Ten Years of Magic

‘Twas the day before Thanksgiving and without a doubt

I was the most happy creature about

Technically, Magic Wednesday has only existed for nine years. But the magic started ten years ago.

Ten years ago I was twelve years old and in the sixth grade. The very first Harry Potter movie had just come out and we thought it would be fun to go see it on the day before Thanksgiving after we picked up our relatives from the airport.

That would have been only a couple of months after 9/11, so it would have been the first year we had to wait outside of security instead of going right up to the gate, but I don’t remember that. What I do remember is my dad asking my aunt and grandpa if they’d had any lunch yet. They said they hadn’t, so we stopped at the co-op on the way home to get some sandwiches.

That’s where I found my scarf. It wasn’t that special. It was just a fuzzy black scarf. But I must’ve worn it every day of every winter for the next five years, because it reminded me of that wonderful day.

I don’t remember much else from that year, but one memory stands out as one of the happiest of my life. As we walked up the sidewalk toward the movie theater, I grabbed my little brother’s hand and we ran the rest of the way, giggling. That one moment of pure childhood glory sums up everything Magic Wednesday is to me.

The next year, I knew it was coming. The second Harry Potter movie had just come out and we would go to see it at the same theater, just like we had the year before. I counted the days. I wrote in my diary about how excited I was. At school on Wednesday I counted the minutes of each shortened class period until early release at noon.

That was what we all remember as the “original” Magic Wednesday. It was the first year I called it that. And it was a wonderful day. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. We went to the airport, we saw Harry Potter, we went out to eat. A tradition had been born.

But traditions can be problematic. The next year, 2003, was the “ill-fated” Magic Wednesday. We spent endless hours arguing over what movie to see (and despite my steel trap mind, I’ve forgotten what we eventually decided on). My brother got sick. By the time the day ended, I was forced to admit that it hadn’t been just like last year, as I had wanted it to be. It hadn’t even been very good. But there was one good thing: That was the first year I wrote a Magic Wednesday poem.

2004 was much better. Nobody got sick, we had a much better choice of movies, it was wonderful. But it just didn’t feel “magic.” That was the year I realized that the magic of the first two years wasn’t something I could create. It just, as I put it in the next poem, “happened that way.”

In 2005 we faced our first Magic Wednesday with no relatives coming to visit. That’s also when the memories start to blur a little bit. That might have been the year that we drove all around town after school buying supplies for my sister’s new guinea pig, but I’m not 100% sure. I think that was also the year they opened the downtown movie theater, which I railed against endlessly for intruding on the space of the theater we’d gone to on the first two Magic Wednesdays, but then came to think was pretty cool.

After that I really don’t remember the details of any specific Magic Wednesday. Sometimes there was a Harry Potter movie to see, sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes it was awesome, sometimes it kind of stank. One year we saw a play instead of a movie. One year we had to have “Magic Friday” instead because everyone’s planes got delayed until late Wednesday night. But there was never another one like the first two, for the reason I’ve already mentioned. Magic just happens.

But Magic Wednesday reminds me that it does happen, and no matter how bad things get, it will happen again someday. Magic Wednesday was an ordinary day that became extraordinary because a twelve-year-old girl decided it would be. Magic can’t be created, but it can be found, even in the most unlikely places, if you look hard enough.

Yes nothing can send my happiness away

On this the most wonderful and Magic Wednesday

Because Sometimes You Just Need to Say Things

I don’t look like the other girls on campus, even when I do myself up like them. Even when I blowdry my hair and put on eye makeup and my trendiest top (which, admittedly is probably an Angry Birds t-shirt) I still can’t capture what they have. I don’t look like them, I don’t walk like them, I don’t talk like them. Sometimes I feel like I live in a different world.

I wouldn’t mind it so much, except that it brings back memories, memories of the time when I tried to shut myself off from everything good that the world had to offer because I was too afraid of the bad that comes along with it. Sometimes I think I’ve almost forgotten about it, and then I’ll see or hear something that reminds me of those days and the pain is still there, as fresh as if it was happening today. The one thing I never, ever want to do again is shut myself off from the world.

But how do I become part of this world if I don’t play by its rules. That’s how it all started. I started exploring the world I had tried to shut out, and oh, what a beautiful place it was. How could I hate a world that gave me American Eagle jeans, Katy Perry songs, Apple products, and Diet Coke? But it also gave me something else. It gave me a message: be perfect.

So I tried. I tried to be every kind of perfect I could think of. I tried to have the perfect body, perfect clothes, perfect hair. I tried to keep my apartment perfectly clean and get perfect grades. I tried to be the perfect singer, the perfect writer. And I failed miserably at every single attempt. But I had to keep trying. I had to be perfect so I could fit perfectly in to the world.

And didn’t just have to be perfect, but when my friends’ lives started to fall apart, I had to be happy, too. Somebody had to be, after all. We had to have an antidote to the gloom and doom that seemed to permeate every get-together. It was easy at first. Keeping it together when everyone else is in crisis is actually one thing I’m really good at. And it made me feel like I was finally achieving something. I was finally perfect and happy…and exhausted…and alone…

But what could I do? I would walk through fire before I would turn away from my friends when they need me, and what they need is a happy face. If that’s all I can give them, then I will put on my happy face from now until the end of eternity, no matter how much it hurts inside because my friends have been there for me in ways they don’t even understand.

Sometimes it feels like a lie, though. It feels like we’re all lying to each other. Why can’t we tell the truth, say how much we miss the fun we used to have, the way we used to know and understand each other. Maybe no one else feels that way. But I do. I’m tired of walking on egg shells. I miss the truth, the depth, that we used to have. I miss having people who actually wanted an honest answer when they asked, “How are you?”

And then I realized that I’m not sure anything is real anymore. I’m not sure I remember how to tell the difference between the things that really are a part of me and the things I pretend are a part of me because it’s a prerequisite for the perfect, shining world I want so badly to belong to. The thing is, I’m pretty sure most things are the latter, with one exception. Bet you can’t guess what it is.

I should have realized the minute I walked into rehearsal, forty-five minutes late, and with all the grace and discreetness of a herd of elephants, that I had stepped into a completely different world. It never ceases to amaze me how choir seems to have some sort of magical force-field surrounding it, protecting it from the unspoken rules that dictate every minute of the rest of my life. There is not one other place on the planet that I could make such an idiot of myself and not think a thing of it. It’s the only time I feel real. Even after everything that’s happened this summer, that hasn’t changed. And so I ask myself the same question I’ve been asking for years: how do I convince myself to be that person, the person I am at choir, all the time?

Cripes if I know. I had it almost, sort of figured out once. But that was four years ago. Things are different now. But somehow I have to figure it out again, because this isn’t working. I wish I knew how. How do I sort out what’s fake from what’s real? How do I convince myself that that music-spilling, riser-stomping, stopping-in-the-middle-of-a-song-to-ask-her-friend-what’s-funny girl is good enough, just the way she is, to leave the choir room and go out into the big, beautiful world, whether they like it or not?

I wish I knew. But I know that in that moment, as I gathered up my scattered music and scurried noisily up the risers to my spot in the back row I felt more like myself than I have in a long time. That has to mean something.

I Grew Up With This

I was ten years old when I became a Harry Potter fan. I was a little late to the Potter party, actually. I was adamantly anti-fantasy and refused to even consider reading the books when they first came out, but somehow my mom finally convinced me. We read the first book out loud together, chapter by chapter, before bed each night. When we finished it, we went to the bookstore the next day to get the second one. I was hooked.

By the time we got to the third book I couldn’t wait for my mom and bedtime anymore. I read it myself. One of my all-time favorite memories is of sitting on the couch, the book in front of me, reading the scene where Gryffindor plays for the Quiddich cup. I was literally cheering the characters on as I read, shrieking at Harry to “Get the snitch! Get the snitch!” When he finally did, I threw my fist in the air and shouted, “YES!”

That was the summer of 2000, the year the fourth book came out. I was still on the second or third book, so I didn’t go to buy it at midnight, although I remember people talking about doing so. I didn’t much like the fourth book the first time I read it. I think I was maybe a little too young and too much of it was over my head. But I plowed through it anyway, figuring I would read it again at some point, and it would make more sense.

All of a sudden, it seemed like Harry Potter was everywhere. There were dolls and toys and school supplies. My fifth-grade classmates argued endlessly about which one of them got to be Harry for Halloween. We spent countless recesses speculating about how long it would be until the next book came out and who the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher would be. And I, like so many kids of my generation, was just a little bit upset when I didn’t get a letter inviting me to Hogwarts on my eleventh birthday.

Then the movies came. The first one came out when I was in sixth grade. We went to see it on the day before Thanksgiving, with our relatives who were visiting for the holiday. The second movie came out a year later and we did the same thing. That, of course, was the genesis of Magic Wednesday.

The fifth book finally came out the summer before I was in eighth grade. It had only been three years, but to a kid that’s more like thirty. Everything was different. It felt like it had been forever. That was the first time I went at midnight to get the book. I spent the entire next day reading it. I had read other books in one day, but never with such intensity and fervor. There was something about those characters, that story. I couldn’t just put it down and go do something else for awhile like I could with most books. I needed to know what happened next and as long as there were pages still to be read I couldn’t pry my eyes away.

I was thirteen that summer, and I figured out that if there were three years between the fifth and sixth books, and then three more between the sixth and seventh, that by the time the seventh one came out I would, for the first time, be older than Harry. Thinking about that made life seem so short. Three years suddenly didn’t feel like such a long time after all.

When the sixth book came out, only two years later, we had to get two copies, one for me and one for my sister. We bought them from a small local bookstore and I was always worried that they would run out of copies, so I insisted we get there early so we could get a good spot in line. My sister stayed up all night, something I’ve never been able to do, to finish it.

The fifth movie and the seventh book came out the same year, the summer before my senior year in high school. The fifth movie was the first one we went to see at midnight, except it ended up being more like one in the morning because the projector broke and they had to fix it. When the seventh book came out, I realized that I was only seventeen. I still wasn’t older than Harry. I took that book home and just stared at it for awhile. I couldn’t believe that this was the end of the story that I had loved and talked about and read again and again for seven years. But, I reminded myself, it wasn’t really the end. There were still two more movies, which then became three movies when they decided to split the seventh one into two parts.

Tonight, at midnight, the final movie opens. This is the last midnight event. There will never be another one. Today on my university campus I overheard a girl, probably about my age, describing the t-shirt she had made to wear to the movie. Apparently her mom thought she was too old for such things. “I don’t care,” she said. “I grew up with this.”

It’s true. We really did grow up with Harry Potter. When I started reading the books, Bill Clinton was still president, you could go right up to the gate in the airport to meet people coming off the plane, iPods didn’t exist, and today’s ten-year-old Harry Potter fans hadn’t even been born yet. The whole world is different. We’re different. But a tiny part of us, the part that wants to stay up half the night to watch a movie that we already know the ending to, hasn’t changed at all.

Another Year Over

I’m posting these a little earlier than usual this year. For anyone who didn’t see my post from last year, I like to come up with names for each month, sort of like chapter titles in a book. I always start with July and end with June. I usually name each month as it happens. Sometimes I know during the first week what that month’s “title” is going to be. Sometimes it takes me until the beginning of the next month. But I always know in advance what June is going to be, since for June I like to come up with an all-encompassing title that sort of sums up the entire year. I usually wait until June to write them down or post them here or share them with others or whatever I’m going to do. But like I said, I’m posting them a little early this year.

This year, for the first time, my titles tell a story. I’ve already told parts of this story. There are parts I cannot tell. I’ve written a lot about this being a hard year, the year I didn’t win. I wish, now, that I could have seen how good it really was and savored every moment of that goodness. There will never be another year like this one.

Some years I know what June’s title will be months in advance, but this year, I only recently decided. Like a lot of this year’s titles, it came from a song, the last line of which tells the story much better than I ever could: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

The Book of the Year 2010-2011

July: Bowling With Ben Franklin

August: The Times, They Are A-Changin’

September: Rise and Fall

October: Getting Horizontal

November: Tom Sawyer’s Guide to a More Complicated Life

December: The Walls Came Down At Christmas

January: Forward Through the Ages

February: Riding to Rutter Rehearsal in the Ridgeline

March: Runnin’ On

April: Faking It and Making It

May: The End of the World As We Know It

June: My Soul, My Life, My All

I Think This Series Is Sunk

The problem with the latest “Pirates” movie is that it’s missing too much of the original flair. Will and Elizabeth are missing, which I was ready for, but there’s also no sign of the Black Pearl (which has apparently been sunk and imprisoned in a bottle), the dog with the keys, or the two bumbling idiots omnipresent in the first three movies. Without all these little details, the movie seems to have lost its personality. It just doesn’t feel like a “Pirates” movie.

The characters who are there seem different, too. Jack Sparrow is his usual self, but he’s just about the only one. Barbosa has joined the English, which pretty much kills the character. One of the best scenes is at the end of the movie when Barbosa claims Blackbeard’s ship and reverts to his pirating ways. Jack’s old friend Gibbs, meanwhile, seems to be eternally cut off from the action and ignorant of the plan. One of his best moments is also at the end, when we learn that he’s made off with the whole fleet of ships in bottles, including the Black Pearl. But up until the last few minutes of the movie, these two act nothing like their original selves, which just makes the whole thing seem odd.

Then there’s the fact that most of the movie takes place on land. There’s not a single sea battle in the whole thing, and what’s a “Pirates” movie without a sea battle? Nor is there any of the usual consulting of compasses and telescopes and calling out “All hands on deck! Hoist the sails!” and that sort of thing. There isn’t even that much sword fighting. Then the Spanish manage to ruin the climax by announcing that they’ve gone to all the trouble of finding the Fountain of Youth just to destroy it, since “none but God can grant eternal life,” or something like that. Once they’ve done so, everyone puts their swords away and goes home.

The biggest problem might be that Jack isn’t directing the adventure. He’s at the mercy of Blackbeard and his daughter Angelica, who Jack was apparently in love with once. So all his usual antics just seem like a desperate attempt to avoid being shot by his captors rather than a brilliant plan to outsmart everyone else and gain the upper hand, which is what usually happens in the first three movies. Then there’s the fact that there isn’t a real bad guy, as evidenced by the un-climax. Blackbeard just isn’t evil enough and then he dies after falling for the oldest trick in the book.

Of course, it’s still a good movie. I’ve always said they could just dress Johnny Depp up like a pirate and have him stand around on a ship for two hours and I would pay money to see it. When it comes out on DVD I’m sure I will go on an adventure to buy it and then watch it three times in one weekend. But it still isn’t quite the same, and I suspect this will be the last movie. Going for number five would really just be silly.

What Hamlet, Harry Potter, and the BSU Football Team Have in Common or The Problem with Methaphors

One day last summer I mentioned to my choir director/voice teacher/friend Paul that my mom and I were going to see Hamlet in Ashland, Oregon. “You’re going to see ‘Amlet?” he said in a ridiculous Monty Python-esque cockney accent. It became sort of an inside joke and he will occasionally start talking in his “Hamlet voice” just to be silly. He was doing this a couple of weeks ago, going on and on in his Hamlet voice, except that all of a sudden Hamlet started to sound an awful lot like Dobby from the Harry Potter movies. And he can do a really good Dobby. It’s pretty funny.

All of that is really just a way of mentioning Hamlet and Harry Potter in the same paragraph, but there is a point, I promise. I’m sure you’re familiar with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech, which is probably one of the most famous passages of literature ever written. I think it’s so famous because it raises a universal question, one we can all relate to. Is it better to suffer through your troubles, or try to do something about them? And Harry Potter, also one of the most popular stories ever written, raises a similar question. Fight or give up? And that brings me to my point.

See, this was supposed to be the year I won.

To understand what I mean by that, you have to understand my whole war metaphor, so I guess I’d better start by explaining that.

You’ve probably seen that famous picture of the sailor kissing the nurse at the end of World War II. It’s one of my favorite pictures. I have a poster of it in my bedroom that I bought during my semester at St. Olaf. Sometimes, when I was having an especially miserable day I would lie on my bed, hug my stuffed clownfish (named Phelps after the swimmer of 2008 Olympics renown), pretend it was my dog Ginger, look up at that poster, and tell myself that someday my war would end and I would get to go home. It was a very convenient metaphor, since my other mantra of strength was telling myself to be like James, the main character in the trilogy I had finished writing over the summer. In the third book of the trilogy, James and his cohorts just so happen to go to war against the evil king, fight an epic battle, and win. It fit my life perfectly. I just had to hang on long enough, fight hard enough, and I would win, too.

But what exactly was I fighting for? The semester ended and I went home to stay, no longer at war with a college I hated. Sometimes I felt like I was at war with a world that told me I should live a certain way, but most of the time I felt like I had lost the war. I was too tired, too depressed to fight. I hoped that if I was quiet enough and kept far enough out of the way the world might just forget about me and let me exist in defeated peace. This isn’t really supposed to be about that “semester off,” but I have to mention it because it became the enemy, the thing I was fighting against. Once I came out the other side, I never, ever, ever wanted to go through anything like that again.

So I started fighting again, and winning. They weren’t big victories, but they added up, from my very first win against the BSU orientation I was forced to attend, to the snowy day at the end of my first semester when I realized that I actually liked school. Then there was the second semester, where I turned from a thrift store skirt wearing almost Quiverfuller to an almost skinny modern college girl who paid attention to what was on the pockets of her jeans and sang along to Katy Perry in the car. They were little victories, but there were a lot of them.

In May, sitting on the airplane on the way to New York to sing at Carnegie Hall, I realized that if I had another year like that one, my war could be won. And I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t have another year like that one. Everything was going in a pretty steadily forward direction, more good things were on the horizon, victory was within my grasp. And then all hell broke loose.

I think it started with the good friends who announced that they were moving away at the end of the summer. That probably doesn’t sound that earth shattering, but you don’t realize how much impact one person has on your life until they aren’t there anymore. I felt like my whole life was going to fall apart. The entire social order of the perfect little world I inhabited was being threatened. I don’t mean to sound like I’m blaming anyone else for my misfortune. I’m not. It’s just that we’re all connected. The things we do have an effect on others. Life would not go on as it always had.

But the end of the summer held hope. If I could just last until the end of August, I could go back to school, that wonderful place that had saved me, given me my life back. Then choir would start again and everything would be okay. Different, but okay. I could get back to being happy, get back to winning. Except that didn’t happen. Are you surprised?

What actually happened was the semester from hell, the one with the easy classes and the busywork and nothing to do or think about except choir. I became caught in a sort of self-perpetuating cycle. The more I obsessed about choir the more school became unimportant, a backdrop against which the real events of my life took place. And the less important school became the more energy I poured into obsessing about choir.

The cycle broke at Christmas, that magical time when all bets are off and everything’s good, but it picked back up again as soon as the new semester started. Except school wasn’t quite so irrelevant anymore. If I had pulled my head out of my choir room drama for five minutes I might have noticed that I had some interesting and challenging classes that deserved and demanded my attention. But I was used to a world where school didn’t matter and choir did and I was too busy comparing my singing ability to that of everyone else in the Rutter concert and wondering why I didn’t get to ever help with anything anymore to think about something as trivial as school.

And then two things happened. First, I got a C on my Islamic Civ. test. That never happens. I don’t get C’s. I don’t even really get B’s. And I’m a master of tests. I can usually get multiple choice questions right based solely on the way the answers are worded and I can BS my way through any essay. But apparently my BSing skills (and I wasn’t even really BSing, since I actually studied) were lost on this professor. Actually, I think most logical thought is lost on this professor, but that’s a different story. The point is, all of a sudden I wasn’t doing so well in school.

The second thing that happened was that I managed to turn my Quest To Be More Involved At Church into a gigantic mess and I probably ruined any chance I had of ever being more involved at church than I am now. The two Big Things in my life were sharing a handbasket to hell and I finally had to admit that I wasn’t winning anymore. I was losing.

And this is where I usually lose most people, because losing isn’t just about grades or choir status. It’s not really about those things at all. Losing conjures up images of that girl in the frumpy thrift store skirts who couldn’t even go to the mall to buy a new belt without feeling like she didn’t belong there, like she should go home, back to her own little world and leave living in the real world to the people who hadn’t decided to drop out of life. And like I said, I don’t ever want to be that girl again.

I had almost accepted the loss. I had almost accepted that I was just going to have to try to make it through the rest of this year and the summer and hope that things go better in the fall. But I don’t accept things like that very well. I don’t just sit around and wait to lose when there’s even the slightest chance that I could still score an eleventh hour victory. As one of the BSU football players said after they won the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, “It isn’t over till it’s zero, zero, zero.”

I had to at least figure out why I was losing. After all, I wasn’t giving up on my war altogether. I was still going to win someday. But if I was ever going to win, I had to know what I was doing wrong. I want to say that the answer came to me in a moment of perfect clarity, preferably while we were belting out the world’s most awesome Hallelujah Chorus in church on Easter morning, but it didn’t. The pieces just sort of started falling together and I started to finally sort of see what the problem is.

I’ve always felt bad admitting that I really, really like performing. I worry it makes me sound like a narcissistic diva who just wants people to look at her. But I’m not, I promise. I like performing because it’s the only time in my life when I don’t have to hide. I don’t have to worry that I’m going to screw up or look stupid or bother someone. It’s when I feel the most true, the most real. It lets me imagine a world where I can always feel like that, a world where I never have to hide.

That’s why I hated being the girl in the frumpy skirt so much. I felt like I had made a deal with the world. I didn’t have to play by its rules and it would leave me alone, but the catch was that I didn’t get any of the good things the world had to offer, either. I was done with that deal. I wanted the world, even if that meant playing by the rules. I thought that’s all it would take. I would follow the rules, and all the good things in the world would be mine.

And when that didn’t work (because of course it didn’t work), I got upset. I tried harder and harder and harder to follow the rules, to be as perfect as I could and I just got more and more frustrated. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I guess I wanted someone to tell me that I was good enough, that I could stop hiding now. But see, I’m pretty sure that deal I thought I made never existed in anyone’s mind but mine. No one ever told me I had to hide, and no one’s going to tell me that it’s okay to stop hiding. I have to figure out how to do that for myself.

If this was a movie, I would come to this great revelation and then I would show up to class the next day wearing an awesome outfit and everyone would somehow know that I was different. And there would probably be a cute, perfect-for-me guy who I had ignored for the whole movie, but now my post-revelation self could understand that he was perfect for me and we would kiss and walk off across campus together while the credits started rolling and a nice, inspiring song played.

But this isn’t a movie. Just because I understand now that the reason I’m losing is because I wasn’t fighting for something I really wanted in the first place, just because I am starting to understand that I never made a deal with the world and I can come out of hiding any time I want even if I don’t follow any of the rules, none of that means I can just snap my fingers and make everything suddenly great. It’s going to take a lot more than that. I have to figure out what I want to fight for. I have to figure out how to come out of hiding even if no one’s given me permission. And I have to figure out how to pass my finals.

I really hoped that I would be declaring victory right about now. I really thought there would be a moment when I just knew that I had won. But more and more I don’t think that moment will ever come. I might win the battle against the Islamic Civ. test or the French Rev paper from hell, but I’m not going to win the war against crap happening in my life. Maybe I need to find a new metaphor.

And you know, for all it feels like a horrible defeat, there were some pretty great moments this year: A first day of school I actually wanted to go to, the day when I decided that I really wanted to be just a history major, my 21^st birthday, the first night I drove back to my apartment and felt like I was going home, teaching myself to hit a high B flat, the amazing Thanksgiving week voice lesson, buying my first size sixes, and then fours, squeaking out “Jubal’s Lyre” and not sounding very good, but still sounding better than I ever thought I could, realizing that I can write (and get and A on) a paper in a single Saturday, and bringing down the house with that awesome Hallelujah Chorus, just to name a few. Maybe none of that is victory. Maybe it is, but it’s just not the kind of victory I was hoping for. Whatever it is, I’ll take it.

What happens now? I don’t really know. I want to keep fighting. I think it makes me stronger, better, happier. But I have to fight for something that matters. And maybe I need to stop focusing so much on winning or losing, the beginning and the end, and just fight, live. After all, people don’t just remember that BSU won the Fiesta Bowl in 2007, they remember how BSU won the Fiesta Bowl in 2007. Maybe I need to focus more on the how. Maybe I need to stop trying so hard to get somewhere and just drive. Maybe driving can be my new metaphor.

I wish I had all the answers. I wish I knew exactly what to do to make things better, perfect. But I don’t. And it doesn’t really matter how carefully I follow the rules, or how hard I study for the test, I still won’t have all the answers. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be all right, anyway. I can always make something up. I think I’m pretty good at that.

You know how in historical novels or movies, whenever a war starts up, the characters always assure each other that it will be over by Christmas but it never is? I think that’s kind of how this year was. My war was supposed to be over by finals week. Well, finals are over and the war isn’t. But that’s okay. It will be soon. Because now I see that victory isn’t in winning the war, it’s in ending the war, and somehow coming to a place where I don’t ever have to hide or be somebody I’m not. As for the rest of it, well, to bring this thing around full circle and quote one of my favorite movies, “It will be all right. How? I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

A 7:55 Kind of Day

One Sunday morning last spring I woke up at 7:55 to a text message from my choir director asking why I wasn’t at church warming up with the high school bell choir. Answer: I am not actually in the high school bell choir and I had no idea that I was expected to play with them that morning. Nevertheless, I bolted out of bed and by 8:15 I was at church with bells in my hands. Then, once I was there, I was weaseled into playing with them at a concert that afternoon as well. What was supposed to be a nice relaxing Sunday (practically an oxymoron in my world) turned into a busy day of rehearsals and performing. I didn’t really mind. Nice relaxing Sundays are rather overrated in my opinion. But having my plans suddenly altered before I’m even really awake is not my favorite way to start the day.

Today progressed in a somewhat similar vein, except that today is Tuesday and I had at least managed to crawl out of bed, drink my coffee, and have a shower before the plan-altering text arrived. It was from my mom, informing me that she needed someone to take our sick dog to the vet for her, as she had to go to work. I agreed, but I’m the sort of person who thinks of all the details, so I didn’t fail to note that I didn’t know the way to the vet, had no money to pay them, and that my uncooperative tin can would be very reluctant to drive all the way there (my tin can doesn’t like to drive anywhere that takes longer than fifteen minutes and involves speeds of more that 35 miles per hour, and even then it would just as soon stay home).

To make a long story short, I quickly blasted my hair with the blow drier, packed up the pizza sticks I was planning to eat for lunch, the potatoes I was planning to fix for dinner, and the book I was planning to pass the day with and headed over to my mom’s house to trade cars and receive further instructions on taking the dog to the vet. Then, desperate not to have to face the task alone, I texted my sister and asked if she would come with me if I came to pick her up on the way. She said she would.

So, nearly an hour before the vet appointment, I loaded the poor, sad dog into the car and drove to the house where my sister and her boyfriend live. But when I called her to tell her I was waiting outside she informed me that they weren’t home at the moment, but would be shortly. I spent ten anxious minutes playing Shoot Bubble on my cell phone (which, by the way, is a rather demoralizing game, as it is fond of loudly informing me that I am a loser if I don’t manage to get rid of all the colored bubbles in time) before they finally arrived and we departed for the vet. All was well, however. We arrived exactly on time.

The entire appointment lasted maybe twenty minutes and we ended up leaving the dog there to get some x-rays and such. I returned my sister to her house and then went back to my mom’s to fix dinner. Fortunately, the day concluded pleasantly with roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and a new episode of “NCIS,” which was only disappointing because it wasn’t the one where we find out how Gibbs and Tony met.

Anyway, as with the original 7:55 day I don’t really mind it. It was not the day I was intending to have but it was not a terrible day by any means. Now if only I could find a way to be as productive with my schoolwork as I was with today’s tasks, I would be doing very well indeed.

But What Are You Going to DO With That?

So, I’m a history major, in case you hadn’t guessed.

When I meet someone new and they learn that I’m a college student, they usually ask me what my major is. When I tell them, they almost invariably respond with, “What are you going to do with that?”

Until last fall, I was planning on majoring in history education and being a history teacher. Most people could accept that answer fine, never mind that education in my state is being cut up, down, left, and right and so it’s not really a great time to be a new teacher trying to find a job. Never mind all of that. I was going for a degree that would qualify me for a specific job, which was fine.

But now everything is different. A history degree doesn’t qualify you to do much of anything except get more history degrees and eventually become a professor so that you can help other nerds get their useless history degrees, thus perpetuating the cycle. So nobody understands why I’m getting one. And they really don’t understand when I respond to that invariable question by saying that I don’t know what I’m going to do after I graduate.

I get it. The economy sucks. A lot of people don’t understand spending thousands of dollars on school if there’s not going to be some immediate payoff. But getting a very specialized degree isn’t going to make a job magically appear where it doesn’t exist. No matter what degree I get, I’m not going to have many job prospects when I graduate. If I’m going to end up in the same place no matter what, I might as well get a degree in something I like.

And you know what? I really like school. I never liked school. Ever. I liked junior high because I liked the person I was, but I didn’t like school itself. I hated high school. I hated my first semester of college. But now I finally am actually enjoying school. I like my classes. I like the things I’m learning about. For the first time I feel like I’m living my life instead of just waiting for it to start. That’s worth it, to me.

I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do when I graduate. I might go to graduate school. I might not. (Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly insane, I actually entertain the notion of going to law school, but then I remember that I don’t have nearly enough motivation for that.) I’ll figure it out. I don’t feel the need to have the rest of my life planned out. I’m pretty sure that never works.

I think what bothers me the most about the “what are you going to do with that” people is the implication that there’s no value in actually getting the degree, its only worth is what kind of a job it can land you. But even if my history degree proves to be, as I once heard someone refer to all liberal arts degrees, “just a piece of paper that says you can rub two brain cells together,” I’ll always know I had a great time getting it. Nobody can ever take that away from me.

All Roads Lead to Choir

It’s been kind of a hard year.

First, I should clarify that by year I mean school year. In my world there have always been two types of years. One starts in January and ends in December and the other one starts in August and ends in June (July just gets left out).

Everything changed in August. I moved into an apartment on my college campus, which I love, but change is always hard and moving sucks. It took awhile to get used to. Then some really good friends moved away. My whole life seemed to be one giant upheaval. But there was hope on the horizon. September was coming and that gave me hope in two forms: school and choir.

School was great last year. I went expecting to hate it and I loved it. This year, almost the opposite happened. I went expecting it to be awesome and I hated it. All my classes were easy and boring, but I had to spend hours every day doing mindless homework. By October I was counting the weeks until Christmas break and in the meantime I threw all my energy into choir.

If you don’t know me very well, you should know that everything always comes back to choir. If something goes wrong, it’s because of choir. If something goes so amazingly well I can’t believe it, it’s because of choir. I could start writing about any aspect of my life, and within a paragraph or two, I would be writing about choir.

The problem last fall was that I had too much brain energy and nowhere for it to go. So I focused it on really stupid “problems” like why the church Christmas concert had been changed from one performance each on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to one performance on Saturday and two on Sunday. I obsessed more over that than I did about the entire semester’s school work combined.

But then Christmas came, the semester from hell ended, the concert was a blast even without the Monday performance, and I almost believed that all would be well again. Except that Christmas break kind of sucked. By New Year’s, I was tired of sitting around with nothing to do all day. I wanted school to start again. I wanted to get on with an awesome new semester that would make me forget how crappy the last one was. I should have known it wasn’t going to happen that way.

The new semester started and it was going pretty well, not amazing, but not terrible, and then my obsessive energy found a new outlet: my vocal adequacy (or inadequacy, depending on what sort of mood I was in on any particular day). At first I thought that might be a somewhat productive thing to obsess over, because How I Can Be a Better Singer is certainly a more legitimate use of brain power than Why We’re Not Having the Concert on Monday. But it’s turned into…well, it’s turned into a mess.

And that, unfortunately, is where I have to end the story. See, I don’t usually talk about my various cohorts on this blog because I’m sure the moment I did they would all develop magic Someone Is Talking About Me sensors and come wandering over here to have a look, and then I would have to answer a bunch of questions about Why I Was Writing About Them On the Internet. So that is why I have to leave out the specifics of how I turned my life into a giant mess.

The point, though, is that I’m basically in the same place I was last fall, which is to say, I’m bored. I have a lot of mental energy that has nowhere to go. I could find a new hobby, sure, but I don’t want a hobby. In an average week I spend about seven hours at church and wish it was more. Finding something that takes an hour or two ever week is not going to help. I need an all-consuming lifestyle. Maybe I should join a cult (I’m just kidding, for those of you who can’t read sarcasm).

I know I probably expect too much of choir. It gets me through the week. It gives me something to care about. It’s where I met most of my really good friends. I guess sometimes I should give choir a break and focus at least a little of my energy on something else, even if that something else is writing blog posts about choir so that I can pretend there isn’t a French Revolution test tomorrow that I should be studying for.

I Can't, I Have Rehearsal

So, I’m starting to get pretty irritated with The Message Board again. I do enjoy reading and posting there and I was finally starting to find my snarky side, but sometimes I worry that I’m going to get upset and say something I don’t mean. The views there are also really black and white, which annoys me as well.

There’s no single thing that’s causing this. I actually thought the recent discussion about the Civil War décor was respectful and reasonable, even if it wasn’t exactly a good example of how we should be looking at history. It’s more just the general attitude. Anyone who’s conservative/Republican is a dominionist. Anyone who’s Christian is fundie/evangelical/believes in creation. Anyone who eats at Chick-Fil-A is anti-gay.

It’s the generalizations about Christians that bug me the most, and not even because I feel insulted or anything like that. I don’t really know why. I guess maybe it’s because I don’t feel like a good Christian most of the time, partly because I don’t feel comfortable being open about my religion. For some people, “Christian” conjures up an image similar to the guy who’s recently taken to standing on the BSU quad in the afternoons shouting about how we all need to go read the word of God. (I’ve nicknamed him Bible Man. I heard someone else call him John the Baptist, which I thought was pretty funny also). That’s the image Christianity gets because that’s what people see. The reason you don’t “see” the normal Christians is because we’re all too busy going drinking after choir practice. But if you don’t see us then we must not be there, right?

Speaking of that, the militant atheists bug me, too. Some people are atheists, which is fine. But a lot of the atheists on this message board are the type who think they’re better/smarter/more evolved than Christians (or, presumably, followers of other religions) because they believe in logic. I believe in logic, too, but I also understand that there are things that can’t be explained logically. It seems like it would be a smarter, more highly evolved position to admit that you don’t have all the answers. But I don’t want to go around calling myself better than everyone else. (I’m not being sarcastic. I really don’t.)

And then, always at the back of my mind, there’s Quiverfull, and I hate it even more for making me care what a bunch of strangers on the internet have to say. Because really, why should I care? If there’s one thing I want to learn, it’s how to be okay with my own self without needing to look up, down, and sideways for some kind of approval. And you know where I get closest to that, ironically enough? It’s when I’m singing.

Sometimes people on these message boards joke about the “house churches” fundies set up, calling them “The Church of the Holy Basement.” They’d probably call my belief system “The Church of the Holy Choir Practice” and they wouldn’t be far off. So you know what, snark on creationists all you want. Talk about how all Christians want to do is outlaw abortion and keep gay people from getting married. Tell yourself how much better you are because you believe in logic. I found the only thing in the world that gives me any kind of self-confidence. Logic can go stuff it.

Well, I suppose I better stop writing now. We have rehearsal in the morning.

Oh, and I’m going to eat at Chick-Fil-A whenever I bloody well please, thank you very much.

How Do You Like Your Historical Figures?

What is it about the dang Civil War? Couldn’t we pick a more interesting historical era to obsess over? I get that some people just really, really like the Civil War, and that’s fine (although it would be nice if they could refrain from writing books about it). But I wish the history-haters on my message board could find a new dead horse to beat.

This week’s controversy surrounded a rather well known fundamentalist family who posted some photos of their home décor on their blog. In one room, they had old pictures of Confederate leaders hanging on the wall. I’m sure you can imagine the reactions on the message board. “They’re honoring racists who fought against their country! That makes them racist, too!”

I have several points to make, here. First, I don’t really care what anyone wants to hang up in their own house where presumably the only other people who will ever see it are people they have invited in. Granted, this family sort of invited the whole world in via the internet, but for heaven’s sake, it’s just a picture on the wall. It doesn’t necessarily have boatloads of meaning attached to it.

Second, we honor guys who fought against their country all the time. Washington, Jefferson, and all their cohorts were just as traitorous as any Confederate leader. The difference is that they won and the winners get to write history. When I brought this up on the message board, somebody basically said that it would be wrong for a Brit to revere or honor Washington for the same reason it was wrong for an American to honor a Confederate leader. I think that’s the biggest load of hooey. A Brit could easily find Washington admirable for fighting for a cause he believed in and seeing it through to the end, even when it looked like he would lose. Why should our choice of favorite historical figure be limited by the country we happen to live in?

But the real issue on the message board wasn’t fighting against your country. It was racism (actually, the real issue was that these people are fundamentalist Christians, but that’s another story). People seemed to be under the impression that by “honoring” these historical figures, this family was agreeing with everything they stood for, which means they must be racists.

That’s an even bigger load of hooey. Let’s take another example. I’m really into Henry VIII. I would probably hang a picture of Henry VIII on my wall. Now, Henry VIII was a jerk. He had two of his wives beheaded and he divorced another one just because she was ugly. He repeatedly disinherited his daughters. The fact that I like Henry VIII doesn’t mean that I think any of those things are okay for anyone to do now, in the 21^st century. It just means that I acknowledge that those things were okay if you were the King of England in the sixteenth century.

My history-is-like-anthropology-but-with-dead-people mentality means that I think there are very few things that are inherently good or bad, right or wrong. It all depends on your society and culture. If you grew up in a home and a society where racism was perfectly acceptable and never met anyone who even suggested otherwise, you couldn’t be expected to just somehow know that it’s wrong. That was America in the 1860’s, especially the South.

Just so I’m perfectly clear, I’m absolutely not saying that racism is okay now, in 2011. But people in the 1860’s didn’t think the way we do today. Their whole world was different. It’s the height of unfairness to expect them to think the way we do, to come to the same conclusions.

I don’t necessarily think that this fundie family thinks like this. My guess is that they have absolutely no idea who the guys in the pictures are, but they like Civil War stuff and so they liked the pictures. I don’t expect the folks on the message board to think like I do either. Not everyone is a history major. I get that. But I wish we could stop judging everyone in the past by our own values. I’ve had to learn not to judge people in the 21^st century for being products of their time. I just think the same courtesy needs to be given to those who came before.