My first public free write

Disclaimer: Ok, please understand this really is a free write. Mostly, it is exposing how my brain thinks and sounds without the lovely filter of slowing down, pausing, editing, or even just giving it time to mull over. Generally, these thoughts are just plain ol' not finished being thought out. But thinking about stuff to the point of making it an actual idea is a long process, and I feel like documenting the beginnings of these potential ideas, and hopefully a fully formed idea can come from it later. Expect these more often, as they require so little effort on my part, sorry.

Way too often we hear “love yourself so you can love others” and translate the whole scripture of  “love thy neighbor as thyself” to mean that once we love ourselves, we are better able to love others. Bleh. I really dislike how pretty much all relief society lessons tend to go this way. We will talk about service for others and suddenly for more than half  of the lesson we are discussing how ultimately service blesses ourselves. We will have a lesson on loving others and in the end we are talking about why loving ourselves first is so important and discussing ways to take care of our own needs, to not “neglect ourselves”.

I think we can’t love ourselves until we love others first. And we never get to that point sometimes, most times, because we want to do it backwards, which  is ultimately the selfish way. We are even often taught  backwards. And it gets us nothing  in the end. It is like people who say they want to “find themselves” before going to college or be able to do anything good. Bleh again. Go do things, good things, and then you will make yourself. If you haven’t made yourself, there won’t be anything to find. In the same way, if you don’t love others first, there won’t be a part of yourself to love. We all struggle with this in some way, and I think that this is why.

We are always taught lessons of virtue by saying that it benefits our own soul, growth, and understanding, that we will be rewarded in heaven as well. While these things are true, I can't help but wonder about how we would live without this promise of eventual rewards. I understand that it is impossible to serve others without the reward of at least feeling good about it. But what if the outcome was really only the other person feeling better? If it did not help us "get to heaven"? Even when it seems to not benefit us in this life, we believe that we will be rewarded in the next life, that everyone basically will get their come uppance. I wonder how much good I would really do if I would not receive the blessings in heaven.
 "He that layeth down his own life shall find it". I've been thinking about this a lot too. Finding our lives is the most beneficial thing for ourselves, so really, laying down your life for something so great is really not a big payment. A "selfless act" that results in benefiting yourself even more than it benefitted anyone else. Would I lay down my life for someone else if I wouldn't gain glory later? Or what about even getting my life back at all?
And I can't help thinking about how this extends to why I do anything. Isn't paying tithing made easier because I know I will be blessed for doing so? Do I pay because I need help financially or something, and not because the money will help someone else? Selfless acts as payment for something that I want for myself.
I know I sound so pessimistic with all this stuff about how even our most selfless acts could be the most selfish. But I just wonder sometimes.

Choose or Die

A Psychological Tip


 Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
 and you're hampered by not having any,
 the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
 is simply by spinning a penny.


 No - not so that chance shall decide the affair
 while you're passively standing there moping;
 but the moment the penny is up in the air,
 you suddenly know what you're hoping

- Piet Hein

I like this poem for making it clear that decision making is an active process that takes work and desire.

And guts. Most of my bravest moments are the ones in which I make a decision that I have been struggling with. It means I have committed to something, and that I trust my Heavenly Father and myself. It means that I have accepted letting the other options go, which is always a risk. It means I am willing to take on the task of following the path (cliche bleh) I have chosen.

Decision making is also a way to prove to yourself that you even have desires and passions at all. There aren't decisions to be made if you don't give a rat's tushy about anything. I know that I am fairly well known among my friends for being the most indecisive person ever when it comes to choosing where to eat. Maybe I'm justifying a personality flaw, but I think it is ok to be indisisive about things that really truly do not matter as long as I am decisive about the things that actually affect my life and those around me.

Important: My friends, how to help my family, what school to go to, who to marry, where I live, how I spend my time, what I study, my opinions on things like religion, black or blue pens (blue). 

Not important: Wendy's or Arby's, diet Coke or diet Dr. Pepper, cereal (I always end up eating a little bit of EVERY type of cereal that is available, always. Tip: start with the less sugary ones end with the chocolatey ones so that the milk isn't all weird with your other cereals, unless you like that kind of thing which makes you kinda messed up.)

 Ok, I digress. Which is NOT the same as being indecisive. Moving on.

What you are decisive about = What you care about

The inverse holds true as well. Being indecisive is a manifestation of a lack of passion, which really just makes you super boring at best and a douche at worst.
Frills though, I would rather someone be a douche than bore me.


Indecision and indirectness = BORED

The past little while has been full of decision making for me. I was frustrated with it at the time, but am now so grateful for all of it. I am grateful that I know what I am supposed to be doing with my life and that I have answers that have been a long time coming. I like having my desires made clear to myself, even if it is accomplished through the often crushing process of decision making. Changing and growing and learning is pretty darn awesome. And the more it happens the more I like it and the better I am at it. 

So, you know, don't fear change blah blah blah. But really, improvement, though inherently painful and stretching, is da bomb. 


 “a crisis and upheaval in his soul, which shook his mind but also ultimately strengthened it for the whole of his life, and towards a definite purpose.”  

- Dostoyevsky's Brother's Karamozov

Most of all I am grateful that I know how to communicate with my Heavenly Father and that I am taken care of. I know how to tell feelings of fear apart from feelings of caution. I know complacency apart from peace. I'm not always the quickest at getting it right, but I do get there eventually. And the best thing is that I am getting better and better at it. It has been so neat these past weeks to feel promptings and recognize them for what they are. Just being reassured that I really am capable of that and that I am improving in it has been the best part of this whole experience. 

What do you think you will answer yourself?

The word "Blustery" has long been in my vocabulary.
Yes, this is the source.  You're welcome.

The wind made me laugh so much today.
I don't just mean being happy on the inside, but out-loud giggling. I was walking to school and leaves were flying, my hair was everywhere, my skirt was fickle, and there was a general sense of playfulness that made everything around me funny or downright adorable. I just couldn't help getting giggle fits and probably looked slightly deranged as a result.

Oh wind, you can flirt with me again any day.
Today was rather blustery, and so much the better for it.

P.S. / update:
Grad school app is coming along, stressful, but along.
Piglet's statements match my life so well right now. I feel weird that I identify with a stuttering cartoon at my age. B-b-b-but I do.

I can, and so

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

- Robert Frost

 

 Whose woods these are I think I know,
 His house is in the village though.
 He will not see me stopping here,
 To watch his woods fill up with snow.

 My little horse must think it queer,
 To stop without a farmhouse near,
 Between the woods and frozen lake,
 The darkest evening of the year.

 He gives his harness bells a shake,
 To ask if there is some mistake.
 The only other sound's the sweep,
 Of easy wind and downy flake.

 The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
 But I have promises to keep,
 And miles to go before I sleep,
 And miles to go before I sleep.

I know I am not the only one, but I am getting so tired. Sometimes it is like these woods, a deep dark lull that entices me towards indifference. Sometimes a maze of confusion that only gets worse the more times I try to get out. Sometimes hysterical panic.

There have been five times in my life where I not only felt I could not get up from under such heavy weight, but that I actually desired to not get up.  

I always got up.

I never completely understand how, but I always know why.

The why is because I want big and important things.
Things so important that it is impossible for me to stop working for them. Things I will work for until I have nothing more to give, because there is nothing else worth having or doing anyway. And I have a responsibility to get them.

And there are some things that I want, that are not so essential, but I want so badly. Things that I know I can have if I work hard enough, harder than I care to think about. And so, I will not think about the work, I will simply work.

I have made myself promises. I promise to get what I want, what should be mine. 

I don't just feel like my heart is bursting with desire, or even that it is bigger, but that my heart has changed shape and filled everything inside me. Everything under my skin is gone and replaced with heart, my insides are one giant muscle that has no other purpose other than working for what I want.

And so I will.

I feel the season

"So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived"
- Truman Capote

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." 
- Albert Camus

"I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death"
- Yutang Lin

I've resisted Autumn for so long, my whole life really. I just love the summer so much. But I really have fallen in love with Autumn this year.

I'm also bursting to begin this again.

mmmmm knitting.

Welcome Fall

Ode To Autumn by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,---
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. 

Wishblows are for making all your dreams come true.

Dun nuh nuh nah naaaaaahhhhh.... DUN DUN

Stanly Fish writes an opinion blog for the New York Times. In this kind of recent article, he actually spends his time and words talking about Law and Order, which has reached it's end after twenty years. I have my own on and off relationship with Law and Order, usually on, so I was hoping for something I would really understand. (Yes, I realize that getting excited about actually being up to date on something Mr. Fish would write about means that I am a bit ignorant of the world around me except for TV and makes me sound like a bit of an idiot. So sorry.)

He doesn't really say anything I found interesting, just kind of what he thinks Dick Wolfe thought about society and how to keep an audience, which is nothing ground breaking.
Mostly I am just wondering about how many episodes Fish has seen in his lifetime. He writes as if he has sat through his share of the marathons. I kind of hope so actually. If he could become a high and mighty critic and theorist with daytime television mucking up his brain, then perhaps there is hope for me still.

Then again, I have found that the majority of his theory essays are extremely redundant of themselves. Like Law and Order, his ideas have the same format, different and usually interesting examples, but ultimately we know where it ends up. If we are what marathons we watch, do I get to be America's next top model? Or do I just turn into the psycho Tyra Banks?

Well, Good thing for Fish that there is no rule, that I know of, that keeps a person from plagiarizing from their own papers. I guess I am grateful for that, too. I would not have gotten through some horribly procrastinated papers if I didn't steal from my older papers. (If this confession gets me in trouble, I was kidding about that last sentence to make Mr. Fish feel better.)
I actually like his argument for how we should teach against plagiarizing, and his follow up as well.

A book nook, look

I tend to first judge a place by whether or not it would be a good book reading spot. This makes me intrinsically love libraries with ottomans, big windows, and generously sized side tables.
Another lovable place is a bright, preferably vacant, living room, mostly because it is right next to the kitchen and reading while eating is a joy that should always be a priority. I acquired the habit of eating cheeto puffs with a fork while reading The Return of the King. You can't turn a page with orange fingers! It is actually quite a skill; if you don't do it just right the cheeto breaks in half or you end up with a bowl of cheeto dust. Subsequently, I always see hobbits in my mind when I eat cheetos.
I will now repress my urge to further digress. ooh Rhyme!

What I have been craving is my room. A good bedroom has always been my favorite reading place. Being on vacation is wonderful, and the beach is way up there on my favorite reading spots list.  But I like having all my own blankets, my pillow that actually fits me, even just looking up from my book to see my own pictures, hairbrush, or jacket.

This is obviously not my room, but I wish it was. I found it here, which is lovely, but has become a time sucker for me. Of course that doesn't deter me in the slightest.

Anyway, this room is, to me, a perfect reading bedroom. Great window and light, handy shelves, pillows, ceiling fan, chair/ottoman to change it up from the bed that is in its own nook. A nook bed! A book nook bed. Oh, I want a nook bed almost as much as I want a library with a rolly ladder.

I like this one too, but not as much. It is more like a window seat in an office, which is still wonderful. And the window looks like it could easily sneak a boy in to enjoy the window seat with, which is uh, totally not the first thing I thought upon seeing this picture.
So, go find a good nook and read, or you know, something. 
And, none of my nook talk is to be associated with that electronic book nook thing. Real paper all the way, I don't care how many trees I take out with me. It smells so good. And you can't write with pen on a "nook". And if anyone saw you sniffing one, they would commit you.
 Good gracious, I better end now. I'm just a bag full of too many digressions today.

Our heads could do with filling, with some interesting stuff

The School In August

By Philip Larkin 

The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
And locked the classroom door,
The hollow desks are lined with dust,
And slow across the floor
A sunbeam creeps between the chairs
Till the sun shines no more.

Who did their hair before this glass?
Who scratched 'Elaine loves Jill'
One drowsy summer sewing-class
With scissors on the sill?
Who practised this piano
Whose notes are now so still?

Ah, notices are taken down,
And scorebooks stowed away,
And seniors grow tomorrow
From the juniors today,
And even swimming groups can fade,
Games mistresses turn grey.

My house woke up early today. I made lunches while eating breakfast.
It is the first day of school today for Rosie and PJ, the first day of their junior and senior years.

This poem came to my mind yesterday and will not leave me alone today. I can't complain too much, Philip Larkin is most often wonderfully biting. But I must be getting old if this is on my mind. I'm just thinking about how I miss having an exciting and scary first day of school. I miss caring so much, taking the entire week before to plan my outfit.

I miss that bucket of emptiness in my stomach that grew even bigger right before going into each classroom because I didn't know who was in the class with me. I miss it becoming filled with some form of helium if I saw my best friends or a cute boy, or filled with mushy mashed potatoes if there was no one I knew or just that one guy who didn't wash his hair.

I'm nostalgic for newness and exciting change.
But Emy, aren't you still in school? Aren't you going to start a new semester soon? Don't you get to go to new classes every semester and even a new ward every year?
Yes yes and yes.
BUT,
Going to class is not new anymore, going to the singles ward is not new anymore. In other words, I no longer have an empty stomach on the first day of class. It's filled with comfortable fluff. In the last few years the fluff has been slowly filtering in. I mistook it for bravery, courage, even maturity and welcomed it on in. I am braver, I have more courage, I am more mature. But the fluff is different. I now see it for what it really is: complacency. I don't think it has necessarily been all bad for me; I do have to get all my credits and get my degree and that takes some time.
 But the fluff is old.
Grey.

I don't want to get stuck in nostalgia, as too many do when they are at the end of a portion of their life. I cannot forget to allow the good kind of empty space back in.
 I want a chance to be filled with new things again. The exciting helium, the disappointing mashed potatoes, maybe even unpredictable waves, folds of silk, or blue and green pebbles.

Math Time

You must look at this graph to understand what I am going to say next. MmmmK.

My good friend Kevin once told me that the f(x)=1/x graph is a good example of tragic miscommunication.

Sometimes you feel like you are working in the same direction as someone else, but you just miss it, and end up going in opposite directions. You think that things are going to work out, but it doesn't click the way you expected. There is some sort of barrier, an asymptote, that keeps mutual understanding at bay.

I always see this graph in my head now when I don't understand someone, or if I am frustrated while trying to explain something. Damn asymptotes getting in my way of communication.

I also sometimes think about the fact that Kevin said this bit of brilliance seven hours into our road trip from CA at three in the morning.

Now I am thinking about how my friend Tristan was with us on that same trip years ago and is now engaged to be married.

And now I am kind of missing calculus. And the sunglasses I lost on the trip.

Math is a crazy Bih.

Lay and Lie, I love and hate

I was reading Things That Make Us [sic] by Martha Brockenbrough tonight, you know, because I have other homework to do. She talks about how there really is nothing wrong with breaking grammar rules when you do it knowingly and on purpose, like in writing music or poetry for example. However, it is nice when you can sound good and keep the rules so beautifully. I am now in love with so much:

"Consider the example of the Decemberists, a progressive rock band that crafted an album around "The Crane Wife," a Japanese folktale for children. From an artistic standpoint, that idiosyncratic inspiration wallops even the most perfectly curved backside. Then there's this lyric from their song "We Both Go Down Together," which comes from an earlier album titled Picaresque (a distinctive term that means "relating to rogues"):

I found you, a tattooed tramp
A dirty daughter from the labor camps
I laid you down in the grass of a clearing
You wept, but your soul was willing

So not only are they writing literate songs and performing them on an astonishing variety of instruments, they're also using "laid" correctly. They would have earned themselves a hall pass for their fine imagery even if they'd bungled this conjugation, so the care they took to get it right nearly moves us to tears, and then to the position of the official band of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar." (Brockenbrough 235).

Gee wiz I love this so much. I then thought of "Hazards of Love 2" which is also beautiful AND uses "lay" correctly:

I'll lay you down in a clover bed
The stars, a roof above our heads
And we'll lie until the Corn Crake crows
Bereft of the weight of our summer clothes
And I'd wager all
The hazards of love

A set of lyrics that I had already found lovely. I'm just so glad. Please listen to these songs if you haven't, and even if you have.

Anyway, here is the chart I use to help me get it all straight. I never use "lay" and "lie" correctly in speech, but always consult this in writing.

Okay, I'm done with sounding like a pompous ass for now.