This is the Bandwagon on which I've Jumped.

We are in a place to watch our world change.
Next week are the elections, for all of you United States citizens. Now, I could begin to spew my ideaology over which canidate I believe is more in alignment to my beliefs, my indignation over the continuation of our two party system, and general rhetoric involving political activism. But I'm not going to do that, not now, at least. The day will come where I will. But this is more important.
Please, on November 4th, go and vote. And don't just vote because someone told you who to vote for. Take twenty, or even just ten, minutes before you head to your polling place, to look up the stances of each canidate. There are websites that even put the stances side-by-side! Decide who aligns best with your beliefs, who you feel will benefit your situation, and vote for them. Don't do it because they seem more popular or their suit looks more stylish or because their wife is prettier. Vote because you want to use your intelligent and informed voice to make the difference between the last eight years and the next. Vote because you've never had a say in politics before. Vote because there are countries in the world where they don't have this right, and the right for all Americans to be able to vote wasn't something that was won easily. You've all heard of "taxation without representation", its the principle that spurred about the creation of this country. This country was founded on the right to have a voice. It took two hundred years after that to make voting available to every Race, Class, and Gender. Vote because the people before us fought their asses off to give us this right. Vote to thank them.
Vote because it is an expression of your individual voice, and Your voice deserves to be heard just as much as everyone else's.

Pause

By the time I wake up in the morning I can hear the construction going on at the bottom of the next hill, two residence halls away. The bangs and scrapes echo off the sides of the hills through the gray dawn of the early morning.

Today it was rainy, and windy, and dark when my alarm went off. The sky looks heavy, and its been hard to get motivated. This is the kind of day where I would usually curl up in bed and write all day, or knit, and maybe read a little. I would keep Damien Rice on repeat along with Jack Johnson and not allow anything heavier to play.

However I have a class in an hour, followed by another, and three meetings scheduled. I have to pick up a mug I made last week and defend a conference in a meeting for the school's budget comittee. I have a paper on North African/South East Asian Human Rights issues due Thursday that I haven't started.

Every once in awhile I wish I could go on a Yoga retreat, or a nature retreat or something akin to those. This is one of those days.

Poised Pen

I tried to write my first book at age twelve. I was in the seventh grade, inspired by my arrival in a new school, and determined to be published by the time I graduated.
Almost every six months, I would start a new book. Something about the old books (or "projects", as they should be called) would always begin to bore me. The tenses got old or the story felt repetitive or not enough was happening to sustain readership. These projects would only make about the 40-60 page mark before I would decide to kill it. Buried in the hard drive of my last laptop are the souls of at least seven former stories, and lying dormant in nondescript, white binders under my desk are two or three more stories, separated into parts that will never be united.
However I will go so far as to say that its not that I don't write well. I make mistakes and I have "tells" as it were (there are a choice 15 words that I probably wouldn't be able to write without, and my sentence structures are unnecessarily complex). I've come to believe that my real issue is that extended looks into the lives of my characters do not entice me. Sure, seven-book anthologies are wonderful. But true, meaningful conflicts occur in tiny spurts throughout our lives. Truthfully, if someone were to try and write a novel about my life, there are only a handful of times in the last four years that would be worthy and readable when recorded, and those times are separated by a good bit of time in-between. I feel the same way about my characters. I hate squishing the conflicts tightly together.
So outside of my current project (re-working an older story from last year I co-wrote with the wonderfully talented and intriguing Jereality) I think I'm going to start tinkering with short stories, and maybe even get back into poetry.
If I come up with anything decent, maybe I'll provide a peek up here.

By the time I finished this post, I felt a million times better. (Updated)

I had a whole post ready to be typed listing the kooky things I've figured out about myself over the last eighteen years. But as I sat down to type it, I felt a tiredness and misery begin to overwhelm me. The sad part is, I wasn't even surprised. The exhaustion has been eating at me for days, along with a terrible, nagging feeling because I can't figure out where it stems from, let alone how to get rid of it.
It wasn't until a few minutes ago that I realized what it was.
I just wanted to scream. Really scream. This is a sensation I've had for most of my adolesence. It gets buried sometimes, but I can remember laying on my bedroom floor back home, just wishing that I could go somewhere to scream as loud as I wanted, until my voice choked and I felt empty. But there really is no place like that. I think its that realization that may hurt the most. Its like the realization that I'm never going to be free from the stuff that plagues me every day, this tiny, cinderblock prison I've managed to build for myself. The killer part is that while I was building it I was painting the walls with poetry and pretty pictures, inviting everyone I knew to look in and admire my craftsmanship. "See how free the bird looks, on this cement wall. Look how high it wishes it could fly!"
Its enough to make me sick.
Maybe when it comes down to it, this is just a bad day, strung onto a week of bad days, which threatens to turn into a month of bad days if I don't become proactive. I think what I need most is contact, people. Up here, I have a good amount of friends, but they're all disconnected. Its not a solid group, they don't even all know each other. I just want to see someone who I have more in common with than two months of living like a well-behaved prisoner who earned extra yard time.
Luckily someone's coming up the day after tomorrow. I am amazingly excited to see her, and I promised myself that I would not burst into tears upon her arrival, with the mere greatfulness of feeling like those friends I talk to online actually exist somewhere out there, and they actually care enough to travel two hours to see me.
You can look forward to a much more peaceful, and happy post when that time comes.

P.S. I apologize for the overall despondent misery of this particular entry. Don't be worried about me though, all will be well.

I'm going to end with a quote from a book I just read by Kurt Vonnegut, entitled "Slaughterhouse-Five"...

"And So It Goes."

P.P.S. I've edited this post from when I published it last night, because while I don't generally feel the need to edit myself, I didn't want what I said to be taken the wrong way. I was speaking from frustration and the need to vent some core issues I've been having. I don't regret the original post, but I also don't feel it was accurately portrayed in my frustration.

Branching

A few years ago if you asked me how important to me the people in my life were, I would say that they were not very important or impactful at all. I had no comprehension of what its like to let people into your life, or to reach out and touch the lives of others. I'm not sure if it was some of the issues I had with others in high school, or if maybe its the sort of lesson you have to grow up a bit to learn, but I have come to understand how important people are. And not just the ones I know personally, but just individuals on this planet in general. Sharing with others, be it experiences or just good will, is an intricately important part of life.
This weekend was filled with seeing friends I rarely get to see, experiencing traditions, and laughter. Its been surprisingly easy to allow myself to forget the love I left behind, and become busy with other things or with new people. But getting to be with people that I care about and spending two days just taking everyone in has been one of the most terrific feelings. I've realized that you don't leave love behind- it is carried with you, buried in both your conscious, and your subconscious, in every second of the day.
I am so grateful that I was able to experience this past weekend. It serves as a reminder that our lives are laced together openly; things from the past influence the future, and we build those futures to incorporate our gained wisdom and love. The people from my past who have stuck with me, and the people who I am connected with without ever meeting them, these are the people who I am using to create my future and my present. I am finally beginning to realize how intensely lucky I am to be surrounded by these people.

Images

Yesterday night I took a local train to a nearby college, where a friend lives. It was a strange visual, speeding on a dirty, old train through industrial New Jersey, watching the sun set below the factory stacks and apartment buildings. The song Hard Love by Bob Franke played in my head the whole ride, and the colors of the sun reminded me of something you'd see in a magazine. When I see that sort of thing, it always creates an internal discord- I want to take a photo of what I'm seeing, to save and cherish, but I also believe that the important things should be captured in your memory, because a camera will never get the moment quite right. This is the reason I very rarely bring a camera anywhere- not to capture the extreme angles of New York City or the harsh contrasts of a bridge against the Adirondack Mountains. Sure, I sometimes take photographs of nature and trees, and I will always take photos of my friends, but when I see something tragically, heart-stoppingly beautiful, I keep it in my memory.

Its not crazy... its cute!

Okay, so here's the thing.... I'm really weird about illness. I know this isn't an uncommon thing, because really, who wants to be sick? But my weirdness takes the "Ahh I don't want the sniffles" issue well beyond "OH MY GUACAMOLE I'M GOING TO SUFFOCATE ON MY OWN SNOT AND DIE UNCOMFORTABLY IN MY SLEEP!!!!"
Yeah, I'm BIG fun!
Anyway, back home this was something that, while not normal, all of my friends at least knew about. So when someone turned up sick, and I stopped speaking to them while simultaneously wiping them down with disinfectant during lunch, they at least knew what was going on. (Saying that they understood would be taking HUGE generosities in the situation). But here... no one knows here. I am two hours away from the core of people who understand (read: Tolerate) my fear of the common cold.
So the dirty looks I was shooting Person A in my Monday classes? Its not your laugh, or your smile, or even your being that offends me... its the fact that as I sat next to you, I could feel your cough tickling my neck and shoulders. THAT'S RIGHT. Somehow, the hand you held fourteen inches away from your face didn't COVER THE MULTITUDE of illness leaking from your person, and it spread everywhere. Not unlike mold. Or the Black Death. I felt like Cruelle DeVille, stading in a room of 101 puppies that wouldn't stop shitting on the carpet, and all I could do in response was wave my arms in the air with rage.
And Person B, I know we have established that we are friends, and my unwillingness to hang out isn't because I'm busy or I don't like you anymore (in truth, I've begun to miss your company) it simply because I am afraid to catch your cold. Only dial that up a million times. Its not really "fear" its more like life-gripping, watch-my-memories-flash-in-consecutive-order, discomfort at the realization that you are going to get me sick, and then I will have to die.
I know that I am in my second month of college and therefore WILL get sick. After all, I live with over 200 people... we're like a life-sized culture for disease and social cues. But I'm just issuing a warning now- when I get sick, I am unbearable. I do research (every time, even if I've had the same issue twice before) and I refuse to get out of my pajamas. The only work I do is what can reasonably be attacked from the confines of my bed, where I lay moaning in misery. I alternate between building a used-tissue castle around myself, and disinfecting everything so that I can't re-catch the illness once I've gotten it, and so I don't spread it to someone else and keep the cycle going perpetually. Because forever is a long time.
I wish I could say that this uncomfortable case of the crazies is restricted to illness. Maybe, compared to all those other things I have stored in my artillery of crazy, the fear of getting sick is a generally reasonable one. But the truth of the matter is, I organize the food in my closet according to size and meal usage, I have a very specific ratio of distance between the magnets on my fridge, and I like to put things in either straight lines or distance them at 90 degree angles from each other, because that makes everything look nicer. And we won't get into my absolute horror pertaining to public bodily functions. We just won't. Not today.
Now please excuse me, I seem to have caught a cold and I now have to count my eyelashes so see how many I pulled out in horror. :)

A Letter.

Dear College:

I've been here for a month. And wow, its been such a quick one! The first two weeks were pretty difficult, I knew absolutely no one, I had no roommate, and every class felt like it was an hour's walk away. But now, I'm making friends, someone moved into the room, I have figured out the most direct route to every class, and I understand the meal plan now! Yay! Its amazing how much food you'll go through when you have no idea when your meal card allows you to eat (three times a day, in specific "meal periods")!

I suppose everything started to shift from "ugh I don't really want to be here" to "yay! This isn't so bad!" last week. I had come back from my parent's house (my other home!) which had been nice, except for the slighty abysmal breakdown I had on Saturday (wandering town in tears in the rain to Paramore's Hallelujah while everyone I loved thought I was somewhere else...excellent!). Anyway, I came back and basically threw myself into things going on on-campus. I figured out the campus Gym (which is free- awesome perk!) and joined a political club and went to a few different events that were closely related to politics and activism. It was pretty amazing- I started meeting people who had the same interests at me, who wanted to talk about the same things that I did.

So I guess when they say that waiting a month before deciding whether or not you like your college they know what they're talking about. It took me, basically, until the first week of October to find a swing, and actually want to leave my dorm room. By now I've been to New York twice (on two very different trips!) and I can almost get around with a map. I've moved back into semi-normal habits, my bed is sleepable, and I have a "social life" almost as good as the one I had back home! (Yes, i know referring to it as a "social life" is uber nerdy, but you have the option of choosing to read another blog! Really! Its True!). So at the moment, I'm pretty happy. Its been a rough month, with starting an entirely new way of life, the breakup, and some other things... but it finally feels like things are settling down and that maybe, just maybe, I can figure out a way to be happy here.

Also, I can make Hot Chocolate in my microwave. Yay!