Ice

I feel as though I live caught between different worlds, as though each aspect of my personality has to be consciously chosen. “I didn’t choose what I am.”

I could be, I could be, I could be.

I did choose. We always have to choose. Some times, I choose poorly. Maybe I chose to be harsh, and serious, and cold. I don’t remember the act of choosing, but I do remember a time before it. I remember being a free spirit, full of vivacity, even precocious; maybe that’s just childhood, though.

I regret many of my choices. I have chosen a path that cannot be exchanged; I have set priorities that can no longer be denied. I have given things up for them, things that most people would consider a part of youth by definition. Emotion is suppressed. Only certain interests are cultivated. Life is put on hold.

When will I live? When can I put down these responsibilities, and just be the me that I feel at these quiet moments of solitude? If I could turn back time seven years, I would laugh more, I would cry more, I would live more. Maybe I can choose to take some of it back; maybe I can reverse something.

Maybe it will all be worth it some day.

The Dark Times

I’m not sure what’s currently the matter with me. I guess I’m just in a rut, at least on the emotional front. A fresh wave of nostalgia breaks over each morning and every night, and I find myself longing for a dimly lit café where soulful music about heartbreak and misery play softly and each person there is linked by the longing of a lonely soul. I’ll admit it—I even broke out one of my favorite aching songs, “Foolproof,” by Ron Sexsmith (Feist does a lovely cover). It’s really a fantastic piece: it talks about heartbreak, about the cynicism that sets in during the aftermath, and then the secret longing we all hold that someone new will sweep us off our feet and treat us right. For everyone else who experience these doldrums, I’ve decided to compile my favorite books and songs that I wallow in during this times. Some fit the mood, some take me out of myself; all are quality.

Music:
Foolproof (Already established as being Ron Sexsmith)
Cry, James Blunt (Shut up. He’s good.)
New Romantic, Laura Marling
King of the Earth, John Ondrasik
She’s Always a Woman, Billy Joel
You Know So Well, Sondre Lerche
100 Years, Five for Fighting
Superman, Five for Fighting
Yellow, Coldplay
Lucy, Hanne Hukkelberg
Minor Details, Sondre Lerche
Ungodly Hour, The Fray
Where’s the Girl, The Scarlet Pimpernel
Prayer, (same)
When I Look at You, (um, same again—man, this musical is just ripe with songs that fit.)
Eet, Regina Spektor
She’s Got a Way, Billy Joel

I like to stick to old favorites for reading:

Coming Home, Rosamunde Pilcher (Escape into someone else’s life and forget the blues.)

I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith (I hope you can’t exactly relate with Cassandra, but it helps your perspective to chew on the drama this girl goes through.)

Gone-Away Lake, Elizabeth Enright (Yes, it is a childrens’ book, but it is excellent, as is the sequel. You’ll get caught up yearning for your childhood and wishing you had an awesome relationship with your cousins.)

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (Elinor always makes me feel better, always inspires me. Eh, she also makes me feel entirely inadequate, so I guess this could go both ways.)

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (One of my favorite heroines of any book, not to mention one of my favorite authors.)

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (Seriously? Can I just go laugh/cry with this book and save you any explanation?)

Waltzing with Mom

Most of my friends blast country or the top ten on their radios when their hurtling down the highway enjoying the freedom of solitary driving; I don’t. I mention music frequently on here, but I usually address my love for classic rock, jazz and hipster Norwegians. Oh yeah, and musicals. Now, I love all of these, but I have failed to mention my deep love of “classical” music.* Are you getting the idea? I hear orchestral music on the radio and turn up the radio. Who needs lyrics? Music speaks. I drive to school with Chopin and Mozart, and, if I’m very lucky, a little Vivaldi. I get my nerd on.

There’s a program on my favorite Canadian station that called something like “Music that Rocked Your World.” People write in to request a classical piece that somehow had an impact on them, and include their story. The host for the program makes everything overly dramatic, but I still love hearing the stories. To hear someone else’s emotional connection to music makes me feel a part of something.

I sat down at my piano today, flipping through a compendium of music that my dad had given me for Christmas. I would find a familiar piece, play a few notes, and then move on. I felt that I was looking for something—there was a strain of a melody stuck in my head that I couldn’t quite make out, but I knew it had to somewhere in this book. Then I turned the pages to Brahms’ Waltz in A Flat (Op. 39, No. 15). That was it. A memory rushed over me, full of warm light: I was only six or seven, sitting on my living room floor next to a large portable stereo. My Suzuki violin CD was playing, and I was trying to follow along in my book; I think it must have been a new book, because this was something I would do whenever I moved up—listen and look ahead to all of the new pieces I would be learning in the next months, finding favorites ahead of time. When the CD made it to this waltz, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and certainly the very best in any Suzuki book I could imagine. I started dancing around the room, and my mother joined me. That’s the image that came to mind—my mother and I twirling through patches of sunlight, my head only just past her waist, my arms wrapped around her, smiles on our faces. That’s music that rocked my world.


*In quotation so that my head remains solidly on my shoulders; I’m aware that this is not the proper terminology, but I would rather appeal to the masses than the choice few, I guess. (P.S.--Baroque music rocks.)

What music rocked your world?

Farewell, Brian Jacques

It’s a sad day, my literature loving friends: Brian Jacques passed away today. Many of you are probably familiar with his Redwall series, wonderful stories of woodland creatures. When I could find a copy of a new installment at our library, I would rush home with it clutched closely to my chest, a wonderful treasure; once I had established myself cozily wrapped in a blanket underneath my bedroom skylight with a water bottle set beside me (there was no way I was going to leave off reading for such a simple provision), I would read for hours, lost in a special world that Jacques had brought to life before my eyes. They were wonderful stories, full to the brim of exciting adventures, daring heroes and heroines, frightening brigands, and delicious vegetarian meals. Squirrels, mice, otters, moles, rats, stoats, badgers, hares, shrews—all now seemed etched into my mind’s eye as he wrote them. I read many of the books, but I never kept up; the final book, the twenty-second of the series, will be released in a couple of months. I hope that his books will inspire the imaginations of our youth for generations to come.

Rest in peace, Brian Jacques—your words will live on.

Inner Spring

I want to chronicle my college career. Maybe that will stay here, or perhaps, when on May 1, 2011, I make the looming decision of which college to attend, I’ll have a fresh place—clean of past mutterings and ramblings—in which to chronicle the new beginning. For now, I’m going to feed parts of something I wrote last week to you.


The Groundwork: I am seventeen, a senior, I have applied to the three colleges that both satisfied my parents and my own picky standards, and I have just completed one hellish weekend of interviewing for an honors program that, if I’m accepted to it, will either take me to the Balkans or London in about four hundred and forty days. Give or take, because I’m really not counting—just tossing around numbers that sound slightly maybe almost-accurate.

Should I back up a bit? I am Avery, an ill-tempered, sharp-tongued, book-devouring girl who looks out at the world through cynical spectacles that I prefer to term ‘realistic’. My reading tells me that said jaded spectacles are due to my youth—an unfortunate stage of life in which all participants feel that they have seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and on the other side of it all, they decided, in their extreme naïveté, that the world is lacking and they are bored of life. (The same books which tell me this have been able to instill enough sanity in me that my thought process isn’t quite so dismal—I’m only half dissatisfied with life, and I happen to feel that I’ve seen far too little for my years.)

I love words. I love them. I love novels, I love poetry, I love essays, I love reviews, I love lyrics, I love dictionaries, I love thoughts, I love feelings, I love emotions, I love expression, I love soul. I love the rules of words, and I love breaking the rules of writing. I want my life to be about all of this. This is purpose. This what makes me get up every morning, what keeps me awake every night, what make me laugh and cry together, what makes me connect, what makes me love. Words make me _____. You can just fill in that blank at will.

Or maybe I should just omit the blank and leave the words alone.

During that weekend I mentioned earlier, I had many encounters with the spoken word—hardly my strong point. Oh, I can write a good speech; I can compose a good conversation. I cannot deliver either. Fortunately, the ordeal started off with written words in the form of a timed essay: one hour to evaluate and discuss a statement, and then write a polished second draft. I’ve got this, I thought. After all, I do intend with my whole being to be an English major. I stared down at the statement I was to evaluate where it perched in deeply black font on obnoxious bright-blue paper. “All’s well that ends well” stared back up at me. Shit. What was this, the SAT? I write! Don’t give me some proverb or cliché saying—give me an author to contend with. Of course I don’t agree with this simple quip! What in life could be so simple? There are always complications; it’s what keeps writers in business.

I spent the hour writing and revising a pointless essay that drew from a novel that I had had read (and hated) a year before. My soul was flat.

What a week.

It started with the usual bustle of trying to finish up last minute work for holidays, food shopping, preparing for my brother to come home for a few days, and general mayhem.

By Tuesday, Stew was home and I stayed up past midnight to finish work for the week so we could spend some time together. On Wednesday, I was baking away, chatting with my family, and completely oblivious to what was coming next: a three page letter that told me of my acceptance to Houghton College and the offer of a substantial scholarship, plus an invitation to interview for their honors program in the spring.

Wow.

I wasn’t expecting to hear back from any of the schools until the end of December. I already had plans of how I would literally live at the end of my driveway, camped out in anticipation of the daily mail delivery. As if all of this wasn’t enough, I also was able to check my latest SAT scores and found that I had upped my score by about 100 points. It was my day, I guess.

Thanksgiving was a nice, quiet affair this year. Being next to useless in the kitchen, my contribution to the meal was a green bean casserole and the donation of an apron to my mother. Hey, every little bit helps, right? Instead of cooking, I cleaned up from time to time and finished the fifth HP book. Really, the day turned out ideally for me: food, family and books.

Friday was, as it is every year, the day that we went to get our Christmas tree. The wind was bitter, so we picked our tree in record time—anything to get out of that cold, which is saying a lot coming from a northern girl who would rather it be below zero than above ninety. As the snow came down, the decorations went up yesterday, making our little country home feel cozier than ever, with wreaths on every window and a glowing woodstove to warm us.

Let’s hope that this week is just as fantastic.

If You Can't Beat 'em...

I know that the web is all abuzz about a grave stone that’s being used as a tourist attraction due to the deceased’s name being Harry Potter, and sure, that doesn’t look good for the series right at this moment, but I’m going to blog about it anyway. Many of you know (or have realized) that I read quite a bit. I mean, my intended major is English with a focus of literature, after all. I’ve been pushing myself through a lot of weighty material lately (think Huxley and such), and I recently came to the realization that I needed a reading vacation—not from books, but just from the heavy stuff. I had made a couple of deals a while back that I would eventually get around to read the Harry Potter series, and now seemed like a good time to get that rather cumbersome monkey off my back—there are seven books, after all, and I don’t particularly like monkeys to begin with. As an added bonus, I decided to read them with a future career as an acquisitions editor in mind: what made these books different from your average teen-directed trash lit? What has made it last and become hugely popular? With this in mind, I set off on my HP journey.

The first step: conquering my pride. It’s not like I had anything against the books, but really—they’re housed the children’s room of my library. Right in front of the librarians’ desk. I’m the sort of person who usually arrives at their desk with a hearty stack of biographies, histories, folklore and even the occasional gardening book—not something that’s been carefully placed on eye level for humans exactly one-half my height. (That last bit wasn’t a joke. The shelves in the kiddie section are actually below my waist. What am I, the Jolly Green Giantess?) However, just over a week ago, I conquered this demon and strode confidently in, whispering a quiet ‘thank you’ when realizing that the room was empty. Vanity: saved.

Naively, I only grabbed the first book. Well, that was done before I turned out my light that night. I was hooked! It was well written, smart, humorous and compelling. True, the characters felt young to me, but looking from an analytical standpoint, the book was solid on all accounts. Hurrying back to the library, I grabbed the next two. Two days later, both had been stacked by my door, waiting to be returned to their short shelves. I just finished the fourth book last night, and I’m eagerly awaiting a trip to the library tomorrow to go pick up the last books. After all, a new challenge has been issued: I’m to be reading the final book by the time that college break starts next week. At this rate, it’ll take me longer to get through all of the films than the books!

I’m getting sidetracked. Basically, if you’ve been holding out on reading these books for any reason up until now, I would suggest that you give it a rest and try them. I know that there’s a lot floating about that the books are of a satanic bent, but I certainly don’t see much of a difference between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings as far as magic is concerned. They both consist of the ever-present forces of Good and Evil, showing the battle between the two as a struggle in which the champions of Good will triumph in the end. If you were to ask me, I would say that it’s a noble inspiration—and since you’re reading my blog, who cares if you actually asked me or not, right? Go indulge in some sinfully easy reading.