Designing Heidi

We've been told that everyone is different, everyone is unique, but lately I've had my doubts.

People follow patterns: it makes life easier to live. Making decisions, even stupid ones like "Apricot or strawberry jam on my toast today?" add up, and can be exhausting. So, we tend to make the choice once, and then repeat it. That's why people have a favorite donut --- "oh, I always get the chocolate covered bavarian" or a favorite soda '---"diet coke, please?" --- but they don't tend to stray from that often, if ever.

I've had moments of odd realization, like "I always use THIS stall in public bathrooms," or "why do I always walk this way to school?" and I don't really have an answer for myself, except that it just seems like it would be exhausting to have to pick a different john or walk an alternative yet equidistant path to class.

It doesn't stop there.

If you zoom out on your life and look at the macro-vision of what you've done, you might find that you're living life a little bit like you write a paper. First, you get an idea, brainstorm it, an then write an outline. As you draft, you follow the skeleton outline you've already envisioned to help you make important decisions about the shape your paper is going to take. You get to a point somewhere just beyond adolescence where everything has been outlined, and if nothing goes wrong, you can feel comfortable with the steady ebb of life's big decisions (many of which tend to happen just beyond adolescence. Isn't that interesting?).

You know, I've actually written that outline. You probably have, too. Really, anyone who's written down their goals or "5 year plan" has outlined, at least in part, their life. That is the major shape of your life which you will live.

When I'm writing a paper, I mean a really long research or argumentative paper, I can't possibly succeed without an outline. It's weird when you realize that you're writing your own life, but last time I checked, life is long. It needs an outline the same way a long paper needs an outline -- you can't possibly succeed without it.

Individualism is overrated. Why be an individual, when you could be successful? Success is a pattern that we can weave into the outline of our lives. Not every life is the same, but successful lives are all similar: those who live successfully are satisfied with what they have done with their time here on earth.

Sure, they've done different things. They've made different contributions, and they've said different words. That's not the point: they've all lived life fully, and found satisfaction in the end.

Are you satisfied with what you've done?

Utah? Well O.K.!

I can't believe it, but I got the most amazing job!

I will be teaching 7th grade langauge arts and creative writing at Syracuse Arts Academy in Utah. It is a dream come true. I am extremely excited. I really can't tell you how far over the moon I am for this job!

I also bought a new car: yes, Baby had to go. Remember the little ford focus I was so enthralled to find last summer? It passed away loudly on my way home from a YSA conference my good friend Ivan put together in Gettysburg (which was incredibly fun, by the way! I probably should have blogged about it, but... oh well! haha). We got it towed (if you don't have towing insurance, get it. It usually only costs a few dollars more per year, and it just saved me $200.00, so it was well worth it!) back to Montgomery and worked on. Then my Mom took her for a shake-down cruise (again to Gettysburg and back) before heading out to the wild, wild west, and it started having a different problem, so I decided to trade her in for something a little more reliable.

Meet Olga, the Olympian.

She's awesome. She gets about 38 miles per gallon on the highway while burdened with all my worldly possessions (she even got a little over 39 once). She steers like a dream, is incredibly comfortable, and smells like a brand new car -- which makes sense, because after all, she's only 2 years old.

By the way, I have an amazing credit score (yes, I am bragging. It was quite surprising, and I'm delighted).

Anyhow, I'm back in Utah with Olga. I didn't really want to come back to Utah when I graduated, but luckily Utah and Provo are actually two very different places, and I'm excited to spend more time with my sisters and cousins who live out here, too. Not to mention my very good friends (you know who you are)!

And honestly, I'm actually very excited to be back in the Beehive State. As my good friend Brigham once said, "this is the place!" ;-)

Recognizing Excellence in Writing

It took me approximately 1 hour to get through the first Twilight novel by Stephanie Meyer, and felt I should gouge out my eyes with a broach to adequately mourn the time wastefully spent skimming through page after page of trashy cliches and basically poor prose. In contrast, I spent 2 delicious hours savoring each word in Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, a deeply beautiful novel that also caused me to mourn: not for time ill spent, but for the end of something so exquisite, so poignant and so beautiful that I wished to always be reading it. It is not ironic that I should so happily spend double the time reading a book of only half the length of Twilight:  it is simply the difference between good and poor writing.

Shakespeare is a fantastic standard in the English language for good writing. He unceasingly employs creative and exacting poetic devices that elevate his writing in a continuous upward transcendence. He does use cliche, but not generally speaking, and not as a fall-back tool of the trade. No. The Bard is much better than that.

Students, too, can learn to be better writers than a New York Times bestselling author! Student writing can be monotonous to read when poorly done, but it also can be a fantastic experience when students rise to the occasion and produce quality work.  I have noticed, while reading student essays, that a few always cause me to to pause and read a little slower. They make me think, and they have a funny sort of beauty, too. They use delicate and sometimes intricate figurative language, and they are rhetorically sound. Writing is nothing more than communication: the attempt of a thinker to transmit his or her thoughts to another. It is immediately apparent to a reader how much thought fueled the writing. The craftsmanship of the figurative language, the complexity of the thoughts, and the poetry of the two fused together make good writing unmistakable.

My Sad Life in a Series of Disney Quotations

Lately I find myself easily comparing me to Jessie the yodeling cowgirl:

"When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful. Every hour we spent together lives within my heart." -Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl, Toy Story 2.

My main tactic for moving on with my life has been to just not think about the last year at all. The experience is way too much like the above quoted Sarah McLachlan song, and the truth is:

I am a desperately hopeless romantic.

I believe in LOVE. What can I say? I was nourished by Disney movies growing up, and now it's just too late. You are what you eat. I can't believe in love and let myself wallow in self pity, not this time. I can't be Mariana of the Moated Grange any longer, or say to myself, "Sometimes its better to be alone" (Megara, Hercules). 

"If there's a prize for rotten judgement, I guess I've already won that." -Megara, Hercules

I know that makes me old fashioned, but I really, truly believe in the kind of love that transcends time, space, and circumstance. I believe that there exists a love that embraces all my weird quirks and histories, and someday, when the time is just right, we will meet.

"¡Ven conmigo! ¡Te mostraré las maravillas de la galaxia, y juntos lucharemos contra el despiadado Zurg!" -Spanish Mode Buzz

It just hasn't happened yet. Until then, "I never look back, darling. It distracts from the now" (Edna Mode, The Incredibles).

"Go, confront the problem. Fight! Win!" -"E"

Life Enrichment vs Life Sustaining

I have been thinking lately about what makes life worth living. Here is a short list:

1. Ice cream. Any time, any where.
2. Visiting the zoo.
3. Watching a double feature at the drive-in movie theater with my friends, and making jokes that they laugh at, even though I'm not that funny, but feeling like Tina Fey because they laughed a LOT.
4. Going for a long run or bike ride and feeling like I'm not running, but flying.
5. Donuts at Grandma's house.
6. Stopping at Little America for 50 cent cones after a long drive through Nebraska
7. Walking through Mammoth Cave in Kentucky with my Dad.
8. Listening to Shakira sing "Waka Waka" and convincing myself that she's talking to me, personally, and that the whole thing has nothing to do with soccer, or Africa, but everything to do with my life lately (Or as John Green would write it, My Life Lately).
9. Reading a book by John Green, and realizing that even though he chose to be a writer instead of a minister, he actually is a minister, not a writer.
10. Reciting "The Soldier" by  Rupert Brooke at work and replacing the word "England" for "Reptiland."
11. Singing along to "Hotel California" with my sisters and brothers as I drive them somewhere, and realizing that my brothers and sisters are more awesome than I ever gave them credit for, because they already know all the lyrics.
12. Watching "Little Women" and crying EVERY TIME when Beth dies.
13. Finishing a large drawing of the solar system, and feeling a small portion of what God must have felt when he created the real solar system.
14. Selling the book Verdi to a young mother who hasn't read it yet.
15. Discovering that there is a new Avatar, and all of the first book so far is available on nick.com, and watching the first 3 episodes with my sisters!

I don't need to do any of these things. They are not requisite to survival. The same is true of many things: in fact, most of the things that make life worth living, I find, are not the things that make life possible to live.

A Plea From Hell

I wrote this poem originally in 10th grade while reading The Inferno by Dante Alighieri and studying the romantic poets of Great Britain. I recently found it and made a few small revisions for rhythm and rhyme (considering the content, I felt that an ontology was required):

We've fallen underground
the sounds of Hell around
The pressure and the strain,
the fire and the pain
The gnashing of the teeth
the stench that from us seethes

It's endless torment;
We're in Hell.
the relief we seek
we know well
is never to come
we won't die
though how our souls will
Always try
I can only start
to tell.

What Dorothy Gale Didn't Tell Aunty Em

"End, begin: it's all the same. Big change!"

-Augra

I love my home, and I've wanted to come back for such a long time -- but, I've got to be honest -- I've had a recurring nightmare for the last few years: when I come home to visit, I am forced by legal or maternal forces to return to high school, and it is awful.

I've been thinking lately that I might want to get an art add-on to my certification. So, before diving into that, I decided to observe some art classes in motion. I contacted my high school art teacher, as well as the elementary art teacher, and I observed them teach for a day.

I loved observing, especially the elementary classes. They were sweet, and creative, and excited about art. They thought I was awesome, and, well, that made them awesome.

Going back to my school was like entering the twilight zone: all of my nightmares congealed with my actual memories, and I felt like I was swimming through a Dali painting.

Everything was just the same as I left it. The teachers were all the same, the posters in the halls and in the rooms were the same, the carpet and schedule and broken policies were the same. The students even seemed to be the exact same students who roamed the halls before I was released, wearing the same cut off shorts and bunched up tee-shirt, combing the same section of hair carefully over the same eye as ever before. The band room reverberated with the same sounds, and the cafeteria stenched of the same smells, the gossip dripped in clinging, black gobs from the same mouths into the same ears.

I took my little sister to a fund raiser fair for the elementary last night, and I saw a classmate who graduated with me. We had been through all those years together, in the same OM team in elementary, in some of the same classes, calling each other strange nick names until the bitter end, and yet, when we passed each other in the hall, we didn't make eye contact. We barely said hello. We walked a little faster.

This town is a fantastic place, full of kind people, and a great school district. There's just something funny about leaving a place as a child, and coming back as an adult. It strips you bear of all you've built around yourself since that time, and it makes you feel trapped in a never-changing mirror.

It doesn't help that I'm in a similar place in my life as I was the last time I was in that building: flux. Then, I had just finished high school, and I knew that I was going to BYU, and everything would be changing, but I was blind the reality of how that change would affect me, shape me, make me the woman I am now. Today, I just finished college. I know that I am going to become an English teacher, and everything will be changing, but I am cognizant of how blind I am to the reality of how this change will affect me, shape me, and turn me into a different woman than I am today.

I wrote a post a while ago about Luke Skywalker. I've been thinking about those thoughts, and I've wanted to take my own advice: but I think that it may have been flawed. Luke and Frodo both find, eventually, the perspective their elders have masted -- eventually. Who am I to criticize them for the time it took them to find serenity amidst a paradigm shift? It may take practice, more than sheer will power.

What do you think? I am all at sea.