my pink room

I don't know how it's possible, but winter break is almost over. Tomorrow I will leave Richmond and head back to my beloved Charleston. It's the fourth Christmas I've had since college started, but this break feels different. Next Christmas I won't be a college student. I'm still trying to figure out what I will be, but right now it's a little unclear. Whatever or wherever I am though, I know I probably won't have a pre-packaged month long break. Hopefully I'll have a life, a real bona-fide, me controlled and (at least partially) me financed life. All of which has got me thinking.
In college it's kind of like you have a split personality, the you that's at school and the you that's at home. And you get to indulge both sides, play both roles, be these two different people. Even my different rooms reflect the different versions of myself. In Charleston my room is painted a tasteful taupe. The walls are covered in photographs from my time in Europe, each of them bordered with a simple black frame. I have a huge grown-up desk and a grown up desk chair to match it. And I have a queen sized grown up bed. All in all, it's a tasteful, mature (except for my Andy Roddick and The Format posters - but I can't have a room that's more mature than me) adultish bedroom. And then I come home to Richmond and I'm freeze framed back into my middle school days. We moved into our current house when I was fourteen and I made it my personal mission to decorate my bedroom. So even though I'm 22, when I come home I'm surrounded by the fourteen year old me's version of a dream room. My walls are a shockingly bright pink (my brother often jokes that from outside it looks like my room is glowing). I have a zebra print rug and a leopard print stool. The curtains are made up of a pink and green plaid pattern. I still have a James Dean poster and a Breakfast Club poster on my walls. My shelves are lined with old swim team, softball and basketball trophies leftover from elementary school. Worn, beloved stuffed animals that my mom could never convince me to get rid of sit idly on top of bookshelves. Even more beloved stuffed animals retain their places on furniture or in chairs. My twin bed is the same bed I slept in as soon as I moved on from a crib. In every sense, my bedroom at home is my childhood personified. And it's always weird when I first get home for break. I think as college students, we get really good at pretending to be grown up when we're away from home. We do our own grocery shopping and stay up as late as we want and go out on school nights. We pay electric bills and squash bugs and fix things (or call our landlords to do it). But then we come home, and suddenly all of that's gone. Mom is in the kitchen making dinner. Dad will run out to the store to buy soft drinks. And for me I end up in a room that makes it very hard to feel grown up. I get used to it as the break goes on, but it seems there's always a moment when I first arrive and when I'm about to leave that simultaneously comforts me and breaks my heart. Growing up is inevitable. Everyone knows that. But the physical remnants of childhood can stay on for a long time, maybe even forever. And you can touch these remnants and hold them, but all it really accomplishes is making you ache for the person who these things really belonged to, a person that doesn't really exist anymore, at least not in the same way. And so when I come into my room for the first time after being gone for a while, and flick on the lights and see all of the things that fourteen year old me loved or even seventeen year old me loved, all of the silly trinkets and old pictures in dusty frames, it's like the two versions of myself (college version and childhood version) collide so forcefully that I end up in some lost place in between the two. Yes, you can come home again, but it's not easy, or at least it never has been for me. It always takes me a while to get my bearings whenever I travel between the two worlds that make up my life right now, the world of pink and the world of taupe. Maybe until I really start my own life, one that's secure and at least semi-permanent, I'm always going to be weaving back and forth, jumping from one me to the next. I guess for right now I'm just half taupe, half bright pink, half mature and independent, half still content to curl up in my childhood bed surrounded by all of the things that remind me of being a kid.

ps

See, I knew 2008 was going to be a surprising kind of year. Shortly after my last little post, I was kidnapped/rescued by my best-friend MK, forced to actually put on real clothes and make-up for the first time since Friday, and taken to join some of my other friends at Richmond's newest New Years tradition, the big shindig in Carytown. I stayed kind to my stomach and did not force feed it any booze, but even if I had wanted to I wouldn't have been able to push my way through the masses to the booze stands or carts or whatever they were. We arrived shortly after 11:40pm, and were able to push our way in to just beyond the periphery of Cary street. I didn't go to this thing last year, but from what I've heard it's grown in size a lot in just one year. I've never seen anything like it in Richmond. Just a giant people sandwich as far as the eye can see, paramedics perched on top of their trucks keeping an eye out for drunken shenanigans or trampling induced injuries, tons of horse police standing in wait, people on the tops of roofs (i was just waiting for one of these drunkards to take a tumble) and a dancing, singing drag queen in the VIP area (what goes by an average boutique by day) to our right. There was a tiny little ball at the top of the Byrd, and at times a little section of the crowd parted enough for me to see it, but mainly I was trying to keep both feet planted on the ground and not start involuntarily crowd surfing. Apparently Richmond can get rowdy. And I for one am glad I got to see it and glad I got to be with friends at midnight. So an unexpected start to 2008. Here's hoping for more unexpectedness to come :)

happy (recuperating) new years!

So here I am writing this at 9:30pm on New Years Eve, instead of being out on the town, out and about, out taking names, out (and i think i'm out of metaphors for going out). Why you ask? Well I made the very (in my opinion) grown up choice to spare my poor, ravaged stomach the onslaught of alcohol that it would inevitably receive if I went out tonight. Yes, the dreaded, stalker stomach flu hit me full force Friday night, and while I feel tons better and have actually been able to eat fairly normally today for the first time, I feel like going out and drinking would be the equivalent of telling my poor, recovering stomach to go screw itself.
Looking back it really was inevitable. We fell like Dominoes. First my sister a couple of days before Christmas, then my dad the night after Christmas, then my brother-in-law the night after that, and my mom the night after that. And I feebly maintained the hope that my youthful vigor would keep me healthy. Well I was an idiot. It took one, tiny queasy feeling Friday night for me to know that it was coming. And within a few hours I was the sickest I've been in a long time. Saturday was spent in a feverish haze. It was weird in a way, because I haven't been sick like that in a really long time, especially not at home. And any fears I might have had that my mom would not be as dutiful a caregiver for me at 22 as she was when I was younger were quickly put to rest. Even though she herself was still recovering, she kept my ginger ale glass full, asked me about once an hour if I was warm enough, and allowed me to remain in bed for a full two days. God bless her. Obviously I've had bad colds and a couple of sore throats and coughs and such since I've been in college, but I haven't had the not being able to do a thing for yourself kind of sickness, the kind where you sleep for sixteen hours straight but still can't get out of bed to get the chap stick the next day, or wake up a in a puddle of your own sweat from a high fever, or kind of abandon hygiene temporarily. It sucks. And I guess if I had to get the stomach flu this year I was lucky to get it while firmly ensconced in the comfort my family home. Although by the same token, my family are the little germ carriers who got me sick in the first place. It is amazing that tiny, invisible little germs can take down five people in less than a week. All pride in my youthful vigor is kind of out the window. Also, I'm no doctor or scientist, but it seems a little unfair that a virus that goes by the nickname stomach flu does not just attack your stomach but it also attacks your entire body. Kind of a case of false advertisement if you ask me. From now on I'm calling it the crippling head ache, throbbing legs, appetite destroying, life sucking stomach flu of misery. It's a lot more accurate. Ugh. I just can't wait until I'm 100%. I feel like I have a lot of eating to do to make up for lost time. I'm still on the slightly bland foods phase, but as soon as I'm completely better I am going to eat the spicest, tastiest, most flavorful meal I can find. I'm thinking Thai.
So my bout with the stomach flu kind of makes a nice transition into the New Year. It was an involuntary, painful thing, but it kind of served as a forced detox. I wanted to start eating healthy after the New Year anyway, and now I have a clean slate to do it with. I haven't drunk coffee or alcohol in several days, and I lost three pounds with the whole not eating for two day thing. So I'll channel my inner Pollyanna and make some lemonade out of my sickness lemons (I was so close to finding some really clever sour lemon, sour stomach analogy there, but I just don't have the energy at the moment, please create your own if you care to). Other than healthy eating I'm not making any other resolutions. I used to always make a lot of resolutions, but I've kind of stopped believing in the utility of New Year's resolutions. I think it's wonderful to want to challenge yourself to be better or do better by making goals for a new year, but I also think unless you have more will power or self control than I, it's hard to make goals for an entire year. I prefer taking things one day at a time. And I'm fully aware that one day this year I might be the best version of myself I can be; avoiding bad carbs, volunteering, writing a brilliant work of fiction, spending less time watching tv, etc. But I'm also fully aware that the next day I might desperately need to order a large, Hawaiian pizza from Gilroy's, plop down in front of a mindless America's Next Top Model marathon, and make fun of people from my bedroom window. I can't make choices for an entire year. I can only make choices for one moment inside of one day. The best I can do is try to make the majority of those choices veer towards bettering myself, and only occasionally give into my inner couch potato, junk food loving misanthrope.
So goodbye 2007. I can honestly say that creatively this was the best year of my life. It started with my last fiction workshop in the spring which emotionally kicked my ass (as a fiction major I've learned that while other majors or careers for that matter might be catalysts for self esteem and warm fuzzy feelings, writing fiction and putting it up for criticism more often than not ends in tears) But, it's because the only way to get better as a writer is to get criticized, no matter how uncomfortable that is. And with three semesters of workshops and criticism culminating in the spring, I do feel like I've improved. I do, however have a long way to go. But after the spring, I kind of took a partial leave of fiction (at least fiction for public consumption) and dove headfirst into the world of non-fiction and journalism. Summer and fall brought me two wonderful, challenging, rewarding, life influencing internships with two wonderful magazines. I can in no way categorize or number the things I learned. I am so thankful for those experiences. A non-fiction class this fall also gave me the chance to take a break from writing about other people's lives and start writing about my own. It was pure self-indulgent, self-exploring, self-everything bliss. It's easy for someone who loves to create fictional stories to forget about the vital importance of documenting your own story in life, no matter how ordinary it may seem compared to fictional adventures. But I learned it's just as challenging and just as rewarding (albeit in different ways) as writing fiction. Which brings me back to this very blog, started in 2007. I hope it goes well beyond this year into many more to come. So if this year has been the year of creative changes and challenges, my hope and wish for 2008, with the (sigh) end of college and start of who knows, is that the year brings just as many personal changes and challenges for me. I'm looking forward to diving into the unknown. I don't know where I'll be in life when 2009 rings in. What a terrifying/thrilling year it will be :)

tiny thoughts

I think the Richmond City Traffic Department (or whoever is in charge of street cleaning) is messing with our heads. One day there are signs on our side of the street that street cleaning is Friday. The next day the signs are gone. And then there are signs on the opposite side of the street saying that street cleaning was in fact Thursday, but did said street cleaning occur on Thursday? Nope. I really think it's someone's idea of a sick joke to make all of us Fan residents scurry around with our cars every time we see one of the dreaded red street cleaning signs, only to have to move our cars again when the signs disappear and reappear somewhere else. We are not monkeys, traffic sirs. And we do not appreciate being toyed with. Fan residents may seem meek, with our front stoops and our miniature front gardens, but you just wait for the wrath of the Fan to be unleashed if this vortex of street cleaning confusion does not end soon.

So everyone in my house has succumbed one by one to the stomach flu, and I feel my turn might just be inevitable. Because of the suddenness of the stomach flu, it's almost like there's a stalker in my house, creeping through hallways and hiding behind doors, waiting to pounce on me and force me into submission. One second I could be merrily eating my lunch and the next moment the stomach flu stalker could have me in its grasp. Because of this, I can't shake the feeling that every meal might be my last for some time. (Disclaimer for grossness). When I'm considering a meal, I seem to not only be considering how enjoyable the food will be going in to my stomach, but how painful it would be going out. Anything a little spicy or acidic gives me slight pause. Do I really want to become intimate with fried jalapeño poppers for hours over the toilet? Or a favorite food even. My beloved Ukrops tuna could turn into my enemy in just minutes. I don't enjoy these thoughts, but in the current state of my household, they're kind of inevitable. I'm just going to cross my fingers that my remarkably strong constitution will keep me healthy (and hope that by imagining my constitution as strong it will in fact be strong, because really I have no idea what my constitution is capable of withstanding).

One of my favorite features of ITunes is the helpful "Listeners Also Bought" list that appears whenever you look at music. I've found some awesome songs and new bands through this, and they're usually pretty spot as far as what kind of music a listener of one band might also enjoy. And I was thinking wouldn't it be great if everything in life worked like that. You go to a restaurant and at the end of the night they give you a list of restaurants that's labeled. "Customers Also Enjoyed." Or when you buy clothes, you get a list of other stores or brands that you might like too. Or it could even go beyond buying things. In college at the end of the semester you could get a list of classes that "students also enjoyed" or when an internship is over you get a list of careers that "interns also enjoyed." What about leaving a city? Someone could hand you a piece of paper listing cities that might be to your liking, or old friends could give you a list of people that you'd probably like to hang out with as well. The world would be a lot easier if there were only these helpful suggestions around.

Merry Christmas

"Merry Christmas, movie house! Merry Christmas, Emporium! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building and Loan!"

Merry Christmas to you all :)