Finding God

I’ve never considered myself to be a very religious person.

I’ve never been an avid church-goer. I was always a “Chreaster,” as one of my friends put it — Christmas and Easter, that’s about it. Part of the problem was that I was never in the same place two weekends in a row. My mom and grandmother had at some point joined the Episcopal church, and for a while they went just about every week — but every other weekend, I was with my dad. My dad, to the extent of my knowledge, is a Baptist.

“No problem,” you could say. “You just go to one church one weekend, another one the next weekend, no big deal. At some point down the road, you’ll just have to decide which doctrine you prefer.”

My dad never had as strong a church-going habit as Mom and Grandmother did. For a while, when I was about ten, he did, but he would try a different church every weekend. That was just after he moved to Pine Bluff, when he was trying to find a congregation he liked, I guess. And then we just sort of stopped going.

Mom, Grandmother, and I, when we would go to the Episcopal church, always went to Saint Mark’s. There, then, was some consistency. But I was so young that Sunday school was more of a daycare than an education about the Bible. Just before we stopped going, I was just old enough to be getting to the basic Bible story bit of Sunday school — Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Daniel in the Lions’ Den — all of that. Not that I remember any of it now.

When I was ten, I started going to Camp Ozark, a non-denominational Christian summer camp in Mount Ida, Arkansas. I loved it; I went every summer for eight years. (I only stopped this year because I’m too old to be a camper, and I just don’t have the time this summer to be an LIT.) Every summer, I left camp with a different sort of feeling.

The year I turned thirteen, I left camp with a definite sense of spiritual well-being. That was the year we moved to Florida, the year I left behind everyone and everything I had ever known. That was the year that I needed something constant. I needed something I knew I could rely on — and that summer, I had God. But I had God in the sense that I could blame Him. I remember asking Him why He had done this to me, why He had taken me away from everything I had ever known. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was meant to be here, that God sent my mom and me to Florida for a reason. I can safely say that I have become a stronger person because of it, but I can also say that I’m done, I’m ready to leave. I feel truly blessed to have been given this opportunity to live in such a diverse environment. And I feel like it came at the right time. We lived in Florida during what I think are the most crucial years in finding who you are. I was thirteen my first year here; now, I’m eighteen, and I’ll be back in the Deep South before my nineteenth birthday. I’m sure that if we had stayed in Arkansas, I would not be the same person I am today.

The same year we moved to Florida, that first year the idea of God really meant something to me, I was also introduced to other aspects of spirituality — namely, the Tarot. My mom gave me my first Tarot deck; I’ve held it as a constant in my life ever since. Whenever I’m looking for answers, I turn first to my cards. While I was still struggling to understand “God,” the Tarot was something tangible, something real, something I could understand. It was my rock.

My enthusiasm for the Christian God waned through the year. After another summer at camp, I went home spiritually refreshed; I was on top of a mountain, and God was beside me. But again, after a few months, my religious zeal again faded.

Another year came and went. I found myself beginning to question what I was being told. How did we know there was only one God? “The evidence of His existence is all around us,” Sam said. Yes, I could agree that some higher power had created the world around us, that the odds of some serendipitous coincidence resulting in the Big Bang were simply too astronomical for science to explain away a higher Being. But my question was never answered — how do we know there is only one God?

I don’t know that there is an answer to this question — I guess that maybe, that’s where the “faith” part of religion comes in. You just have to believe.

A few more years passed by, and my spirituality waxed and waned. This last summer at camp, though, I didn’t leave with that spiritual high. I didn’t leave with that feeling of spiritual well-being. I left feeling like I had more questions than when I had started. So many people had so many interpretations of so many different things, I didn’t know whom to turn to or whom to believe. All I knew was that I felt, in a word, lost.

My mom understood my feeling of emptiness in that area — she had told me multiple times that she felt like she had neglected a part of my upbringing. For my eighteenth birthday, she gave me a cross to wear, in hopes that it might help me find my way.

I can’t say if I’ve really “found God,” but I can say that I know someone or something is up there watching out for me. I’ve been able to overcome any obstacle thrown at me and emerge a stronger person.

Drama Llama II.

It’s funny how one little thing can ruin your day.

My day was going fantastically. I woke up this morning, picked up a couple of friends, and drove to the beach. I managed to make it home without a sunburn, despite laying out in the sun for four straight hours.

I was in a super-good mood. No drama today. No talking about prom. Just laying in the sun, swimming in the ocean, and looking at guys on the beach. I really needed today.

So I get home, take a shower, and sit around for about fifteen minutes, and then my parents come home. Mom asks if I’m okay with prom — basically, the group I’m going with is made up of couples… and me. I say, “Yeah, I’m fine. I haven’t really thought about it today. Oh, and one of the guys in our group was dumped by his girlfriend, so I won’t be the only single.” My mom suggests I think about asking him to go with me. About that time, my phone rings.

I answer it, and it’s the girl that’s basically in charge of organizing everything. She tells me that A: the guy my mom said I should ask to go had already decided on someone else, and that B: our group has expanded by four more people. She’s asking my opinion on all of it, and all I can think is how many times do I have to tell you? I. Don’t. Care.

Basically, my friends just automatically assume I don’t have a date. And that pisses me off more than the fact that I don’t have one. So they’re making all these plans and filling up our table, not once bothering to say, “Hey, are you planning on bringing a date?”

So as I’m venting to Mom, my step-dad comes in and says my step-brother and one-year-old nephew are coming over.

So now I’m sitting here, fuming, having to listen to my loud step-family talk to each other, gushing about my nephew’s haircut. So they’re yelling at each other across the living room, the baby’s crying, and the TV is on. This house is never quiet.

Is this year over yet?

Drama llama

I’m tired of high school.

More accurately, I’m tired of all the drama.

Like, really. I’m tired of all the he-said, she-said; I’m tired of the bitching; I’m tired of everything. Mostly, I’m tired of the people. I’m tired of being around the people that just don’t care. Yes, you’re required by law to attend school until you’re sixteen, but while you’re there, you might as well make the best of it. Do these people really think that ten years down the road — two, even — it’s going to matter what that blonde in math class said, or that the varsity quarterback slept with an oboe player, or that you were the only one at the homecoming dance without a date?

(Granted, I’m a little pissed off that I don’t have a date to prom. It shouldn’t matter this much to me — and I’m sure it wouldn’t if the rest of my group weren’t made up of couples.)

But, really. The last couple of months, I was swept up in trauma and drama of teenage angst of the “I don’t like you because so-and-so told me that you said such-and-such behind my back” variety. Also a bit of the “she slept with her boyfriend, she’s such a slut” sort of angst.

You know, is it really anyone’s business what someone else may or may not be doing with his or her significant other? If two people have been dating for a while and they decide they’re ready to have sex, that’s their decision; that’s their business. Sleeping with one person shouldn’t brand you as a slut, or a skank, or a whore, or whatever else.

And yet, that seems to be all I’m hearing about — “Oh, M. slept with her boyfriend.” or “Oh, S. and D. were out in their car in the school parking lot before the band concert; wonder what they were doing?” Honestly, should it matter? Fine, it’s juicy gossip, people like to talk, whatever; but that doesn’t mean someone should go around spreading speculation about two people.

“Well, they can defend themselves,” it could be argued. Well, yeah, they could, if people would say things in front of them. But that’s never how it goes, is it? It’s always behind backs; how can you confront someone about a rumor if you aren’t supposed to know who started it? What’s to stop them from denying it — after all, you’d have no proof that said person called you a bitch. You’d have no proof that they were lying through their teeth when they said you were their best friend. You’d have nothing to go on but the word of another “friend” who is more than likely going behind your back, too.

Not that that’s always the case. But that’s what I was caught up in. The drama wasn’t even mine — I just happened to be a mutual friend of both sides of the issue. I was a shoulder to cry on for one friend, and I was excluded from the other side of things by mere association.

And now? That’s all settled, everyone’s friends again — even if things do get a little strained from time to time. But now, more rumors are flying with prom right around the corner. “Oh, she’s going with him?” and “He asked her to go with him?” Honestly, I’ve never been much of a school dance person, but I figured, it’s prom. It’s sort of a rite of passage, isn’t it? And so I’m going.

All I can say is that it is definitely time for spring break. This year has been way too long, and I desperately need a break. I just need to get away from people.

Footloose

So, somehow I got roped into playing clarinet for my school’s musical this week. Which, granted, is something I’ve always wanted to do, but I didn’t volunteer to play for a reason. There’s a Japanese high school band coming to Florida this week (students from my school, including myself, are housing them for two nights). I hadn’t volunteered to play for the musical because I wanted to go to their performance Thursday night — which I can’t do because of the musical.

But either way, playing for the musical or going to the concert, I’d be missing out on something I really want to do, so I figured I might as well make the best of it, since my band director asked me to do this.

The problem is that our drama department (as lackluster as it is this year with the new teacher) is performing Footloose.

I had heard of it, but I had never heard the music from it, didn’t know what it was about, anything. Well, now I know what it’s about. (In a nutshell, some punk kid from Chicago moves to Bomont — which, by the way, is in Texas, assuming the writers meant Beaumont; otherwise, it’s in West Virginia — and in this little rural town, dancing is illegal. So he and his new Bomont/Beaumont buddies rally together to abolish the anti-dancing laws.)

Which is all well and good for a musical. Except the music is not all that great. We (the band students playing in the pit) complained to the choral director, and he told us “You should see the original score; it’s worse than the one we have.”

We had our first full-rehearsal this past Wednesday. One of my friends, who has played in the pit for our school’s annual musical twice before, told me that the show has never been this rough a week before the show. Even I, without having any sort of reference point to judge how rough the show really was, noticed that it was pretty bad, to say the least.

Basically, our Ren is, to put it mildly, flamboyant. He’s over the top; it’s horrendous. (By the way, he expects to get into (SC)AMDA “based on his talent, not on his grades,” then work on a cruise ship for a while before taking his career to Broadway. I wish him the best of luck in his endeavor. He’ll need it.) He’s the son of the drama teacher (so, naturally, he has the lead part), and as a former department member told me, he and his mother believe in entertaining, but not acting.

The singing is on-key about half the time, and when it is, the people onstage don’t know how to follow KP’s directing. Rarely do I know how my part is supposed to fit into the vocalists’, and when I do, I still feel unsure of myself because whoever is singing will be fluctuating so badly in his tempo that I begin to wonder if he’s singing the same song I’m trying to play.

But, anyway. The show opens Thursday; we have rehearsals Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Hopefully things will shape up between now and then.

Megacon – Friday

So, this weekend is Megacon down at the Orange County Convention Center. I’m so excited.

My friend and I decided that it would be better to brave the rain and rush hour traffic to go down today to buy our tickets for tomorrow instead of getting up at the crack of dawn to get them tomorrow morning.

Needless to say, without even going into the convention hall, I had my day made.

No sooner had we walked into the convention center than who do I see? Dr. Facilier, closely followed by Mama Odie, complete with JuJu the Snake around her shoulders. I was so pumped to see that Princess and the Frog already has cosplayers. You have no idea.

FCAT.

FCAT week. Oh, boy. My high school is the only one in the county that makes upperclassmen go to school while the underclassmen are testing. So, in other words, we’re stuck in our least favourite classes for two hours at a time all week. (Which wasn’t that big a deal when we were used to 90-minute classes. Now that we’re on the 7-period day and our classes are only 50 minutes long… suddenly sitting in the same room for 120 minutes seems like an eternity.) I just hope my first period tomorrow isn’t displaced because of testing… Byers never told us where to go.

But, aside from the awfulness of FCAT week, I finally, finally finished Cold Mountain. I can see why people love it; I can see why it’s typically classified as a “good book”; I can see why our teacher chose to assign it for our English class. It was beautifully written — the language was wonderfully lyrical, it flowed smoothly, all of that. But, I have to say, I was disappointed.

Maybe it was all the hype. Maybe it was because I was one of the last in my class to actually start reading it, and everyone went on and on about how “awesome” it was.

Honestly, I felt like it was really slow. Painfully so in some places. When stuff happened, stuff happened, almost too fast to understand what was going on. (I had to reread a certain set of sentences at the end a couple of times to make sure I had really read what I thought I had read.) But between the sudden bursts of action, it just seemed to drag on and on and on and on. I wanted to grab the characters and say, “I don’t care how the wind through an oak tree sounds different from the wind through an elm, Ruby! I don’t care that you know the names of the stars, Ada! I don’t care that you know how to calculate distance based on the delay of sound, Inman! Just shut up and get on with the story!”

But, finally, the book came to an end, and my final verdict was this: You can keep your Charles Frazier; I’ll take Margaret Mitchell any day.

I did get a kick out of the Goatwoman and Pangle, though, mostly because I know people strikingly similar to them. Miss Donna and Banjo Boy, I salute you.

So, now, I’m on to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. I’m on page forty-five. General thoughts:
- The “Author’s Preface” at the beginning ends by being signed “M.R.H.” Mary Russell, obviously. Mary Russell… Holmes, even? You know they’re going to hook up. It’s practically inevitable. Or she’ll somehow end up taking Holmes’s name.
- Mary Russell needs to just take a chill pill. She’s a spunky, feminist teenager. We get that. We also get that she conveniently is able to match wits with Sherlock. Fantastic. Now stop being so pretentious, Mary, and let’s get on with the story.

Overall, though, despite absolutely hating Mary at this point, I’m liking the book. I’m glad I had a nice, long, two-hour-long class this morning to read. Thank you, FCAT.

Angry Letter No. 3

S. –

I’m tired of you and your shit.

Get over yourself.

I don’t know what your problem is. Maybe you’re jealous that I have other friends. And, you know, if that’s the case, that’s fine. But you should probably tell me instead of ragging on my other friends when they’re not around.

As you told M. last night, everyone’s entitled to their own opinions. Who am I to disagree with that? But, the thing is, when you smirk at people and laugh at them when they make honest efforts to try to understand something, they don’t like that.

If we’re honestly not good enough friends that you can come up to me and say, “I have a problem with you hanging out with M. because of reasons X, Y, and Z,” then maybe I have a problem hanging out with you.

Just because you don’t agree with the way M. lives her life doesn’t give you the right to go around calling her a slut or a bitch or whatever. Do you honestly know first-hand that she’s a slut? Whose information are you relying on? Are you listening to her exes? Are you listening to her friends? Are you listening to friends-of-friends? Do you honestly know how reliable your sources are?

I really hate you right now.

If you’re really so two-faced that you can lie to our faces and say “nothing’s wrong,” and then talk about us as soon as we’re gone, why should I put up with you? Why shouldn’t I do the same?

I’ll tell you why: because I was raised better.

– CD.

Poetry

I don’t understand why people seem to think that poetry without capitalization or punctuation is somehow superior to poetry that is grammatically correct.

Is it because it’s poetry, and so it’s expected to be outside the boundaries of what’s technically “correct”? Is it because such “raw expression of emotion” deserves to be unhampered by the conventions of writing? Is it because proper grammar would detract from the meaning of the poem?

In my inbox on deviantART, or in the list of daily deviations, if I see something without capitalization, I immediately ignore it. So maybe I’m as bad as the people that don’t capitalize — some of them might think that all-lowercase automatically equals a fantastic poem; I think it automatically indicates a writer trying to be awesome. The operative word there is trying.

Not that all poetry without capitalization is complete trash — but then, it’s not all pure gold, either.

Cold Mountain

Now that I’ve finally finished Harry Potter à l’École des Sorciers, I get to start actually reading my assigned books for English. This week (well, the past couple of weeks, really), it’s Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.

I haven’t seen the movie, so, thankfully, I don’t have images of Jude Law and Nicole Kidman drifting through my head — which is a good thing, according to my teacher and the three people in my class that have seen the movie. But, honestly, I don’t really have any image of Inman or Ada, and I’d almost rather have incorrect ones than none at all.

But I’m only on page 33, so we’ll see how things pan out.

My overall impressions thus far:

- Ada is completely useless. She doesn’t know how to make her own food other than fried eggs; she doesn’t know how to weed a garden; she is evidently incapable of hiring help. If her father left her the land, you’d assume he would have left her some money, too. Or, you know, she could start learning to do things through trial-and-error.

- The writing style to me seems very… stiff. Maybe that’s not the word I’m looking for, but I feel like Frazier is trying to mimic an older style, and for me, it just isn’t working. Stiff definitely isn’t the word I’m looking for, actually; the writing flows smoothly, but it seems sort of forced. Like when angsty teenagers try to write in an Elizabethan sort of style for their medieval romance novels.

And, yeah. I felt like I had more to say, but evidently, I don’t. Oh well.

“That Girl”

Today I had the realization that I’m “that girl” — the one people know but don’t really count among their close friends, the one that more or less sort of gets along with everyone but doesn’t really fit in with one specific group very well, the one that people know they can ask for favors but don’t really pay attention to otherwise.

I mean, take for example my English class. The conversation/discussion/debate is monopolized by basically three people every day. If anyone else tries to raise their hand to voice their opinion, they’re shot down by one of the three people that don’t know how to shut their traps and let someone else talk. One of my friends and I sit on one side of the room with our hands patiently raised, waiting our turn, but we’re always among the last to be acknowledged by our teacher — even if we were some of the first to put our hands up to speak.

Sometimes, a general statement will be made, and I’ll chime in to try to include myself in the discussion, but I’m always ignored. It could be argued, I guess, that the people on the other side of the room can’t hear me, but even the people sitting to my immediate left ignore my input.

But when someone needs to share a textbook because they don’t have theirs, or when someone needs help on last night’s homework, who do they ask? Me.

I’ve always sort of known that this is my place in the social hierarchy of school — even before we moved to Florida, when I went to a small private school in Arkansas, I was still the girl that everyone sort of knew, but didn’t fit in with a particular group. I was never in the cheerleading group; I watched some animé, but wasn’t as big a fan as some of the other kids; I took dance, but was never as good or as light on my feet as the other dancers; I wasn’t a drama kid; the other band kids really weren’t that into it — the list goes on. I never really knew what to classify myself as, and I wasn’t content being the “well-rounded” girl. I wanted to feel like I really belonged somewhere.

In Florida, I spent three months at school with no friends. We moved in seventh grade, and I was still trying to find who I was or wanted to be. I told myself that the move would be a fresh start, that I could be who I wanted to be, that I could completely change my image. I told myself that I wouldn’t be “that girl” any more. The problem was that I didn’t know how to make friends. I had been in classes with the same 80 people for 6 years; now, I didn’t have any two classes with the same person. I was isolated.

I was moved into the gifted program, and so I never saw the few friends I had managed to make. I was suddenly with a whole new group of people, and didn’t know a single one. And even by the end of seventh grade, I had a few friends, but I was still “that girl.”

High school has been the same. I identify myself as a band kid — but even that isn’t enough. Within the band kids are the serious ones who plan on going into music as a career, the pot-heads, the overachievers, the kids that say they’re only in it because their parents insist upon it… and so on and so forth. Most people can be identified by section — the flutes are the competitive ones, the tubas are the “jocks” (as far as band kids can be considered jocks), the trumpets are arrogant, the saxophones are obnoxious — but I don’t know where I fall. I march with the sax, but I’m the “good girl” of the section — the one that follows the rules; I’m not as outspoken as the other saxes. I play clarinet during concert season, but the clarinets are probably one of the least-unified sections in the band — the clarinets are the ones that, for the most part, don’t care. But I care.

I’m still trying to find my place and find who I want to be. Hopefully once I’m out of the house, I’ll be able to define myself by what I want for myself, not what my parents do.