today's title comes from all along the watchtower, originally by bob dylan and covered by every decent musician of the last 20 years. if you don't have it already, download it.
i've been a bad, bad blogger. let's just call april the month of bad blogging and leave it at that. and i'd like to think that i'll make it up to you next month but...prom. and AP exams. so my blogging will probably remain sporadic until at least early june.
so, before i talk about anything else, i think i'll update you on my life. yes, i know - you've all been waiting on the edge of your seats for this.
the highs? b day early release turning into the Hijack Empty Classrooms to Watch The Amazing Race on a Promethean Board Club. getting fours and fives on my econ and gov practice exams. new books. new makeup. forgetting lunch at home and having the momster's assistant drop off robeks and chocolate covered strawberries. glee. bones. kings of leon tour dates being announced. having audrey hepburn on a shirt.
the lows: calc. physics. homework. ap exams. realtors and buyers and sellers being in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night shrieking things like "the contract hasn't been ratified yet!" and "what's it's mris number?" and "oh my god will you all shut up?"
...okay, maybe that last one was me. but in all fairness it was extremely annoying having to listen to real estate talk the one time i actually finished my homework and went to bed early.
minor complaints aside, i've been feeling pretty lucky lately. maybe it was the unexpected smoothie windfall today, or the even more unexpected side-trip to tyson's to get
this:
and
this (in air guitar):
or maybe it's just that i'm glad not to be a rape victim with multiple personalities (see my last post). lately i've been thinking that life? it's been pretty good to most of us so far.
i've kept a list of quotes as long as i can remember. some of the notebooks are so old the pages are actually starting to yellow (don't worry - the glitter gel pen remains as bright as ever) and i actually have to squint to render my oh-so-lovely-hearts-and-stars-over-the-letter-i middle school handwriting legible. i looked through a few of them last night and found it ironic that two of the first things i wrote down could be summed up like this: great art comes from great suffering.
i haven't suffered. not really. if anything, i've been stupidly, ridiculously lucky in life. i might complain about the parents (a lot) or school (even more) but...i got parents who spoiled and loved me. maybe a little too much, actually, since if they'd just had the decency to deprive me a little bit i might be a little more prepared for life in the Real World, but i digress. and school? well, we all complain, but deep down most of us like it. for one thing, none of us would know each other without it. and for another thing, none of us would be reading, writing, or blogging without the wonderful benefits of education - something
millions of children in the world still go without.
so maybe i'm not yet capable of creating great art. well, i already knew that - why do you think i'm going to college? and maybe i'm one of those people who you can look at and say, "well, nothing really bad has ever happened to her." i've got thinky thoughts nonetheless.
banana will be blogging about this pretty soon, so i'm not going to delve into this too much (right now) but -
remember when my lit class was reading the poisonwood bible and i dragged out my poor, defeated little copy from freshman year and went back to being in love with it? i don't think i ever blogged this quote, but it's one of the first that i highlighted:
According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame match to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?
it's a question we all have at one point or another, and i don't think we will ever know answer. god isn't something you can understand; faith isn't a cheat-sheet to all the universe's mysteries, just your place in it. in other words, there are just some things that we aren't supposed to know because we're human (hopefully). we are supposed to question and argue and grow.
oh, growth. it's a complicated word. for most people, it carries pleasant connotations of preteen growth spurts and too-short pajama bottoms and passing average height. the rest of us mostly hear it and feel bitter. sometimes we even use it to talk about moral growth. sometime like today, i mean.
like it or not, the world has changed a bit since the inklings roamed the streets of oxford smoking pipe tobacco and having Serious Theological Debates. we are, in the words of one lovely new york times article, a generation raised on "pulp and not substance" (if anyone else read that article, mind sending me the link? i never emailed it to myself and i want to reread it). there are people whose only goal in life is to be famous or date someone wealthy, and instead of being the exception, one only has to look at mtv, e!, tlc, or any other television channel besides cnn and fox, to see that they're becoming the rule. these are supposed to be our role models and peers.
basically, we're screwed. see will smith for details:
so what do we do? are we supposed to sit around all day and contemplate life? it's doable, i guess, especially if we add cigarettes and fedoras and french garrets in paris into the mix. we can all swan around looking wan and miserable and contemplating important questions about life, god, death, and the universe. (if you get that song reference, you get a cookie). for true authenticity we should try absinthe and practice sighing asthmatically. oh, and bonus points if you die of consumption.
or, we join the mtv-worshipping, twilight-loving, abercrombie- and hollister-wearing, d-list wannabes that seem to make up half our generation. instructions include buying an edward cullen poster, listening to nothing but top 40 music, and having no original thoughts or ideas.
i don't know about you, but i kind of hate both of those options. i'm not a genius, though - i'm not entirely sure what's behind door number three. i guess that this whole post has actually been one long, rambling, grammatically incorrect way of asking - who am i? what am i? and where do i go from here?
because most of us reading this have the same source material, if you will. we're all lucky. we're all pretty smart
or just plain pretty, i love you all for being good-looking, not that i'm shallow or anything. and as soon as we entered this world shrieking with all of our considerable lung power, things started influencing us - family and friends, religion and pop culture. literature. music. the woman you bumped into on the street and the homeless person you pretended not to see. school and work and ideas and plans. that vague picture in the sky that alternately looks like a castle or a prison but is always, always labelled The Future, in capital letters that block out everything else. falling back on someone else's words is easy, so i'll let chuck palahniuk say it better: "nothing of me is original. i am the combined effort of everyone i have ever known."
so i guess that's where i'm going to leave off. mostly because those are the conclusions i managed to reach in my allotted time on the think thought train today. after that i got distracted by the momster's clients offering me cookies and ice cream cake (it was great) and makeup and books and making silly allusions to books everyone has read but which i'll quote anyway. my relationship with life is very, very complicated (take that facebook).
and i can never leave a post without sharing music, so here's lissie's latest:
