Almost There!

A week from this moment, Friday evening, I'll be on summer break. I'll be at a music festival with a bunch of my recently graduated friends, setting up a tent and enjoying the amazing bands. I'll probably feel pretty carefree, giddy with newly acquired freedom and imaging the whole beautiful summer lying out in front of me. I'll slap mosquitoes and sleep in as late as I want. When I get home I'll do summery things like go swimming and drink iced tea and eat peach sandwiches. I’ll finally have time to read all the books I've wanted to read and start painting again and go on long, aimless bike rides through corn fields. I am so damn excited.

But a week is a long time, or at least it can be, and I have a lot to accomplish before then. It feels like an eternity. I shouldn't be indulging in these elaborate summer fantasies now, when I know my attention should really be directed towards finishing up the semester and doing well on my exams. The temptation is always to give up near the end. Summer will happen whether or not I do well these next few days. I wish I didn't realize that, but I do and I keep being reminded. How many hours are between me and summer? If I take the time to count, I might go insane.

The rest of my family is on break and, as of today, so are all the seniors (congratulations guys!), which is making me feel slightly imprisoned in school. One of the main reasons I’m so excited for summer break is that I won’t have to worry about school anymore. Now, don’t get me wrong. I actually really like some aspects of school; at least, I like learning. But academic achievement has been breathing down my neck since last August, and I’m so very ready for a chance of pace. Everyone was right about junior year being super stressful so I’ll be quite relieved for it to be over.

I’d be lying if I said all I felt was excitement and happiness at this year ending. Yes, I’m very excited to escape the grind of school, but I’m also realizing the end of this year is going to mean saying goodbye to a lot of really amazing friends who are graduating. I hope to stay in touch with everyone and see people as much as I can over the summer, but I recognize that things will never be same. I know that I can’t compare my feelings of bittersweet to those of graduating seniors who are leaving behind everything they know and have grown accustomed to over the past five years, but all the same I feel that this school year ending marks a big shift in my own life, which is hopefully something I can embrace.

In parting, happy almost summer to all of you and a giant hug to my seniors!

Leggings are NOT PANTS

(It's springtime and I'm feeling very frivolous.Time for a little ranting about things of little significance!)

It irks me when people wear leggings or tights as a substitute for pants. Like it irks me a lot. I mentioned this offhand to my buddy Sid Madhubalan and he seemed, I think, rather disappointed by my disdainful and admittedly over-the-top ranting. I am usually pretty accepting; I believe in each person's autonomy to dress and live however they wish, but there is something fundementally indecent to me about strutting around in leggings like it is totally normal and modest. It's not even that I find the skin-tightness of them indecent, it is more that they are parading around as pants when they were so clearly intended to be worn as an under layer. It's like wearing spandex or boxers and claiming that they are perfectly legitimate shorts. Not okay!

I am not the first to express outrage at this obnoxious trend, nor shall I be the last. In fact there is an entire website dedicate to photographs of unknowing legging-wearers on the U of I campus, as well as a hilarious and typographically appeal anti-leggings manifesto that a friend pointed me to. But I know there are plenty of people out there who love leggings very dearly and consider them a staple in their wardrobe. I can think of several good friends of mine who wear them on a regular basis and it has never been a cause for strife. What can I say; agree to disagree?

I know what people say--leggings are so comfortable! Leggings are inexpensive! Leggings are flattering and go with any top! I disagree. As for comfort, wearing actually sweatpants is far more comfortable and significantly warmer and cozier. I'd argue that there are more durable leggings which are intended to be worn solo and leggings which were intended to be worn underneath something else that are made of thinner material and are cheaper. So yes, leggings can be quite inexpensive, but when you think about what you are actually paying for, material wise, it is pretty underwhelming. Really if you are going to commit this faux pas you might as well shell out from a good quality pair that fits well and is warm.

I feel it is time to dispel a myth: leggings are not universally flattering. They show everything--imagine your lower half being dipped in opaque paint--and if you have a perfect body then fine, great, but if you have even the slightest imperfection then it immediately becomes obvious to everyone you walk past. They are such an unforgiving fashion, leaving next to nothing to the imagination. I can't imagine not feeling horribly self-conscious walking around with everything so visible. I should make very clear, I don't hate leggings because they are leggings; I hate them because people wear them like pants, which is simply wrong. Leggings can be quite attractive if they are worn under a dress or even, yes, a sufficiently long shirt. In short, I don't want to see your butt.

Yes, I am staunchly anti-legging, but they don't actively both me that much. I mean, I don't explode in paroxysm of rage every time I see this particular abomination (being on the U of I campus would be hell if I did). But I am often tempted to make a snide remark or roll my eyes, or worse shout out "get some pants!" I suppose every decade must have its regrettable fashion, so hopefully this look will fade into that past and become an outdated relic of the 2000's. In parting, keep it classy!

Sometimes I Whine About the Weather

I am going to write about something that is not even a little bit interesting, but that I nonetheless feel the need to complain about: the weather. I am so tired of this cold, windy nonsense. It is Springtime but we are still oscillating between miserable post-winter coldness and short bursts of appropriate warmth. Its April already and I want to address the season, saying “Get your act together!” Nobody can handle this frustration anymore. We want to be wear shorts and go barefooted through the mud; we want to feel gentle winds and heavy rainstorms. None of this damp, chilly unseasonable weather. I’m tired of wondering and hoping for spring days and so often being left out in the cold. We survived the long, zombifying Winter and now we are owed. We deserve some warm, green salvation.

Springtime means eating dinners outside and taking long walks in the long evenings. I’m ready to retire my sweaters and heavy wool socks until next winter. I’m ready for the birds to return south and the dogwood in my backyard to burst with white blossoms. Ugh, I’m sounding like a giant, sentimental cliche. This is what happens when I’m so deprived! I promise I’ll shut up about it the moment I get a few good warm days. Before I know it will be hot and humid out and everyone will be a little bit sunburnt. Maybe this year we are going to skip Spring altogether and go straight to Summer, since we have had some unusually hot and summery days sandwiched between cold, dreary ones.

I am so bothered by this! I had a soccer game today and despite the reasonable and sunny weather this morning, by the time we got to the field the temperature had dropped and it was once again overcast and chilly. Soccer is so much more enjoyable when the weather is agreeable. I’m sensitive to my environment. Something chemical happens to my brain and body when the temperature hit 65 degrees. I can feel this physical burst of energy and happiness. And winter always gives me hell; I sleep a lot more and smile less. I’ve been waiting for the weather to shift since last November and I’m getting so impatient. When can we have some warm days?

Writing Is Hard! Argh!

There is something singularly terrifying about a blank sheet of paper (or, more relevantly a blank word doc) waiting to be filled up with clever words and brilliant ideas. It’s easy, at least for someone like me, to be totally overwhelmed every time I sit down to write. Seriously, it’s become a part of my writing process. I leave space in my brain for the inevitable freaking out and indecisiveness that I have to cycle through before I can write anything work keeping. It’s all very frustrating because I’m supposed to like writing and yet the actual process involves a lot of teeth gnashing and declarations of “I hate writing.” I’m sure many of you know the feeling: one thirty AM, trying to make a random medley of paragraphs fit together or trying to make two pesky sentences sound less clumsy. I wish writing was a simple activity with a single intended result. I like to know when I’m succeeding and when I’m failing.

My fear of writing has spawned some pretty bad habits, the worst of which is my procrastination. It makes it really hard to do a good job when I’m sitting down to write a four page paper the night before it’s due. Another of my bad writing habits is censoring myself as I write. If a word feels off or an idea seems half-baked or rings false, I simply can’t keep writing. I usually delete whatever I’ve written and leave myself some kind of reminder that I need to fill in whatever is missing. I am totally incapable of just letting go and writing without stopping. When I write I work on two or three paragraphs simultaneously, adding a sentence here, scrolling up to briefly outline an idea, typing out anything interesting I can think of to say. And I usually I find myself opening up Firefox every two or three sentences to check Facebook or my email or go in search for a better mix of writing songs, further interrupting the flow of my ideas. Between copy and pasting sentences and deleting chunks of words every couple minutes, everything seems to end up in a jumbled mess. Writing feels like a game of MadLibs—I’m always trying to fill in the blanks and hopefully achieve some kind of unity.

I probably think about writing more than most people do. I’ll share something a little personal to explain why. A couple years ago I decided that I wanted to get one fundamental thing out of my education: the ability to be a good writer. And as far as hobbies and passions go, I’ve always thought of myself as someone who loves and cares about writing as the most wonderful and important form of self-expression. I want to be able to win people’s hearts and minds with my words, there’s the embarrassing, icky truth. I want to be a great writer, and each time I sit down with a blank sheet of paper, I tell myself “this should be amazing.” It’s exhausting, but hopefully I can find a way to translate my ambition into actual, tangible productivity sometime soon.

Sometimes I Talk About My Hair

(in which I ramble about my hair, occasionally bordering on vanity but mostly just being trivial and silly)

Last summer, after months of contemplation, I finally took a leap and cut my hair short. This decision came to me one afternoon with great urgency. It sounds a little crazy, but I was overcome by such an intense need to change my appearance and remove the long strands of hair around my face and shoulders that I went into my bathroom, closed my eyes, and snipped a jagged line all around my face. Impulsiveness at its best. It looked absolutely awful, which I’d expected, but I managed to find an appointment at a salon the very next day and got it fixed. I wanted to look like Bob Dylan off the cover of Blonde on Blonde, but I ended up looking like myself, only slightly improved.

It was a good choice. Obviously I feel strongly enough about my hair to write a blog post about it. But I should clarify, my obsession with short hair is not just a cosmetic one, though I do find it extremely attractive on almost all humans. I have had hair below my shoulders for the majority of my life, so cutting it off seemed like a good change. No more would I be held back by my lackluster hair! I was a brand new woman! I was free and confident and prepared to face all my fears and achieve my dreams! Me and my haircut were kicking ass and taking names!

Just kidding.

At least, I am mostly kidding. I think changing my hair has afforded me a certain degree of confidence. I can’t imagine growing it out again—the very thought fills me with horror. For at least a year now I have been having these daydreams and sleeping dreams about chopping off all my hair. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about that, especially since this desire has only intensified since I actually cut it. I guess I’ve just come to associate short hair with personal progress, which is not really something I can explain so I’ll just have to write it off as a ridiculous impulse.

I’m thinking of cutting it again soon, actually, for practical reasons. I need to keep it off my neck and out of my face during soccer and I also need to get some more practice doing my own hair. The first time I cut my own hair was a disaster, but I’ve kept trying since I don’t have the funds to get it cut at a salon as often as I’d like and I keep getting these urges to cut it. Sometimes when I’m bored and restless, I make myself feel better by having adventures in hair cutting. There is nothing like the satisfaction of hearing that snip, and feeling a lock of hair fall away.

I could go on and on about this, but I think I’ve already run out of compelling things to say. In short (oh, a pun), short hair is awesome and feels really good on your head. I haven’t brushed my hair in months and it looks more or less normal. I urge everyone who is considering cutting their hair to give it a chance and see how lovely they feel. I think more girls out there should consider androgyny and stop wasting time combing and curling their long locks. Short hair is liberation!

A Confession of Messiness

Let me describe to you the unfortunate mess that is piled across my desk at this moment. On the far left is a shoebox of three dollar cosmetics and hairclips. Beside that, a clutter of half-full of water glasses and crusty-bottomed tea and coffee mugs. Two pencil cups crammed full of paintbrushes, pens, and colored pencils. There is also a rusty fork in there which sort of baffles me. Underneath that are scraps of paper with to-do lists and doodles and crumpled homework assignments, blank notecards, jewelry, my wallet, headphones, borrowed CDs, a book of Phillip Levine poems, and a thin layer of dust. I can’t remember the last time my desk was even remotely tidy, despite my valiant attempts to keep everything in order.

The rest of my room is in similar disarray. It has been like this for years, much to my mother’s chagrin. A couple years ago, when my brother left for college, I took over his room, which is signifigantly larger than my old one. But somehow my mess is always also proportionately slightly too large for the space I’ve been allotted. It’s not like I have a particularly large volume of possesions—my childhood obsession with collecting endless tchotchkes disappeared years ago and now I try to buy as little junk as possible (though I confess it is still sort of a struggle). It is just that everything seems to pile up and overflow; even things I haven’t used in months seem to surface on my bedroom floor and get in the way.

This has caused a certain amount of tension in my family. I remember getting in trouble for leaving messes around the house more than anything else when I was younger. There was a period when I was very young when I’d leave balled up socks around the house. I remember fighting with my parents almost daily about it, but for some reason refusing to change my habits. Later on I graduated to leaving half empty cans of flat fizzy water in my room, which frustrated my parents even more. I have no if I was simply unable to change or if a seven-year-old me was playing passive aggressive games. Despite being the world’s sullenest child, I have to suspect the former. Either way, at this point it is a steadfast habit; it is my way of life.

And it isn’t just the way I keep my room or locker. My everything is messy, my brain is messy—and I like it that way. My notebooks are always full of doodles and nonsensical scribbles. I keep my hair and clothes and social life in what I hope is a cheerful disarray. I don’t mind being a slob. I think other people who are forced to cohabit or share spaces with me mind a lot more than I ever will. I’d like to think that messy=free spirited, but I’m more and more convinced that messy just equals messy. But this also means that being messy doesn’t make me lazy or impolite or boorish, which is all I really want to convince people of. I guess it is just a bad habit.

Musing on The Institution

(Note: I realize this is a fairly long post, but I'd be really tickled if you guys took the time to read it since it is sort of relevant to our lives as students)

I have started to think that Uni is causing evil to my soul. Being here is also causing undeniable good and positive growth, but I’m cross and buried in homework right now so we can address that reality later. I have been having this thought, I need to be elsewhere, for a long time, born of the universal angsty angst of teenage existence and the sneaking suspicion that I’m being given the runaround in regard to my Future. I shall explain the feeling further. I can cite numerous conversations with fellow students in which we have mused together “what we are getting out of this? Why are we here? What is reality and what is a dream?” I wonder if I’m wasting my time at Uni trying to get good grades and achieve what I’m expected to achieve.

And here is the real question I asked myself tonight: when did doing what I like become a distraction? Sometimes I want to spend my time on other planes of existence than the cycle of school-home-study-sleep, rinse and repeat. I get it—feeling a little bit dreary and dull is nothing particularly special or worth publicly groaning about, especially at this time of year. But underneath the layers of slightly melodramatic complaints, there is some real contemplation which I’d like to think is valid and honest. Being at this school takes away a massive chunk of my free time and replaces it with—what, exactly? an unending stream of tests to pass, assignments to speed through, chunks of reading to skim? It isn’t too hard to get by with decent achievements here, but it means so more time commitment than it does actual interest or creativity.

Sometimes I feel dull at school, zombified, knowing that every fact or fragment of information goes in one ear and out the other. I make a good effort to sleep plenty, since I’m the type of person who handles being alive badly on less than 6 hours of sleep, but it never feels like enough. And I try hard to focus in class, but I’m spacey by nature, and the moment I start to think that understanding or remembering these words is only appealing to me so I can pass an exam and get an acceptable grade so that I can succeed in the way the Uni High has defined success, I get a little queasy. There have been moments—many in fact; they happen daily—when I’m sitting in class realizing that I’m actually being inspired in some legitimate fashion, that I’m doing something I find important and indispensible. But mostly that is not the case. Mostly I’m bored and half-asleep or dreaming.

I’m thinking about all this, and I’m also thinking about the stress associated. Even if those first paragraphs were totally useless to you, I’m sure that word stress makes good sense. I’ve tried many times to divorce myself from the anxieties of school and tests—I know that my value as a human being should not be informed by the grades I get—but it is sort of inescapable. Do you guys ever have dreams that you have a paper due the next day that you forgot to write and you are trapped in a room with a 15 page long math exam and you lost your calculator and if you don’t finish in time a giant spider will burst through the wall and devour your family? I hate that my subconscious is so afraid of school. And I’m sort of tired of hearing about how everyone is going to fail every test they get how it is going to ruin their life because really everyone could just calm down a little and get some perspective.

But these are just my two cents, at this particular moment in life. I don’t mean to apologize anything I’ve said, because I believe it all, but I would like to remind anyone who finds my irritation excessive that I do in fact, possess a grain of affection or two for Uni High. But the system is flawed, and sometimes I wish I had the time to be more than a student, or that the general consensus on success was a little less grade oriented. I wish that being interested in learning about the world was more virtuous than being interested in cramming three hours the night before an exam. I wish there was something more interesting for me to be interested in. But I’ll be out of here soon enough and maybe time and distance will allow me more sentimental appreciation for the place.