Goddamn Karma

Me: Ladidahdidah going to work Lahdidah


Bike: YAAYYYYYY HILLLLL!


Gods of Karma: I think lockpique is having far too good a week.


Other Gods of Karma: Yeah, it's disrupting the balance.


More Gods of stupid jerkfaced karma: We'd better step in fast.


Dumb pointy rock: I don't like where this is going, guys...

Gravity and Physics (Because they're ASSHOLES, pardon my English): We ruin EVERYTHING!

Bike: Oh no!

Me: @#&^%*^&*&%(_)*(&*^#$*&%*^&(&$$*

Bike repairdude at Scheels: Yeah, your innertube has *techy repair-term* and your spokes are *techy repair-term*, and we need to make sure the *techy repair-term* has *techy repair-term*, so instead of the 6 bucks you thought you'd need, it's gonna be more like 25.

Me: Okay, I guess I'll pick it up tomorrow, and in the meantime, WALK everywhere.

Inner Me: #$%^&(^$$^#_(*^*%&%#@$&(*^$%#&^%#$%#^@#%!

Gods of Karma: YAAAAAAYYYYYYYY

Blameless bike which has done nothing wrong: AWWWwwwwwww. :'(
So yeah, Gods of Karma. You made my bike cry. Hope you're happy now.

Stop Killing Our Future

I was talking to a friend about Ron Paul, because he(the friend) is now a delegate for 2000 people (be afraid. be very afraid).

He said an interesting thing in passing, and he probably had no idea that I'd seize upon that stray comment, so don't blame him for this rant. 

Ok. So he and his friend were talking to the senator being elected (Sorum.) and mentioned that he was pretty cool – a stand up guy – but also mentioned that he (Sorum) didn’t really pay all that much attention to a “couple of kids” until he realized that they were in charge of 2000 votes. That is - until he figured out they had actual power and influence upon his position.


And okay. I get the popular preconception of the teenage years being stupid and hormonal and not political, but come on. I’m nineteen. I’m in TPS (Ten Percent Society), FUND (Freethinkers of UND), Honors, VP of CrWC (Creative Writing Club) , SPILL (Supporting Peers in Laidback Listening), volunteering to help with an engineering outreach program next week, and I’m working with the Nonprofit Group on campus. I play D&D and read Howard Zinn and Genome for fun. I’ve been quoted in our newspaper twice – once on CrWC, once on the Interfaith Fair. I wrote a letter to the editor when I was twelve, asking for a horoscope designed for kids. I know self defense, I write - a lot, and I have a job offer from the multicultural center here. I’m undecided, yeah, but I know damn near every building on this campus, which lunch room’s the best for food (Terrace), seating (squires), quick (MarketPlace), and always open (Wilkerson). I’m a voter. I’m eligible to join the military. I critique my friends’ papers and stories, and I’m almost always available to give advice. I pay taxes. I am, for all intents and purposes, an adult, and so are most of my friends. You want to know the best thing about coming to college? It was the fact that, for once, my professors actually wanted to hear me talk. They wanted to hear me think.


College is the first place where I have realized that some of the things I’m saying are something new and might be right. College is the first place where I have realized that some of the things I’m doing are right.

Experience shouldn’t count for so damn much unless you constantly use that experience. I’m probably not going to argue with Hawking about Physics, or King about writing horror. But I know that I know more about certain ideas than some of my older colleagues, and I will not back down from them just because they have been alive longer than I have. 


Once upon a time, length of life used to mean that you were more evolved – better at survival, and not getting killed. But that was before medical advances and technology and better hygiene. In 21st century America, being older than someone else means that either your genes haven’t yet missed something important while self-replicating, or your doctor is good.

This is a serious problem in America, where kids are killing themselves because it’s the only way to get people to listen. When did teen suicide become the new way of expressing yourself? It took two years and nine teen suicides for Bachmann’s home district to lift the “No Homo Promo” Policy. Nine. 

We are killing our future.

Kids are smarter than you think, but they believe adults. What you tell them impacts their beliefs, their choices, their future. And when you tell them that the only way for them to get your attention is by killing themselves, they will listen to you very well.


I don’t have a solid solution. I hope someone comes up with one soon. But I think it’s pretty clear that we need one soon. The issue isn’t so small as LGBT bullying, or the religious diehards at my school who think it's funny to write that the Freethinker group here is going to hell. And yeah, that ticks me off. But these are symptoms of a larger problem.


The issue is the fact that no one is listening to the kids. “A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I'll sell 'em for a dollar/They're worth so much more after I'm a goner/And maybe then you'll hear the words I been singin'/Funny when you're dead how people start listenin'” goes the song – and it’s true. It has become a case of too little, too late – especially for the nine casualties of the “No Homo Promo” policy.


We need to stop using children as our weapons in a war of miscommunications and bad policy.


You need to respect kids.


Because we're more powerful than you think. And once we realize that, we won't be the future.

We'll be the present.

Midnight Ramblings

It's midnight. Or whatever.
I'm sitting on the blue fluffy thing that takes up much of the corner of my floor. The lights are dim; I've only got one on. My door is closed, so I keep sneaking uneasy glances at it out of the corner of my eye; something I'm not fully aware of. It's a little cold, but I can't quite justify getting up to put on a sweatshirt, or pajamas.
My room's kind of a mess. My roommate and I just reorganized it, and so there's an abandoned chair in the center of the room and the floor is littered with a small, neat pile of dust, candy wrappers, bottle caps and broken pencils. My roommate's bed is empty; she's working, or rather at her family's house, asleep by this time of the night.
The halls are dimly lit and largely empty. There are no voices, no running. Just the occasional noises from upstairs and the opening and closing of the heavy doors at the ends of the halls betray the fact that there are people in the building. It isn't total silence; there's a clock ticking in the corner of the room, and my computer is humming softly; but it's the closest to ambient noise I'm going to get in a college dorm room.
My keyboard pauses, then clicks softly as the refrigerator (small, mildly battered, and close to my seat) kicks in with a heavy whir.
I suppose I've been doing some thinking.
I'd like to find a major. You can't really graduate with a degree in Undecided, or even Facebook. My past opinions on majors, thus far, have been: Civil Engineering, English, History, Computer Science, Criminal Justice, Humanities, Psychology, Creative Writing, Anthropology and Religion. And even though I know it's not possible, it would be lovely if I could just apprentice myself to someone, or if I could take a pilgrimage out to a desert to speak to the Oracle, who would tell me what I'm fated to be. I'd like someone to tell me what to do, and at the same time, I'd hate it with a passion.
An apprenticeship would be nice, though. It seems like a very clean transition to adulthood. Apprentice to Journeyman, complete a masterwork, become a Master, take an apprentice. Cycle.
I suppose I'm mostly just sick of being treated like a child. I'd like a clean cut to adulthood, a public ceremony accepted by society, that people can look at and say, "Oh, they've got their journeyman papers. Okay."
Too many laws and conventions are in place in our Great Country that are targeted solely at age groups. And that's all very well and good, I'm sure, if all people were to mature at the same rate.
But I know people who have passports, un-limited driver's licenses, insurance, cars, houses...and who I would not trust with my brother's pet cat. Likewise, I know people who are in high school who shouldn't have to live with their parents anymore because of the simple fact that they've already surpassed them in taking care of themselves. This isn't always the case. But it is often enough to invalidate the weight placed upon age in our society.
And so I'm sick of not quite being sure of my status, when some people ask me for advice and some people feel obligated to force it on me, when some people listen to my words and hear what I have to say and some people ignore my words as "just another teenager." Wisdom comes with experience, but experience bears only a superficial connection to age.
To that effect, I'm not returning home this summer. I'm not working at my dad's work. I'm not living in the house that, every time I step through the threshold, miraculously transforms me into a much younger person. I'm staying up here, getting my own job, and living on my terms (which aren't likely to be that radically changed from the present.) It's partially an effort for independence, partially my own attempt at journeyman's papers (though when I moved 700 miles away, I feel I could have passed journeyman then) and also partially an experiment. Do I need to return home in order to validate my independence?
I'm giving up hills and trees for this. I'm giving up some friends and some Italian cheese.
But I'm doing it anyway, because this will be, in my opinion, my test for journeyman. And when I pass it, nothing will really change on the outside. But I'll get a hella more confident in my adult status.

Pride

In August, 2005, the citizens of New Orleans were hit by a hurricane. It was made all the more devastating because they had actually thought that it was going to pass them by right up to the last day, when the path of the hurricane pointed itself right for New Orleans. The devastation was also worse because of New Orleans' failed levee systems. (My sister pointed me to a book about that.)

Citizens had begun the day as normal. Some had actually left the city for cover, but many had not. It had been a year of close calls and false promises on the part of the weather, and many people didn't think that anything of any magnitude would occur.

We were wrong.

Today, more than five years after the disaster area that Katrina and New Orleans' failed levee systems left behind, people are still struggling to survive in a city that has been mostly forgotten by FEMA and our ADD media in favor of Haiti, Japan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and the many protests occurring in our world.

But people are helping. My sister went to New Orleans as part of her school even before the hurricane hit, and worked with Catholic Charities.

Time passed. My English and Journalism major sister graduated and went to work at Bernstein Global Financial in Chicago, a wealth management company.

And for a while my family didn't hear anything about New Orleans. Until the hurricane hit in 2005.

Two years ago, my sister moved to New Orleans to continue what she had done in school; helping people rebuild their homes, their lives, and their communities. She still worked with Catholic Charities. And in time she became the volunteer coordinator in Operation Helping Hands.
And even though I'd be proud of my siblings no matter what they did or where they went, I think that made me the proudest.

I visited her last year for spring break for a week; my parents had visited her for Mardi Gras, just a week or two earlier. They left work boots from my dad's company (Link!) and took with them the knowledge that my sister was happy and safe. When I went, I worked for a day or so. I learned how to prime a house and how to paint windows. I also learned a lot about my sister.

See, when I was a kid, I used to think she was perfect. She got good grades, didn't stay out too late, and I never saw her get into a fight with my parents. But last year I learned something even better. My sister isn't perfect. Like me, she has a tendency of wearing very nice clothes to paint houses or sets and getting them covered in dust and paint and wood glue. But she is pretty damn awesome.

Operation Helping Hands was only supposed to last for four more years, but they've instead decided to close in two years. The reason? When the initial surge of donations and volunteer work began, a lot of drywall was donated from China. And that drywall had unsafe levels of sulfur in it. The sulfuric acid that it eventually exudes corrodes metal. Operation Helping Hands has decided to replace all of the unsafe drywall that they used then with safe drywall, and that's going to use up the rest of the grants.

So that leaves quite a few volunteers in that program wondering "Where do we go from here?" The end of that time limit is coming up faster than you'd think.

And so my sister is returning to Chicago.

And after two years, her handprint is joining the handprints of other volunteers who have come to work with the great people at Operation Helping Hands.
And just like my sister, it's pretty damn awesome.



(Edit: A few hours after I posted, my sister emailed me with a few details I got wrong. So here's to the edit button on the blog. :) Hopefully this satisfies both of us.)

And here's a shout out to the many volunteer programs that are still fighting Hurricane Katrina's devastating aftereffects: Project Homecoming, Lowernine, United Saints Recovery Project, Beacon of Hope, Habitat for Humanity and Phoenix of New Orleans. You guys are great! :)

Minor Disagreement

"And I'm sorry, but I don't want to have this argument anymore. I might feel..." Searching for the words to say how I feel, what I feel. Right now the only thing I can think of, honestly, is tense and uncomfortable. Why do you have to talk about this now? Why did you have to spoil this now? I can't eat - I look down at my half-eaten pepperoni pizza slice on my plate, next to it the grapes. It had made me so happy when I'd realized that the dining center had had them.
I can't eat.
"badly for the fact that you had to wake up, but we have rules in our room now." I'm still fumbling for words. Words - spoken words - are never your problem. And when I'm talking in front of three people, one of whom are angry, two of whom are, I know, judging, weighing, measuring in that way that our gender has...the words stick in my throat along with the partially digested grape.
You say something to the judge, say it again, there's a question. I know these things but they're already fading in my head.
At this moment I can think only of escape. It's always been my habit to run from these things, these conflicts that make up our lives. But I'm serving no good here but to repeat myself.
"See, we have these commandments in our room. And we've been asking people to stop leaving garbage in our room for a while now, because we have to clean it up..."
"But there were *5* other people in that room, and *I* had to wake up..."
"And I don't want to argue about it anymore. I'm not going to apologize for it."
Awkward tense silence to match the tenseness in my stomach. I'm not done with my plate but I'm done with my food.
I get up, walk to the dish area, put my dishes down. I can't even pause long enough to put them on the conveyor belt, and then I'm walking - not running- walking briskly down the stairs, through the tunnels.
In the elevator I can put a hand to my stomach, a fist to mirror the fist in my gut and my head and knotted around my feelings. It's hard to disagree with a friend - I have gone from having none to having many in what feels like a very short time, and I'm still terrified of losing the ones I have.
I will mourn this, angst over this, and finally write it down, trying to work out the tenseness in my stomach.
You won't remember this.

Weird Dream from when I was a kid.

Well, kid meaning younger than I am now. But still.


When I was a kid, I had this dream that I was hanging out with this six foot tall Aryan (His hair was brown. His eyes were brown. He had really cool eyebrows. I don't know why I assigned him as "Aryan," I just did.), discussing the comical merits of Robin Williams in front of a huge poster of his movies.

Technically, the werewolf was an assassin who was hired to kill me, so while we were hanging out discussing Robin Williams, his decrepit boss starts hissing at him to do his job already. But I had come prepared.

For earlier, (Yes, my dreams have plot and flashbacks) I had been running through some tunnels when I was tackled by this net that forced me to only tell the truth, and the leader of the people with the net gave me these crazy colorful beads that I stuck in my pocket.

So I had these beads, and as the old guy's freaking out at me, I start chucking them at him. And they burn like fire. Presumably he died.

My subconscious has some serious issues.

Musette

A girl walks through a deep forest, humming a song that her mother taught her.
In the distance, birds trill. Closer still, the sounds of young animal footsteps echo merrily against the caverns of dark growing green. The sunlight casts green dappled light onto the girl's freckled skin as she walks easily through these woods. Her step is light and sure and crunches the leaves and branches underfoot.
Everything is as it should be, as it has been, as it will be.
And then it changes.
A cloud passes overhead, and the light that was green becomes dark and brooding and full of mystery.
The girl is frightened, but still hums, even as the birds begin to quiet and the animals seek out shelter against what they sense as a coming storm. The song that the girl hums is like a bulwark against the fear and mistrust of the mystery inherent in the darkness that begins to stretch underfoot. Shadows lengthen. Branches become claws. A hollow wind begins, chilling the air as the darkness chills the light, turns innocent mystery to something darker still.
The song dies.