Life Sentences for Children

I am supposed to be working on my biology outline right now. I, an omnivore who would choose a steak over a salad nine times out of ten, am arguing that vegetarianism is the most eco-friendly-minded dietary choice a person can make. This is true, but I don't want to be arguing it. I wanted to explore eco-friendly food choices in a local produce kind of way, but I was told to change my topic because it was "too broad". Somehow I got narrowed to vegetarianism. I am not enjoying my research at all, either, because: A) it means that I am constantly accidentally stumbling across PETA material, which is mostly oversexualized, violent, star-studded, reactionary junk. And B) it is a poster project, meaning that most of my material needs to be visual, and there is a surprising lack of charts and graphs to prove what I want to prove. I just found a site site that had four visual aids, all of which I plan on using, but before that all I could find was cartoons making jokes about eating vegetarians and photos of PETA protests, wherein women wearing bikinis and ballgowns made of leaves were walking the streets of various cities. ...seriously? That is how you plan on getting people to go veggie?

Anywho, I went to NPR.com when I got tired of reading veggie this and veggie that, and I read an article on their home page about whether it can be deemed cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a child to life in prison. The example they gave was that of Joe Sullivan, a man who is now 33 years old but who, at 13, raped a woman in her 70s and robbed her (Clockwork Orange, anybody?). He is still in prison 20 years later, and will be for the rest of his life. The question is posed - is it fair or morally acceptable for the justice system to put a child in a prison and then leave him there until he dies however many years later? Can we expect a child to have known enough to not do whatever it was he did that got him in trouble in the first place? Can we expect rehabilitation to work on someone who does something so atrocious at so young an age? (Not that we really do rehabilitation in the States anyways...)

Personally, I have always been of the mindset that a judicial system should aim to rehabilitate, not punish the people who commit crimes. The possibility of rehabilitation increases significantly when the criminal is young, but throwing children in prison for the rest of their lives is not going to do anyone any good. Not knowing anything about Joe Sullivan, I can almost guarantee that he is now about as criminal as they come, even if he was simply a little misguided as a child, because he has spent 20 years of his life surrounded almost solely by criminals. If, however, we had given him a chance to reform his ways in the beginning, things could have ended differently. As such, I would not suggest reversing his sentence now, but I would make it impossible (or at least difficult) for such a ruling to occur again.

Silence pervaded the tiny room, blocking conversation and laughter with a heavy ferocity. Untrusting, red eyes met briefly, only to dart back to the tiny boxes.

Theirs, Not Mine

They have destroyed the chances of it actually happening.
Every touch, promise,
Blandishment
(Because that's what it all really is, isn't it?)
Finds its provisional place within me
Where it giggles and squirms with all the
Energy of an excitable child.
Then, too soon,
It dies,
Slowly and with paroxysms of self-righteous anger.
It tries to prove its validity
But without its creator to confirm its case it has
No credibility. It was empty from the start.
Pity, boredom, curiosity, drunkenness,
Whatever created it, they only last so long
And when they disappear, it does too.
And I am left outside
Underneath a clouding sky
To wonder in the rain.

A poem.

DELETE.

Start over.

I want to be somewhere else right now.
I want to be where it is warm
So I could go back to wearing
Dresses every day
Instead of sweatpants.
I want my skin to turn red and then slowly
Ease into a shade of brown that looks like
Toast or caramel or a shiny wood table.
I want my hair to turn blonder by the day
As the sun beats mercilessly upon earth
And all its tired occupants.
I want my backpack full of only what I need
To live on the road,
And a graphing notepad, three pens, a sharpie,
And A Picture of Dorian Gray.
I want to curl up under a stunted tree
Beside a highway in the mountains
With the blue bottle of tequila
My trendy, friendly Alaskan couple ride offered
Before dropping me off at the hitching mecca.
I want to lay spreadeagled in a field on my back
Counting stars and finding patterns and stories
Reminiscent of those the ancients told around blazing campfires.
I want to meet people that I love and admire and adore one day
And say goodbye to them forever the next.
That way they will stay perfect
And I can remain wrapped in the security blanket of ignorance
That we have pretended is an adventurous spirit
Or a love of humanity
But is quite undeniably an incredible fear of being let down
Or losing something good.
I want everything to be fluid, interchangeable, temporary.
For everything to be inextricably linked,
But without consequences,
Positive or negative,
To anything.
I want to be a phantom.
I want to be gone.

I can't tell if that elderly gentleman regularly wears black tights, a mini skirt and sparkly earrings or if it's a Halloween costume.

i have the worst job ever. i have the worst job ever. i have the worst job ever. with the possible exception of stripping or prostitution.

We are playing phrase charades in my english class right now. Still waiting to fricking learn something today.

Why is everyone so annoying?

Cannae Focae

Sup cho.

I just got finished listening to Drop Down by Designer Drugs twenty-five times in a row. Why? You may ask. Why. I will tell you.

When I got out of my sociology class this morning I realized, in a rather unhappy moment, that I have a Tai Chi paper about complementary medicine due today. It's not a big paper. In fact, it's actually a one page summary, so you wouldn't think it would be a big deal. However, the catch is that we are also required to find five scholarly journal articles and write an annotated bibliography (meaning that you must read and summarize each one in the bibliography.) I had not yet started this project so I have spent the last hour and a half running around the interweb trying to find articles on Ayurveda that are actually free and accesible and not just sitting on any webpage. I have definitely been employing the "the conclusion is the only part of a paper you need to read to get it" method.

Anyways, I have found that when I am trying to get work done quickly the best way to do it is to have music with little to no lyrics that moves quickly blaring as loudly as I can. I don't listen to it at all, but it pushes me into whatever I am doing really well.

This is a stupid entry but I'm posting it because I feel like I'm back in high school on TearsKeepAFalling when I could write nothing and publish it and not feel bad about it.

My blog.

Ha.

Texty

I know it's awful to be excited about my own joke, but I thought this was golden:

Brian: (1:18 am) Hey whats ups
Holly: (1:20 am) a service one can hire to send packages as an alternative to fed ex or the us postal system.

(For the record, yes, I know it's supposed to be postal service, but it was 1 am so I forgive me for the slip up and admire my early morning wit. Hopefully you do too.)

One of the few things that legitimately disgusts me is when a person thinks that sugar-coating or twisting a truth is not the same thing as lying.

Just drove past a car with the license plate GRIN. Think the world is trying to get a point across today?

There is a six year old Latina in an oversized pink jacket standing on a corner smiling that too big for photos grin at passing cars. Totally just made my day.

Birthday Mocha, Life Update and an Itty Bitty Rant

Hello, good friends and strangers.

Firstly, it is my birthday, so I would like to wish a very happy birthday to myself and thank Caribou Coffee for their most brilliant idea of giving away free coffee drinks to people on their birthday. Hello free large white mocha with a shot of almond deliciousness.

Secondly I'll update those of you who care on my life a bit. I am still at a flipping community college, and I have a love/hate relationship with that reality. I'm making some good friends, many of whom are international students, which is a lot of fun, but I am not impressed with at least half of my classes, which sucks because I'm paying for this lack of education, and although it's not as expensive as, say, a four year school would be, it is still pretty pricey. I'm more broke than I've been since high school and I don't even have a job to replenish my money stash. Sucks to be me. But I'm also in the school play, the Twelfth Night, (I'm Viola, the lead, although I don't think that being the lead necessarily means that I have the most lines...the plot just happens to revolve around me.)

Anywho. I came here to rant for a reason, so now I'm going to do that.

I am sick of scientifically minded people who bash religious people for not checking their facts before recklessly believing in something, but put science on a ridiculous holier-than-thou pedestal that, quite frankly, it doesn't deserve. I don't currently consider myself a religious person and I see the value in science, but I'm not not doing to laud science as the end all and be all of the modern world and I'm not going to say that religious people are backwards. The reality is that truly religious people find meaning in their religious texts and spiritual practices and just because I don't, it doesn't give me any right to tell them that they are wrong because they experience something that I don't.

This frustration is coming as a result of my Environmental Ethics class. There is one student in particular who likes to quantify everything scientifically (ie love does not exist because emotions are a result of chemical reactions in the brain therefore it is an illusion) and discredits anything that cannot be explained with science purely because it cannot be explained with science. (Hello circular reasoning that seems legitimate because a generalized term of "science" is used to back up whatever it is that I'm not actually proving.) I do not understand how this can possibly be considered any more acceptable than a religious person who refuses to look at the world through any lens other than the one they've learned from their religions. Both are equally prejudiced, it's just that one can say that they have "logic" behind their opinions whereas the other says it's God.

Edit:

Jerk of the day: I got to school and found a parking spot that was half taken up by someone who double parked. I could still fit my car in the spot, however, so I pulled in (not easily, but without hitting anyone) leaving the car on my right enough space to squeeze in if they weren't morbidly obese. (Which I think was actually really nice of me, considering that they were FREAKING DOUBLE PARKED). I go back out to my car to get a piece of gum later and find them gone and a receipt stuck to by back window (sticky paper) with the words "Stupid Ass" written on it. Freaking a, jerk. I am not the one who double parked. I am just the one who took the only spot left in the parking lot, without hitting or insulting you even though you, if anyone, deserved it. Also "stupid ass" is a terrible insult. I would have taken jackass or dumbass simply because they're used, but stupid ass? Who says that?

Learn how to park.

Today was a good day but I'm profoundly unhappy right now. What is that all about?

A hurried meditation on the n-word.

Today in my sociology class we were talking about words and how they can be used to put minorities or groups with a lesser social status down (ie homosexuals and females). Then we got onto the n-word. I don't understand the n-word. I mean, I get that it has a significant, painful history behind it and I can understand never wanting to hear that word again. What I don't understand it the implied reality that African Americans can use the word and white people cannot.

There is this comedian, I can't remember his name, he's a white guy and he tells this story: He was stopped after a show and someone asked him why white people couldn't use the n-word and black people could. He says "Well I guess we haven't used it that well in the past." This is true. But why is it that a word with so much painful history would then be used excessively in pop culture, even if it is by those who it was initially created to put down? Would it not be easier to simply let it slip into the annexes of history as one more piece of human history that should and will remain in the past?

I think what gets me most about this is the explicit racism that the n-word represents. When it was in its first heyday it was a word that was racist against African Americans. Now it is racist against European Americans. How? In that it denies them something based on their skin color. A black person can call a white person an n-word, but a white person can't even say the word in an academic environment without fearing repercussions of some kind. The use of classic literature in certain schools is disputed by frightened parents because the n-word is used occasionally but a black rapper can use the n-word more than any other word in a rap song without worrying about how it will be received. When there is a clear division of what is acceptable and what is not drawn between two races, one can not possibly label it as anything but racist, but because it is the white person who is at the disadvantage, no one is willing to even suggest that it is racist to keep the n-word out of the mouths of white people.

Personally, I would rather just get rid of the n-word altogether than integrate it into everyone's vocabulary. What I don't understand is that there is no other group that has discriminatory words used against them that has not mainstreamed those words, supposedly to their advantage. Bitch and the faggot, for example, are almost to the level where they are acceptable terms and in a few more generations I wouldn't be surprised to find them no worse than "fool" or "jerk." I am convinced that this is because females and homosexuals took those two words and abused them amongst themselves and with others until they were the ones who controlled the words, not others, and they invited people from other groups to use those words in a light way as well. The words are obviously still be used offensively, but if the power is taken out of a word it will gradually become less and less offensive. I see no such future for the n-word. The power of the n-word is being perpetuated rather than challenged and overturned.

What bothers me more than anything is that when I try to understand the double standards set by the n-word and those who perpetuate it I leave feeling like a racist and with no more answers that I had in the beginning. Questions are answered intelligently at first, but when the discussion reaches a certain point the answers become redundant and meaningless. It is normally something that can be boiled down to "You didn't grow up around it so you don't understand." Everything is explainable and sometimes it is the very act of explaining something that helps us understand how little (or how much) foundation there is to what we believe or think.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any explicit reason for the unevenness in n-word usage, which leads me to think that there is no reason, and if there is no reason something should be done to change it. But I can't initiate this change because I'm white and I don't even have a right to have opinions about the n-word.

Someone please tell me how we are making any progress towards equality when we have things as simple as a word dividing us.

Do teachers honestly expect to get a worthwhile paper when they only assign two pages? I need more space...or more basic questions. Pick one.

How can I learn anything when my peers want to be spoonfed, my professors can't cater class to one person's questions and I'm getting more bitter by the second?

Glacier

This is a personal narrative essay that I just wrote for my English class. True story from this summer that I don't think I ever got around to telling you guys. Sooo...now you know! (Also you should know that I'm giving you pictures and my professor only gets text, so feel special.)

It was nearing five o'clock, which is on the late – meaning dusky – side of things in the great outdoors, but my sister and I had been sitting in our cramped blue Saturn for at least seven hours that day and we needed to stretch our legs in a slightly more athletic fashion than is possible lying in a sleeping bag, so after we pitched the tent we took out our free Glacier National Park map and searched desperately for the nearest hiking trail.

We found a short one, about two and a half miles long, that was a walkable distance from our campsite. This was an incredible blessing, as my cynical side cannot fathom anything more ludicrous than driving somewhere so you can walk when you get there and my sister, Evie, doesn’t appreciate cynical insights. I was all for doubletiming our usual pace and doing the whole trail that night, which would have left us finishing just as the stars started to peek through the navy glass of a darkening sky. Evie, however, eying the abundant "Warning: Bears!" signs did not agree. Before we had hiked half a mile she was using every approach but her words to suggest we turn around immediately.



I also had a healthy fear of bears, so I talked incessantly, incessancy not being something I am fond of, much less known for. I noted that we were on a hairpin trail and defined the term explicitly, immediately moving on to extrapolate on the beauty of the trail, trees and river with every combination of “awesome”, “cool” and “gorgeous” I could. Almost every word or idea that passed through my mind also passed through my lips, loudly. I kept waiting for the conversation to become two-sided, but Evie's bear-repulsion method was sulking in the hopes of turning around.

As we came to another turn and I veered left to stay on the path my words suddenly dissolved on my tongue and I immediately began backpedaling, completely forgetting to finish explaining my theory on whether or not a civilization exterior to our own would be capable of accurately understanding the purpose of our highway systems or billboards. A sizable brown mass in the center of the trail sat unmoving approximately twenty feet from us, making my life, before a given, suddenly infinitely more important than alien anthropology.

A sudden guffaw tore out of my throat. It was a dead tree. Nonetheless, heart still racing and face still flushed, I decided to finally acknowledge my sister's persistent nonverbals and another quarter mile up the trail we turned around so we would get back to camp while the sun was still up.



The next morning we repacked and drove through the park, stopping occasionally to enjoy summer snow or a glacial stream, the colors of which were such a stunning turquoise that the only accurate comparison would be to the ocean waters unique to beach resorts known for their fine white sand and tendency to fence themselves off from impoverished locals. One of our first stops was a short, touristy trail to a waterfall.

Evie, being a morning person, tried to keep up a steady stream of words or song, and whenever we lapsed into a silence she would shout "Ay yi yi!" to fend off any nearby bears. I led briskly, excited to see the waterfall and to be on a hike for which there was mutual excitement. Evie had just let out a rather weak "Ay yi yi!" when we rounded a corner and I felt my body turn rigid through no control of my own. My eyes widened, disbelieving, trying unsuccessfully to turn the massive grizzly bear ten feet up the path into a dead tree. Its head turned slightly and two small points of sunlight reflected off its eyes from where they were nestled deep in its thick, ragged fur.

Oblivious, Evie caught up to me and tried to continue walking forward as I began taking unconscious, self-preservationist steps backwards. As we collided I tripped over a rock in the middle of the path and fell to the dirt. I could sense Evie looking up the path as she helped me to my feet and the adrenaline suddenly burst into my veins screaming that this was the time for flight; none of that pansy, ranger-mandated quiet backing away nonsense, either. I had fallen to the ground and proved myself prey to the bear. Now my only choice was to run like the prey it thought I was and win the race for my limbs and unscarred skin.

Luckily, by the time Evie got me to my feet she had me in such a vice grip that I couldn't have run if I tried. She pushed me down the trail in the direction from which we had come and, looking over her shoulder, whispered, “It’s moving up the trail.”

My body seized impulsively, like a runner’s in the moment the starting gun fires, the body ordering the mind to let it run. Evie’s grip tightened and I noted the hill to our right, figuring that if the bear started running, not just walking up the trail, I could throw myself down and roll through the rocks, bushes and small trees, land in that freezing glacial river and doggypaddle my way to safety. Bruises, cuts and hypothermia wouldn’t matter so long as no mauling occurred.

Eventually we got far enough away from the bear that I was able to slowly turn and see the empty trail behind us. The three or four seconds in which I saw the bear and fell to the ground replayed in my mind constantly that day, until, like a movie on an old VHS, the memory almost became fuzzy in its detail, blurred by my constant attention. We were told that grizzlies are marvelous swimmers, so my river plan had been a bad one, and a ranger said we were lucky to have seen a grizzly in real life and close up. I almost disagreed. Never in my life had I been so consumed by fear or certainty of death. Never in my life had I been more aware of each moment of my life as it slipped by, moment by excruciatingly glorious moment.

But it's just a place...?

I am currently typing on my little sister's new macbook pro whilst sitting in my godmother's front room here in Chicago, IL. This computer is awesome. I think I like their new model better and I'm also quite sure that it will break a lot less often than mine did. That is not the point. I'm being something they call evasive right now.

My godmother lives near North Park, a school I went to for one semester immediately after my Dad died. It was a miserable experience for me but these days I pretty much just make jokes about how awful it was when I'm asked and make sure to emphasize any and every silver lining that I can after I make the jokes. Because I have been using the approach of making light of the situation to deal with it I forgot exactly how horrible it was for me there.

Today we moved my little sister into her dorm at North Park (and, just for the record, I think she'll love this school) and it was surprisingly difficult for me. Last night I was just as excited about moving her in as she was but as we got closer to campus I realized that I was starting to feel sick. A former classmate of mine was helping the freshmen move in and decided to talk to me. In the middle of our conversation he was telling me how he thinks North Park is the only place where you can make this certain kind of lifelong friends. I disagreed but also made the "well not for me!" joke that had to be told. He said that I had at least one, quite obviously suggesting that he was the one friend I derived from my North Park experience, which made me so angry because I rarely spoke to this kid and only hung out with him outside of class once. He was a nobody as far as my time here was concerned and he has not contacted me once since I left. And he is my lifelong North Park friend? I do have friends from North Park that I still talk to, thank you very much. When that conversation was over my sister and I rode up the elevator with all of our things and another former classmate helped carry her mini refrigerator. I very deliberately didn't speak to him and he awkwardly recognized but didn't acknowledge me. But the worst was when I was helping my sister unpack in her dorm and found myself feeling debilitatingly sick. I can't wrap my head around it...

This is my issue: North Park is just a place and it isn't a bad place at that. No one was terrible (or even slightly unkind) to me when I was here. It's just that I was hurting really badly and because of that I couldn't get close to anyone or do well in my classes. How is it than even as I am telling myself that this isn't a bad place, that it's filled with good people and professors and it's relatively pretty to boot, I am still so moved (invisibly) by my experience here that I cannot even spend a significant amount of time on campus without feeling ill or miserable or both? It doesn't make sense. Firstly it bothers me that I don't seem to have control over what I feel. Secondly it bothers me that simply being physically present in a place can make me feel this terrible.

Agh, what is going on?

I think I should probably just never come back here. Ever. :)

Time Travels and a Shiny Something.

I've been doing a little bit of time travel in an effort to avoid finishing the job application from hell. (It's long and it's useless. Essentially they're having me retype my entire resume for them in tiny little boxes. It seems like a terrible waste of time, but I need a job and a job at Sequoia National Park would be stellar, so I'm going to suffer through all of this useless typing in the hope that I will land the job, establish residency and spend a year calling Sequoia my home.) Anywho, the time travel I've been doing has been via email. Whenever I come across a piece of information I don't think I have I type a few key phrases into my gmail account and shabam! an email from two years ago appears and answers the question for me. I relived the tragedy that was Naknek and witnessed as I tried my best to be as mature as I could in a situation where everyone was acting like they were five and I really wanted to do the same, but wanted to do my father one better than that since he had only recently passed away. That's where I thought I was. In retrospect I looked like a five year old dressed up in her father's suit and shoes, using words that didn't fit in her mouth yet. I hope no one else could see that because at the time I felt so right, so mature, so in pain but so dealing with it. Such is life.

The next stop on my time travel excursion was actually a mistake, but an interesting one. I stumbled upon one of the earlier emails in a chain between a high school friend of mine and me. I sent this before my Dad died. It makes me sad because it proves that I was making a turnaround spiritually. It marks a me that was willing to see the beauty in something that I had hated for quite some time because it made no sense and it hurt people. He died and I regressed. So it goes. Enjoy:

"I had the coolest dream last night. It was only a little part of a dream, actually, but it was amazing. Basic story is this. There is a woman looking for her children or something like that and I think that she's outside of an orphanage. There are a couple kids walking about and I start following one (I being an invisible presence...pretty much like we're watching a movie, that's what I mean when I say I here.) as she goes up the stairs. She's moving toward the mother and she's holding another little kid's hand in the kind of way that makes you think they're best friends that can and do hold hands for no reason other than that it feels good to know that you have someone there who knows you. I look around and I see these little classic, classic cartoons walking around. Not a lot of them, but a few. No more than fiveish. There are more kids and then suddenly I am where the mother is, looking at them all coming toward me. It sounds creepy but they were all so nonthreatening that it wasn't. It was like a group of friends coming to meet her, or, better, people who happened to be gathering in one area, not even seeing her as a goal. They stopped and she she sees a couple nice cars (which backed toward her as a way of movement rather than going forward) the classic cartoons and children. They're all standing in this sort of quad area behind the brick building (presumably an orphanage, but it has a good vibe coming off it). One of the little girls, who is wearing a dress, looks at the mother and says "This is God."

"This is what I wrote after I woke up: I think that it means that "God" is imagination, creativity, invention, tradition, acceptance and innocence, softness and security. God encompasses all of the comfortable and exciting parts of life because that is what is good in the world and if we are going to have a god we are going to have something that makes us feel good. We want a god who is all the good in the world so just taking pieces of the world that are good: cars, proof that we can make something big and amazing. Chidren, the innocence and memory of the world. Cartoons, something comfortable and nostalgic. All of these can have a little evil in them, but when they are presented with no threat, presented in only their positive lights, slightly pastel and very shiny, all we can see is the beauty and good of them and all that can be said that this, this is God.

"Thoughts?"

Trying to do things that are productive...

I've been trying to do productive things for the past week. The problem is that the productive things I've been doing have not been very...important? For instance, today I:

1. Woke up on my floor, surrounded by sharpies, clean clothes from my trip that are still lying around, my guitar case, three pillows, two blankets and several pairs of shoes.

2. Cursed the fact that I had cleverly decided to leave any and all timekeeping devices out of my room, therefore barring myself from sleeping later than I need to.

3. Checked my phone and spent the next hour texting with J2M2 buddies. It made my fingers hurt. A more text friendly phone would probably be an intelligent purchase. Bright side: I may have helped one of the girls I was texting figure out a way to communicate with her mum better. *Fingers crossed.*

4. Checked my email, deleted everything useless (which was most of it), and read the email from Jessica, wherein I found a possible hostel to employ me.

5. Realized I had missed office hours and would have to wait until 6:30pm to call. Hostels have funny office hours.

6. Stared at the giant (and growing) hole in the back of my sleeping dress that I still have not taken the time to fix and decided to take a shower.

7. Stood in the shower thinking about things that made me feel intelligent before realizing that I was wasting water and hurriedly finishing the actual washing of self process.

8. Left bathroom to look for dress to wear today.

9. Heard phone ringing.

10. Answered it. It was Anthony. Lost connection after hellos. Figured that if he wanted to talk he would call back.

11. Got dressed. Wore a shirt as a dress and spandex shorts. SKANKY. But not because I was spending the whole day at home.

12. Talked to Anthony for almost an hour while playing games on the interweb. Planned the illegal selling of his mummified remains to a museum after his death, induced by sleeping in the trunk of my car. Funny.

13. Organized email addresses into groups and deleted everyone whose email I did not recognize. I have a lot less email addresses now. Hopefully none of those people were important.

14. Returned to reading God: A Biography (Jack Miles). Stellar book.

15. Went on a bike ride. Got exhausted. Too humid for physical activity.

16. Laid on couch, feeling tired.

17. Ate dinner.

18. Played those geography games on the internet. I now know all of Canada and most of South America. The US is hard.

19. Making this list.

20. Will watch Monk, Psych and make that phone call.

...And that actually makes it sound like I did more than I really did today.

Also that is not at all what I intended this blog entry to be. I was going to talk about some of my travels. Bahahaha.

Edit:

That's an ixnay on the ostelinghay objay my riendsfay. Turns out the last option I had stopped hiring two months ago. LAME. Anyone want to harbor a Holly in their home until December? Qualification: you must live in California...preferably in an area where a Holly could get a job.

I'm posting as me now.

I was going to keep this blog "secret" by posting under a different email address as my own, but I decided that was a. stupid and b. juvenile. Although I might be a little bit of both of those things I would like to think that I am not extremely inundated by either of those traits and as such I am going to man up (I really wish there was a female-friendly equivalent to that saying) and take 100% accountability of this blog as my own. My name is Holly Peterson and I approve this blog. Maybe I'll even tell people about it irl. :)

As you may recall my sister and I were on a roadtrip. We stopped at the ocean,




the redwoods,


Vancouver Island,


Pike's Place,


lakes,


and much more. We enjoyed ourselves immensely and we only got in one fight during the entire two week (?) trip. However, all good things must pass and on July 11thish she left me to do CHIC and I tried to find something to do with my time. Quite quickly I found out about a pretty sweet hostel (in Half Moon Bay) and booked three nights there. As soon as I arrived I changed my plan to two nights, which miraculously worked out perfectly and earned me three new friends, with whom I went kayaking and to another hostel in Point Reyes. Hostels are the best because you meet crazy awesome impromptu people there.

This is us:



After that I did a crazy little thing called J2M2 (the second two is pronounced "squared", fyi) which was wonderful and crazy and will be explained more in depth in my next entry. As will my hosteling experience. But for now I'm ready to say goodnight and just leave you will a bunch of photos. Wheehoo.

This is the J2M2 bunch...

Camping with the sister.

My sister, Evie, is taking a roadtrip in a nifty little circle around the States and I am joining her for the beginning of the trip. We're doing a lot of camping (Glacier National Park is FABULOUS, Lewis and Clark State Park has too many mosquitos and Theodore Roosevelt National Park is nice, but bland) and I think we're learning a lot about one another as well. The interesting thing, for me, though, is that the more I learn about my sister the less she makes sense to me. This, unfortunately, seems to be the case with everything. The more one knows, the less one knows. For some reason I thought people would be different, that eventually their behaviors would make sense, but this does not seem to be the case. Unless you consider yourself a very simple person, if someone tells you that they "get you" I would suggest not trusting that person because that person is either lying to themselves or to you. Neither of those things is acceptable (and this is coming from a person who does both.)

Well...I'm trying to decide what to do with my immediate future now. My sister is going to Bellingham in the next couple days and since I was just there I want to find something else to do. If only there was more work around. Must...find...job...in...cool...place... Evie and I actually got into a bit of an argument today because she says I am being too open minded when it comes to finding something to do next and that open mindedness is barring me from finding something. I think that if people are too set on exactly what they want to do and when they will be so stuck in what should be that they won't be able to realize what could be. Plus whenever I make plans they fall through, so the open mindedness definitely helps to assuage the disappointment.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm wide open. I'm thinking it's probably too late to go to Alaska for cannery work. Hmm. Not knowing = excitement. I could live my life in limbo.

HELLO FROM GLACIER NATIONAL PARK TWO DAYS AGO.

I am going to pretend someone made this for me.

Because I need to believe that someone cares that much.

i can't see you...WHY DON'T YOU SAY HI?!?!

Most of my day today was spent running around my house singing at the top of my lungs in my not-pretty voice, of which I am becoming increasingly fond. I also went to the grocery store where, when buying eggs, a baby ruth bar and some veggies I also purchased an invisible bagel. I say this because I have no recollection of picking up or eating or even seeing any bagels – invisible or otherwise - today, but I was definitely charged $0.60 for one. Anywho, when my sister got home from nannying I realized that it was a beautiful day and I had spent none of it outside so I decided to go to one of the parks near my home to read, listen to music and absorb some golden rays.

After snagging a good-sized chunk of one of my loaves of French bread and a book of Ernest Hemingway short stories I stuck my ipod down my dress and dance-walked my way to the park. My initial plan was to sit at the end of a dock that juts into the small lake there and dangle my feet in the water as I read and listened to music that is not conducive to the focus needed for reading. When I got down the hill I saw that someone was fishing at the end of the dock and rather than get in his way I decided to amend my plan and instead sit on a bench near the dock in order to snag the dock as soon as they left it. Almost immediately after forming this plan I also realized that I knew the person on the dock and suddenly, for no good reason other than that I'm human and we're silly like this, I felt very strongly that I should not say hello. I met this person when I was working at Primo and he is just now becoming a high school freshman. But, more importantly, he was from a different part of my life, the “Primo Café, this is Holly, how may I help you?” stage of my life and it seemed right that he stay there. If that does not make sense, consider this: a child, upon seeing his teacher in a public place that is not school, often feels uncomfortable and has no desire to speak to his teacher because his teacher does not belong outside of the classroom. It is the exact same logic, just slightly messed up because I’m an adult now. Despite his being a young'un I really enjoy the conversations I have with him, as they are characterized by an exuberance unique to children. But the wrongness of interacting with a person who did not “belong” in this compartment of my life overruled my want to speak to him, so I went and sat on my bench and waited for him to leave while I read about another bitter man in another Hemingway story.

This is where it gets terrible in a mundanely comic way. I don't think he noticed me when I first noticed him, but eventually, based on his body language, I could tell that he had recognized me and was making a duplicate effort to pretend that he neither saw nor recognized me. It was like one of those deliciously, subtly awkward moments that normally occur briefly in passing: in line at the bank, walking through the grocery store or walking across campus, but this time the moment was stretched to at least an hour and instead of being in an even remotely crowded place we were at a park of which the two of us were the only occupants. He wouldn't stop fishing and I wanted my vitamin D so we both very deliberately pretended the other was not there, while constantly checking to see if our presence was going to be acknowledged. Of course we were both very discreet and our mannerisms probably would have been entirely unnoticeable were it not for the fact that every time one of us moved significantly enough that it looked as though we were actually leaving without saying hello (HOW DARE (S)HE) the other person would start, plainly surprised, and then go dramatically back to feigning apathy.

After moving from my bench to a small field to a swingset I decided I’d had enough and that I would say hello before going home and (what do you know?) after we passed the initial awkwardness of both of our overly enthusiastic realizations that we knew one another, we had a very pleasant conversation. Although I will admit that I am a bit worried about the kid. I’m hoping that my perception of him is slightly misconstrued due to his trying to impress me with his drug and alcohol exploits (he’s a kid…it’s still cool for him to live for beer and pot?)

Ai. People. I love us so much. I know that these elaborate ignoring games are not unique to DJ or me. Who on earth possibly started such a terrible thing?

Blogging (As Not A Teenager)

I have, more or less, had a blog since middle school and I would argue that it was somewhere between my early high school years and early college years that I thrived most as a blogger because there was so much less pressure about what and how often I had to write. Sometimes I wrote really interesting posts about religion or my feelings on my father having cancer, but more common were the posts where I actually talked about what was happening in my life, what music I liked, and simply told silly stories about car accidents, my run-ins with the communion at Catholic churches or being late.

Example: (early 2006)

"I like the person who drives my bus. But I'm out of shape. (And yes both of those sentences make sense together). So today I wore the shoes that I own that aren't possible to just slip into, and you can't do that little "my shoes aren't on, but I can technically still walk" thing. So I get upstairs, on schedule, spend about five minutes trying to tie my shoes until I realize that I should probably start running unless I want to be missing the bus. So I go out my door...walk for about ten seconds realize that if I don't run I have no chance of making the bus and then break into a sprint. Then my neighbor's dog starts chasing me and barking it's head off (that dog scares me) so I stop running (bus...going to miss it because of a dog!) until he walks away at which point I start running like a mad(wo)man towards the end of my street. I slow to a fast walk, but then I see everyone lining up in a little line, (ha! lining up in a line!) so I know that the bus is right around the corner so this time I really sprint and luckily the bus driver noticed me running like a penguin (because that's how I run) and waited. And I get on the bus and just sit there...bus not moving...gasping for air...and then I realize that some guy was running towards the bus too. So technically I didn't have to run, because bus driver lady would have waited for him too. So yeah. Holly=horrifically out of shape. But somehow I really love the whole sprinting thing. Feels good."

Now I find that blogging is more difficult because, although things of the exact same magnitude are happening I have a harder time writing about them...

Example (yesterday)

Yesterday at work, after spending two hours sifting through pallets of boxes of scantron tests all of my coworkers and I were told to go home because there was no more work to do. This was frustrating for all of us, but I felt especially bad for the people who had driven for an hour to get there that morning, because I know of at least two people who do drive that far. They probably didn't even get paid enough to cover their gas money for the day. On my way home I noticed two cop cars (no lights or sirens running) turning into a public park and, suddenly overcome by an overwhelming feeling of curiosity, I casually switched lanes and followed them to the park. The second car paused and the driver shouted out of her window to talk to what looked like a high school student who worked for the city parks and was weed whacking on the side of the road. I turned off my radio but still couldn't hear anything. They pulled into the parking lot on the left and I pulled into the parking lot on the right, striving for sneakiness. I watched them for a little while and pretended to check my messages on my phone and got out of my car. Even outside of my car I couldn't hear anything so I decided to go home and watched them open the kid's backpack as I drove out of the parking lot. SOMEONE GOT BUSTED FOR DRUGS.
(The best part of this story is when I got home, told my family this story and got yelled at by my sister for following a cop car. She thought it was illegal and could not see the humor in the story because she was so busy being upset that I had dared break a law that, to my knowledge, does not even exist. What the shmuck?)

See, I have a harder time devoting a blog entry to that story because for some reason I now operate under the assumption that I need to have a point, or at least write enough paragraphs and sentences that no one will notice that I don't have a point because I said so much. Of course this makes no sense whatsoever.

In the movie "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" several characters have a conversation about what they want their movie to do for its viewers. One of them, rather simply, says that it should be funny. Another asks, "Is that all?" He responds, "Is that not enough?" That was one of my favorite quotes for the longest time because it's a stellar reminder that not everything has to be packed with meaning. Sometimes things just are and that is precisely what makes them so wonderful. They are inherently themselves and there are no pretenses or injected, phony frills on them feigning importance where there is none. Oscar Wilde claimed that it is the most elect man who can look at something beautiful and see only beauty. He says there is hope for people who see beautiful meanings in beautiful things, clearly implying that they are still lacking because of their inability to simply appreciate something for what it is.

This is me trying to become one of the elect, not in my perspectives but in my motives. Rather than looking to stuff my words and stories with morals or lessons learned I am going to try to present everything as it was or is. Of course that is what the dude in Nausea tried to do - complete removal of self in presentation of facts - and he was crazy. Y'know maybe I'll go for a happy medium. Maybe this blog will be a throwback to those days when I could write a post without thinking too hard about it. It's great when a post is long and meaningful, but it is just as great when it is silly or confused and short.

This post was me lowering that metaphorical bar I love so much. Consider it lowered and read respectively

Heya!

(Anyone notice the "it's" error in my first story? Ugh. Shudder.)

Hitch, Hitch, Hooray!

If you had told me a month ago that I would hitchhike from Washington to Minnesota before May ended I would have laughed at you. I would have told you that hitchhiking is dangerous and illegal and I am not going to put myself in those kinds of situations and that, despite having the occasional desire to stick out my thumb on a long walk home, I am not quite the hitchhiking “type.” Turns out I am.

Before I go on I would like to dispel a certain untrue rumor regarding the legality of hitchhiking in the United States. It is not illegal. In some states pedestrians are not allowed on the highways, but hitching by an entrance ramp is 100% legal and hitching in a high visibility location on highways is usually fine as well. The only laws about hitchhiking concern the safety of drivers pulling to the side of the road: as long as there is a shoulder on the highway and the hitchhiker is not standing on a hairpin curve, all is well. So there.

Also before I go on I think you should know that I was planning on hitching in Canada because my sources said it is a bit less sketchy in Canada than in the States. When I hitched up to Canada and the great nation refused to grant me access I decided to stick it to the Canadians by proving that Americans are just as good at taking care of their fellow man, woman, hitchhiker. (This was also actually a very exciting event for me, as the Canadian border patrol literally escorted me down the sidewalk and then warned me that the cameras would “take over” when they relinquished my passport to me and let me walk all by my lonesome the rest of the way to the US border. Evidently somebody thought I was a bit more desperate to get into Canada than I actually was.)

Unless you are willing to count my hitchhiking the .1 miles up my street as a middle school student courtesy of a good humored neighbor, the first time I honest to golly hitchhiked was May 17, 2009. I was in Chemainus on Vancouver Island with the 23-year old nephew, Jesse, of the man, Steve, whom I had only a few hours before paid to take me tandem hang gliding. (It was sweet.) Jesse offered me his couch for the night and we decided to hitchhike the 17 kilometers to his home and build up my hitching resume. We stood on a street corner for a while and watched people pretend they did not see us, shrug apologetically, – sometimes condescendingly – or yell not very friendly – or overly friendly – things out of their windows. It was spectacular. My personal favorite were the few who would slow down as though they were going to give us a ride and then tear off, laughing at their own cleverness. Eventually a blond man, Kerry, picked us up. After introducing ourselves and making small talk for a while Kerry asked if we smoked marijuana (a surprisingly open and frequent practice in all the parts of Canada I visited), and then, sounding slightly panicked, offered to smoke us out. The brusqueness of his question took me off guard and I, laughing, but with just as much nervous speed coloring my voice as had colored his, said that I was fine without. Later I apologized to Jesse, as it occurred to me that maybe he had wanted some and I had denied him that by my quick refusal. Jesse simply noted, “I think he was just lonely, eh?”

Jesse unwittingly summed up very well what seemed to be the most common kind of people who pick up hitchhikers. The people who picked me up were not sleaze balls, they were not rapists, kidnappers or even moderately unkind people. Usually they were just lonely. (The other types I noticed were the people who worried if they didn’t pick me up a creeper would, the ex-hitchhikers who were returning the favors paid to them in the past, the slightly intrigued and the overtly friendly.) Many of my drivers were divorced or experiencing relationship trouble. Others were simply on a long road trip by themselves and wanted a set of ears or a few interesting stories. Several of my drivers took me a few exits further than they were going, simply because they wanted the company or said they knew of an entrance ramp that was a little busier. Having fully expected to turn down creepy rides or jump out of cars that had suddenly become uncomfortable, I found myself pleasantly surprised by everyone who picked me up.

This is not to say that I never felt threatened (and that is not to say that I ever was threatened) as I was constantly aware of my surroundings and tensed, more than once, when my driver would reach for *gasp* a water bottle. As far as I could tell I was never even hit on. In fact, more often than not whenever I would leave a car the driver would look at me seriously and tell me to be careful, that they were worried, that they didn’t want me to get hurt. These people radiated sincerity. They implied, almost plaintively, I know I can’t stop you hitchhiking but not everyone is as good of a human being as I am. Don’t get hurt.

I was fortunate in my hitchhiking. I never spent more than a half hour on a curb (as opposed to the 4-6 hour waits I was warned about), which can be partially attributed to the fact that the few times I was dropped off at an entrance ramp out in the country with very little traffic I would start walking, sometimes illegally, on the highway (it is hitchhiking, after all). Come to think of it, I probably never spent more than an hour walking, either. Many of the rides I got were several hours long, and the ones that were short almost always brought me to a better hitching point than the last.

The range of people who I met was absolutely stunning. There was the Pakistani-Canadian woman who came to the States to fill up with gas and told me about the wedding she was planning for her son. The young couple from Alaska who brought me to the best hitching point ever and gave me what was left of a bottle of tequila when I told them I might be camping out that night. (Don’t worry, Mum, it was only a quarter of a bottle and I gave most of it to the punk rocker hitchhiker friends I made in Bozeman.) The Australian man who pointed out the supporting walls his company built on the sides of the highway in Seattle. The twenty-six year old glass blower who told me about being in the Air Force and his psychopath of an ex-girlfriend. The thirty-one year old trucker who drove me over 600 miles (in North Dakota, thank goodness, I did not want to hitchhike in the extensive nothingness that is North Dakota) and let me drive the truck for a little while. That was thousands of dollars worth of yogurt and cottage cheese under my control, friends. The fifty-year old man who gave me a tour of Wallace, Montana, which featured a manhole cover labeled “the Center of the Universe”, while choking back tears over his current lady troubles. The older woman who brought me to Heather and Chad’s house, never being able to tear herself away from the conversation subject of my personal safety – or the lack thereof – regarding my newfound love of hitchhiking. (Provided I haven’t forgotten any there were eighteen rides total, not all listed here out of consideration for your attention spans.)

Hitchhiking is my new favorite way to travel because of the connections made, the stories, opinions and information shared. The thing that I love most about hitchhiking, though, is the extreme delicacy of the process. Had I not tried to go to Canada first my trip would have been drastically different. If I had woken up at nine instead of eight on the day I met my punk rocker hitchhiking friends, chances are pretty good I would not have met them. If I hadn’t started walking instead of sitting on the curb I would not have had a place to stay my second night of hitching. Hitchhiking is one of those rare activities that forces its participants to realize exactly how much every choice, and the timing of every choice, affects every subsequent event.

See you on the road?