Manhattan Point

“This town’s turning into a vacation town,” my father said sourly. “Famous Dave’s! Why? Why do we need chain restaurants up here?”
“I don’t know, Karl, I kind of like it,” my mom said, eyeing the new rustic-posh day spa as we drove by.
“Used to be just cabins and resorts, and The Bay Bar,” my dad grumbled. “Didn’t need all these stores and…coffee shops.”
The conversation was interrupted when my little brother shouted “Crack the window!” My mom let her window down a few inches and our Springer Spaniel bounced up off the floor and onto her lap. Her nose went to the open window and her tail furiously beat my father. It’s amusing every time. Dogs freak when they smell Northern Minnesota.
“Polly, down!” my mom commanded. Polly wagged her tail and licked my mom’s face. My mom turned around towards the back seat and asked me, “Josie, are you excited to see Keya?”
“Uh, yeah. I always am.” This year, I have to admit, I wasn’t quite as excited for the cabin as I had been in past years. I can remember the feeling distinctly, though. The waiting and waiting all school year to be reunited with my best friend in the world, then the nervousness that we would be different. The trepidation I felt when I saw my cabin crush, Grant, for the first time every summer. He was always equally hot, and I was more anxious every year. This year, though, things were different. I had a boyfriend this time. I think some deep part of me couldn’t wait to casually tell all my cabin friends that I had a boyfriend at home. What would Grant think about that? Also, I had great friends at home now, just as cool and exciting as my cabin friends had always been. Honestly, and sadly, the Jet-Skis were what I was most excited about this time.
These were the things going through my head as our mid-sized SUV followed a line of giant, boat-pulling SUVs down the winding, densely forested road that led to Manhattan Point. That’s sort of like our neighborhood. It’s a piece of land that juts out into the lake. All the families along the Point have been friends for generations.
There’s a unique culture in Minnesota, perhaps you aren’t familiar with it, of going to the cabin on summer weekends. The rest of the country goes on vacation down south, but we go north. Minnesota is very beautiful up north, with our treasured 17,000 lakes and wild forests. Nearly everyone in the Twin Cities has somewhere up north to go during the summer. Maybe a time share, a favorite resort, a summer camp, or a cabin if you’re economically privileged.
Our cabin belongs to my grandma, who has spent every summer there since she was fourteen. We’ve been lucky to accumulate lots of toys up there, golf carts and Jet Skis and a water trampoline. It’s paradise.
As we pulled into our driveway, I peeked at the neighbors’ cabins as always. No cars in Grant’s driveway, but Keya’s half-wrecked Lumina was sitting on her front yard. And next to it, Keya herself was tanning in a patch of sunlight, lying on a deck chair in a string bikini and sunglasses. She sat up when we slammed shut the car doors. Polly went sprinting full-speed across the street toward Keya, all her Springer energy bursting out of her after the three-hour drive. Thank god a car wasn’t coming at that particular moment.
“Polly-poo!” Keya said. (Side note: Keya is pronounced like Kia the car. Her mom named her Keyarrah, so you see, Keya is just the lesser of two evils.) A little dog perked up under Keya’s chair, grinding Polly to a halt. Polly sniffed tentatively at the little rat-like thing. The dog sniffed back, and they found each other quite likable. They started running around the yard together, Polly nearly trampling the thing.
I watched this from my yard, and waved to Keya when she looked my way. I left my duffel bag in the car and walked over to Keya. “Hey Keya.”
“Hello, my long-lost summer love,” she replied. She got up and we hugged.
“Who’s that dog?” I asked.
“This is my puppy BJ. Actually it’s me and Jason’s.”
“Your mom let you name your dog BJ?” I asked incredulously.
“Eh, you know, moms don’t get inna…innu…what are they called…”
“Innuendos.”
“Yeah. And if they do know what it means, they totally hope you don’t. Moms like to think the best of us.”
“But she let you get a dog with your boyfriend?”
“Yeah, why not?” she shrugged. I guess Deanna was probably just happy Keya wasn’t engaged yet. That’s what happens around here when you turn 18. Oh, I forgot to mention that Keya was what we call a local. She didn’t vacation up in the glamorous north. She lived there year-round, endured all its brutality. She went to school with like 12 other students. She had to drive 40 miles to buy decent clothes. I felt infinite pity for her life up there.
“You look different,” I told her. She was skinny and tall as always, but her long red hair had been cut shoulder-length and bleached a harsh blonde. Her eyebrows were even thinner than last year, and one of them was pierced.
“You look the same.” It was true. I never changed. Mousy brown hair isn’t easily fixable, and make-up is superfluous on my forgettable face. I’ve stayed 5’2” since sixth grade and I wouldn’t call my fashion very thrilling.
“Want to go to the beach?” Keya asked.
“Sure, let me bring my stuff in the cabin and I’ll meet you there.” Keya didn’t live on the lake, but we let her family use our cabin’s beach whenever they wanted. So we met on my beach, her tiny string bikini making my bikini look like a tablecloth across my chaste chest. We lounged on the beach on towels and looked at the sparkling lake. The water was still too cold for swimming or water sports, but the beach was warm and sunny.
“So, Josie. Do you have a boyfriend?” Keya asked.
“Yeah,” I said, like it was nothing I wasn’t used to saying.
“I know,” she said with a grin, “I saw it on Facebook. What’s he like? What’s his name?”
“His name’s Christian. He’s really fun and- ”
“Hot?”
“Yeah,” I said, laughing.
“Of course he is. You’re so gorgeous, Josie.”
“What!”
“Yeah, girl. You get hotter every year!”
“Um, no,” I said. “So where are you going to school in the fall?”
“Uh, Itasca?” she said (that’s the community college of the north woods). Then she quickly said, “And you’re going to Marquette University? I saw that on Facebook too.”
“Funny. Yeah, I’m going to Marquette.”
“Where’s that?”
“Milwaukee.”
“That’s Wisconsin, right?”
“Uh, yeah. Your public schools must have been shit if you don’t know what cities are in the next state over.”
“Well…” she said defensively.
“It’s funny. So you’re staying up here for school?”
“Yeah. Itasca’s like 45 minutes away, so I’ll have to get an apartment. But you know, it’ll be good to be close to home.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I didn’t know what to say after that. I’d suspected this, since she hadn’t listed which college she was going to in the fall on her Facebook profile. Yeah, I’d stalked her too. What else is Facebook for? We were both silent for a while as the sun hopefully colored our skin a little.
Eventually, Keya said, “You excited to see Grant?”
“Yeah, I guess. Have you talked to him lately?”
“Just online. He said he’ll be up after dinner tonight.”
“Cool.”
“Do you remember when we were twelve and you were in love with Grant?” Keya asked.
“I was not in love with Grant!”
“Yes you were! It’s fine, I totally was too.”
“What! All those summers we both liked him and kept it a secret?”
“Yeah. But I hid it better than you did,” Keya said. I shrugged.
“Have you seen his profile lately? He looks goooood.”
“Still the preppiest dresser ever?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. ‘Hi, I’m Grant, I have beautiful eyes and I own the entire summer collection at Hollister, all in red to match my brand-new red Corvette.’” Keya teased.
“Does he really have a Corvette?”
“He does. He drove me around in it when you weren’t up here last Labor Day.”
“That’s ridiculous. Who buys their son a Corvette for his 18th birthday?”
“Bitch, your parents bought you a Jetta.”
“Yeah, but that’s a practical car. It’ll get me through the next twelve years.”
“I don’t know…I think anyone who gets cars for their birthday can suck it.” Oh no, there it was. The perpetually unavoidable conversation topic: suburban kids vs. rural kids. We were the bad guys, always. Grant and I, who had definitely not chosen to grow up in the “Cities”, always had to defend ourselves endlessly against poor-little-northwoods-Keya. It wasn’t worth discussing. I chose not to speak.
“So how’s Jason?” I asked eventually. I imagined he was exactly the same as the last two summers. Buzz cut, Fox racing jackets, chew rotting under his lips, and a dull personality.
“He’s great. Still treats me like a princess.”
“Where is he today?”
“At work. It’s the busy season for them.” Jason’s family owned a dock-installation service, which means rich lakefront property owners paid them to put in and take out their docks every summer. It was a pretty successful business, and Jason was going to inherit it one day, making him the most popular guy in the Brainerd Lakes area.
It scared me that Keya was making no indication of future plans beyond dating Jason and living on Manhattan Point her whole life. We had been planning on going to college together forever. But that year, I’d been too scared to ask her what she was planning on, somehow knowing it didn’t involve a four-year school. A part of me hurt really bad when I realized what different directions our lives were about to go in.
We chatted and tanned all afternoon. I tried to be responsible by putting on sunblock occasionally, but Keya teased me each time. Shocking. Eventually my mom called from the top of the bank, 30 feet above us. “Dinner’s ready, Josie! Keya, would you like to eat with us?”
Keya made a face. “Did she make some organic…poached…fishy…grime again?” she whispered.
I laughed and said, “Probably.” The truth was, my mom’s cooking was amazing. But Keya never seemed to outgrow the child’s taste in food. She would happily eat pizza for every meal.
Keya yelled, “I think my mom made a nice dinner tonight, but thanks anyway, Ellie!”
“Okay!” she replied.
“I guess I have to go up,” I said. “But you can stay if you want.”
“I’ll go home. But I totally think we should corner Grant tonight and force him to play night games with us like when we were twelve.”
“He’ll love that. Can’t wait. See you at nine?”
“Cool.” We walked up the forty-odd stairs to the top of the bank. I went in to my cabin, she went in to her house.
I helped my mom finish making dinner, salmon wrapped in prosciutto with mashed potatoes and fried eggplant. She asked me, “How’s Keya these days? It’s been a long time since you’ve seen her.”
“She’s good.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Boyfriends. Life. Her new dog BJ.”
“She named her dog BJ?” my mom asked in amusement.
“Yeah. How classy, huh?”
“Yeah…”
“It’s weird, I feel like we’re not…kindred spirits like we used to be.”
“Mm?”
“Yeah, maybe it’s just that she’s not really going away to college like she always wanted to. I want her to get away from this place, you know? Like, it’s great to visit, but she deserves better than to stay here forever.”
“Didn’t you think it was unlikely that she’d go away to college?”
“No, she always said she wanted to go somewhere with me. We’ve talked about it since we were kids. I don’t get why she’s changed so much. Like college is the last thing on her mind.”
My mom stopped whipping the potatoes and looked at me. “Josie, I don’t think Keya’s changed at all. She’s always been like this. It’s you that’s changed. You’ve just grown up a lot. You’re starting to see the differences between the two of you.”
I was silent for a while. “So what do I do? Do I try to convince her not to stay in northern Minnesota her whole life? Do I let us drift apart?”
“You figure out what she’s really thinking. What her future looks like to her and how she feels about it. If she needs someone to convince her to do something more with her life, then talk to her about it. If she truly wants to marry that guy she’s dating and move into a trailer, then be supportive.”
“I just wish I could fix things for her.”
“I know,” my mom said. Then, “Dinner!”
My dad, Polly, and Nick came to the dining room. We ate our fancy dinner while across the street, Keya was probably eating mac and cheese.
After dinner, I played Sequence with my family, a game that is only fun at the cabin. Then we went down to the dock to clean the Jet Ski. Nick was dying to ride it, even though the freezing water would feel like a million needle pricks if you fell in.
I was leaning over the side of the Jet Ski, waxing it from an awkward position when I looked up and nearly fell in the lake. My heart painfully skipped a beat before my brain even registered that standing on the next dock over was my childhood crush. Grant Vilner shouted, “Hey Nicky!” My brother waved and said “Hey.” Grant saw me and waved. He gestured to the beach between our docks and I nodded. We met in the middle of the beach after clumsily trying to avoid stepping in the freezing water.
“How’ve you been?” he asked.
“Great. You?”
“Good. God, I haven’t seen you since like the beginning of last summer.”
“I know, it’s been a long time.”
“We’ll have to work on that this year,” he said. “It just sucks, I work a lot. I try not to work weekends, but you know….”
“Yeah. Where do you work?”
“Same as before. The golf course.”
“Oh sweet.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey,” I said, “Keya and I were thinking of forcing you to play night games with us tonight, like when we were all kids.”
“Oh that sounds cool. I don’t think my family’s going anywhere tonight, so yeah that’ll work. Nine-thirty?”
“Cool. I should go finish waxing the Jet-Ski.”
“Me too…lots to do this weekend.”
“See you.”
“’Bye, Josie.”
I walked back to my dock with my heart pounding a little faster than usual.
　
By ten o’clock, we were all running around in the dark on my property and Grant’s property. Nick and Jason and Grant’s two little sisters had joined us. We were playing Sardines, which is a variation on Hide-and-Go-Seek where you have to hide along with whoever initially hides once you find them. The last person looking is the next hider. Grant was hiding somewhere and so far it looked like no one had found him. I knew all his old hiding spots, and the places where everyone else tended to hide. I knew Grant would never hide in those places, but I quickly checked them anyway. Judging by his insistence on playing Sardines, he was clearly trying for the most unique spot ever chosen (although everyone knew the all-time best would always be Keya’s older brother up in the tree; it took us two hours to find him) so I walked around slowly, deliberately.
Walking through a dark forest is scary, no matter how many times you played night games growing up. My dog Polly leapt out of nowhere and I jumped and made a little shrieking noise. I heard a rustle toward the road. My investigation led me to the Vilners’ pile of unchopped logs. I had already looked there. Upon further scrutiny, though, I realized there were logs missing from the bottom of the pile. I crouched down and whispered, “Grant?”
“Hey Josie,” was the reply.
“Um, is this thing safe?” I whispered. There were logs above him and to each side of him. It looked precarious.
“Yeah. I built it this spring when you all weren’t up. It’s all nailed together and everything. It’s really structural. I am an engineering student, you know. Come on in.”
“Is there space?”
“Yeah, a little.” I wriggled into the black tunnel, unable to see what was ahead of me. Grant’s shoe hit me in the face, but then I found the way. We were lying on our stomachs, shoulder to shoulder with no extra space. I was afraid of the perfect darkness that prevented me from even seeing his face. I was terrified that I would move a log and they would all crush us. I was scared that no one would find us, and I was scared that they would.
“I hate to think what bugs are crawling on me right now,” I said. Grant chuckled.
“You like my ultimate hiding space?” he asked.
“I do. But I don’t like being in it.”
“Yeah, it sucks that I’ve created the best hiding spot ever and now I don’t get to have fun running around out there at all. It’s going to take all night for them to find us.”
“Yeah we definitely have some time to kill. They weren’t even close at all.”
“So…” he said. “Where are you going to school in the fall?”
“Marquette?”
“Cool. Wisconsin schools are far superior to Minnesota schools.”
“You’re still at Madison?”
“Yeah, love it. I thought you’d come visit it sometime and see me.”“Oh, I did visit it. I guess I didn’t think to call you.”
“Oh. You didn’t like Madison?”
“No, I did. I just decided to go to a private school in the end.”
“Cool.” There was an awkward silence.
“So, did you meet Keya’s dog BJ?” I asked. We were whispering as silently as we could to avoid giving away our position.
“BJ! That’s awful. No, I haven’t. That’s such a…”
“Like a white-trash name, right?” I said. Then I gasped and quickly added, “I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s true, Josie. Keya’s not getting any classier.”
“I just want to get her out of here.”
“Yeah. That would probably be good for her.” Grant’s hand moved a little so it was touching mine. I think it was accidental. Neither of us flinched to remove the sudden contact. “So she’s still dating this Jason guy?”
“Yeah. Like two years now. He’s way better than that other guy she was with, but I still think she should get away from him and this town for a while ’cause that’s the only way she’ll ever get out of here, you know, if she does it soon…” I was talking (whispering) too fast in order to distract myself and Grant from our hands touching.
“Are you dating anyone?” Grant asked.
I paused before I whispered, “No.” Visions of my wonderful boyfriend at home swirled through my head. Then visions of countless summers of Grant wiped away any thoughts of Christian. I don’t know what I thought would happen if he thought I was single.
“Are you?” I asked.
“No. My girlfriend’s studying in Barcelona next semester so we broke up a month ago.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“I don’t know. Yes and no.”
“It’s kind of cozy down here,” I said.
“Ha. Pretty fuckin’ dirty, though.”
I could feel his breath on my face but I couldn’t see where it came from. This whole time, my pounding heart was trying to make me aware of the significance of this moment. It told my memory to never forget one detail of this night. I breathed it in.
There seemed to be nothing more for us to say, so we laid there in silence. Sometimes it’s too difficult to say something that will make a certain thing happen. Those words don’t come when you want to say them. There were wordless thoughts of what I wanted to happen, but no easy way to make them happen. My mouth stayed closed and my face didn’t lean towards his. I wondered if his brain was having a similar battle.
Suddenly, there was the sound of footsteps crunching toward us. Our moment was gone. Grant’s little sister knelt down by my feet. “Hi, guys.”
“Hi Brit,” I whispered.
“There’s no way I’ll fit under there,” she said a little too loud. More footsteps appeared, then a few minutes later, everyone had found us and I had to wriggle out from under that dirty, cobweb-y, centipede-infested trailer. None of us older kids were up for another round, so we sent the little kids in to bed and walked down the steps to the beach.
Keya kept giving me significant looks, like “I saw you two were hiding in that tiny space together, now tell me what’s up.” I ignored those looks.
Grant set off some fireworks on my dock. Jason and Keya cuddled on the beach. I sat drawing circles in the cold sand and watching Grant. When he came back, he sat by me, deliberately turning his back on the couple that was annoyingly making out by this point.
“I do have a boyfriend,” I blurted out. “I don’t know why I told you I don’t.”
“Oh,” Grant said, drawing a circle with a stick. Then I didn’t know what to say, because I had sort of just admitted I had feelings for him, thus meaning I had probably always had feelings for him, and that is never not awkward. We were silent for a long time, looking at the stars and the water lapping at the beach.
“Want to go rent a horror movie?” Grant asked eventually. The glint in his eye told me the awkwardness between us had run its course during our extended silence. Now it was time to get back to old cabin traditions.
“Definitely.”
“I’ll drive.”
“Is the rental place still open?”
“The gas station should be.”
“Sweet. Keya? Jason? Want to come with us to get a horror movie?”
“Hell yeah!” Jason said. “Better be a ridiculously bad slasher movie!”
“What? Josie’s still not too snooty for a slasher movie?” Keya teased.
“Well, there’s time for that when I get to college. I’m sure I’ll get totally pretentious there. But here? It sounds perfect.”

Entertainment in My Life Right Now

17 Again: This movie was pretty funny, if you want to see a lightweight comedy with a beautiful boy lighting up the screen for two hours. The dialogue is fun because you have to consider everything Zac Efron says in two different contexts: as a secretly middle-aged man and as a teenage boy. The sub-plot with his freaky fanboy best friend is hilarious. His house is decked out with every imaginable artifact from any fantasy/sci-fi story ever.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Also hilarious. So far, this re-imagining of Jane Austen's classic hasn't scared me at all. I hope it does at some point, but for now it's fun to laugh at the absurd lines. Most of it is just the original story, and there's a lot of plot in there, but once in a while some zombie action takes place. Very fun.

Arrested Development: This show is funny, but not as amazing as I've heard it is. There are silly moments that make me laugh, but it isn't as immediately funny as How I Met Your Mother or Friends, for example. Michael Cera as a kid in love with his cousin is probably the best plotline. That boy is endlessly great at what he does.

10 Things I Hate About You: Yeah, I finally saw it. Tonight, I watched it after like 10 years of resisting it. Everyone loves this movie, and I have to agree that it wasn't as cheesy and juvenile as I expected it to be. I really only watched it because I currently have a movie-star-crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's so cute and young in this movie! But of course it was a good story, since it was adapted from a Shakespeare play.

Wii Fit: Very fun and guilt-free. Always a good thing.

Role Models Reconsidered

Recently, I have been fed up with people criticizing the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer for providing young girls with a poor female role model. I love those books without shame, and I feel like I’ve learned some good things about life from them. Maybe if all those indignant feminists took a step back from their Bella Swan bashing, they’d realize that maybe it’s time we redefine what makes a character a Strong Female Role Model.
Feminism no longer means rebelling against your husband and getting a secretarial job. Women today compete in the world as equals to men. It took a revolution to get us to where we are, and it’s something we deserve to be proud of. But the battle to free American women of the tyranny of men is largely behind us. While the Strong Female Role Models of the past were the Mary Tyler Moores and other characters who stepped out into the workforce, female characters in our modern stories should demonstrate self-reflection and the ability to choose what is right for them in their own life. This extends far beyond the decision to put career first or family first.
The film Girl, Interrupted is narrated by the character of Susanna Kaysen, a young woman who has just attempted suicide and is placed in a mental institution. She is promiscuous, has a bad attitude, and looks at the world in a very dark way. She’s not a character you would want your little girl to encounter. However, she deserves some credit for the huge decisions she makes over the course of the movie. While she is in the mental hospital, you can tell Susanna is tempted to sink into the oblivion of life in an institution. She says she wants to go, but her refusal to make progress during therapy shows how she struggles with the decision to stay in that never-a-dull-moment hospital or to go out into the big, scary world. For many people, to go through life as a happy person is a proactive decision they must make. I learned that for myself at thirteen, and Susanna learned that after a difficult year in a mental institution. This is a life lesson that we are often unaware of. Susanna’s decision to get better, which she makes in a time of deep inner turmoil, shows maturity and responsibility that any young woman would benefit from seeing.
Carolyn, from Pumpkin, if not for her evolution over the course of the film, is an example of a disastrous modern role model. The irony is that she is presented as a young woman who is going somewhere in this world, someone who has got it together. She has a perfect tennis-star boyfriend, is the most beloved sister in her sorority, and always wears a pleasant expression. It is only after her poetry professor reveals Carolyn’s naiveté to her classmates and the film’s audience that we realize she is actually a very weak person. In her whole life, she has never made a real decision for herself. She is only a happy person because she has never really considered what will make her happy, only what should make her happy. Once her eyes are opened to this, Carolyn decides the only thing that will make her happy is dating a sweet-natured mentally-handicapped boy. Though the community is thrown into a frenzy over this, she is not actually harming the boy, but making him happy as well. After more self-reflection, Carolyn drops out of school and becomes a very different person. While I can’t condone academic negligence and slightly inappropriate romances, it is undeniable that Carolyn’s evolution shows how careful self-reflection can lead to a more fulfilling life.
Shopgirl presents us with a very normal, timid girl named Mirabelle, who longs for a real romance just like every young woman does. This is harmful to her though, since she falls very easily under the spell of a man whose feelings for her are lukewarm. Ray wins her over quickly by buying her nice things and giving the lonely girl attention. It is a painful thing to watch as she slowly gets her heart broken by his apathy, but her humanity in dealing with the situation makes her into a good, solid role model, if not a great one. She forces herself to snap out of her delusion and face the harsh reality that he doesn’t love her. Mirabelle deliberately pushes through the pain in order to get to the other side of the break-up. This is something every girl will deal with in her life, and it is an impressively big move for such a quiet girl.
Shanté , in Two Can Play That Game, is a character specifically written to be a good role model for other women. She is independently wealthy, she is happy and well-adjusted, and she is a powerful businesswoman. She even states in the film that her friends look up to her when it comes to dealing with relationships. She claims to know every rule in the book when it comes to keeping your man in line. When she catches her perfect boyfriend at a club with another woman, she calmly enacts a step-by-step process to win him back. Things go awry very quickly, though, when her boyfriend’s friend gets involved and starts scheming against her. The game gets tangled up, and soon Shanté is wishing it would all just disappear and she could get back together with her boyfriend. Though she is cool and confident, her main quality throughout the film is how insincere she is. She thinks she knows what she wants: to teach her man a lesson. But what she really, truly wants is for them to be happily in love again. If she were only honest with herself, she would see that talking to him in a sincere way is the best way to get what she really wants. All this time, she is narrating directly to the camera all these confident little rules that are failing left and right. This woman is a bad role model. If she could just take a step back and see that overpowering men is not what being a strong woman means, Shanté could get what she wants and be happy again. This is another case of knowing yourself and being honest with what you want.
In Twilight, Bella Swan has made a proactive decision in deciding her own future. How can that be called weak? Choosing vampirism over college in order to spend eternity with your soul mate might have been considered a poor career move back in the sixties, but hello, it is a new era and it is up to us to define what a woman’s life should be like. Feminism has evolved from “you’re strong if you do” to “you’re weak if you don’t.” The millions of choices in a woman’s life should be her choices to make. Instead of being what the world thinks she should be, she needs to become what she feels she should be. These characters, apart from Shanté , each dug into their own souls to find out what they want from life. Instead of judging women for the choices they make, we should just cherish the fact that we have all these options. Well, except vampirism, I guess. Unfortunately. [1239 words]


Works Cited

Girl, Interrupted. Dir. James Mangold. Perf. Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. DVD. Columbia Pictures, 1999.

Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. 2005.

Pumpkin. Dir. Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder. Perf. Christinna Ricci, Hank Harris. DVD. United Artists, 2002.

Shopgirl. Dir. Anand Tucker. Perf. Claire Danes, Steve Martin. DVD. Touchstone Pictures, 2005.
Two Can Play That Game. Dir. Mark Brown. Perf. Vivica A. Fox, Morris Chestnut. DVD. Scr

Entertainment I am NOW Consuming

I just watched In Bruges, and it was really, really great. I actually feel asleep in the middle of it, but I gave it a second chance and it was so worth it. It was an amazing story about sin, redemption, second chances, sacrifices, and other things I only think about when a good story forces me to ponder them. It was marketed as a comedy--specifically a quirky comedy that has the word fuck in it a lot--but it was ultimately a drama grounded in realism; the comedy just came from how honest it was. It was gritty, witty, and had a killer ending. Watch it.

Recently, I have been battling an addiction to How I Met Your Mother. It's a CBS comedy (Who watches CBS? No one? Definitely not me.) that could easily slip by every audience's notice, while it goes on year after year in perfect brilliance. Critics like it, but for all their attempts to make it more known, HIMYM still suffers in anonymity. But it is the new Friends. With a few more viewers, these actors could be making the million dollars an episode that the Friends crew earned in their final season. The show is about five friends in New York City. It mostly follows their dating life, particularly Ted's. The ultimate storyline is about how Ted meets the mother of his children, which is often frustrating for the nice architect with good intentions. Episode to episode, it is a great comedy, with funny situations and witty inside jokes. But it is the romance that keeps me watching. Like any good TV show, HIMYM handles its love stories with a suspenseful combination of restraint and exhilerating cliffhangers. I'm trying to get everyone hooked on this show, though I realize that beginning from episode one can be a dangerous thing. You may never leave your computer once you start illegaling downloading the episodes. Just kidding, I did not say that....

Entertainment I Am Consuming Right Now

Currently:

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski: Lovely. I'm hoping it lasts a long time.

Friends, Season 8: Endlessly brilliant. Better every time I watch it.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman: Should be required for everyone to read. It's making me into a bleeding-heart liberal and an aspiring hippie. It's actually a textbook for one of my classes, but it's pretty entertaining.

Lost: Obviously. Can't wait til Wednesday!


Recently:

The Boyfriend List, by E. Lockhart: A wonderful surprise. It is a wise, therapeutic little novel that might make sense of your high school experience. Its realism is shocking.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz: Sort of disappointing. It had its worthwhile moments, but it wasn't brilliant like it's supposed to be. Bad narrative.

He's Just Not That Into You: Well-spent two-hours. It is cutesy, breezy entertainment that tries to stress you out but really is just innocent fun. Not as enlightening as it thinks it is, though.

Firefox: Great movie. It's from the early '90s, when its star Angelina Jolie was dating her female costar (haha that's right). It is thought-provoking and captures the feeling of close female relationships very well.

Melodramatic Sufferings of Love

It is a torturous thing to be of such
Romantic sensibilities as mine.
My favorite heroines of fiction wear
This affliction close to their hearts,
While I stagger under its force.
Its mass times its acceleration.
Its heavy despair then its rapid exhilaration.
The knock-your-breath-out disappointments
Then the take-your-breath-away thrills.
But such is the sorrow of my life,
That my heart spends its days in an illusion of calm
While it waits to burst out of my chest.

How Excited Am I For New Movies?

Twilight: 55%

I think it will just disappoint me, after loving the books with my entire soul as long as I have. But the midnight showing should be fun. And if the story sucks, I can still just stare into Edward Cullen's smouldering golden eyes for two hours.

Australia: 110%

I predict this will be my new Ultimate Favorite Movie. It's got all the ingredients to be amazing, like an exotic setting, Baz Luhrman, an epic plotline, sweeping romance, and a hunky cowboy. If the movie is as good as the trailers, I will see it like four times in theaters.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: 100%

I love the short story, and wanted it to last much, much longer than just a few pages. Plus, with Brad Pitt and such a whimsical look, it has to be perfection.

Bolt: 40%

I'll see it, because of course I need to pay my respects to the wonders of Disney. But will it be good? I don't know, they never really make good computer-animated films without the help of Pixar...

Zach and Miri Make a Porno: 90%

Yeah, it looks great. That's all I can say.

Changeling: 18%

I'd watch it, but I won't pay money for it. It's getting really mixed reviews, so I think I'll pass for the time being.

How We All Long For What We Don’t Have

On this November night I kiss my summer boyfriend
With reluctance, sadness, and uncertainty
Two months removed from the ruins of that promising relationship
Here is my wonderful ex still in love with me
And I break his heart with everything I say or do
But difficult words have always struggled on our tongues
Keeping in so many things I should say
Like how it was him that broke us in two
Even if I sent the text that made it true
And he should have expected
That taking some time apart would mean my tragic love affair
Would fly through town and give me a taste of a whirlwind
And go back to South Dakota while I gave my pain to my pillow
In teardrops that he has caused for four years
So a kiss in November in a big city is one thing
My heart cannot be a part of when it belongs in a
Rural college town in the next state over

The Product of My Recent Poetic Mood

I left out the poem called "Angst Angst Angst" 'cause who wants to read a poem with that title???

A Rebuttal of Tara’s Poem

Oh yes, it was a great summer
Fun and full of wonder and sun
Oh hateful sun, the nights were better

But what came before the summer were
Days of go go go
And stopping in passing to chat about Edward
To squeeze that into our whirlwind lives
I would have lost my mind
Or maybe just my spark
Without my three beloved roommates
Just outside my bedroom door
Always up for the Twilight talks that revived me
For spending money on good food
For venting about that other roommate
For planning our next shared adventure
Our lives moved in sync
Anchored in The Loft
Until we pulled up our anchors one by one
And tried unsuccessfully to be okay
With where the tide carried each of us
While lucky Edward can spend forever
Floating through the air molecules
Of the too-nice apartment where girls spoke his name
More than they spoke any other
I know he’s still there
And maybe this fall bit the happiness out of me
Because Edward can’t protect me
While he exists in The Loft
Once we’re together again he’ll be there too
And The Loft is an intangible thing that we thought was
Concrete floor and exposed pipes and crumbling wall
But really it’s just us


Dealing With Minnesota

You could argue that the unexpected
Warm breeze on a November day
Is the breath of some higher being
Taking his frustrations out on
A girl who hates the cold
And is suddenly reminded of the long
Winter quickly approaching
On the heels of this gust of air
That somehow smells like summer.
You could argue that the
Painful sun slanting through your
Window is just a mean reminder
That soon the sun will bounce
Brightly off snow banks and carry
No warmth even though it is the
Same sun that scorched you in
Your lifeguard chair all summer.



I wrote this one a long time ago:

The Brook

Or maybe it was the people that made
my life there everything it was.
Lauren dancing in the hallway
to Gwen Stefani.
Luke rushing through the lounge
with a kiss on the cheek here,
a kiss on the cheek there.
Maggie telling a scandalous and
very entertaining story.
Ashley watching Friends in the lounge
with people huddled around laughing.
Shana doing Calc homework while everyone
whirls around her drunkenly.
Lexi doing French homework while
wearing one of her adorable hats.
Nate belting out “America the Beautiful”
in the hallway for everyone to hear.
Lela leading nine o’clock abs.
Nick shrewdly talking his way out of
an alcohol citation.
Cassie popping in the room with
yet another cute emo boy in tow.
Kyle eating oranges, oranges,
and more oranges.
Kris rounding up reluctant people to
go watch free movies at the student union.
Sam carrying on a great drunken
French conversation avec moi.
Tara being a great friend to whoever
needs her at this particular moment.
Colleen discussing any movie with me,
geek to geek.
Mazy serving his parents’ expensive
wine to anyone who wants to risk
getting caught drinking in the lounge.
Austin introducing her friendly
boyfriend to all her crazy friends.
Will bringing us over to his frat house
for all the free beer we can drink.
Anna gamely explaining the logistics
of sexual favors to all of us innocents.
Kipp getting his long hair cut off
sloppily by all the girls.
And me, journaling away like crazy
and trying not to forget any of it.
The Brook was crazy, oh yes it was.
But it shaped us and took care of us.
Wistfully I am amused by
how we lived in the dorms.

The Three Types of Relationships

It's been a long time. I think my summer was just too much to process. I needed some time to understand those whirlwind three months. It was work, new friends, and a wonderful boyfriend that popped up at an unexpected time. But the boyfriend starting pulling away when school started, so i had to end it cleanly two nights ago. Yeah, there's hurt, but there's also freedom and relief after doing this painful thing.

And now the only thing to do is write about it. I talked to my mom about it yesterday, and as Carrie Bradshaw-style relationship philosophers, we decided maybe there are only three types of relationships, and only one of them leads to something good.

Type one: He likes her more than she likes him. Girls are suckers for attention, and if he treats her like a princess, chances are she'll develop some affectionate feelings for him too. At times, it is a shock for girls to see the loving side of men, and if there's any sort of attraction there, it will probably lead to her wanting him too. It will be a good thing for a while, but not forever.

Type two: He's just not that into her. No matter how much a girl likes a guy, no amount of attention will make him want her back. Sure, there are exceptions to this, but if a guy doesn't like what he sees, there's never going to be anything. Girls can't win over a guy with flattery the way they can win over girls. This will definitely end badly for the girl because it will never lead to anything.

Type three: Mutual adoration. Passion. Soul mates. In the best of cases, a blissful eternity together.

My relationship was a type one. I noticed how cute he was in the beginning of the summer, but we were together because he loved me and spoiled me and made me care about him too. He told me he loved me earlier on than I ever would have expected, and I always half-heartedly said it back. It sort of hurt my mouth to say it, which tells me I never really loved him. I was certainly never compelled to say it to him before he said it to me. And so, we were doomed from the beginning. As soon as things got a little less than perfect, I was out of there. I left him behind to deal with it alone. The hard part is, he was my best friend for three months, and I'm in pain and I want him to help me get through it. But I have to keep my distance and hope I can find a type three relationship while I avoid type ones and twos.

Randoms

Here's what's going on in my life, for anyone who may care:

-I'm finally over the killer virus that swept through my apartment and landed four of the five of us in a near-death state for a week straight. That made three days of lifeguard training even less fun.
-I have one more final exam and then it's summer! Woohoo! Or not. I start working full time two days from now. Boo.
-All of my friends and I are running out of money thanks to a surprise electricity bill that was 4.5 times its usual amount. Cool.
-The guy I a little obsessed with in my Creative Writing class is named Alex I found out, and he is now out of my life completely, since that class is over with. Moment of silence.
-Also, my should-be-boyfriend, who unfortunately was already dating someone when I met him last semester, is also out of my life for four months, since we just took our last final together about an hour ago. I'm pretty down about that. Moment of silence.

Recent movie reviews:

Iron Man: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. This movie was frickin' hilarious and packed with action that even girls can enjoy. It was "sassy," as one of my friends put it (sorry, can't remember which one) and made me super happy that Robert Downey, Jr. battled his drug problems and became a star again. How I love his sarcastic hotness. I would have liked some more romance in this movie, but I could totally tell that they were setting that stuff up for the sequels. Can't wait for those!

Prince Caspian: This movie was pretty good. I'm not a Narnia freak, but I still laughed a lot and I enjoyed the story. I'm guessing my viewing experience was a bit enhanced from most people's, since I went to a midnight showing of it and everyone was really into the movie. We clapped a lot, laughed a lot, and I never even got close to drifting off to sleep. I would have preferred more story and less battle, but I guess that's what Narnia's all about. Let's have yet another moment of silence for Peter Pevensie, who is the best part of those movies because he's so cute, and he won't be in them anymore because his character is too grown up. Sadness.

Money Love

I wrote this last year as an alternative-voice narrative. It's written in the voice of an almost-thirty-year-old guy with some serious issues.

Penny and I weren’t working out anymore. So I moved out. I wouldn’t say I “dumped” her. Sounds too abrupt. It was more like a gradual decaying and then a “maybe we’re not meant for each other.” Yeah, she cried. Who wouldn’t? No girl wants to be single again at 29. Starting over sucks. But shit, I wasn’t gonna spend my life with a girl I didn’t love.
Yeah, well, after a week of celebrating my freedom with the guys- this is yesterday- I turn on the TV. It was maybe 8 in the morning. I didn’t even plan on watching the TV. Good background noise, you know? But then I saw Penny on TV. Yeah, my Penny. I sat down to watch.
“So Penny, here it comes…The million-dollar question!” Regis was saying. Penny was all smiley and shit. Shouldn’t she still be crying somewhere? I thought. Regis asked, “How has the money changed your life?”
Ugh, that guy was annoying. The question he asked didn’t even register on my groggy mind. I was staring at Penny. I bought her that shirt.
“Well, Regis…it’s only been a couple days,” Penny said. “I haven’t been able to do much with the money yet. I do have plans for it, however.” What was this money they were talking about?
“Plans, huh? Gonna buy a yacht? A jet?”
“Actually, I’ve been debating charities.”
“Well! A philanthropist lottery winner,” Regis said. Lottery. Whoa…
“Well, I mean, obviously I won’t give it all away,” Penny smiled. My mind was racing. “I’d love a cute little sports car. And a…” I couldn’t listen anymore. This was too much for me to handle.
Just then, A.J. walked in with a “Mornin’.” I was crashing at my kid brother’s place until I found a new apartment. I pointed at the TV. A.J. peered at it through his hangover.
“’S that Penny?” he asked.
I nodded. “She won the fuckin’ lottery.”
“Jackpot?”
“Probly. She’s on Regis.”
“God. That was a big jackpot. Like…200 million,” A.J. said. “Sucks for you.”
“For real. One week.” Took me a while to get to work. I couldn’t stop thinking about my ex and her money and how much I missed her face. You know how they say you don’t know what you got till it’s gone? Story of my life at that moment.
Selling insurance all day isn’t the most stimulating thing you can do. Especially when you’re daydreaming about tossing piles and piles of hundreds up in the air and feeling them fall slowly around you and your gorgeous girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend.
At 5 o’clock, my last client left my office, and my ass was out that door. I hated to think that if I had just lasted another week with Penny, I probably wouldn’t have had to ever go back to work there. I had to get her back.
An hour later at the local bar and at the bottom of my third Heinekin, I finally
wasn’t thinking about Penny. Then Roger started flipping channels on the TV. Of course he ran across a segment on the news about how local girl Penny Pumble won a $216 million jackpot. The rest of the four guys in the bar were all like, “Holy shit!” and “Is this for real?” I waited for it.
The guys looked down the bar towards me. “Your girlfriend won the lottery, Mitch, you lucky man.”
“Not my girlfriend anymore,” I said. I didn’t explain. They didn’t ask.
But they did continue to talk about Penny. Joe said, “Did you know that if you were to lay down quarters side-by-side from Minnesota to Florida and mark one of them with a permanent marker, the odds of you picking a random quarter and it being the marked one are better than your odds of winning the lottery?”
“I believe it,” Roger the bartender replied.
So it was during my fourth beer that I started to realize shit. Seeing Penny’s face had reminded me of how I’d never find another girl like her. Remind me again why we broke up? Did I really think that cute receptionist at the office was gonna make my life complete? Suddenly thirty was looking like a good age to start being a grown-up. I needed my girlfriend back.
I also needed to not sell insurance anymore.
“’Nuther beer over here, Roger,” I said. You know, just to help me come up with a plan to win her back. I was seeing visions of me and Penny living on a yacht and traveling the world and drinking Cristal and being the ones buying the insurance for once.
But the next thought I had was Yeah right she’s gonna want me back. It was a terrible moment when I realized I didn’t have a shot in hell. Would have been enough that I’d dumped her. Now, on top of that, she’d think I was after her money. Which I wasn’t. I mean, sure it’d be cool having more money than you could ever spend. But what I really wanted was…Penny. And her money.
Dang, I was screwed, man. This was real life. But there was only one thing to do. I had to talk to Penny. It took me an hour to get a cab and get to the apartment I used to share with Penny. I pressed the buzzer.
“Yeah?” I heard her voice on the intercom.
“Penny! It’s me. Mitch.”
“What do you want?” she answered coldy.
“Umm…” I thought of what to say, then kept it simple. “I miss you.”
“Yeah I’ll bet you do. I knew you’d come back for me when you found out about the money,” Penny said.
I decided to try this: “What money?”
“Oh, funny, Mitch.”
“No seriously.” It was annoying arguing over the intercom. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Go away.”
“I love you.” Girls like to hear that. Doesn’t matter what they say.
“How’s that receptionist?” she asked meanly.
“Just let me in.” The door clicked open. When I got to her apartment, she made me stay in the hallway.
“Looks empty without my shit,” I said casually, peeking into her place.
“Yeah, well, 216 million dollars should fill it up with new stuff.”
“Hey, Harriet! I’ve missed you so much!” I said as our Australian sheep dog came to the door, wagging her tail at the sight of me. I looked at Penny with a puppy-dog face. “Take me back.”
“No. You dumped me. For a receptionist.”
“Penny, you know how scared I’ve been to turn thirty. I was dumb. I just wanted to find out if there was more life for me to live out there. But you’re it for me.”
“I’ve got a new start, Mitch. You’re not part of it.”
“Penny, you know you loved me!” I said as I got desperate. “You cried when I moved out!” There was a pause.
“What if…” Penny proposed, “I offered you a million dollars never to see me again. Freedom and money. Exactly what you want.”
I thought about it. But I quickly realized that just by thinking about it I had made my choice. “Asshole,” Penny said as she slammed the door in my face. More like dumb asshole, I thought, as I walked away girlfriend-less and million-dollar-less.

My Testimony in Favor of the Abolition of Seventh Grade

Here is a memoir-type piece that I wrote for a Creative Writing class.

March 2000
This is a good day. Watching Anne of Green Gables for the bazillionth time as I’m curled up underneath a comforter on the couch is my idea of perfect happiness. There’s a fitted bed sheet under me and sitting on the coffee table is a tall glass of orange juice and Sprite on ice. The familiar fixtures of my sick days are around me, and I’m wearing pajamas. I am sublimely happy.
I could have asked for a mental health day. Then I wouldn’t have had to pretend I’m sick. My mom lets me have those every once in a while. On those precious days, she’ll take me to Baker’s Square for breakfast and let me get dressed and experience life outside of seventh grade. But today I didn’t feel like explaining to her why my mental health is nearing its tipping point. I just woke her up at 6:30 to tell her I have a sore throat and then went back to bed.
So that’s why I’m stuck playing this game of let’s-pretend-Sarah’s-actually-sick. I’m ashamed to say that I’m getting quite good at this game. I’m also good at convincing the school nurse that I need to be sent home. Mommy must wonder every day when she’s eating lunch if she’s going to need to load the three babies in the car soon to come get me. She’s probably never surprised when the nurse calls her to ask if she can pick me up. I wonder if the nurse notices how often I’m in her office. She’s probably used to dealing with students who long to be sent home sick every day. It is the world’s worst middle school, after all.
When I woke up this morning, though, I felt that exciting faint possibility of illness. I stayed in bed for a while, wondering whether to tell mom to call in for me or get up and get ready for the bus. I don’t enjoy the guilt I feel when I stay home from school, but even more than that, I hate being in school. It’s a nasty trade-off, and only the days when I have tested positive for strep are free of this guilt.
Strep throat is my best friend. Thankfully, I am immensely prone to it. I get strep whenever I come within a mile of someone carrying it. It’s probably my favorite illness in the world. I like a lot of contagious afflictions, but streptococcus is the best. In me, strep throat just causes a sore throat. I don’t really have to deal with the fever, achiness, and overall crappy feeling. I just wake up with a sharply painful throat, convince my mom to take me to Minute Clinic, invariably test positive (I know the feeling so well, I could diagnose myself at this point), and am forced to stay out of school for 24 hours. After starting my anti-biotics, the pain goes away immediately and I feel great. That’s why I always get hopeful when I feel a little twinge in my throat. I concentrate all my effort on willing that slight pain to continue on for a couple of hours so I can get a strep test. Gosh, I wish every day was a strep day for me.
Of course, today the pain in my throat isn’t quite enough to ask for a trip to Minute Clinic, so I’m just complaining about feeling icky in general. That’s enough to justify a day on the couch. When Mommy checked on me this morning, she had a hesitant look on her face, like it isn’t right to let me stay home so often. But she knows better than to ask me directly why I want to stay home so often.
Call me crazy, but I don’t want to talk about it. Not with her. My mom is my best friend in the world, the one constant in my revolving door of school-switching and grade-skipping. It’s embarrassing what I’m going through, so I’d rather not bring it up. Plus, it was her idea that they move me up another grade in school, and I’d hate to make her realize how bad of a plan that was. I’d rather deal with all this by myself. Preferably outside the walls of that dreaded middle school. If my mom and dad knew what was going on, they wouldn’t hesitate to let me stay home from school.
I suppose I’m being bullied. It’s hard for me to put it that way, but I guess that’s what it is. To put a label on it feels weird. Bullying calls to mind burly fifth-grade boys picking on nerdy third-graders on the playground. It isn’t a term we associate with preteen girls. But that one group of girls kicked me out of their lunch table. That was hard. I dealt with that okay. I just moved to the table for weird girls and tried my best to fit in and stay strong. It is Crystal Tils, though- who kicked me in the hallway outside the lunch room for no apparent reason- who makes my life hell. The administration would be quite alarmed by that kicking incident, I’m sure, but it would be stupid to get them involved. I would forever be known as the girl who got a Popular Girl in trouble. That would be awful. I think I’ll wait for another seven years before I actually speak the word bullied. It’s better to just keep it to myself and stay out of school as often as I can.
No one likes middle school. It’s incredibly hard to relate to other awkward kids in your own awkward stage. Everyone’s fighting with all their might to be a Popular Kid, and I hate to admit that is all I want as well. But my over-maturity and articulacy make it hard for me to interact with them. Did Mom and Dad really think my social problems would be solved by dropping me in with the older kids? This problem is going to take a long time to sort out. It’s just so much effort to try and make friends with these kids who are so resistant to letting a fifth-grader join their circle. And who can blame them? I ruin their credibility. Better just to stay out of school as much as I can until these silly middle schoolers outgrow their need for popularity.
Mommy was a nurse before she was a stay-at-home mom, so she loves taking care of sick kids. I’m getting better and better at playing ill. When I don’t wear eye make-up, my eyes look like there’s too much skin for them, they’re so puffy. I have convenient purple rings under my eyes also, and one of them droops lazily if I’m not wearing eye liner. So basically, I can exaggerate the heaviness of my eyes and look like I have a never-ending cold virus. She always looks concerned when I come downstairs like this.
“You look pekid,” is how she puts it. I’ve never heard anyone else use that term. I don’t even know how to spell it, to be honest.
Otherwise, I don’t really need smoke-and-mirrors to convince Mommy to call in for me. Ferris Bueller took way too many precautions, in my opinion. So much effort! The only person I really need to put on a show for is Daddy. Shoot, he might be coming home soon, come to think of it. I turn off the TV and VCR, grab my pillow, and head upstairs, making my steps heavy and labored. I cough a little for emphasis. I close my bedroom door behind me and jump into bed. My father is incredibly intimidating. He loves to tell me how he never missed a day of school in his whole life and that’s how he became a surgeon. Well, congratulations. Way to make me feel guilty about avoiding the horrible reality of my school life.
For now, I must wait in bed until I hear his distinctive footsteps coming up the stairs. He will stop at the top of them and crack open my door. He will feel my forehead and give me a disapproving look.
I see dying people every day at work who would love to be able to go to school, his look will accuse. But he’ll really say, “Not feeling well? You look okay to me.”
“I’m feeling better,” I’ll shrug.
“Okay…” he will say as he leaves.
I will sigh with guilt and relief. He does this every time I stay home sick. If I were a normal kid, I would sleep through my sick days, but I’m an insomniac and I’m hardly ever truly ill anyways, so I can never sleep through the day. The fact that I’m highly alert during my days off doesn’t help my charade. I’ll have to read in bed until Daddy comes home. But I just finished reading the four Harry Potter books for the first time. What’s worth reading after that?
My rule for myself is that I’m not allowed to reflect on my bad attendance record. These thoughts are supposed to stay tucked away beyond my consciousness. I have to tell myself that the only reason I’m home sick today is because I don’t feel well and I don’t want to get all the other kids sick. I’ve never let myself take a closer look before. If Mommy doesn’t question it, I don’t question it. It’s better to keep my introspection limited at this point in my life. Terrible things are revealed when you take a closer look.
I am eleven and a half years old. My life was quite normal until this year. Last year, I was a fourth-grader at a private elementary school and I was well-liked by my many friends. I was chronically bored in school, though, so a child psychologist tested my intelligence and maturity and announced that I would fit in better in the tenth grade. It goes without saying that I wasn’t going to move up six grades in school, so I moved up one grade and switched to a public middle school. At the same time, my parents decided to go back to Russia and adopt two more babies, in addition to the one Russian they already had, Colin, and the domestically adopted Natalie. My parents were in and out of the United States all year and ultimately ended up with Anna and Alex. So I am now the oldest of five children. Halfway through sixth grade, they tested me again and I was still off the charts. They moved me up another grade over winter break without really asking my opinion in the matter. So basically, it’s been a hectic year.
And I am distressed. I don’t think I’m ready to use the word depressed. I think I’ll wait another couple of years to use that term. I’ve always been somewhat sullen and obsessed with escapism. You could say those are two signs of depression, but I’d rather not deal with that diagnosis just yet. My mom, aunt, and grandma are all very open about their battle with depression. I feel like they’ve been waiting for me to join them in pill-popping semi-happiness. In a couple of years, I probably will. For now, I shall just avoid school to the best of my ability. I mean, it’s not like skipping a day here and there will make a difference in my education in the long-run. Let’s face it: I skipped two whole years of school and I didn’t miss a thing. So this begs a closer look. Is middle school even necessary?
May 2008
My throat hurts. Out of old habit, my heart soars with the possibility of a positive strep test.

What Happens When You're Hopeful

In Advanced Expository Writing last spring, I was supposed to write a life-lesson narrative. I showed my professor this, and he was like, "This is a highly entertaining non-life-lesson." "Shit." So I had to write another story, which I got an A on, of course :)

What Happens When You're Hopeful
February 1, 2007

“Turn around!” Emma yelled from the back seat. “Do it, Sam. Do it!”
“No, no, no!” I squealed excitedly. “Sam, don’t you dare!”
“I’m gonna do it,” Sam said, warning us. The two hot guys from the ice cream shop were walking down a sidewalk on the opposite side of the road, strutting like freshmen and not wearing shirts. Sam looked both ways, then abruptly pulled her giant red pick-up in a U-y, checking herself out in the rearview mirror as she did this.
We all stopped yelling (except for Kayla, who had been giggling at us the whole time) and tried to act cool as we drove by the boys (except for Kayla, who was still giggling). The guys had clearly noticed us too, since they both did a little head-nod our way when we passed.
“Ohmygod, they so checked us out,” I said after we were out of their sight.
“I told you guys,” Sam said smugly. “They want us. We need to pull over.” Sam was the most obviously, well, slutty of The Hardcore Four. She was the type that pretended she didn’t want another relationship, and acted like guys didn’t affect her much, but we all knew she desperately wanted something more than a fling with a guy she really cared about.
“No way, Sam. We are not going to meet those guys. That’s crazy,” said Emma. But Sam pulled another U-y and we were once again headed back towards the shirtless guys. This wasn’t like us to pick up random guys. But…it was summer, we were looking for adventure, and we were never going to see them again anyways, so what the hell.
They stopped walking when they saw us, and Sam pulled over the truck. We were parked on the opposite side of the road from them, but it wasn’t a big deal. They waited until a car went by, then walked across the busy street to meet some chicks in this random-ass vacation town they were in. The tall one came to my window, and the stoned-looking one went to Sam’s.
“’Sup? I’m Garrett,” the tall one said to me. He was sooo cute. Tall, dark, and tan. The four of us girls introduced ourselves.
The guy at Sam’s window- I want to call him Jason, but that might be wrong- was like, “Dude, I am never going to remember your names.”
“He’s been drunk since like ten in the morning,” Garrett explained. At this point the sun was going down. “But yeah, what are you girls up to tonight?”
“We don’t have any plans, do you?” I replied. This wasn’t so scary, meeting random guys.
“Nah, you should give us a call. We’ll chill,” Garrett said. I put his phone number into my cell, and the guys left with a “Peace.” After we watched them walk across the street, I was quick to yell “Dibs on Garrett!”
“You can’t call dibs on him, we all want him!” Sam whined.
“Okay, fine. Then none of us can have him,” I established. “Deal?”
“Deal,” they all agreed.
Sam drove us back to my cabin while we all chattered excitedly about actually doing something that brave. Back at Toothacres (all the cabins around us have nicknames; mine was named after my great-grandfather, a famous dentist), we said hi to Grandma and went upstairs to The Kid Room, a huge bedroom with colorful bunkbeds and room for seven.
Exhilerated by our accomplishment and unsure of whether the boys would really
call, we spent the next couple hours doing each other’s make-up and picking out cute clothes to wear. We ignored the obvious problem: there were two of them and four of us. Finally, they called, or maybe we called them, but what matters is we agreed to meet them in town so they could find the way to my cabin. We mumbled an excuse to Grandma about getting some medicine for Sam, then sprinted out to the truck and drove to town.
When we found the boys and brought them back over, I didn’t feel like explaining to Grandma that we’d brought boys over, so we snuck them down to the beach. “Let’s go swimming,” Sam suggested to Garrett and no one else. He agreed and they both stripped down to their underwear and jumped in the lake. Soon they were sitting on the diving platform about a hundred yards away. Surprise, surprise.
Back at the end of the dock, Jason laid on his back while Emma and I rested our heads on his strong arms and Kayla sat close by. We looked at the stars and life was perfect. Jason was a really cool guy to talk to. It turns out he and Garrett were a grade below us and went to a high school in the same district as ours. It was totally random that they lived ten minutes away from us, and yet we had met hours north of home. We learned about his past relationships and we all laughed when none of us knew any constellations, besides the Big Dipper of course. Duh, anyone knows how to find that one.
“God, they’ve been out there a long time,” I said after a while. “You think they’re making-out yet?”
“I don’t know, shh…” Jason said. We listened carefully.
“Whoa, they’re still talking,” Kayla said incredulously.
“She so wants Garrett,” Emma confided to Jason. I felt a pang of sympathy for my vulnerable friend out there on the platform. She was obviously going for the relationship, rather than the one-time make-out session at the lake. Stupid, stupid girl. They weren’t really into us, they just didn’t have any other plans for the night.
After we started getting bored with the stars, Garrett and Sam climbed back up on the dock smiling and shivering violently. We headed up to the hot tub, where we were loud enough to wake Grandma up. She came outside and asked, “Sarah, who’s out here?”
I leaped from the hot tub and ran over to Grandma. “Uh, it’s just us…” I said. “And the boys.” I quickly explained who the boys were and Grandma told me they had to leave now. About an hour and a half later, they left, and only one of us was expecting to see them again.
Maybe two days later, Sam decided she couldn’t handle not hearing from Garrett any longer. She sent him a text message, the universal “I’m too nervous to actually call him” solution. I acted confused and indignant when she later related the story to me, her eyes full of hurt, but inside I wasn’t surprised a bit. Apparently, when he got her text and realized that chick from the lake actually wanted to hang out again, Garrett replied with an “I lied to you girls. We don’t really live in Champlin. We live in Wisconsin.” Now, if they were from Wisconsin, how would they have known that Champlin is right by Andover? It was freakin’ ridiculous. He had pulled the sloppiest move ever to get out of hanging out with Sam again. I hated him for being yet another disappointing guy to my friend, but I had to admit, she asked for it.
Yet revenge is sweet. Half a year after we met the shirtless guys, I still have
Garrett’s number in my phone. I‘ll send him a text, and when he doesn’t know who it is, he’s absolutely tortured by it. “Who is this?” he always asks. I never reply. [1278 words]

I Miss My Puppy

Summer, my English Springer Spaniel. Aww...

She's so smart, she actually opens doors on her own.

Sadly, she doesn't look like this anymore.

I miss her. I have to drive a half hour to see her.

Hook Me Up With Some Heartache

This is a paper I wrote on November 3, 2006. I want it to be read.

Let’s say your best friend has just told you she hooked-up with a super-hot guy last night but didn’t know his name. If you’re a seventeen-year-old girl like I am, you might be putting on a congratulatory face but really praying to God your friend doesn’t get hurt. If you’re not a seventeen-year-old girl, however, you’re probably wondering right now, “What the hell does hooked-up mean?” Don’t be afraid; you aren’t the first person to ask this. To my generation, hooking-up is just something we’re expected to do. We know what it means. To others, it is something way beyond comprehension.

After polling 10,000 readers, Seventeen Magazine, along with sexetc.org, defined “hooking-up” as: “Slang expression that can mean different things to different people. Generally refers to when two people are sexual with one another -- kissing, touching or having sexual intercourse” (seventeen.com). This seems pretty reasonable. However, this definition doesn’t touch on the horrible truth that hooking-up always occurs outside of a relationship. In fact, a good portion of hooking-up occurs between two people that have met just that day.
So now that we’ve established what exactly (or, rather what generally) hooking-up means, it’s time to focus on the consequences of this trend. Can I let you in on a little secret? Shhh, don’t tell the boys our age. Hooking-up is ruining us girls. We won’t admit this is true; we’ll “do shit” with guys, and we might even brag about it afterwards. But all of us girls know how damaging this is to our emotional and sexual health. If you’ve hooked-up with a guy, you’ve probably cried about it later.

The expectations placed upon us girls these days leave us no room to say No. If you’re not hooking-up with people, and talking about it the next week at school, you’re considered a prude. If you like a guy, he expects to get a few good make-out sessions out of it. If he likes you back, you go out with him (which in our generation is like the equivalent of marriage) and you’re expected to have sex sooner or later. This is the situation we face.

Our parents wonder why we don’t casually date anymore, but we have a hard time explaining why. Basically, it’s because boys have grown used to getting what they want without putting forth much effort. Forget flowers and candy. We’re lucky if a guy takes us out to a movie before taking us back to his house to “get some”. Our version of dating is called “hanging-out” and it usually entails watching a movie with a guy you like. If this is as far as the relationship goes, you can say you had a “thing” with the guy, or that you hooked-up a few times.
I would be lying if I said girls never want to hook-up with a guy. It’s fun to let it happen once in a while. We rationalize it to ourselves by saying things like, “you’re getting good experience for when you have a guy you really like,” or “oh well we were drunk, it happens.” But we never really feel great about it later on.
We’re naturally the more emotionally needy of the sexes. Girls can’t get by on sex alone. And how often does a recurring hook-up turn into a relationship? It’s very rare. In fact, it will usually occur to a girl after hooking-up with someone that “Oops, I guess I ruined my shot with him.” This is how girls end up with broken hearts. Those boys get our hopes up and then play it off like it meant nothing.

I heard of countless girls that got too emotionally attached to a guy they had hooked-up with, but it had never happened to me. Then it did. I fell really hard for a boy I had never liked until the third time we hooked-up. He told me we needed to hang-out more often and promised me we would. But months passed, and he didn’t call. It hurt. I felt used. I knew I couldn’t blame anyone but myself, however. So I lost him as a friend, and I had to force myself to get over him. I hate to portray myself as the victim here, since it takes two to tango, but it really wouldn’t have played out like this if it had been up to me. It was after this situation that my friends and I realized this has to stop.

How will this problem be reversed? The boys our age aren’t about to change their ways. They’re spoiled, and they know it. Why would they go back to the whole White Knight/Chivalry thing when they get more sex as it is? This issue is so hidden that no one can change it except those it affects. To bring this problem to an end, we would have to look back in history and emulate the sexual morals of our forefathers. Today’s situation had to have come from somewhere. Societal morals have degenerated to this point. Can’t they go back to how they were? When discussing this issue with a guy friend, he said, “Shit, we’re just screwed, man” (Manlove). He was as torn as I am.

The other major question I ask is: Who is to blame? I’m not asking where the strange term hooking-up came from (I mean, think about it, what a weird name). I’m wondering who told our boys, somewhere along the way, that girls are okay with putting-out and being ignored. Blame is often placed on the media, and rightfully. Just look at James Bond, the man that must be mentioned in any discussion of womanizing. The character is never chastised for bedding woman after woman outside of a relationship.

But here’s my ultimate theory. The Big Dilemma is something we’ve inherited from our overzealous parents, along with our college funds and our big ambitions. Our parents have invested more in us than any other generation’s parents ever did. I know I’m generalizing here, but pretty much anyone my age can tell you how their parents told them every day, “You can be anything you want when you grow up!” Our entire childhoods, we were encouraged not just to go to college and get good jobs, but to dominate the world and please, oh please, not to waste all their effort and settle for anything less. With the sexist boundaries all but obliterated by the feminists of the ‘70s, we are now all free to be highly successful adults. There’s a lot of pressure on us.

So these days, marriage is not what we all go to college searching for. In fact, in all our ambitiousness, we have to push the idea of marriage far into the future, where we can’t think about it. There is a time and a place for everything, and your college years and early professional years are for ensuring your success in this world. My dad tells me the next ten years will be the most important years of my life and the choices I make will determine the rest of my life, blah blah blah. “Me Time,” I call it.

In the mean time, dating is a tricky thing. Slightly scared by the idea of falling in love at a young age, we tip-toe around the opposite sex in a game of feigned intimacy. We have made up a culture of hooking-up and called it normal because it is the only way we know how to relate to one another. God forbid we should find true love at such a young age! Yet we want fun and we want it now. Bring on the boys and the booze and the gossip and we will make believe this is what we want.

In order to fix this giant effing hole in our lives, we girls are going to have to assume some responsibility for these circumstances. We’ve gradually let more and more things slide. I think it got harder and harder for us to let the guys know that we’re not okay with things how they are. We need to learn how to do this. If we can start demanding something more- perhaps a little romance- we might save ourselves from the damage being done. I don’t wish upon any girl this bleak outlook towards men that has emerged in my generation. We whine about how sucky guys are these days, but it’s really the situation that sucks. Hooking-up needs to end.




Works Cited
"2006 Hookup Survey." Seventeen Magazine. 2006. 7 Oct. 2006 http://www.seventeen.com/health/smarts/articles/0,,625884_694391,00.html

Brockman. "Get Some." Urban Dictionary. 15 Sept. 2003. 3 Nov. 2006 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=get+some.

Manlove, Luke. Interview. Minneapolis, MN. Spring 2007.

Why I Laughed When He Sipped His Water

“Oh, Tara, did you see the guy behind us?” I whispered to my best friend on the first day of Creative Writing lecture. She nodded with raised eyebrows and we started giggling obnoxiously. He was amazing. If I looked sideways to her, he was directly in my line of sight. This caused problems for me for that whole first lecture. I would lean over to whisper something to Tara, catch a glimpse of his starlingly perfect face, and dissolve in a giggly swoon. She gave me a look of confusion at one point and I blushed in embarrassment.

This guy didn’t look anything like the other guys at the University of Minnesota. He was sharply handome, romantically handsome. He looked like he belonged in another time period. Black hair, strong jaw, dark eyes, pale skin. My dream. He would notice when I looked back in amazement. I must have done it five times in those fifty minutes. His eyes would meet mine and then go back to the lecturer, no annoyance visible on his angelic face.

Several days later, I discovered with a falling face that he wasn’t in my discussion class. I would only get one hour a week to ogle this boy. But I did well at ogling during that hour every Wednesday. By some miracle, he ended up sitting directly in my line of sight every single lecture. If I was to look towards the lecture podium, there would be my dream guy, waiting to be admired. He wasn’t exactly hot like other guys were hot. He wore weird clothes and didn’t speak. I doubted that he had this kind of effect on any other girl in the room. Beyond acknowledging his good looks, Tara never mentioned him again. I guess I saw potential in him. I could picture him in a new black leather coat that I would buy for him, walking next to me around campus and looking achingly handsome.

It became a habit on Wednesdays to dress a little nicer than I usually did. It was silly, really, to get all worked up about some nameless guy in one of my classes. But I never found boys that reminded me of a literary character, and the romantic in me grabbed at the chance to swoon over someone.

And remind me of a literary character he did. He shouldn’t have reminded me of Edward Cullen. Not physically, at least. Edward is supposed to have bronze hair, not black, and golden eyes rather than brown. But this mystery boy had something Edward-ish about him. It might have been his stiff posture, or the elegant way he held his pen. Maybe I just associate any beautiful guy with Edward. But if there’s one way into my heart, it is to remind me of Edward the vampire.

Edward Cullen exists in the dense, rainy forests of Forks, Washington, in a popular teen book series called Twilight. He is a perfect example of what men should be like. There’s something intangible about Edward that has made millions of teenage girls love him obsessively. Even my mom loves Edward Cullen. Suddenly, we all have higher standards in men after we read the Twilight series. We need our men to be gorgeous, protective, mercurial, seductive, mysterious, funny, intelligent, and a little bit dangerous. If a guy like Edward exists in our real world, I haven’t heard about him yet.

But from time to time, I sense some Edward in a random guy I encounter. With this Creative Writing guy, I couldn’t shake the comparison, so my crush grew. I wrote poems about him instead of listening to the guest lecturers. I gazed at his profile as long as I could without letting my friends know I was doing it. That would be awkward. I was aware that it was ridiculous to be so infatuated with someone I had never spoken with. It’s such a shame that looks attract, was how I would always end the poems about this guy. It wasn’t fair for him to win all my attention like this. How did other guys have a shot in my over-romanticized world? I would look around him at the other guys, the nondescript boys that I would never notice, and it seemed absurd that I had such a strong preference for one over all the others. But attraction is a strange phenomenon, and it isn’t really worth your time to ponder it.

One Wednesday, about midway through a forgettable lecture on fiction writing, my mystery boy made a sudden movement and caught my overly-aware eye. He reached for his backpack and pulled out a Nalgene full of water. He untwisted the cap and brought the water bottle to his lips. He took a sip of water and my shoulders shook with silent laughter. He was not Edward Cullen after all, for vampires cannot drink water. Silly me.

Back in Class

Gross. I started classes yesterday. Fuck shitticky fuck fuck. I wasn't ready for it. But it's one of those things you just can't prevent, you know? Oh, well, classes seem to be okay this semester. Lots of:

a) architectural professors dripping in condescension
b) sitting next to the boy that belongs to another girl but that I can't seem to get over (silly me, he's not really Edward Cullen, he just reminds me of him)
c) other crap that makes each day a typical day in the life of a college kid.

Right now I'm listening to Motion City Soundtrack, my foolproof fall-back music. It means I need to get new music. I love Justin Pierre & Co. so much, though, it's hard for me to stay away long.

In Creative Writing class, we have to write a story in 6 words, due Monday. Ridiculously hard. The example we were given was one from Hemingway, where he told this epic-ly sad story about baby shoes that were never worn. I'm not gonna live up to that one. But here are some ideas:

1) First, glory; second, disgrace; third, impeached.

2) Illustrious star, "Here, try Heroin," tragedy. (This one is a tribute to Heath Ledger, who shockingly and tragicly died yesterday of a drug overdose, which was not necessarily Heroin. I can't get his death out of my celebrity-obsessed mind.)

Le Premier

Omigod, Enchanted actually lived up to my expectations. I'll admit, I pretty much peed my pants when I saw the trailer, and immediately called it my favorite movie, months before it was even released. There was already a poster of Princess Giselle hanging on my wall a few days before the movie was even in theaters. But guess what? The movie was spectacular! It was exactly what Hollywood needs to focus on making: popcorn movies with good stories. It was brilliance. Someday I shall write books with this sort of blend.

I am skipping French class right now and blogging and listening to Britney's new CD. What kind of a college student am I?