasp, shock, dismay.

I was pretty sheltered on the topic of certain failings in Christian culture until I came to college. Turns out, for every "love the sinner, hate the sin" conference, there are two hundred people lined up with badly-spelled signs dragging God's love for all people in the dirt. Might as well be the Romans spitting at a certain Lord and Savior they all claim to follow. Part of the reason I need to love and accept LGBTQA* people, wholeheartedly, no pious strings attached, is that so many people are unashamed of their intolerance. When I discovered the existence of Westboro Baptist, with their wretched theology on gross display for all to see in their web address "www.godhatesfags.com", I was so disgusted I spent a while doubting the goodness of human beings - but only after I'd spent a lot of time wondering if it was just a big trolling joke. Surely no one, regardless of faith or creed, could ascribe to such vitriol. Ironic how a religious organization can make it so clear that we are fallen.

But I promised that this wasn't a religious issue (clearly it is, but shhh), so I'll move on.

According to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, more than 400,000 kids are living without permanent families in America. 115,000 of these children are eligible for adoption, but nearly 40% will wait in foster care for over three years before being adopted. Adoption by gay couples is legal in some states, to varying degrees, but illegal in others. It's hard enough for opposite-sex couples to go through all the rigmarole of paperwork and adoption procedure, but same-sex couples face another kind of prejudice and preventative law entirely. It's been proven by experts that the children of same-sex couples are "just as likely to be well-adjusted as those raised by heterosexual parents." (Thank you Wikipedia. Yes, there is a source.)

Where am I going with this. Ah, yes. I support the right of same-sex couples to adopt because A) WOW look at that huge problem of children without homes we have in America, and that's not even looking at the orphan problem worldwide; and B) there's that interesting factor that same-sex couples are incapable of accidentally getting themselves knocked up. There's no unplanned pregnancies in a same-sex relationship, no struggle over abortion or the upheaval that occurs when two unprepared people find themselves having to support another human being regardless of their financial or emotional fitness for the task. Gay couples have to plan, in excruciating detail, for the ways they can have their own family. It's not a matter of "whoops, baby en route," but of "what's the best way for us to start a family?"

(Disclaimer: accidents don't automatically mean the parents can't/won't support or love the baby just as much as if it was a planned pregnancy. But sometimes, it does.)

I have a private joke with myself that homosexuality is God's solution for overpopulation. More seriously, I believe in evolution, and I believe that God engineered it, that it's an intended part of his creation - so why not engineer a potential way for humans to mate that would help curb overpopulation and take care of all the unwanted children who need homes and families? I dunno, seems feasible to me.

There's a lot more I could say, a lot more research and stats I could whip out, but I won't. Because underneath all of that jargon and science and psychology, there is only this: why are we so fussed with fighting something rooted in love, instead of fighting all the myriad of things in this world rooted in hate? Bottom line is, for me, it's silly and pointless to march against love. And that's all it is. It's not AIDs or perverts or fishnet stockings, it's not butch or queer or I'm a panromantic asexual genderqueer undergoing hormonal transition, it's not signs or parades or nightclubs or prostitution or unsafe sex or my-kid-is-gay parental self-help books.

It's just people in love. Human beings bonding over coffee on rainy Saturdays, or cuddling up to watch the football game, or taking a vacation to Disney World. Ordinary, boring, everyday. Wonderful. Just like boy meets girl, but without the sexist stereotypes.

I have another little private joke with myself (I have a lot of these): the real reason homosexuality freaks people out is because our society is so bound up with gender roles we don't know what to do when a girl cuts her hair short, or when a guy is brave enough to admit that pink is his favorite color. I'm an ardent feminist (not a feminazi, there's a difference); I'm as much in favor of eradicating centuries of male-dominated patriarchy as I am of legalizing the import of Kinder Surprise Eggs - in other words, a lot. (Don't mind the facetiousness, I can't help it.) So that's probably another reason I'm so much of a supporter of LGBTQA* - because equality is equality, regardless of gender roles. I spent a few years working at a daycare, and the amount of pink and purple plastered all over those poor little girls made me weep for future generations of stereotyped young women and men pressed into their perfect cardboard cut-out boxes like Barbie and Ken dolls lined up on display shelves.

But that's a topic for another day.

In conclusion: people are people, love is love, let's focus our efforts on something a little more important than eradicating people who don't fit the gender and sexual orientation binary. Like, I don't know, feeding the hungry, or clothing the naked, or visiting people who are in jail. Jesus thought the pariahs of his day were pretty cool - I will willingly give up my life savings to bet that he'd be chillin' with the crazy half-dressed folks hanging off gay club floats for Pride Parades worldwide.

The Journey Itself is Home

Events seem to be coming together to conspire against me. I spent the weeks leading up to school griping and complaining about how I didn't know where I would end up after college, forgetting that I do not exist in a black hole. Time has meaning, and carries on as it always has. I will not step into college, blink, and step out of it again with no progress to my character or person.

I mean, college is progressing at a frighteningly rapid pace (um, it's almost October? When did that happen?), but we still measure it out in hours and days and weeks, not microseconds. There's still time to figure it out.

To be honest, one of my biggest freakouts was directly related to grad school. Did I want to jump right in, or take a break from structured education? How was I going to pull together a portfolio of my writing as I simultaneously pulled together a senior art show, readings for three upper-level Lit courses, and tried for my first 4.0? The answer, of course, is that I wasn't. To finish my college career with a bang would require more emotional stamina and mental fortitude than I'd heretofore expended, and I was going to have to give something up, or I'd never be able to sustain it.

Yes, an MFA in Creative Writing is on my list of life goals (a list I refine every couple of months). But now I'm in no particular rush to complete it.

I started this blog as a way to record my journey through senior year and beyond, figuring out the path my life would take. So even though updating it feels like a constant cry for attention, I'm going to do it anyway, because I want to be able to read through it in twenty years and laugh at myself, and doubly appreciate the path that led me to wherever forty-one-year-old me will be. Yes, this is my first update in weeks, and we're already a third of the way into the semester, but hopefully I'll be a little more profuse in future.

I said earlier that events were conspiring against me, but 'for me' is definitely more accurate. This entire school year is screaming in my ear GET OUT THERE! Two of the three literature classes I'm taking focus heavily on the theme of travel, and right now we're reading a fantastic travelogue by William Least Heat-Moon about his voyage across the US solely by water. My novel-in-progress centers around a Lewis and Clark-esque journey across post-apocalyptic America. I keep stumbling into conversations with friends about their plans to move to Germany or the UK, to work in the missions field in Romania, or to find some way of escaping the humdrum expectations of society and just wander.

In the first day of World Lit II, our professor encouraged us to read the coming travel-based books with an eye not to the intended destination, but to the journey: "The road itself is home." It's probably freaking my parents out to think of it, but that's exactly my plan. Whether the road is literal or figurative, I intend to face the oncoming uncertainties with an attitude of joy and curiosity, content to walk strange highways merely for the sake of exploration.

When I was a kid, I had this insatiable desire to see what was beyond the horizon. Whatever furthest point I could see, I wanted to walk to it and find the next line of trees or hills or mountains, just keep going until I'd seen all there was to see. I doubt I'll ever see every square mile of land the globe has to offer, but even a fraction of that would suffice.

On Facebook I mentioned WWOOFing, and so far that's the tentative plan. When I graduate in May, I hope to WWOOF my way through a significant portion of the US. Then I'll try for an internship with Culture Magazine. After that, who knows? All plans are subject to the unpredictable whims of life.  And that's part of the fun.

Fear and Community, and the Power of Prayer

For those of you who don't know, last night (Sunday) was the first worship service with Foot of the Cross, the student-led worship ministry here on campus. It was outside, a beautiful warm evening on the steps of the library with a small band, a nice big gathering of students, and of course our lovely Student Chaplain, Kelsey. I'll be perfectly honest: I went mostly to support Kelsey, both personally and in her campus ministry, and also because a lot of my friends were going and I didn't have anything better to do. It's not that I hate worship, but I'd gone to church once already, and two in one day is a bit much - even for a pastor's daughter. (The horror!)

So, the first bit was good, a tad loud at first but nice: your typical worship set with some really great keyboarding by Pearce's worship leader Tim, and a faaaaaaabulous lead singer whose name I don't know yet but will hopefully find out. She was amazing, especially with the smoky, jazzy rendition of an old-hat "nineties worship song" (you know the ones). I wasn't regretting going, exactly, but I wasn't really super into it.

Then the first set ended, and Kelsey came out to introduce the next thing: a time of prayer and contemplation, whether in groups or alone - but to change it up, she'd provided chalk for us to write our requests and struggles anonymously on the cement in front of the library steps. One option was to trace our handprint wherever we'd written down our prayers, and other people could come and put their hands over it while they prayed for our need.

At first I was like, "Aww, that's cute, that'll be a fun way to go around and pray for people in community and connect physically as well as symbolically."

Then I wrote down my prayer request and started bawling.

Well, I had two, and it was really the second that got me. The first was regarding my dear friend who is going to serve in Romania for nine months once she graduates in December. Then another came to me, like it was dropped into my lap: I don't know where I'm going after school. Handprint.

There was something about that handprint that made it, suddenly, intensely personal. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that, especially among my junior and senior friends who haven't quite solidified (or even thought about) their post-graduation plans. And as I scrawled it out in bold capitals, traced my hand (which, with chalk, turned out rather fat with stubby, disproportionately tiny fingers), and stepped away, it became strangely anonymous: as if someone else had written it, and I'd turned around to see it just there, perfectly formed and speaking straight into my heart.

I didn't realize until that moment the depth of my fear. As children raised at the turn of the century, we are used to having our lives planned out for us. It's a formula perfectly designed for success until now, post-recession and still struggling: preschool, kindergarten, first through twelfth grade, graduate with good grades and maybe some good AP scores, take your SAT, go to college, get a 4.0 (or as near as you can), graduate.

Fifty years ago, boom. Instant job. Or at least, a direct path to follow, guided to a perfectly packaged life: career, spouse, kids, dog, house, car, white picket fence. The American Dream.

Now, there are no certainties. There are plenty of people writing about the millenials, about those people coming into their own in a post-Postmodern, economically struggling society: my generation. I won't rehash it. But I will quote one person, a girl around my age, responding via email to a Reader's Digest article an issue or so back that talked about how we, the millenials, are "rewriting the rules for success."

From where I stand, there is no success. Only survival. 

I don't know where I'm going after school. Standing there looking at my confession, bright pink and all caps on the ground at my feet, I realized how scared I really was. All advice, senior year excitement, and grad school researching aside, there is great fear in not knowing what comes next. All my life, I've followed the prescribed route as much as I could - and this is where the ocean falls off the edge of the earth, and there are no more landmarks.

I thought that was bad. Then, people started praying for it. I went around, doing my own hand thing on other requests - some anonymous, others not so much - and out of the corner of my eye, person after person knelt and put their hands on the words I had written and brought them before God. It was no longer my burden. It belonged to them, to all of us, this fear: the fear brought by the end of the road and the beginning of wilderness.

In chapel today, Dr. Paul Stewart said something like "Roberts tells you that coming here will give you everything you need to succeed" in probably the most sarcastic manner I've ever heard someone recommend an education. (If you didn't go to chapel, you missed out.) The truth is, Roberts may give us an education, may set us on the path to wisdom, but that doesn't guarantee "success" as Americans have traditionally understood it.

I can do without the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids, but I'd still like to have some idea of what comes next, and the not knowing is far scarier than I realized until I actually wrote it down. I'm a writer by nature: the words I put down "become flesh" in a near-biblical way, finding life and truth from the very act of laying them down next to one another. When I wrote those words, they were manifested in a way they hadn't been before, revealing themselves to me as a burden that I didn't fully realize I was carrying.

The cool part is, I'm not the only one carrying it now. Writing it down, giving it up to others and to God, spread out the weight of it and made it easier to bear. I had my little crying jag, along with about half the people in attendance, and we came together and comforted each other. Life is full of uncertainties: just looking at the writing scrawled in multicolored chalk in front of the library steps made that clear to me. This generation has some crazy times ahead of it as we test the waters, fighting to survive, to succeed, to be someone. That fight, I think, will be one of the most important and most life-changing things we ever do. What comes after is up to God.

To that girl who wrote in with her chilling statement, I would say this: maybe, in this new era, survival is success. Let's keep our heads above water, ladies and gentlemen, and see where this year takes us.

In Which I Become SALTy

I am not a people person.

That's not to say I hate people (although I do, sometimes - but generally as a whole, in a love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin kind of way). I actually think people are pretty cool, in all our crazy diversity and different ways of processing the world. But I'm also an introvert, and for a long time, I let that define the way I interact with others and the way I view my own social sphere.

Coming into Roberts Wesleyan College as a freshman, a lot of that was turned upside down. I was living on campus in a dorm with my best friend and twenty-two other girls, and I was surrounded constantly by others: in classes, in chapel, at mealtimes, or just walking down the path to the next item on my agenda. At the time, it was an epiphany, a bit of a coming-out-of-my-shell moment.

Then sophomore year rolled around, I moved back home to save money, and everything regressed. I let my early morning work hours and my five-minute separation from campus restrict me, dividing me from campus life and everything that was going on with my friends, with events and clubs and general college life. In a lot of ways it felt like I was even more introverted than before, seizing onto my own natural inclination to retreat and bow out of responsibilities, out of public appearances, out of any kind of varied social life. My focus was purely academic, and while academia is always a good thing, without the tempering environment of what "college life" really is, in all its varying guises, I was missing out on a lot - spiritually, socially, and emotionally.

Don't get me wrong - it wasn't the new commuter status that was separating me from the college environment and community. It was my own reluctance to meet new people, embrace new experiences, and really get everything out of my college years that I could.

Last spring, my friend Brittany (another Brittany - they just seem to flock to me) hosted one of her annual campfire/swimming parties for our group of friends. It had expanded a little bit since I'd last hung out with them, and now included a girl I knew vaguely from a few previous gatherings - a transfer student from Alaska, of all places, who was super friendly and outgoing and apparently didn't require a two-year holding period before metaphorically embracing me as a new friend, as I sometimes feel I do. Somehow or another she'd discovered I liked to write, and before I knew it I was agreeing to apply for a position on the Beacon staff, the RWC student-run newspaper.

Whaaaaaaat. Involvement? Social... interaction? Being a... a LEADER, what is that?! Being on SALT? I couldn't even remember the words that went into that flavorful anagram (it's Student Association Leadership Team, I'm now aware).

A few weeks later, I got the email telling me I had been selected to be the Assistant Editor, under my new friend Victoria as Editor-in-Chief. For the entire summer, I didn't let myself think about it. I was excited to be working on a project like the Beacon with two people I knew would make an awesome team, but I was nervous about being on SALT, a very visual team on campus that interacts with tons of people and essentially helps foster the community at RWC. So, no thoughts. None. The occasional email and text regarding the Beacon or SALT were mere blips on my radar screen.

Then, suddenly, it was the penultimate week of August and it was time to start training week. I hiked to campus with my enormous purple backpack in much trepidation, uncertain of what to expect and terrified of all the new people and weird activities that I figured would be par for the "team building" course. (I wasn't wrong, but I really didn't have any reason to be worried).

Upon approaching the bus, shadowing a few of my friends who were also on SALT, I was faced almost immediately with an unfamiliar kid in a baseball cap who, in almost any other setting, I would immediately label as "dodgy trouble-maker who's always late to class" - and he introduced himself, asked my name, my year, was I on SALT, welcome to the team et cetera. The friendliest, most welcoming dude I've ever met, and I'd been ready to clam up and profile him entirely unfairly. (I might have been right about the trouble-making part, but it's all in good fun.)

The rest of those few days, spent at Lighthouse Christian Camp, were simultaneously the longest and shortest days of my life. They were packed with sunshine and lounging by the lake, hilarious games that broke the ice and put me at ease, and - most importantly - a group of people that I foresee will quickly become some of the best friends I'll make in college. By Tuesday, packing our stuff to return to Roberts, I was deeply regretting that I'd waited until my senior year to become truly involved and invested in my own college experience and the experiences of others.

I'll be honest: I wasn't looking forward to my senior year. All I saw ahead of me was hard work, the endless planning and drudgery of commuting (even if I am closer nowadays), and the big scary finality of graduating and have no concrete plans for where to go after that. I still see hard work, but now it's in conjunction with others who will support me and work with me in our various tasks, both shared and solo. I still see the mildly annoying requirements of commuting, but now I have a bike and a community on campus I'm eager to get to and be a part of. I still see graduation, a red letter day in May marked on my massive day planner that's already scarily full of dates and details, but now the time between here and there is an amazing lineup of opportunities, developing friendships, and crazy adventures that will, I believe, have a positive and long-lasting impact on who I am and where I fit into the fabric of this world.

This was a deep one, guys. Sorry. But in the process of one weekend, I feel like my entire set of priorities shifted and solidified, and I'm excited about it. Introversion and shyness are no longer the deciding factors in my life; they don't define me, and I won't let them become my weaknesses. Instead I'm going to cultivate a love of working with other people and being part of a huge social and academic community, and not let myself stumble into the trap of sealing myself from the outside world. Right now, RWC is my family, and I'm looking forward to helping support and nourish it in the unique ways that I can bring to the table.

Today, one of our SALTy folks, Randie, gave an awesome devotional on 1 Corinthians 12:15-26, which talks about the importance of the parts of the body (of Christ) and how they fit together/need each other, even though they're all different. I think I'm finally ackowleging my part in the RWC body. It's gonna be a great year.

In which I drink my morning coffee.

The sad truth is, I've become a coffee drinker.

I used to be a tea person almost exclusively. It started with musty-sweet herbal peach from the old glass canning jar in Grandma's cottage at the lake, sipped around a campfire to cut the sweetness of s'mores. Then the citrus kick of Celestial Seasonings' Lemon Zinger - still the tastiest herbal tea I'll ever find, I'm convinced - and on to the more complex blends: Lady Grey, rooibos, Ceylon, Assam, and maté. All delicious, all different.

Then, coffee.

I used to be that wannabe hipster who sipped complex espresso concoctions with long, meaningless jargon names from eco-friendly paper cups. I still enjoy a nice latté (the "Oxford" from Leaf and Bean is a delight; a coconut latté with soy milk from The Blackbird up in Canton, NY is divine), but more and more I find myself waking up, rolling out of bed, and brewing myself a single-serving pot of joe with my breakfast.

Of course, even "plain old coffee" doesn't have to be plain. I've recently discovered the joys of flavored roasts: vanilla crème brûlée, for instance, or Bananas Foster, or tiramisu. Wow. And the best part is, leaving creamers and fripperies behind me means a little sugar and a healthy splash of rice milk doesn't detract or clash with the flavors (a recent, happy accidental discovery). I'm sorry to say that yes, I do take sugar and milk with my coffee. A travesty to true coffee-lovers everywhere.

My (aforementioned) friend Brittany, in her infinite wisdom, once said that maturity can be measured in how one takes one's coffee. When you're young and carefree with less refined tastes, lattés and mochas and iced frappes are the bomb. But step by step, you graduate from caramel macchiato mocha frappes to cappucinos with half a shot of flavoring, to coffee with a bunch of cream and sugar, to coffee with a little milk, to plain and simple black - and that's when you know you're a grownup. I'll be honest: I don't think I'll ever reach the "black coffee stage," but if taking it with sugar and rice milk makes me youthful, I guess I can handle that.

But what about tea? The love of my life for so many years, the sweet fragrant grasses that somehow come together to make the most delicious hot liquid known to man? The thing about tea is, it's hot. Unless it's iced tea, but that always seems like an imposter to me. Hot tea is hard to drink in the summertime, especially if you boil the water in a kettle like I do. (Microwaved tea? Ugh!) Coffee's heat is more contained in the pot, and letting it cool as you sip it slowly on a drowsy summer morning doesn't detract from the taste or experience. Lukewarm tea, on the other hand, is limpid and sort of disappointing. So for now I'll leave it on the shelf for cold, rainy afternoons and the eventual onset of autumn, and enjoy my morning coffee without a lick of guilt.

Well, maybe a little bit of guilt. Coffee has long been associated with decadence and lack of self-control for me. My Dad has always had a couple cups in the mornings, or least for as long as I can remember. It's probably his only vice (except for Yummies' ice cream, which is a whole 'nother story). Every once in a while, he'll get the urge to prove he's not addicted to caffeine, and he'll go off it for a week or so, withstanding the headaches and the sluggishness just to prove he can. Then, when he's had his moment of decaffeinated triumph, he'll go right back to the pot (the coffee pot, obviously) - after all, he can stop anytime he wants.

Right now, I don't need to drink coffee to function. A cup of half-caff in the mornings, about four days out of seven, is my little grownup treat, because it tastes good and because I can. I'm pretty sensitive to caffeine - I had a Thai iced coffee once without knowing what was in it (espresso and condensed milk, turns out), and I thought I was going to have a heart attack - so I try not to overindulge. Nothing caffeinated after lunch (or else I have weird, elaborate dreams), and only one cup a day (discounting the rare decaf latté when I'm out with friends or family to Jitters or something).

I made the mistake once of having a large cup of coffee in the morning and a tall iced coffee in the evening of the same day, and then nothing for the next day or two. The result was a raging headache. Whether it was a matter of caffeine withdrawal or just coincidence, I don't intend to find out. My body and I have reached an agreement: I respect its caffeine intake threshold, and it won't give me bizarre dreams or migraine attacks in retaliation.

Thing is, I hate wasting coffee. It's so delicious, and sometimes expensive. Today my cup is a bit larger than usual, because there was a bit left over in the pot from Grandma's morning cuppa when I went to make my own single serving, and I couldn't bear to toss more than a few tablespoons of it down the sink. So that's all for me today.

I think there's a lot to be said for knowing your limits. I'm not always good at that. Just ask my sweet tooth and its penchant for "classy" desserts (my friend's words, not mine). I just really like tiramisu, okay? And I like baking things, which is a dangerous hobby. Maybe I should concentrate on veggie soups for a while. I've found that knowing just how much butter and heavy cream went into that cake frosting doesn't do much to deter me from stealing bites throughout the day.

Thus, coffee! The only calories in it are the little bits of milk and sugar I add, or the nonexistent ones in stevia-based sweeteners. It's rich and decadent, and studies have shown it to be good for you (in moderation, of course). I'd rather deal with a little over-excitement and elevated heart rate than be tempted to stuff myself with crepe-and-lemon-curd cake.

One more thing, before I get carried away talking about yummy food instead of the actual point of this blog, which is growing up. My aunt (my mom's sister) and I have started writing letters back and forth - the longhand is fun, and always seems to have a bit more meaning than sterile typefaces, like the one you're reading now. I'd like to share a bit of her last letter that was particularly meaningful.

...picture a small, sturdy used-to-be-painted-red boat. It's covered with scratches, dents, patched holes, torn sails, barnacles, graffiti, and the engine (it has sails and an engine) runs rough. Imagine it on a calm day put-put-putting into a sudden harbor, an unexpected port. Up to the docks. Throw out the line. There it bobs in the water. Home! And it doesn't have to brave the high seas anymore. That's how I felt and still feel. ... Since leaving home at 17  I'd been on a long eventful dramatic journey and I was so ready to settle down. No more travel! No more adventures! Yay! Happiness. 

Thinking about you and your blog and your letter you sent and all that you are facing I realize that your little boat is just put-put-putting out of the harbor. Since I spend most of my time with college students, I spend a lot of time standing on the dock waving brave little boats off - "Bon voyage!" I say, "do good things, make the world better, good luck!" It's different when it's my own dear Rachel, but still familiar. I'm glad my feet are staying on dry land, even as I hug those departing sailors and watch them sail off to wonderful adventures. 

So, we're at opposite ends of the wheel; that's what generations do. My own parents have yet another set of challenges and realities. But we're all together in this wonderful world, and so the "journey" metaphor breaks down there, to some extent.  We're in different "places" yet we're in one spot, often, and can signal each other, ship to shore."

I read that on the day it came in the mail, and felt an immense peace. She's absolutely right - my own voyage is just beginning. And I look around me, and I see my friends on their own voyages, hoisting sails, casting off ropes, getting ready to head into the big wide ocean to see what they can find.  It's a scary proposition, especially knowing how easy it is to be driven off course, to read the stars wrong, to run into squalls and storms. But then I remember that I'm not alone: that there are lighthouses standing guard against sandbanks and reefs, that there are sailors who have gone before and returned safely who are glad to share advice, maps, compasses, spyglasses - everything we need to make our own safe voyages and come back the better and the wiser for it.

I'll end, once more, with a song, a wonderful song by Jónsi that's just as good as a kick of caffeine, and less likely to give you a headache later upon overindulgence.

In which I discover Paradise.

Try and understand what part you have to play in the world in which you live. There’s more to life than you know and it’s all happening out there. Discover what part you can play and then go for it. --Sir Ian McKellan

The Internet is an amazing place, and don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

The hype right now in our culture is all about how Facebook and handheld devices are ruining our lives/destroying social interaction/turning us into braindead automatons who will one day be ordered to take over the planet. There was even a Roberts Reads on that a few years ago, and the author came to speak about the dangers of technological advancement. It was all terribly Puritan and full of Deep Thoughts that I doubt half the population on campus understood. 

I'm not saying all of that is lies. I'm just saying, there's a bright side.

As a writer and a generally creative person, I'm very familiar with the p-word: procrastination. GASP. Yes, I am a sucker for wasting time on the Internet when I should be writing/sketching/plotting/harvesting braindead automatons. It's just so seductive. And it's not like I can just switch it off. I need the Internet, for music and research and character name generators and and and....

The list goes on. But as I delve into the whole novel-writing business anew, there are some Internet things that have come to my attention that are seriously awesome. Especially for me and other writerly ilk.

First, NaNoWriMo. What a mouthful. November is National Novel Writing Month, and at nanowrimo.org you can sign up to write 50,000 words in one month. Ever slogged out two thousand words for a mediocre "response journal" in a Dr. Mrs. class? Multiply that. Times twenty-five. I did it waaaay back in ninth grade and produced the really very terrible first draft of Medusa, which got written and rewritten about five times (one of them about three years ago in another NaNo attempt) before dying a slow and horrible death in the deepest recesses of my hard drive. 

I stayed away from Internet challenges and serious writing for a few years. Then, I discovered Camp NaNoWriMo! The summer camp version of the November slog, done in both April and July. I'd doodled a few words here and there for a potential post-apocalyptic-type storyline, so I decided to give it a go. By day four I had over 7,000 words. By day six I'd decided to up my wordcount goal to 60k, and the next day I had roughly 16k+ of raw, unedited story sprawled across my laptop, my mom's laptop, and two notebooks.

Today, day thirteen, I have thirty-thousand words: halfway to my month's-end goal, and three days ahead of schedule. That's an average of 2,320 words a day (though some days I've written upwards of 5k), and I only need to write 1,571 a day to finish on time. Maybe I should cave and change my goal to 70k.

I'm not saying all this to brag - well, maybe a little bit. The truth is, I've had a lot of help along the way. From, you guessed it, the Internet. 

On the sidebar to your right is a short list of some of the blogs I follow. One of them, "Pretentious Title," is the blog of Rachel Aaron, a sci-fi/fantasy authoress. I hadn't read her, but a writing buddy from CampNaNo referred me to one of her posts, and suddenly, a whole new world of Internet resources opened up to me. There are blogs by writers and agents. There are vlogs (linked below is part of a vlog series by writer Kelsey Macke). There are online challenges, sprint wars, twitter accounts. Last night I discovered and participated in @FriNightWrites' #writeclub challenge, a writing challenge held every Friday night to write as much as you can in half an hour, tweet the wordcount results, take a ten minute break, and repeat - from 2 PM to 2 AM EST. I didn't stay up the whole night, but I did write more than 4k in two and a half hours, jumping ahead in my wordcount goal for the day and breaking the halfway mark around 11 PM.

I'm not a twitter person, but combine #writeclub with #PitchMAS (in which you pitch your story in 35 characters or less and agents scroll through the hashtag picking up ones that they like to make a potential offer), and I'm aaallll over it. 

This is exciting stuff. When I was a kid, trucking along like an idealistic little 1k-a-day fairy on Medusa's early stages, I had no idea any of this existed. But there's a whole community out there of publishers, agents, and writers - both professional and aspiring - who are working together to further the writing and publishing industry; and, by extension, to further the reading world. And I'm becoming a part of it. CRAZY.

Frontier, the tentative title for my work-in-progress, if far from being a complete manuscript, let alone a polished one. But I'd say I'm well on my way, and with this whole new world of online community and interaction - something that never could have existed fifty years ago - the insane, impossible goal of being published doesn't sound so impossible anymore.

I leave you with a brief vlog entry by the aforementioned Kelsey Macke, who is crazy and delightful and always has good things to say about being creative, about being a writer, and having faith in yourself to accomplish what you set out to do. 

In Which My Big Little Brother is Awesome

I got the message late at night, returning to the hotel room after a long day wandering Berlin with the rest of my group. It was a post on my Facebook timeline from my brother.

hey, somebody said you're in Luxembourg or some obscure place in Europe. can you get me a sweet keychain while you're out? the last one you got me is slightly broken. try not to make it beer themed

I spent five minutes laughing and then answered, Haha yeah, it's some weird little country like that idk. Request noted! I was just wondering what I should get you. Karl's always hard to buy stuff for because he either a) isn't sure what he wants or b) wants something ridiculously expensive like a two-ton amp or $300 ear buds from some shady guy on Ebay. So I was happy to have a clear-cut gift goal in mind.

Unfortunately, key chains are stupidly hard to find. I mean, they're everywhere - I poked my head into a dozen tourist shops and stalls throughout Berlin and Dresden - but they were all hokey little things (usually beer-themed), brightly colored, or super cheap and bound to break before you even get your keys on the ring. It was with some desperation that I set out to find the perfect key chain in the tiny Alpine town of Obammergau, on our way to check out the infamous Neuschwanstein Castle.

It was terrible. I'd see one and think oh, that might work, and then I'd spend the next five minutes panicking over whether Karl would like it or not. He probably would have liked it regardless - come on, it's just a dumb key chain - but I wanted to make it really good. It was the only thing he'd asked for, surely I could make a little effort.

At last, in the last shop we stopped in, I found one: a little plastic cube with the coat of arms of King Ludwig II of Bavaria on the inside. It was a cheap version of those cool glass things with the laser etching on the inside, but it was unique and interesting (and under 2 euro), and I was desperate. I bought it. The shopkeeper put it in a little white bag, and I stuffed it into my satchel - it was so small and light it fit easily in the front pocket along with the tons of ticket scraps and battered travel guides I'd stuck in there - before dashing out into the heavy drizzle for the tour bus.

Back in Rochester a week later, I cheerfully went to my yellow satchel to unearth the key chain. I hadn't unpacked yet, but I'd cleaned out all the junk from my bags before leaving Munich, and I was confident it would be easy to find.

I was on my third go-through of the yellow satchel when I realized what had happened. That stupid white gift bag, shoved in with the paper scraps and collected junk of traveling, had been so light and unremarkable that I'd chucked it out back in Munich, in the midst of my cleaning flurry the night before we flew out. And now I was in Rochester, six daylight hours away, empty-handed, with my brother hanging eagerly in the doorway of my bedroom. (Okay, I'd brought him chocolate, but still - he'd really wanted a key chain).

But all was not lost. My lovely friend Ally, who'd been on the trip as well, was going to be spending more time in Germany before coming back home. I messaged her frantically, and she delivered with great aplomb. I went to welcome her back home as a surprise with our other friend Mel, and after a round of happy hugs and story-telling and lunch, she got into her boxes and handed me the most brilliant key chain I'd ever seen in my life: black and silver, Deutschland and Germany engraved on it, with the German coat of arms (an eagle) in heavy metal in the center. I was saved.

I have no memory of the night my brother was born - or of any of the next year or so, really. But there is video evidence. The first time I held him, Dad had taken me to visit Mom in the hospital. In the video, I'm swaddled in visitor's scrubs, sitting on the bed beside my (very tired) mother. Dad had probably just arranged baby Karl safely in my lap and gone to switch on the camera, because he's not in the frame. I look at Karl, who at this point is still an indistinguishable potato-y lump wrapped in blankets, and ask, "Mine?"

In the video, Mom laughs (a bit sarcastically) and says, "Sure, you can have it," thinking I meant the not-so-comfortable hospital bed. But I know the truth. I was talking about that potato-y lump, who would come to be known by many names: Karl Mendel Daningburg, Karl-ba-darl, and Karl get your hands off those cookies right now. And today, he is very far from being indistinguishable.

In fact, he's rather hard to miss. Right about now, if you happen to be on campus along with the multitudes of Bible quizzers that have descended upon it, you would see him standing head and shoulders above the crowds (literally - he has about a foot on my measly 5'3" status), sporting a manly beard with a generous splash of gray (from the Eastern European genes), and probably studying the New Testament out of his mind. If that isn't the best introduction to a dude you ever read, I don't know what is.

He's also unlike me in every way possible. I'm artistic, he's science- and math-minded. I'm short, he's really freaking tall. I'm smart, he's borderline genius. I'm sometimes amusing, usually on accident; he's witty nearly all the time. I left public high school to homeschool myself because the environment stressed me out, he loved high school and graduated ninth in his class. I played flute for six years in school, he plays alto and baritone saxophone, bass guitar, electric guitar, and drums. Give him a few years and he'll be his own jazz quintet, if he's not too busy inventing reverse acid rain and a cure for cancer in his sophomore year at college.

Basically, he's cool. Which is something I'm really not. I also think he's more mature than I was at his age - he always has been, which made growing up with him pretty fun and free of argumentation (mostly) - because I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go at eighteen. I stuck close to home for college, not just because it was cheap and convenient, but because I was afraid. I'm an introvert through and through, and going to a totally new place to study something I had no idea about was terrifying. Karl's lucky enough to have the brain and the enthusiasm for something more concrete than just "being artsy," which was all I could claim at the cusp of my college career.

But honestly, I'm glad he's better than me at just about everything. I'm glad he's smarter, handsomer, funnier, and better at making friends - because it's a kick in the butt for me when I'm stuck in the slow lane.

Lately, all he's been doing is studying for Bible Quizzing nationals. I was home for four days over the long Fourth of July weekend, and I helped him go through questions and unique words. He's got 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Titus, Jude, 1 and 2 Timothy, and 1,2, and 3 John practically completely memorized. He's got a fantastic head for memorizing this stuff, and he's been doing it day after day for weeks. He's actually going a little bit crazy with it - the other day, he said he woke up reciting Scripture. I don't think I've ever been that dedicated to anything.

Helping him was also motivating to me, though. Over the past ten days I've written over twenty thousand words toward a completely new novel. His college search kicked my butt into researching grad schools. In some ways, we're in completely different stages of life - he'll be starting college just as I finish up - but we're still in sync with one another, and I hope somehow I've helped him along as much as he's helped me.

He's coming out of the stage where being around family is uncool - not that he ever was in that stage, but the older he gets the more our camaraderie grows. The other day I creeped on his quizzing team a bit to give him that stupid German key chain, and as soon as he caught sight of me he did that thing where he throws his arms and his eyebrows in the air like he's totally surprised and psyched to see me. In the middle of their team leader giving a pep talk, he did that little flaily flip-out, and I felt on top of the world. Because that big, smart, hulking, bearded dude is my little brother, and what makes him really special to me is that he's mine, even after all this time.

Here's to you, Karl. You're a real bro.

In Which I am a Terrible Person

I am a terrible person. Today, I climbed into the shower with the water full blast and looked up. I was not alone. There was a spider on the ceiling of the shower, one of those nasty long-legged ones that wriggle about unpleasantly. Dad was outside. Karl, who was tall enough (if not exactly brave enough), was upstairs in his room with the A/C on full blast, and thus unsummonable. Mom was getting groceries. The dirty work was up to me.

If you know me, you know I'm short. I can claim three inches over five feet, and that's not much when staring death in the eye from three feet over your head. My first instinct was to jump out of the shower at high speed, but luckily my logical left brain kicked in first. I climbed delicately around the shower curtain and stared at my nemesis. There were no long-handled things in sight, so I grabbed the empty soapdish sitting on the edge of the shower and chucked it a few times. All it did was get water on the ceiling and make the spider wiggle its horrible legs at me. Plan B: Chemical Warfare.

Our bathroom is also a laundry room and general cleaning-supply-holding-room. My eye landed on the lemon Pledge sitting innocuously on the shelf. Perfect! I grabbed it and whipped back the shower curtain. The spider (I fancied) cowered away in fear of imminent disposal. I drew my Pledge and fired.

Pledge smells pretty nice, but it's not much for killing spiders at long range. My enemy wriggled and danced in its little nest of invisible web, but not much else. Repulsed, I returned to the shelf. Aha. Bathroom cleaner (GreenWorks, thank you very much) was the obvious choice. Not only was it meant to be sprayed in bathtubs, but it had (I hoped) stronger properties than that of a dust-remover.

I whipped back the shower curtain once more. The spider had moved farther away - it had learned its lesson - but I was in a blood rage now. I attacked without mercy. (This is the 'I am a terrible person' part.) The spider wriggled some more, kicking its awful legs, and dropped to the soap shelf. I continued my attack relentlessly until it fell to the shower floor. Miraculously, it was still moving, trying to crawl back up its long strand of spider-silk. All futile. I switched on the showerhead (it has very impressive water pressure), and the spider was instantly doused in hot water. It curled up its nasty legs and floated gently to the drain, where it finally disappeared.

Needless to say, I spent the next ten minutes in the shower with my eyes on the drain, waiting for it to claw its way back up and devour my flesh. I'm happy to report that no such thing occurred. I still kind of feel like a jerk, though. Surely death by GreenWorks is less than pleasant.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Brittany on the phone. We'd gotten close on a two-week art trip to Germany, and for once I found myself capable of holding a phone conversation without awkward minute-long pauses or sitting in silence while getting talked at for hours on end. Brittany was a year ahead of me in college and has just graduated, stepping right in to a (fantastically lucky) full-time graphic design position. In other words, she is An Adult, and to some extent I regard her with some awe and trepidation (except when she's fangirling over Harry Potter).

The thing I remember the most about that phone conversation was something she said about being An Adult: "Whenever I have to do something that scares me or that makes me nervous, I just tell myself 'I am a strong, capable, independent woman,' and that makes it easier." (Obviously a paraphrase, my memory isn't that good.)

Those very words were in my mind as I faced off with the spider (not the first I've killed on my own, but the first I've killed au naturel and dripping water all over the bathroom floor. It made me feel very Amazonian), and they're in my mind now as I sarcastically pen my first blog post. I turn twenty-one in twenty-nine days. More and more, I'm beginning to feel the pressures of growing up: what am I going to do after I graduate? How am I going to make enough money to live on? Should I get an online boyfriend so people stop asking me about it? Will losing weight make me happier?

All very mysterious, adult-y questions. Questions, I hope, that will someday be answered. And since writing is, like, my "thing" - and since everybody and their mother (including mine! The horror! Just kidding, Mom) has a blog now, what better way to inflict my daily life upon the world than through my own little corner of the World Wide Web?

So, to finish up, here are a few things I've done in my youth that I hope will be a benefit to me as I make the trek into Adulthood:

1. traveled to London, Paris, and Germany on the aforementioned art trips
2. held a steady(ish) partime job for two years
3. read an awful lot of books
4. written hundreds of thousands of words in really bad teenage fantasy fiction
5. failed to bake sourdough bread
6. inhaled more cat and dog hair than is probably healthy
7. slogged through three years of art school that may or may not be of use in my future career (and one more to go)
8. loved and been loved by a family I'm incredibly lucky to have

I leave you with this quote from casting director Russell Boast that I think everyone ought to hear, and adhere to:

Do anything – write, perform, sing, dance, paint, put on a play, and don’t wait for anyone to give you permission. You don’t need permission to do what you were born to do.