Tuesday, August 18, 2009

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. :)

Friday, August 14, 2009

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.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

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...