A Year: 2012

In years past, I’ve made an effort to make one last post each December that recounts some of the achievements, discoveries, and challenges of the year before.  This usually comes out as a long post that is filled with bullets that I doubt anyone cares to read, so this year, I’ll be writing a shorter one that really gets to the point.

So, what happened in 2012?

• I started RPing on tumblr in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom, which meant that I made some absolutely amazing friends and improved my writing of fiction immensely.  I’ll admit that starting to RP seemed like a giant waste of time.  Sure, I was having fun, but I kept wondering what else I could be doing.  I grew worried that I had gotten into something unhealthy, but it ended up working out.  I took breaks when I needed them, went on hiatuses but kept up social contact with the friends that I had made.  I sent baked goods and Christmas cards to the friends that I had made, added them on Facebook, spent hours on Skype laughing and crying with them.  I can’t regret any moment of time, as it was never time wasted.
• I had my first boy-friend, and I broke up with my first boy-friend.  It wasn’t working out.  We’re still friends.
• I came out as being somewhere on the asexual spectrum.  There are days when I don’t know if it’s asexuality or greysexuality or demisexuality, when I look at something and just think it’s whatthefuckIdon’tevenknow-sexuality.  It’s strange, and even after a year of thinking about it, I don’t know exactly where I am.
• Life moved on after Grandma’s death, as it does after any death.  We miss her, of course.  But I promised her that I’d keep living and thriving and loving.
• I got really sick in March until June with mono.  The mono brought out full symptoms of POTS, which is a secondary illness branching off from having EDS.  I never fully recovered, and I don’t expect to.  Instead, I’ve been learning how to adapt to the life that I now lead.  This has led to many things: diet changes, decisions about delaying grad school for a year, taking life slower, working less over the summer, and knowing my limits so that I don’t push them.
• I’ve been finishing off the last courses of my psychology major and printmaking minor.  I’m going to miss them terribly–especially art and all of the friends that I’ve made through the art department.
• I got to see Chris Thile in concert with the Punch Brothers, and I gave him a hug after the concert.  This was a legitimate bullet point on my bucket list that I could cross off.  Do remember that I’ve been obsessed with this guy’s music since he was in Nickel Creek and I first heard their music TWELVE YEARS AGO.
• I went to Florida over the summer and visited with my dad, brother, both sisters, and their families.  It was a pretty good time, and I wish that I could see them more often.
• Last, and most importantly, I met Alexander this year.  Words cannot fully describe what this means, and I won’t try too terribly to explain them, either.  Just know that I’ve never loved someone so much in my life and that this is a seriously big deal.  I expect him to be in my life for a very long time, and I’m his as long as he’s mine.

So there you have it: a year in review.  This is about as short as I can make it, but I think that it covers some highlights.  Enjoy; though this list is really more for me than anyone else.  All of my writing is, really.

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Things Change

We already know this as humans that things change.  Everything changes.  Sometimes it’s gradual and occurs so slowly that one day you open your eyes and feel your breath catch at the sight before you.  Other times, it’s so quick that no matter how many times you look at the change, over and over again, you can’t bring yourself to fully understand how much it’s not the same.

Summers are like that.  Each summer has its own flavour and its own unique changes that make it what it will be in your memories.  You sort through each of these archetypes that you have built and ask yourself what each summer is and how they changed from one to another.  Did you adventure on the train to Kansas and Colorado?  Did you go to nerd camp and Kansas City?  Did you leave on a whirlwind trip that took you half of the way across the world and challenge every preconceived notion that you had of another country?  What did you learn in that summer when you stayed home reading 500,000 words of fanfiction and planning a zombie-themed dance?  And what did you learn when you got your first summer job and spent two weeks trying to hide?  Or when you realised that it would be the last summer with her and last cruise and last anything?

This summer is met that flow.  It’s a question of what I’ve learned and what has changed.  Between friends being more or less scattered because of university, to the family dynamic completely changing from Grandma’s death.  From feeling more grounded in Saint Charles due to my job and having broken up with my boy-friend (and here I didn’t even tell you that story, and it has already ended).  There’s a natural progression that is both frightening and welcome because it is the meaning of what it is to live.

Living can be difficult.  Feeling can be difficult.  Waking up in the mornings to a task you don’t want to do can be difficult.  Taking pills, testing your heart, doctors visits.  They can drain you slowly, but they can’t slow down what a summer can do to the body.  How much more alive I, personally, can feel from the rest. I can feel the change, feel my joints go out of socket less and need less sleep.  Slow moving, but there.

It’s strange how I forget about this place.  I forget that I can write here because I’m so busy writing on tumblr.  Granted, it’s not personal writing but fiction, but nonetheless, I’ve become amazed at how much I’ve written in the past few months.  Thousands upon thousands of words with some truly amazing people. And there were some questions upon writing yesterday that reminded me of this.  Reminded me of Germany and the Roessles und die perfekte Welle und der perfekte Tag.  All of it came rushing about again, which brings back all of those memories that, if you’ve read anything here, you know that I still hold dear.  Scarcely a post goes by that I don’t at least briefly mention Germany. 

Things change.  They truly do.  But some things stay fairly static inside of their change.  And maybe that’s Germany.  Maybe that’s what it is to remember and hold on to something so tightly.

Das ist die perfekte Welle
Das ist der perfekte Tag
Lass dich einfach von ihr Tragen
Denk am besten gar nicht nach
Ich bin hier
Ich bin frei

–Perfekte Welle, Juli

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House of Tom Bombadil

Did I tell you all that I lost fifteen percent of my body weight last semester within three months?  Did I forget about that?  No…  No, I briefly mentioned losing weight, but I didn’t mention how much.  Twenty two pounds.  That’s how much.

You know, when I tell people about this, it doesn’t matter how negative my tone is or how upset I look–they congratulate me.  When I explain that it was stress and Ehlers Danlos Syndrome related, they still congratulate me.  When I say that I have never felt more weak and more tired in my life, that I’m blacking out more and not able to finish what I need to for uni, they keep on congratulating me.

There’s a major problem when health is pushed aside in favour of lost weight.  My weight has become more important and worthy than my own wellness, and it sickens me that shape is valued over substance.  I’m chronically ill with EDS, most likely POTS (I’m getting tested this summer), and now mono for the past two months.  I just can’t get well, and I’m dropping weight again, even though I’m already right at the line of having an underweight BMI.  And yet, I’ve never been told more in the past few months just how good I look.

I feel like I’m dying.  I need to be sleeping over twelve hours per day.  I am dizzy.  Tired.  Weak.  In pain.  Scared.  And I’m told that I look beautiful.  It doesn’t make any sense at all.

I guess that all I’m trying to say is that, you can compliment my looks all you please, but if I tell you that I am unhappy about losing weight because I’m slowly succumbing to some terrible diseases, please don’t tell me that my looks are more important.  I would gain back all of that weight and be pudgy again if it meant that I felt well.  I’d gain even more to feel like I wasn’t some elderly folk inside of a twenty year-old’s body.

Sorry.

I’ve spent a lot of the past month spiralling into another depression from health.  It’s caused me to re-evaluate a lot of my life, change future plans, and start doing some things for me.  I’m tired and upset and causing permanent damage to my body, so I’m taking a year off after I graduate from uni so that I can get an internship and then travel before starting grad school.  I’ve dropped tumblr recently since I think that an hiatus will help me focus more on my health and course work.  I’ve stopped trying in some of my classes. I haven’t turned in online French homework in a month, and I don’t even care any more.  I’ll have to find some time this week to finish it amongst all of the other things, but I just…  I don’t fucking care.  There’s so much else in my life right now.

This is so rambly.  Es tut mir Leid.

Last time that I spoke with you all, I was writing about my grandma.  I still think about her so much, but things get better with time.  They always do, emotionally speaking.  And I mentioned a few things about losing and gaining people.  December…  Well, I got a boy-friend.  Which sounds like I caught a Pokemon or something, but I assure you that’s not quite the case.  Our story will probably be better saved for another time, but at least I’ve finally mentioned it (only four and an half months later, tralalala).

No really.  This has just about been the shittiest post I think I’ve ever made on this blog.  But call it free-writing.  Train of thought.  Just some things that I need to get out.  I listened to Miho Fukuhara’s “Let It Out” one too many times this morning; blame that.

Anyway, this summer, I plan on getting better.  Lots of rest, working three days per week until I feel a little more human, seeing doctors to get diagnosis and help, going to Florida to visit family.  That sort of stuff.  I’m looking forward to the end of the semester so incredibly much.  Sleep.  It’s all I need and all I want.  Just sleep.

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Films

It’s odd, but I get some kind of enjoyment out of watching films alone where I’m able to just sit there and sob all of the way through.  Now, it’s not as though I just literally cry at the site of a film, but I’ve found that I’m unable to cry in front of others when something really beautiful happens.  When by myself, though, it’s so easy to just let myself have emotion, and I end up feeling some kind of satisfaction in being sad.  As though all of those years keeping things pent up are finally over, and that I can be free to just let go.  I’m free to see beauty and realise that sometimes beauty is sad and that there’s nothing wrong with that.

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Simple and Clean

There’s music playing in the background that I used to yell out back in middle school with my neighbour, music from an old video game that we used to play.  It feels like such a long time ago, standing in my backyard by the pool in our long skirts and singing together.  Looking back, I wonder if I should miss it.  She’s no longer a part of my life, and I don’t really mind.  She moved away, we were never much alike, and in that younger kid sense, we easily drifted apart.  But I’m still listening to this song, wondering how it could possible have been six years ago.  Part of me feels like that it was so terribly recent and that six years isn’t an incredibly long time, but the other half of me feels like that was an entirely different life ago.  Like a past life.  Sometimes, things are very hidden away in memories, and when you find yourself catching them, it throws you back into the wall.

I still haven’t figured out whether I can put up with that feeling and feel intact afterwards.  Strange how you encounter your old thoughts and behaviours by losing your breath.

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On Adventures

There are few days when I don’t look back on my trip to Germany in 2008 with Sister Cities and think, “Where did that time go?”  It was, in all honesty, one of the greatest adventures of my life.  Three weeks in a completely foreign country with a language I barely knew how to speak and so many wonderful people.  New things to try.  New foods to eat.  Everything new and yet so shockingly old.  A seven hundred year-old home that was still being lived in or a thousand year old church.  I’m still completely enchanted by it all, and I probably never won’t be.

I’ll be going on another adventure roughly four and a half months from now when I head to Chicago and then Denver by taking the train and staying in a hostel before making it out to my sister’s wedding.  I’m excited, I really am.  But there’s this little part of me that keeps saying: you are trying to relive Germany, and you will fail.

It’s something that I don’t want to accept, but the more that I think about it, it may be true.  I spend so much time thinking about those good times and how I’d love to live through them again, and sometimes I think I plan my life around that.  Trying to explore and adventure to new places again and again.  But it is not sustainable.  After a while, you have to move into other aspects of your life and leave adventures behind.  I suppose that many people call this growing up or maturing, but I just find it disheartening.  Why give up your dreams of adventures?  Why not try to relive them or make new memories?

But, because I search so desperately for them, I think that they become doomed from the get go to not live up to my expectations.  It’s similar to how I hated Girls State because I had gone to Missouri Scholars Academy the year before and was just comparing it to something so much greater.  Chicago/Denver cannot be another Germany, but I need to accept that it can be its own separate adventure.  It can be something new.  It can be something wonderful.  And I just need to keep an open mind and throw away that idea that you must ‘mature’ to no longer having fun.

If that’s what maturing is, then I will have no part in it.

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How I killed my computer, and other such ridiculous things.

I have a difficult time with computer reformatting–that is a fact.  Over the past few years, I’ve had to reformat several computers and deal with the loss of nearly all of my data.  Over and over and over again.  I used to bitch about it a lot in my diary since it was such a yearly thing back in high school, and I had counted myself as lucky for lasting this long with my laptop.

But, all things come to an end, don’t they?

One very malicious virus from one not so official site.  I keep thinking, “If I hadn’t gone onto that website, if I hadn’t clicked on the allow button for what I thought was my virus-protection, if I had backed up all of my things beforehand…”  But there’s only so much you can do with ‘what if’s.  After a while, they stop mattering, and you have to see if you learned something from the situation.

I was reading about astronomy.  Astronomy! When the website forced a pop up that was suddenly taken down by an ‘Allow Disallow’ kind of prompt.  Seeing the pop up as Vista Total Security, I thought that it was the virus protection automatically installed on my computer and pressed allow.  What a stupid thing to do.  Vista Total Security, my friends, is actually a malware virus.  At first, it tricks you into believing it’s automatic virus protection, but after a few hours of constant warnings and pop ups from it telling you that your computer is infected, you begin to wonder if maybe Vista Total Security is the virus.  Well, it was.  And I immediately started backing up my files on my new external hard-drive.  Good thing I did, too, since my entire computer wasn’t working after five hours.

I called Marshall for some help with it, and he ended up recommending that I reformat the system by installing Windows 7, which I had happened to keep up here in case I wanted to switch over.  So, for several hours last night, I made the switch and then uploaded all of my previous information back onto my laptop.

Except some of it was missing.

Most of it being music.

Three fifths of my music.

Now, I’m the type of girl who collects music and takes it pretty damn seriously.  I organise it into wonderful playlists and care deeply about my connection to certain music.  So, seeing that 3000 of my songs were missing was a bit of a shock this morning.  I just stood there in front of my computer wondering how my iTunes could only have saved what was uploaded by CD rather than both CD and flash-drive.  I felt foolish for not checking beforehand that everything had been saved.  And I felt betrayed.  It should have copied, and even if I had known when I was transferring everything, there wouldn’t have been enough time to save everything before the virus took over.  It all came down to electronic betrayal, and I couldn’t help but feel frazzled.

But not too terribly upset.

Sure, the what-if’s have been soaring, and I certainly wish that I hadn’t lost so much, but I know that I can get much of it back.  I have so many CDs in my truck from my previous computers, so that’s a start.  My friends have offered me up their classical music to replace my Chopin, Vivaldi, and Tchaikovsky, and I’m confident that things can be right.

I realised today at lunch that, had this happened back in high school, I probably would have cried.  Actually, I know that I would have cried for at least a day because, when I did originally lose all of my music (even though it was only 400 songs at the time), I cried for days.  But I keep thinking about the situation now and how it really doesn’t matter.  I’ll get it back.  Everything I actually cared about will be back in my music library, and the world will move on, and I’m still alive, and my photos are all intact, and things are actually pretty damn okay.

Being positive in light of miniature disasters mean the difference between being able to handle the stress and completely shutting down, and I’m willing to start taking the stress on as direct challenges.  You delete my music?  I get it back.  Easy as that.

So, here begins the epic repairing of my music library.

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Moving On

And here is where I continue telling you about my life and what has been happening lately in some type of witty but meaningful manner, all of which should lead to some life lesson.  Except that I’m not really the type to have it all mean something except for a rant that could be finished within a single sentence.  Maybe a sentence with semi-colon in the middle, but you get the picture.  But the reason that I’m writing all of this is to say that, for today (and maybe only today), I have the confidence to write as though I do not have an audience.

It’s a tricky thing, writing for an audience.  It’s something that I originally didn’t think that I would encounter since the internet is sometimes a massive wasteland of unread rantings, and yet people did start reading this.  And, somehow, that made my writing become a bit more artificial.  For the first time, I had to start worrying about who would read and what they’d think and whether I would upset them.  And it was important to keep in mind, because I did hurt some people, especially around a year ago.  Anger is a strange motivator that can cause you to have better work-outs or more motivation toward an exam or the ability to change the world you live in, but it’s also a force that can come across in waves.  You may think the first wave is brilliant, but the second comes back with the hurt feelings of others.  And, for that, I am held fully accountable and sorry.

But I do want to be more honest with you, and I do want to be able to tell you how I really think and feel without worrying about condemnation or assault.  While this may never be as fully ‘me’ as, say, my diary, I still want this to be a fully honest public forum that expands from my thoughts.  So I leave you for only this moment.  This tiny little moment.  And I want you to know that I will be back and I will be writing more and it will be of a level of honesty that really hasn’t occurred on here since my blog was first activated (minus the two years that it sat in cyber-space).  I hope that I can speak with all of you on a better level, regardless of what anyone may think.

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Maturity

Sometimes I doubt whether I’ve matured at all in the past two years.  It must have something to do with leaving teenage egocentricism and starting to develop at a much slower rate, even if all kinds of crazy things are going on all around me.  I keep looking back to when I was sixteen and seventeen and thinking that maybe I wasn’t all that stupid, which now strikes me as odd.  All throughout my life, I would look back at the things I wrote from a few years before and scoff at how incredibly dumb I was.  Now, though I’ll laugh at how I know better as an adult, I can’t bring myself to make fun of myself from a few years ago.  Once I hit that point where, cognitively, I was an adult, things just kind of… stagnated.

But, as a slap to the face, I received a very lengthy comment from a man whom I had written to a year and a half ago about his doctrine concerning suicide and religion.  To sum up his argument, it was that by teaching evolution/atheism, that it was the cause of teenage suicide.  Finding that ridiculous, I had written a letter to him detailing the causation-correlation dilemma and psychological facts presented with teen suicide.  But, when I had posted a copy to my blog, it was not in the most civil of tones and was quite condescending.  Looking back, I wish I’d done something different.

I never agreed with him.  I still don’t agree with him.  But even sixteen months later, I’m shaking my head at my behaviour.  It’s the nagging question: Why couldn’t you have presented the facts and left it at that?  I wonder why, and it makes me question my maturity.  And it makes me wonder if I have matured since then since I now see what I wrote in a different light.

It’s just something to think about.  Maturity, and what the word means when it really comes down to your actions, behaviours, what you say, et cetera.

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Books I’d like to read some time soon.

There are so many books that I’d like to read, but I can never find the time during the school year.  But, come this summer, there’s a big long list waiting for me.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to read/reread some of them.

• The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
• Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis)
• 1984 (George Orwell)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling; yes, I’ll try to reread this one)
• The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown; everyone keeps telling me that it’s the best of his yet)
• Hiroshima (John Hersey; in which I will cry in my backyard while reading)
• Faerie Tale (Raymond Feist; I may actually get this one finished by May)

If you have any recommendations for things I should read this summer, please don’t hesitate to tell me!  I’m very receptive to new books.

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