Why is everything poetry and not prose lately?

This is rather worse poetry than the last one, but it adds a little perspective.


I want to turn cartwheels and fly and slide down stairs headfirst -
Not for any reason, not because I am happy (or sad, for that matter)
Just because

The world goes swinging around the sun,
And I go swinging through life
Up and down, up and down.

Sometimes I see - I think I see - the pattern to all the woven strands
Of life, the world, existence and time
"Eureka!" I yell, and then it's gone.

Like a child, it runs away when I say I've found it
Like snow, it melts when I grab it
Hide-and-seek is more fun when everyone wants to play

I watch in silent wonder and the universe opens to me
But I must remember to not grow too sure of its compliance
Or it will slam its doors in my face.

Pi has a pattern and so has music
The kind you can see, but not predict
Like life.

In balance, out of balance
in again, out again, Michael Finnegan
So it goes.

I think this is a poem

It is too confusing to be anything else.

I close the book of my teenage years and try to start afresh
but find I am still writing the same tale
in black on white

I am alone in a world of black and white (or really, just alone)
We are grey - so different, yet the same.

It is not good be to alone
But I am
For no one understands me, my world
Not even I.

Black and white, they press questions on me (starkly divided, yet ever changing),
Who are you?
Grey is only what, not who.
An answer rises to my lips, but they are stone.
Stones are white.
Stones are black.

I speak, but my words are black and white
The truth is grey.
It is somewhere in between, where no one can see
I regret that I spoke.

I remain silent, try the better part of wisdom
but they do not understand.
Do you understand?
I don't.

Always questions, never answers.
I have no answers. Seek them not here.

I am not alone.
A voice cries "Run to the light!"
I hear. I run
only to fall in the pit at my feet. Black engulfs me.

falling, falling

Again, the voice.
I run again, and fall again.
I cannot escape the vicious circle, black and white.

How can I run when I am broken (broken into dark and light)?
How can I sing with this weight on my chest?

I cannot do it. I cannot escape. Take it off me. Let me go.
Let me go!





I am free, but not for long.

Yeah, school is over and has been for a while...

so I suppose that makes me triply overdue for a real post.

But an introvert having a blog and posting regularly on it is a rare thing. You guys are ALL extroverts, right? E-this, E-that - and here am I, INFJ, and not just sort of introverted. 100% introverted. I am a loner, and always will be. I used to have problems with that, and be lonely as well as a loner (which is kind of a contradiction). I basically thought that I was a loner because there wasn't anyone like me, and I yearned for people like me to hang out with. And, you know, there may not be anyone like me, but now I'm reconciled to that and rather reconciled to being a loner. I rarely have the urge to tell people what happened to me yesterday and what's going on in my brainspace and what big emotional paradox I'm trying to sort out. I tend to keep it inside of me and chew on it for a long, long time, and eventually come to a conclusion about all of it, but sometimes I don't even tell people that. It reminds me of a verse in Luke that says "And Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart." I assume she was an introvert too.

Psychologists say it's bad for people to internalize things and not talk about them. I don't trust psychologists very much. I wonder if it is really that it is bad for extroverts to internalize things when they don't want to, and perhaps bad for introverts to externalize things when they don't want to. I am not saying that introverts should all go off and live in a cave and never speak to another human being - that takes a very special kind of person and most of us (including me) would go insane without any human contact, but some people need a lot less of it than others. During the school year, you didn't hear anything from me because I felt inundated with people and couldn't wait to get away from it all so I could stop and think. I went from being around people a few hours a week when I was homeschooled - maybe ten hours - to being around people the majority of my waking hours. I was desperate for alone time.

Now, I thought that a blog would make life simpler, because I could keep up with ten people with the amount of stress that I would normally get from keeping up with one. Well, apparently it was still not simple enough. I haven't kept up with anyone outside of classmates, my piano teacher, and my parents, all of whom saw me anyway. Diaries never worked for me either.

So I can't even keep up with the slowest of you in terms of posting speed. Are you willing to wait for that? It's what you get when you ask (ahem, strong-arm) an introvert into trying to keep a blog. Not to mention one whose major outlet is non-verbal.

Oh, you still want to know what's happening around here? (Faugh, they'll never get it, Lirael.) I am checking out books galore from all of the libraries I have access to, getting lost in fantasy/sci-fi worlds again, which I haven't really done for about two and a half years, trying to get a job at a music store, practicing (I feel as if I am a worse pianist than I was at the beginning of the year, what with less time to practice and rushing pieces for recitals), thinking about some compositional ideas, trying to guess what kind of flute I'm getting for my birthday (two decades gone already...), and sneezing from allergies. Oh, and JCC has a German Bible in their library, so I've checked it out for the summer and am teaching myself German. 'Tis the first foreign language I've sunk my teeth into for years!

*The giant sucking sound of school*

My deep apologies for the horrible absence of posts. There is really no excuse for me not posting over Christmas break.

But school has really swamped me now. I'm doing 17 credits (full load) plus choir plus CYSO. Yes, I'm a masochist, if you didn't already know that. I do love all of you guys and miss you - I haven't even had a chance to read your blogs since the beginning of the semester, it's been that crazy. Or spend more than five minutes on facebook - or read anything for pleasure (all of which I managed last semester). And the other thing is that this blog is really about me and my life and I'm trying to get my mind off of that right now. I want to spend my time living life instead of thinking about life. Anyway, class is about to start - my few minutes of break is over. Back to the crazy up-and-down of the merry-go-round.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, people!

I am thankful for all of you, and I'm thankful that Pastor Harris invited me to play at Junior Camp so I could end up meeting such wonderful people, and I'm thankful to God for giving him the idea to start the whole thing.

Hey, I've got a plan. It's kind of a last-minute thing, so it might not work, but it'd be cool if it did. How about everyone who reads this post today (it has to just be today) sends an email to Pastor Harris thanking him for starting the amazing thing that is Camp Hope, and also posts on their blog telling everyone who reads it to do the same. Wouldn't that be the most awesome Thanksgiving surprise for him?

If you're not a language nerd, you might want to skip this

...on the other hand, if you are a language nerd, you might already know all this.

I love the Greek word logos. In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. It means so much more than the English word 'word.' I've heard it translated 'reason,' or 'meaning,' or 'language,' and those are all good, but none of them really cut it alone.

Now I want to make an important distinction. When we talk about English words having more than one meaning, we usually mean multiple exclusive meanings, and we figure out which one someone means by the context of the word in the sentence. Either someone means one thing, or they mean the other, but not both.

Like the word 'plane.' Either someone means 'a flying contraption built by humans, with big noisy engines etc etc.' or they mean 'a flat geometrical surface with only two dimensions,' but they don't ever mean both at the same time.

That't not the kind of thing I'm talking about. What happens with Latin words all the time, and with Greek words sometimes, is that they include the meanings of more than one English word, and so we have to translate it different ways in different contexts to make it make sense, but it really means 'all of the above together, as a unit.' Like another of my favorite words, the French word (...but wait a minute! You didn't mention French! Yeah, okay, this pretty much happens in any language. As I was saying, like the French word) vrai. It means both true and real at the same time. I think combining those two ideas is so awesome...

Anyway, so here's a counter-example. English has one word for love, and we say I love my friends and God loves me and I love my old jeans that I've worn for years and years and I love my spouse (not me, of course, a married person), and those all use the same word. But if I translated those into Greek, each of those four phrases would use a different word for love.

So this is what I'm talking about with logos. It means word, and language, and meaning, and reason, all at once, and all as a unit, and all pointing to some idea behind all of those that wraps them up into a single, beautiful concept.

Postmodern Thought and the Teenage Lang

Y'know, like, how some people you meet, like, you notice they, like, say "like" like every other word?

I have a theory that this actually stems from Postmodernism.

See, part of Postmodernism is this idea that noone can really know what is real and unreal outside of their own mind. You know your mind is real because you are your mind. "I think, therefore I am." But beyond that, all your sense impressions, all your interactions with other people, could be your own imagination or someone else's. I'm told the Matrix is essentially based on the idea that half the world is living in a computer-generated world and doesn't realize it. (I haven't actually seen it, so correct me if I'm wrong.) It also reminds me of The Truman Show. I've even entertained the idea myself that everyone around me is in this vast conspiracy and places like London or New York or India or Alaska don't really exist, I'm just made to believe they do. Postcards are all CGI. I mean, if movies look real, reality could be fake! But I'm waxing loquacious.

If everything could just be an appearance of reality, for all we know, we can't make any definitive statements at all about what we see happening around us. We can only say it was "like" it happened.

So, I'm, like, sitting at my computer. And, like, I've got these blog friends that, like, comment on stuff I say. But I don't know if any of it is really there or not.