2015 Goals (part 2)

In the last post, I went into detail on my monthly projects, such as November's Gratitude Journal, December's Minimalist Game, and this coming January's No Sweets Policy. In this post, I want to talk about the Goodreads' annual reading challenge, and some crafty projects and general progress goals I have for myself.


Reading Challenge
For the 2014 Reading Challenge, I set a goal to read 50 books. When 2014 ends, I will have read about 40 books. I won't quite have met my goal, but I'll still have read twice as many books for fun as I did during high school and college put together. The ones that stand out in my memory and which I would definitely recommend are Pagan Visions for a Sustainable Future, Covencraft, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Good Omens, Uglies, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

For the 2015 Reading Challenge, I think I am going to make my goal 50 books again. It's about a book a week, and I really should be able to do it, but I won't be upset if I don't make it to 50 as long as I put out a good effort towards reading consistently. I've done some thinking about some books I want to read as part of the 50, so here's a nifty bullet list:

• I want to re-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Series.
• I definitely want to finish Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at the Harry Potter read-alouds, and if we can I really want to do Goblet of Fire as well.
• I at least want to give The Satanic Verses my best shot. It's huge and dense and very different from Haroun, but I loved Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life both so much that I really want to read the book that made Salman Rushdie have to hide from his government. Plus, I already bought it.
• I want to read some Terry Pratchett. I really enjoyed Good Omens (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman) this year, and read it in a FLASH. If the rest of Pratchett's stuff is anything like that, I'll love it. I'll probably read some Discworld. Also I think he's written some stuff about witches that I'd really like to read. That may or may not actually be part of the nigh-infinite Discworld series.
• I want to read The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman, and at least one Neil Gaiman novel. I loved Anansi Boys, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, but I never finished Neverwhere or American Gods (didn't get very far in that one, even) back in high school, and I never even started Stardust. That's three big problems right there, and I know I can solve at least one of them this year.

I'm noticing a strange pattern: 2014 was definitely over 50% non-fiction for me (largely metaphysical), but everything I've written as a goal for 2015 has been a novel (or graphic novel).

There's two more:

• This one's kind of iffy and I don't know if I mean it, but I kind of want to read the Game of Thrones series or whatever it's called. What that means is that I want to have read it, but I know what reading it is and what I would be getting into, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of committment given that I already definitely want to read The Satanic Verses and re-read LotR.
• And let's throw one non-fiction in there to retain my sanity: I've got two Stephen Hawking books and I haven't read either one, so I'll try to read either The Universe In A Nutshell or The Grand Design. I'm leaning towards the latter.

As far as Crafty Stuff goes, here are some goals.

Abstract things to achieve:

• Sell my wares at a market regularly.
• Give Etsy a serious shot.
• Repair my woodburner and do more woodburning
• Get my craft room up and running
• Teach Minimalist Girl to sew
• Do more crafting than Pinteresting

Things to make:

• Finish Britt's cloak
• Finish my already-cut-out teal-blue linen Renaissance overdress
• Make something to wear under it
• Make a Spirit Quilt (I'll probably do a series of posts about my Spirit Quilt, as it will be my first quilt and a big project). This involves quilting, applique, embroidery, beading, and a lot of patience.
• Quilted leaf potholder
• Make a woven seed bead bracelet in a pattern of my own design (I'm about halfway done with my first one, actually, but it's got a lot of mistakes)
• Anything (seriously, anything) out of all the fabric I have accumulated. I keep saying I need skirts--well, there are at least three different fabrics that I bought for the express purpose of making skirts. Make some skirts, goddammit.

And I know I already talked in-depth about my monthly projects for 2015, but here are a few more thoughts, general goals and stuff:

• By the end of the year, have developed healthy habits for cooking, eating, exercising, and socializing (be less lazy and more accountable, cook more, eat better, exercise more often and get better at it, and don't be so gosh darn afraid to go out and do things and meet people)
• Keep a clean, organized, and largely clutter-free home (hopefully a large part of this will come naturally out of having played The Minimalist Game)
• Actually make enough money to contribute a full half of the rent
• Build skills
• I'm kind of thinking about doing weekly projects as well. For example, my monthly project for January is no sweets/sugary things; I may also have a week in January where I'm not allowed to use any prepared food from Trader Joe's or anywhere else and I have to cook everything from scratch, including packed lunches (I thought about that for a month, but with our schedule it is NOT realistic at this time). I might have a week where every day I have to practice a certain aria, or a week where I have to finish a Quilt block every day, or read a short story every day, or write a song every day. I like the idea of these shorter weekly projects for things like skill-building and creative productivity. Expect to see a January post soon

I think that's all for now (I know it was quite a lot).

Good night and Happy Almost New Year,

Lovely Wednesday

2015 Goals (part 1)

My New Year's Resolutions are going to be a bit funny in 2015.

In 2014, I made no New Year's Resolutions, but did a much better job of keeping the ones I would have made or had made in the past. This year I did more of what I wanted; I have had jobs, I broke free from a toxic system, I read more, I belly danced more, I did more art, I cooked and cleaned more, I was happier. I can't say I've ever had an unhappy year, but 2014 was a particularly happy one. I even get along better with my parents than I did before this year.

Towards the end of 2014, though, I tried a sort of resolutions project almost on accident... and it worked really well--at least, it worked far better than any New Year's resolutions I've ever made. What I did was for November and December, I gave myself monthly projects. They both happened spontaneously, but I like this pattern so much I'm going to keep it going less spontaneously. For November 2014, I kept a Gratitude Journal. The goal was to write at least one thing in it every day. I definitely missed days, but I also definitely ended up with way more than 30 things written out, an enhanced awareness of all the things I had to be grateful fore, and a habit that has carried through to at least late December. For December 2014, Boyfriend and I played the Minimalist Game, which you can read about by going back a few posts. I left town in the middle of the Minimalist Game, which made it difficult to finish throwing things away at my house, but Boyfriend and I fully intend to finish with a total of at least 496 things donated, recycled, trashed, used up, given away, or otherwise gotten rid of upon my return to the Lone Star State. That sounds like a lot, but when you take into account that we're two scatterbrained people who both hoard potential project materials and just condensed two households into one, it's really not. Even though we're pretty behind in the Minimalist Game right now, we still achieved a LOT towards our more relevant goal of having a neater, cleaner, more efficient, better organized, and more streamlined apartment, and our related goal of not being such materialistic hoarders. As proof, I helped my mom get rid of a shit-ton of Christmas decorations she probably hasn't used in the last decade (that's not to say there aren't still at least 6 big boxes worth of Christmas decorations in her house not including front-yard-reindeer, but every ornament counts). Even if we haven't yet gotten rid of 496 things this December, our attitudes towards "stuff" have changed. We're far less attached to it, and far more honest about what things we genuinely want to hang on to.

What I'm trying to say is that these monthly projects seem to work for me, and so I want to continue them: a different monthly project for every month of the year, with the goal of building habits that outlast the month. For example, I have decided that for January of 2015, I will have no sweets at all. No cookies, cake, candy, ice cream. No maple syrup, no sugar in my tea. Honey only for coughing or a sore throat, no soda, no juice with added sugar. Fruit is fine, and dried fruit as long as there's no added sugar. The worst will be no chocolate. I have a HUGE sweet tooth, and I pretty much always have at least one or two options around the house for sweet snacking. Usually it's a bar of dark chocolate to snack on and a box of non-dairy ice cream sandwiches for the evenings. If I don't pay attention, I can go an entire day eating nothing but sweets--every child's dream, and the quickest way to diabetes.

Diabetes runs in my family and, speaking of gratitude, I am seriously lucky that I don't have it by now given how much sugar I can consume if I don't watch myself, especially in combination with my tendency to enjoy stationary activities (piano, handicrafts, and the worst: cooking).

I've tried a couple times to set a strict, all-encompassing regimen for myself: only one small portion of a sweet thing once a day, eat all different colors of vegetables, and do a half hour of exercise every day. You'd think that would be easy enough (so did I), but I've found that when I add in so many new factors at once, it's just too much to keep track of and I lose motivation within two weeks or less. So, I want to build up these healthy habits one at a time, and I'm starting by cutting down on the sugar. I know I am not strong enough to refrain from sugary things completely for an indefinite period of time, so the month-long time limit gives me something to look forward to. I think it will be a hell of a lot easier to stay away from sweets altogether knowing I only have to do it for a month than it would be to limit myself to one serving of sweets per day for eternity. I guarantee eternity would not last very long. However, while a month is short enough to give me something to look forward to, it's also long enough to give me time to break my sugar addiction, flush it out of my system, and hopefully build a habit of not even wanting sugary things that often. I'll admit I picked January because I really didn't want to miss out on my mom's Christmas cookies, but I think that's totally within my rights. I'm actually looking forward to this no-sugar project.

I'm not sure yet what all my other monthly projects for 2015 will be, although I know a lot of them will focus on building habits of healthy eating and exercise, and you can bet you'll hear all about them right here on this blog.

This post was actually supposed to be mostly about the books I want to read and the crafts I want to do this coming year, but I think this post is too long and I am too tired to even include that now. That's the other half of my New Year's Resolutions this year, and I'll probably go into those tomorrow.

Gratitude Journal

So I've been keeping my Gratitude Journal in an actual leather-bound journal, but it's at my mom's house and I'm at my Dad's house, so I wanted to make a few short entries here before I forget to write them down.

1. Dads who, without asking why, will happily drive their daughters to Rite-Aid at 9pm on a Saturday are the best dads. I am lucky to have one of them.
2. This particular Dad is also the sort who will make bread pudding for breakfast and Yorkshire pudding for dinner. I am grateful to have experienced this today, and grateful that I do not eat this way every day. It was delicious but my body is full of too much oil. On the other hand, that leftover Prime Rib from Christmas was just what my body needed today.
3. I am grateful for the heated blanket my stepmom gave me for Christmas last year. It makes it much easier to be grateful that my family is energy conscious and refuses to turn on the heat until it's literally freezing, which, in Southern California, is never.
4. I am grateful for 24-hour pharmacies. When I was in the Netherlands I really needed one and all the pharmacies were closed at 1am on a Wednesday for some reason, but in the U.S. (at least the parts I've lived in) that particular aspect of life is better, I think. Dutch breakfasts are something else, though.

These are just the few I was itching to write down. You may hear more gratitude later. 

Also, if you are considering keeping a gratitude journal, or even if you aren't, do it. It's one of the best things I've ever done. It has made me much more aware of all the wonderful things I have to be grateful for, many of which I could easily take for granted. This isn't even about God or anything, although it could be if that's what you're into--it's just about really appreciating every moment and living it to its fullest potential, and realizing how amazing this world and our lives are. More than once since I started this have I found myself breaking down in tears of joy and gratitude that I just can't hold in. Even if all I am is alive, I have more than someone else, and I have that much to be grateful for... and every moment, I am so much more than alive. It's amazing, it's just amazing.

Best,

Lovely

Pretty Pictures and Strange Prose

I am pleased to report that I am at a point in my computer graphics skills where I can turn a poorly lit photograph of a pencil-on-lined-paper sketch into this...

...which I can then turn into...

...a beautiful, full-color, fully-scalable vector image!

I know I'm tooting my own horn, but I feel pretty proud of myself.

Besides, who else's horn would I toot?

All this is over one of the textbooks I'm writing for the Three Sisters Learning Path, and my bad decision to start formatting it even though I'm only halfway through the content. I do tend to get carried away with formatting, which is what happened here. Any book needs a title page, so I looked up sample book title pages, only to find that they all had the publisher's logo displayed at the bottom! I knew I would be self-publishing, which meant... Three Sisters needed a logo that would look good on a title page. Well, here we are.

So now you know my secret. I'm writing a word family reader! But not a gross one... I hope.

I'm kind of disgusted by most of the word family readers out there. They all seem to be full of strange themes and garish pictures. I want this one to be fun to read, and without too much to distract from the words. Plus, I can't turn down thirty-something prompts for fun poetic exercises.

I know you're just itching to here some of the things I've written for the book. I'm not sure whether these are prose or poetry--I think they're something in between--but they're fun to write and read (at least I think so). Here are a few of my favorites:

Once there was a cat called Kate. Kate went on a date with a rat. The rat was late to the date. When the rat came, he sat on Kate's plate. Kate the cat ate the rat.

A sailor called Bill told a whale of a tale. He said he got his ship on sale and ate nothing but stale bread, kale, and pale ale. He sleeps on a bale of hay.

The Monster Mash is quite a bash. It's a bash I'd like to crash! Monsters flash and gnash their teeth, and all wear clothes that clash! They thrash on the dance floor and splash in the punch. You've never seen monsters act so brash! It's a mad dash to pay cash for a ticket to the Monster Mash.

I just hope my sense-of-humor is appropriate for first graders.

You'll be hearing more from me soon.

Three Sisters Learning Path

I've stated before that I'm writing a curriculum for private and home school whether Rainbow Spirit Academy happens or not, but I've been doing a lot of thinking on it lately and wanted to share my work with you.

I wrote a bunch about it a while ago, but just kept it to myself. Here are my original thoughts:

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In a garden, weeds creep in to steal the nutrients the gardener gives to the plants he planted himself. The weeds must be removed so that the plants can grow. Many systems of education treat the arts as a weed which must be removed from the garden so that the intellect can flourish--or, at best, as an unnecessary luxury which drains resources from more important things.

At Rainbow Spirit Academy, we like to think of the arts as one of the three sisters--the three plants (corn, beans, and squash) which Native Americans often planted together to take advantage of their mutualistic relationships. The corn provides a trellis for the beans to grow on, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil, and the squash's big, floppy leaves shade the roots of all three, providing a living mulch for the soil in which its sisters grow.

The core curriculum most schools teach is merely the beans--just the facts, with maybe a sprinkling of practical experience and creative thought. At Rainbow Spirit Academy, we like facts--but they do not constitute a complete education. To really be prepared for life beyond school (and not just for the next tier of school!), you need a strong moral, spiritual, and creative backbone for the facts to grow on, as well as a thorough foundation of practical know-how to protect and make use of all that information and creativity.

The Three Sisters Curriculum and Educational Philosophy stems from that idea, so we focus on all three aspects of human learning and development. Each aspect is symbolically linked to one of the three sisters from Native American agriculture:

In a system where each of these aspects is treated as a crucial and inseparable part of a whole, individuals are encouraged to blossom into happy and productive members of their community.

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I've decided to call it the Three Sisters Learning Path, though, instead of Three Sisters Curriculum. It sounds friendlier, more welcoming, and I think it's evocative of trailblazing, exploration, self-motivation, and self-guidance, whereas the word curriculum is so harsh. It IS a curriculum, but it's also definitely a way of learning... a learning path. 

More on 3Sisters soon.

Sonnet - Fear of Permanence

Quietly, last night you spoke your fear
that, though your choice as yet is indeterminate,
the ever-looming date is drawing near
when love must cease or become permanent;
And that if you, e.g., should choose the latter,
you further fear our love will gather dust,
or worse, having been too much exposed to water,
our iron bonds should oxidize and rust.
And Love, I scarcely could more thankful be
that you have opened up and thus expressed
your love and fear and other thoughts to me,
rescuing them from their prison in your breast--
but I feel if we can trust and listen well,
we need not even fear the hounds of hell.

Regarding School and Real Life

This was originally posted on my other blog, Notes on Books and Other Things, on June 15, 2013. That blog still exists, but I'm trying to condense all my blogs here because I like this one best and it makes sense to me.
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     Growing up, I often struggled between loving to learn and hating to go to school.

     I went to school and often enjoyed it simply because I loved to learn, but hated memorizing things that I thought were essentially useless, or at least not taught in a way that made them engaging and made their use apparent. I was always learning on my own, pursuing extracurricular interests, and reading voraciously--in fact, I spent most of fourth grade reading under my desk with my head on the table as if I had a terrible headache; I even thought I'd been clever enough to get away with it until the last day of school when Mrs. Takashima congratulated all of us on a "year well done, even those of us who spent the whole thing reading under their desks."

     I was embarrassed to have been caught, but looking back I'm really glad that Mrs. Takashima recognized how valuable my love of reading was to my education, and that in the grand scheme of things, as long as I was doing the work and passing the tests (and I always did very well), and as long as I was not being disruptive, that it was alright for me to pursue learning on my own, even in her class. Man, what a great teacher.

    The next year my family moved cities and school districts, and because of the different district requirements my parents seriously considered having me repeat fourth grade over again. Thank god they saw sense and didn't--thirteen years of public school was tedious enough without repeating one of them.

     I often wished I could go to some other school... a private school or a boarding school where they only taught things I was interested in... or some fantasy school in my mind. Or, I wished I had a governess like so many of the characters I read about had in their books, to teach me languages and history and math in a way that was interactive and engaging, and at a pace that moved as quickly as I learned without having to wait for 35 other students to not only understand the material but to settle down and stop talking (the settling down often took much longer than the learning, after all).

     What I'm getting to with all this is that I think I would like to homeschool my children. Obviously, we're talking a good many years from now, because I'm currently 20, unmarried, and unemployed, and you certainly cannot homeschool children you don't have. However, I really think I could offer my children a much fuller, more engaging, more interesting, and more well-rounded experience than the one public school was able to offer me. I managed to get a lot more out of public school than many students do, because I filled waiting time with reading and drawing and writing; I pursued the study of foreign languages independently; I was fortunate enough to have parents who were in a position to put me in piano lessons, voice lessons, girl scouts, drum lessons, art lessons, cotillion, band, choir, opera... you name it; and especially because my parents were very involved in my learning.

     My dad is a chemistry professor at Caltech, and every year of elementary school (and even once in middle school), he would arrange to come in and do fun science demonstrations for the class: the whole class got to see a pickle become a lightbulb; they got to see seven beakers of rainbow liquid poured into each other all become clear and mixed again became the seven colors of the rainbow again; they got to see a marshmallow expand to twenty times its size in a vaccuum and then shrink down to the size of a raisin. They got to see all these things, but I got to go into the lab and learn how it all worked, and help engineer each experiment so it would work on the big day.

     My mom is a doctor, and one of the most multi-talented people I've ever met. Any medical questions I had have always received (long-winded but) detailed explanatory answers. She grew up in Texas going to school with astronauts' children, and fascinated by space and space exploration, and when I was in kindergarten she helped my whole class build a moonscape and a papier mache Apollo 13, she sewed two kindergartener-sized astronaut suits and took pictures of my whole class. She loved to garden, and built an animal garden with my third-grade class (butterfly bush, kangaroo paw, zebra grass, snail vine, etc...). I remember riding in the car while she drove to a not-nearby museum to borrow their giant plastic model of a flower so that she could teach my class about plant sex organs. She taught me to sew and she taught me to cook, and I'm still learning from her all the time. I will never be as good as she is at decorating cakes.

     Both my parents travel often--my dad would always tell me stories about his business travels, and my mom would plan our camping trips and other excursions for weeks. Even vacations I was not always excited about before (I didn't always know how good I had it) have become integral to the way I see the world around me.

     I am absolutely certain that I have learned at least twice as much from my parents as I have from my teachers before college, and I still have much more to learn from them. Beyond that, I am fairly certain that, with the flexibility to work with the pace, interests, talents, strengths, and weaknesses of my own children, I could teach them much better than a public school system could. Mind, I don't say this out of disrespect for teachers: I strongly admire and believe in the public education system and have often considered becoming a teacher myself; my boyfriend is a substitute teacher, and I respect the work that is done in the public school system infinitely, but if a child's parents are passionate about their child's learning, and able to foster and support it, I don't believe that the public school system is able, by nature of its size, to offer the depth that a one-on-one (or at most a few-on-one), individually-tailored, home-based, exploratory education experience can offer.

     That said, I don't understand how anyone can afford to own a home, let alone own a home with children in it on one income. I know there are people who do manage to do this, but as an about-to-be-college-senior hoping to move to Austin after I graduate, I can hardly even imagine renting an apartment on one income. I don't think I'll have to, but it's still a scary prospect. It's for this reason only that I regret my fancy create-your-own-not-science-major; I do believe that I am a more well-rounded and better-educated person for having studied the things I've studied, but they're not about to get me into medical school and I don't want to go to medical school anyway.

     I decided to study English and Japanese and Art because those are the things that interested me, but I've recognized recently that if I'm ever going to be able to manage my own finances, let alone have my own finances to manage, I'm going to have to get good at it now, and I'm going to have to become employable now. There is no time to wait until I am unemployed--that's not something I can afford. So, I've spent the last few days updating my Linkedin and my resume, today I made (and handpainted) business cards (in Japanese and English), and I've been researching jobs for which I am or can become qualified and which hopefully would not bore me to death. Next semester I'm registered to continue my study of Japanese, and I'm taking a class on Entrepreneurship. I'm also finishing up the requirements for my degree program and starting work on my Honors thesis(!).

     Because of my artsy, liberal, non-conformist side, I've always kind of shied away from "corporate" ideas like networking, business cards, linkedin, suits, natural hair colors, and desks... because I held the attitude that "If a company doesn't want to hire someone with blue hair, then I don't want to work for them," but the truth of the matter is it may not be that the company discriminates against alternative taste--if you are looking for a serious job with blue hair, it says that you are not willing to compromise to be a part of their company, which is something that you absolutely have to do. If I'm not willing to make a compromise on something as trivial as my hair, why should they pay me? They shouldn't. So, I'll also be phasing out the blue hair this year. I'm going to miss it, and someday I fully expect to be a member of the rainbow head club again--once I've proved myself in the workforce and have a good enough reputation that my hair will not precede me.

     My current plan/goal/strategy is this: work for and learn from established companies/organizations/etc., to gain experience, real world workforce knowledge, connections, and funding for my own projects; in the meantime, write, do art, and develop my own business plan/s; and start my own business(es) and get them functional enough that I have flexible work hours and/or can work from home. At that point, perhaps I will be able to afford the time and money to have and homeschool children. Those last steps are a long way ahead, and I know it... but the years are going faster than ever, and I want to be able to give my children a childhood of experiences that is as good as or better than what I was blessed to grow up with, and if I can't do that, then I can't afford to have children.

The Infinite Library

This was originally posted on my other blog, Notes on Books and Other Things, on January 12, 2013. That blog still exists, but I'm trying to condense all my blogs here because I like this one best and it makes sense to me.
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I should probably tell you why this blog is located at myinfinitelibrary.blogspot.com, why it is my infinite library, and what an infinite library is.

I don't have all the answers. That's what an infinite library is not.

In fact, my infinite library is very different from other infinite libraries. It's a concept that was introduced to me by a professor from Germany who taught a course called Modernism and Beyond in European and World Literature to me when I studied abroad at Universiteit Maastricht in the Spring semester of 2012.

I liked this professor because he knew we would not like everything we read in his class, and he did not ask us to like it or even try to like it--he only asked us to try to appreciate it and learn from it, and to try to understand why we did or did not like each book we read. What all did we read? Gosh... Demian, Nadja, To the Lighthouse, Heart of Darkness, "The Wasteland," "Waiting for Godot," Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man... perhaps something else. That sounds comprehensive to me. Perhaps I'll talk about those books later. Demian in particular changed the way I look at the world, and it was fantastic. I regret that the books were provided by the school and I did not get to keep my notes.

In any case, the professor presented in passing an idea he called the infinite library, and which I have probably revised since hearing it. This idea is the biggest thing I garnered from this class, and has changed my world view more than anything we read or anything else we talked about. I vaguely remember him crediting this idea to T.S. Eliot, but have found nothing to support that. There is apparently an infinite library concept introduced by Terry Pratchett, but it is rather different insofar as I can tell. The infinite library as I think of it is this:

When you are born, your infinite library is essentially empty. It is an infinite room full of infinite shelves full of no books at all. From that point on, every single thing you hear, taste, smell, read, touch, or experience becomes a book in your infinite library--but each book is not free-standing. Oh, no! Each book is affected by every single other book already in your infinite library, and as your infinite library grows, everything you experience thus become deeper and more multi-layered and more meaningful, more connected. In the physical world, a poem is the same every time someone reads it. The words stay the same in spelling, meaning, order, and juxtaposition; the punctuation is constant; the number of lines is unchanged; and so on. But the infinite library is another matter! In the infinite library, every time you read the same poem, an entirely new book is added to your infinite library, because it was an entirely different experience for you. Even if nothing else has changed, the second time you read it you already know how it is going to end--and more than likely, other things have changed. You may have undergone more and more varied struggles, you may have fallen in love, you may have read another book--and so this new experience of reading it is separate from the first and any other previous times you may have read it.

This can be applied to anything, not just literature--when I rode carousels as a child it was for the novelty alone; now it is for the novelty as well as for the nostalgia, and when I do I think of the carousel I rode in Paris and how it was next to a beignet stand and it was a foggy day; how all the horses on the Disneyland carousel are white so children don't fight over them; how Griffith Park refuses to accept help to refurbish their carousel; how I used to be a member of the Santa Monica carousel when I was very little, and once met Sean Penn and his kid there; what my own carousel would be like if I had one--you can have your very own for just over five hundred thousand dollars! (I know, I know... I can't afford that either)... and so on.

Anyhow, that is that. I don't know how much I'll talk about the infinite library on this blog, but I talk about it a lot in real life, so there you have it.

Happy New Year!

Standing Up For Stargirl

If you are reading my blog and you haven't yet read Stargirl and its sequel, Love, Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli, then go read them and then come back and read this. They are very quick reads, so that's a totally manageable request. This is a copy-paste of a review I wrote on Goodreads of Love, Stargirl, because I disagreed with what some other reviewers were saying. IT HAS SPOILERS!!!

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I'm writing this review to stand up for Stargirl.

A lot of other reviewers seem to have really hated this book [Love, Stargirl] in comparison to its predecessor, Stargirl. The main reasons I've read for this are that, first, the whole point of Stargirl written from Leo's perspective is that Stargirl Caraway is mysterious, ethereal, and otherworldly, and therefore a sequel written from her perspective spoils the magic and mystery; and that, second, If Stargirl is supposed to serve as an example of what people should strive to be, then she oughtn't to spend so much time moping over her ex-boyfriend, Leo.

I picked up Stargirl and Love, Stargirl to read because I'm starting a part-time job as English teacher to two of my friend's homeschooled children (that's two children, not two friends, the apostrophe's in the correct place), and I was looking for a selection of enjoyable reads that were both low-level and well-written (an astonishingly rare combination), and Stargirl came up on someone's list. I started reading it (and its sequel) via the Amazon "Look Inside" preview, and the first time they omitted a serious chunk of text I went out to the used bookstores, bought both, and read through them immediately. The books are VERY well-written without being too SAT-word heavy for 7- and 9-year olds to get through easily (I hope!). The reader picks up interesting, odd facts about mockingbirds, solstices, weather patterns, and rat breeds if he/she is paying attention, which is one of my favorite things in books about particularly knowledgeable characters. All the characters in Love, Stargirl (as in Stargirl) are entertaining, and each is likable and charming in his/her own way.

I was attracted to Stargirl at first for I think a different reason that the publisher expects most people to be. The promotional writing on Amazon indicated that readers would be mystified by Stargirl and relate to/align themselves with Leo, who has to choose between Her (Stargirl, a shining beacon of love, light, truth, and adventure) and Them (the rest of the MAHS student body, motivated only by passing fads, rules for popularity, and basketball; in other words, victims of the human psychological condition). However, I relate very closely to Stargirl. I was never homeschooled like she was, but I was never properly a part of any clique at school. I spent my entire schooling up to late high school with few to no close friends, because I would rather be forming relationships with books. Somehow, towards the end of high school, my confidence and sense of adventure blossomed, and the following quotes about Stargirl Caraway could easily be direct quotes about me:

"Several times in those early weeks of September, she showed up in something outrageous. A 1920s flapper dress. An Indian buckskin. A kimono. One day she wore a denim miniskirt with green stockings, and crawling up one leg was a parade of enamel ladybug and butterfly pins. "Normal" for her were long, floor-brushing pioneer dresses and skirts."

“Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters. 

'I hate change,' she said. 'It's so . . . jangly.'

'Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?' I said.

'Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?'"

"She saw things. I had not known there was so much to see. 

She was forever tugging my arm and saying, 'Look!'

I would look around, seeing nothing. 'Where?'

She would point. 'There.'

In the beginning I still could not see. She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as 'nothing' I walked in a gray world of nothing.”  

I wanted to read these books because she and I had so much in common, and there are things she is better at than I am, and things I'm better at than she is, and I wanted to learn from her, and I wanted to read the story of someone who was so much like me. As you can imagine, I was pretty disappointed in Leo over the second half of Stargirl, but Stargirl herself was never disappointing to me.

Okay, now that I've given you my background info, I'm going to actually address the complaints about Love, Stargirl, that other reviewers have expressed.

Stargirl is not mysterious. She is not an alien. She is not superhuman. She is not any of those things. She is, just like Spinelli insists via his Wise Old Man, Archie, totally human--more human or at least more in touch with her humanity than most of the rest of the book's cast, in fact. She is very in touch with her own humanity and the earth on which she lives, and with the humanity of those around her. She's adjusted her habits accordingly, and is generally better at being selfless than most characters and most real people are. She's certainly better at it than I am.

If Stargirl is a real, regular, non-mysterious human just like you, as becomes rather more clear in Love, Stargirl, if you weren't paying close enough attention to Stargirl and Archie in the first book, then Love, Stargirl should be a beacon of hope. It is a glimpse into the inner workings of the mind of someone who actually cares about humanity and living each day to its fullest. This is actually amplified by the fact that she spends the first part of the book moping over Leo, about which others have complained.

Every bit of Stargirl's struggle with her feelings for Leo is real. When you are a person who loves as easily and as deeply as Stargirl does, that love does not go away easily, and it shouldn't. You don't have to stop loving someone to move on to the next part of your life. I think most people today, when they are broken up with (pardon my dangling preposition), even if it was with someone they were really crazy about, someone who was maybe a really great person, they try to demonize the ex-partner. That's really not necessary, and often really detrimental to our personal growth. Stargirl isn't exactly Miss Psychologically Healthy as she doesn't-even-try to get over Leo in the first two thirds of the book, but even then she understands and implements something that most of us don't: she can be upset with Leo for turning his back on her, and recognize that he doesn't deserve her, while still realizing that his weaknesses and faults do not make him a bad person, and while still loving him despite those weaknesses and faults.

Even worse, the other thing that many people do when they're broken up with, if they don't demonize the ex-partner, is that they turn against themselves. I've seen friends after a bad breakup insist that it was all their fault, pick apart every conversation over the course of the whole relationship to find some little thing (or collection of things) they said wrong to steer the whole 'ship astray, or insist they're too fat, or stupid, or ugly, or somehow were never good enough for the other person in the first place, even often when it's perfectly clear to uninvolved third parties that this is not the case.

Stargirl also does not do this. I was a little disappointed in her when she became Susan in the first book, but when she decided to be Stargirl again, she never looked back, and had no regrets. She recognized that becoming a better person and becoming a different person are two different things, and she should only have to do one of them. Leo wanted her to become Susan, a DIFFERENT person. Stargirl just wants to be a better Stargirl, which is the challenge she faces in Love, Stargirl. She never blames herself for Leo turning from her, which is good. She DOES let herself become a little unhealthily obsessed with linking her happiness to Leo's presence (in his absence), but any of you who have been through a similar experience cannot tell me that her misery is unrealistic. And, in the end, we come to a thematic conclusion. There's no point spending all that time mourning Leo's absence, because Leo is yesterday and maybe tomorrow, but he's not today, and TODAY is today, and there's only one of those each day, and they all become yesterdays so quickly, and once a today is a yesterday there's nothing you can do to change how much of it you spent moping or mourning and how much of it you spent joyfully.

The climax of the book is the Winter Solstice sunrise, something you really can only see once a year, and the way Stargirl set it up, maybe only once in a lifetime. Stargirl almost gave up on it, and was afraid that no one else would want to live for today enough to be up on a snowy hill before sunrise... and then pretty much every character in the book showed up, including Betty Lou the agoraphobe (who usually lives in some combination of yesterdays and tomorrows, but was the very person to give Stargirl the advice from the Buddhists about living today) and Charlie (who spends each day at the cemetery with his wife who is buried there, reliving all his yesterdays with her; even Charlie the yesterday-man is convinced to go see this sunrise).

In summation, if you're disappointed because you found out Stargirl is a regular human being who's just a few steps ahead of the rest of us, you shouldn't be, you rather should see that as a hopeful sign that you, too, can improve as a human being; and if you're disappointed that she mopes over Leo you should recognize that she's a lot more healthy about moping than most people are and that in fact the whole point of the book is that she stops moping over Leo when she realizes that she's supposed to live today for today.

The end.

Wiser

I look back at words I wrote when I was wiser,

and now they offer some small comfort to this miser

who is me, the one, the same, who was the writer

who wrote words of comfort to me, who was wiser.

"I'm not young enough to know everything,"

experiences cheat us out of pure analogy.

The fairy tales don't fit with what remains of our beliefs,

and so we find ourselves in search of a new true mythology.

• vintage sunglasses
• thrifted boots
• thigh highs... I want to say by Leg Avenue? But I bought them on ebay.
• dress from Ross or Marshalls or TJ Maxx or something.
• Lipstick is Revlon something or other I think.
• Goddamn. I give you NO USEFUL INFORMATION. 

Also, the above captions are song lyrics I wrote on the plane from Dallas to Los Angeles last weekend.

ALL the love,

<3LW

IBCing You (aka I love root beer)

These pictures were taken in my backyard yesterday, most of them by my beautiful boyfriend Rafferty. <3

The kepi is his.

Toy horse supplied by Playmobil... aka from my endless collection of child's things I totally still play with.

I'm in love with these shoes, not least because they're incredibly comfy. I bought them for my trip to the Netherlands this coming semester (I leave January 26th!) because they are warm, comfortable walking shoes, even though the leather and fur are both fake. The fur is inside to about twice the length that is folded over, and they lace on the front and zip up the inner sides. The brand is Groove, and I bought them at Marshalls in Carson City, Nevada (we drove from Los Angeles up to Alturas to visit my uncle on his ranch for Christmas, and spent the night going up in Carson City). I wore them a little bit up there to ride, as it was quite cold, and just the other day (when these photos were taken) to camp on Colorado Blvd for the Rose Parade. 

I think my boyfriend needs to photograph me more... I'm loving the results. <3

I won this shirt in a holiday gift exchange... it's incredibly soft, and I think the perfect balance of masculinity/femininity for a girl who wants to jaunt around in men's Hawaiian shirts but still look good. Then again, that's just me.

These sunglasses were a miracle find. I saw them lying around at this great antique shop near Alturas for $8.00, and thought they were awesome... but of course cool vintage sunglasses for me are a losing battle, since I wear glasses and don't have the patience for contacts. But, I thought I'd try them on anyway just to see how they looked... since, you know, a girl can dream. I slipped 'em on, checked the mirror, smiled a sad smile, and took a quick look around... and noticed that I was able to read the posters on the walls. 

"MOM. I CAN SEE."

"What, honey?"

"I CAN SEE IN THESE GLASSES."
And the rest is history. :)

Reproduction sergeant's Union kepi for the marines, circa 1863. Navy wool, wood-lined, with black leather brim. Used for reenacting with ACWA's Confederate Marine Infantry, Co. B. It's my boyfriend's. 

IBC Root beer is by no means my favorite, but hey--it's still root beer, and I'm a fanatic. All that glitters may not be gold, but it's still glittery. Virgil's is my favorite, then A&W or Mug (I go back and forth with those two), then IBC, as far as major brands go (although typically the less major the brand, the better). Virgil's is really a breed all it's own--the only place I know to carry it is Trader Joes. Check it out.

And, no, I don't drink. I'm only 19 and live in the US so it shouldn't really be a question whether I do or not, but I'm also in college and what happens happens, so it really is a question, and for the record the answer is no, I don't. While we're on the topic, I also don't smoke or do any drugs. My soul is slightly torn between the part that abhors smoking and smokers for breeding idiocy and illness and the part that knows how damn classy a good pipe looks. Or those cigarette holders from the '20s. Look good in 20 years versus have a good looking pipe now? I picked the former, that's all. Enough moral babble. Fashion.

My rainbow bracelets! As I've mentioned, I have a boyfriend and I identify as straight, but as I have probably also mentioned, civil rights and freedom of expression are the absolute most important issues to me in politics, and I serve as founding secretary of SIF (Sexual Identity Forum) at Baylor University. SIFemBears.com

I wear my rainbow out of pride for the difference my (and our) work makes and has made, out of love for my friends and for all people however they identify themselves, out of respect, out of support, and as a symbol that those who know and believe in what the rainbow stands for are not alone. Sporting the rainbow does not mean you are gay or bi; it does not mean you agree politically or morally with "gayness" (is that pc? I don't know)--all it means is that you are a safe person with whom to talk, to whom you can be "out," and with whom you can freely be yourself. 

That's all, folks.

Best of the best,

<3LW

Two Poems About College

Morning Birdsong

the songs of morning birds

like glitter dust the air

as i have just awoken

not from sleep but

from immersion, deep

within a two-pound paper

freshly printed

across my eyelids,

eyelids frozen not in ice

but in half-sleep—

that place between bed and coffee

where the words

wait sitting to get written

this morning i will

beat the stars to bed, but barely—

they litter still the sky

but the stars, like

tiny fireflies, are

swallowed as if by the morning

songbirds themselves,

one

by

one.

four a.m.

at four

in the morning

I unlocked

the dorm’s

south door.

a coffee-stained coat,

white, quite worn,

I wore.

at semester,

I swore

I wouldn’t do this

anymore.

I’d get back before

my eyes were sore

from reading Machiavelli.

But the core

of college

is cold coffee

until there isn’t

any coffee anymore

and if then

I spend

a dollar more,

what am I paying for?