Old Long Since

Apparently, that’s the literal Scottish translation of “Auld Lang Syne",” the song typically sung at New Year’s. The song with the melody everyone knows and the words no one knows. More “idiomatically” (according to Wikipedia), it means “long, long ago.” That seemed more appropriate for a near-end of the year blog post.

Yesterday, I aged another year without the world being profoundly different for it. For me, however, this year has been one of the most influential of my life.

Long, long ago, I stepped off a canoe onto the banks of a Peruvian village called “Shevojah” where I slept in a tent, ate more power bars than I ever care to eat for the rest of my life, and faced the first major and irrevocable change to my life plans in quite some time.

Long, long ago I made the decision to return to CLR for summer 2009. Anyone who has ever spent more than an hour in my company knows how integral that place has been in my life for the past year. Past three years, if we’re honest with ourselves.

This year I went to more weddings and heard about more engagements than ever before; however, I’m certain 2010 will surpass 2009 in that happy respect.

This past semester, Fall 2009, was my last semester in undergraduate classes; I worked harder in those four months than I think I ever have at more tasks than I’ve ever had to tackle. I think I miffed many people with my slightly hermit-esque behavior at school and with my tendency to flee to camp almost every other weekend. I don’t regret it, but I do hope to cling harder to my social life in 2010. Perhaps as a student teacher, that is a fool’s hope. We’ll see.

This year taught me many pretty lessons, the most stunning of which was learning that being a professional writer is not actually one of my dreams. Even the world of fiction writing becomes tedious if visited too often and out of obligation. My goal for my life, then, is balance. Never making the things I love too overtly into jobs.

Many people make resolutions at this point… mine, I think, are simple enough.

1. Love more.
2. Talk less.
3. Walk more.
4. Sit less.
5. Read more.
6. Watch less.
7. Pray more.
8. Worry less.
9. Trust more.
10. Hide less.

We’ll see how it goes, won’t we?

A Day for a Poem

It's never scientific, after all.
There is no checklist, no empirical process
no necessary weather forecast or
emotional state of being.

It's not a particularly sunny day, now
the rain has settled into stagnant pools among
the dead leaves, and the sun hides behind dull
clouds like the word you can sense but never find
when you need it.

My feet are cold, and my house nearly emptied.
My mother must have turned on the Christmas tree
before she left, and the dogs sleep beneath it like presents;
however, Christmas is still to come.

Today is no one's birthday, nor the anniversary of
a sweet gesture, so far as I can remember.
It's almost lunchtime, and no one has died,
or proposed, or graduated.

But most of our problems stem from being too
inwardly focused, I think, so just because I can't find
any socks, or see sunlight shatter in beams through clouds,
or make note of this day as when I found true love

doesn't mean that it hasn't been a tear-soaked,
laughter-filled and unforgettable day for someone else on
the other side of this earth. So I put my glasses on
and decided today was as good as any day for a poem.

Distractive Listening

Walking around my college campus, for what will be my last year, I've noticed a few things that might have slipped my notice in years passed. For example, I've always been aware of how students and others walking around the city walk with their headphones or earbuds on, listening to music as they walk from place to place. However, I've not stopped to think about this new tendency until today.

I passed a friend of mine today, who was listening to her music, smiling distantly, and even bobbing her head a bit to the music. I waved and called her name, but she couldn't hear me. I laughed it off as we always do, but I couldn't shake the sense that this picture of extreme individualism was more than just a society-wide affinity for good tunes.

Why is it that we are so apt to slide on the headphones and turn on the iPod as we walk crowded streets? Why do we want to cover up the sounds our surroundings with music? Just walking back to my apartment after passing my friend, I was so much more aware of the sounds of my city: people talking, tourists, the sound of cars and footsteps and hoof-beats from carriage tours. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed the wind whistling through the changing leaves and my hair.

Even when jogging or working out, the first thing we do is put in headphones, to watch the TV perched on the  edge of the treadmill or to listen to our favorite playlists as we run a capricious path between buildings and patches of grass. Why is that? Do we not want to hear our own labored breaths or the sounds of our own feet pounding against the ground? Would we rather focus on the beat of the music than the beat of our hearts? Why the distraction?

Perhaps, instead, it is a ploy to keep our privacy. When you walk or jog down the street with buds in your ears, you are less likely to hear someone call your name, or call for help. If you're waiting at the corner for the light to change, a stranger is not going to strike up a casual conversation with you once they see the headphones. The tiny white buds are a great wall.

I wonder if this isn't some grand metaphor playing out before our eyes; so many people among us are walking through life with buds in their ears, listening only to what they want to hear--not hearing heir own labored breaths and racing heart and pounding footsteps as they jog, a reminder of their fragile grasp on life, of impending mortality. Maybe none of us want to hear ourselves running because we'd have to then acknowledge from what we are fleeing. So many people around us, waiting on the light to change, have in the ear buds, not wanting you to start a conversation with them outside of their convenience, not hearing the Voice calling their name.

Or maybe we are the ones with the headphones on. Maybe we don't want to acknowledge our surroundings, hear the cries for help, or even hear the sounds of city and nature. "In the world, and not of it," we might say to ourselves as we jog, taking Words out of context as we are so apt to do and running, running from the faces and stories and waving arms, not waving but drowning. And it's all too easy to say we didn't hear, but the truth of it all is we fail to listen.

fear

things i fear:

• clowns
• bees/wasps/flying stinging things
• breaking my nose
• pain
• missed opportunities
• losing control
• being a poor leader
• stupid mistakes
• disappointing someone i admire
• hurting someone else
• being hated and not knowing it
• losing my brother
• failure

things i don't fear:

• death

Stories Can Save Us.

Today, I sang "Happy Birthday" to Tim O'Brien, Vietnam Veteran, "older father" (as he put it), and world-renowned writer of The Things They Carried, among other poignant novels. Obviously, I wasn't the only one singing--the rest of the audience crowded in the Carolina First Arena joined in to sing to him after he spent over an hour speaking to us about stories, truth, life, and war.

More than anything, I wanted to be one of the loud freshman and cautiously excited faculty members that popped from their chairs in a rush to line up in front of him for an unscheduled autograph. I can imagine how the conversation might go...

"Hi, Mr. O'Brien."

"Hey, there. What's your name?"

"H-Hillary." I would stutter here, certainly. Even being 15 feet away, I was starstruck.

"Tell me about yourself, Hillary." I think he'd be interested, or at least, would pretend to be so his signature could have a note before it. But listening to him speak and seeing how personable and humble and sincere he was, I think he would genuinely want to know a little about every person whose book he signed. And I know what I would want to say and how embarrassed I would be say it, especially to Tim O'Brien.

"Well, I want to be a writer. I'm working on a project now about a soldier's return from Afghanistan and how he and his family react to his return." Except I'm sure I would stutter much more here and fail to explain my project with any semblance of clarity.

I don't know how he would react to my admission; I'm sure he and writers of his caliber hear similar rushed confessions every time they speak. Maybe he would nod and say, "That's great, keep working at it." Maybe he'd say, "Good luck, kid." Maybe he would smile empathetically and think on his life, when he was first starting out and sign "You'll make it," above his name. I'm not sure.

But I'm willing to bet that if I sat down with Tim O'Brien and let him read my manuscript, he might tell me the same thing that my advisor, Anthony Varallo, tells me, the same thing that Bret Lott and Carol Ann Davis told me when they reviewed the first half:

"Don't be afraid."

Of what? Well, here's what I've got so far.

Don't be afraid to lie. Tim O'Brien said this tonight, and as a young writer who hasn't had the experiences that he has, I can see the necessity of this. I've always been told, ever since writing workshops as a nerdy fifth grader, to "write what you know." Because of this, I've been afraid to venture much beyond my own experiences in my writing. But as a not-quite twenty-two year old who grew up in the suburbs and tried to make as little trouble as possible, I haven't had too many experiences that readers might find striking. I shouldn't be afraid to use the imagination my parents often laughed at when I was young.

Don't be afraid to tell the truth. Just because it's fiction doesn't mean real life is off-limits. In fact, things that are close to my heart are going to be the most believable on the page. When I had my bachelor's essay committee meeting at the half-way point, I thought I was in a group therapy session instead of a formal review. The three accomplished writers reading my very rough draft could read my prose and see details of my life that I had never revealed. So this story is born out of your fear, one of them said. Reveal that; your narrator isn't you, but she is very similar to you. Just as you're afraid of what will happen if your kid brother goes to war, so she is going to be afraid of failing her brother who has returned from it.

Don't be afraid of conflict. The characters are pulled from your own life and experience, and even though they're different from those people who inspired them, you don't want to hurt them or put conflict in their lives because they are so similar to people you love. But if your characters don't fight or get in trouble or worry or make waves, no one will want to read about them.

Don't be afraid of happy endings. Just because the trend in modern fiction is to be pessimistic about everything doesn't mean your story can't end on a positive note or your characters can't get what it is they are wanting. But if they get it too easily, the end won't ring true.

It'd be great if I took a moment to revel Tim O'Brien's lessons and then, clutching my laptop to my chest, ran into my bedroom, shut the door, and churned out the rest of my book in shining, clear prose that brought my incredibly talented panel of advisors to tears. Instead, I think I'm going to sit on my couch tonight, watch a movie with my roommate, talk, laugh, and live until I go to sleep. Why?

Living is not about writing; writing is about living.