Currently Listening O Brother, Where Art Thou? By Various Artists - Soundtrack I'll Fly Away see related

Another night spent trying to clean my room.

Old, hardened acrylic paint picked off the floor in clumps, originally plucked from the circular openings. They went into the garbage, along with papers of scattered numbers or notices from colleges I won’t attend. Clothing folded and put into drawers, or boxes for the Salvation Army. A lone, dirty sock gets thrown into the laundry pile across the hall. No matter how many times I try to clean, there is always more.

I forget why I went downstairs, but I ended up in front of the computer trying to track down accounts of people I know. Of course, I won’t enter the expansive community they’ve already joined. I’d rather stand back from afar, watching, reading about the lives of people whose name is the only thing I know.

Sometimes, it leaves me feeling lonely, sitting around late at night peering into other people’s lives. If I’ve alienated myself, though, it was intentionally and deliberately – a belligerent post on one of my internet accounts comes to mind.

I look at the phone in my lap, a simple blue cell phone with a crack down the middle of the screen to display my high esteem for technology. I want it to ring. I’ve wanted it to ring for a while now.

Because of my laziness, or perhaps because I inwardly realize the pointlessness of my search, I stop at the page of a local band. Screaming and thrashing guitars garnish this page. I know those in the band, but I don’t like their music.

I peruse their space, finding show dates and cryptic comments from strangers. The third song is still as horrible as the first, but I think of going to a show. Though I could make small talk with those I know, I wouldn’t enjoy myself as much as I would enjoy an evening spent at home, listening to familiar songs in the comfort of soft light and incense.

I leave the community, recognizing that nothing is there for me. And again consider the phone in my lap. This ritual of waiting and then answering is a routine by now, just like the quiet weekends. Just like the smile I see and the embrace I feel every Friday, and the yearning every Sunday.

That voice I hear every night, and the love I feel every day. That is why I clutch that phone, mixed feelings of joy and apprehension as I wait continually for another phone call, accepting both emotions as a temporary state that will vanish given enough time and the inevitable change of circumstance. Eventually, the smile, embrace, and voice will become one, every day, and in this night, alone, I think that I will be overtaken with complete serenity when that day comes. My love will be free from the trials of separation, brilliant and unbridled once more, ever-transforming and always ineffable in its overwhelming beauty.

And I know that I am home.

I need to get away from here.

For the past three months I have been in decline, and I don't know how to halt the process. Part of it has been the need for recent adjustments forced upon me by changes in circumstances - but the biggest and hardest change, one that I cannot adjust to, is my motionlessness.

I pondered this as I drove home from school, skipping the German class I abhor so I could work on schoolwork in a blessedly empty house and change into more comfortable clothing. As I drove down main street in Slatington, I landed in traffic behind a small black pickup truck reading "Sonoma" on the back flap. A spare tire was upright in the bed, and man with a straw hat and a striped button-down shirt was hunched over the wheel. Automatically I did not like him.

Thus is the curse of small, rural American towns. Places like this embitter normally good individuals until they are no better than what brought them down in the first place. All around me I see types, the same people over and over walking the same cracked sidewalks of the same sad decrepit towns - people I don't know, people with dazed looks and cheap clothing, ones that look as if they spent their whole lives in that town and I hate them for their ignorance. Now I recall every time I denied my Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, and my grandfather's shirt with a groundhog - Grundsau - saying "If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much" - the all-encompassing Dutchie motto. Just hearing the thick, slurred accent sometimes makes me frustrated.

I do not have disdain just for Dutchies and their offspring, though, but every kid with a lip ring in dark clothing trying to be "emo" or whatever label early adolescents preoccupy themselves with now, every bleach blonde girl covered in makeup and Hollister merchandise and every blank-faced guy in a polo shirt about to rip from the bulging muscles underneath, every person trying to emulate the deep south even though snow fell before Thanksgiving this year. And I am now just as judgemental as those Dutchies and everyone who has said an unfair word against me in the past.

When I started going to the local community college, I thought it would be an exciting change. But as much as I grew academically or personally, I was still imprisoned by this place. The courses I took in literature were broad introductory studies, nothing like the wonderful myriad things shown in university catalogs. Community college was not designed with gifted and ambitious humanities and arts transfer students in mind. I still saw those people, those types from high school. I drove through the same towns I had known since birth. I still live in the same house, in the same room. it's just now my patience wears thin and I have trouble controlling my temper.

This is not me and I know it. I used to have a joi de vivre that I loved, and I want it back desperately. I want to be in control of my emotions again rather than lapse into bad spirits and weeping like a junkie mindlessly handing over money. I want to be good - my soul cries out every day to be good! - but I don't know how in my current state.

I am trapped for the next six to nine months. It is too late for me to apply for spring transfer, so I must endure community college and redundancy for another semester. The only diversions that I do not create myself are found in one friend close enough to visit (one I don't see much because of my workload), or miles away in an equally shabby city. I can barely afford the cost of this transportation, let alone the payment for any entertainment I do find.

Things would be better for me if my Kevin wasn't away at college during the week. Missing him amplifies whatever problems that develop, and he is not immediately here to hold me and console me, and now that summer is gone I do not have the security of knowing I'll see him every evening (since his move we have resorted to phone calls). On top of that, I can't help being jealous sometimes - he got the hell out of here a year early and put himself immediately on the course for a college degree in a new setting.

This is why I must attend a real college as soon as possible and as close to him as possible. I must start working productively towards my dreams rather than pretend I am doing so at this place. I need to put myself in surroundings that are inspiring rather than frustrating, so I can once again feel myself.

I will get away from here.

A Flaw in Feminism

Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” based on a speech she gave in 1928 on women and fiction at the all-female Newnham and Girton colleges, explores feminist topics. Topics covered include the male-created view of women through history, as well as their place in literature compared to their treatment in reality. While Woolf does bring some valid points to light in ways differing from previous discourse written by males, do not believe that she uses a writing style that is solely unique to women.

First of all, it would be helpful to point out that I don’t consider myself feminist at all - I recently told a friend that feminism doesn’t interest me because I have cookies to bake. But I digressed; my problem with feminism belongs in the classroom. I don’t consider the differences between the sexes to be as significant as others see them. I do know from a Child Development course that, mentally, the sexes function differently. It has been proven that men are better with spatial problems (manipulating objects mentally) and women are better with language. Women also have been known to make decisions based on intuition more often than their male counterparts, who try to be rational. However, I believe it is debatable whether or not these differences are innate or socially constructed.

As I read through this selection, I asked myself whether some passages seemed different from past male writings. Some of them seemed to be written in a new style, seeming to support the idea that women are more emotional than fact-based. Woolf uses rhetorical questions quite often, such as in the first paragraph: “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” (1978). Male writers such as Rousseau, Whitman, and Emerson created their arguments through assertion of facts rather than setting forth questions for the audience to ponder.

Additionally, Woolf is more subtle in her comparisons and linking of ideas than male writers seem to be. The narrator of “A Room of One’s Own” simultaneously criticizes men and the man she is sitting next to: “One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man – I looked at the student next me – who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight” (1982). There is no definite subject in the third section of the sentence, which seems like a description of the student and a simultaneous description of all men as weaker creatures than they like to think themselves. She also links two ideas seamlessly in one sentence by saying, “One has certain foolish vanities. It is only human nature, I reflected, and began drawing cart-wheels and circles over the angry professor’s face . . .” (1982). With this sentence, she establishes her thought pattern and her physical manifestation of them, her anger and consequent outburst of destruction.

No matter these differences, I found sections that did not seem distinctly feminine. Woolf constantly references historical and literary figures such as Chaucer and Lady Macbeth (1988), characters and authors whose value is unlocked through intellect and analysis rather than emotional attachment. She also makes statements filled with conviction and fact rather than emotional appeal, such as “Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down” (1993). She also uses logic in her conclusions about the woman’s role in literature and history, allowing for some anger and other emotions but definitely focusing on what she has learned through rational observation.

Also, I doubt that one’s writing style depends on involuntary characteristics such as manhood or womanhood, but a conscious choice to write in a certain way. To use personal examples, my boyfriend, when writing and speaking rhetorically, organizes his ideas in a way similar to the way men traditionally choose to speak and write. This is not because he is male, but because he follows the Greek model, which the vast majority of men have historically chosen – one that women probably would have chosen had they been prominent writers before the 19th century. I myself tend to follow historical models, regardless of my gender or that of the models’ creators, and plenty of female politicians use rhetoric as well as any male politician without gaining the label of “androgynous.” Complementarily, men can write as subtly as women without being emasculated, as twentieth century poetry continually demonstrates. Any kind of significant difference in writing styles among the sexes has been created for that sole purpose.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Sarah Lawall and Maynard Mack. Vol. F. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. 1978-1996.

My reading and social experiences the past few months have convinced me that I am quite a rare breed indeed.

I love learning about Western movements such as Classicism and Romanticism, something that's been supported through the art, music, literature, and history courses I've been taking at college. I exclude World movements from this because I know very little about the East, though I plan to look into it at some point. But when it comes to cultural studies, something of equal, if not greater, interest is tribal cultures - especially those of Eurasia and the Americas. If my high school "education" wouldn't have failed me so miserably in teaching me more about these things (or that they existed - I barely even considered European's tribal roots until Kevin came along and enlightened me, and I never understood all the Western movements until college), I would have soaked up book upon book about these things by now. I'm not very interested in the immediate present, let alone this supposed global village we have, so much as the past and how it's shaped the present.

I even have problems with sociology, psychology, and anthropology, three fields that do interest me. But they're too scientific - and science is imperfect. It's the same body of knowledge that told us 700 years ago that Earth was flat, the center of the universe, and infested with dragons; 200 years ago prescribed bloodletting as a cure for illness. Who's to say that our confidence in science today is justified? We can only look at the world through our human limitations, and unfortunately, one of them is egocentrism. Sociology and psychology originally stemmed from the study of 19th-century European society, the latter tending to focus on males. How do we know it applies to cultures past? We can guess, and a lot of the time it's correct, but there's always some exception, and always some way around it. Mental illness is a wonderful example, especially schizophrenia. There are four main types of it, but there are few people who are positively one type - there are innumerous shades of grey. This applies to the difference between health and illness, too. A lot of cultures encourage hallucinations (Native American vision quests, for example, and the numerous tribes whose shamans regularly go into trance) but Western ones usually think they're wrong to have.

Yes, I know I sound like a college student regurgitating everything in my notebooks, and maybe to a degree I am. However, I realize (as I showed before with my critique of science) that what we think we know about the world is far from imperfect. I know that politically, education tends to teach leftist views, and sociology was certainly the most liberal-based course I've taken (politically, I consider myself somewhere between Moderate and Apathetic, by the way). Tolerance is a wonderful thing, it is, but sometimes we perpetuate things by making too big of a deal out of them. I don't care about diversity in college, the ratio of white students to minority students, or women's studies or Latino studies. We use reverse discrimination to solve the problems of racism, justifying the legality of all-black colleges and the illegality of all-white colleges, as being a form of reparation for things our ancestors did 150 years ago. And maybe they'll be telling us in ten years to go out of our way to marry somebody of a different ethnicity. If we didn't make such a big deal out of it, it would cease to be a problem.

Everybody's going to be a little biased, a little racist. I avoid people who don't use proper English and wear those stupid hats barely on top of their heads, and I judge people without getting to know them personally, but if I'm in a situation where I have to speak with them I treat them with as much civility as I would anyone else. It's ingrained in human nature to judge, and it's absurd to think we can remove all our preconceptions and get to know everybody, or have only positive preconceptions first. There are some people with very little positive aspects - it's just another example of all the shades of grey that compose our world. The world "ethnocentrism" is overused, and as for "globalization," indigenous people in Siberia and Libya have nowhere near as much access to telephones and internet as the West. The people I speak with on the internet are vastly local or in the U.S. or Canada, excluding a Slovenian and the occasional Brit.

I don't care about globalization. I don't care about diversity, which is synonymous with skin color and geography these days, rather than our hopes and aspirations. I'll cite LaSalle University of Philadelphia. Their mission statement, instead of making a big deal of "diversity," focuses more on holistic development of the student. They realize that yes, we all come from different backgrounds and have different ideas, but they are regardless of race, and everyone shares a common human nature. Sometimes, it seems we get so caught up in catering to everyone that we forget we are all essentially the same.

This scenic route leads to a point: I differ from this horrible Post-Modern age. I don't fit into any of its conventions. I like poetry, but I think Bukowski is a redundant cynic who, as far as I have seen, has contributed little to poetry except creating a persona that social "deviants" think is cool. It all reads the same, and he teaches nothing that we don't already know. Simultaneously, I think William Cullen Bryant is atrocious. I consider myself a romantic, but I have nothing but contempt for Nicholas Sparks.

I criticize things whose other separate aspects I will readily embrace as my own. I don't like elitists - and I think I'm a better person than them because I know my virtues are true and I don't feel the need to precariously exaggerate them as a way of making others looks lower than me. I don't cover up my beauty with powder or bangles, but show it the opposite way by spending as little time as possible on appearances - thus highlighting my connection to Nature, which I totally believe is among the most beautiful things we can experience. I want to go to college to further myself as a human being - not just educationally, but spiritually and philosophically. Getting a job is far from the main reason I want to go, though it's a nice addition. Speaking of jobs, the one I want has nothing to do with money, or availability, nothing at all to do with business or software or computers or human resources and customer service.

I want, ultimately, to teach and to inspire through my teachings - to make people see things differently, and help them learn something about the world and about themselves. I want to show them beauty, and the possibilities of what this world could be. I tentatively plan to do it in conventional ways, through published writings and hopefully a position at some kind of institution, the same manner that people have been taking since the days of Socrates.

I'll add as a conclusion that feel absolutely blessed to have found somebody with similar goals, somebody for whom I have the deepest respect, understanding, and love. The companion I sought for years and found earlier than I ever imagined. Somebody who is a constant inspiration, source of strength, and who I feel is destined for greatness. Hopefully, he and I will attain it together.

After a wonderful conversation with Kevin reminding me of how he's bettered me, and after typing up a supportive post for Michelle citing "The Epiphany," I realized something.

I think I've just found themes for my tales.

'The Epiphany," though horribly tragic, has a theme of overcoming psychological barriers (in more ways than one, now that I'm thinking about it). For years, my content and themes would be morbid - death, destruction, frustration in some. Rather dark, and though I do like dark things, I don't want to write dark things. I've changed so much in just the past year and a half, and part of my changing is realizing that I want to inspire people through my expressions, i.e., my art and my poetry and my stories. The first product in this new mode of thought is "An Afternoon at School," in which I tell a child's storybooklike tale of a windy wintry day. In creative writing a few months before, I did a wonderful PowerPoint presentation with the same concept - the images were dark, but not morbid, and the tone of the story was exactly how I want to write - omniscient, neutral... but also with an underlying joie de vivre. At least, now that I do feel joie de vivre.

So though I will continue to have some dark stories, I must (and this is something I've been considering for a while, I just never put it into words) add some positive into it, or at least strive for an overall neutral tone. And my new endeavours? They can have an uplifting tone without being a Mitch Albom novel.

That's how I want to draw. That's how I want to write and compose. I've finally figured it out.

EDIT: For anyone that reads this and hasn't figured it out, the name "Oh Ambivalence" is meant to be a paradox. I like neutrality and knowing that I know nothing [Socrates reference], and in a sense I then strive for and praise it.