I can fucking do it.

I can fucking do it.

I fucking have to do it.

It's just once. It'll pass.

Worst case scenario, I live out the rest of my perfectly adequate, enjoyable life, meet people I love, live thoughrally and boldly and unapologietically, and die as well as I know how, and some time later the whole world and everything in it burns in the darkest pits of hell. 

Which isn't so bad.

This doesn't matter that much. Nothing ever matters that much. It's a terrible mistake to believe it does.

The next time I have opportunity to personify Fireflies,

I will make them all drunk, all the time.

I am a good person.

I am a good person.

 

I didn't get that much done today. But that's fine. I did a lot of work-- I did. I took care of several people in ways most people can't. I am strong. I am brave. I am competent. I'm okay. I'm alright.

Truth?

My Chemistry teacher wanted more details and a more complete explanation. I did not think I could give him a more to the point answer. So I wrote him a paragraph that says exactly the same thing but is long and fairly elaborate in its langauge. But about halfway through the composition becomes sketchy. That's because I was listening to Eminem with more focus than doing science homework. Shhhh. Don't tell.

secrets that are all mine.

when i'm in my room, alone, i turn the music up and dance like i'm a fucking rockstar.

this, somehow, is what's making my search for colleges not feel like a predatorial monster right now. like, "take my brain, take my hand, take me where i cannot stand . . . i don't care, i'm still free, you can't take my bad-music-and-equally-bad-i-mean-shamefully-radically-bad-i-mean-like-makes-you-ashamed-by-association-bad-dancing-from-me . . ."

yeah, i just went there.

 

in confidence, 

claire

i wrote you a poem.

So I went to writing camp, and it was about imagery. We had homework every night, and I liked some of the results. They were written quickly, and are unrevised, but I hope you can find something in them to like. 

Day 1: Use a 2D image.

-----------------------

On the Nature of Windows

the chapel was broken in a million tiny ways. 

the arms of the pews had been

       worn down by nervous fingers,

    the once-smooth stone   was

           porous and rough,

    the floor was grimy and covered in dust.

but that window--

    that beautiful stained-glass window--

it shone, still brilliant,

    a flurry of color, 

               of color that cut through the grey decay--

           it was fire,

              and orange,

              and deep sweet blue,

                    rich dark purple, 

                           and white.

on the floor and the pews

       where it laid itself down, 

    it fell like petals

           and draped like silk--

the thirsty grey stone

    drank the colors

    down,

              and they were warm, 

                    and it was cold,

              and they were so living,

                    and it so dead,

                           and it    felt

                             beautiful

                                again.

--------------------------------

My thanks to e. e. cummings for pioneering the art of spacing your lines exactly where you want to. It felt pretty natural handwitten, but typing it up, I feel like I've committed wholly to a trick that isn't mine. But hey, steal from the best, right?

Day 2: The assignment was to evoke a person without using their face at all.

-------------------------------

Sometimes I think she was made of shoes.

Like one time, we went to the park in April because she wanted to play on the playground in the rain. She didn’t check the forecast, she just expected it to rain, right then, at 2:00, just because she wanted it to. And if it wouldn’t rain for her right on schedule, she at least wanted to jump in the puddles from yesterday’s rain, and this morning’s rain, and whatever rain was left over from last month that hadn’t managed to evaporate yet because it kept raining all the time. She was already there when I drove up. She was standing by this gigantic puddle in the parking lot, and there was this rubber ducky floating in the middle of this huge muddy parking-lot puddle, and she was standing at the very edge of the puddle with her toes just in the water in these bright yellow rain boots.

Or like that time she managed to break in through my window at four in the freaking morning—with two cups of hot Starbucks, no less—and she was like, “get up, sleepyhead! It’s beach time!” It was still, like, half an hour to sun-up when we got to the boardwalk. It was dark, still, but kind of dusky so you could still see, and everything was really, weirdly still. No birds, no people, not even sun—it was just the waves going up, and turning white, and down, and up, and down, and the weird thing is, she didn’t even want to do anything. She just sat there on the railing of the boardwalk in her blue jeans and these funny white ballet flats, kicking her feet back and forth.

Or like, our sophomore year, these two guys dared us to go to prom with them, and I was like, “no”, and she was like, “challenge accepted!” and then I was like, “okay fine.” So then she took me shopping, and picked out my dress and shoes and everything, and it was actually pretty fun. And then, prom night, she showed up at my house in this lacey little black dress, black fishnets, and bright pink Chuck Taylor high-tops carrying a box of what she termed, “schmancy dinner a la Dominoes.”

The last time I saw her she was barefoot, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my room. She showed me the bus ticked, and promised she’d be safe. And then she walked out of my room, and down the stairs, and to the door; and she put on her Nike running shoes, and I haven’t seen her since.

-------------------

I'll be honest, I wrote that for the last scene. And the second one. I like the second one. I don't know-- let me know what you think.

Day 3: [Telling you the prompt would give it away.]

--------------------

She tumbled out of bed 

in her Disney princess pajamas,

her fluffy red hair unkempt,

and slipped on her Cookie Monster slippers.

She walked downstairs to the kitchen,

where she placed one scoop of orange sherbet

next to one scoop of raspberry sherbet

in a blue bowl.

And then she took her breakfast out to the deck,

and watched the sun rise over the lake. 

------------------------

You have to visualize it or else it's boring.

Day 4: Use a list to create a sense of breadth. 

----------------------

How do I hate thee?

     Let me count the ways.

Thou art more oppressive than humidity in Iowa in July,

     more cumbersome than having to explain your intentions to your mother,

your neediness is like having maple syrup on your fingers

     and there's no water in sight;

I hate you freer than a worn-out couch on a curb,

     purer than the faith of Mother Theresa;

I hate you stronger than your own unshakeable loneliness

     and with all the passion of your aggressive hopelessness;

you smell like dirty gym socks, 

     and you speak with the grace of a rotting gazelle. 

I hate you harder than a math test you stayed up all night studying for,

     and after talking to you, I feel like I have to go shake like a dog. 

In short,

     I hate you to the moon, and straight on 'til morning.

-----------------------

Disclaimed: that wasn't written at a person-- it's a joke. And anyway, Joella liked it. 

Right. I went to Iowa City for a week and read lots and lots and lots of stuff, and listened to many very smart people talk, and wrote some stuff that wasn't as good as the stuff the genius people wrote, but I thought there were redeeming qualities to all of them, and on the whole I like them, so I shared them with you. I hope you enjoyed.

Thanks for reading, and definitely leave a comment and tell me what you thought.

Cheers!

today,

i found out that i'm that kind of person.

i said to myself, i don't empathize well with characters right now. i find them boring. i find their troubles overrated and their joys irrelevant.

i said to myself, this would be an excellent time to read an epic, or something. something from before the time when writing was more about character than plot. like, the iliad or something. but i've always had a hard time with those. i find them dull, too.

i said to myself, what do i find interesting in books? i answered myself, theme? that third layer to books, after story and character?

so i was like, i've heard ulysses is all full of that, and i don't think you have to take the person seriously, and the story follows that of the odyssey, but in the same stroke, nothing happens. maybe i should read that.

and then i asked google. google says it's impenetrably hard to read. most people either don't get through it or just don't get it. there are a number of personal accounts of people who say it's not worth it, that they hated it, that it's really long, and other people who say that now they get it, but they didn't at first. and all of that made me want to read. i guess i'm that kind of a person.

so i guess i'm going to try to tackle james joyce's ulysses. i'll tell you how it goes.

cheers,
claire.

science is a religion.

coming soon.

secrets that are all mine.

when i'm in my room, alone, i turn the music up and dance like i'm a fucking rockstar.

this, somehow, is what's making my search for colleges not feel like a predatorial monster right now. like, "take my brain, take my hand, take me where i cannot stand . . . i don't care, i'm still free, you can't take my bad-music-and-equally-bad-i-mean-shamefully-radically-bad-i-mean-like-makes-you-ashamed-by-association-bad-dancing-from-me . . ."

yeah, i just went there.

 

in confidence, 

claire

internet,

i'm feeling bellicose. i'm feeling confrontational, frustrated, and right. and belligerent. both bellicose, and belligerent. not antebellum, or at least not yet.

the opportunities for alliteration and cleverness abound, right now, but i'm way not interested enough to pounce on it.

the possible sets:
--- bellicose / belligerent / believe / rebel / belle :  the words for hostile derive from the latin bellum, making them redundant, but most people wouldn't know it, but i would. belle is always how the root sounds to me, but is of course french (and english via loan) for beautiful, which is ironic. and something about "belligerent" makes me think of "believe". again, the irony.
--- frustrated / feisty / fight / fright
--- aggressive / assertive / argumentative / accusatative // aggress / assert / arguementate / accusatate : it sounds so serious. and then, "accusatative" and even worse, "accusatate". it resists being taken seriously, and as we know, if i have any morals at all, that's one of them.
--- pell-mell / what the hell / a smattering of other "-ell" words.

strangely, having indulged myself in my favorite pedantic practice like the pontificative pilkunnussija i have so pretentiously proven myself to be, i no longer want to argue at things.

many thanks, english, old sport.
claire.

today,

somebody who sucks at written language said "riotous indignation". i suspect he meant "righteous indignation", which is a thing. but the more i think about it, the more i like "riotous", instead. everybody will think "righteous" anyway, but they'll also think about riots. it's like a two for one bonus deal.

sincerely,
claire.

i went on a fishing trip.

there are two types of people, when it comes to The Old Man and the Sea: those who don't like it, and those who have been on a fishing trip. i have gone from the former to the latter.

Dear Internet,

tonight i wrote a story, and it's screwed up.

this is why it happened: i was talking with a friend over skype. i said i'd be back in about ten minutes. when i got back in ten minutes, the friend did not respond, and so i indulged myself in the mildest form of skype-trolling: leaving a long string of dense, obscure messages. i decided to write a story.

it took longer than i expected, but i'll be honest with you: i love it. it's not good, really-- it's not well written, or well thought-out, but i like it.

full disclosure? it makes me feel like gaiman, in the same way finding a big stick in the woods, thumping it on the ground, and informing to the squirrel in front of you that it "SHAALLLLL NOT PAAAAAAAASSSSSSS!!!" makes you feel like gandalf. you don't have magic powers of a mouse-nest of a beard or an elven ring or hobbits, for that matter, but that doesn't matter at all. i don't know what super-power gaiman has, but i like feeling like i have it too. even though i don't. clearly.

this, then is the story-- enjoy:

(a few notes:
- i kept the IM formatting by making indents because it was written over IM, and that makes a difference in how you pace your words and stuff. also, it would have been work to make it make sense without it.
- sinister means, literally, left-handed. from latin. the latin for right-handed is dexter. the friend i was writing to is left-handed.
- i made this story up as i went. i started with nothing but two randomly chosen nouns.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     there once was a penguin who lived in a watermelon.

     it was not a very big watermelon, and it was not a very cold watermelon, and it was not a very antarctic watermelon, and as watermelons went, it was not even particularly pretty.

     and the penguin said to himself, "i do not want to live in a watermelon. i want to live in the sea."

     and so he climbed out of his watermelon and flew the few inches to the great table on which the watermelon houses of his penguin community all sat,

     and he went to the watermelon of his neighbor-penguin, and he said to him, "Sinister, i don't like my watermelon anymore."

     Sinister was not a very bright penguin. he was the kind of penguin who believed all of and only what he was told. his understanding of the world was as black and white as he was.

     Sinister was only black and white.

     this, anyway, was what the penguins would tell you about him.

     but what they didn't know is that Sinister had a secret-- Sinister was an evil genius.

     "what do you mean you don't like your watermelon, Dixie?" said Sinister.

     "it's large and green and it keeps you cold at night. what more could you ask for?"

     and Dixie said to Sinister, "i don't rightly know. but i just have this feeling . . .  i don't know. i keep thinking about the sea. dreaming about it, really. salivating over it, and fantasizing about it, and doing whatever the verb form of nostalgia is when you do it to the future, and--" and Sinister cut him off, and said, "shut the fuck up, dixie, and go home. you're drunk."

     this had not been the truth until Sinister proclaimed it so.

     but drunk or otherwise, dixie suspected he was onto something-- he really did want to live in the sea, and furthermore, he figured to himself, all penguins were supposed to live in the sea. they must all want it too, but they just didn't know it.

     dixie went home and read 1984 by george orwell, which was published in england by penguin books in 1950.

     he promptly forgot every word of it, for he was a penguin, and furthermore an idiot.

     but among sinister's secrets were that he, too, wanted to live in the sea. he always had.

     the difference between sinister and dixie was this: sinister was crazy enough and smart enough and evil enough and genius enough to pull the whole thing off.

     i'll skip to the end: sinister cut his foot off, and then made himself a new one.

     he mixed the blood with the red fruit of the inside of his watermelon, and he chanted away four penguin days.

     much like the days of the christian creation myth, nobody has any idea how long a penguin day is, and it doesn't matter in the slightest.

     i, personally, believe they are 4.23689 billion years E-4 a piece.

     but that's just my opinion, and anyway, i digress.

     the blood ritual was not to a penguin god.

     or it was, in a sense, though sinister did not quite know it.

     the ceremony was to creat within himself a sense of utter solidarity, or insanity, and devil-may-care, or rather god-may-care--- diety-may-care--- what have you--- the point is that it worked.

     sinister, as you might expect, had spent his life in doubt and mild insecurty and careful, witty, aloof observation. now, his focus was fully on himself, and his idea, and on nothing more.

     what sinister did not know was that the ritual was, in fact, a ritual to the penguin god, and a ritual to himself, for sinister was the penguin god.

     he was their jesus, if you will, though he himself did not know it.

     sinister, freshly emerged from his fourty days in the watermelon-blood cocktail that made a fruity pool at the bottom of his watermelon, took his rotten fleshy foot and shot it with a freeze ray.

     this had the convieniant effect of making it not unlike a saw.

     he climbed out of his watermelon, armed with his frozen fruity bloody foot-saw, and looked at his watermelon.

     it was all he had known.

     it was his home.

     it was his life.

     and then, he took his foot to it, and he used it as a lever, and because he had a place to stand, he moved his world.

     he rolled it off the table.

     he rolled it down the hallway of the universe,

     and to the great black door, finally free of the contstraints of time and penguin-space, and there on the threshhold, he used his foot to cut the top of his watermelon off.

     then, he flew into it, cut his other foot off, told it to quit its whining and shut the bloody fuck up if it knew what was good for it, shot it with a freeze ray, sprayed it with that chemical that makes hiking boots waterproof, attached a new foot where the old one was supposed to be, and connected his organic, disembodied feet with a long pole.

     and he kyaked away into the expanse of the blackness until, after many long penguin-eternities in the nothingness, he washed up on a beach.

     he surveyed the beach, and the ice, and the penguins there, and while he knew they were penguins, he knew they were not like him.

     they were nothing like his penguins.

     they did not look the same, or talk the same, and they did not live in watermelon.

     and he looked at the sea, and he remembered his dreams, and he thought to himself, "this is everything you ever wanted."

     and he told himself, "you like the sea."

     but he did not like the sea.

     he told himself, "you want to stay here in the sea."

     but he did not want to stay here in the sea.

     he told himself, "man up, you goddamn coward, and live your sorry remainder of your pathetic useless life here in this icy hell you've made your way to."

     but he did not man up, nor was he a goddamn coward, for he was not god-damned, because he was, in fact, something like god, and he did not damn, and he certainly did not damn himself, and he was not sorry, and there was no remainder to his life, and he infinitely more eth-etic and log-etic than path-etic, and he was far from useless, and the thing he had was not quite a life, really, when you thought about it, though it was when you didn't, which was all a part of the problem, really,

     and while his mind was thinking and churning over the truths and the falsehoods and all of the things in between, his hands had been moving of their own accord, as though possessed by an evil spirit (who was highly intelligent and inventive), and they picked up the pole that connected the two feet, and they tossed the feet into the ocean, and they held the pole, and, in doing so, made it into a shotgun, and they aimed, and they fired, and sinister's heart stopped.

     sinister had not been alive, though he'd been something like it.

     he hadn't been god, though he'd been a god, or anyway, he'd been more than a prophet, for certain, and he hadn't been possessed, quite-- all this to say, he could no more fully, absolutely, unabashedly die than he could fully be any of the other things he'd never fully been.

     siniter did what sinister always did-- he played silly, lefthanded tricks, and he was a little bit everything, and never fully anything, and always indefinable.

     he vanished, in a sense, though became ubiquitous and evident in others.

     he expired, in one sense, and inspired, in another.

     his life fully ended at one point in time, in one sense, but in the same stroke he bacame immortal.

     sinister became the spirit of the left-handed.

     this is why all left handed people are known to have feet like penguins, and to be black, white, or something in between.

     this is also why they tend to like watermelon.

THE END!

     (but this is the story of sinister, isn't it? and so it does not end.)

     ((and yet there is nothing more.))

for emily, wherever i may find her.

you might not want to read this. it's not thoughtful or intentional or any of that jazz.

actually, you want to read the poem. skip down to the poem. the poem is great. hell, the poem is fucking excellent.

(that's fucking as an adjective, not a verb, you dirty-minded bastards.)

((god damn. i swear a lot.))


i feel like talking at you tonight, internet.

there are only two places blog-writers end up; they either acquire readers and then write good shit or else they get tired of trying and then they talk to the internet with no intention of anybody ever reading it, just for the hell of it.

i have arrived.

today, i spent a couple of hours with emily. emily is my forever-friend, you know? that one you've known for so long that after a few months of only rarely talking in that efficient, tasky kind of a way, it's as easy as eating pie to remember how to be friends.

i suspect that modern civilization has the nasty habit of overlooking important details, and i think this is one of them: your brain forms in your adolescence to customize itself to your long-lasting survival. that wasn't it. this is it: you become a person suited to the people you grew up with, and the people you grew up with become the people you expect always to interact with.

and what the hell, i'm seventeen and clueless and probably wrong and definitely more idealistic than any rational adult can stand to maintain, but i'm seventeen, and that's what seventeen is for.

poetry break!

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,

casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.

So I made him look at the poem.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,

and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed
amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children. Of course later

that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.

“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
he explained, and the band played on.

also, while we're acknowledging our personal inanity by comparing ourselves to our personal favorite geniuses, mark twain once said, "the man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little." and while we're at it, winston churchill was all like, "any man who is under thirty, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over thirty, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

also, my sorry underqualified ass had to go mess with the HTML to bring you that poem. forgive the formatting-- it's better than before (i promise).

now. having established the scale of my relative perfect and utter insignificance, we resume.

emily and my family are the people i built myself around when my brain was made of plastic.

today we got coffee and went on a bike ride and played cards and i was surprised by the degree to which nothing had changed, and then i got to thinking about friendships and the weight of them and how if they were actual literal ships that represented friendships in a real, actual metaphorical ocean, they would float, and then the wreckage would float, and the ocean would be absolutely chock-full or ships and floating ships and half floating ships and floating half ships and abandoned floating ships and big ships and little ships and literal ships that were actually literally metaphorical (i'm just playing with you now) and i was thinking about the purpose of ships and how bad my metaphor really was and how that metaphorical ocean would have to be made of metaphorical honey to convey how much the brain or society or whatever it is friendships float in wants them to float only honey isn't pretty colored, or anyway, it isn't the color of the ocean.

i don't think that at all, by the way.

that metaphor.

i don't think it's good. it's there to amuse you, and for some of you, confuse you. you know who you are.



with questionable insincerity,
claire.

i wrote a paper tonight.

it was hard. i haven't written a word. but i solved the puzzle.

i found this quote, meanwhile: "Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them: the finding is called science, the importing--art, religion, love, pride."

BREAKING NEWS!

water lilies don't have feet.

that is all.



edit: you should probably read this poem to understand that.
it's by dickinson, and it's gorgeous.
also, it's part joke and part sarcasm and stuff. not full-serious-like, that makes it no fun.

-101-
Will there really be a "Morning"?
Is there such a thing as "Day"?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Men from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called "Morning" lies!

hey internet.

it's been a while. sorry about that.

i've been thinking about stuff, i promise. i just haven't had time to tell you about it.

i will, though.

later.

maybe.

today i discovered that i am a moral and existential nihilist. what did you do this morning?

yeah. as it turns out, i don't believe in a soul. and i don't believe in there being an objective, inherent value to life. and i don't believe in morality, because i believe it's derived from the drive for survival, which as afore mentioned i believe is a quest for an arbitrary reward.

the way i see it is this: nobody ever does anything they don't want to. nobody ever wants anything that isn't good for them. so every action is inherently self serving. and if you think about it, all the things we want are just ways to survive or to survive better. some of them we know, and some are built with like, neuro-chemical rewards. basically, pleasure and pain are ways your brain's discovered to reward and punish you for surviving better or worse than expected, respectively.

so your brain's evolved to survive.

i've probably told you this a hundred times, haven't i? sorry.

here's the thing, though: why did your brain start wanting to survive?

this is where it gets trippy and nihilistic. maybe some things wanted to survive, and others didn't, and the ones that didn't want to survive didn't survive, and that was the end, and the ones that did want to, did. and over time, as the process continued, you had to want it badder and badder to keep living, and somehow life ended up being this really coveted possession.

my choir's like that. for some reason, being good at it is worth something. all the people who want to be, want to be, and all the people that don't, aren't.

this is actually exactly why money works. the dollar isn't on the gold standard anymore, which means the only thing that keeps it worth a dollar is the belief that it is. but even when it was on the gold standard, gold still wasn't objectively worth anything-- everybody just decided to want it.

i think survival is the gold standard of value. all value. including the actual gold standard, and the dollar, and the accolades that a ridiculous amount of practice, work, luck, egotism and ass-kissing can earn you in that strange department.

oh my god, internet. i'm a fucking nihilist.

i knew what i believed, but i didn't realize it meant not believing in a soul, or morality, or a purpose to life. i'm having a goddamn existential crisis.

i'm not, actually. i'm fine with it. because i want to survive-- bad. today, i had breakfast, lunch, and then skipped my daily snack, and i was hungry, and i got really, really grouchy because i hadn't had my daily granola bar and i was a little bit hungry. i stubbed my toe the other day, and then i swore. loudly. to help prove this point, i held my breath as long as i could. i did a minute fourty one seconds, which according to TIME magazine is about ninteen seconds below average. at about 1.21, i started really feeling it.

unlike choir, i can't quit life. i can't opt out of wanting it. my life is not worthless, and the world is not going to hell, because there is more than enough value to go around, to justify morality, and to keep everybody compliant and willing to listen.

thanks for reading.
claire

this will not be here for long. i will delete it, or this sentence.

what is said here is impermenant, and i will not claim it in conversation ever again. probably.

my aunt and uncle and three little cousins came for good friday supper tonight. and i don't know. oh, also my grandma and sister and brother in law. i don't mind my siblings; i like them quite a lot, actually. but my extended family-- they take more doing, you know?

almost without exception, the relationships i hold day to day are governed by a creed of efficiency; we are friends if and only if it is efficient. we are enemies only as long as it's affordable or preferably cheap to do so. mostly, we just make one another laugh. they are built on thinking and witticism and cleverness and laughing and efficiency and getting things done, and not much more, and not much less. somehow, my extended family is not like this.

they showed up as i was leaving to make a run to the store-- i had stuff to do, you understand. and then i came home, and i had to get oriented, drop off the groceries, make managements. they were not conducive to this. to be fair, that's not what they expected of me, of course. they traveled two hours to get here, and they damn well expected me to have set time aside to talk to them.

but i came up to my room to take care of what i needed to do feeling oppressed and unprepared and impatient. i felt like you do when you're having a waterfight and somebody fixes the hose on your face, and you can't see or breathe or anything, and you just want them to quit it. like that, only not.

i recognize that my position on this is perfectly unfair. but i also recognize that the things we think don't always follow the rules we make for our thoughts, and it's a personal rule of mine not to ignore those things-- often, you know things you don't know yet. you know? i do.

thanks for listening,
Claire

dear grammar nazis,

having until recently been an esteemed member of your respectable and overswollen ranks, i understand the code of honor and dignity that comes with a masterful grasp of the traditional use of this beautiful language we all speak in. at the same time, though, i understand that to purposelessly hold onto arbitrary conventions that would do everyone more good dead is not really a service to anyone. a speaker should be able to use their creativity and god given talent for language to use words in whatever way they find most effective.

ah, to hell with it. every sentence above subtly breaks one prescriptive rule, which was actually pretty hard to do.

so here's the long and short of it: language changes. but who gets to change it? who gets to say what's right and what's wrong? there are basically two camps on this: prescriptive and descriptive. prescriptivists give this authority to people who write manuals, basically. they claim the most educated are the most qualified to make the rules. these are the people who told us to never split infinitives (did you catch that? it was ironic. did you see? right?) or end a sentence in a preposition. then there are descriptivists who say the only measure of what's correct is what's effective. if a native speaker doesn't bat an eye at it, it's correct. so how does language change? individuals mess with it however they see fit. it's not so different from democracy, as opposed to a prescriptive oligarchy.

you can read about this on the internet, if you want to know more.

here's why we're getting into this now: capitalization. you'll notice i'm not using it.

i've thought about it, and there is simply no upside to capitalization except to distinguish proper nouns. when taking notes by hand, i also use all-caps headings because they're easier to pick out when looking back through. and it's a convention. it's like wearing black socks with black shoes, although i do recommend doing that, so i guess it's not like that at all. anyway, if you want to sound formal and respected, you should use capitals, just like you should dress up to get people to respect you. it's a convention. it's symbolic communication.

this blog, though. this is personal, not formal, and personally, i don't like capitals very much. i've decided to stop using them. except maybe i still will-- i don't know. this, though, is my explanation for foregoing capital letters.

enjoy!
claire


(i know, i said proper nouns. but you knew that was proper. and i didn't want to capitalize it, and that's my executive choice as a writer.)

dear [the Name of this letter's sole adressee],

just so you know? i am about a million pounds grateful for you. i've been meaning to mention it to you for a few days, and i have, a few times, but in specific senses. i'm serious, though: thanks for being friends.

thanks for the stuff i learn from you, like how to solve a rubik's cube, and how to use leverage to not get attacked, and how the way a person sets their hands or angles their body tells you about how they're reacting to the situation; thanks for the stuff you've been willing to learn from me, like why poetry isn't dusty and musty but lively and vivid, and bloody prescriptivists are bloody and prescriptivistic.

thanks for doing stupid stuff with me, from getting frighteningly lost to writing a bloody novel in a single month to trying to figure out what in hell kindness and honesty are, to hiding paper cranes in nooks and crannies to remind people not to forget to be awesome. that kind of stuff isn't hardly worth doing alone-- it's exponentially more fun and more interesting to do with someone else. 

thanks for listening to every single new development in my constantly upheavaled relationship with christianity and the nature of human thought and action, but much more than that, thanks for helping me figure it out. for questions. for additions. it occurs to me that outside of books and my family, you are probably the greatest influence on what and how i think and what i will believe in the present and future. 

i enjoy you and the things we do and the jokes we tell and the books we read and the ways we think, and i'm grateful for you.

and of course, i'm afraid of you, too, in that little way that we're all afraid of one another.

but that's fine. 

thanks for yourself and the bits you've lent to me and the bits of me you've rearranged. (is that a good model for interactions? i still don't know.)

sincerely, 

claire 

Dear e. e. cummings,

There's this poem you wrote:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                    i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant 
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

I think if somebody told me I could save one poem out of all the poetry I've ever read, and the rest would be vaporized, this is the poem I would save. "This is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart." That line just catches me. Have you seen the stars?

But the other thing that catches me is the question of where people begin and end. After someone dies, it's common to hear that they live on in the lives they've touched and the hearts of their loved ones. But why does that only begin to happen when they die? And why do we assume that the venn diagram of two people looks like two untouching circles? And if I read something you wrote, and your thoughts are running through my head, and then they stay there, do they keep being your thoughts? And what if I start to really believe in them? Do they start to become mine?

And what about our experiences? Does the memory of a shared experience belong equally to all involved? Even if it was a trivial encounter to one person but was lifechanging to the other? What if one person forgets? Does it belong only to the one who remembers? Or does the experience belong wholly and completely to each person, regardless of others involved?

And what about the experiences we forget? Do our pasts really belong to us? Does mine belong to me? Can I only claim the bits I remember? What kind of ownership is it if I have no clue what it is I'm owning? Do I even want to own my entire past? And if I don't, how in hell do I get rid of part of it? Up and disown it? Do I have a right to my past, or a responsibility to it, or both, or neither, and can you have one without the other? And how does ownership of something like a memory or a past or a thought or an experience manifest itself? Does it have any practical manifestation? Is the idea of possession even a good model to begin with?

And what are people made of? And can you give yourself away? And if you do, do you stop having yourself? And can you give part of yourself away? Invest it? How do you cash in that investment? If you give part of yourself away, are you less yourself? Is there, then, less of yourself?

I don't know. But the all of the questions lead me to suspect that the model of one person owning all of themselves and nothing more is wrong.

Sincerely,
Claire

Dear the Members of the Church I Loyally Attend,

There is a poem, and I think you ought to read it. It's called Possible Answers to Prayer, and it's by Scott Cairns.

Your petitions—though they continue to bear   

just the one signature—have been duly recorded.   

Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent   

entertainment value—nonetheless serve   

to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath   

a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more   

conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,   

the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes   

recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly   

righteous indignation toward the many   

whose habits and sympathies offend you—         

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend   

how near I am, with what fervor I adore

precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

I go to your church every Sunday, and I have to tell you: the culture there sucks. Where is your boldness? Where is your respect for those not like you? Where is your art?

But anyway. One of you said to me, the other day, "It's only fair that we get a chance to share the word in the schools, what with what the GSA is doing." And it caught me off guard. What the GSA did was hand out shirts that said, "gay? fine by me." No capitalization, no graphics, pretty simple and understated. And it's true, they do read a little bit like, "By the power invested in me as the judge of such matters, I hereby grant thee permission to by gay," but they also read like, "Hey-- your sexuality doesn't change my opinion of you, and I will still respect you." Quite frankly, church-goers, that's a message you'd do well to endorse.

My grudge against the church comes out the church culture, and the way they see an "us", perfect, saved people, and a "them", sinners, all those who disagree with us. And that's almost fine-- the Bible does describe an us of saved people and a them of those the us should try to show God to, but you're missing something. You're missing that you don't get to up and be condescending and feel awesome once you're a Christian. The gospel is built on love, and on valuing people simply because they're human, and imagining them the way you imagine yourself, and being kind, and caring for others, and I don't see it. That project where you're going to preach Christianity in the schools is called the Ethos project. I looked up the word Ethos. It means, basically, a culture's mindset, values, and assumptions. Your assumptions as they reveal themselves in your implications and actions suck.

Blogreaders, I'm sorry to whine so much about Christianity. I promise to whine about some other stuff soon.

Sincerely if the slightest bit regretfully,
Claire

Dear [Those Who Wage War on Dinosaurs, the Big Bang, and Evolution],

Mostly, science is science. We keep evolution around not because it's pretty but because it's useful, and it's useful because it allows us to understand and interact with the world effectively. 

But sometimes, science is a mythology, too. 

And that's okay. 

Sincerely, 

Claire 

Dear [The Name of the Kid Once Got Pulled Over By A Cop For Speeding By A Lot And Also Not Paying Attention With My Lifelong Best Friend In The Car And Then Swore Her To Secrecy With The Result That I Didn't Find Out About This Incident Until Several Weeks After the Fact],

The other day, we were talking over lunch. Everyone else had already left, and we didn't have much to say to one another, so as I always do, I mentioned the most interesting thing I've been thinking about recently. It was the version of the bible story that my mom had told me the night before. I wasn't entirely clear on what hat story was, and I'd like to let the world know, but it's a long story, so it'll have to wait.

What you said was this; "That's interesting, but I don't see what difference it makes, really."

It matters because metaphors do have power.

The reason the story catches my interest is that it's a better story. It shows a less arbitrary God, and a real enemy, and a God who isn't totally in love with making rules. Past all of that, though, it's a story. I mean a real, honest to god story, the kind worth telling generation to generation. My mom's story upgrades the thing from the kind of story that makes you feel like somebody, somewhere, is lying to you to the kind of story that you want to hear again. In the same way that rhythm is at the very core of music and line is at the very core of art, story is at the very core of literature.

I don't like a chaotic, arbitrary God, because I think in patterns, and that which you can't understand is scary. I don't like a God who pointlessly made a very nice garden that was also a death trap and was surprised when shit went wrong, but yet is all knowing and has preordained my future. I prefer a God who wrote all of the languages and speaks them all perfectly, and who wrote the strongest metaphors, the ones every culture clings to, and who made our minds to thrive on patterns and then made a patterned universe so we could understand it, but still made it complex enough that we could spend our entire collective existence figuring out. I like the God who invented calculus and quantum mechanics and is totally fluent in all of it. And also? I would really prefer a God who wrote a really, really beautiful book to help us understand him, and I'd love it if he were capable of writing a worthwhile story in the process. That is why it matters.

Sincerely,
Claire

Dear Groucho Marx,

You may remember that you once remarked, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." Well, Mr. Marx, I don't care to go to any college that will admit me as a student.

Colleges seem to sort themselves neatly in my mind into colleges that are boring (Morningside, I'm looking at you) and colleges I have no prayer of getting into (like for instance, University of Rochester). I'm sure there are colleges in between. I'm sure some boring colleges are more interesting than they would seem and some impossible colleges will, in fact, take me. But I'm gonna be honest, I hope it's the latter option that comes true.

Yeah, while we're here on the topic, I'm gonna take myself a minute to complain. Skip ahead if you like. The idea of college is like an anxiety attack in a bottle. I shouldn't have gotten that B in math class-- I should have studied those few hours more. I should have taken 4 years of German instead of that stupid journalism class. Better yet, I shouldn't have screwed around with choir, I should have taken Spanish, too. I should have left room for AP Chemistry, even though I don't expect to like regular chemistry. I should have joined more clubs as a freshman. I should join more clubs now. I shouldn't bother with art next year. I can't major in linguistics, I have to get a job. I probably won't have time to take all the classes I want to take, like music theory, and history, and linguistics, and psychology. I should read more books!

That last sentence was "I should read more books!" I'm down with reading more books.

The thing is, those petty awards like grades and major letters will eventually be meaningless. (I mean, the pins will hang out on some forgotten piece of felt in my mom's attic for years and she might pull it out someday to when my kids are over at Grandma's house, and we can all take about one minute to feel nostalgic, and that will be worth something. Maybe I better hold out for that one minute of supremely limited fame.) Even now, those letters and grades are pretty meaningless. Learning things is great, because it allows you to learn to think. Being able to think well is very useful for things like developing coherent ideas, and solving complex problems, and being fascinated with this complex and interesting world we live in. Getting golden starts does not promote fascination and curiosity.

Ideally, everything we learn in school would promote fascination and curiosity and develop the ability to think critically and elegantly, and ideally, grades would perfectly reflect what we had learned and therefore the results of that learning, and then they would be useful. As it is, they do a barely adequate job of it. Colleges must assume they have most of the value they ought to have, and for that reason, we must continue the menial quest for meaningless rewards.

Ho-hum.
Claire

P.S.  I got college propaganda from Beloit with the word ho-hum in it, and well used, too.

Dear [Your Name],

Kindness week.

Kindness week wasn't nearly the ordeal I was afraid of because, as a challenge, it's not a very good one. It takes more than a week to figure out kindness, and much more than a week to make it a habit. It was effective, though, in making me think about kindness. These are thoughts;

Kindness is rooted in the assumption that whoever you're being kind to has value on account of being human.  That's what I think. In that light, it's a logical extension of imagining others complexly.

Kindness is more potent when applied to our closer relationships.

"Kind" tends to describe something that happened in a specific situation, rather than a person who ongoingly is kind.

Kindness is not so different from serving others. Having an attitude of kindness is not so different from having a "servant's heart", either.

Kind is different from Nice. Nice has largely to do with avoiding conflict, and has the connotation of being shallower. Kindness has more to do with doing something to the eventual benefit of the person you're being kind to.

I didn't know what to change in order to be kind, during kindness week. Where is kindness needed? How do you be kind without seeming self-important? What should I do in order to be kind? I don't know. This is the kind of thing people spend their lives doing, being kind.

I don't mean to overstate myself, so let's be clear: a week isn't enough time to fully realize what kindness is, so something in the above is probably a little bit not right, and certainly the definition isn't complete. A week also isn't enough time to adopt kindness as a habit. It hasn't drastically altered my behavior very much. I did not walk out of Kindness Week a fully different, better person.

Sincerely,
Claire

Dear [The Name of the Kid Whom I Didn't Expect to Find Poetry So Interesting],

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that imagining others complexly is a really good idea. By the way, for those uninitiated, imagining others complexly is an idea I learned largely from John Green of vlogbrothers and authorship fame. (Click on any word in this sentence to find out why vlogbrothers is awesome.) Basically, it means remembering that other people are people too, and nothing more, and nothing less. It means not making them into single-dimensional ideas, and it means using creativity to get to empathy (more on that concept here).

The thing is, I'm not sure it's possible to imagine people really, really complexly. It's hard enough imagining ourselves complexly, and we all have constant access to what it's like to be us. Not only that, there are too many people and too many patterns to imagine everyone as complexly as we imagine ourselves. The trick to it, then, is is choosing good patterns. The failsafe patterns John suggests are that all people are valuable, that all people are like you, and that it's important to remember that you're probably always at least a little bit wrong about a person.

It occurs to me that so far, this post has been a bit dry and technical. Try it out-- it makes the ideas way more interesting.

Anyway, what came along with trying to imagine others complexly was realizing that kindness is essential. I am not usually mean, and I am usually loyal, but these things don't make kindness. I told you about most of these things as they occurred to me. We came up with the idea of kindness week. We're starting tomorrow.

I've done honesty week a few times-- it's refreshing, and it's pretty easy. But kindness week? I'm scared. I'm not good at being kind, not really. I'm not good at it because it takes effort, and it's not always fun, and I'm not even convinced that I like it. But the idea of kindness seems like a good one, so I guess I'll have a go. On the other hand, even in the last few days, I have been impressed by the kindness I've seen in you, and if you can do it, anyone can. (That was a joke; I have every respect for you.)

Chances are high I'm over-idealizing the situation, but when it's a new situation, that's easy to do. Next week, blogreaders, I'll have an update for you.

Sincerely,
Clarie

Dear e. e. cummings,

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

That was a poem you wrote one time, about the giddiness that the very beginning of spring induces, but also about the way children lose their innocence and the way that childlike glee reminds us of the distance between those feelings and the feelings of being grown up.

It has recently turned from winter to Just-spring, here in Iowa. The sun seems to have remembered that sometimes, Iowa is worth shining on full blast. Much of the snow has melted, and the grass has started to look green again. It's been warm enough to leave your coat at home, and the frost has come up out of the ground. (By the way, frost coming up out of the ground is a great metaphor waiting to happen.) The world here has become mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.


I've been thinking about your poem all week, ever since the sun came out. Part of the magic is in taking the defining physical features of Just-spring (mud and puddles) and attaching them to subjective words that elicit the perfect connotation. Part of it is in attaching Just-spring to the excitement of children playing. That's effective not because children play the games you described in Just-spring more than in any other time, but because it connects the feelings the reader remembers from those games with the feelings the reader associates with Just-spring. Part of it is in calling Just-spring its own distinct phenomenon, different from regular spring as it is from regular winter.


But what gives this poem dimension is placing Just-spring up against Pan, the balloonman. The motion you've given the children is held in contrast by the static action of the balloonman. All he does is whistle far and wee. Nothing has really changed in the coming of Just-spring.


The thing about Just-spring is that it's temporary. Already, the temperature has begun to drop, and it's supposed to snow on Monday. There are several weeks that will look as much like winter as spring between here and the straightaway to summer. I know when you wrote "in Just-" in the first line, you meant it like one word, "injust", and that you meant it to reflect that it's unfair that children have to grow up; but your poem belongs to its readers now, and I think it's injust that just-spring doesn't last.


Thanks for your beautiful contribution to literature; the western world and I are in your debt. If there's anything we can do for you in return (outside of reading, teaching, and loving your poetry) don't hesitate to let us know.


Sincerely,
Claire

Dear [The Name of the Kid Who Sits One Desk Up and One Desk Over From Me in AP Physics Class],

I think people are smart.

I mean, communicating is complicated-- take speaking, for example. Every word is a symbol with no inherent meaning. Then, those words are organized into grammar, which is complex and full of patterns that sometimes undercut one another in weird ways. Then, you factor in context, and facial expressions, and body language, and inflection, and you attach that meaning to what you already know. You take into account the listener's bias. That's a lot of stuff to do, a lot of patterns to attend to.

I find it difficult to accept that people are capable of all that without trying, but aren't highly intelligent.

And I don't really know who would argue against that.

Today, you told me the way society represses creativity separates those who can hold onto it from those who can't. The result is "Smart" people and "Stupid" people. You also challenged me with this hypothetical: What if you had a government that didn't allow freedom of thought, but all of the citizens were always happy, and didn't know any different? That's a good hypothetical because of the questions it raises. Do people have a right to think for themselves? Is independent thought inherently valuable? Is it possible to really control thought? If you were able to fully control thought, would that, in fact, be self-serving in the long run? Orwell asked a lot of the same questions in 1984, and I didn't know the answers when I read it either. So I'm still mulling over that one, but here are thoughts in the meantime.

This country is a democracy. In fact, most countries are, now. Democracies assume that the masses are, in fact, capable of making the best choice, that people are intelligent, and do have good judgement. Why would you want to educate people out of the ability to think critically? Isn't that essential for making good decisions? If you, as a citizen of a democracy, are personally invested the actions of the country, which are determined by the people, wouldn't you want to educate the crap out of them so they can think intelligently and make intelligent decisions? I would.

I'm pretty sure thought exists only in patterns, that intelligence is the ability to notice, describe and manipulate those patterns, and that creativity is like intelligence but with a stronger emphasis on manipulating patterns. I'm pretty sure intelligence is the most the most prominent evolutionary adaptation this species has, that it's a large part of the reason we're still living, and that it's most of the reason we're living this way. (The gigantic pull toward entertainment? In incredible comfort? With the ability to postpone death lots and lots of times per capita? Have you seen the first world?) And I know I'm biased, but I think the way I get to live is awesome. Why thwart the ability that's kept humans alive and improving their surroundings since forever ago until now? But I recognize that I started with assumptions, and that they may be incorrect.

These are just thoughts. They might be wrong. They might be only partly wrong. They may rely on assumptions that are flawed. I reserve the licence to change my mind whenever I so choose, and I give you, whoever you are, every licence to call me out on bad thinking.

Sincerely,
Claire





Post Script: Dear [The Name of the Kid Who Sits One Desk Up From Me],
I find it difficult to reconcile your statement "I don't understand why school needs to be reformed" with your statement "I will not let you turn me into a sheep. Even if free thought brings my destruction, it is worth fighting for."

Dear the Internet,

This is the gameplan. This blog will have on it (ideally) developed and developing thoughts. Probably the won't be as letters-ey as the other open letters blog I have. The reason I have two is that this one is harder to find, and therefore provides greater anonymity. The other shows up on the first page of google if you search my name (so that's pretty cool). The plan is that it'll be updated at least every week. But that's just the plan. The plan may have to change.

Oh yeah. The other blog. It lives Here, but it's pretty whiney. I wouldn't recommend going over there unless you want to read me whining like no one but Victor Frankenstein and Arthur Dimmesdale have ever whined before.

Sincerely,
Claire