Philosophies

Well I think I win the award for blog updating.

/sarcasm

Let’s ignore the fact that I’ve been gone for a month, mmkay? And instead just get caught up in What’s Going On:

1. The semester is over, I have no major.
2. I quit my job, need new one.
3. Hm. It seems there are only two big important things that have happened lately. Which is really fine by me because, um, sometimes big important does not equal big good important.

So when I was a wee little lass of thirteen I started this notebook in which I would put my PHILOSOPHICAL RAMBLINGS. (And as an aside, wow, I grossly overused the exclamation marks. It’s embarrassing really.)

But some of the things I thought and wrote were… worth thinking. And writing. Here are a few of them:

From age 13…

[about the book CON-FIDENCE by Todd Strasser] It was a great book because it was about how everyone is pretending and no one is what they seem.

..maybe if people don’t talk about you, they don’t know you exist, and then, maybe you don’t exist. [It's very "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound?" isn't it?]

and aside, to my younger self, ENOUGH WITH THE EXCLAMATION POINTS ALREADY. I GET IT.

…he left the class with a frown on his face, so now I’m wondering how important being the best is and should be to me.

…sometimes out outside image can be good, but inside we feel kinda bad, like we’re not living up to our own expectations of ourselves. … Is our image just an image, or a reflection of what’s inside us? Does a good image make us a good person, or a bad image make us a bad person? 

You may notice I pose more questions here than I answer.

How do I know if I’m grown up?

From age 14…

How do we know how far to go when it comes to keeping a friend? If you have to put on a mask and become a different person, is that friend really worth having?

From age 15…

Why do we invest so much of ourselves into another person just to see it dissolve. Or explode. Or whatever. …even if it’s one-sided, why do we do that to ourselves? … we risk ourselves because somewhere in our heart we always believe that [someone] is waiting – somewhere, for us.

From age 18…

My theory of family is that what makes us family are the stories that connect us. Familial legends passed down and retold. The stories are woven between the members, tying them together as family no matter the distance – physical or otherwise – between them. Without the stories we are just strangers passing through.

I think big thoughts.

My Resolution

Whatever happens from here,

I am not going to pretend like I don’t care and I refuse to stop caring.

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Acknowledged

Writing prompt (from Twenty Something Writers, which I am a part of even though I’m not, you know, twenty):

Leave 5 of your most prized and cherished posessions to people who you feel deserve them. Who gets what and why? (Feel free to do more than 5 if you’d like)

I may have to do more than five… 

If I were to die… (which is quite morbid and I hope to postpone for as long as possible).

 

…many moments later….

You know what, guys? This is getting ridiculous for me. I don’t have that much that matters that much to me that I think another person would appreciate. So instead I’ll just thank people for what they have given me. 

Acknowledgements of my life, if you will.

• Grandma, thank you for letting me be your sidekick, thank you for making snow cream with me and for giving me my first bible and for every other thing you’ve ever done that’s helped make me who I am today. Thank you for always being on my side, for always loving me, for never thinking I’m too crazy or insane or pathetic, for understanding.
• To the four (or the three of them who aren’t me), thank you for being my anchor. Thank you for not blocking me out, thank you for being the best group in the entire world and for making me laugh and making me cry and making me want to scream and making me be there.
• Mom, thank you for loving me even when I’m rotten. And I know I’m rotten to you a lot. Thank you for forgiving me every time I mess up again, for teaching me to cook, for telling me you don’t think adopted children are loved any less than biological children, and for understanding what I didn’t want to say when I needed you to.
• Dad, thank you for letting me be crazy, for helping me understand what’s good and what isn’t, for giving me Don’t Panic, and for wanting me to be strong. Thank you for taking me flying, for building the tree house, for being more “here” than it would seem possible to be even when you’re in Germany or New York or Hawaii.
• I leave the last spot open, as I always do, for someone yet-to-be-acknowledged.

 

Another Letter to This Place

It’s Thursday, last week.

I’m driving in my car to Gayle Forman’s event for If I Stay. I’ve left school early, ditched my last class, am wearing that black dress that I think is nice enough to wear everywhere, all the time. I’m winding down a California interstate with Lady Gaga blaring to keep myself awake.

I didn’t sleep much the night before.

California is all civilization and buildings and money and glamour (real or imagined) and sun and surf and “dude” and “like” and then suddenly… it’s not. Suddenly it’s just me and the air, the only break in the outdoors being the freeway I’m driving on. Mountains, hills, the hesitant neither-desert-nor-tropics landscape surrounding me.

Wow, I think, California is beautiful.

And I pause. Turn down the music. Repeat the phrase in my mind, turning it over like a shiny new book I’m contemplating buying.

California is beautiful.

The truth of the statement is undeniable, but unbelievable, even as I repeat it slowly, accepting it. Trying out this new reality, this new bit of truth in my life.

I feel calm then, as it washes over me. I am driving to a book event, listening to Lady Gaga, and California is beautiful. And for an instant there is this surge of love in me. A love for California. This state. This weird, wacky, wicked state.

I don’t know if I hate you anymore, I tell California in my mind, hoping hesitantly to make amends with my reluctant state.

So here it is. Another letter to California.

Dear California, I begin, unsure of the “Dear” at the beginning. It seems so formal. But then, I don’t know, yet, if I’m comfortable enough to not be formal with California.

I don’t know if I hate you anymore. You are beautiful, there’s no denying that. Once you get out of the cities and the light and the fake and the “it” that you tend to exude, you really are a beautiful place. A place I can understand loving. A place I love, in a way.

But I can’t love you 100%, I can’t attach myself to you so fully like everyone else does. You’ve taken so much from me. It took everything I had, and a lot I didn’t realize I had, to be myself here. To feel alright. To smile inside. To not be a total freaked-out mess.

I don’t need to tell you everything you did, everything that happened with or without your consent. You already know. 

I might never not hate you, just a little, somewhere small and hidden, for that.

But there’s something else too. I do love you. Honest I do. If you strip away everything I hate, there’s this little part of you that’s honest. The part I saw driving through to the book event. The part where nothing’s glitz and nothing’s glam and nothing (and nobody) is fake. The part where nobody lives because there is no “it”. No palm trees, no ski slopes, no sand dunes. Just peace. There’s that part, and I think it’s honest, and it draws me in.

I don’t know how I beat you – the parts of you I hate so much, I mean – and I’m not even sure that I’m done beating you. There are still times, let’s be honest, that I want to recoil. I won’t get into those times. But the point is that I don’t. I keep going. And somewhere along the line all that going, it made me realize things I was too angry to see before.

I’m not saying I want to live here, want to stay here. 

I’m not saying everything’s great between us.

I can’t forgive you completely like I could a flesh-and-blood person because you, dear California, are just a state. Some arbitrary borders, a collection of stereotypes and realities and stereotypes that are realities. You are an abstract. You can’t make things right. 

I’m not saying whatever it is you want me to or everyone else wants me to or I want to be able to. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully say those things. Everything’s too complicated. 

I am saying… I kind of like you. You’re alright.

Sincerely,

Jordyn

Ummm

This not knowing what in the world I’m doing thing is terrifying.

How am I supposed to plan classes for next semester or what to do during the summer when I don’t know what I’m doing?

Undecided and Hopelessly Adrift

I haven’t publicly announced this yet, but here goes…

I don’t know when I decided I wanted to be a writer. To be honest I’m not even sure that I chose writing as much as writing chose me. I learned to read when I was, I don’t know, like three years old or something ridiculous like that. My parents bought me Hooked on Phonics and I read At Play, which was full of those simple Dick-and-Jane stories, and I saw stories that had nothing to do with me or my life or the dirt road I lived on or the cousins I was always with.

I saw something different, and somewhere inside of me I knew that there were a trillion other “differents” if I could only imagine them. Stories untold, characters unimagined. Worlds unbuilt.

I devoured books. Amelia Bedelia, Laura Ingells Wilder, Berenstain Bears, the Curious George books my mother brainwashed me into liking. At night when I was older and had a little sister, I would lay in bed and tell her stories as she fell asleep, imagining people and places that didn’t exist except in my mind.

I wanted to be a writer.

I had to be a writer, even if I never made any money, even if I was never any good.

I just had to write.

And then I got a little bit older and did some research in those When I Grow Up books that the school library held. It turned out that writers didn’t make much money. I had no idea what the numbers meant really, but I understood when they said most writers have another job too. Something that lets them, you know, eat and stuff.

Fifth grade. My class took our weekly trip to the school library, sat listening to the librarian read a book to us, and then were let free. I headed over to the nonfiction section – this was my big “reading biographies” year that happened when my dad told me I read too much fiction. That year I read biographies of Amelia Earhart, Michelle Kwan, the Wright Brothers, Florence Nightengale, and Charles Lindbergh. (Do we sense an all-encompassing theme here?) 

But that day I pulled out the books about careers, flipped through them, and decided to be a teacher. It was such an easy choice. I’d first thought about teaching back in second grade, thanks to the most incredible teacher ever, who was the epitome of what an elementary school teacher should be: kind and caring and smart and interesting and interested. I wanted to be all of those things. And I loved kids. Always had. Still do. 

I don’t know if I chose teaching because I liked school, because I loved kids and wanted to help them, or because I wanted to be like my second grade teacher. But I know the over reaching idea of it was This makes sense. I can teach and I can write. I’ll like it. It’s practical.

I was a weird fifth grader, sure, but those thoughts stayed with me always.

I was going to write, but I was going to teach. Getting published, making money at writing, was this huge abstract what-if. The kind of wish you make when you see the first star at night. Teaching, on the other hand, was solid. It was concrete.

I could go to college, I could get my degree, and I could get a job. I could be a teacher.

Sixth grade.

Seventh grade.

Eighth grade.

Ninth grade.

Tenth grade.

Eleventh grade and oh-wow-I-graduated-early.

First-year of college.

Second-year of college.

And then… how do I put this? I don’t know how to say it so that it doesn’t sound so completely stupid and childish and immature, but…

I realized that maybe teaching isn’t what I want to do.

Why?

Because I hate school. I mean, not school itself – not my classes or learning for the most part. But the whole school system. Standardized tests, teaching the test, No Child Left Behind Except For All Of Them, gearing up to get into college, omg, and then once you’re there you’re just learning more stupid stuff you don’t really need to know just so you can have a degree.

Because I have no idea where I want to live once I get done with California and I have have have to know that in order to get the right certification and not have to either go back to school later on or waste time now.

Because I see what it takes to be a good teacher. I see that you have to care, you have to be selfless, you have to really put your heart and soul into it. You have to be there, one hundred percent, or it just won’t work. Students (and this is just my opinion, informed though it may be) are pushed into a school system that is against them for the most part – recess is being taken away from elementary schools, art and music are being cut because of funds, everything is about testing, talents and interests aren’t explored. So much is against these kids that, being totally serious here, it makes me sick to think about. Teachers should be the one thing that’s for them, and they need to really, really be for them.

Teaching isn’t a “plan B” for something else. It’s not a backup career or anything else. It’s a commitment, and a huge one at that.

…and I don’t think I can do it.

Which puts me, officially, in the College of the Undecided and Hopelessly Adrift.

So what am I doing?

I don’t know. Writing, of course, goes without saying. But my fifth-grade self was entirely right: I need something else. Because writing is the sort of career where you can work for years (and years and years and possibly forever) without seeing any monetary payment.

Right now I’m thinking something in the publishing field. I seem to like books quite a lot (note: understatement) and am getting interested in – not agent, that would be too messy trying to be on both sides of the fence in that way – but maybe publicist, or something editorial.

I don’t know, is what I’m trying to say.

And it’s the first time in my life, ever, that I haven’t known.

(Okay, I mean obviously I just sent out a bunch of queries and am working on my second novel so I know something, but I don’t know what I’m going to college for right now, or how I’m going to be supporting myself. It’s really scary. I don’t think I like it.)

Oh, and also? Thanks a lot to Becca for making me realize all this. It’s basically her fault I’m hopelessly adrift right now.

Variations on a Theme

I am so so sick of having variations of the same conversation

over

and over

again.

There is nothing wrong with what I think.

I Could Have Used This

Responding to the prompt on Twenty Something Writers (yes, I’m one of the twenty something writers… in spite of the fact that I’m not yet twenty) to write a letter to my younger self.

So here goes.

Dear Self, circa 2005

Hello! Welcome to California! I know you weren’t expecting to find a note from 2009 in your room, but life is full of surprises. (You get published, the Cardinals make it to the Superbowl, and the economy sucks.)

Anyway. Here are some things you should know:

1. YOU HAVE JUST ENTERED THE TWILIGHT ZONE! No, seriously. You’re going to meet some weird people and have some weird days. Sometimes this sucks and sometimes it’s just hilarious.
2. It’s going to be nearly impossible to make friends here. You’re going to hear this a lot in the coming years but let your future self be the first to tell you (because I finally agree with it): it’s NOT YOU. It’s this place and the weird, weird people. They’ve all known each other forever and you’re DIFFERENT. And did I mention it’s all very very strange?
3. That being said… there are good people and you find a few you really care about. But be careful, because you ARE really sweet and loving and genuine – don’t let anything that happens make you forget that, and realize that sometimes you just have to step back and accept that other people are out of your control.
4. Speaking of Mich, eventually you guys won’t fight so much. You know she always means well (and you always mean well) and even though you don’t always see eye-to-eye on things, she is always there when you need her no matter how crazy you’re acting.
5. Life is going to get really complicated and difficult for a while, but don’t get too wrapped around the axel about it. You make it through – you always do. Don’t forget that, ever.

-Jordyn, circa 2009

PS. Also: you have a boxed set of Get Smart DVDs, so that’s definitely something to look forward to.

Missed is the Only Word

2009 started out kind of, well, weird, for lack of a better word. A bit surreal, a bit startling. A bit unexpected. A bit sad.

And yesterday I spent the day studying, then went to Starbucks to write for an hour or so, then, because I was there anyway, picked up some groceries. I was pushing my cart through the aisles at nine o’clock at night, completely alone, and I started thinking about some of the things I miss… and the things I don’t.

I miss hanging out – silly photo shoots and laughing as we walked. I miss feeling like I was, if not part of a group, at least on the fringes of one. I miss the possibility of excitement, the idea that something might happen. I miss the feeling of being a “normal” teenager who did normal teenage things and had normal teenage friends. I miss feeling like things weren’t over. I miss the two people I always knew I would miss, the ones I really cared about and believed also cared about me.

I miss that so much it hurts sometimes, and I can’t understand why because…

I don’t miss thinking maybe nobody was really paying any attention to who I was (or that if they were they didn’t care). I don’t miss feeling like I would never really be accepted into that group. I don’t miss hearing the word “drama” over and over ad nauseum. I don’t miss the nagging feeling that things were happening without me, that I was left out. I don’t miss being relegated to second place and knowing it wasn’t just in my imagination. 

I don’t miss feeling out of step.

And whatever else 2009 brings – so far it’s been surprising – I know that good will come out of it for me.