Year the This--I Mean Fifth

Year: 

2016

Most Read:

In Memoriam, Orlando: A Poem for Pulse, 6/12 (326 reads)

A New Endeavor Coming Soon, 2/29 (25 reads)

Ideas for Sale: Cheap!, 6/3

Policies/Current Events Addressed: 

Cultural violence (3/28, Nonviolence Just Got Harder)

Gun control (4/6, Gun Control Means Using Both Hands)

Orlando Pulse shooting (6/12, In Memoriam, Orlando: A Poem for Pulse)

Personal Events:

Posting “Stolen Earth Tales”, March 21, 2016 (A New Endeavor Coming Soon)

Birthday party, July 15, 2016 (Keep the Receipt for that Pity)

                

My Favorites: 

5/7 It's My Party, But I Don't Want to Cry

6/12 In Memoriam, Orlando: A Poem for Pulse

6/23 Without a Sound

And so here we are.  It’s strange.  My pride wants me to present myself as I am, fully grown and fully shaped, stronger than ever before.  And yet this has been one of the least impressive years when it comes to blog posts.  I have been trying this year to post more regularly, with moderate—okay, with a little success.  But these posts feel forced to me, rather boring, most of them.  They are nothing like the ethereal, thoughtful posts that I used to publish.  Indeed, my favorites from this year were the ones I didn't think about too much, the ones that are honest, raw, and untouched by my inner editor.  I’m trying too hard, putting myself forward as a serious voice in a serious world when what I really want is to bring a bit of lightness and thought. 

I’m glad I have done this, if only for this reason.  It’s been an education to look back and see who I was and what my strengths and weaknesses were in the past.  As a person I do believe I am improving, but as a writer I still have work to do.  Let’s see if I can’t get back to the voice I once had, speaking inspiration and wonder and light into the dark.  Let's get back to musing, shall we?

Year the Fourth

Year: 

2015

Most Read: 

Why I Need Feminism: Sword for my Fight, 9/1 (29 reads)

Hey, It’s a Book Review: Godmother Girl by Johanna Lemon, 8/6 (27 reads)

Can I Be Both?  One Christian’s Struggle with the Gay Rights Campaign, 6/29 (27 reads)

Policies/Current Events Addressed: 

Messages to young women in popular music (5/28, Right Sound, Wrong Thought)

Caitlyn Jenner (6/2, I'm Not Insulted)

Christianity vs. Gay Rights (6/29, Can I Be Both?  One Christian's Struggle with the Gay Rights Campaign)

Women’s clothing (8/25, I Am Displeased)

Beauty in media (9/1, Mind Over Matter)

Feminism (9/11, Why I Need Feminism: Sword for my Fight)

Personal Events: 

Trip to NYC April 7-12 (Philosophy From the Subway)

My favorites: 

3/1 Counting Hours, Or Making Hours Count?

5/15 Find the True

8/10 Notaphor?

Time rolled along, and my world stayed mostly the same.  I went to work, I went home, I wrote, I sang, I lived.  This was the year I began to look up and pay attention to what was going on around me, and more importantly, started to express my opinion where others could see it.  In these many writings about the issues of the time, I can see a strength and a grace that I had never had before.  I know that part of that was contrived by the writer in myself, but I hope that I can grow into that image I painted of myself with my words.  

Year the Third

Year: 

2014

Most read: 

Her Morning Terror, 3/7

A Life of Extremes, 2/28

Policies/Current Events Addressed: 

Body image (3/7, Her Morning Terror)

Expectations for young adults (8/11, Many Steps to Go)

Higher education (9/16, How to Find the Circumference of an Idea)

My favorites: 

1/21 Do Not Read This Post Unless You're Willing to Play

2/21 Charming Snakes

5/5 Epiphany

8/1 The Shape of Our Containers

8/12 A Letter to an Unpleasant Man

On we move into the third year of my blog.  I was better at posting that year, but still not very prolific.  Still, I can’t help but notice that my posts had a more cheerful tone.  I felt better about my life and myself and was slowly settling into a sense of satisfaction with my lot.  Of course that was disturbed once or twice by a bad boss and other stresses, but my writing shows me that I was learning how to cope with negativity.  I was learning patience, and how to see beautiful things in the world around me.  These things, along with my writing and my music, helped to feed my soul and keep me in a better state of mind and heart.  In short, this girl is beginning to sound like me.

Year the Second

Year: 

2013

Most read:

Return Your Angers, 6/20 (45 reads)

Adulthood? 10/16 (12 reads)

Policies/Current Events Addressed: 

Religion (5/29, Simply Amazing)

Personal Events: 

First novel sent to and refused by a publisher, August 23 2013 ("No")

My favorites: 

1/25 Lonely Is a Freedom

1/27 A Wordless Thought Fulfilled

1/28 Ain't it Great to be Crazy

12/6 In the Eye of the Beholder

12/13 This is a Test

Remember how I said that I usually end up quitting a project after a while?  This was the year that I nearly did.  I continued my strong consistency in my blog writing through January of 2013, and then the gaps between posts stretch sometimes to two months.  I distinctly remember someone asking me, during one of those gaps, why I didn’t write in my blog anymore.  Whoever it was I’m grateful to them, because without that gentle nag I might have let this endeavor fade into the background.

It wasn’t a very eventful year for me, 2013, and many of the events that did occur did not appear in my blog.  I was still uncertain as to how to present myself online, how much to tell and how much to embellish it.  I was beginning to identify myself through my job as a server, and at the same time resisting being defined by that work.  More, I felt uninspired, like my life was devolving from the grand and magical adventure it had been at Hollins into something vaguely resembling adulthood. But I was growing stronger, strong enough to take on a role I wasn’t quite prepared for and to stand up for myself.  It was progress that would continue in the coming years, progress that would lead me to find magic in my life again, and more importantly, to make it for myself.

Year the First

Year:

late 2011-2012

Most read posts: 

Train of Thought: Assessing an Assessment, 9/28/12 (2518 reads)

ThisBridge Will Only Take You Halfway There, 10/4/12 (487 reads)

Reparteeis Something We Think Of Twenty-Four Hours Too Late, 10/12/12 (121 reads)

Policies/Current Events Addressed: 

Climate change (11/22/11, Save the Planet?)

Politics (12/17/11, For the People?; 11/8/12, Obligatory Election Post)

Religion (4/8/12, Private Vs. Personal Faith; 7/1/12, In Response to Bad Metaphors and Cruel Theology; 12/12/12 What Comes Next?)

LGBTQ rights (10/6/12, "Self-Evident" Means "Obvious": Protecting the Pursuit of Happiness)

Autism (10/29/12, Doomed if You're Different)

Mental health and gun safety (12/17/12, It's Not the Gun, But the Hand on the Trigger)

Personal Events: 

College graduation May 20 2012 (Farewell Hollins Home)

New job October 17 2012 (Dream Job (?))

First NaNo November 2012 (Get to Work, Snowman Says)

My favorites: 

11/18/11 Acoustics 

11/17/12 Poetry: Asking the Impossible Questions

This year’s collection (as there were only two months of blogging in 2011, I combined it with 2012) speaks of a young woman still involved with schoolwork and comic books.  I don’t disparage either of those things, of course; in fact I miss both of them.  That girl was moderately self-aware, though frequently a bit dramatic and prone to purple prose.  I also could make mistakes about myself, too; at one point I believed myself “cured” of anti-social tendencies, to which I’ve proven the lie in past years.  Many things, however, remained the same.  I still can’t cook, for example.  I still love to play with words.  I still keep my journals (currently I’m on volume 17).  I still have doubts about the value of my work and whether anyone will ever want to read it.  There are questions I still have not answered.  And I still look forward to the best in others and in the world.

Five Years of Musing

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything for this blog.  For most of October I have no excuse, just the usual inattention/laziness/procrastination.  During November, however, I was otherwise occupied with another National Novel Writing Month, which I am not a little bit proud to say I aced with flying colors.  Usually with NaNo, I finish on the very last day, with maybe fifty words to spare above the 50,000 mandated by the challenge.  This year, I completed not only the challenge, but also my personal goal, with almost a week left in the month.

As with most of my past NaNo’s, I was working on my joy, my frustration, and my obsession, the Youngest series.  It’s a sci-fi post-apocalyptic series based on a sentient machine that takes the form of a human to examine the species that created it.  Release, the first, was completed a year and a half after my college graduation, with Renewal following soon after.  I started the third, whose title I struggled with for ages, last year for NaNo, and this year my goal was to finish it.  I have done so, with over a hundred single-spaced pages, not to mention 60,000 words.  The book is a monster, sixty pages longer than its two predecessors, and I am well aware that it needs a lot of editing.  But I’m very happy to have it completed, and happier to have decided on a title that might finally work: Revelation.

I’ve been writing in this form for many more years than I’ve been participating in NaNo, of course.  Since I was in middle school and discovered all the uses of a word processor, I’ve been hammering out novels.  Some of them I cringe to remember, of course, but some I still have and occasionally will go back through when I need a chuckle. 

More of a novelty to me is this form of writing, that of documenting my life and my thoughts for others’ perusal.  I have now been blogging for five years, which is somewhat shocking.  I do have a tendency to start projects and never finish them.  It’s taken a lot of self-discipline and elbow-grease to get three novels into a series, and I have my own fascination with the world and the characters to thank for that (and, maybe, three or four NaNo challenges).  Many others of my ideas have not been so lucky. 

Blogging is different.  I kept a diary for a hot second when I was a kid, but the diary quickly morphed into something less straightforward, a ‘rambling journal’ in which I collected ideas, poems, drawings, and other scraps of information.  This was easier to keep up with, and it was more interesting to me than my own life.  I thought, who would ever want to read about me?  Sometimes I still feel that way.  But I’ve grown a lot since I was that little college senior, just beginning to wonder if writing really could be a thing for the rest of my life.  And with my blog now, I can look back at that growth, see the ways my life has changed and remember things that happened along the way.  For that reason, I’m glad I have it, even if no one else ever reads or cares.  Writing for me is a good enough excuse.

That’s why I’ve decided to spend this week looking back at some of my work.  Each day this week I will take a look at what I’ve written, looking at events in my personal life, passing thoughts I have discussed, and responses to real world events.  I will try to see how I’ve evolved (or maybe devolved) and study my own voice.  There will also, of course, be links to some of my favorites from each year, the ‘greatest hits,’ as it were.  And on Saturday, I will discuss how I intend to continue.

For those of you who are reading—and here I address myself, too, in some future nostalgia—thank you for coming this way with me.  Thank you for taking an interest, and for caring.  And thank you for musing with me along the wandering way.

You're Reading WHAT??

Last week was Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of books that are often prohibited by schools for various reasons.  Books might be banned for profanity, sexuality, inaccuracy, religious viewpoints, violence, and really any other reason that persons in authority might come up with.  The idea is that these books are inappropriate for young readers.

This idea has always seemed ridiculous to me.  First of all, how can we define “inappropriate”?  The very word summons up the idea of propriety, which wears a connotation of a stiff, narrow-minded, and boring way to live one’s life.  (I can’t hear that word without remembering Barbara Streisand’s character smugly reciting its definition on an escalator in the movie What’s Up, Doc, which I highly recommend and would probably be banned by the persons in authority I cite above.)  The problem with propriety is that life is not proper or appropriate.  Our world is ugly and dirty and insane and sexual and profane.  Personally, I think it’s a good idea to prepare young people for that sooner rather than later.  All that muck will find them eventually, and if they have at least some idea what it’s like, they’ll be able to cope with it better.

Second of all, having been a teenager, I can tell you that forbidding something is the best way to be sure that they seek it out.  Tell a teenager that they can’t read something and they will immediately wonder why, and try to find out.  My first trashy romance was a dreadfully written time-travel story with cardboard characters (with perfect physiques, of course), full of purple prose and yes, lots and lots of sex.  I thought it was the greatest thing ever, partly because I learned a lot from it, but mostly because my mother would have disapproved of my reading it.  (Of course, knowing my mother much better now than I did when I was fifteen, I know she would probably have been very amused to know I’d read that particular book and would have made a few recommendations for better options.) 

Thirdly, the whole point of education (or at least, what the point of education should be) is to teach people to think for themselves.  Ragini Bhuyan, writing about a contested censorship in India, said it very well when he said, “The central premise of [the censors’] argument is that a student exposed to alternate ways of thinking will necessarily adopt them, instead of doing what is actually expected of students, which is to evaluate the information you are presented with.”  Parents worry that students who read about violence will become violent, students who read about profanity will begin to speak that profanity, and students who read about homosexuality will become homosexual (the ensuing question “what the hell is wrong with that?” is a post for another day).  But more often, a student reading about horrible, ugly things in a book will learn from that that these things are horrible and ugly and should be avoided.  A student reading about profanity and homosexuality will have more information about these things with which to make their own opinions about these issues. 

The point, to me, is that if we weren’t teaching our students to absorb opinions into themselves and vomit them out again at a later point—if we taught them instead to think for themselves—we wouldn’t have to worry about them reading anything.