Politics and me

I don't figure that I'm going to go into a listing of all my political beliefs and theories here, but I just took a long Political survey (Political Survey) and wanted to share the results on my blog.

This is my sort of Political Compass type thing...on the actual Political Compass website, my left-right position is similar but the Y-axis is Authoritarian-Libertarian instead of Pragmatism-Idealism. So there's a bit of a difference there.

I'm in the Libertarian Left quadrant. Good ol' lefty liberal, that's me! I'm just too attached to all those bothersome notions of, y'know, peace and freedom and brotherhood and equality and so on....

Peace out!

Lovely last weekend!

Here I am hanging out at the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Savannah, GA. I was there with my boyfriend and his family, and we got to walk in the parade because his dad is somehow related to someone on the Parade Committee....yeah that's how it works.

You know how people like to say all these nice romantic things about taking long walks on the beach with the person they love, or staying out late to lie on their backs and gaze at the stars? But then they never actually DO those things?

Well, I've done them. I'd love to say that I wish I could make it a habit, but there's no way it could be a habit because we live six hours from the nearest beach and near a major metropolitan area, so the stars are kinda...eh. Not to mention the man I love and I live about 45 minutes away from each other.

But I have to say, it really is something to lie out on the beach and gaze at the stars, lying next to your beloved. You should really try it sometime. PLEASE. Make some room in your busy schedule, grab your spouse/loved one, and haul ass over to a beach (don't forget the towels/blanket!). Try to go for one that's not quite so commercial, maybe more residential...that way there's fewer people and lights. It's breathtakingly gorgeous, and amazingly surreal.

Concerning...Myself?

I know I only post every once in a while, and probably don't have any regular readers (yet...), but I figured that it's probably time to give a little preview/profile of myself...for those of you who are simply DYING to know. I think I'm going to adopt Tink's style for this post (Tink from the Pickled Beef blog)

...I'm still having a little trouble with the hyperlink thing. It wouldn't turn off when I wanted it to, so I had to make a new paragraph. Geez, blogs are hard! ;) But I meant that I would adopt the "numbered list" style just to give some extra information about myself to those wonderful people sitting stunned at their computers, overcome with curiosity. (You exist, right?)

Anyway...here goes....

1. My name is....wouldn't you like to know? ^_^ For the purposes of blogging, I might go by Faran or some other made-up name. It'll be clear that it's me, though. My real name is extremely common, and EVERYONE knows at least 3 people with the name (though they're mostly young...it only got really popular right in the year that I was born).
2. Right now, I live in GA, U.S.A. I might end up attending college out of that state, and believe me, when I make my choice (still have yet to receive acceptances from my major schools!! ARRGH! IT'S MARCH!!), I will let everyone know. Loudly.
3. Georgia has amazing weather at the moment. It's right at that time of year where the weather outside is just perfect. Unfortunately, it's not even spring yet, and spring lasts about two weeks. So the climate will become the usual Unbearable Summer That Lasts Until The End of September in about the second week of April. Which sucks.
4. I'm a senior in high school, in 3 difficult AP courses, an advanced acting class, and two pretty worthless classes. I'm a drama nerd, and a science nerd (nice combination, no?), and fairly proud to proclaim my status as a nerd.
5. I have different music tastes from most of my classmates--where they like indie, punk, pop, or rock, I have a distinct taste for Broadway musicals and the soundtracks of movies. Sure, I like some alternative rock occasionally, but fully half of my CD collection is Broadway. I'm also a fan of certain comedians (Eddie Izzard WINS), and have some musical comedy CDs in my collection as well.
6. I'm an absolutely WRETCHED procrastinator. Last night I was up until 3 am, having spent the whole day doing homework for my AP Environmental Science class, and two major projects for my AP European History class (which is the one I regret taking this year, because it's SO MUCH work!!). I could have gotten them done earlier...if I hadn't spent the first two days of the three-day weekend doing other stuff.
7. I have a wonderful circle of friends who are very supportive, and very strange. I don't really have a best friend, but if I did, it would be a guy I'll call MH. We practically have our own language and system of interactions, which most people regard very strangely when they witness it.
8. I have an absolutely wonderful boyfriend I'll refer to as JR. We have been dating for almost a year (our anniversary is April 6), and the story of how we met is like something from a movie. I won't get into it, but I'll just say that we met on a Caribbean cruise...and things have simply just worked out since then. We have a lot of differences (political, etc.), but we both have so much of a will to work things out between us that they have never caused much of a rift. We have similar senses of humor, and talk about a lot of nerdy stuff. It rocks ^_^
9. My family ancestry, although we've been American for generations and generations, is almost entirely of Scottish and English extraction. This might explain my peculiar affinity for bagpipe music and English literature. Or else I'm just weird.
10. I have a very strong personal connection to many works of fiction in specific genres, for a variety of reasons. A combination of personal experiences and study has led me to have a fierce loyalty to specific stories and understandings of the universe that are connected to particular writings of certain authors and my own developed theories of the universe. ....Not that that made much sense, but I guess it would suffice to include that I'm just a wee tad more special than most teens who seem like me, and that my fierce defense of certain books and ideas and experiences comes from deep personal connections.
11. Now I'm just fooling you. There are no more things for me to write, really.
12. Except this one.
13. And this one.
14. I'm just wasting your time now.

So...there you have it. Just a little bit about me, and not that much to go on, but it's more than you had before. And all credit goes to Tink of the Pickled Beef blog (found in my blogroll) for the numbered-list design. I did NOT come up with that myself!

Thanks for reading, if you did. Maybe I'll get back to actually thinking (*gasp* I do that?) in the next post I make.

Per aspera ad astra

I'm experimenting with a different font. For the sake of it. Better to change something small and be able to deal with it than lose control of a big change, right?

I've been ignoring my blog for a little too long, mostly thanks due to the swamp of schoolwork that has accompanied the...I believe it's 6? absences that I have accrued in going to different colleges in order to interview for large amounts of scholarship money. I enjoyed several of the trips (four different colleges extended invitations), but I wish there was less work to make up! *sigh* The curse of being a second semester senior...anything more than a minimal amount seems overwhelming. Can't wait to see how shocked I'll be once I get to college.

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Once in a while, we all come across something that really resounds with us, no matter how obscure or incomprehensible, simple or mundane. It might be a book, a work of art, a musical symphony, or a scholarly article. Maybe it's just the view from a mountainside or a glance passed in the street. Something calls to a higher consciousness and makes us want to expand past the walls of our minds (excuse me while I make the abstract a little oversimplified). I came across a reference in a scholarly article our AP Literature class had to read as part of our unit studying Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The article is by Professer Severyn T. Bruyn, and is called "Art and Aesthetics in Action." I believe it can be found online at http://www2.bc.edu/~bruyn/Theoretical.html

I was particularly touched by a quote he uses from Gopi Krishna, founder of the Research Institute for Kundalini at Nishat in Kashmir. It reads:

"Suddenly, with a roar like that of a waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid gold entering my brain through the spinal cord. The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder...I [became] a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed in light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe."

I have felt this. This resounds with me. Anyone?

It makes me want to follow the title I used--Through adversity, to the stars.

Looking Up

So, it's been a while since I've updated. I thought when I first got this blog that I would update every day, but life continues to get in the way.

Not that I mind! My life has several recurring perks that I am quite enjoying at the moment, so I am not really complaining. I have a great boyfriend (who gave me jewelry for Valentine's Day! What could be better than that?) and we're doing quite well. We're at just over 10 months now, and still going strong...it's the longest relationship I've been in yet, and I'm going to be very excited when we reach 1 year in April. This picture is of us, in May 2006. for my junior prom. It's a bad picture, but I don't have the latest photos of us from New Year's up on my computer yet and I'm being lazy.

I'm doing well in school, although it's not that interesting to me anymore. That may also be attributed to my situation as a Second Semester Senior, to whom high school is now something that I'm just working on until the college of my dreams accepts me and offers me mucho dinero to go there because I'm such a fabulous and amazing student. (No, really.) I'm not that arrogant. But I do desperately need a merit scholarship to go pretty much anywhere out of state, or to any private school (which 8 out of 10 places I've applied to are). Which is why I have to go to no less than THREE separate scholarship interview weekends this month. This weekend, next weekend, and three days in the middle of the week of the week after that. What college has a scholarship interview invitational on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday? It's ridiculous!! I both enjoy missing school and don't...considering there's work I'll have to make up. But hey, I won't be in school! So, things are looking up a bit.

I guess the only drawback to taking 3 APs is the homework. And that's not so bad, except for the part where I get less than 6 hours of sleep a night, and more regularly only about 4.5 to 5 hours. So that part's a little unfortunate, but I try to remedy it each weekend. I'm not necessarily sure if that's as healthy, but it's the best I can do. And I know it is only going to get worse this semester. Then I should have a full summer to laze about and do interesting things, before heading off to college. Hooray for upcoming life-changing experiences!

Down with the Sickness!

Okay, so I'm not intending to copy off the name of a song and album title from the metal band Disturbed (which I used to like, but isn't really my thing anymore), but I figured that those four words carry the best description of my feelings right now.

I am sick. Sick as a dog. Better yet, I've been to the doctor and we pretty much only know that it is NOT pneumonia (small comfort, eh?). I'm feverish off and on, feeling weak and aching all the time, and I have a runny nose. That's leaving out my principal complaint--the coughing. Not a light, delicate little ladylike cough. I mean, a deep, chest-congestion, holy-crap-I'm-hacking-my-lungs-out cough. I can't take a deep breath or try to laugh without sounding like my trachea and lungs are trying to force themselves out of my mouth. Did I mention that it's distinctly unpleasant? (Understatement of the century...)

So now I'm on amoxicillin...not that it'll help much, but whatever. Maybe, psychosomatically, my illness will go, "Oh no! An antibiotic! Not that! Eeeuuuuuuuurgh!" And shrivel up and die. Which is exactly what it needs to do. There is no reason I should feel this crappy during a month as busy as this one. I hate it when my body betrays me, right when I'm depending on it to be in its usual state.

I decided to take this small break from being ill to put down a few thoughts about our bodies and minds. Has anyone else ever felt that their body was too confining, too limiting, and that there's some essential energy within that just wants to break free and be immaterial? I feel like my body is grossly inadequate for everything my internal spirit wants to do, like fly. At the same time, many people say that the brain is the key for everything, and I recognize that, but is the brain nothing more than a manifestation of the mind in reality? I strongly believe that the mind is an immaterial thing, that happens to inhabit a body while on the material plane. Still, I can't help but wonder if we honestly need the brain to have a mind--and what ramifications this has for what happens after death? We're so limited to what we can perceive through our senses and our brains...there ought to be more.

To conclude, I like my mind. A lot. But I hate my body, because it never cooperates. Blargh! Please, pray with me that I'll get better...this is very painful and unpleasant, and I'm doing everything I can to make it go away (because I have better things to do with my time than be sick!). Don't feel like you have to pray, though...it's just an impassioned request. Anyway, I hope you, whoever you are, are well. I don't wish this illness on anyone.

So-Called Productivity

It might help to establish that I am writing this post while at school. I'm in a class where I spend time as a sort of teaching aide, helping out the teacher with the minimal work (the bitchwork) and the students as well--students who are in my own grade! I might add that I elected to take this class, and I am not getting paid for my time.

While I'm not complaining about a class which doesn't require any real homework or time spent out of class, I thought I might take a moment while in school to ponder about the state of our public school system. I try to keep politics out of this blog as much as possible, and I really don't know politically how I'm supposed to stand on this question, so don't accuse me of being one way or the other here.

I have seen the educational system both fail and succeed, from experience and from hearsay. My elementary school in West Virginia had wretched computers with outdated programs on which I excelled--I had completed the entirety of the 5th grade curriculum programs when I was barely halfway through 4th grade! When I moved to Georgia, I moved into a much more affluent area by comparison, and my elementary school showed it--much bigger, shinier, with new and fast computers. And I can't help but think, weren't these kids in my new elementary school getting a better quality of education than the ones in my old one? Not that computer quality necessarily dictates educational quality! I might say that the quality of the teachers in my old elementary school was far superior to that of the ones in the new. In my high school (which I will be SO glad to be leaving soon--just a few months!), there's an interesting mix of great equipment and crappy, ancient equipment, and fantastic teachers and really horrible teachers. However, I've visited the southern portion of my county, which is far less affluent, and the schools there are overcrowded, underfunded, and full of kids who are just falling through the cracks. Does anyone really deserve this? In our country, where having a job that makes adequate amounts of money basically requires education, is it fair to get students off to a bad start? I'm not even talking about college here--it's what comes before college that affects students more, in my opinion.

I have been hearing a lot recently about proposals for vouchers for the parents of children in poorly-performing schools to send them to private schools. While I can see where these people are coming from, I'm not sure I agree, because private schools have the ability to determine their own curricula and do not necessarily have to comply with what public schools have to teach. Sending a child to a private school on the taxpayer's check means the state supports what the child is learning, and if the child is learning something directly contradicting the curricula established by the state, i.e. creation science as opposed to evolution, that is considered the state's tacit approval of what is being taught, is it not? And what about the doctrination of students in the religion of the private school? I am a spiritual person--perhaps in some blog post I'll be able to expound my spiritual views and ideas about God and the universe--but I don't think the state should be supporting religious education. It makes me extremely uncomfortable because religious issues are for the religious organizations and the individuals...not the government. I love my spiritual beliefs, but I don't want anyone teaching them in a school run by the government and the taxpayers' money. They're between me and God. Does this view make me drastically different from anyone else?

Anyway, I have simply no idea how people should even begin to approach the inequality between schools in different areas. One side starts accusing the other of discrimination, and then there's yelling about "just throwing money at" the problem, and all the while I'm just wanting to remind people that there are young livelihoods at stake. Go work at a school and volunteer with the kids--and not in the rich, stuck-up neighborhoods. I mean, take a look at how the rest of the population lives. I've mentored kids in a school that was in a really bad neighborhood, and there was so much that they had been lacking. It was very saddening. If you are a smart person with the time, please consider devoting yourself to helping a student at a disadvantaged school. I've been lucky. But I know there are thousands of students who have not been.

The Lighter Side of Rejection

This afternoon I have experienced my first taste of rejection in this whole Let's Get Into College process. I wasn't rejected from the college; instead, from a very prestigious scholarship program within the college that would have taken care of all the costs the HOPE wouldn't have covered (the HOPE covers tuition only, not room/board/fees/books). I was offered a lesser scholarship that doesn't come with any of the prestige or nice travel offerings that are found in the prestigious one. Not much of a consolation prize, though, in comparison.

I was a little shocked, though, to be truthful; I have an academic average of over 100, I'm ranked 5th in my class of 365, and I have only one B on my otherwise all-A transcript--and it's an 89. (In a freshman drama class, for crying out loud!) My mom helped me write excellent essays and I asked a teacher and a friend who think very highly of me to write my recommendations. I have a huge list of summer activities, community service projects, and awards to my name. What more could they want??

I'm not going to waste time wondering about that, though. When I first read the letter about receiving the Charter Scholarship instead of the Foundation Fellows, I was shocked, but not quite appalled and not upset enough to cry or anything like that. I read that only 73 out of over 800 applicants could be offered the Ramsey, much less the Foundation Fellows! That makes me feel a little better, but all the same...

You might say that I've been used to high academic achievement and the receipt of accolades for this achievement my entire life. I've never been on anything but the Super Honor Roll, I always get the Legion of Scholars award at the end of the year, and I've been offered so many great things--including this nice position I'm in as a National Merit Semifinalist, soon Finalist hopefully--as a result of all my good grades, high test scores, and hard work. But for one of the first times of my life, something/someone decided I wasn't good enough. This is new, and different, for me. I'm going to use it as an opportunity for growth.

When something is a disappointment for you, there are feelings of shock, shame, confusion, and wondering. It is unhealthy, however, to dwell on what could possibly have gone wrong. I refuse to waste time wondering just what aspect of my application made me less qualified than someone else to be part of the Foundation Fellows. I have other things to do, and other scholarship invitations from other universities! Sometimes things in life just don't make sense, and while I'm all for expressing how you feel, eventually there's a point when you accept that rejection or that disappointment, and use it to help you get on with your life. I refuse to be troubled for more than a day about this, and will be marching on again very soon. (And on the lighter side, I hadn't really wanted to go to UGA anyway, so now I have all the more of a reason NOT to, and to go somewhere out of state instead! Happy day! ^_^)

Let the feeling overtake you...

It has recently occurred to me that culture and society seem to place too much emphasis on delicacy and restraint of one's emotions, especially in public. Our entire lives we face a dichotomy of attitudes with regards to how we feel--"Let it out," "It's a shame to have a tantrum," "Tell me how you feel," "That's too much information," and of course, the ever-popular "Express yourself!"

Why do we support the full expression of one's emotions, but never in a way that might make someone else uncomfortable? Is it because we are all too self-obsessed to want to see deeply into someone else's heart if we don't know them? --Or even if we do know them? All my life I've been in situations where someone who is crying or vehemently angry or upset is sent away, told to wash their face, put out of sight and mind until they have restored their emotional balance. Only then can they be re-admitted to our supposedly polite society. Is this practice really necessary? Are we all so disturbed by someone who is crying that we cannot accept their presence without trying to make them stop crying? Why is so much effort placed on trying to stop negative expressions like crying or shouting? You know that the alternative is to keep things bottled up, stifled, locked away in some secret storm-chamber of the heart until it will all burst at some point. Everyone does this, and we all KNOW it's unhealthy! Why do we continue to support it?

There is nothing inherently permanently emotionally damaging about crying after a major disappointment or injury (physical or mental). Retaining all your disappointment and sorrow is what is damaging. I know what it's like to cram as much unhappiness as humanly possible into the abandoned back corners of your mind. It isn't pretty. It festers and grows, taking over other parts of your life, until everything around you can swirl with negativity. I honestly think that this over-emphasis on total restraint and calmness, especially among others, is at least partly responsible for all these people with depression. I can only imagine how much worse things must have been in the even more repressed Victorian era. No wonder they drank those "cordials" all the time.

Calmness is an illusion. Restraint is a figment of the collective imagination of society. We are truly emotional beings; why should we spend so much time denying that? I challenge every person who is reading this to go a day wearing your heart on your sleeve. Don't deny your impulse to tell the person you love that you love them! If your heart is aching because something bad has happened, let yourself be troubled for once. It's very possible to let your feelings out without it interfering with your productivity or whatever else you might be concerned with. There are logical limits to things, but the restraint shoved on us by the people around us is artificial and less than your logical limit. Hug your child. Cry when your heart tells you to cry. Let someone KNOW when you're upset. It'll do everyone a lot more good than keeping it all stifled inside.

Oh, and sorry, but I figured that to increase the number of people getting my messages, I need to increase the traffic on my site, so I'm succumbing to the need to link to something that will get me more traffic. http://bestestblogofalltime.blogspot.com
I'm sorry, but it was the only way I could think of. I'll try not to do this too often.

Achievements and Regrets

Let me first establish that my mother is a very strong and brilliant person, and I love her dearly (though I have never been able to vocalize that fact without crying). She certainly has her flaws, mainly with impatience, anger, and unwillingness to put up with temporary emotional indulgence. However, she is still my mother, and regardless of what she says or does, I will never want her to be anything other than that, and bear her no ill-will.

That said, she recently put me in a position which I am not sure any child deserves to be in...namely, the unspeaking audience of a confession which can be nothing but awkward and upsetting for me.

My mother has gone to great lengths to do things for me, and I am unbelievably grateful for how much she has done to raise me well and get me what I needed. She holds 3 degrees--a bachelor's, master's, AND Ph.D., all in English. However, her student teaching was very brief, because as far as I know, she never wanted to teach. She married my father as a graduate student and for 12 years they established a life together before they ever had my sister, and then I was born 4 years later. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for a good deal of my life, and only in the past several years has she taken up substitute teaching and then work as a tax specialist at H&R Block. I've never complained through any of this, as I think it has been nice to have a very accessible parent who was available when I needed her and not ever stressed about some kind of office deal or whatnot.

But... the other day as she drove me home from where the bus drops me off, she just kind of stopped talking and was silent for a while. Then she burst out about how she has three advanced degrees, and all this intellectual potential, and she has been spending her time raising daughters, fixing up houses, and finding the best prices for things like carrots and cat food. She talked about how there was so much that she gave up because of me and my sister, and how tired she gets of all the little things. ....So what am I to do with all this? There was nothing I could say--what could I have said?
"Sorry I ruined your life, Mom. It's a little hard to stop existing at this point."
"What did I have to do with any of that? "
"Why are you telling me? What do you want me to DO about it?"

Exactly. There is nothing I can do about the dreams my mother abandoned to become a stay-at-home mom. I see this kind of regret from people every day--from my bus drivers who are mind-numbingly bored with life, to my teachers who see their hopes dying a little more each day that they have to deal with irritating teenagers, to my own mother. And all I have to say is.....WAKE UP! This is my message to the world...

Find something in your dreams that you can achieve, and then actually DO it! How much time can you waste doing something you hate? FIND A WAY. Write the novel. Find the time and money to make the trip to Rome, or Finland, or China, and then GO. Sing your heart out to someone, somewhere. Just stop letting all your little dreams fester and die in your own heart and regretting everything you've never done! Life is tenuous, at best....at any moment, you could die. Everyone knows this, but how many of them actually practice it in their lives? If you know that you'd regret not doing something if you died in a year's time, find a way and DO it, and grow and live and prosper from it. Sometime in the next few months, I'm going to find a way to tell my boyfriend that I love him and also confess my love to a classmate whom I've secretly loved almost since the day I met him, but in a very platonic way. (Yes, you can love two people at once; don't knock it until it has happened to you.) If you don't feel like you're really living....DEFINE what you think is "living" and then LIVE it! Achieve the things you want and can achieve! Don't let yourself get sucked into the cycle of "if only I could have done this" and "I've always wanted to do that". That's almost all that the old people in nursing homes talk about, what they didn't achieve. Don't be one of them. My mother already is. But you don't have to be.

Does the world need yet another blog?

Apparently, it does.

Hi, I'm another 17-year-old who suffers delusions of adequacy in this unfathomably large universe. You probably were one once, and if you weren't....well, you will be. Maybe not the 17 years old part. But there's no denying that hopefully every intelligent person on this Earth will enter a period where it feels as though the walls of their mind have been pushed beyond the cramped box of everyday life and they truly realize that this universe is big. Really, really big. Bigger than the biggest thing you could ever possibly imagine. And here I am, 5 feet 8 inches and about 140-something pounds, thinking I'm significant?

I might add that I am going to particularly avoid sounding like an emo idiot in my blog, but that in certain circumstances it is going to be difficult to avoid. My life is far from conventional and has for some time resembled one of those peculiar suspense-fantasy films where hardly anything makes sense and the meaning of events is only clear long after they have occurred. Nevertheless, I am still a teenager, a senior in high school, with friends, a boyfriend, parents, and a life in suburban America. And it may be thus concluded that I will, on occasion, blog about them. But I shall make every attempt to spare the details of my life from exposure that will make me sound like some normal, non-thinking American teenager.

So why do I need to open another blog, and waste your valuable time? For some time I have wanted to find a place to share my feelings of unreality in a world hopelessly caught up with simple things, where I see people perfectly happy to think whatever they are told to think, and where other people are monstrously unhappy because of the circumstances life threw them into. I hope to present myself as someone who has always had feelings of needing something more than a life that deals with the existing world--more than college, graduate school, a job, a house, working life, marriage, kids, retirement, and death. I need more. Everyone probably does, but who truly achieves it? I don't mean more in the sense of being famous, or becoming some kind of wandering hermit. I need more, in the sense that I need to smell the air when the evening light suffuses it with meaning, and I need to dance between the raindrops, and sit and commune with the spirit of the mountain stream while the air sparkles around me.

As Blanche DuBois might say, "I don't want realism, I want magic!" Except without all the delusional-sex-maniac overtones and implications of ignorance that Tennessee Williams intended.

So yes, expect me to occasionally sound like I'm insane or some kind of freak. Expect both the mundane and the strange from me...you'd be a fool to expect anything less. I expect I'll occasionally hit on some interesting truths, occasionally bore people, and occasionally confuse them, and many other things. I'm looking forward to at least finally having a place to put my thoughts when I'm avoiding doing schoolwork (as I am now).

Above all, welcome to my blog!