Fight to Love

Back in the day, my sister and I would bicker more than we played Polly Pockets. With only 18 months between us, we butted heads like a couple of mountain goats. You lost my favorite pair of overalls? I'm losing my voice screaming at you. You used my hairbrush? Here, let me rip out a hundred follicles. You ate my Charleston Chews? The chocolate and knuckle sandwich combo is a house favorite.

Sharing a room did nothing to soften our calloused hearts. I can remember reverting to duct tape to divide our periwinkle room in two. Rule number one: my side is mine. Rule number two: your side is yours. Rule number three: your side is also mine. Evil me, evil me. They say duct tape fixes everything. Folks, it does not fix a broken relationship. Our differences seemed to grow with each candle atop our birthday cakes.

Finally 2009 marked the calender, and Jess moved off to bigger and better things. And by bigger and better, I mean highschool (which I later discovered to be bigger and badder). Being at two different schools, my sister and I developed a new perspective on our relationship. We no longer endlessly argued. We had come to accept each other's differences. Through fighting, we learned to love.

As with Joe Louis' match against his white opponent in The Champion of the World, fighting is the Bridge to Taribithea. Erm. I mean love. Fighting is the Bridge to Love. Blacks and whites fought only to conclude with accepting one another. Just as an agreement begins with an argument, love oftentimes begins with hate.

Let's take a walk to love! Rosey hearts and rainbows and unicorns await!

Day-blind Dreams

A dream deferred does not dissapear.  Dreams are "day-blind stars, waiting with their light" (Berry); you can't always see them, but they still exist. It is up to the dreamer to hold on to hope when life's obstacles, like clouds, obstruct a person from their goals. Wind pushes a dreamer even further off course, and precipitation fogs one's vision.

Every now and then, a shooting star carves its way out of the midnight darkness and makes its way onto the territory of a dreamer. If she so chooses, she can grasp that star and let it's light radiate off onto her skin. Such opportunities arise and allow a dream to fluorish, but one needs to have the sharp eyes to pick out these fleeting opportunities amongst many other miniscule stars.

Dreams never die--they evolve. When I was young, it was my dream to be an ice cream truck driver. Free ice cream whenever, whereever. Every child's fantasy. As I accumulated candles on my cake, this dream of "becoming (something)" transformed from ice cream woman to famous actress to author to veterinarean to marine biologist to rheumatologist to geneticist to anything but what I am now. Although what I wanted varied through the years, the mechanism and motivation behind said desires remained constant.

The key to achieving your dreams is persistence and a little bit of luck. Oh, did I say a little bit? I meant seventeen truck loads and eight oceans of luck. Because there are only seven oceans on Earth, and I'm writing to humans and not aliens on Jupiter, it may be somewhat of a difficulty to accumulate an eighth ocean of luck. This is where persistence comes into play. Never. Give. Up. Success stems from never stopping, having the strength given all life's unfavorable circumstances to TRUDGE ON through the rain and the snow and the wind and the clouds and the blinding sun. TRUDGE ON and let your shooting star find you.

Troy High Presents DJay Gatsby

If you're the least bit cool, you went to Snow Glow this weekend. Similar to Gatsby's exuberant parties, the dance attracts large flocks of social butterflies ready to mingle and have a good time. The characters in The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, upon a closer look, highly resemble personalities you may have noticed if you decided to be cool for a weekend and attend the school gathering.

Gatsby is the DJ who plays just barely tolerable music that nobody has ever heard of (no offense to DJ Ryan Richards). Although he initiates the party, he lacks the information about his guests to match the music to the atmosphere. In the novel, Gatsby is the mysterious observer who stays to the side of the room. Secluding himself as a DJ does behind a computer and detaching himself from the world as DJ's do beneath oversized pairs of headphones, Jay Gatsby might as well be called DJay.

Daisy is the girl who gets asked by five different guys even though Snow Glow isn't a "date dance".  She's that desirable to the male population, receiving ten candy grams and sharing them with her classmates not because she truly wants to be generous, but so she can flaunt her admirers to the world.

Nick is a teacher with a flashlight, an observer of all the chaos, involuntarily thrown amid the mess of undeveloped relationships and confused, love-stuck teenagers who don't know how to express their feelings for each other through the artform of dancing.

Widely known throughout the school as "Haughty Taughty Tom", one can find Tom Buchanan in the dead center of the floor, dancing with any and every girl he can get his hands on. Surrounding himself with numerous options, he need not be worried about never having a dance partner.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Owl Eyes is the freshman who is astonished that when they said "Snow Glow", they really meant it. He would marvel at the black lights and the plethora of glowing white teeth. Too distracted to dance, Owl Eyes steps back, tilts his head slightly to the right, mouth parted, staring at the wondrous neon rainbows flying across the gymnasium walls like shooting stars.

If you're the least bit cool, you not only went to Snow Glow, but you observed these dance-room personalities as well.

What Has Changed is Not the Women

If a woman in the 1920s was considered a "new woman" decades later for wearing risqué dresses revealing sexy ankles, imagine what the women during present times will be considered in a few more decades. Will we be deemed as "newer women" for wearing leggings, v-neck shirts, and pencil skirts that are now deserving the name not because they are as straight as a pencil, but because they are the length of a pencil? Eh, probably.

People need to get over their fears of human anatomy. Women have curves--this is fact. You can cover her figure with as much fabric as you would like, though taking this precaution does not make her figure dissapear. She is there. Her shape is there. And you are there judging her for the body granted to her for having an extra x - chromosome. Only babies believe what they can't see does not exist. Stop being babies.

What causes distress and jostles society is how a woman portrays these natural curves. You act like it is such a surprise when a women wears tighter clothing, and curves are visible. Shock. Tragedy strikes! You can continue to pretend the world never knew of such information as a curve. She reveals a secret suppressed by fabric for decades. She is deemed a slut. Yes, s-l-u-t. Shun me because you are afraid of not only a woman's figure, but also a word. Letters are daggers. Watch out before they get you, too.

Slowly but surely, women's fashion inches closer and closer to the beginning of man, before Adam and Eve ate the Fruit of Sin, when clothes were a faint idea in the far away distance. When the "newest women" make history books for wearing nothing but the skin on their skeleton, society will--surprise--go berzerk. What has changed from the times both men and women of all ages strutted around the cave show-casing everything for everyone to see is not women's fashion. What has changed is the society itself that judges women's fashion. How can one civilization never think twice about revealing the human figure, yet a society we like to call "advanced" cares almost too much about what we show and what we don't?

Sarcastices Save the Day...or Not?

Although punctuation is helpful in expressing an author's message in a clear and concise way, there are some areas where the dots, lines, and tick marks fall short. Oftentimes, I find that the puncuation of the 21st century is not enough to express the intentions of my text messages. Incapable of using an emoji keyboard, many of my friends read my messages in the wrong tone. I find this especially true when I use sarcasm. I resort to using a pair of parentheses with the word "sarcasm" sandwiched between them. Can I be any more blunt?

I stumbled upon an article online that offers some ideas to further advance the evolution of puncuation. It turns out, there is a solution to this problem: sarcastices! These zigzag brackets inform a reader to read the passage with sarcasm. Convenient and perfect for the modern day teen, sarcastices insure that your sarcasm will come across as sarcasm and not snooty-stuck-up-brattiness.

But then again, these marks are essentially the same idea as my "(sarcasm)". If you're a thorough and analytical reader, you would be able to detect sarcasm through the author's use of irony and other literary devices. Sarcastices would not be necessary if the reader would read closer and the author would write better. But who wants to put in that kind of effort?

In this case, the evolution of punctuation is the direct result of lazy human beings, unwilling to put in the effort of using words instead of puncuation to create sarcastic undertones. There are trillions of word combinations that would indicate sarcasm, yet only one puncuation mark. Most would choose the easy route, using the puncuation to get his or her point across quicker. The use of sarcasticed paired with the youth's abbreviated language for texting ("C U L8R"), literature is becoming more and more geared toward the quick pace of modern living; however, without a proper mark for sarcasm, it's evolution remains not quite up to speed with the ever-changing English language.

The Many Forms of Secrecy: Sophisticated to Slapdash

Secrets are the result of a flawed community, with close-minded members fearing judgment and imperfection. Hold secrets in and they shred you apart, but tell them to the world and they tear the shreds of you apart even further. There is no winner in the world of secrecy, for if there were, it would not be reality; secrecy is hidden reality. Reality will always surface, like like a booey in a lake. And thus, there is no point in attempting to camouflage the truth.

Here's a nice, little haiku to wrap up some mundane Sunday thoughts. Courtesy of moi.

"Do not run from me.
I am your reality.
Fear not, and you're free."

How about an acrostic.

"S lowly
E ating my insides
C hewing
R avenously
E ating
T o my
S kin"

Anybody in the mood for a limerick?

"There once was a man with secrets
Who had a red mark on his chest
Never let them see
Falsely feeling free
Oh boy did he fail time's cruel test"

My guess is by now you have figured out I am just trying to extend this post any way that I can. It's 11:30 pm on a school night. I am tired. Or maybe I am really not... Maybe I hold elementary literature near and dear to my heart... It will be my little secret.

Just Another Stripe in the Rainbow

My size is forever-shifting from miniscule to extraordinary. I am mute, yet you hear me in your every thought. If you let me control your life, you will never know happiness. What am I?

Answer: Guilt. A five letter word with such an influential impact on our lives that each letter carries significant weight.  Guilt knaws at the innermost core of our beings. It is a chain around our limbs, with the other end tied to the memory of its origin. It is the sinking stomach sensation on a roller coaster.

You may choose to ignore it.
Or you may choose to spill every bit of your mind onto the cold, linolium floor at your feet, hoping that by expunging every screaming thought in your head, the origin of your guilt that has been suppressed for so long flows out amongst the rest. Once it leaves your stomach, passes your chest, and drains from your mind, you feel free. By splitting the experience among others, the guilt shrinks from extraordinary back to miniscule. And once again, you feel light. You could float. You are a cloud.

Clouds have no feelings, after all.
It would be nice to be a cloud.
I would like to be a cloud.
Birds could pass right through you. Birds with piercing beaks. It would never phase you. Never weigh you down.
Because you are a cloud.
Clouds have no feelings, after all.

But by being a cloud you could never experience the good feelings either. This is the heart of the human experience. Happiness and joy and surprise and peace.

Let's not be clouds.
Let's be dimensional personalities with great capacity to experience emotions.

You can think of guilt as a negative sensation that blankets your every mood. Or you can see it as just another stripe in the rainbow of human emotions. But when it comes down to it, to get from color to color, one must blend into the varying hues in between.

Blend on, folks.