War of My Life

Come out angels, come out ghosts

Come out darkness, bring everyone you know

I’m not running and I’m not scared

I am waiting and well-prepared

I’m in the war of my life, at the door of my life…

-John Mayer, War of My Life

How very appropriate.

I really do feel that I am at the door of my life. Last year of high school, and I feel that I really am becoming my own best friend. I actually really truly enjoy being who I am.

Last year was a series of events that felt like a row of dominoes collapsing, one after another after another after another…dominoes I was afraid to see fall, dominoes I didn’t even know existed.

I want to say it should never have happened. And maybe it wouldn’t have, if I did it over again. But I do feel that everything that I went through last year – the way I stretched my heart and mind and soul and body farther than I’d ever care to stretch them again – taught me something about who I am, and who I was, and who I want to/will be. The silent screams, the tears, the running through rain…it was important. It happened for a reason.

I’m in the delicate process of weeding out the unhealthiness in my life – not just food-wise, either. It’s so refreshing to live a life you don’t have to worry about, though I’m not saying I’m not proud of the life I’ve led up to this point. I feel like I’ve gained wisdom, giant shiploads of it, to the point where I end up spewing it out at random to people who cross my path at a given time.

It sounds a little strange for a 17 year old to talk about being wise, but the truth is, I feel a little like I’m older than 17. Like I’ve aged, in certain ways. But I like who I’ve become.

I like that I laugh more easily now. I like that I can’t help but smile sometimes, as I walk across campus or put a piece of bread in the toaster or annotate a poem in Lit AP. I like that I’m a little bit crazy, a lot more articulate, and an inch taller. I like that. And I like knowing more of who I am.

I’m moving forward. I’m climbing the rigging of my ragged ship to reach the crow’s nest, where, feeling at the top of the world, I’ll put my eye to the telescope and see everything I can see.

I tend to fall into periods of silence, where I’ll just stare out the window or at my fingers curled in my lap, and I’ll just think. I’ll explore my mind. Maybe it’s irritating to other people, but it’s helping me. How will you ever make friends with yourself if you don’t take the time to listen to what your heartbeat is saying?

There’s a language that your self speaks. In the beat of your heart, the  blue of your veins, the curl of your hair on a particular day. It’s in the flecks of color in your eyes and in the dreams that flash before them in moments of deepest sleep. It in everything you do and everything you surround yourself with. So, I’d say, take the time to listen. What you’ll hear might surprise you.

Spohkin Wurd

Words:

Township

Horizon

High school

Max

What came of the free-write session, unedited, uncut:

If I saw horizons I would leave and follow them, to whatever township it is, whatever sunlight and glory I was going to come to and it would be mine. But hey they taught me in school that that’s selfish, so you over there, it’ll be yours too. And mine. And everyone’s. And maybe I’ll find some kind of sparkle or glitter or twinkle in your eyes that will lead me to the end of that horizon, and I’ll

fall

fall

fall

into the unknown world and we’ll have to bring back the existence of light and knowledge and peace. Pax et Lux. I wrote that in an essay. Why are we consolidating thoughts into one stupid piece of graded work, why can’t we just move and dance and sing and say as we wish because in my opinion there’s no other way to have a harmony, a melody, with fingers dancing over keys or keys over fingertips. And music can be made as long as you believe in the power, in the beauty of your dreams and mine, the white canvas, the white we paint in so many colors. The glass bottle a drew with colored pencils of green, yellow, pink, blue, purple RAINBOWS connecting Heaven and Earth and the sky with the ground and doves with war, children, shafted to the side to make room for logical thought, shafted to save face with those who have lost all the mysteries. Septimus and Thomasina, on an empty shore…And they dance until midnight blacks out their end.

Who Are You?

I want to ask this question to every person who commented or “liked” or reblogged the illustration I submitted to I Can Read. It was a sketch of a grand piano, and it said “play to your heart’s desire” at the top. It might seem kind of vain, but I was really really excited when it showed up on I Can Read, so much so that when I got home I looked through everyone who left some kind of note on it, and God, it was so…I don’t know what to say. I just kept scrolling down and seeing people’s tumblr screen-names and reading the comments and it was like peeking into the lives of all these different people from who knows where, with all these different stories and identities and struggles and, and, and…wow. Look at how big the world is. Look at how far apart we are. How many people we’ll never meet, how many potential best friends or arch-enemies or lovers who we’ll never know the name of, never know anything of past a a few posts on a blog or a picture or even a tiny, two line comment.

This is why I blog. To be a part of a community. The human network. I was reading comment after comment, people indirectly talking to their boyfriends or girlfriends or fiancés or just friends, telling them “I wish you would…” or “I still want to hear you play” or “yes please. i’ll love you forever”, and people whose dreams were echoed in the pencil marks I made and in the simple words I had written, saying, “If only I really reallly could make this my life. Forever and ever, since I was 5 and after playing for over 10 years to me this is the most beautiful instrument in the world.” I wanted to tell this person “me too.” And I wanted to tell the person who wishes for a piano but is staying in DC “you can always get a cheap keyboard. Or just make friends with a piano store owner.” I kind of wanted to read the poem that someone wrote in English about “playing to your heart’s desire” and tell the person who didn’t get into their dream college that, you know, everything will be okay. And to all those people who quit piano or who haven’t played in a year or a month’s time, I wanted to ask them why? Why give up something you love? There is always time to go back and learn. To that guy who was disheartened after trying to play the piano for the first time in a year, I wanted to tell him that it doesn’t matter how clumsy your fingers are or how scratchy your voice is. Just play. Please, just play, because the world wants – no, needs – your music.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a book. Or a box of kleenex. Or a pencil. Or some other inanimate thing. But humans – humanity – we have so much. So many thoughts. So many faces. So many emotions, struggles, victories, stories. I just cannot fathom how incredibly, amazingly, beautifully diverse we are.

Oh Dear.

I made a handy little list for college essays, which you can get off of my tumblr. And, well, despite my feeling that yes, I was doing okay on my apps and yes, I can finish everything by December 1st and yes, I am way ahead of where my sister was last year, right now the only thought that is occurring to me as I look down at nearly a full page of essays is…crap.

This whole college admissions process is weighing me down like a sack of rocks in water. I feel a little bit overwhelmed, and it’s the first time I’ve felt so…I don’t know, scared? apprehensive? nervous? stressed? – this entire school year. It’s a little bit unnerving to go from feeling that you’ve accomplished quite a bit of work and then realize that all of that is actually not much at all. Things just keep adding up, and I just figured out that Mount Holyoke also asks for a copy of a paper, with comments from a teacher, that “shows you at your intellectual best.” Intellectual best? What’s that? And how can I get some?

I wish I could just go to Hogwarts. You don’t even have to apply, and there’s no college or grad school afterwards – you’re thrown into the real (or unreal?) world as soon as you graduate! Magic doesn’t seem THAT difficult. I mean, what’s making a Draught of Living Death compared to PDP from AP Bio last year? At least you have the ingredients listed out for you in Potions.

Now I’m just whining. I printed out a timelog that I got off of Pitch Design Union, so it can help me get back on track with work. The problem is, I need to somehow balance doing homework and essays with gchat. I think it’s social suicide to get rid of it. And, you know, school is not just about work. It is also about the memories and inside jokes and friends you make that will last you a lifetime, or at least make you keel over laughing for ten straight minutes. And if that’s not enough to convince you, gmail and gchat and gdocs are integral tools for journalism. As much as it slows down my productivity, I have to leave my email window open just in case.

All right. That’s enough.

What’s New?

I’m have a tumblr! I’m keeping this for wordier posts, but photos, art, design, audio will mostly be on the tumblr. Find me at http://luminocity.tumblr.com!

Pink

I honestly have no reason to name this post Pink. Other than the fact that for the past 30 seconds I’ve been contemplating the color of the Juicy lipgloss that, for some reason, is sitting on my desk.

What else? I’m thinking about color. Color, color, color. Mastery of color is incredibly difficult, don’t you think? I mean, how do you teach someone how to put colors together to make something visually appealing, or how to use color in such a way that it gets across a message or draws your eye around a painting or carries light throughout a piece of art?

I think it’s humbling. There’s beauty in color – so, so much. I wonder what it must be like to not be able to see color. To hear people talking about how blue the sky is, or how gorgeous a sunrise is, and never be able to experience the same joys that butter yellow and kelly green and deep blue and yes, pink, inspire in us?

I have terrible eyesight. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m going to be blind at the age of 30. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be able to discern the knuckles on my hand from more than one inch away from my nose. I wonder if it feels any different to not wear contacts or glasses. Do your eyes feel lighter? Can you see things more clearly? Am I missing out on the vibrancy or intensity or value of a color because it’s distorted through the lens of my glasses?

Sometimes, I’ll look in the mirror after I’ve taken out one of my contacts, and it appears to me that the eye without the contact seems to have more nuances and colors and depth and it just looks more real.

And then I’ll start wondering if colors are really the colors that we see. Do animals see things differently than us? Is blue really blue? Or is it green? What does nothingness look like? Is it black? Is it white? Is it both? But that doesn’t work, if it’s nothingness, it doesn’t have any color! But then how can you envision nothingness? How is time the fourth dimension? What really is the space-time fabric that everyone talks about and no one understands? Can I sew it together? Rip a hole in it? Make a pillow fort out of it?

These are the kinds of thoughts that plague my mind in the half awake, half asleep dream state that occurs right before I drop off to sleep, and I’m lying down in the dark on my bed, perhaps after looking at the moon outside or if it isn’t visible, just how the darkness illuminates all the shapes of everything outside and how empty and dark and beautiful and cold it all is and how I kind of wish that I was outside, asleep, alone, under the stars or in a tree or maybe even on top of a mountain in the middle of Yosemite or Yellowstone or in the Himalayas which makes me think of ice and how many beautiful colors you can find in it and how can you draw eggs in colored pencils without actually using white and how art really isn’t about recreating something you’ve seen but more like recreating something you felt and how I love colors and maybe I should finish that essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson and reread Obama’s inauguration speech but I’ll do that tomorrow because I’m too tired but oh, crap, did I forget to print out my SSR forms again and why can’t I just be more responsible sometimes and wow, I’m really looking forward to college so I can get out of this place where more than ever I don’t feel like I belong except sometimes when it feels like hey, maybe it’s not all bad but then it really is and here, let me count to ten but oh wait you’re awake let me hear more stories and laugh quietly and sleepily and listen closer and you know…maybe…I…should…

And then I wake up the next morning.

A Wonderful Way to Describe It

It’s 12:46 am, and I am listening to Frank Sinatra suavely singing “My Way” and “Chicago” and “New York, New York,” and I am seized by a sudden desire to walk down a rainy city street in a raincoat and galoshes and dance on the sidewalk, like Fred Astaire in Singin’ In the Rain.

I love New York.

I have only been there once that I can remember, but I swear, it was love at first sight. I love how the lights shine at night, how everyone and no one has a purpose, how everyone is just there and everything seems so very real and alive.

The city has something to it, something strikingly old-world and yet modern, that combines the architecture of years past with the innovation of the present. It has history. In New York, you may find yourself or find others, you may find solace in a florist shop on Broadway or in Central Park or on the steps of the Met, and there is a place for everyone.

New York is like a dance, where no one knows the choreography but everyone dances anyway, under the bright lights and orange-and-purple sky, and it is always beautiful.

“O Me! O Life!”

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

-John Keating, Dead Poets Society

Lookie!

Look what I learned how to make! http://www.smashingmagazine.com/, check it

Back in the Day…

Today, I went for a bike ride. Then, I made chalk drawings on my driveway! Is it strange that I feel so much more like a kid this summer than before? Well, maybe a more responsible kid, with better chalk drawing skills, but still, I feel like I’m having a real summer.

What exactly is a real summer? I guess, for me, summer is defined in a number of different ways. Summer is supposed to be full of running around, playing games, popsicles, adventures, time to eat and read and talk and draw. Or…a time to catch up with myself.

I think I had a storybook childhood, living in the midwest. It’s astonishing just how different my life was in Ohio as compared to California. I spent my early years in wide open spaces, under a huge, huge sky in a giant house and beautiful garden. I had neighbors – real neighbors, who invited you in for lemonade and dropped by for lunch unannounced, who let you trample their garden and whose kids were your playmates. And I lived in a real neighborhood! It had a name and everything (Robin’s Trace, it was called). I used to take a yellow schoolbus to and from school every day, and the conductor was a mean old woman named Sam, who used to yell at us and then one day got into a minor crash that knocked the fender off a car. It was on the radio that afternoon.

I remember how I’d run around in the grass and the trees barefoot with my sister and our friends, playing in fairy-world and catching grasshoppers and chasing fireflies, swinging on the swingset in my backyard and cultivating my own little strawberry patch on the side of the house. There were these fat soft brown rabbits that used to hop out of the forest across the street and eat our vegetables and sometimes live under our deck, but they were the cutest things in the world. Also, my dad built our deck, and we all helped paint it. Cute, huh?

There were deck parties every summer, sometimes three in one night, so everyone would go to one party, and then cross the street and go to another one, and then finally set up camp at the last one, with dusk settling in and the mosquito lamps lit, and the adults would laugh while the kids would play games and get bitten by bugs.

Time seemed to pass at an easy rate. Seasons slid easily from one to another. Come spring, I’d have my new “spring jacket” for the rain. Clouds would clear up for summer which would bring countless days outside under the hot sun, and occasionally visits from Japanese beetle swarms that liked to take over the grapevines on the right side of my house. Summer would transition into fall, and on September 1st we’d be ready for a new school year. October came around with bright blue skys and multi-colored leaves adorning every tree in sight, until winter swept them away in a flurry of snow. We had snow days full of hot chocolate and mittens and tights paired with snowboots, and days when we’d miss the bus and have to go to the principal’s office to explain.

We had actual basements, and instead of earthquake drills, we had tornado drills where we’d huddle with our hands over our heads in the hallways, and hear the sirens of the alarm trucks sounding as they zoomed past. We played soccer on green fields surrounded by…more green fields. And trees. And hills.

There was neighborhood trick-or-treating and a Bonfire Night every year, and there was a house where no one dared to ring the doorbell on Halloween night (except my friends and I broke that rule, got scared out of our wits, and never went back again). Once, we rescued a turtle that was stranded in the middle of the road. Also, my “intermediate school” (school for 2nd grade up to 6th grade, if I recall correctly) was next to a cemetery, and if anything went over the fence separating the playground from the graveyard, it was considered lost for all eternity.

I’m so glad that I lived in such a place. I think it gave me some real perspective on how life should/can be lived – it’s possible to take your time, to do things that you enjoy. It’s not all about the future or moving up the social hierarchy. It’s about pretending that the crow on the weathervane of your neighbor’s house is your best friend, and about swinging so high that you feel like you’re flying. It’s about going to deck parties and having friends who take care to personally show you everything that doesn’t have ham in it so you can eat it, having neighbors who treat you like the little girl you are and try to teach you how to whistle and supply you with plenty of popsicles and band-aids. That’s what life is supposed to be about. Adventures. Feeling young. Discovering things. Not letting the dirt and grime of the “real world” affect how you live. Just…an eternal summer.