The Animals We Love

I think that sometimes it's harder to lose animals than it is to lose people. The animals we love teach us things that humans will never be able to - when I have wanted to scream at every person in my life, when I have been convinced I hated all of them, I could never have hated my dog. Their utter devotion, their helplessness without us, their unquestioning affection all teach us compassion and empathy in ways that you cannot learn from another person, or from reading out of a book, or from being lectured to.

I understand the value of a human life, and that people must always come before animals, but I understand also the value of implicit trust and unquestionable love on our ability to develop emotionally. I understand that when my cat followed me when I was 8 and tried to run away, he didn't know what he was doing - what matters is that he did it anyways, and that his helplessness in the face of the world, and my worry that he would get lost, in part motivated me to sit in the bushes around the block until I cooled down and went home, rather than continuing on and getting lost and hurt. I understand that when I cried and my dog sat with me until I could breath again, he had no idea what was going on, he had no grasp of human emotion or what those tears meant. That didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now. What matters is that he sat with me, that I was comforted, that his distress was perhaps more genuine than any half-true reassurances a friend could offer.

Now those animals are gone. Those dogs, who sat beside me growing up, who inhabit nearly every one of my childhood memories, have passed away. One at the age of 17 after a long and happy life as the adored companion of three little girls. One more recently and far too young, only 10, the victim of invisible disease. That hurts the most - all those missed years without my constant companion. I still expect to trip over him, in his usual position sitting by my side, when I get up off the couch. I still expect to hear him barking when I come home. I expect to be bowled over by 80lbs of childish joy every time a chain jingles and he thinks he might get walked. What hurts more, though, is knowing that he didn't understand. That if he suffered, he didn't know why. That when he died alone and in the dark I was in a brightly lit ER being unnecessarily poked and prodded while he was the one who needed medical attention. It feels like betrayal to have left him alone in the face of that when he never once ignored my slightest suffering.

Our cat we lost to kidney damage, the only chance of saving him an operation that only could have prolonged his suffering. That was easier. We put him out of his suffering, it was relief instead of loss. Our other cat, now, has run away. My sisters are putting up posters for him, but I doubt he'll come back. He was a nasty cat, and hated us. He'd bite you if you paid attention to him and bite you if he thought you were ignoring him. Moving traumatized him and for the last two years he has lived mostly upstairs, hiding under beds and hissing at the new cat and the puppy whenever they get near.

Despite that, I'll miss him. Mostly because he was the last remainder of the animals that I grew up with. I pity him his suffering, I mourn his inability to understand that he was loved, no matter how evil and ugly. Ignorance is the most terrifying thing of all - ignorance of your worth, ignorance of death. When people die at least they understand what's happening. At least they know the whys, the hows, even if they don't know what's waiting for them afterwards (or if anything is waiting at all). Some people might find comfort in knowing that animals die without knowledge of those things, but I never have. I don't think I ever will.

Having been taught so many things by them, I can only feel guilt that I couldn't give them that one reassurance at the end in return, no matter how much I loved them in return for their devotion.

Looking and Not Seeing

I feel like a lot of people go around with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears. They don't look at the world, they don't see anything but their lives laid out right in front of them.

They look at paintings and photographs and see a theoretical beauty, served up for their interpretation, rather than looking at everything around them and seeing real beauty. They listen to music because it fills the silence, not because they love it. They read novels about knights in shining armor and female heroes that aren't too heroic (because that would be masculine) instead of listening to the stories the people they know have to tell, or picking up a history book. They ask God or the television what love is instead of going out in search of it themselves.

Maybe I just know a lot of people who never really do anything with their lives and a lot of people who do so much with their lives, and I compare them too closely. Or maybe they need to be compared, measured up, and found wanting so that they can learn to fix it.

Purity, Abstinence, Morality and Lack Thereof

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The Social Network (Love or hate or a bit of both?)

I keep going back and forth on whether or not I actually like The Social Network. Before I get into the detail, let me first say that it was an incredibly enjoyable movie. Witty, fast paced, rude and completely unapologetic, its characters were completely unlikable in all the right ways and there was hardly a dull moment. It won me over in the first scene, where Mark Zuckerberg the asshole is dumped by his girlfriend with the qualifier 'it's not because you're a nerd, it's because you're just an asshole'. (Nerd boys, there's a lot of truth in this. If you're complaining that you can't get a girlfriend because you're 'nerdy', ask yourself first, are you just a dick?)

But here's the thing: I can't guiltlessly like it, because it was also unapologetically sexist. I don't find that as bothersome as a lot of the blogosphere does and I certainly didn't ruin my movie experience by sitting there analyzing all the ways that it was an inaccurate and offensive portrayal of women, but it was there and it can't be avoided. Aside from the intelligent and fed up girlfriend that appears in the first scene as the catalyst for Mark's creation of facebook (by first inspiring him to create a site where girls at the school can be compared side by side and rated) the only girls to appear in the movie are mindless objects for the enjoyment of the male dominated cast. To the extent that they have any influence over the main characters, it is negative.

It's one thing to say 'the main characters of this movie are male because the creators of this company were male', the main defense I've seen bopping around the few negative reviews of The Social Network, and another thing entirely to say that it's justifiable to have treated every single minor female character as a sex object. Even when the company has expanded to include dozens of workers and interns the only girls who get screen time are having lines of coke snorted off of their stomachs and personally delivering things to the main characters so that they can be ogled and cat called. In the background the male interns are shown writing code and doing meaningful tasks for the company...with no women among them. Aaron Sorkin's defense that it's just a reflection of the reality of the techworld doesn't really hold water. There are women doing meaningful things in that environment, they just didn't fit into his storyline so he didn't mention them, even in passing. Alright, whatever, but at least acknowledge what you're doing.

At the same time, at least the sexism wasn't portrayed as a good thing. It just was what it was. The characters were clearly assholes for a whole slew of other reasons and no one was jumping to the defense of their treatment of the women around them.

So...I still don't know if I like this movie or not. I like asshole characters in general. I appreciate portrayals of the more negative side of human personalities and interactions, without a hero or a villain. Frankly, I like seeing people screw each other over and treat each other like shit and, well, act like real people in real relationships. Because real people are generally kind of assholes. Even the nicest ones fall into that trap from time to time, and most of us aren't the nicest that we could possibly be.

So what I think it comes down to is this: I would recommend this more as a source of great amusement, it's far more well written than most anything else I've seen all year, with great pacing and decent acting. But take it with a grain of salt. Realize it could be better and take it for what it is, not what it could be.

NaNoWriMo Is Coming

The site (nanowrimo.org) has been reset for the year, the forums wiped clean just to be dirtied by our rambling minds again. It's a fresh start! I'll win this year, I swear!

For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and takes place every November not just nationally but internationally. It's a challenge to write 50,000 words in a month (which is short, as far as novels go). No, there's no prize if you win. But you get stickers!

It's an exercise in just getting words on the page. Quantity, rather than quality, is what matters. Save your red pen and editing for December! Or January, when you're not quite so sick of what you just wrote. Being a perfectionist about writing and also awfully lazy, I've never managed to win, though one year I came close and it was only due to an evil conspiracy hatched by my computer and flash drive that I lost (a previous copy of my novel, backed up on the flash drive, was copied over all other existing files at four in the morning, erasing around fifteen thousand words and brutally murdering my motivation).

I'm going to win this year, though. Really I am. Surely it will be easy to write 50,000 words about impossibly adorable genetically engineered pocket sized dragons eating faces, wreaking havoc, and causing moral quandaries, all with a side of questionably motivated genocide and corruption.

Right? Right.

I'm still nervous.

Finding the Words

There are so many things I want to talk about. I am nearly overflowing with topics, with thoughts that would do better on a page than in my head. But...I don't seem to have the words. Anyone who knows me can tell you that that's a rare thing, I can talk about nothing forever, and when I actually WANT to talk? You've got no chance of getting me to shut up. I'll tell you what I'm thinking whether you like it or not. Apparently I intimidate people with how vocal I am about...just about everything (pardon me if I think that, perhaps, those people NEED to be intimidated, so that maybe they'll learn to speak up, too).

But today I just don't have the words. Today I'm tired. Two weeks ago I fell off of a horse, all that remains as evidence is a scar on my face and a lingering sprained ankle, but healing is tiring. My heart hurts, because caring is tiring. People are strange and complicated animals and understanding them, or at least trying to, is tiring. (I don't think I'm ever going to perfect that skill, but maybe I'll learn to find an off button for whatever makes me want to understand people.)

If I was going to try, I could write about: the mustang roundup (though I already did that, and I just need to edit it from an essay into a blog post), my accident and how much I hate hospitals and bitchy ER nurses, the damned horse that hospitalized me and how much I love him, or how much fake concern from people who hate me annoys me and has made me want to hit something in the past few weeks. If not those, then I could write about how I've been reminded lately why I haven't consistently watched the news in years and why I stick to abstract concepts of social justice rather than current events, because the world makes me sick and I like to cling to what little faith in humanity I have left. Or I could be a bit less tragic, a little more hopeful, try to remind myself that there are things worth paying attention to by talking about the It Gets Better Project (and how much I sometimes love Dan Savage) and all the amazing people who have already participated in it and who are spreading it to reach those who need it. I could say that sometimes Violet Blue, or maybe The Rejectionist, say really cool things.

Perhaps I could try grounding myself in real life instead by writing about Beth DiCaprio who runs the Grace Foundation and continues to give me amazing opportunities to do inspiring things (and has really cool dogs that I want to kidnap).

I could meander into discussing music and how much I love it and need it and really need to acquire more of it. I could tell you how cute my puppy is at great length, because she's damn cute and and a really good foot warmer to boot. Had I the words, I could probably go on about books forever because, you see, I have so many and they're all pretty wonderful. Maybe even a mention of Banned Book Week and how ridiculous banning any form of literature is, though I haven't bothered to read a banned book this week even despite having meant to.

But, see, I don't have the words. I have all these really cool words, strung together in sentences and mashed up into paragraphs, but I don't have the right words. I can't find the ones I want. So I guess that will all have to wait.

How I Got To Where I Am (or My Journey to Unschooling)

College is the goal, the motivator in everything we do from kindergarten until high school graduation. To have attained that goal in some small way by entering the Freshman English classroom is, or should be, the end of a journey from point A to point B and therefore a success story. For me, in this English classroom, it is not. Traditional schooling has always proved to be a stumbling block for me; from the first grade public school class environment to what is referred to as a school-at-home curriculum I have not fit the expectations of the system and have sought alternative educational options, in the process abandoning the idea of completing my entire college education at a four year university for the sake of convenience and monetary constraints.

In a system that teaches to the middle in an attempt to average out the success of all its students there is no place for those who excel or fall behind. If you require any special attention you are pushed aside to be dealt with later, with whatever small amount of energy or resources might be left over after the majority is pacified. At least, that was my experience in the public education system starting at a very young age. Having finished my work early I would be punished for trying to otherwise amuse myself. Misbehaving because of boredom or disenchantment with underpaid and undereducated teachers who had little to no passion for their subject, I was sent to counseling. If I could not conform I must be labeled in a way that could be more easily handled by the administration.

On one particularly memorable occasion the school administration tried to tell my mother that I had Tourette’s syndrome. Well, yes, I did have several motor tics as a child—coping mechanisms developed to help me deal with an environment that made me nervous and uncomfortable. I cycled through bouts of habitual eye blinking and throat clearing, two main tics used to diagnose people with Tourette’s, as well as other twitches, though I can’t ever remember manifesting all of them in the same time period. I suppose I could have had/have Tourette’s, but these were not the reasons that they brought up to defend their opinion. No, they had no real concern for my mental health; they simply wanted to diagnose me with something, anything, to makes their lives easier. If I could be put into a box and medicated then their lives would be simpler. If they could say I spoke out in class and had no respect for them because I was somehow damaged as far as they were concerned then I wouldn’t be back-talking for any legitimate reason like oh, say, they can never given me any real reason to respect them. (On an interesting side note, I have never again experienced any of these tics after leaving school.)

After having completed fifth grade, using a curriculum that I had finished through a brief stint in independent study two years previously in third grade, my parents removed me from public school to use a homeschooling program with course work modeled off of the public school standards. That worked little better than public school had in the first place and was quickly abandoned and followed by a descent into the little known but much despised practice of Unschooling. I spent several years going through a process commonly referred to as ‘deschooling’. I don’t remember much of those years. I slept a lot, I sat around and ate junk food, I watched a lecture series on Ancient Egypt and tried NaNoWriMo for the first time. During that time I refused to go out and socialize or talk to people, especially people my own age. A lot of people would classify that as highly unhealthy, but I’d say they’re wrong. I, as a person who was really fucked up at the time, needed to take that time to get my feet back under me. Trust me, when I came out the other side of that I was a much happier and more functional person than I had been for years before.

As my family got the hang of the lifestyle of Unschooling we discovered that it fit our interests and goals far better than public school ever had, mine especially. For the past four years I have studied what I was interested in, pursued my passions, and learned far more about a broader range of subjects than my friends in public school have ever dreamed. I’ll be the first to admit that there are some subjects that I’m more than a little behind in, but I have every confidence that I’ll easily catch up just as soon as it’s relevant that I apply myself to them. I think the fact that I easily tested into a college freshman English class, scoring nearly as highly as you can on the test (though they wouldn’t let me test OUT of the freshman class, sadly), after having had absolutely no formal English curriculum for the past five years, just goes to show how very little you really need to follow school standards to get the education you want and need.

Next semester I’ll be taking a full course load at the local community college as a highschool graduate, though in some respects I’ll still be taking highschool level classes to catch up, but for now I’m doing what I love: playing with horses, volunteering at The Grace Foundation of NorCal (these first two things tie into each other, which makes me very happy!), reading, writing, having interesting discussions with interesting people, and going on as many adventures as I can while I’m young enough to drop everything and run off to have fun.

Tell me, how is that a less valid way of getting where I’m going? College is still a goal, but it isn’t THE defining goal anymore. I’m partially there already. I’ll make it the rest of the way eventually.