Bulldozing the Way

Today at Mass, our deacon gave a homily geared toward the children in attendance. It was about advent and preparing for Jesus to come; pretty typical for this time of year. The interesting thing to me is that it was the best homily I have heard in a very long time. It was very basic and simple. It was based on the gospel. It was devoid of politics and guilt trips for money. It was about God.

Surprisingly, this kind of homily seems to be less and less common. I think one of the reasons I have become so wary of the church and religion is because any more it seems like merely a vehicle for political propaganda, at least in the U.S. When our priest told us a year ago that, while the church would not tell us who to vote for, we should bear in mind that abortion is murder and therefore voting for someone not set on abolishing abortion would be a terrible sin, I about walked out of the church. It's not that I believe abortion is a good thing; I don't. I think it's pretty awful. But I also think the millions of people dying in Darfur, Guinea, and many other African and Middle Eastern nations is pretty awful too. I think it's pretty awful that millions of people in America die because they are denied health care. There are many things happening in this world that are pretty terrible. So why would I choose just one group to care about and ignore all the rest? Is that really the Christian thing to do?

It seems to me that the church has been a little too focused on using their power to convince or coerce me into voting a particular way on one or two issues, and ignoring what they're really supposed to be doing for the congregation: teaching us about Jesus and God and his love for us. And that is precisely what the deacon did today. He told us John the Baptist was the bulldozer, who "made straight and clear the path of God." I love that image. And he says that John was a living sacrament. And each one of us are too, because "Christ" means "anointed one," and each one of us was anointed at baptism. So we have to make clear the path for others. We have to do the right things so others will follow our lead.

And the things we are supposed to do have nothing to do with politics. We should help other people. We shouldn't argue with each other. We should love each other, because God loves us. He loves us more than anything else in the world, because he made each one of us absolutely unique and special. Now that's the kind of religion I'm interested in: loving each other and treating others how God would want us to. It was a refreshing sermon, and it gave me hope once again, that maybe there is something to this religion thing. But it also reminded me once again, that my faith is a personal thing, and I won't let any organized religion get in the way of that, no matter how well-intentioned they claim to be.

The Little Things

I came across a website today that made my day. It's called mylifeisg.com, and it's basically a compilation of (supposedly) true anecdotes about why various people's lives are great. Most of them were sappy, and some of them were silly:

"OMG i'm 13 and just got a boyfriend today! I luv him forever! MLIG!"

But amazingly, a lot of them were truly uplifting. The ones that caught my eye the most were those that talked about how a friend or stranger's simple smile or other action made their day, sometimes preventing them from seriously harming themselves. It brought to my attention how important it is to be a friendly, welcoming person. You never know what a person is going through inside. Some people are incredibly good actors, pretending that they're fine when in reality they're a step away from swallowing a handful of pills or pulling a trigger. It happens everywhere. I have friends who have been suicidal in the past. I have friends who are still scarily close to that place. These are wonderful people with so much to give the world. They just need to be told that, reminded of that. Shown a smile and given a random hug.

I read a story a long time ago in a Chicken Soup book about a boy who saw a classmate he barely knew struggling to walk home under a pile of books. When the classmate dropped them, he stopped to help him out, smiling and befriending him. They became best friends. At their high school graduation, the friend who had struggled home that day gave a speech. He told how he had been carrying home all of the contents of his locker that night because he had planned to kill himself, and he didn't want his mom to have to do it. The kindness and friendship he had been shown had changed his mind, and he had decided to live.

I guess the moral of all of this is that I've made a pact with myself to be as friendly a person as I can, to everyone. I urge others to do the same. Smile at the grocery store checkout person. Wave when you pass someone on the street. Compliment someone. Obviously you don't want to take it too far--stalking is generally frowned upon by society--but little things can make all of the difference. This world needs more love, so do your part. Smile.

I'm Watching You

Halloween is here, and I'm watching you. Yes, it's what I do--watch people; observe situations; listen to what's happening around me. I always have, and I imagine (and hope) I will continue to do so. They say it's the quiet ones you have to look out for. I'm here to tell you that it's true.

I don't talk much, and people often think that means I'm not involved in what's going on around me, I'm not paying attention. But my ears are always open, and so are my eyes. I pick up on little things. I often know when two people are romantically interested in each other before it's public knowledge. I can usually tell when someone is annoyed by another person or dislikes them, just by observing their body language and tone of voice. I pay attention to these things, and then I use them in my writing. Not specific people, of course, just characteristics and mannerisms.

I also find that people tend to speak freely around me. Maybe they forget I'm there, or maybe they just don't see me as a threat because I "don't talk." And they're right, in a way. I won't typically talk about things that I overhear. I don't like gossip, and I try hard to avoid it." My favorite example of this is an art class I was in during my tenth grade year of high school. I was placed at a table with three upperclassmen, known for partying and doing drugs, etc. I knew about every party that happened. I just sat there quietly, working on my projects, and amused myself by listening unobtrusively to every thing that they talked about. They certainly weren't bothering to hide it from me. I knew about it the day there were rumors of random backpack searches and one of them hid her pot stash in a plant in the back of the art room.

I often wonder if I should have told someone about all of these things that I overheard in that class. But the truth is I don't think it ever really hit me that they actually did have parties with drinking and drugs. That whole culture was completely foreign to me. (I was a nerd, remember?) Sure, I heard them talking about it, but I never thought it was a reality, for some reason. I suppose regardless of my thinking back then, it's too late to do anything about it now, anyway.

Besides, talking about what I hear would break the "Quiet Person Code." If that happens, I would lose my cover. People would stop talking freely around me. And that would make my life so much more boring. I love observing people, learning about them--why they act a certain way, how they handle different situations, etc. It's fun.

And, of course, it lends itself to a great supply of fodder for my creative soul.

The Many Voices of a Writer

Voice. Tone. Inflection.

It's something I've been thinking about lately. Writing professors often speak of "finding your voice" as a writer. Once you have that settled, it makes the writing process easier, because your voice becomes subconscious, and in some ways determines what you write about. My voice for fiction is slow and steady, controlled, deliberate. I find myself writing about small towns and inner struggles with the most success. (A professor once compared me to Flannery O'Connor--one of the biggest compliments I have ever received.) My voice for blogging, as a friend recently told me, is outgoing and bold--much more so than I am in real life. My voice for academic writing is, well, academic. None of these styles are voices I "put on" or adopt consciously. They just happen as I write.

So what determines a writer's voice? Is it personal experience? Subconscious repetition of others? Completely random? Maybe it's a mix of all three. It's hard to say. I don't know how mine developed. I may be lucky in that mine did come so easily. I never thought about it until my professors started talking about it. When I read other students' work, it was often obvious that they were still finding theirs. Of course I still have a long ways to go, but I at least have a good feel for it, and I can't seem to escape it unless I consciously try to. I guess that's supposed to be a good sign.

Once you have a settled voice, however, the fun starts. Because then you get to start playing with it. Two of my favorite short stories were written in strong voices. One was of a young girl in first person POV who prattled on and on about the "clowns in politics" her daddy told her about. The other, and more recent, was the third person POV of a young autistic man who thinks he killed his baby brother fifteen years ago. I had so much fun playing with voice; the stories wouldn't have worked otherwise.

I have had two recent encounters with people regarding my various voices that really made me think. The first was when the friend I mentioned before e-mailed me in response to my last post.

"I love reading your posts, by the way. They speak of a Laura who is constantly angry, bold, and outspoken, vs. the Laura I know."

I would have to agree with this sentiment, in some respects. I blog for the sole purpose of expressing the thoughts and ideas I have that I am incapable of relating in real life. What you read here is a part of me you won't see anywhere else. So please don't expect to. The first rule of blogging: don't talk about blogging. If you try to corner me in real life and talk about what I write here, I will evade your questions, answering in one word and running in the opposite direction as soon as I can. Leave all the comments you went--you can even e-mail me--but please do not try to talk to me about it. (Oh, and I'm not a constantly angry person. Usually.)

The second encounter I had happened today at work. My boss praised me for "losing my scholastic voice" in an article I wrote. I wasn't sure how to feel about that. Yes, Mountain Home is not the place for scholastic treatises on Hume's "purple patches." I understand that. But at the same time, I have spent the last four years of my life seriously working to improve that scholastic voice to the point where it might be taken seriously by academia. (I never said I got there, but I tried.) So if I managed to lose it completely five months after graduation, well, I don't see that as a victory, per se. I guess it's a manner of balancing it all and separating the voices in my head so they don't pop up in inappropriate places.

So I guess the only question left is a personal one for me: Where is all of this leading me? I've considered graduate school in literature or creative writing (or, if I wanted to kill myself, a program melding the two). I've considered trying to write for publication. And I've considered not bothering with any of that and continuing on with blogs and personal journals. I think it's important, whatever I end up doing, to keep working on all of these voices. Who knows, maybe I can be like Joyce Carol Oates and do it all. That would be interesting.

An Insult to Literature Everywhere

As I was browsing through Barnes & Noble this weekend while visiting my brother in Washington, DC, I came across something so disturbing, so horrific, even, that I knew it was time to take a stand.  Now, I hesitate to write this post because the topic about which I am going to write is something I hardly even deem worthy of the thirty minutes it will take for me complete this complaint. I am not a hater.  I understand that some people of the younger female generation are held enthralled by grotesquely pale, sparkling young men who have an uncontrollable urge to bite and thus kill the women they love. This is weird to me, and I don’t understand it, but I was okay leaving it at that. I wasn’t going to read it, but I tried REALLY hard not to judge those who did fall under its spell too harshly.

Yes, if Twilight had stayed on its designated shelf in the Tween Fad section of the store with the rest of the obnoxious literary disgraces, I would have been perfectly happy to live and let live. But no. It wasn’t content to stay in its place. Like Eliot’s slinking yellow fog, it spread its polluting influence to places in which it has no business being.

When I saw this book lying there on the New Fiction table in a bookstore I had previously respected, a little part of me died. It still makes me shudder. I don’t know if this recent abomination is a direct result of the Twilight series, but I imagine it comes from the same general fad beginning in the 90s with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other such TV shows. I never understood the attraction to this phenomenon; I thought it was strange and silly. But it didn’t bother me, so long as it stayed in its place. (Let me say here that the vampires Twilight and other such renderings romanticize are a completely different species than the old-school vampires of Dracula or even B-grade horror films.)

But this is just ridiculous. How in the world could anyone ever compare Fitzwilliam Darcy, one of literature’s leading men—a timeless, classic heartthrob whose charm has lived on for almost 200 years—to a pale, sparkling, emo vampire? It blows my mind. I could handle the previous Pride and Prejudice spinoffs. I even read a couple of them. But I can guarantee that I will not be reading this one, and I will not hold back my wrathful judgment of anyone who does.

And it’s not even just the comparison of these two leading men. To even begin to compare the literary quality of the writings of Jane Austen and Stephenie Meyer would be a joke. I will readily admit that, as a want-to-be writer, I harbor anger and dislike for these sensational writers (like Meyer and Dan Brown) who become overnight successes, despite the fact that they are not exceptional writers. Far from it. In fact, I know many people who can write much better than them and are much more deserving of national renown. We should be rewarding the next Joyces, Shakespeares, Eliots, and Kerouacs of the world.

But I digress. My point is, Austen was an incredibly influential writer who, while her novels are considered by some (uneducated in the intricacies of irony and early feminism present in the novels) as romantic and silly fads, she was a talented writer with some important commentary on her society. She wrote love stories, yes, but they are much more than that to the exacting reader. Twilight on the other hand…well, unless Meyer is trying to tell young girls to search out unhealthy relationships with men who will never be available (or even exist in real life, for that matter), I’m not sure what the saving grace of her books might be.

Don’t get me wrong. I think any book that gets kids to read is fine. I’m a huge proponent of Harry Potter, for instance. (Although I would argue that JK Rowling is a much more talented writer than Meyer will ever be. And I haven’t seen any Mr. Darcy, Wizard books lying around, either.) Yes, they may be fun to read—escapist and a catalyst for daydreams, but that is all. And that is precisely why they need to stay with others of their kind, not infiltrating historically great literature. The next thing you know we’ll be seeing Hamlet’s dead father coming back as a zombie to rip Claudius to shreds while Hamlet emerges as a reluctant emo-punk star of the Shakespearean world. (Although the latter part of that scenario doesn’t actually seem too far from the reality of the play, come to think of it…)

As a final note, I feel that my argument would be incomplete without pointing out that Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy was 100 times more attractive than Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen could ever hope to be.

Imagining the Unimaginable

Imagination*. I have spent a good deal of time contemplating this phenomenon. It's incredible. To a certain extent, we can think beyond the concrete, beyond reality. We can create worlds and scenarios beyond what could ever happen in real life. We can create, period. Sure, we are bound by some limitations. Can a blind person imagine color? A deaf person, music? I can't imagine what spaghetti smells like. I can't imagine the intricate flavors of find culinary creations. If I try, there's just a blank wall. There must be some basis for imagination. 

This is why I understand it to be largely evolutionary. No imagination can make any jump too large. It's all about baby steps. We build off of each other's imaginings, thus eventually creating something incredible. Hence the inventions of today that were unimaginable 50, 100, or 1,000 years ago. Surely Pythagorus couldn't imagine the computer as it stands today. But I'm not interested in technological imagination. No, I leave that to my brother and the other scientists of the world. 

I'm more interested in the artistic, or creative imagination. I often find myself writing about children. In some ways I believe it is my goal as a writer to recapture a child's imagination and present it in terms understandable to adults, so that we might relive it. I was blessed as a child to have a very active imagination. 90% of my free time was spent "playing pretend" with my brothers or friends. I think most of our conversations began with "Let's pretend..." It was a way of life. Anything is possible to a child's mind. And little is taboo. I remember one particular game I played with my best friend when we were young. It was called War, and it basically involved us packing up our dolls and moving to various locations within the house, setting up camp, and avoiding the soldiers, who would kidnap our babies if they knew we had them. I have no idea where we got the idea for this game, and to be honest, the alluring part of the game was probably all of the changing outfits--nothing to do with becoming socially aware of others' difficulties. 

This same friend and I often played Barbies for hours on end, sometimes rarely talking to each other. We had seriously in depth and drawn-out scenarios we played out. The game went on in our heads, and we were in tune with one another enough to know what was going on. We didn't have to talk about it. And of course I would play with my other dolls in the same way, often alone, creating vast scenarios for them, carrying on conversations, etc. One of my favorite childhood TV shows was the Muppet Babies. Talk about imagination! And their imaginings actually came true. Even as a young child I longed for that experience. And so I lived vicariously through Kermit and Miss Piggy's fantastic adventures.

I would give anything to have that kind of imagination and mental focus again. Perhaps it has to do with the sheer number of things crammed into my brain these days. I could never devote three hours to one game of house. My mind would be in a million different directions. I'm not ever sure I would know how to start "playing pretend." I cannot make pretend become my reality anymore, and it's really a shame. 

I'm not saying that I want to live in a world I've created for myself that has no baring on the real world, of course. I just would like to be able to escape every once in a while for extended periods of time, without getting drawn into the world of work, relationships, and responsibility. I would especially like to be able to do this when it comes to writing. To recapture that childhood innocence and complete withdrawal into a pretend world would be an incredible feat for me. In some ways I can capture this through reading. I can lose myself in another world. But it's not the same. There isn't the freedom of imagination there would be in writing. Reading offers the line of focus to follow--it's already there, laid out for me. But that's what it is. I have to follow that writer's line. In writing I can create my own line--ultimate imagination. 

The truly great writers, I think, have found a way to do this: to immerse themselves into their story completely and utterly. To live it through the pen or keyboard. To make it interesting enough for others to want to follow and get lost in as well. I only hope that someday, however far off it may be, I'll accomplish this. And until then, I just have to keep trying. 

*This post is dedicated to Kate. I didn't bother doing all the reading you did...I just made stuff up. So you can have the last word.

Nerds Unite!

Ok, so I'm just going to come out with it from the start. I am a huge nerd. There's really no way around it. If you didn't already know that about me, this post was going to out me anyway. I have gone through various stages of nerd-dom in my life, each as satisfyingly nerdy and fun as the last. You see, I embrace nerd-dom. It's so much fun!


Only when you can dress up like Professor Trelawney at the age of twenty-something and parade around town, can you feel the true liberation and pure exhilaration nerd-dom offers. These are some of my closest friends and my father. We have Harry, Tonks, Dumbledore, Trelawney (my hair was much bigger, but deflated throughout the evening), Jena from Ravenclaw (I think), Becca from Slytherin (of course), and Bri from Gryffindor. What fun that was!


Of course, there are other stages of nerd-dom that I have gone through as well. High school was all about music. I was the president of the band. I started a handbell quartet. I developed an inexplicable love of Mozart that I cannot shake to this day. At the moment I find myself wearing Mozart socks, given to me by a good friend and true nerd at heart. I took a class on Mozart during the Spring semester of my senior year of college, just to make my undeniable love slightly more legitimate.

In college I slipped into my one true calling, however: Literature. You would be hard pressed to find a twenty-three year old who loves Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque with quite the same passion as I harbor. Tristram Shandy, considered by many to be a long blathering of nothingness, held great joy and humor for me. With the exception of my equally nerdy best friend, no one looked forward to our English senior seminar, Encyclopedic Realism, with the enthusiasm I had. And don't even get me started on James Joyce. I could read Portrait and Ulysses 1,000 times and not tire of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom's ridiculous ramblings. Oh, the beauty.

But I digress. Now I come to the inspiration for tonight's post: Grammar. After getting into numerous "discussions" with one particular writer at Mountain Home, I was accused by said writer of being a grammar snob. Fair enough. It's my job, you know? Well, this writer (let's call him Bill) stopped by the office a few days after one particularly heated comma debate, and tossed a book on my desk.

"Have you read this?"
"No."
"Read it."

And then he walked out. I laughed to myself (despite our differences of opinion regarding parenthetical phrases and adjective phrases, I quite like Bill and respect him a great deal) and put the book off to the side. Just yesterday I saw the book again, and decided to take a look at it.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I have not laughed so hard over a book since the unfortunate "windowpane incident" in Tristram Shandy. I laughed out loud, sometimes maniacally, for hours. I related to it, I suddenly felt not-so-alone in the world. "There are others like you,"this book told me. "It's okay to be a nerd."

So what was this hysterical book, you ask? Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. A book about grammar. A book about the downfall of the English language. And most of all, a book about grammar nerds. As I read about Truss's burning desires to walk around handing out "Unnecessary Apostrophe" stickers to the dreaded "greengrocers" of the world (Apple's Pear's and Orange's for sale), I could not help but relate. You see, I've been there. No matter how much I try to repress the memory, the time that I stealthily erased a misused apostrophe on a Pizza Hut whiteboard haunts me to this day. But Truss told me that it's okay--in fact it's more than okay. It's a great thing I'm doing. Together, grammar nerds will unite and save English punctuation from the hungry jaws of text messages, e-mails, and horrendous internet headlines (GOLD'WATCHFORSAIL**JUST10$*CREDDIT^CARDNU3BERSWELCOM).

It is fast becoming a scary world out there, and someone has to do something about it. And so, in all of my nerd-dom glory, I have taken up the call to be a grammar vigilante: saving the world, one comma at a time.