Sunday, September 17, 2006

People Who Are More Successful Than Me...

I went to high school with this kid and now he's on ABC Family! Who knew?!

As I remember from my classes, he was a very sweet person, so I don't mind pimping his IMDB site here. Go check him out!

K.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Dreaming of Elysian Fields

I had a dream last night where I was in a cemetery.

The sky was blue, the kind of blue that you only see touched up in photos. Tombstones dotted the rolling hills, stretching far out into the distance. The stones, I seem to remember, were engraved with Hebrew, so it was clearly a Jewish cemetery. The strangest thing, besides the sheer size of the complex, was my lack of fear or trepidation. Grave yards are not, have never been, my thing.

I was standing with my family among the tombstones, apparently waiting for something. Suddenly, I saw movement in the hills. People were standing by each stone, looking around and squinting in the sun. Around me, men and women began to emerge from the graves.

Aghast, I grabbed my father, begged him for an explanation. He smiled at me and said that once a year the dead climbed out of their tomb to stand in the sun and see their families. At the end of the day, they would re-inter themselves, not to emerge for another year.

For some reason, I accepted this, no matter how strange it was. I guess it helped that the corpses I saw were fully formed with a glint of life in still-intact eyeballs. Live families were reunited with the deceased, hugs shared all around.

I met my Bubbe for the first time.

(I'm crying as I write this.)

She died from cancer before I was born. She always wanted grandchildren, but I came far too late. I've been told that I'm a lot like her in personality and habit. Before the day ended, I had met her and was reunited with my Granddad, who passed when I was four. As the sun set, the dead climbed back into their graves.

What does this dream mean? I suppose if I were more spiritual, I would have many interesting suggestion, whereas in my unenlightened state, I have none. All I know is that when I woke up, I was smiling.

I apologize for the horrendous writing in this post, but I had to get it out.

K.

PS. Bonus points for those who know what the Elysian Fields were.

Monday, September 11, 2006

The Obligatory September 11th Post

As I'm always the blogger who jumps on the bandwagon the second after a wheel pops off its axel, I think I'll continue the tradition by posting a 9/11 piece three hours before 9/11/2006 ends. Why mess with tradition?

Anyone who doesn't know will probably be very turned off by the lines above. They might even quickly backtrack, vowing never to venture into this den of depravity again. Who writes such a flippant introduction to a September 11th article?

I don't mean to be so callous. I really don't. I remember perfectly where I was when the dreadful event occurred, my confusion, and my suspicion that everyone at school knew more about world events than I did. And I cried for those thousands of people. Then I raged. Finally, I accepted.

Five years later, I look back on the event and cannot seem to summon up the same intensity of feeling. The Towers were once there; now they aren't. The people were once there; now they aren't. I can only think of it in a black and white sense with no emotion to color the picture. I'm not totally sure why this happened to me, but I can venture a few guesses.

Having monitored the news for the last five years, I may have grown a little jaded towards the death of civilians. It's awful, I know. But when people are being blown up, shot, or massacred everyday, you have to build a cocoon around yourself to keep your sanity. If I mourned for everyone, I would be a shivering wreck, unable to go on with daily life. I feel that my cocoon protects me from the tragedies today, but it also prevents me from bring up past hurts, such as 9/11. I guess, deep inside, I don't want to feel anything because I'm afraid that I'll never be able to go on with my own life.

Something else that might make it impossible for me to adequately appreciate the significance of this day is the 2004 presidential election. No, not the outcome-- the fact that both parties bandied 9/11 about for their own political gains. Who are you, you scum-sucking scheming bastards, to exploit the deaths of thousands of people and the virtual paralysis of a nation for your own aims of gaining or keeping power? Who are you to play on the sympathies of your fellow Americans in order to garner votes? It just makes me sick. It also makes me wonder if such insensitivity and callousness made me lose the meaning of September 11th. I can only pray that my ability to feel isn't permanently retarded by politicians.

Finally, I come to probably the most prevalent reason: the simple passage of time. If I look down at my legs right now, I will find a bruise that has taken up residence on my body for a few weeks. When I got it, it must have hurt like a bitch, but now I can barely remember what caused it. It's just a splotch of color now; it no longer hurts. Maybe 9/11 is the same way. Five years has just made the pain fade away.

I know I build up these defenses to make myself a stronger person, but I wonder if losing my ability to empathize is making me weaker in the long run. I have a lot to think about.

K.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Facing the Truth

I find myself not looking on news sites anymore because I will invariably find something about Steve Irwin.

Yeah, I'm still on about that.

I find that I'm not alone in my odd feelings. As I walk through my dorm hallways, I see tributes to the Crocodile Hunter on white boards. People still talk about it, most of the time with downcast faces.

I couldn't figure out why the death of one man a world away could affect so many people on my campus. I know of one person who met him, but the rest of us only knew him from Animal Planet or his run-ins with the press. The death of the pope caused less consternation. I just couldn't understand.

Then I spoke to my roommate, a paragon of wisdom clothed in giggly, dippy exterior.

"Well," she said, "it was just so sudden and random. And he was young too. You could sort of relate to him."

True.

I guess it's not just that we miss our beloved Crocodile Hunter, we also have our mortality shoved into our faces. College kids aren't used to that. We think nothing of crossing the road in the direct path of on-coming cars or drinking enough to kill a horse, then getting up the next day to do it all over again. What happens if one day that car doesn't slow down? Or if that last sip of alcohol is just too much for our bodies to handle? What then?

Well, then we die. Simple as that.

But what else does our impending death say to us? It reminds us of that old, cliched saying, "live each day like it's your last." Death is coming, people. Everyday, our internal clocks continue winding down and we get a little older. This is all we have. Drink yourself silly. Travel. Do incredibly stupid things. You might not get to do it again tomorrow.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some manifesto-writing to do. No time like the present!

K.

PS. Thanks, Steve.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Bad Luck

I had written a hell of a post last night, but it was deleted by my personal friend, Blogger. Thanks, Blogger, I owe you one! So I was too despondent to re-write the thing and went to bed irritated.

About an hour later, I woke up with the feeling that my stomach was making a trek up to my mouth. I sprang from my bed and dashed into the bathroom. Several hours later, I came to the conclusion that I had been poisoned by university-produced salad, brushed my teeth, and fell into a deep, exhausted slumber.

As they say, it never rains-- it pours. Here's hoping for a more cheerful entry later tonight!

K.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Croc Hunting No More

Out of habit, I tend to make the CNN website my homepage. That way, if something catastrophic happens, I can be suitable shocked and informed before moving on to my daily business.

Consider me shocked:

Steve Irwin Dead from Stingray Barb

Are you kidding me? That's like David Blaine drowning in that damn fool stunt of his earlier this year! The Crocodile Hunter can't be dead!

I know that people die everyday and one person isn't more important than another, but I almost feel like I lost a friend. He was so open and passionate about his work that you couldn't help but admire him (even when he held his little baby over a set of razor sharp teeth, but we won't go into that). There was no greater advocate for those wild animals than Steve Irwin.

I'll miss him.

K.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Creative Writing Crisis

(This picture has little to do with the content of this post, but it makes me smile. Thank you, Bill Watterson!)

There is nothing worse than sitting over a blank sheet of paper and knowing, deeeeeeeeep in the back of your brain, that you have only one week to churn out a short story that will submitted to the all-consuming editorial maw of your peers and you're stuck with this piece of crap for weeks, doing revision after revision until your hands shake and you understand why Fitzgerald and Hemingway became alcoholics, but you have to keep editing and editing because your grade and writing reputation is at stake, here, but you get so damn tired that-

Yeah, I'm going to stop right there with that line of thought.

But that's the position I'm in-- I'll write, turn it in, get it back, do revisions, turn it back in again, get it back again, and so on. I know that at some point I will never want to see that story again.

I don't even know if I have a viable idea. It's something that happened several years ago, something that I thought would be too personal to write about. But I've been reading from my Creative Writing textbook and have come to the conclusion that if I change the characters, the setting, and the circumstances of my personal event, I could possibly come out of this with a good story on my hands. Or I could come out with a cliched piece of crap. Whichever.

I have no idea why this is so hard for me. Maybe it's because I have spent years writing critical essays that I've totally lost the knack for fiction. Hell, even my personal essays are mostly true, though admitted sometimes exaggerated to get the point across. This jumping into this short story stuff is like trying to do a split having not stretched for years: it going to hurt like hell.

Maybe I can come out of this unscathed and having learned a great deal about my craft. If not, my 21st birthday is coming up. Geniuses like Fitzgerald and Hemingway couldn't have gone too wrong!

K.