Listening, bowling, writing and designing

I’m starting to conquer the Advanced Writing listening assignment I dreaded so much. I found a group of moms who sit on the bleachers at the Mizzou Rec Pool while their kids are at swim practice. The kids practice six days a week for at least 2 hours a day. Most parents drop off and pick up, but some of the moms stay the whole time to relax and chat. They use it as a break from the craziness of life. This is ideal because I know exactly where they’ll be and when, and now they know who I am. I just sat myself right down and introduced myself and told them what I wanted to do. They thought it was a little strange at first so I just chatted with them for a while til they got to like me. Now that they’re used to me I can go back and hopefully capture some good dialogue.

Lori talked to me the most, but Lisa dominated the conversation between the two of them. They talked about pretty typical woman stuff, but it was still interesting. A second Lisa came on the scene halfway through and started a husband-bashing session. Lori turned to me and said, “It’s group therapy.” Lisa’s husband had freaked on out her for not having dinner ready after the last swim meet. He was home from a long day at work and hungry. She wanted to know if he had all his fingers and toes intact and why he wasn’t capable of finding his own food. I haven’t gotten their last names and phone numbers yet. I’ll try that tonight now that they’re used to me. Hopefully they won’t mind.

Two hours a day six days a week is a lot of practice for 10- to 12-year-old kids. I wonder if the kids like competitive swimming, or if it’s one of those things their parents push them into. They were talking about Michael Phelps coming to the Missouri Grand Prix swim meet this weekend. I wonder if they are trying to make their kids famous. That might be an interesting story, but it’s not my assignment. I asked the ladies some questions to get them comfortable and get some background information. But now I’m just supposed to listen and see what comes out. Should be interesting.

I’m heading back to the bowling alley where I used to work tonight. Another girl in my Advanced Writing class is doing the listening assignment at the bowling alley and she’s having trouble. They won’t let her come in during league and nothing much happens the rest of the time. I’m going to try to sweet talk the managers into letting her hang out with the league players. I’m sure there are some of them who wouldn’t mind and she’ll get some really colorful dialogue. Those guys are crazy. I’m a little nervous. Hopefully they still like me up at the bowling alley. At the end of last year, they begged me to come back after Colorado. I told them I would so they’d hold my spot, but I changed my mind. People come and go pretty regularly at jobs like that, so hopefully they won’t hold it against me. I had issues with the way the manager messed up my schedule all the time and I got tired of being constantly hit on by the league guys. I hope I can get the girl in.

I’m so tired, but I still have a lot to do tonight. Hopefully I can help her out and then leave and go sit with my swim moms for a while, then work on my creative nonfiction essay that’s due Thursday and look at my mag design project for Monday. Somewhere in there I might eat dinner. All I want to do is sleep. That’s the prize I’m working toward.

The Restoration of Home Internet

As I mentioned in my last post, my laptop hasn’t been picking up our wireless internet lately. It’d been almost a week and I was getting really frustrated. I like to think I don’t use the internet that much, but this experience has taught me how wrong I was. I’m ashamed to admit that I wanted it for some reason or another at least once every hour that I was at home.

Luckily, I fixed the problem this morning. I was going to take it to the university’s tech store, but first I tried (for the hundredth time) to do it on my own. I won’t bore you with the extremely complex details of the repair. Suffice it to say I am a technological genius. No wonder I struggle with writing sometimes; I’ve discovered my true calling. I’m headed to Best Buy to apply for the Geek Squad.

Ok, I’m kidding. It wasn’t that tricky and I’m not very good at this kind of thing. I should have figured it out a while ago.  I just like inflating my own ego. But I am very pleased to have the internet back at my house. Now I don’t have to go to the library twice a day. This is bad news for the things I need to get done this week, but oh well. Viva la Internet!

Good day sunshine

“I need to laugh and when the sun is out I’ve got something I can laugh about. I feel good.” -The Beatles, Good Day Sunshine

It’s a pretty cheesy song, but seems appropriate. There are a few things I could credit with my mood improvement. One is the sun. Even if it’s still cold out, the sunshine makes a huge difference in how I feel. The world seems less heavy.

Another is my boyfriend. He showed up at my house yesterday to surprise me with a beautiful bouquet of flowers. This was especially sweet since he had to work last night. He drove an hour and a half each way and could only stay 25 minutes before heading back to work. He knew I had a bad week and needed a pick me up. Hugging him made me a feel a lot better, and now I have the flowers to remind me every time I see them. I’ll add a picture of the flowers later. They’re pretty great.

Flowers from Michael

I saved the best for last: God. I’ve been struggling on my own because I feel like I need to take charge of things. But my mom, my friend Matt (Curly) and Jamie reminded me that God is just waiting for me to ask for help. I know people have been praying for me the last few days and it has helped tremendously. The power of prayer is awesome. God is taking the pressure off. My job right now is not to have everything worked out and perfectly planned. My job is to rely on God, to listen and follow, to love other people. Everything else will fall into place.

My laptop stopped letting me connect to the wireless internet, so my access is a bit limited right now. I will try to get on frequently at the library and hopefully figure out the problem soon. Thanks everyone for the support and keep reading. I leave you with a song that is my prayer today. It says, “this world has nothing for me,”  meaning I need to readjust my thinking. My joy and fulfillment come from God. Instead of asking what the world has for me, I should be seeking what I can give to improve the world. (Yes, slight idea snatching from JFK. Ask not what your country can do for you…) But it’s true. My struggle is a result of selfishness. Time to get the focus off me.

“I need you Jesus to come to my rescue. Where else can I go? There’s no other name by which I am saved. Capture me with grace. And I will follow you. This world has nothing for me.” -Newsong, Rescue

Hey, it’s Friday.

Snow is falling in huge wet flakes that instantly turn to slush on the ground. I finally got a good night’s sleep. I had a dream that wasn’t bad – the first in months. I ate a decent lunch: pasta with green pepper and mushroom red sauce to which I added basil and shredded gouda.

I don’t feel happy, but I feel OK. Just blah rather than miserable. It’s a start. I want to write some fiction, but currently have no story ideas. I need to be working on my nonfiction; my first essay is due Thursday.

I also need to be eavesdropping, but I really don’t want to. We are doing an assignment on dialogue for Advanced Writing. I am supposed to go to the gym and listen in on people’s conversations. I’m supposed to convince them to let me do this and to give me their names because I’m a journalist. I guess the journalist title gives me some privileges that I am none too eager to use. But Berkeley thinks it’s a great idea. Just let me go back to the cave, that sounds much better. It could be worse. Some poor kid got assigned the funeral home. He’s already attended one stranger’s funeral uninvited and is now working on going to a visitation and burial. I think I would be a consciencious objector if that were my assignment.

Perhaps I’m just not curious and nosy enough to be a truly good journalist. Reporting is always the worst part. I just want to write. This is one of my least favorite reporting assignments to date. The worst was for the Missourian, going to the house of a dead motorcycle accident victim to try and talk to someone who knew him. Luckily, no one was home. Maybe if I’d done that, this would be easier.

How I’m doing

“It’s gonna get harder still before it gets easy. I’m alone in this. I’m as I’ve always been, a step behind what’s happening.” –Jimmy Eat World, Always Be

I’m lonely, but I can’t bring myself to call my friends or go out.

I’m tired, but seem incapable of sleep.

I’m stressed, but can’t force myself to catch up on things.

I want something, but don’t know what.

The future freaks me out but the present isn’t much better.  I don’t know what to do with myself. Don’t know what to look forward to. Don’t understand my purpose unless God has called me to be a mopey, self-pitying slob. There are good days and bad days. But lately it seems they are all bad. I wish someone would tell me what to do.

“Good things happen slowly, and bad things happen fast.” — A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

The Fourth State of Matter

I just read The Fourth State of Matter by  Jo Ann Beard for my nonfiction creative writing class. It is extremely good. Extremely. I hope to write like this someday, though I hope never to have an experience like this to write about. This was a personal history piece published in The New Yorker. My only complaint is that I want to know more. I don’t want it to end. I need a sequel in which we find out what happens with the two biggest unresolved issues (I won’t name for fear of spoiling something).

If you’re interested in good writing, read this. But I warn you, I nearly cried. Had I read it on a different day, I would have cried. Such good writing. So real. This is the kind of stuff that reassures me that yeah, I really do want to do this.

The domestification of Nikki

Is domestification a word? No. Am I doing it? Yes.

I’m going to be graduating in May. After that, I’ll spend the summer being a mountain woman and teaching kids about Jesus in Colorado. After that…I got nothing. No plans. No job prospects. No idea what kind of job I want. Or where I’ll live. Or anything.

So I figure I should at least make sure I’m useful in some capacity. I need to be more domestic.

The task that’s given me the most trouble is cooking. I could be good at it if I had unlimited time, money and mouths to feed. As it is, I only feed myself on a low budget and usually don’t start thinking about a meal until I’m hungry and in a hurry. But I’m working on it. Thanks to Michael I have a sweet knife set. Together, we’ve made a delicious mango pork tenderloin with rice pilaf and mango chutney. We also made a killer meatloaf with garlic parsley mashed potatoes. All from scratch. (Okay, we bought chutney, but real homemade chutney takes a long time and lot of expensive ingredients.)

Tonight I made chicken fried rice. I marinated the chicken in teriyaki and soy sauce in the fridge for 2 days. I cut the chicken into strips and cooked it in a pan with oil. In another pan, I sliced up carrots with a bit of oil. After a while, I added celery to the carrots, then cashews at the last minute. I made vegetable fried rice in a pot (this was cheating – I used Knorr’s rice; it’s really fast.) I realize it’s not that complicated of a meal, but it’s much more effort than I usually go through for myself. I was fairly pleased with the way it turned out. Maybe I’m useful after all.

Dreams

I’m at my old house, running through the backyard barefoot. Someone is chasing me – a girl I don’t know. It is imperative that I get away. I jump down a steep bank and plunge into the creek. It’s gotten so much bigger than it was when I was a kid. I run through the creek and hope she won’t be able to follow me. Trying to be silent, I race along all the way to another city. Though I’m in a soaking wet t-shirt, I go into a ritzy old hotel where women dance in regal ballgowns. I hide in a bathtub in the basement. Someone is there. The door is off the hinges and I have to hold it up and hide behind it. The room is full of kids in sleeping bags and Michael and I hide amongst them. It goes on. Always hiding, always fearful.

I’m driving home across three states and realize I have no idea where I’m going. I’m so distracted I can’t even control my car. I drive through a light and off the road onto  the grass. There’s a cop but he doesn’t seem to mind me. I get back on the road and try to remember the way we came. Why were we there?  Why am I alone? Somehow, I get to a mall. It is gigantic. I run into Bridget and her mom. We walk to their car, catching up on life. Then I go to mine, but get in the passenger side on accident. Bridget’s mom gets in the driver’s seat and takes me to another parking lot in another part of the mall. I keep asking what she’s doing, but she ignores me. I follow her into the mall, which is like a subway station. We go up several flights of stairs and horizontally quite far from our starting point. Sadly, I don’t pay attention to where we’ve been.

She leaves me and I am utterly lost. This mall has like 16 levels and 10 parking lots and I have no clue where my car is. Meanwhile, it’s pouring down rain outside and the lots are flooded. Really flooded – maybe 10 feet of water. The mall apparently is also a private school and there are fire engines everywhere to evacuate all the uniformed kids. I manage to find an exit and am overjoyed, only to realize it is where my car used to be but isn’t anymore.

I go up an escalator, but there’s no landing at the top. I have to climb onto a tiny point of floor with a huge drop-off on either side of me and a rack of clothes in the way. My parents are waiting for me in a Holiday Inn in St. Peters and are probably freaking out because I’ve been gone so long and they can’t get a hold of me. I try to call them, but don’t have my phone because I have no pockets. It’s in the car. I wander for hours. The mall closes and I still can’t find my car.

My brain wakes me up because it gives up on ever finding the solution. I’m tired and disoriented and not ready for another day.

Writer’s block

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” -Margaret Atwood

“Don’t get it right, just get it written.” -James Thurber

This semester is great because I finally get to do what I’ve wanted all the time: longform writing. This semester is horrible because I can’t seem to write a thing. Here I am in Creative Nonfiction and Advanced Writing and I feel like I have nothing worthwhile to say. It’s all fine and good to write for myself, but it’s hard to write something specific that has universal appeal.

I’m supposed to be working on a fun, easy assignment. Our professor took us to the Devil’s Icebox cave in Rock Bridge State Park. We were each assigned a sense and told to observe as much as we could about it. I loved it. I knew it was coming and it was one of the reasons I signed up for this class. I got a really easy sense: sight. Lots of people think visually, so it’s not hard to connect with visual writing. I took a few pages of notes at the cave and enjoyed taking it all in. Now the assignment. Simple: one page that uses our assigned sense to describe the cave. So easy.

But there are some really talented writers in my class. I know theirs will be better than mine. I know mine will babble on with too much description and will never get to a point. I’m afraid I’ll accidentally slip in a cliche. So here I am, writing about writing rather than actually doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I need to get this done so I can go drink champagne. My roommate got accepted to Vanderbilt and Harvard for grad school today. We need to celebrate.

It distracts me from the cave though. It makes me think about my own future plans. She knows what she’s doing and she knows it’s going to be awesome. I keep having dreams about getting chased, hunted, stalked. I’ve even been turning into animals: I was a frog being hunted by an eagle and a duck being hunted by people. I’m obviously helpless, lost and terrified. How lame is that. It used to seem like graduating college would be a triumph. Now it will feel like a failure if I don’t succeed at doing something with it. But I need to stop thinking about that for a while. I need to transport myself back to a cave where icicles hang from the ceiling and silvery minerals sparkle in my headlamp’s beam. Time to write.

The deception of “choice”

Some brilliant abortion marketer decided to label abortion “choice.” Very effective; everyone should have a right to choose. Our American psyche of individual rights and liberties forbids that our choices be taken away.

But we do not have a right to all choices. I cannot choose to bring more than three ounces of shampoo in a bottle on a plane. I cannot choose to steal a car if the owner leaves the key in the ignition. The government tells me I cannot choose these things, no matter how the limitation inconveniences me. We do not have the right to privacy when we might endanger another individual.

In exchange for a civilized society, we give our government permission to restrict our choices. Our government exists to protect us from the destructive whims of our fellow man. Most pro-choice politicians claim to be personally against abortion. So why do politicians say they cannot take away a woman’s right to choose abortion? We’ve somehow forgotten that we are not legally entitled to all choices. Isn’t the right to kill another person one of the choices we shouldn’t have? Many abortion proponents have backed away from the claim that abortion doesn’t take a life. They weigh the life of the baby against the convenience of the mother, and somehow, they decide that life is less important.

Fortunately, my generation is wising up to the deception of “choice.” Even those who have bought “choice” hook, line and sinker cannot deny the tremendous surge of youth in the pro-life movement. Supporters of the Roe decision are getting nervous, according to this Washington Post column. Get nervous, because we are standing up, spanning various religious, political and personal views to unite and recognize that we don’t want abortion.

President Obama, in defense of allowing abortion said, “I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all . . .”

I agree. I don’t consider abortion a religious issue. I don’t consider abortion a partisan issue. I don’t consider it a women’s issue. It is a humanitarian issue. The principle that everyone can agree on is that we should not kill. Doctors take an oath to do no harm, but we no longer seem to care what harm we do as long as we serve ourselves. Our society demands to have every choice but no consequences. That kind of attitude can only stand so long before we self-destruct.