This Day is Bananas

Dear Blog, I feel like crying. I’m dizzy (so dizzy) and more worn out than I’ve been in years. I’m hesitant to bring it up because people tend to kind of freak out, but… my health is acting up.

I don’t think it’s going to be anything HUGE – they’ll probably just want to do a few tests and adjust my medication (which needs to be done anyway), but I am trying to get in to see my pediatric cardiologist a few months earlier than I was planning. (Only like a month and a half early, really.)

And I’m so dizzy and I can’t think to do anything*

[definition of "anything" = schoolwork. writing. basically anything productive or that requires brain power. mah brain is quite scrambled; i'm typing worse than normal.]

so I decided to take a nap. I mentioned the worn out bit, right?

WORST NAP EVER, BLOG!

There were two of them – TWO OF THEM! Plus her. And them. The them are people I DON’T EVEN KNOW but they were MEAN omg. And I stepped on the lawn that you weren’t supposed to step on and everyone looked at me funny and it was so awkward and OH.

MY.

GOSH.

I’m just glad it was a dream. That’s all I’m saying. Because I woke up and I wanted to cry, cry, cry it was so horrible. And then I sat up and remembered how dizzy I was and why I took a nap in the first place and I wanted to cry even more.

THIS DAY IS SUPER FUN, GUIS. /sarcasm

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.

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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

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.

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.

Best of Fifty

Let’s discuss my 365 project for a moment.

I started it the first of this year, as a way to:

improve my limited photography skills,

take note of my days in a different way,

have a pictorial journal/journey of my year,

see what happened.

Now I’ve passed Day 50, and while many of the pictures are lame snapshots, some taken in bad light with photo booth, there are a lot that I like. My photography skills are still pretty much nonexistent, but here you go…

THE BEST OF THE FIRST FIFTY.

This is day five, and I still think it’s one of the best – maybe the best. I took the picture in the back of a tiny closet… I was sitting down and the hand above me was already touching the ceiling. It was an awkward picture to take trying to set up the camera and get more than just my face in the frame.

Day thirteen, another one that I think turned out way good. (And I’m inside the same closet! Haha.) This was inspired by Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and it also turned out much better than expected. I love it now.

Day twenty-four. I like the colors in it, and how the “lightbulb” filter turned out. I’m not sure how good it is by others’s standards, but I think it’s nice.

Day twenty-five! This was for a “geek” theme, and I think that’s probably one of the biggest reasons I like it – showing off my Psychology-Today-obsessed side. I like the colors too – the contrast and black and white. Oh, and my pose, how most of my face is covered with the magazine.

Day thirty-four, my crazyface picture. I put a bunch of spiking gel in my hair and made a bunch of crazy faces. I find it funny.

This was day forty-seven, it was a copycat of America’s Next Top Model challenge, and I chose to copy this picture (a high school cliche “bookworm” shot) for obvious reasons. Books and nerdiness are awesome components of any day. The shot I copied is this one:

And this is day forty-nine, a very recent shot but one I love. It’s the first of my 30 Days, 30 Secrets project, and I took the shot in the tub (obviously), with that lovely sign. I ended up loving the colors and light. (Most of my best photos are processed, obviously, sometimes heavily because I go a little process/edit-happy.) Basically I adore the mood of it.

Ah.

You guys, I am really loving this 365 project. I’ve wanted to get into photography for a long time, but I just have a snapshot camera and I’m not really serious enough to get myself set up with film or a “real” photographer’s camera. So basically my tools are the camera, whatever I can find nearby to use for a makeshift tripod, and the editing on Picnik. 

I don’t think I can explain my feelings about this project and experience the way I’d like to just yet. I’ll try to someday, but for now just know… I love this experience.

In Which I Am A Nutter

We all have our weird things, right?

Like some people don’t like garbage bags and some can’t stand wooden spoons.

Me?

Well, okay, so. You know how when you put something in the microwave it gets hot? Then when it’s done being fried with radiation or whatever it is that happens, the microwave BEEPS?

Yes. Well.

I CANNOT STAND IT.

Sometimes I stand by the microwave, waiting for whatever’s in it to be done so I can open the door BEFORE IT BEEPS. If someone else in the house uses the microwave I yell at them as soon as it beeps to TAKE IT OUT TAKE IT OUT MAKE IT STOP!!!

You see, I have Beeping Microwave Sonar.

The microwave is downstairs in the kitchen and my room is upstairs, on the opposite side of the house, yet I can always hear the microwave when it beeps. Kitchen, living room, bedroom – wherever I am. I hear it. And something inside me gets incredibly annoyed and I feel like if it doesn’t stop I might break out in hives.

I’ve never actually had hives. But I imagine they feel like how hearing the microwave beep sounds. IE. they make you want to explode in pain and/or frustration. If the beeping doesn’t STOP, and QUICKLY, I start to go swiftly insane.

I do things like yell at whoever is closer to the microwave than me/whoever is using the microwave/whoever is around. And block my ears/go “lalalalalala” to block out the noise. And grit my teeth in anger.

So yeah. I’m weird about the microwave beeping.

But that’s not the only microwave-related thing that turns me into a nervous wreck.

The other thing is when people stop the microwave before it’s done going and then they don’t hit the clear button and the time left is still there instead of, um, the actual time.

This makes me a nutter.

I freak out for a moment, saying things like, “AM I THE ONLY ONE THIS DRIVES CRAZY???” (apparently I am). I hurry over and hit the clear button, then I FIND whoever used the microwave last and give them a stern talking-to.

They tell me I have problems.

Maybe they’re right. I have microwave-related problems.

BUT ALL PROBLEMS COULD BE AVOIDED IF PEOPLE JUST STOPPED THE INCESSANT BEEPING AND CLEARED THE SCREEN PLEASE.

Songs of a Bygone Era

If you haven’t seen this video yet, you are missing out.

Either that or you now think I’m crazy.

Anyway. Let’s transition from THAT weirdness.

Today I was searching in my purse for a slip of paper that I lost (and never found, sadly), and I came upon a reminder of bygone days. A ticket stub from what feels like eons ago but was really only a few months back. I dropped the ticket stub as if it were on fire, remembering when I’d gone to see the movie with some people months ago.

It’s sad when the people you know become the people you knew.

Sometimes when I talk to my grandma on the phone she’ll ask if I still keep in touch with some old friends from back home. And though I remember being best friends with those girls, remember staying over at their house or them staying over at my house, sometimes I don’t immediately remember who she’s talking about. They’ve faded so much from my memory and my life, their identities replaced by cardboard cut-outs marked “too-perfect” and “not-quite-as-perfect.” I don’t know those people anymore and they don’t know me.

But I haven’t seen them in years. So that happens.

What’s worse is that all the ties I’ve made recently seem to have been severed as well, and how BLIND am I? How blind to others’ faults, to their shortcomings, to the things they don’t tell me that ruin everything?

“I feel so stupid,” I told my dad. “I feel like I chose to trust the worst possible people, and if I thought they were good, how am I supposed to know from now on? Who’s good and who I shouldn’t be around? Why am I so stupid?” I felt betrayed not only by others, but by myself. For being stupid, for being what I saw as naive and childish.

“You’re not stupid, and you don’t know,” he told me. “You never know. You just have to go by what you see and take people as they come.”

I sighed. It would have helped, I thought, if everyone were just honest. Geez.

But they aren’t, and I am and sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who is and it kind of sucks, but now I see that my dad is right. I’m not that stupid and I’m not that naive. I’m just honest and trusting and genuine and I expect the world to meet me with the same straight-forwardness I meet it with, but that doesn’t always work. Sometimes people aren’t used to that. More often than not honesty and trust are lacking, and that is not my fault, which is what I have to keep telling myself because I don’t want to become bitter and jaded – one of those people that has a general distrust and dislike of everything and everyone.

It’s sad sometimes, but I’d rather be honest, trusting, generally peaceful and happy and occasionally get hurt than lie and be distrustful and bitter to protect myself.

25 Conference Things

The conference, right?

You want to hear about the conference.

Well. Okay. But the only way I can think of to do that is to do that whole Facebook-meme-esque thing that’s been going around like the plague and list 25 things about the conference for your reading pleasure. 

So. Without further ado… 25 Things About the Conference: (oh, and if by chance you came to my blog FROM the conference, ie. I gave you my card or we exchanged info… welcome! Yay! Comment! Lemme know you’re here! Share your thoughts on the conference!)

1. Pretty sure I was one of the youngest writers there. This was expected and not nearly as weird/awkward as I thought it might be.
2. It’s somewhat nerve-wracking talking to agents and editors. One of the first people I talked to was a guy seated at the Young Adult table the first night and I didn’t notice at first that he was one of the speakers, and there’s no point to that story except that agents and editors are easy to talk to as long as you aren’t crazy. (I mean crazy in a bad way, because we’re all crazy.)
3. Following point number 2… I did get the chance to meet and talk to quite a few agents and editors. The YA genre seemed to be highly represented and it was awesome talking to people who are involved in publishing. Not only talking about what I’m working on, but just about books in general. John Green, Sarah Dessen, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and the YA genre as a whole. It was so fun.
4. My cute little cards were a success. Yay! (I was quite worried about this, truth be told, but everyone seemed to like them.)
5. On Saturday I left my mom’s jacket (that I was borrowing) in rooms I’d just left at least three times. Finally I had to run out to my car and lock the jacket in the trunk to keep myself from losing it. This did mean freezing for the rest of the day.
6. Aside from today (Sunday) it was raining the whole weekend. Must have been fun for the people who came out here specifically for this conference and were expecting the usual Southern Cal weather of sunshine.
7. I took notes like mad.
8. The Agents’ Panel I sat in on was one of the greatest parts of the conference. A lot of the submissions information I knew or could have easily found online, but it was good hearing the agents talk about what they like/don’t like and actually getting the chance to ask questions and talk to one of them afterwards.
9. Have decided my title (still) needs work. Oy. Apparently title matters. And I happen to, uh… kind of suck at titles.
10. I went to an on-the-spot first three pages critique. My pages weren’t read but I did learn you shouldn’t confuse the reader during the first few page. Like, you really have to establish who the character is and set the scene instead of just jumping into something that’s going to be explained later because people won’t read long enough to find out what happens. (Which, I know, I know, sounds really obvious, but it’s all the more clear when you hear first pages read aloud without any preamble as to the story.)
11. I met a lot of people! I have eleven business cards sitting here from writers and publishing professionals, including a few that were conducting the sessions I was in. Plus I’ve got contact or website information for four more people written in my notebook. Um, wow?
12. I knew the answers to questions I didn’t know I knew the answers to… if that makes any sense. A few people asked me why I write Young Adult and I KNEW WHY!!! I was pleasantly surprised at myself.
13. I had the thought, after it was all done, that all of my family and much of my friends (all of my friends except those I’ve met through RED) would have been bored to death at the conference. But for me it was insanely fun.
14. Okay … what did I go to sessions on? Umm…. how to get the most out of the conference, how to “find” the story, grammar, internet marketing, voice in YA, ingredients for plot, and how to make your first novel successful. In case you were wondering.
15. I saw a lot of the same people in a lot of my sessions, and they weren’t necessarily the people who write in the same genre as I do. One of them was writing literary fiction, another trying to find an agent for his thriller, another working on a nonfiction parenting book. I found that interesting.
16. They had writing books on sale. I resisted buying any.
17. But I did go to Barnes & Noble and (finally!) buy a copy of MT Anderson’s Feed, so maybe this point negates the previous one?
18. At one point the lights went out.
19. Then they came back on.
20. Five minutes later they went out again. It was interesting. People were basically eating in the dark and talking in the dark and using their cellphones to see. Some of us just went into the hallway near the windows for a while.
21. THERE ARE ACTUALLY AGENCIES ON THE WEST COAST. Nice!
22. Thanks to my grammar workshop, I now know the difference between blond and blonde, a while and awhile, and I know that ellipses have spaces before and after them. Woo! I knew I needed that grammar workshop.
23. I think it went well.
24. It’s surprisingly difficult to list this many things. I’m watching Toddly00 on YouTube if anyone is interested in that bit of news that has nothing at all to do with the conference.
25. I’ll leave this spot open for your questions.

BUT. One of the suggestions at the internet marketing session was to have a Facebook. And actually friend people/get to know people/network through it. Which means I now have a public Facebook. Jordyn Turney. Friend me!

Aaaand there you have it. My last name is officially on the interwebz. I trust you will not use this information for evil.