I have a debate tomorrow on whether fire was the most important symbol in Lord of the Flies. My friend and I are on the con side, which is just as well because I do not believe fire is the best one. Piggy's glasses are! haha! We are definitely going to pummel the opposing side with our awesomeness and high intellect. I'm writing my opening-speech right now...it has to be four minutes long but I don't think it should be. I think it should be as long as necessary to convey my point, and then I should be able to end it and get FULL POINTS!!! yeeeeah!
so, because of that, and my inherent laziness, I will leave you with another proestry piece I wrote today [when I wasn't working on my speech.] Background: When I was younger I loved star-gazing, but I have always been terrified of space (go figure...) The thought of being stuck up there in a space-craft or ejected into nothingness continues to haunt me forever, but I still love the stars and, above all, the moon. [Though not as much as I used to] It's a piece about that, and also, the fact that growing up SUCKS and I wish I didn't have to become so sensible.
The Great Beyond
The moon overtook me, darlings.
I used to pray on stars. I used to twirl beneath clouds, palms up, tap-dancing to the cadence of raindrops on rooftops, and only look up. I used to circle bonfires, arms waving about my head, my hair catching the firelight and turning auburn, singing with my eyes full of flame. My heart used to be alive.
They always told me the moon was magnificent, treacherous like the bodies it controlled, but endlessly forgiving. Luna, beautiful Luna, show me the man on the moon. All I ever see are craters and icecaps and flags unmoving in the atmosphere.
I was once a creature in the deep, made of lithe limbs and coiled-chrome muscles. I jack-in-the-boxed from chests, leapt from closets, and somersaulted off couches, bruising but never breaking. I growled at dogs and slunk through shadows. I was rabid and ferocious, but I was also scared. I was a child creeping with baited breath over floorboards that creaked, lying uneasy in the gloom as the house personified and the walls growled back. I howled at the moon to see if martians answered, and counted shooting stars like candy. I digested the heavens, eyes full of galaxies, even though my heart told my head to be afraid; that only emptiness and asphyxiation waited in the great beyond.
My parents taught me to walk and write and string laces through shoes, but I, alone, learned how to gaze at stars. As a child I was full of wishes; I blew on dandelions and plucked clover and lit candles for the dead, but, much as I feared the darkness, nothing promised more than those mysterious, burning celestial bodies. I engraved the paths of comets in my irises, traced constellations on my kneecaps, and discovered nebulas in Rorschach. I counted the twinkles of the stars and chased the moon - living my life in phases; waxing and waning, and eventually turning invisible to most of the world.
I found my life-line in Orion's belt, and discovered the curve of my back-bone in his starlit bow.
I was wide-eyed and wonderful, but one day, I simply stopped looking up.
I stopped wondering why raindrops always fell and never rose, and why salt on wood turned the flames green. I stopped chasing the ends of rainbows, and stopped wishing on candle-smoke. One day, I howled at the moon, and she did not respond. I waved but she did not smile back. Instead, she brought the rain and hail and waves crashing down on me, and I no longer asked for the man on the moon. All I ever saw was a wolf staring down at me; a magnificent shape carved from rock and asteroids and icecaps. I began to see the stars as balls of gas instead of smiling, burning beings, and the clouds' silver lining turned to smog.
I used to pray on stars. I used to brave the darkness for a glimpse of the moon, and taste the treacherous waves, searching for messages of her love and salty-sweet promises. I used to dance and sing and wish [wish with a conviction that proved I believed, completely.] My heart used to be alive. But one day the moon overtook me, and I diminished.
I used to pray on stars as if they could truly, truly hear me. It is only now, surrounded by dew-grass angels, mud sucking at my knees, and fingers buried in the turf, that I realize.
The stars I pray on have been dead for a thousand years. They could no more smile down on me nor dance, than live and be loved.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
I Find Fibonnaci In the Green of Hyoscyamine
I tried, but I'm sorry. I don't have anything interesting to say, except that 1.) yes, I do not have a facebook anymore 2.) yes, I will probably be posting some of my writings on here for familia/amigos who want to read them 3.) yeah, I have no idea why I'm incorporating spanish into this 4.) I tried to make a card-castle.
OOH! Funny story [well, kind of]!
So, I'm sitting on the floor in front of my midget coffee table playing solitaire, and I get bored. I get so bored, in fact, that I decide to make a Bad-Ass Awesome-Sauce Coolest-Bestest-Greatestest-Constructed Card-Castle EVER, even though I hate making card castles, and have never completed one in my whole life.
Anyways, so I happened to have just watched a vlogbrothers vlog by Mr. Hank Green last month in which he explained that the best way to make a card-tower/castle/house is to...well, you'll see. It's a different method of stacking them, in which they all support each others weight rather nicely and makes it possible to reach enormous heights [if you can actually stack cards]
So, I'm reeeeeeally excited, and spend the next half hour or so trying to build this stupid castle and failing epically each time (though, every once in a while, I actually improved a little bit, and managed to get one card further before demolition happened at the hands of fate.) And the whole time I'm doing this, my mom is trying to convince me that this is not the best way to stack cards and that I should do it the traditional way, which I understand, because for some people that works [some people not being me.] -- But I tried it her way, just to see, and yes, I was right, I failed even epically-er; I didn't make it past two cards. --
What I finally managed to do was built two and a half floors, take a picture (because I knew in my heart that my lopsided, slowly-shrinking-with-each-floor-added castle was going to topple when I tried to add on to it):
<----It's beautiful, no?
and then, yes, promptly kill it all with my last two cards:
Not very exciting, but you can see my masterpiece. :) I'm so proud!!!
So yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say.
Here! Read a weird prosetry piece I wrote about pills and oxygen! Don't ask...my mind works in mysterious ways. Sometimes, I wonder about myself. I wonder if ANYONE see anything the same way I see it, because, well...Who else sees geometry in spilled medications or fireworks in the redness of your closed eyelids when you look at a lightbulb?
Whatever.
Enjoy!
I Find Fibonnaci In the Green of Hyoscyamine
At 4:29pm, I start to hold my breath.
Fireworks explode behind my eyes; myriads of red and purple sparklers, gunpowder missiles igniting and spraying flecks of orange and gold. Silver stars crackle and burst: shimmering and flickering as they trickle to the ground; iridescent cascades of dawn and dusk and starlight.
My lungs want to break their boundaries and drown themselves in the beauty of the element: six valence electrons dancing, kissing and binding together [oh, the acid producer is flavorless, diatomic, and spiteful.] Oxygen burns my tongue and leaves my nostrils tingling. Still, my body mourns its absence; my brain cells scream for the replenishing blueness. I want to get lost in oxygen's ocean of life, to let the electron clouds smother me and the waves to toss me until I am lost beyond all hope and can simply lay, basking in a suffocating balloon of it.
I close my eyes and breathe out. My head grows light, and the world spins backwards, and I breathe in. My body won't let me die this way - I don't want to anyway. I only wish to postpone the inevitable. The less I breathe in, the sweeter life tastes.
At 4:37pm, I fumble with child-safety seals.
Pills rattle and spill onto the floor in ghostly shapes and patterns; Ibuprofen and Advil forming trapezoids and parallelograms, vitamins tumbling into puddles of ascorbic acid and niacin. I fall to the ground with them, my hands slipping from the counter, knees buckling and hitting hard linoleum. I find Fibonacci in the purple of iron and the green of hyoscyamine [little drugs put under the tongue six at a time, the bitter taste of mint lingering between my teeth, and the pain in my stomach: gone.] They color code before my eyes, jumping to each other like magnets and magic beans; pink folic acid twisting into spirals alongside phenylalanine, capsules of thiamine mononitrate rolling towards crumbling bits of vanillin: acid green blended with blue.
I cover my eyes and think of words. I twist and bend them to my bidding, hastily unfurling their roots from that horrid, bitter Greek, forcing them together like a negative and a positive [hands quaking under all the pressure,] and igniting the oxygen around me to blend their edges and create one. Grammar is too much as I chew my pencil, click my pen, and write my words in white-out; blotting out sections of Shakespeare and Green and old newspapers because blank paper is simply too daunting in my mania. Vowels grow curly tails and T's turn jagged like knives and I tear holes in my books, but I ignore it all. I cast a hand through my hair and carve verbs into sofa cushions, trying to wring sentences and paragraphs from my brain like water from a wet towel.
If I could write, then I could stop thinking...
At 4:54pm, I cry.
I cry for those missing words that have left me hollow and half-decomposed by shadows. Tears are bitter, easily shattered like dew-drops. They used to bring relief, but now they merely acid-etch my cheeks; leaving more pain than they came forth to extinguish.
At 6:59pm, I try to speak, but all that comes out are ragged pleas raw with exasperation, blackened by combustion.
At 7:10pm, I start to hold my breath. I stare into my mirror of erised and see a million choices gazing back at me.
At 7:16pm, I hold my breath. I close my eyes and listen to my heartbeat. I feel my lungs shuddering, my fingers shaking, my brain spiraling through complexities. I smell blood and asphalt and gunpowder. I taste salt tears, folic acid, and stale oxygen. I see pink spirals, red and green Fibonacci, and golden stars [fireworks exploding behind my eyes.]
At 7:21pm, I breathe in.
OOH! Funny story [well, kind of]!
So, I'm sitting on the floor in front of my midget coffee table playing solitaire, and I get bored. I get so bored, in fact, that I decide to make a Bad-Ass Awesome-Sauce Coolest-Bestest-Greatestest-Constructed Card-Castle EVER, even though I hate making card castles, and have never completed one in my whole life.
Anyways, so I happened to have just watched a vlogbrothers vlog by Mr. Hank Green last month in which he explained that the best way to make a card-tower/castle/house is to...well, you'll see. It's a different method of stacking them, in which they all support each others weight rather nicely and makes it possible to reach enormous heights [if you can actually stack cards]
So, I'm reeeeeeally excited, and spend the next half hour or so trying to build this stupid castle and failing epically each time (though, every once in a while, I actually improved a little bit, and managed to get one card further before demolition happened at the hands of fate.) And the whole time I'm doing this, my mom is trying to convince me that this is not the best way to stack cards and that I should do it the traditional way, which I understand, because for some people that works [some people not being me.] -- But I tried it her way, just to see, and yes, I was right, I failed even epically-er; I didn't make it past two cards. --
What I finally managed to do was built two and a half floors, take a picture (because I knew in my heart that my lopsided, slowly-shrinking-with-each-floor-added castle was going to topple when I tried to add on to it):
<----It's beautiful, no?
and then, yes, promptly kill it all with my last two cards:
Not very exciting, but you can see my masterpiece. :) I'm so proud!!!
So yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say.
Here! Read a weird prosetry piece I wrote about pills and oxygen! Don't ask...my mind works in mysterious ways. Sometimes, I wonder about myself. I wonder if ANYONE see anything the same way I see it, because, well...Who else sees geometry in spilled medications or fireworks in the redness of your closed eyelids when you look at a lightbulb?
Whatever.
Enjoy!
I Find Fibonnaci In the Green of Hyoscyamine
At 4:29pm, I start to hold my breath.
Fireworks explode behind my eyes; myriads of red and purple sparklers, gunpowder missiles igniting and spraying flecks of orange and gold. Silver stars crackle and burst: shimmering and flickering as they trickle to the ground; iridescent cascades of dawn and dusk and starlight.
My lungs want to break their boundaries and drown themselves in the beauty of the element: six valence electrons dancing, kissing and binding together [oh, the acid producer is flavorless, diatomic, and spiteful.] Oxygen burns my tongue and leaves my nostrils tingling. Still, my body mourns its absence; my brain cells scream for the replenishing blueness. I want to get lost in oxygen's ocean of life, to let the electron clouds smother me and the waves to toss me until I am lost beyond all hope and can simply lay, basking in a suffocating balloon of it.
I close my eyes and breathe out. My head grows light, and the world spins backwards, and I breathe in. My body won't let me die this way - I don't want to anyway. I only wish to postpone the inevitable. The less I breathe in, the sweeter life tastes.
At 4:37pm, I fumble with child-safety seals.
Pills rattle and spill onto the floor in ghostly shapes and patterns; Ibuprofen and Advil forming trapezoids and parallelograms, vitamins tumbling into puddles of ascorbic acid and niacin. I fall to the ground with them, my hands slipping from the counter, knees buckling and hitting hard linoleum. I find Fibonacci in the purple of iron and the green of hyoscyamine [little drugs put under the tongue six at a time, the bitter taste of mint lingering between my teeth, and the pain in my stomach: gone.] They color code before my eyes, jumping to each other like magnets and magic beans; pink folic acid twisting into spirals alongside phenylalanine, capsules of thiamine mononitrate rolling towards crumbling bits of vanillin: acid green blended with blue.
I cover my eyes and think of words. I twist and bend them to my bidding, hastily unfurling their roots from that horrid, bitter Greek, forcing them together like a negative and a positive [hands quaking under all the pressure,] and igniting the oxygen around me to blend their edges and create one. Grammar is too much as I chew my pencil, click my pen, and write my words in white-out; blotting out sections of Shakespeare and Green and old newspapers because blank paper is simply too daunting in my mania. Vowels grow curly tails and T's turn jagged like knives and I tear holes in my books, but I ignore it all. I cast a hand through my hair and carve verbs into sofa cushions, trying to wring sentences and paragraphs from my brain like water from a wet towel.
If I could write, then I could stop thinking...
At 4:54pm, I cry.
I cry for those missing words that have left me hollow and half-decomposed by shadows. Tears are bitter, easily shattered like dew-drops. They used to bring relief, but now they merely acid-etch my cheeks; leaving more pain than they came forth to extinguish.
At 6:59pm, I try to speak, but all that comes out are ragged pleas raw with exasperation, blackened by combustion.
At 7:10pm, I start to hold my breath. I stare into my mirror of erised and see a million choices gazing back at me.
At 7:16pm, I hold my breath. I close my eyes and listen to my heartbeat. I feel my lungs shuddering, my fingers shaking, my brain spiraling through complexities. I smell blood and asphalt and gunpowder. I taste salt tears, folic acid, and stale oxygen. I see pink spirals, red and green Fibonacci, and golden stars [fireworks exploding behind my eyes.]
At 7:21pm, I breathe in.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
My Brain Would Appreciate the Lack of YOU
Dear smoke alarm,
SHUT UP!
It is not necessary for you to reassert your presence in my house by periodically letting out an earsplitting "beep" that, quite literally, splits my eardrums in to fragments and leaves them to lie, throbbing, in my head where they eventually get forced down my ear canal by your incessant bleepbleepbeeping. If you didn't guess before, let me tell you that this is immenselyimmensely painful in every way, and I do not enjoy it AT. ALL.
But not even that is the end of your treachery, is it? Once my shattered eardrum is sufficiently burrowed inside my skull, sounds waves from your stupidity slowly move it deeper and deeper until the razor-sharp fragments impale my brain, or - more specifically - my temporal lobe. This is also immenselyimmensely painful, and leaves a residue of anger and fear and sadness along with migraines and potential ear and brain damage in its wake. I hate headaches. I hate brain damage. I hate feeling sad. Why do you inflict these things upon me when I am least expecting it? Why can’t you give a little warning before you decide to deafen me for the rest of my life; surely I deserve that, at least?! I mean, I haven’t KILLED you yet, have I? (Though, as your destructive behavior continues, that option becomes more and more agreeable to my murderous side.)
Another thing, smoke alarm, you terrify me. I mean, we are trained from birth to be wary of your beeps. “Remember, children, when the little red box starts screeching and screaming and beeping incessantly, that means something’s wrong.”
Whenever your beeps grow more numerous and closer together and louder in decibels, I begin to wonder: is the roof on fire? Is someone trying to kill me by flooding my ventilation shafts and air-conditioning vents with noxious fumes that, once anyone else leaves the room, will seep from the floor in a cloud of creepy purple mist and slowly sneak its way inside my system until all trace of oxygen has been snatched from my body and I will fall to the ground, gasping like a fish out of water, flopping and gulping and making fish faces as my brain slowly switches from involuntary functions to Brain? What brain? Then, ten days later, someone will find my body and I will have partially decomposed or rotted away, and rats will have eaten my bulging purple eyeballs, and rigor mortis will have turned me into a strange horror creature with half-chewed-off arms and legs bent at funny angles. After that, no one will come to my funeral because they won’t want to smell little ol’ dead me, and then I will silently cry as they bury me because no one will have heard my last words: “It was the smoke alarm’s fault….it LIED!!!”
Yes, these are the sort of things you lead little paranoid me to believe in, and then I am afraid to sleep and afraid to be alone and afraid to enter the house, so that I either stay up all night with a gun under my pillow (I don’t know where I obtain this imaginary gun or why I think it will be effective against poisonous gas, but it’s a hallucination, so go with it), waiting, or sit outside in the freezing rain, peering in the window like a sad, dripping puppy dog with a mass of matted, muddy hair, finally caving and coming inside, only to have the noxious fumes nightmare and become terrified all over again.
What all of this boils down to, smoke alarm, is: WHY DO YOU HAVE TO MAKE THAT NOISE?!?! I know it’s your purpose in life to alert people to things, but there really isn’t anything to alert me to now, is there? I would understand if I’d left the stove on or carbon monoxide were leaking through the vents or my head was on fire, but there’s nothing like that going on. Instead, every ten minutes I have to get up and press the little green button that makes you shriek in my ear for 10 seconds, all so that, for 9 minutes and 50 seconds, you will remain quiet as you build up the energy needed to beep again on your own free will.
Either that, or I scream at you, call you names that even a personified version of you - an inanimate object - couldn’t understand, and pound you with my fist until either you give in or I do [usually me, since pain is a powerful incentive to stop punching a hard object.]
Honestly, smoke alarm, I understand your need for attention. Sometimes even I feel the need to scream into my pillow or yell at someone “look at me! I exist!” but trust me, smoke alarm, I know you exist. Once again, I am alerted to your presence, and have reclaimed the knowledge that yes, you are glued to my living room wall, and yes, you work, and yes, I will wake up if you ever go off in an emergency. Just, please, stop. One beep is enough, trust me.
I hope you can come to understand my side of the argument, and that, perhaps over brunch, we can discuss and accept our differences [I, Jane, you, smoke alarm] and eventually reach a compromise of some sort. Maybe you can promise to be quiet from now on, as long as I promise, in return, to give you a pat now and again and slip you some broccoli under the table (even though you’re five feet up and attached to the wall, and, oh yeah, a mechanical object without any taste buds or stomach or teeth or any necessity for human-sustenance.)
Thank you for taking the time to listen.
Sincerely,
--the girl sitting on the couch, her ears bleeding
SHUT UP!
It is not necessary for you to reassert your presence in my house by periodically letting out an earsplitting "beep" that, quite literally, splits my eardrums in to fragments and leaves them to lie, throbbing, in my head where they eventually get forced down my ear canal by your incessant bleepbleepbeeping. If you didn't guess before, let me tell you that this is immenselyimmensely painful in every way, and I do not enjoy it AT. ALL.
But not even that is the end of your treachery, is it? Once my shattered eardrum is sufficiently burrowed inside my skull, sounds waves from your stupidity slowly move it deeper and deeper until the razor-sharp fragments impale my brain, or - more specifically - my temporal lobe. This is also immenselyimmensely painful, and leaves a residue of anger and fear and sadness along with migraines and potential ear and brain damage in its wake. I hate headaches. I hate brain damage. I hate feeling sad. Why do you inflict these things upon me when I am least expecting it? Why can’t you give a little warning before you decide to deafen me for the rest of my life; surely I deserve that, at least?! I mean, I haven’t KILLED you yet, have I? (Though, as your destructive behavior continues, that option becomes more and more agreeable to my murderous side.)
Another thing, smoke alarm, you terrify me. I mean, we are trained from birth to be wary of your beeps. “Remember, children, when the little red box starts screeching and screaming and beeping incessantly, that means something’s wrong.”
Whenever your beeps grow more numerous and closer together and louder in decibels, I begin to wonder: is the roof on fire? Is someone trying to kill me by flooding my ventilation shafts and air-conditioning vents with noxious fumes that, once anyone else leaves the room, will seep from the floor in a cloud of creepy purple mist and slowly sneak its way inside my system until all trace of oxygen has been snatched from my body and I will fall to the ground, gasping like a fish out of water, flopping and gulping and making fish faces as my brain slowly switches from involuntary functions to Brain? What brain? Then, ten days later, someone will find my body and I will have partially decomposed or rotted away, and rats will have eaten my bulging purple eyeballs, and rigor mortis will have turned me into a strange horror creature with half-chewed-off arms and legs bent at funny angles. After that, no one will come to my funeral because they won’t want to smell little ol’ dead me, and then I will silently cry as they bury me because no one will have heard my last words: “It was the smoke alarm’s fault….it LIED!!!”
Yes, these are the sort of things you lead little paranoid me to believe in, and then I am afraid to sleep and afraid to be alone and afraid to enter the house, so that I either stay up all night with a gun under my pillow (I don’t know where I obtain this imaginary gun or why I think it will be effective against poisonous gas, but it’s a hallucination, so go with it), waiting, or sit outside in the freezing rain, peering in the window like a sad, dripping puppy dog with a mass of matted, muddy hair, finally caving and coming inside, only to have the noxious fumes nightmare and become terrified all over again.
What all of this boils down to, smoke alarm, is: WHY DO YOU HAVE TO MAKE THAT NOISE?!?! I know it’s your purpose in life to alert people to things, but there really isn’t anything to alert me to now, is there? I would understand if I’d left the stove on or carbon monoxide were leaking through the vents or my head was on fire, but there’s nothing like that going on. Instead, every ten minutes I have to get up and press the little green button that makes you shriek in my ear for 10 seconds, all so that, for 9 minutes and 50 seconds, you will remain quiet as you build up the energy needed to beep again on your own free will.
Either that, or I scream at you, call you names that even a personified version of you - an inanimate object - couldn’t understand, and pound you with my fist until either you give in or I do [usually me, since pain is a powerful incentive to stop punching a hard object.]
Honestly, smoke alarm, I understand your need for attention. Sometimes even I feel the need to scream into my pillow or yell at someone “look at me! I exist!” but trust me, smoke alarm, I know you exist. Once again, I am alerted to your presence, and have reclaimed the knowledge that yes, you are glued to my living room wall, and yes, you work, and yes, I will wake up if you ever go off in an emergency. Just, please, stop. One beep is enough, trust me.
I hope you can come to understand my side of the argument, and that, perhaps over brunch, we can discuss and accept our differences [I, Jane, you, smoke alarm] and eventually reach a compromise of some sort. Maybe you can promise to be quiet from now on, as long as I promise, in return, to give you a pat now and again and slip you some broccoli under the table (even though you’re five feet up and attached to the wall, and, oh yeah, a mechanical object without any taste buds or stomach or teeth or any necessity for human-sustenance.)
Thank you for taking the time to listen.
Sincerely,
--the girl sitting on the couch, her ears bleeding
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