Abort! Abort!

I just got back from a family vacation in Mexico early this morning. One thing I love most about my family is that we leave our vacations on good terms and still loving each other. Some families leave trips like this bitter enemies for the next two months until time and space start healing wounds. We're all so good natured that (usually) when things start imploding (or exploding) we just chuckle at the irony and chock it up for something to laugh at later. It's how the Dayleys travel.

One thing I noticed on this particular trip, though, is that plane travel seems to be kind of subtly reverting back to a very Titanic-esque order of business. At least on US Airways. For example, only first class is fed anything. The rest of the commoners have to pay more money to get a drop of water. I wonder if this still applies to screaming babies/airsick passengers.

Airsick passenger in Coach: I'm not feeling very well. I'm pretty sure I'm going to vomit into one of your pathetically small little bags if I don't get some ginger ale into my system soon. Do you have any. . .

Stewardess: Well, Sir/Ma'am, I would be happy to serve you whatever drink you like if you could give me $2. Then I will give you a US Airways commemorable Dixie Cup full of ginger ale to settle your upset stomach.

APIC: But I don't have any cash. Everyone knows that it's stupid to carry cash these days, and even if I did have cash it would probably not be $2 worth.

S: Well, I'm sorry Sir/Ma'am but our guidelines are quite clear - we are not allowed to serve beverages to coach class without a small fee under any circumstances.

APIC: You would prefer that I vomit all over your carpet?

S: Of course not Sir/Ma'am. But for a small fee we could upgrade the status of your complimentary vomit bag. We now provide them in three sizes and colors, as well as scented and unscented options . . .

APIC: But I don't have any money. You're going to have to clean all this -

S: Unfortunately, stewardesses are only in charge of cleaning up messes of any kind in First Class. If you would like me to clean up your vomit, I would be happy to do so for an additional $20. . .

All right. This is a small exaggeration, I admit. But only a small one.

Here are some other great things I saw on my way home yesterday:

1. There was so much humidity in the air in Puerto Vallarta that the plane we boarded was smoking. Seriously. It looked like they'd put dry ice into all the vents. I half expected to hear some kind of creepy music over the vents. I asked the stewardess about it and (after paying her a few quarters for her time) she told me that it was just the condensation and that there was no need to be worried. Very reassuring.

2. There was a woman walking around the Phoenix airport yesterday wearing something that looked like an old Shirley Temple costume (the short, ruffly tap dance skirt variety), pink cowboy boots, and sporting a fro. A big, curly, blondish fro. Amazing. I love people watching. Thank you to that woman, wherever she is, for brightening my day.

3. We waited on the tarmac in Phoenix for an hour (after an hour delay for weather) because the mechanic had to come check something before we could go. The crew did nothing to inform us as to why we were being delayed, so finally after about forty minutes, I asked. I was informed (after spotting her another couple of dollars for her time) that we were waiting for a mechanic to come and sign some paperwork. Apparently, one of the three bathrooms on the plane was out of order. We were still allowed to fly even if the bathroom was not functioning, we just had to have the mechanic come, confirm that the bathroom was broken, sign a paper confirming this fact, and then we would be allowed to go.

I'm being serious.

We waited for an hour for a signature.

Rest assured, though. All class distinction was maintained. The two or three people in first class were guaranteed exclusive use of their bathroom, and the fifty or so of the rest of us had to argue for time over the hole in the back. Phew!

Introducing Pluckie, the Undead Vampire Chicken

This is a conversation I have had with several of my female friends in the last few days:

Me: "So, what are you doing Saturday morning? I don't have to be at the theater until around noon, so I think we should - "

Female Friend: (said with rather wide, ravenous eyes) BREAKING DAWN! BREAKING DAWN!

Me: "Oh, right. I forgot that the book was coming out this weekend. Thank heaven I no longer work at Barns and Noble - I will work for Harry Potter book releases but I would never want to spend several hours catering to a bunch of -"

Female Friend (now entering some kind of trance): BREAKING DAWN! BREAKING DAWN!!! IMHOTEP! BREAKING DAWN. . . (and it goes on while they slowly turn into dazed vampire/werewolf obsessed zombies. Eventually I leave).

I say this in jest, of course, since many of my female friends who will be spending their Friday night paying homage to their fandom are some of my favorite people. I love them. I respect their need to pay homage to fandoms, as I have done it many times over in this blog and elsewhere for the Potter-verse.

That being said, when I came across this parody/accurate prediction (UPDATE: Part II is now online) of what is likely to happen in the next book, I nearly spilled my guts out on the floor from laughing. Absolute brilliance, my friends. I don't know what is better, the descriptions of the "chapters" or the several comments from tweenagers who are confused about whether or not the guy is being serious.

So to my female friends - enjoy your love fest this weekend. I will be having a love fest of a different kind. Bring on a re-read of Sense and Sensibility or North and South - I'd take a Col Brandon, and Edward Ferras (not all Edwards are created equal, you know - this one can't read minds or there would be no plot) and a John Thornton any day. Much more interesting conversationalists, I think.

Excuse me for a second - I'm going to pass out.

I have been wanting to write an essay on this topic for a while but I haven't quite been able to work my head around it. The old essayist in me wants to create a giant metaphor out of everything but I feel like putting a bow on a box of thoughts isn't quite doing this topic justice. It's more complicated than that.

I'll explain.

But first, a story.

I went to a dermatologist yesterday for a few routine checks and things that aren't any of your business. Nothing big. They're putting me on an oral medication that would do great damage to a baby if I were to get pregnant in the next five months (ha!) so they are required by law to test my blood once every month until the end of the year. No big deal. Needles and blood don't bother me. I don't really like them, but I'm not mortally afraid of them. That being said, my appointment was at about 11:10. By the time I went in for lab work it was around noon. I hadn't eaten since seven that morning and even then it was just a bowl of cereal. Thanks to some genes from my mother, I have a kind of minor case of hypoglycemia that makes me feel somewhat shaky when I haven't eaten for a while. I also have low blood pressure, which makes my circulation somewhat poor and. . . basically it was a recipe for disaster. I walked into the room and thought -"I'm going to faint in here. They're going to take my blood, and I'm going to pass out. Shoot." I told them that I hadn't eaten and they said it wasn't that much blood and I'd be fine and. . . whatever. I knew I was going to faint. And I did. Not a very pleasant sensation on the whole and it left me completely out of it for the rest of the day. It takes me a while to get over these things.

I had a kind of morbid fascination with fainting when I was young (er. . . well, up until about last November) because it seemed like such a romantic thing to do. Anne Shirley had - once again - corrupted me with her use of the word "romance". But it really isn't very fun. Trust me on this.

The first time I fainted was last year the day before Thanksgiving. I had come up with my mom and my brothers to visit my grandmother in a care center that she was staying in while she recovered from extensive back surgery. My grandmother is one of the most giving, hard working people I've ever met - but there she was, looking rather yellow in nothing but one of those awful hospital gowns and a robe eating like a baby with my grandfather spoon feeding her what she could eat because she was too weak to lift the fork for herself. "You have served me for many years, Margie," he said, "It is a pleasure to be able to serve you now."

It was horrible and tragic. It was easily the first moment in my life when I have literally come to terms with mortality. Keep in mind that outside of my uncle (whom I didn't know very well) and my great grandparents (that I also didn't know very well) - no one in my immediate family has ever died. And none of them have - in my memory -ever been seriously ill either. One of my uncles had cancer when I was very young but I hardly remember that and we were living too far away to see what he went through. The idea of people I love being so ill scared me. I watched my grandfather feeding my grandmother and watched her struggle to gnaw on peaches I felt sick. It was about this point when I fainted. It was probably tied also to the lack of food I'd had that day - but if I was being honest I would attribute it more to the horror of seeing my grandmother so sick than my hunger.

I remember waking up rather late on Thanksgiving morning. I had hit my head on a bar of the hallway of the care center when I fainted and my head ached. I felt rather disoriented. I looked in the mirror of the bedroom I was staying in and my skin color looked exactly like my grandmothers.

The next day we went bowling. I heard my aunt laugh and I thought it was Grandma Newman. I saw my aunt's manicured nails and remembered that both my grandmothers make an effort to get their nails done before they go out. My Grandma Newman had gone to get hers done before she went in for surgery, even. Listening to my aunt talk reminded me of my grandmother - in the way she laughed and the way she phrased her words and the inflection she used. . .

I still haven't worked my head around it. If I were going to stamp a metaphor on all this I'd find a way to talk about the resilience of Newman women or something, or maybe my regret at not feeling as connected with my dad's side of the family as I do with my mother's. . . but that feels too forced. Maybe that's why I don't really feel ready to write anything about what happened yet - because the story doesn't really have an "ending". It was a short, fifteen minute period of time with little leading to it, or away from it. I'm still not sure what to make of it all - but I do know that at some point - this streak of mine will end. My family members will die or get sick - it happens to everyone. I'm just glad we have been blessed and protected thus far.

If there is anything virtuous, lovely. . .

"When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different - something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be south and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth."
~Anne of the Island, Pg 108

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about what it means to be refined. It's such an interesting word. It is a word that implies a continual process. It is an active word. Somehow, for me, the phrase "personal improvement" or even phrases about trying to be better don't quite seem as (for lack of a better term) as refined as the word "refined".

As part of this new quest of mine to be a more refined sort of person, my mom sent me a talk given at at BYU devotional in 2006 by Douglas L. Callister called "Your Refined Heavenly Home". My mother knows me well. The talk is really incredible. Brother Callister did a beautiful job of describing how a refined person would behave. "The nearer we get to God," he says, "the more easily our spirits are touched by refined and beautiful things [...] Refinement is a companion to developed spirituality. Refinement and spirituality are two strings drawn by the same bow."

The portion of the talk that I enjoyed the most was about literature and speech (naturally). I remember having long discussions in some of my education classes about how only literary nuts (like me) will ever appreciate analyzing literature and "what does it really ever do for us" and "should we make our students do it when they're not getting anything out of it?". This hasn't ever exactly sat well with me - not just with literature but with all forms of media or information or whatever that get thrown at us. I get bothered by people who take things at face value or say that they "like" or "don't like" something without any reasoning one way or the other on why.

Take a guy I used to work with, for example. He all out hated the Harry Potter books. The reasoning he gave was that they were popular and he didn't want to read them for that reason. He said they were stupid and he just didn't like them. Now, this is ridiculous. If he didn't want to read them, all he had to say was that he didn't want to read them because they didn't sound interesting. But not wanting to read them on principle and then attacking them is not good enough, any more than saying that you love them "just. . . because they're. . . funny and stuff" is an acceptable answer. Shouldn't we be self aware enough to be able to express why we like what we do?

The ability to express ourselves well is something that is so key to being refined. Language is important. I say that not just as an English major who loves words, but as someone who has seen the difference in a life you can make by using words well or not so well. Brother Callister continues:

We will feel more comfortable in Heavenly Father's presence if we have developed proper habits of speech. We not only wish to see God's face "with pleasure," we want to open our mouths with confidence that our speech harmonizes with the refinement of heaven. We will thrill to hear exalted beings express their sublime thoughts in perfectly chosen words. I suppose that the language of heaven properly spoken, may approach a form of music. Did C.S. Lewis have this in mind when he wrote: 'Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you - almost apart from their meaning - a thrill like music?'

This brings me back to the quote from the top of this entry. It's taken from a chapter in the third "Anne" book when Anne's old school chum Ruby Gillis is dying of consumption. Ruby's chief concern in dying is that heaven will feel so different than what she is used to, even if it is wonderful. Anne has to admit that Ruby is right. It will feel different for her because she has based her life on being frivolous and obsessed with beaux. What if, then, part of our preparation for Celestial life is not just in becoming more Christlike with characteristics of love or charity, etc.? We are meant to be good, well rounded and refined individuals. We are to make our lives and our homes beautiful "as reflected in the language, literature, art, music, and order of heaven." In other words, part of our preparation for meeting God comes in ways that may not be counted as strictly "spiritual". If we are to be like our Father in Heaven, we are to be a people of refinement who seek after things that are "virtuous, lovely, of good report or praiseworthy."

A well read individual. . .

In case there was any doubt. Ha! This is a list of the top 100 printed books by Big Read (Thanks Marisa!) According to them, most adults have only read 6 on this list. You are supposed to bold the ones you have read and italicize the ones you intend to read. I am going to add commentary as well because . . . otherwise this would be boring for me.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility is my favorite, though)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Love it. I'm so excited to take my senior capstone course on it.)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (The new movie that came out with Toby Stevens is FANTASTIC)
4. The Harry Potter Series JK Rowling (I should probably bold this one several more times - I've read them more than I can count. And. . . I'm listening to the sixth book again right now. Keeper Tryouts. Hermione is a sneaky little witch. . . )
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Didn't actually like this one all that much though. . . )
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (This one is half bolded because I started and never finished. I don't know if that counts)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (One of the most thought provoking books I've ever read)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Again, only partly bolded because I never finished the series, but I read all of the first book and enjoyed it. Not as good as Harry Potter)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (No, but I've read others by Dickens)
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (And all the sequels. I went through a Little Women phase, no thanks to Christian Bale for being crush-worthy. Hehe)
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Still can't figure out why I like this book as much as I do. It's so dark!)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Has anyone really read everything by Shakespeare? I've read most of his plays that are worth reading.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (Every last freaking word. Holy cow. This book was a chore.)
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (I worship at Fitzgerald's feet. The man had such command over language!)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Ha! Genius. I love British Humor)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (One of the first classics I remember buying for myself)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (Not my favorite, but still fairly enjoyable.)
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I still knock on the backs of wardrobes)
34. Emma - Jane Austen (Some people really don't like Emma, but I enjoy her even with all of her flaws)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen (I know! One of the great tragedies of my literary life. But I WILL read it. I own it)
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Er. . . I'm confused. *looks at number 33*)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (Another one of the first classics I bought)
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Started and never finished. I thought it was a piece of literary trash even if the story was interesting. Horribly written)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (My favorite book. EVER.)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (Man, I need to read this one. It looks amazing.)
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Yay! There it is. Oh Col. Brandon, take me away. . . . I'm only a little kidding)
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (That book blew my mind. Such incredible writing, and the story was killer)
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (I kind of want to read this one and kind of don't. I haven't decided yet.)
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (I started and never finished when I was in high school but I want to give it another go)
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (My favorite Dickens book)
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (One of the books that has changed my life.)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (I loved this book, but I'm mad that Bryson wrote it because he stole my thunder after going to England last year. This is the book I would like to have written if he hadn't beaten me to it.)
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (I hated this movie)
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry .
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White (This book was a huge part of my childhood. I had a piggy bank named Wilbur that I would sing to.)
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (I don't really have any desire to read this book at all. It sounds too sentimental and indulgent to me)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I'm debating on if this is worth reading or not)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (One too many times.)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (Yay! But Matilda was better.)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total Read:32. Though, to be fair, "The Harry Potter Series" Is not one book. Nor is The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia. So, subtracting one for LWW being listed twice, that takes my total from 31 to 48. It also takes this list from 100 to 116. So ha.

Total Planning to Read:24. Note that most of these are American Lit. Figures that most of the books I've read on this lit are British, isn't it? I'm such an Anglophile. I'll probably knock off several on this list when I take my American Lit classes this next year.

Books that aren't on this list that I wish would be:

1. Enders Game
2. North and South
3. The Giver
4. The House of Mirth
5. Importance of Being Earnest
6. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
   

"I give unto men weakness. . . "

First off - you may have noticed that lovely new little counter of visitors to my blog! It's pretty. And it has all sorts of cool features like a world map to show me how far my blog is reaching and how long people stay when they visit, etc. Don't let the high numbers fool you, though, I'm pretty sure that most people who stop by stay for less than a second when they realize that it's just a blog and not some super cool analysis. In case you were wondering, the two most searched entries are both movie reviews - one on Harry Potter (and I'm pretty sure those searches aren't intentional) and one on Narnia (which comes from people looking up the quote online). In any case, I will wave to my international non-readers and thank them for stopping by. And I highly recommend the counter. "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly suggest picking one up."

This post will be slightly more religious than usual. I've been thinking quite a bit recently about the way that people kind of view God as a tyrant who has a bad day at work and needs to be pacified by the Savior so that he doesn't take out that anger on us.

Let me explain.

A few weeks ago in relief society our wonderful president wrote on the board "I am enough, I have always been enough, and I will always be enough." We had an interesting discussion that brought me to a conclusion: God is not mad at me for sinning. Nor is he mad at me for being weak. Because he made me that way. He gave me - and everyone else - weaknesses. He expects us to fail, in a sense. That doesn't necessarily mean he likes it - what parent likes to see their child make mistakes? But I don't think that's the point. We are given weakness that we can be humble.

Yet another one of the great dichotomies in the gospel. Multiply and replenish the earth but don't eat the fruit. Be perfect, but I'm going to give you weakness.

I love it when the gospel makes me think.

"Three cheers for Miss Shirley, winner of the Avery!"

I grew up on Anne of Green Gables. Literally, it's one of my first memories. I used to act out scenes in my living room. I had almost the entire movie memorized before I reached the second grade. Anne wasn't just my "bosom friend", she was a part of me.

I'm rather defensive of her. I very selfishly believe that no one on earth understands her and relates to her more than I do. We are like one person and no one will ever be able to convince me otherwise. And it isn't even just being alike in personality - our lives have mirrored in very funny and interesting ways.

If you want a full list, I can give it to you but here is the most obvious one:

A few months ago I submitted (without a ton of hope) a piece I've been working on to a creative writing contest for undergraduate students offered by BYU. It was a piece I've been working on for a while but was somewhat frustrated with because it didn't really have a "home". But I thought it had merit so I submitted it thinking that I didn't have anything to lose.

So for those Anne-fans out there - I have just won my Avery. That's right. I am now Miss Newman, winner of the Kagel and Blessing scholarship - $1875 worth of tuition for two semesters. If you could jump through your computer screen and into mine you would see a massive amount of jumping up and down and screaming.

So, for those of you who are interested, posted below are portions of my prize winning essay. The full piece is 9 pages long and too big for a blog, so if you want to read the full thing, send me your email and I'll send it on to you. And I promise my next post will be less of an add for my amazing writing skills and more analysis-oriented. I already have plans. Enjoy!

The Mostly-Imagined Real Wanderings of a Kindred Soul Abroad

In which I become an impressionist.

I was sitting on a bench in a park near our hostel in Keswick with my new drawing pencils out. It was a stupid buy but I had to do it. In my head, I had decided that my England experience wouldn’t be complete until I’d drawn something. Every other girl on the trip was drawing like mad in their journals and it looked so artistic and why wasn’t I doing it? So I spent a half an hour in the store searching for exactly the right kind of pencils even though whatever I drew with them would inevitably be horrible because I am an artistic cripple. And they were all utter rubbish. I was right, which is fairly irritating. In my head, real travelers are the ones who are able to draw the places they’ve been to, not just snap a photo like a tourist and move on. It doesn’t take much time or talent to operate most digital cameras.

After the trip was over that box of very expensive colored pencils joined the rest of my over priced art supplies in a box under my bed. I will probably never use them again. But I have such a weak spot for art supplies! They look so alluring in their tubes and boxes. They are my Achilles heel. Or one of them, at least. I have many heels.

Actually, it isn’t even just art supplies I have a weakness for. Office supply stores are the death of me because new pens and blank notebooks are like Christmas. I love blank sheets of paper waiting to be written on. There’s something really exciting about watching a piece of notebook paper fill with words or a canvas with dabs of paint. If only my canvases would look more like art and less like a prize for the refrigerator of a merciful mother who will pity my attempts at greatness.

I think part of my subconscious associates good art with good tools that come from shiny metal boxes. That if I continue to buy these very cool professional pencils, then my less than mediocre sketching skills will suddenly improve, because I don’t have the patience to wait for them to get better. And what was my excuse that time? I had imagined that maybe being in Europe would suddenly fuel the senses between my mind and my fingertips with extra romance and artistic talent. It seemed appropriate. Europe and art. They go together, right? I had needed some kind of justification for how much they cost.

The idea that purchasing professional drawing pencils will turn me into an artist is as illogical as believing that running at a real vault will transform me into a gymnast (though I have entertained that idea as well). I took several art classes in high school and in all of them I was more than usually horrible at drawing. I hate it because being able to draw seems like such a romantic and appropriate accomplishment. Something Jane Austen’s stock of men would approve of. Except Darcy. Darcy’s the kind of hero who would only approve of a certain kind of art if it was done well and I don’t think our tastes would match. Darcy and I don’t get along. Not that I don’t think he’s amazing in his own broody way, but I’m not about to fall at his fictional feet any time soon. Though, now that I think of it, putting on this display of false accomplishments is rather like something Mary Bennett would do. I never aspired to be Elizabeth, but I didn’t aspire to be Mary either. Well. That’s rather disturbing. I’d rather be Elizabeth and get the broody rich hero with the nice house than be Mary and annoy the heck out of everyone and end up pining for Mr. Collins the rest of my life. That would be a fate worse than having the chorus of “Yellow Submarine” play in my head for eternity.

For the first week after I bought the pencils at the shop in Keswick, I used them almost every day in my journal at the risk of feeling guilty spending so much money on something I won’t use later. During that week, they turned into multi-colored swords slowly massacring the mountains that I decided to draw. They did a pretty clean job of it, too. Every stroke on the pages of my journal made the land bleed in agony. No depth? Check. Horrible blending? Check, check. Not recognizable as a mountain? I fail. F minus minus. The details got progressively worse as I moved from hill to hill through the pages because my patience in sketching exactly what I saw wore thin quickly. No matter how hard I tried I simply could not take those very real mountains and make them seem like anything more than a muddled bunch of colors on my paper. The hill on the farthest right of the page in Keswick, for example, is mostly a blob of scratchy frustrated greenish brown with a dash of yellow for good measure. If anyone ever looks through my journal and sees the drawings I will tell them that I was going for some kind of impressionist interpretation with an allusion to a child-like view of . . . never mind. I’ll just tell them I found some kid on the side of the road and asked them to draw in my pretty book. Then they’ll think it’s cute instead of embarrassing. I’ll call the kid Neville. I will tell them that Neville sat and talked to me for a half an hour and thought I was brilliant and that before he left we were the greatest of friends. I’ll tell them that Neville even broke the rules of British conduct and voluntarily gave me a hug. In public.

Of course, in the middle of my despair at being such a wretched artist, I managed to work up another story for myself. It helped me feel better. Because I was drawing I decided to imagine that I was an art student. Bottom of my class, no doubt, but with the proper amount of visual deliberation over what I was drawing I could pretend that I was Renoir. Only female. And English. Fortunately, I am much better at acting than I am at drawing. I looked up at the mountain. I squinted and deliberated for an appropriate amount of time. I looked down at my box of shiny pencils and select a darkish green one. I tenderly removed it from the box. I looked at the mountain for more squinting deliberation. I carefully picked a spot on the paper and then drew something resembling a line. I looked from the page to the mountain and back several times. All artists do this. Pretending to be an artist is exactly the same as someone taking a notebook to a café to write. You don’t actually have to do anything, just look like you are and the other patrons will appreciate the atmosphere, and you’ll go home feeling as though you’ve accomplished something for society. You have preserved part of that wonderful tradition of making café’s an arty, cultured place to be. I know several people who only go to café’s for this reason. They buy their designer coffee and sit in a corner listening to the jazzy-generic music for hours discussing really important theoretical things like . . . global warming or the state of the economy in relatively loud voices so that everyone else in the room can admire their intelligence and culture.

I know because I’ve done it.

In which I blend into the sky.

I don’t know what I imagined Tennyson Downs looking like before we hiked there. I’d never even heard of them before. I guessed that they would have to be nice because they were associated with Tennyson, but I’d never seen a ‘down’ before, so going to Tennyson Downs that night was a completely new experience. It’s only about a mile from where we were staying that night – not very far at all. Our leader John had said that it was a beautiful place to watch the sunset, and I trusted him and his expertise from leading the program before. Besides - anything that’s good enough for Tennyson is good enough for me. John was right, though. That wide, quiet place is beautiful. The Downs are an open stretch of grass overlooking the water on the top of a hill. Put that way it sounds so simple, but the Downs are simple. You hike up through some trees and then suddenly the trees stop and you just see an open stretch of land like a plateau and a gigantic Celtic cross marking the land in Tennyson’s honor. A blank canvas with Tennyson’s seal of approval on it.

The wind felt like it was blowing right through me. As though I was something slightly more than ghost but less than human and I could feel the air inside me, not just around me. I was part of the air and surrounded by it at the same time.

My hands were freezing. It made my handwriting turn into an even clumsier scrawl because I had to put on my gloves to keep out the cold. I’d moved away from the rest of the group because I wanted to be alone. The wind blocked out the noise of everything but Brooke’s didgeridoo, lambs bleating in the distance, and a few birds soaring above the ocean to the left of where I was sitting. I wanted to dream for a bit. I can’t dream on nights like that one when there is too much going on.

In the distance I could see the lights of the town starting to flicker, breaking through the black ground and coming through the mist like stars. I imagined that I was sitting on a patch of grass in the middle of space, surrounded on all sides by stars. I imagined that the old legend is true, and that the night sky is a blanket with pinprick holes in it so that the light of heaven can shine down on people while they sleep.

I kept getting distracted by reality. The sound of the ocean drew my thoughts like a magnet. The sea was a deep steel-colored grey meeting with the sky. The farther to the left I looked, the harder it was to see the distinction between air and water. It was as though someone had taken their thumb to the canvass and smudged the difference so that the sky and the water blended together into one flesh. It was beautiful. I tried to take a picture of it but it wasn’t any good. Sunsets can’t be captured on film. Moments like that one just have to be experienced. You have to pay attention.

That’s why I moved away from the others. Over my shoulder I could see them starting to huddle in groups to talk or watch the stars come out. With the wind running through my ears the sounds were diminished and I was free to think. My mind has more room to wander without other bodies and other thoughts getting in the way. I put my journal in my bag after it got too cold to write and lay down onto the grass to look up at the stars. It’s a strange feeling, being alone in such a wide space with the stars towering above you. I felt like everything and nothing all at the same time. I thought about falling asleep there. I thought about curling up with my bag as a pillow to watch for the little pin pricks of heaven coming through.

In which I swallow the world.

I have decided that there are different kinds of air in Tintagel. There is the air that is cold and sharp and it bolts down through your throat giving you the same kind of feeling you get after a long run. Then there is the air that is cold, but calm and almost sleepy. It flows through your body like the waves of the tide coming in and out. Maybe the air depends on the time of day. My second night in Tintagel, I ventured outside to watch the sunset. The air was brisk but calm. It lulled me into a feeling of comfort in spite of the chill. I started to imagine that my feet were growing roots into the ground so that I could stay there forever.

Our hostel was located near the edge of a cliff on the southern coast. Wildflowers grew in clumps around the slanted rocks and the water changed from deep blue to white as it beat rhythmically against the land. The sun was starting to set in the west, casting orange light against the cliffs to the left, turning them to what would probably be called red, though that is only part of the way true.

I wish I could write colors as honestly as I see them. I take pictures of the land, but I don’t know that it could ever do justice to what I see. How can I explain what it looks like? Words don’t go far enough. It’s like one of the lines from the song Candlelight Carol by Robert Shaw; “How do you capture the wind on the water?” How do I describe this place when the only words that come to mind are ‘hill’ and ‘cliff’ when where I was sitting wasn’t quite either? How do I write down the colors I saw and the contrasts between the blues and the oranges and the greens and browns and whites and grays? I’ve decided that it was one of those times that just had to be lived deliberately. I finished my entry and put my journal down in the grass. I can’t write in moments like that one. I’m afraid if I spend time writing I will get so caught up in words that I will miss something important, some other lesson that the wind and the flowers want to teach.

Looking at the cliffs and hearing the ocean made me imagine that I was back on Prince Edward Island where the cliffs near the sea also burn a bright red. Next to England, PEI is my favorite place on earth. It is my safe place. It is where my mind dreams of when I want to feel completely uninhibited. Before I’d even seen the beaches and fields and trees it was a haven of comfort to me when I felt like people were being critical of me. I went there with my mother and a family friend with her two daughters. The island is located just off the coast of Nova Scotia and is a popular pilgrimage for fans of the Anne of Green Gables series because the books are set there. Every year the population of the Island triples between the end of June and mid-August. Fortunately, we went at the beginning of June and had Cavendish Beach and the rest of the island all to ourselves for a week. We would walk from our cottage every day (and night) to explore and sit and talk. I would usually migrate away from my mom and the others after a while. I would find a spot to write. Then I would close my eyes and smell the sea and listen to the symphony of natural sound around me in utter contentment. I remember sitting alone one night at my favorite spot on the beach with my journal out and my hair down, thinking about how horrid and ruined the beauty of the spot would seem if it was crowded with women in skimpy bikinis or dogs playing Frisbee with their owners. People who thought they knew and understood Anne or her creator better than I do. People who assumed that they understood real beauty. While I was there, my beach was a temple to the part of me that lives and breathes two separate ways, each running along side each other between a dream and reality. I am both sense and sensibility. I am realistic and romantic.

The sound of the waves pulled me back to England. I looked away from the cliffs and back at the sky and my thoughts shifted to an old myth from India about a young boy god who had to go live with a herd of cows because of a jealous uncle who wanted to kill him. The uncle was afraid that his nephew would try to take over heaven. The boy looked exactly like everyone else on the outside, but if you looked down his throat you would be able to see the whole universe somehow.

I wish I could be like that boy. Not because I want to have my uncle plotting my murder, but because I want to capture places and moments. I want to find a way to take these places with me because pictures and words are so dead and empty compared to all the life embodied in this place. Maybe if I were to purse my lips and suck in my breath the universe would funnel into my mouth and lodge itself in my throat for safekeeping. Then whenever I want to I can pick Tintagel or Tennyson Downs or the moors out of my mouth and fly myself back.

I lay down on the ground, imagining instead that my body would absorb the dirt and the grass and the wildflowers and the air through osmosis until the dirt was imbedded in my skin and the wildflowers in my heart and the air in my blood.

"Exercising the right not to walk. . . "

My mom told me that the last post I wrote made her feel depressed. I suppose that's what happens when you title something "failure". All those negative connotations. But I promise you I'm doing alright. I'm doing really well, actually. Thanks to a bit of inspiration and a kind friend I'm involved in a play and have found about a dozen new friends to hang out with. And with the end of the term rapidly approaching, my stress level will go down significantly by the end of the week. Yay!

For my Teaching Writing class right now I'm working on a unit on Individualism. The idea is that students will improve their narrative writing skills. Granted - the unit may never actually come to pass. I would need a fairly large supply of books and/or a school district that allows me to ask students to purchase their own copies of books. I have divided the students into three different lit circles, each studying two different books that address the different aspects of/challenges inherent to being an individual. There's House on Mango Street and Night for individuality and family relationships/culture clashes, The Giver and Stargirl for individuality vs. conformity, and The Outsiders and The Chocolate War for individuality and oppression of your peers. These are all really incredible books largely based on personal experience (with the potential exceptions of The Giver and Stargirl) and I think it has the potential to be a really good, interesting unit once I iron out the specifics.

The trouble I'm having with all this intellectually is that I don't really have my mind wrapped around this whole concept of what it means to be an individual yet myself. It's driving me crazy, actually - because there isn't an "answer" to any of my questions. Is it good or bad to be an "individual"? What does it mean to be an individual anyway? Surely there's someone out there in the void or wide expanses of past/future people that thinks the way I do? Is anyone truly unique? And what about the people who "go against the grain" but really just end up running with the crowd? What's so bad about conforming? Robert Frost talks about how taking the road less traveled makes all the difference, but is the road less traveled always the best road?

I think this is going to be another one of those concepts that I don't fully understand until I have a nice long chat with the powers that be after I die. There seem to be so many conflicts. Because you don't want to conform for the sake of conformity any more than you want to go against the grain for the sake of being different. This whole idea of disturbing the universe presented in The Chocolate War, for example - the main character of this book ends up into a kind of isolation of his peers because he "disturbs" that status quo. Is it worth being so "different" that you don't have any camaraderie? It reminds me of the movie About a Boy and the theme of no man being an island.

Bah. Now I'm just frustrating myself some more. I think in the end this whole concept of being an "individual" - whatever that means - is maybe more at the cusp of our existence than we give it credit for. We can spend our whole lives defining and re-defining ourselves in relation to the way we think or in relation to our position among our peers or in our jobs or. . . whatever other social circles we run in. It's a lesson in generally being more socially aware and recognizing the consequences of our actions and our power for change. Sucking our individual marrows out of life but not choking on the bone. We need to know our own limits.

I don't think any of this made sense. That's what happens when I try to think this early in the morning.

Failure

First, an anecdote: My father took my brother to school this week. The way my dad tells it, he stayed at the college for about three hours before my brother said "Dad. . . it isn't really cool for college kids to walk around campus with their parents and grandparents." When I heard this story I laughed for a long time. That, my friends, is the mark of a freshman - even more than the dazed/confused/stressed look the first week of classes. "College kids" who think it isn't "cool" to have their parents around obviously haven't learned to work the system correctly. I love when my parents come to visit. Aside from the fact that I really enjoy their company, it means a few free meals and being a bit spoiled for the day. Case in point? My dad went to the BYU bookstore with me today and I came out with a new BYU sweatshirt and a license plate cover for my car.

On to the main point:

J.K. Rowling spoke today at Harvard for their commencement. Being the avid worshiper of all she says, I looked up the speech online and read it through. I wasn't disappointed at all. Bless her, she really has some powerful insights on life. The point that struck me the most was on her discussion on the benefits of failure.

She began by saying that many of the graduates (and I think this applies just as much, if not more so to BYU students than to Harvard students) are likely driven just as much by the fear of failure than the desire for success. "Ultimately," she continues, "we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it."

In light of some of my personal struggles the last few months, this struck me. Indulge me for a bit - The last few months have been hard ones for me. In many ways I don't think I've ever felt so alone. Much of this is due to the changing relationships I have with many of my friends who are moving away or getting married or simply drifting in their own direction away from me. Being the semi-loner that I am, I haven't really done much to stop this or work against it. One of my freshman roommates, for example, is getting married this month. I haven't received an invitation to her wedding reception at all and knew nothing at all about her bridal shower even though I know my other roommates were all invited. I won't lie and say that didn't hurt.

Aside from "failed" or "failing" relationships, I've been extremely depressed about my writing. I don't think I'm a horrible writer, but I don't see myself as truly spectacular either. The post-England class may have done more harm than good for me in the end, I think. I watched as my friends entered contests and received any amount of recognition while I entered the same contests and others and didn't hear a thing back at all. Of course I know that this is normal - hardly a published writer in the world hasn't met with large amounts of rejection, but the sting is still there. When you pour your heart into something and get little positive feedback, it's hard to find any light at the end of a tunnel.

I've struggled theatrically as well. I've auditioned for dozens of shows the past few years and my success rate has been rapidly declining. I used to know that I would at least be called for a second audition at virtually any theater in the valley. Then, inexplicably, the call backs stopped. It's strange because I have felt -and rightfully so, I think - that my auditions have improved. It doesn't make any sense. It's hard to know if it is just theater politics or if I'm growing more delusional about my abilities.

One Sunday a few weeks ago I had one very large emotional breakdown. I was frustrated because I felt so mediocre. I'm a good writer, not a great writer. I'm a decent actress, not an amazing actress. I have friends, but many of them seem to be moving on while I'm still stuck in singleville. This advice from JKR would have been highly useful once I'd stopped dwelling in semi-irrational-land: that measuring success or failure in any given thing by these imagined standards of the world won't do you any good. Because really, by the world's standards I'm probably a failure in all three of those things. I'm a failure as a friend because I'm so horrible at keeping in touch with people. I move on quickly because few people ever break down the walls I've put around myself for protection. I'm a failure as a writer because I'm an unpublished no-ideas girl with vague ambitions and no way to reach them. I'm a failure as an actress because I hardly ever make the shows I audition for. I'm pretty much an all around failure.

Do I really believe that? No. I did at the time. I had hit a kind of rock-bottom.

Later in her speech, JKR says that "personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement." In other words - setting my standard of success or failure in any one hobby or talent of mine by these so-called measures that the world makes is never going to make a success of me. Even if I do manage to somehow break out of my writing-rut and publish some amazing novel that receives great critical acclaim, what are the odds that I will ever meet with the same success as JKR, for example? I would say that the odds are about as good as my ever learning to fly to Neverland.

So I'm learning to pep-talk myself. I don't care if the world never reads my magnificent words - I enjoy writing. I love language. I love picking it apart and enjoying the clever plays that writers have on their readers. I love coming up with those games myself. If no one else ever enjoys it, then why on earth should that take away from my personal success? And so what if I don't make the cast of some play? I have always known that I have no desire to enter the film/theater industries. I have flaws as an actress but I have strengths as well. When I do get to perform I do all I can to make my part good.

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."

So failure, then, doesn't have to be the opposite of success. Failure isn't falling down, it's staying down.

Mark Twain would be proud. . .

Last weekend I had to run some errands. As I was leaving my apartment I saw a boy re-staining one of the fences that divides my complex and the one just north of us. It was a blazing hot day and he looked like he just started. I took about one second to feel bad for him and then I just laughed, thinking about Tom Sawyer.

A few hours later I came back. This time I saw this boy kicking it back in the shade with an apple and about four other boys re-staining the fence.

I'm not even kidding.

Things never happen the same way twice. . . (again)

It's been a while since I've written thanks to several hours of rehearsal for a show every week plus school and work and other commitments of various kinds, but a response to my last post got me thinking and (after seeing Prince Caspian a ridiculous amount of times - 5 as of tomorrow) I have had a bit more time to digest some of the more major themes from the film. I've also re-listened to the book on CD (many thanks to my roommate for giving it to me for my birthday!). So here it goes.

To I.Don't.Want.To.Grow.Up:

I think you really should read the books. I say that as a future English teacher and as a lover of all things C.S. Lewis. I really think that this film complements the book quite well. They expand and elaborate on each other. That being said, here are my thoughts on the ending of the film and the kind of "downer" note:

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we get a little more insight as to what Aslan may have told Susan and Peter because he speaks with Lucy and Edmund about why they won't be going back to Narnia again:

"Please, Lamb," said Lucy, "is this the way to Aslan's country?"
"Not for you," said the Lamb. "For you the door into Aslan's country is from your own world."
"What!" said Edmund. "Is there a way into Aslan's country from our world too?"
"There is a way into my country from all the worlds," said the Lamb; but as he spoke his snowy white flushed into tawny gold and his size changed and he was Aslan himself, towering above them and scattering light from his mane.
"Oh, Aslan," said Lucy. "Will you tell us how to get into your country from our world?"
"I shall be telling you all the time," said Aslan. "But I wil not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river [...] You are too old, children," said Aslan, "and you must begin to come close to your own world now."
"It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?"
"But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan. [...] "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

In other words, yes. The ending of Caspian is rather bittersweet. I think that as you get older you appreciate it more. I really struggle with it. So much of my life is in dream-land. The thought of growing up bothers me because I have invested so much of myself into building and shaping my imagination. But Aslan isn't asking Peter and Susan to forget Narnia altogether, he is just telling them that they cannot live there any longer. Part of growing up is learning not to "dwell in dreams and forget to live."

I think another part of it rests in the growing and evolving faith of the characters. Lucy, in particular, represents the greatest amount of innocent faith. She believes everything without question. In The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe she is the first to discover Narnia. She accepts that there could be such a place instantly and she continues to believe it into Prince Caspian and Dawn Treader. Of all her siblings - as the youngest - she exhibits the greatest amount of innocent faith. I think what Lewis is trying to say, though - and this is only my opinion - is that a greater more mature faith is good as well. Peter and Susan are old enough to ask questions and make decisions and learn some more complicated aspects of religion. Lucy and Edmund aren't quite that old. So their saying good-bye to Narnia is somewhat bittersweet and the movie played it excellently - they are simultaneously growing up and moving away from a kind of innocence and accepting the challenge of finding Aslan again elsewhere.

As for "Things never happen the same way twice" - I think it means exactly what it sounds like. It's sort of like how the immune system works. From my (limited) understanding of how the body functions, we don't typically get the same strain of a cold or flu or another virus because our body builds up immunity to it, right? It's the same way with life experiences. The challenges we are given are never the same from one to another. The circumstances are always a bit different. We need these tweaked circumstances because we've built up a kind of emotional/intellectual immunity to the first challenge. We have already grown from that event in one way or another and we don't need to grow in that exact same way again. Aslan is telling Lucy that things never happen the same way twice because He believes that we need to grow in many different ways - not the same way over and over again.

Of course, this is just my opinion. There are lots of interpretations.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Narnia?!

Things never happen the same way twice

I saw Prince Caspian twice this weekend. I don't believe in seeing movies in theaters once if I really like them, any more than I believe in reading a book once. There's something about watching a movie in a theater with a group of people that heightens the experience more than watching something in a living room with a few friends does. There aren't as many distractions for one thing. I love going to midnight openings because everyone is so excited and so accepting of the flaws of a film and willing to laugh at the most ridiculous things. Maybe it's just because everyone is so tired! This is why I went to see the movie again a second time the next day: different audience, and I wasn't so tired. I wanted to see what I had missed the first time.

First of all, I think the movie was brilliant. Aside from the fact that there really isn't anything you can work with in the text to make a film. The action doesn't pick up until the book is 3/4ths over. Most of the book involves a lot of walking and talking and not much else. They had to make some major changes - expanding on some things and making some small changes to the plot for sake of making the book filmable.

I thought the greatest strength of the movie compared to the book was a little attention to that practical matter of how difficult it would be to go from being nearly thirty years old and the ruler of a country to being a British school kid again. For all intents and purposes, the Pevensies could all have been married when they ruled Narnia. They may well have had families. Peter especially would have suffered. As High King you get the idea that he took his job very seriously. He would have wanted to protect his Kingdom. Leaving it like that would have been awful not just on a personal level and the struggle at having to be young again, but in that frustration in being torn from his responsibility. I thought it was a brilliant move to have that frustration show in his character. It gave him depth that wasn't really there in the original book.

The transition Susan made was nice too - you start to see why she would have fallen into this obsession with 'worldly things' in The Last Battle - it's her defense. She doesn't do it because she's forgotten Narnia. She does it because she has to in order to keep her head. It wasn't easy for her to leave Narnia. So she throws herself into England to help herself move on. She just goes a bit far in the end. Speaking of Susan - how awful would it be to lose all your family in one go? I thought about that the other day when I was flipping through The Last Battle. Peter and Edmund and Lucy and her cousin Eustace, her parents, the Professor. . . they all die instantly. She's left completely alone while they all move on to Narnia v. 2.0. Horrid!

The spiritual aspect of the film wasn't quite so strong as the book, perhaps. In the book they make a bit of a fuss about when each of the Pevensies start to see Aslan again. The movie focussed a little more on the development and growth of the characters, which works better for a film. The messages they did keep, though, were strong. I was particularly happy with the chats that Lucy had with both Susan and Peter - both of whom come to her asking for advice on why they didn't get to see Aslan. Lucy tells Susan it's because she doesn't think that Susan wants to see Aslan, and she tells Peter that she thinks Peter isn't looking for him. How many times do we do that? We get so caught up in proving ourselves (Peter) or worry about what will happen because of our mistakes (Susan) that we stop looking for God and try to do everything on our own, or we don't want to find him in case he tells us what we already know. Wonderful.

I thought the movie did a particularly good job with the growth in Edmund. His character literally takes a 180 from the last film to this one. Now he is Peter's rock - he's the one with his head on. He saves the day more than once. Skandar did an excellent job with him. I suppose that might be another reason why Peter is able to maintain his hold on Narnia and Su isn't - Peter has Edmund. Edmund knows what it is to doubt. He relates to it. Lucy doesn't because she is so solid. Other than that, Edmund and Peter also fought in battles together as Kings. That's a kind of bond and trust that doesn't die. Susan doesn't have anyone to relate to. She goes to school away from the boys and Lucy doesn't understand - no wonder she has a harder time than the rest.

I admire Lucy, though. It isn't easy to be strong when those around you - particularly those you are closest to - don't believe you. That kind of innocent faith that she has is a real strength. She is also very forgiving - something I struggle with. As soon as Peter and Susan come to her for help - even though they've been awful to her - she stretches out that hand of forgiveness without question. What a wonderful lesson.

In the end, my favorite part is that idea of the restoration and the last days. The battle at the end is severely outnumbered. The Narnian's do everything they can and in the end they win because they have Aslan on their side, in spite of their lack of size and experience compared to the Telemarines.

Of course, being me, leaving the movie was the worst part. Aslan telling Susan and Peter that they were too old for Narnia and that they wouldn't be coming back hit a personal note with me since I turned 21 last week. Not that I am old by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm certainly not a child any more. I have this awful feeling that my days of living in my own kind of dream-land - my personal Narnia - will have to come to an end sooner rather than later as I enter the work force and start teaching in the next year. It's sad. I'm not so sure that I like it at all. It's very bittersweet this growing up business. Can't I be young and obsessed with literature and imagination forever? Where's that well of immortal water when you need it?

Why no, I'm not one of the Children of Israel, thank you very much

I moved into a new ward a few weeks ago and - because luck is finally in my favor - I'm going to be teaching Sunday School! I'm so excited. No, seriously. I've wanted this calling for ages. It's good practice for me as a future teacher and then I don't have to sit through boring lessons.

I do have one small concern, though.

If there's one thing I've learned about how strange people can be, it's that we're really good at analyzing and judging things that are removed from us, but not so good at seeing those flaws (or accepting those flaws) in ourselves. I find it interesting, then, how many people want to make the gospel black and white in one way or another. Take the people who want to know how far they can go before they need to see the bishop, for example. Or the people who mistake the "culture" of the church for the "gospel" of the church and shun those who drink Dr. Pepper/watch PG-13 movies/how they spend Sunday/who they spend Sunday with/whatever. These are the kinds of people who subconsciously seem to want the church to follow a kind of "Law of Moses" but don't think that's what they want.

These are extremes. I don't know that I've seen too much of that around here. What I wonder about is something I've been thinking more about recently than almost anything else. I'm still not sure how to express it, but writing helps me work my mind around things so here it goes:

The church is more flexible than people give it credit for. I don't think there are very many absolute truths in the gospel, really. Or at least not many absolute truths that will mean the same thing for everyone. Everyone brings their own baggage to the table.

One of my new favorite sections in the D&C is the one about the Apocrypha. Essentially, the Lord tells Joseph that the Apocrypha does have some value and that if it is read with the right spirit, it can be uplifting. This is why I don't apologize for finding spiritual insight when I listen to good music or read a book. Does that mean it applies to everyone? No. But all things testify of Christ.

This, then, is what makes me somewhat nervous about this teaching of Sunday School thing - because the idea that the gospel can be personal and universal is a hard one to accept for some people, especially in the practices and applications of that gospel.

I think this is especially difficult in Utah where some people assume that the exception is the rule. Honestly, I think that the deeper fabric of the church in Utah is a little more difficult to deal with than it is elsewhere because the culture of the church and the culture of every day life entwine so tightly together. We had a talk today in one of my classes about teens who experiment with homosexuality and the girl who was discussing the topic just shut it down. Homosexuality is bad. It's never "right." Whatever. I don't think it's that simple. I really don't. And I think this tight-lipped taboo we have on "touchy" subjects like homosexuality or sexuality in general within the church is a dangerous thing. Where else are boys supposed to go, for example, when they have questions about sexuality but they don't feel like they can talk about it with people in the church/their parents? Of course they're going to go to their friends. Of course they're going to experiment with pornography. And naturally the girls who don't buy the "you are beautiful because you are a child of God" argument are going to develop eating disorders.

You think I'm being extreme? The porn industry makes more than Yahoo/MSN/Hotmail and G-mail combined every year. It boils down to about $3000/second in the US alone.

Ok, so I don't really know what this post is about anymore, but there it is. There are conflicts in the culture around me that I'm not sure I have the ability to confront intelligently right now. But writing helps and. . . hey. So does discussion.

Re: The weather

Dear Mother Nature,

I would appreciate it if you would make up your mind on all the weather we have been having lately in Happy Valley. These ups and downs in temperature are doing murder to my skin.

Oh, and I would really like to drive home in my new car with the sun roof open, so don't make any sudden changes to the schedule in the next 24 hours, ok? Ok.

~Unfortunate Lilymaid

Painting pretty pictures

I really don't like the last few days of the school year. They're about as useless as the first few days of school but for different reasons. In my Writing about Literature class right now, we're watching presentations on papers for the next two class periods. I wouldn't go but our professor has given us high-school-ish sheets to fill out in order to rate the presenters. If this wasn't such a load of busy work I'd be more ok with it. I mean, sure, you want people to come. It wouldn't be fair for the people going last not to have an audience at all. But our teacher gives out grades without taking into consideration the views of the class. That's her prerogative, but I still resent the busy work.

Ok. Part of this is that I resent her as well. She flat out refuses to give me an A because she knows it's driving me crazy. She gave me an A- on my last presentation for heaven knows what reason (she only marked off two minor things out of about twenty different categories), and she gave Ms. "I'm going to rock around on my feet and keep my hands in my pockets and make no interesting claims" an A, and Ms. "I enjoy wandering through - oh look a butterfly - I don't know what I'm doing here" an A as well. So irritating.

Rant over. My point is entirely different. But I think I'm allowed to rant because no one really reads this thing anyway, right? Of course right.

Someone said something today in their presentation that really bothered me. Not in an "I'm offended, I'm going to resent you for the rest of my life" kind of way, more in a "no! That's not right," kind of way. She is writing her paper on My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. Asher, the main character, is a painter and a Jew. I won't go into all the details, you can (and should) read the book for yourself. One of the main conflicts in the book sits in what art is supposed to accomplish and whether it should be beautiful or not. Asher's mother Rivkeh tells him over and over again to paint something beautiful. "Paint pretty pictures, Asher." Over and over again she begs for him to paint something lovely.

But Asher feels like painting something that isn't necessarily beautiful. At least not by his mother's definition. He draws Stalin in a coffin. He paints his mother on a cross. He paints his mythic ancestor.

The only time he draws something "beautiful" - a brother and sister walking down the road together - he feels as though he's drawn a lie. He hates it.

The commentary that the presenter gave is that Asher can paint "pretty pictures" like his mother wants him to or he can paint the world realistically.

I've written on this before. Last Christmas after the "Scottish episode that shall not be named" (aka. the Robin Hood finale) I wrote about how I don't think that we should consider reality to be bad things. Now I want to expand on that.

I think about my reality. My reality starts between about seven-thirty and nine-thirty every day. I wake up and put on a robe over my pajamas and eat some cereal for breakfast. I watch the news for a while. The news isn't always positive. Rarely positive, really - I suppose this is why so many people associate "reality" with wars and starvation and crime rates. I get ready for school or work and walk to campus. On days when I go to work first I walk along a brick path south of campus that is lined with trees. I love this part of my walk. It is beautiful and gives me a chance to think and enjoy the view of the mountains without the general rush to get to classes. I go to my classes and spend time some of my friends. At night I do some homework, talk to my family, eat dinner and read for a while. It really isn't so bad. It's really great, actually.

People tell me that after I leave school I'll enter the "real world". So what is that supposed to mean? Well, it means I have to get a job. Yes. I understand that, thank you very much. It means I have to be responsible for myself and my finances. Well. . . ok. I was expecting that. Do I think it will be easy? No. It's a different challenge. But I don't expect to be unhappy. I don't expect everything to be to my liking, but I don't expect things to be horrible either. I want to be optimistic about my life. I want to make my world worth living in.

In other words, enduring to the end isn't suffering valiantly. Men are supposed to have joy, yes? "For God so loved the world." God loved the world. Not just the people in it, but the rest of it too.

Not that I promote a completely Pollyana-ish view on the world. There's something to be said for recognizing that the world isn't always fair or kind. I worry about people, for example, who think that BYU is a completely safe place. You have to be careful who you trust everywhere. That being said, I think you can be realistic about your life and be happy about it as well.

I need to refine these thoughts so that the next time I meet someone who says this, I can tell them to be a little more optimistic.

"I do believe it is tempests"

"This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted." ~A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis

I've been thinking.

This is good, you say. A person ought to think. Especially a person who is (gasp) actually going to graduate from college in the next year. Sometimes I think people leave college so disillusioned by things that they no longer think and have simply wasted several thousand dollars and many hours of sleep.

I've been thinking about the different qualities of different characteristics. We had a lecture several eons ago in a British Lit class I took about how the opposite quality to a lie isn't truth, it's a different kind of lie. Take for example these extremes:

You are a blond-haired-blue-eyed Christian in Germany during World War II. Your next door neighbors have been your friends for many years. They happen to be Jewish. Rather than stand and watch them leave for the death camps, you decide to hide the family in your home until you can move them to a safer location. Some of the police come to your house and ask if you know what has happened to your neighbors. You tell the police you don't know. It's a lie.

You are about to marry a really great person. He/she asks you if you have ever had sex with another person before. You have, but you lie and say that you haven't.

Both of these are lies. According to my Book of Mormon teacher from a few years ago, you would probably go to hell for both because lying is a sin. But we don't hold them on the same plane because there are different levels of "lies". Telling your kid Santa exists is different than lying to a police officer, right?

I started thinking about this last night when I was reading my dose of Uncle Jack for the day. A Grief Observed is a seventy-some-odd page masterpiece of sub-conscious thought following the death of his wife. It's started me thinking about the way people sort of look out for each other and do humane things that - under definition - might be less so. Lying to someone to tell them they look better when they don't. Telling your future mother-in-law that you love her food if you don't. The lines are never as clear between "right" and "wrong" as we would like.

The part of that quote that I love so much is that it really allows for someone to love as God loves, mistakes and foibles and all. I think that's one of the biggest problems I see in people who want to plan elaborate dates, for example, and never take the time to be friends with someone. In the recent past I went out several times with someone who - while a really great guy - spent so much time trying to come up with creative activities that the date became the focus of the night and not the "I really want to get to know you" part. People jump right into dating someone before they take the time to become friends. Dating is such a joke, sometimes. It takes forever for a person to really be themself when there's so much pressure to have fun.

You need that time. To go through a period of disenchantment and then realize that you don't care.

Sound and Fury

I'm about to write on something that most people will probably not care about. It's a turn from what I normally take the time to say - stuff about movies or books or life as a college student. This is a little different.

From the beginning I'd like to make it clear that I am not representing the deaf or hearing communities. I'm just putting my thoughts down on a debate I've been having in my head for a while.

I'm in a Deaf Culture class right now. I've taken two years of sign and in order to get my language credit passed off, the University requires me to finish off with a semester studying deaf culture. BYU is unique in that all of the ASL teachers are deaf. It has provided me with a really unique learning experience and I'm glad that I've had the chance to learn sign. I think it is a beautiful language.

I've been struggling a bit with my 301 class, though. It frustrates me to go in a class and learn about how hearing people are "bad" or "oppressive" and to be deaf is "right" and "good" compared to being hearing.

Part of this frustration is warranted. The deaf world has been through the mill in the last hundred years. The fact is, there are more hearing people in the world than deaf people. 95% of deaf children have hearing parents, and most of those hearing parents haven't had exposure to the deaf world before. They don't know what to do. The hearing world literally revolves around sound. We know when to get up because of an alarm. We hear our phones ring or the doorbell. We know when to feed our children because we hear them cry. We know when to stop a lane change because someone honks at us. We know that something is wrong downstairs when we hear the sound of glass breaking. We have a literal obsession with recognizing sounds and understanding where they come from. For a hearing person with little exposure to the deaf way of life, the idea of living without sound is incomprehensible and frightening. Even now as I'm writing I've got my music on. The Beatles. What would life be like if I couldn't hear the Beatles? I would wager that nearly every student on campus would spontaneously explode if someone cut the cord between them and their iPod.

We watched a movie yesterday in 301 about a family who has a deaf son. They focus so much on his inability to hear that they inhibit him from acquiring any knowledge at all. His mother says over and over that she just wants him to be able to talk and order his own food at a restaurant, etc. She says having a deaf son is like expecting a child with legs and getting one with fins instead.

But that's not quite right. He doesn't have fins. He still has legs. And expecting a deaf child to live like a hearing child is ridiculous. He can't hear.

Prior to watching that movie I'd wondered about what I would do if I had a deaf child, even though I do know sign and can communicate well enough. As an English person, I struggled with it, because there are some major drawbacks in deaf education at the moment. Public education made the mistake of throwing most deaf kids in with other handicapped children with mental disorders. Deaf children aren't stupid. They just need a bit of help. What's happened is that you have hearing parents desperate to teach their kids to talk, and by the time they learn sign later on in life (if they do) they're well behind in other subjects and can't have the independence their parents wanted for them in the first place. Most kids educated in ASL are well behind in English. They can't write or read as well. They can communicate perfectly, but they struggle to communicate with the outside world in a written way because ASL is not a written language. I decided that if I were to have (or adopt) a deaf child, I would stress importance in understanding English. Just as I would stress the importance of learning English in a child I adopted from China: to survive in America, to become truly educated, it is vital that you be able to present yourself well.

The trouble I have with this class is that the material is outdated and, in many ways, I see the deaf community as crippling themselves. The Gallaudet Revolution in the late 80s did great things for the deaf world, but it's still so close to the hearts in the leaders of the deaf community that they have trouble breaking out of the "oppressed" mindset, just as some members of the black community struggle because of Civil Rights movement backlash. Sure - there are people that genuinely do not understand the struggle and don't want to. But there are many people who would be willing to help if they knew what to do. Most of the materials we use in the class are outdated. I feel frustrated when I read long chapters in books about how hearing people are mean and it's all their fault that deaf people have a horrible life, etc. It makes me want to stand up in class and say "look - you don't need to tell me that it's better to use sign. I'm here! I'm trying. Tell it to that stupid mother trying to yell into the ear of her deaf son so that he could 'hear'-"

I have hope for the deaf world though. I have a feeling that the farther we move from the Deaf President Now campaign, the more willing people will be to come together. I think the study of deaf culture will expand and grow into something better. Right now, though, I struggle. It's not my fault I can hear. Blame the powers that be, if you want.

"If I weren't going to be a writer, I'd go to New York and pursue the stage..."

I looked at the date of my last post today and got a bit of a shock. January 21st? Goodness. In my defense my life has been busy and I haven't had much to write about, but still. Shouldn't I have a plethora of things to say all the time?

Which leads (somewhat roughly) into my topic for the day. A few weeks ago I sat down with one of my professors. He more or less tossed an imaginary gauntlet on the floor of his office and said something to the effect of: "Joni, you can be a professional writer if you want to be, but you'll have to work harder."

Well. If that didn't smack me back into place a bit.

When I was twelve I was determined to be a writer. I wrote little short stories all over the place, one of which was a twenty or so page epoch tale of a girl on the Oregon Trail complete with birth, death and (naturally) cholera. All the Oregon-Trail-Tale necessities. I remember very vividly telling my sixth grade teacher that one day I was going to be a real published author and that I would dedicate my first book to her. This enthusiasm for the idea of being a writer carried on into high school when I started writing a magical-realism book about a girl in Ireland. She lived in a house with a field of daffodils around it that drove the neighbors mad because they were just so conspicuous. My creative writing teacher told me over and over again that I ought to write professionally. I scorned the rest of the "kids" in my classes that wrote really horrible, sappy poetry. I managed to get published in a magazine. It was a good year.

Then, of course, I went to college. I took one creative writing class that I really didn't like because (a) I didn't have any inspiration to write and, (b) my professor's theory on how you write stories irritated me. I thought it was a load of poo.

I don't know that I've written anything in the creative department since then.

I'm starting to get a bit of that bug back, though. That urge to write something wonderful. In working with this professor on my writing, though, he was speaking specifically about being a professional essayist. Only I don't want to be a professional essayist.

This last statement has a bit of irony to it, really. What have I done the last three years that was anything but essaying? Journaling, I suppose, which is a form of essay. Personal narratives. Nothing creative. Why is that?

Well, I suppose that part of it is because I read a lot of crap. I've always wondered at how some authors manage to get published with the junk they write. It's such an impossible industry to break into and most of it is a load of really horrid writing that somehow manages to strike a literary (or imaginary) chord. Take Twilight for instance - the books are not well written (don't even try arguing with me on this), but they've been selling out all over the place. Nearly every teenage girl in the world has read them and/or made their boyfriends read them (why any high school boy would do that for a girlfriend, I don't know). Or maybe that example isn't fair. I'd use Harry Potter but everyone knows how that turns out too - another random, twist of fate chance that opens up an empire. But what of the great unknown books? There are some incredible storytellers out there that get completely overshadowed in the young adult fiction world by ripping yarns like . . . The Babysitter's Club. One of the reasons why I think I haven't written is because I don't want to write junk.

Then of course there's the fear that all I will have to say will have already been said by someone. Heaven forbid I steal from someone else. I need to be original!! But how can I be original when there have been billions of other stories told? Well, I can't. I don't know that there's any such thing as a truly original story when you pick off all the fluff. I just have to find a way to tell the same story in a new enough way that it tricks people. How do you do that?

Hindrance number three: I'm a historical purist. I don't want to write anything modern, but if I'm going to write something historical I want to make sure I do it well. And, while I'm at it - I don't much fancy setting anything in America either. I suppose the upside is that I would get to travel back to my beloved England for field research . . . maybe this isn't such a hindrance after all . . .

Another question, then - why did I have to grow up into a realistic sort of mindset that keeps pestering me by saying "chances are you'll fail, why even start"? What ever happened to that twelve year old inside me that said I would put my teacher's name on the dedication page of my first book and knew that eventually I would? Whatever happened to "the glory and the dream"?

So for now, I'm trying to come up with ideas. I still rather like the idea of that little story I was working on all that time ago. With a little refinement of course - maybe I can come up with some solid conflict and say something worth reading. Until then, though - it's definitely given me some things to think about. What is it about growing up that makes us so boring in how we dream? What's wrong with wanting something wonderful? Or is it just that our idea of "wonderful" shifts? Is that settling? Or is that just living "responsibly"?