Hoping to Set a New Tone for a Busy, Dramatic Week

The beauty of life is that we are ourselves but we can also use imagination to be anything (doesn't it sound like a reading rainbow song?). So, we can imagine to be in the shoes of other people and wonder why they act a certain way. I'll quote Einstein to back this up: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world." So this is my secret weapon and I'm sharing it with everyone out there (guess it's not a secret anymore). Whatever bad and terribly sickening circumstances finds you, remember that you have a mind- so use it.

When I was little, I had a love affair with a book titled The Little Princess by Frances Hodgsen Burnett (check spelling of author?). This very precocious girl is sent to boarding school, while her father goes to war. The stupid headmistress hates the brilliant girl but sucks up to her because she's mad wealthy. But, the girl's father dies and she is supposedly left penniless because rumor says her father lost all his money before his death. Out of anger, the stupid headmistress makes her a scullery maid. Tough times come about but in spite of all that, the girl rises above all the hatred and humiliation using her imagination. For a seven year-old girl, it was a beautiful story. This wasn't a typical children's book about "self-esteem" (i-think-i-can-i-think-i-can) or believing in yourself. It was pure beauty because that girl was so above all that. She didn't have to prove anything.

It was a beautiful story. And it still is. Imagination, sounds pretty vague, but that's what makes it seems like magic. I'm not going to oversoul this term to death. But lately, I've been finding that imagination and inspiration and peace may be all the same thing. That's my sappy, bohemian moral for the week.

The Soulless Ethnographer

That's a picture of my friend, Frantz in Paris. What a model of diligence. Let's call it, "The Opposite." In that, I mean the opposite of what I always do at 11:51pm on a school night. Procrastinating!

I've got an anthropology essay to write. National Geographic type of writing is not easy at all. One has to seamlessly weave together bits of theory, personal experience, splendidly detailed observation, and at the same time, make everything sound original, creative, fresh, and provocative. And keep the inevitable biases on the DL. No problem? Sob.

Essays are my thing. I'd rather have them over anything- exams, problem sets, presentations, orthodontist appointments. PLEASE, let me just write you a five-page, double-spaced, one-inch margin paper.

But in this case, I'm feeling really uninspired. I have this phobia of writing on the laptop. Blank word documents are intimidating! So, I've been handwriting everything first and it hasn't been a problem... yet. (I'm trying to keep my mind off of a senior thesis) It's been a smooth ride till now. Anthropology is owning me. I'm no national geographic reporter or Jon Krakauer. But you know, why can't I scribble something out? Anything... and now, it's 12:02 am. I'm a picture, titled "Soulless Ethnographer."

Too Cha Cha for a Spring Formal?

My collection of dresses has exponentially increased this year. Anyone who needs to borrow one, feel free to help yourself to my useless closet! Paris, mixers, formals, etc... I've never needed so much formal wear in my life. A good secret: Forever 21. Cheap, one time wear dresses.

On the Verge of Sounding Morbid

The other day, my parents and I drove down to Westchester to visit my grandparents. Correction, my grandparents' graves. We've been making this trip for as long as I could remember. I HATED it and being surrounded by tons of (shudder) dead bodies. We would buy flowers from a nearby shop and set them at the bottom of the marble wall of dead bodi- er, crips. Then, we quietly, nostalgically stood in a line for what felt like an eternity.

This time, it was the same ordeal. We drove down; I fell asleep for the entire ride. As we entered the gates of death (literally), I waited for the weird, shuddery, life-after-death thoughts to wash over me. But they didn't come. It was very interesting. The building seemed quiet and cold as usual. I was relaxed, though. The place was thoughtful, peaceful. Instead of feeling horrified at the thought of decomposing bodies within these walls, I felt okay. The place was seeping with MEMORY. Oddly, at the verge of sounding disgustingly psychotic, I took a great interest to construction of a neighboring mausoleum. I mean, you know that dead people are in there, but really! Do you know how that's organized?

There's something so taboo about anything associated with death. But this need to be politically correct has forever drawn people to the subject. And then I got to thinking about it. (Well, you really can't help thinking about death when you're in a cemetery) DEATH. We try to prepare for it by planning out the details of our insurance, funerals, must I say, coffin and crip preparations (God, always the pressure to not offend people slash political correctness). "Well, we can put you on a waiting list of people who want these better crip locations but they'll be more expensive. This place is filling up pretty fast. Or I can sell you one but it'll take two years to complete. God forbid, anything happen in the next two years... But if you need one right away, I can do my best to manage that, too," explained a (god!) crip salesman to my parents. Okay, at this point my calmness vanished. My parents are looking to reserve a place at this mausoleum for themselves. Me, calm?

I am way past the verge of sounding morbid. I am jumping off the cliff of morbidity. But these things bother me. Life insurance bothers me. Young women marrying eighty year-old tycoons bother me. This gamble called LIFE/DEATH is a disturbing, yet terribly interesting idea. It was a good thing that I felt oddly calm that day. The salesman, my parents, and I discussed death as though we were talking weather. Unpredictable but something we're paying good money to take the edge off of our fear for its unpredictability. Should that bother me, too?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION | What am I really talking about here?

Lately, I've been going through one of those nostalgic, "finding my place in the cosmos" phases. It all started a couple of weeks ago when I realized I haven't really read read a book in what felt like years. That, combined with dramatic, yet predictable, mood swings and a pathetic writer's block, prompted me to confront my mind. My mind is a sputtering of blahblah's and accumulated brain trash, a state of being also known as frustration. Frustration: discovering that I actually possess very little originality. And that I have no gift for language after all. My style is... eh, up and down. In addition to all of that, I've become a total wallflower. I've got this slush pile of muddied-up, untranslatable ideas.

So continuing on with this story (see, brain freeze!!!)... A couple weeks ago, I went to the Cornell store and bought a pile of books off the New York Times bestsellers list. I was going to reinvent my inner bookworm. I started reading and have been reading all this Spring break, only to further confirm my fears: Yes. These writers are... incredible... outstanding... The little gold sticker on the cover flap is winking at me with a smug, "Yeah! You're a failure!" glimmer. Yep, I'm a complete failure. I've discovered that this ivy-league education has amounted to NOTHING so far. A couple mis-learned chemical equations and concepts of modern art, sure. But still, I'm trapped in a huge confused haze. I'm bothering myself with a steady stream of annoying, philosophical questions. What am I doing with my life? What have I ever been writing about? Why do I feel as though I'm always making the same points? These annoying little thoughts are like mosquitoes, invisible but so prevalent. They'll bite, pinch, nag someone into a stupor. Am I making any sense?

At this point, I started going through all my old blogs and writings like a damn witch hunter . "God, what was I talking about?" "This is ridic."There goes my autobiography. A mess of unfocused, rambling, run-ons that sometimes will have me questioning my high school English education that maybe never taught me why it is so bad to have run-ons in writing when I could actually have prevented the usage, and thus, should probably relearn my grammar and then, now I can finally prevent run-ons! What am I really talking about here?

I'm nineteen years old and I've been eating, drinking, traveling, learning, laughing, sleeping, crying, writing some good stuff, writing plain crap, questioning, rebelling, dancing, thinking, testing, working, growing, changing, singing badly, fighting, loving, driving, running, yawning, and sneezing for a good while. There are good experiences but worse, regretful experiences to confront. The Poughkeepsie Journal, of which I blog for, says I'm a teenager writing about my adventures at college. But am I really doing that? I must admit, most of my adventures have been away from school. School can become so routine; all the weeks' events melt and flow into one another. And before you know it, you're a graduating senior, waiting in line for that rolled-up piece of paper. What have I been learning? What have I been writing about? What do I want to write about?

Now, I'm reading. Tearing through newspapers, magazines and paperback novels, hardcover bestsellers, nonfiction, fiction, self-help, resource. Envious and disturbed. I've got this living, breathing address on the world wide web. But nothing real. It's UNDER CONSTRUCTION. And I've got to figure out what am I really talking about and what do I do with the next four or five years of - no, not my life - other people's lives, our lives. So, that's my spring break in a nutshell. Am I making sense? Oh gosh, I've written one big fat entry, again.

Do NOT Go See The Other Boleyn Girl

The Other Boleyn Girl was SUCH a terrible movie, lacking any sort of plot development. I felt as if I were watching a film on fast-forward. I understand that the book had a lot of twist and turns and the director couldn't include all of them. However, to then shove as much as possible into two hours? All the while, the film ignores historical fact and creates such monotonous, boring and above all, horribly predictable characters. It was just too much. And such an insult to some great actors. I was hoping to at least see qualities of a modern, but still true to history and literature, production. Maybe, something along the lines of the mini-series The Tudors. Although both are not accurate, at least the latter develops its own style. The Other Boleyn Girl was utterly predictable and looked like it was shot in the '70s. It should have focused on just one motif throughout the play. Even Anne Boleyn, a character who is supposed to be intensely dramatic, really interesting, and witty with tons of complicated schemes and fancy ideas... was just a screaming, shivering blob. Hmm. Maybe, I'm too harsh of a critic but really, I would highly recommend you spend your $10 on something more interesting!

The Other Boleyn Girl | Actually Serious Books

I recently finished the book, The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. It was a thorough account of a historical event, I believe. However, one aspect made me uneasy: it felt a bit overly romanticized. Mary Boleyn: sweet and innocent. Anne Boleyn: evil and ambitious. That was that. I didn't really have to finish the book without knowing how literary karma would complete the plot. BUT I will say, we all need one of those summer-beach-reads once in a while. It was a typical scandalous-romance-type read and I'm looking forward to see the movie, a scandalous-romance-type of chick flick.


My next recommendations: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. They're a bit more serious, though I'm hoping Eat, Pray, Love will be a good transition from humorous/serious to actual serious/serious.

SEVEN weeks

I'm sitting at my desk, and it is completely littered with empty water bottles, random books, a pot of dying flowers, and other dusty things. I need to do something about this mess. Tomorrow begins Spring Break; I really wish I was going somewhere warm and tropical. Actually, I'm taking a bus back to Poughkeepsie: more gray skies and dusty desks. I'm going to cement myself to my bedroom chair and crank out some internship applications. Quite depressing, in fact...

A grand total of SEVEN weeks have passed by since the semester has started. A blur of craziness. It's as though my life has completely flip-flopped because I cannot detect any similarities to the first seven weeks of last semester (as a baby freshman, can you believe it!). I had a sort of philosophical crisis this morning. I realized that after I return from Spring Break, well... it'll only be a few more weeks until April and then May follows... a whole ending of an academic year will have arrived. I'll be a SOPHOMORE.

Whatever happened to high school? Do I even remember middle school? Why does it seem as though running around on the soccer field of Hagan elementary seemed so vivid in my mind just a year ago? And who have I turned into now... I'll be looking for jobs and then I'll be a real person. By that, I mean a person who actually has bills to pay for and social responsibilities to uphold. No more of this nonsense, like sitting here at my laptop (a brave veteran, showcasing two broken keys) and brooding on this... well, nonsense.

So, I find it hard to believe that SEVEN weeks have gone by; a period of time I cannot redo or change. No doubt it's been a whole lot better than that messy, clueless first semester of college, however. It would be quite impossible NOT to change as a person after my cultural awakening Parisian holiday, Greek initiation, and reassessment of my academic plans and concepts of friendship. Goddamn, even Holden Caulfield would agree. I am still frustrated out of my mind, though. And with what, I can never quite figure out...