Farewell Hollins Home

Exactly twelve hours ago, I graduated summa cum laude, second in my class, from Hollins University, a place which has held my heart since the age of thirteen.  The ceremony was the culmination of four years of so much work that it makes me tired just thinking about it all--classes, study abroad, work and internships and personal projects, all contained within the metaphorical walls of a very sheltering place.  Hollins is a small women’s college, and it becomes home to those who spend any more than a week there.  The people there are open-minded and bright-hearted, and the women who are grown there truly do become sisters to one another.

I have so many lovely memories of that place.  In the past week, everything I looked at was something precious, because something special happened there.  My roommate of four years and I lived in three of the dormitories and made fun of the others.  I worked in the library, took classes in Pleasants, Turner, Dana, and the VAC, and practically lived in the music building.  We were constantly criticizing the food in the dining hall.  More than just the buildings, though, were the little things, the random memories that I prize most of all.  Jumping atop the three-foot wall outside the dining hall to play tightrope, talking about climbing the old silo, hiding in the secret entrance to the music hall to cry alone at midnight…  These memories, these things that I saw every day, are the mark of a place which was my home, one that I deeply love.

But today it was different.  Today, as I was making my final walk out to the car, I looked around and I saw just a place.  A beautiful place, of course, with the classic brick buildings, smooth curving walks and brilliant green grass and trees everywhere.  But just a place.  For those few moments, I looked at Hollins and I saw it as I did at age thirteen, when I first came onto campus—a strange, lovely school with a great deal of potential.  And I realized that Hollins doesn’t belong to me anymore.  Or better, I don’t belong to it.

It was a strangely reassuring concept, proving that I am ready to move on to greater things.  I will always find a home at Hollins, but it will not hold me back from the life I build on my own.  The wonderful things about Hollins were never in the walks or the ways, but in the people I met and the changes they made in me.  And those things, I take with me.  So I am not afraid or sad to leave my magnificent school behind me.  What I gave to it will remain, and what it gave to me will give me strength and courage wherever I go.  That is a gift beyond price.

How to Run a Life

I went out to lunch with two of my good friends, both of whom will be graduating college with me in a few days.  It was a bit of a surreal experience.  All three of us have completed final exams and projects, theses, theatre productions, dance performances, all behind us.  So the conversation did not revolve around our school lives.  Instead, we were three adult women, talking about life in general—“real life” as we called it, life which involves taxes, credit reports, jobs, separation from family and choices based solely upon one’s own desires.  Isn’t that terrifying?

It’s funny how we learn to judge adulthood.  As children, we think that “grown-ups” are the ones who have everything together.  They have all the answers, all the plans and ideas and reassurances.  What a laugh that is!  Then as a teenager moving into college, we begin to think that we are adults, that by choosing a school and moving out on our own, we are making our own choices and running our own lives.  But a life is a complicated machine, and it takes more to run one than staying up all night, eating junk food, and deciding to go to class for once.  College isn’t really a choice anymore: in this society, it’s an expectation.  And thinking back, there was really ever only one college that I chose to apply for myself; the rest were my father’s idea.  Going to college is a big step, yes, but it’s still safe. 

Leaving college, on the other hand, is stepping off a damn cliff.  There are no safety nets—parents are expected to cut you off at this point, and suddenly no one is able to tell you what to do.  There is so little helpful advice for those of us at this point in our lives, because no one in the world knows better than you do what is going to make you happy.  Here is the point where we begin to put our education to the test and, unfortunately, begin to see where it fell short.  How do I get a good credit score?  What do you mean, year-long lease?  And no, I haven’t actually balanced my checkbook this month. 

With all this hanging over our heads, our lunch date was a bit less buoyant than others have been in the past.  But looking at my fellow graduates-to-be, I couldn’t help but think that we will all be fine.  The best way to learn how to do something is to do it, right?  And hard and cold as it might be, life itself is an excellent teacher.  So in three days, I will take that step off the edge, and whether I crash or whether I build a parachute out of my socks is up to me.  Either way, I’ll learn from my mistakes and be better prepared for the next step, and the next and the next.

Think Before Speaking: Spice Up Your Vocabulary

English is a bewildering language.  On the one hand, it’s got enough rules to make you dizzy, and once you get around those, there are at least half as many exceptions to the rules.  But on the other hand, the language is always growing and changing, picking up new words every day—from other languages, from technology or the internet, or just from people’s minds.  Over the past few months, I’ve been collecting a list of words I would like to add to my vocabulary, and I would like to share them with you.  If you have any you'd like to add to the list, I'd love to hear them!

Fussbudget and its companion, flutterbudget, both nouns.  I picked these up from friends.  They mean people who are uncommonly nervous or anxious, or, in the case of fussbudget, nosy.  Someday I will have a pair of dogs, dubbed the Budget twins, Fuss and Flutter.   

Hippopotamic, adj.  Used in the 1987 film The Princess Bride as one of Vizzini’s terms of endearment for Fezzic.  Meaning large, bulky, taking up too much space, with a connotation of lazy, slow, fat.  Because sometimes there just aren’t enough words to describe bigness.

Pookie, adj.  Used by my father.  Describes a feeling of listlessness, sadness, perhaps even mild illness.  General “got-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed” feeling.

Ah shidanza! int.  Used in the 2009 film The Princess and the Frog by the warty prince himself.  Simply an exclamation of excitement or amazement.  One of those that’s just really fun to say.

Scuzzy, adj.  Used by my roommate, Taylor Hodge.  Describes something grimy or otherwise suspiciously unhygienic.  I also picked up the word “sketchy/sketch” from her, which has a similar meaning.

Bangorang, int.  Used in the 1991 film Hook.  Because I’m a Lost Boy at heart.

Hoopla, noun.  Not sure where I heard this first—it’s used pretty frequently.  A good word to describe an exciting or messy situation.  And again, fun to say.

Coo coo k’choo, int.  Used in the 2003 film Finding Nemo, though I’m not entirely sure if that was its first usage.  In the film, it was used to express mild amazement at how quickly time passes.  “Ah, it’s awesome, Jellyman.”

The Creative Mind

During the past few days, I’ve been in a bit of a slump.  I’ve been sleeping a lot, lazing around in all my free time, and just generally feeling low and grumbly.  I couldn’t figure out why exactly—things are winding down for the year, so I don’t have very much to do.  I’ve already decided not to worry very much about finding a job or an apartment (at least in theory) and I don’t think that’s the cause.  For a long time, I thought I was just being sulky, as every human being has a right to be every once in a while.

But there was more to it, as I’ve discovered today.  Thinking about it this morning, I remembered the last time that my slump lifted—when I started to rearrange files on my computer in preparation for a new writing project.  Seems strange, but it’s true: even doing that little bit of work gave me an energy and an optimism I had been missing.  I realized then that this listless feeling has persisted because I am a writer who is not writing. 

Pearl Buck once described the creative mind as a creature of sensitivity, someone who absorbs everything around him or her in acute detail.  This “cruelly delicate organism,” Buck says, also has the need to create, as a way of sustaining the self, for “without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off…”  I am like that.  I have a need to make something beautiful, or if not beautiful, at least powerful.  Be it words or music, something has to come out of my soul every day, or my subconscious mind feels like it has failed the world.  For a writer, or for any artist, the worst feeling in the world is the absence of motivation and inspiration.  Even writing this little bit soothes the itch that I couldn’t scratch.  Now that I am aware of the consequences of ignoring this need, I can take better care of myself. 

How interesting it is to me, that humans have evolved beyond simple survival—to continue to exist, we must feed our minds and our souls, or we will waste away in a feeling of meaninglessness.  It’s too bad that we don’t know how to sustain our mental and emotional needs as well as we could.  Maybe if we did, the world would be a happier place, or at least an easier one to understand.

Private vs. Personal Faith

In my church, there is a beautiful stained glass window directly back from the pulpit.  It is enormous, running almost to the ceiling of the hall, and the colors are brilliant on a sunny day.  It portrays Jesus in a red robe, sitting against a stone wall, and five children are gathered around him.  This morning, I had a chance to study this window for quite some time, and it got me to thinking.

Four of the children in the window take up the center of the piece—they kneel before Jesus, touching his robes, and Jesus holds the youngest in his arms.  But the fifth child is the one who interests me most.  Alone of all the figures in the window, her face is not seen—the child has turned towards Jesus, her back to the viewer.  I say “her” for convenience, but it could as easily be a little boy.  The child kneels off to one side, and one hand is reached out towards the hem of Jesus’s robe, but if she is actually touching the cloth, it is a very light contact.

I think of that child as representing most of us Christians in the world.  Society these days frowns upon intense religion—it is seen as fanatic or obsessive, and it is embarrassing to most of us.  I see the images on facebook (“share this photo if Jesus is welcome on your profile!”) and I quickly scroll down past it, telling myself of course Jesus is welcome on my profile, and that it’s enough that I know that.  Others don’t have to know.  In effect, I am a “private” Christian.

It’s not just Christianity, either.  There are other religions in which people take—or pretend to take—only a casual interest.  We tell ourselves that as long as we know, as long as we remember what we believe, that’s enough.  And to an extent, it is.  Faith as a positive force in the world is meant to make people better within themselves, and “private” faith is sufficient to accomplish that.

But in another sense, there is no such thing as a “private” faith.  The ideals of the modern society shouldn’t shame us into silence, but they do.  We are like that child in the stained glass window—when we turn towards spirituality, we turn away from the world, and our reaching for better things is tentative and surreptitious.  But why?  Very few of us really are fanatics or obsessive, which is the conclusion to which society tends to reach.  When we have these beliefs that make us reach for the good in the world, that make us want to support it and lift it up to the light, why should we feel the need to hide them?  Private faith, also, is dangerous, because it means we are the only one aware of it, and so we are the only ones who can maintain it.  When faith is secret, it is so easy to go against our principles if it is more comfortable or convenient to do so.  I know I have in the past, and probably will in the future.

There is such a thing as too much religion, of course.  That’s the entire reason that our culture shies away from faith these days.  But there has to be a happy medium between fanaticism and atheism.  Consider this, then, my official turn to face the world: I am a Christian, which does not mean I scorn all other religions or even the lack of religion.  It is a personal faith, but not a private one, and yes, there is a difference.  Faith, after all, is not just a crusade to improve the world.  To me, it is a battle to improve the self, and I’m proud to say that I will keep up that struggle for many years.  And if enough of us own up to that struggle—thereby holding ourselves accountable for it—well, we will brighten the world just by default.

Sunday Friendships

One of the really nice things about being a singer is getting to sit with the choir when I go to church.  I like being part of the music, but more than that I like to look out at the church family while I’m there, so that even if I don’t get to talk to everyone, I still feel like I’ve seen them and made sure that they’re doing all right.  And from that vantage point, I notice things that I wouldn’t if I were part of the congregation.  For example, the last time I was in church, I saw two girls sitting together.  One of them was Jennifer, a peer of my younger brother’s, about eighteen years old now.  The other, Gracie, was much younger, seven or eight.  Gracie was leaning over to show Jennifer something, and there was a big smile on both of their faces.

I kept thinking about that scene for a long time that afternoon.  I wondered why it kept coming back to me, until I remembered when I had been Jennifer's age.  Back then there was a younger girl, Natalia, who used to sit with me every week.  We would draw on our bulletins, pass notes, and play MASH to predict where we would live and who we would marry (using a highly illogical system to choose from severely limited options, of course).  My younger sister, too, had an older girl, Kerry, to look up to, and even further back, I can remember my own weekly heroines, Katherine, Kelly, and Lindsey.  These relationships were all very important to us at the time, but as the years went by and the girls on both sides grew older, the connection began to fade.  Now I find it awkward to talk to Natalia—her interests have changed, as have mine, and more than that we’re both so busy now that it’s hard to get in touch.

I think it’s important to connect with older women, no matter what your age.  Years bring wisdom, and even a simple connection with someone more experienced in life can be beneficial.  But with two relatively young girls, the relationship has a sweetness that cannot be replicated later in life.  The young girl admires the elder and therefore is happy just to be her friend, while the elder girl is flattered by and often grateful for the attention.  It's almost like picking out an older sister, someone who doesn't actually live with you and therefore still has the appeal of the unfamiliar.  The mutual affection is simple, but strong, and unmarred by any of the drama that too often comes with more “mature” friendships.

Thinking of my own young friend, I am glad and proud of both Natalia and myself—she’s growing up beautifully, and I think I’ve done pretty well.  I do miss those days, though, when we were the closest of friends simply because we were what we were.  Very little in life comes quite so naturally as that.

I Know With Whom Time Ambles Withal

It’s been nearly a month since I last posted, yet looking back at my most recent post, it seems like it was yesterday.  What I mean when I use that phrase is that I know, logically, that a great deal of time has passed, but I remember the moment I thought and felt those things as clearly as I remember this morning.  Maybe more clearly, as my posts often come out of outstanding moments of deep thought.

Time is a very strange thing.  We talk about killing it, making it, and sparing it or freeing it up (which is a very odd phrase).  It goes by sometimes in bursts, sometimes in a slow crawl, and sometimes in a sprint.  And the funny thing is, even with all the things we say about time, we only rarely notice it passing.

My mind tends to organize memories or images by their homogeneity.  Sitting here on the sleeper sofa with my back against one arm, my feet on the other, I can think of many, many other moments where I have sat just so, hammering away on my keyboard—different sofas, perhaps, and different keyboards, but the same idea.  I did this early this morning, and unless I’m consciously remembering my actions of the day (including a job interview, dinner with my family, and driving to Raleigh and back), I might as well have been in this seat all day.

For me, life goes by in segments.  There are small ones in moving from one activity to another—classes in school or projects I’m working on—and large ones in periods of life—one semester to the next, or even from high school to college and college to the mysteries of post-graduate life.  I do think it’s important and necessary, though, every once in a while to pause and be conscious of time itself, of how it’s going by and we can never get it back.  It helps us appreciate what we are always losing and always gaining.