BUT IT'S THE SOLAR SYSTEM

It's a frightening day when you realize that you can sing perfectly, with all the lyrics and everything, an NSYNC B-side song that you haven't heard in at least 6 or 7 years. Is this why I have trouble remembering math formulas and the rules of biological cellular functions? Because they aren't in story/song format sung by NSYNC?! WHAT ELSE IS CLOGGING UP MY BRAIN LIKE A DISEASED COMPUTER HARD DRIVE.

I'm thinking most of school should just be in song format from now on, because that's apparently all I can handle. My brain hasn't progressed beyond the need to be entertained to learn, it's like a moody 6 year old. Good lord.

Jumbled Thoughts on Cake and "Mad Men"

Some things I have thought about a great deal today instead of homework:
1. Cake
2. Watching Mad Men with my mom

I cannot organize my thoughts into one coherent entry until I finish this Capstone essay, but I need to jump-start my writing muscles, so here we are.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wanted to do homework this afternoon, I really did, but I was hungry, so I ate supper, then I took a nap because I was tired and my head hurt, and then I woke up with an insatiable craving for cake.

If I had to choose a favorite cake, it would be a three-way tie between my mom's chocolate sheet cake, my paternal grandmother's coconut cake, and my maternal grandmother's caramel cake (when she doesn't try to substitute something in it to "make it healthier", most memorably angel food cake instead of yellow cake. this resulted in chaos and unhappiness.) Although the latter's lemon cake is also mind-blowingly excellent.

Pies are a good thing too, (I think in particular of my maternal grandmother's pecan pie and blueberry pie) but there is nothing like a really good slice of cake. It is fluffy, usually mixes well with milk and ice cream, and there is the issue of decoration to consider. All pies have to offer beside the filling is the crust, whereas cakes have flavored icing, in the shape of things; maybe flowers.

HAVE A RECIPE:

My Grandmother's Lemon Cake
Ingredients
Cake:
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable Crisco
6 eggs
1 tablespoon milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Icing:
1 box confectioner's sugar
juice from two lemons
1/2 cup milk

Steps
1. Preheat oven to 275 deg. F
2. Mix sugar and Crisco thoroughly
3. Add eggs and flour little by little; 2 eggs and 1/2 cup flour at a time.
4. Add lemon juice and milk
5. Mix well and bake
6. Mix icing ingredients well and pour over warm cake

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Mom: Omgomgomg ~*Jon Hamm*~ you are so attractive.
Me: I KNOW RIGHT. JUST. Don Draper is such an awful awful person that I would loathe in real life and kind of hate in TV life, but hot damn JON HAMM.
Mom: STOP CURSING, I raised you better than that.
Me: MRS. BLANKENSHIP IS ON SCREEN, EVERYONE BE QUIET.

The favorite character on Mad Men of both myself and my mom is Mrs. Blankenship, definitely, full on, all the way across the sky. Because she is clearly the refreshing fount of no-nonsense I-dislike-you-and-am-in-no-way-attracted-to-you-Don that none of his other secretaries have been. Also she has maybe the best lines, especially considering that they're all uttered in this extremely loud, passive-aggressive, monotone growl.

"MR. DRAPER, YOUR CHILD'S PSYCHOLOGIST CALLED."
"MR. DRAPER, SOMEONE CALLED WHEN YOU WERE IN THE TOILET, I DON'T REMEMBER HIS NAME, HE WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT LUNCH."

Every single time she is on screen, we just collapse with laughter. Maybe this is a thing that will only be understood by those who watch this show. Probably. It always makes me laugh, though.

Discouraged

Ever since middle school, when I started attending the Adventist private school system, I've listened to pastors wail about the number of "young people" growing up in the church and then drifting or leaving in their twenties and never coming back. They wrung their hands, and scowled around but mostly just looked sad and mystified, before looking determined and hopeful out at us young time bombs, who would maybe explode in a fury of rejection or acceptance of Jesus and the church, but more likely quietly fizzle out. But for then, we were still good, still safe, still working through puberty with the roil of emotions that would at least move us along in our search for God. Before our twenties, when we were in great danger of becoming lazy, tired, sedentary in our spiritual lives.

I always felt mostly normal throughout my life and have mostly felt conflicted about it. I'm not drawn towards chaos or instability, and never envied brilliant unbalanced people like some do. I'm mostly all right with being intelligent without genius and hard working without being incredibly driven. But sometimes I feel like I should be the exception, even if I'm not sure I can be. And this is one of those instances. As much as I'd like to be the time bomb that explodes, I don't think I am. I fear I may be the one, the 70% or whatever the statistic is now, that just fizzles.

It's not that I don't respect Christianity, and Adventism in particular, it's just that I am so tired. I'm not leaving the church, but I do feel dead in the water, just treading and not really going anywhere. I accept responsibility for this, no one is to blame directly for my relationship with God, and the state of mine is probably the way it is because I am very often cowardly, only forced into forward motion at the very last second when I have no choice.

But I also feel tired by all the events this school makes me attend. All the worships, vespers, convocations, in which they exhort us to make time for personal devotions and find meaning for ourselves, and I want to scream back at them "PLEASE LET ME, YOU ARE WEARING ME OUT." Because I do not have time, and it kills me that they blame me for that. Yes, I could probably cut back on the time I spend reading books for entertainment, or watching TV or whatever, but I could also be spending the time that you're taking to tell me to go pray TO ACTUALLY PRAY.

Religion and God and spirituality is such a viscerally personal thing, I am so discouraged by this whole situation. It kills me that I can't seem to retain Christianity and I'm just sitting there a lot of the time. I know what to do and don't know what to do. I am both terrified to ask what to do, lest the answer be terrifying, and tired of just sitting around.

Mostly though, I want the personal space from this infuriating institution to work it out, without them worrying over me, without them howling about the young people leaving and then being unable to fathom why being over-parented would lead to the parents being resented.

Southern Adventist University, please calm down and leave me alone for a bit. I hope everything will be fine with me, but I fear that I definitely will not be fine if something about this doesn't change.

Playground Detectives

I don't know that I had a terribly vivid imagination as a kid, but I was a highly suspicious and somewhat paranoid kid. I liked knowing exactly what to expect and having explanations for things I didn't understand. That being said, I was shy of adults and didn't particularly like to ask questions that I thought might be obvious. Which left me with little else to do when I discovered a mystery during recess but speculate and think about maybe investigating.

There were two major mysteries that existed on my grade school playground: The Mystery of the Red Colored Wood in the Mulch Pile on the upper playground and The Mystery of the Missing Fence on the lower. My team of fellow investigators included Coleman, Joey, and occasionally Kara.

Joey fancied himself an intellectual, but one who liked NASCAR and pro-wrestling. He got all A's, and the teachers were always fond of him, except for when he constantly interrupted their questions with the answers. Coleman had decided to become the class clown and my sidekick, which was great because I loved people who made me laugh and let me boss them around. The teachers were less fond of him, especially when he had a tantrum because I didn't win the class spelling bee. I was baffled by his loyalty, but he was fun to have around. Kara mostly just hung around to watch Coleman do something foolish and maybe get hurt.

I decided early on that the mulch pile mystery was definitely the inferior one. Coleman's conclusion of MURDER, because of the presence of reddish wood chips, just seemed too obvious. And frankly, his later addition of the escaped zoo gorilla seemed silly.

"There is no wood that is red! Look around! All the trees are brown! THERE HAS TO BE A BODY SOMEWHERE," and then he would furiously dig into the huge mountain of wood and dirt. Joey would scoff.

"What about REDWOOD trees?" he asked. Coleman shook his head, still digging.

"This wood is TOO red. Too red for anything but MURDER." He gave up digging soon, and we bounced around on top of the pile, until the teachers told us to get down before we hurt ourselves.

The fence mystery captured my imagination for almost two years. It was perhaps more intriguing because of its lack of evidence of foul play, unlike the red wood chips in the mulch pile. One day a panel of the chain link fence surrounding the lower playground and separating it from the patch of woods at the back of the school, was present, was there, and the next it simply wasn't. The panel beside it appeared twisted, the pole half out of the ground and the wire poking out the sides. It was all very suspicious.

"Maybe it was a wild boar. My dad read about a wild boar in North Georgia that got up to like, 100 pounds," Joey informed us as we examined the gate. This time Coleman scoffed.

"ONE HUNDRED pounds? Have you seen pigs? They are definitely not that big," he informed Joey.

Eventually interest in the gate died down, but I would glance at it every so often, with its strange gaping entrance into the woods, and wonder. Finally I decided that I would never know. A few weeks before summer after third grade, I saw the school janitor replacing the panel, and concluded that it must have been a routine maintenance thing.

OR WAS IT.

And Then All My Dreams Came True

I never talked, or even thought, much about dreams until middle school. I've always had pretty vivid nightmares, but nice or interesting dreams, no. I could remember very well the murderous evil reflected in the eyes of the skeletons that burst from the glowing green hell of my closet, but happy thoughts just seemed to dissipate in a faintly cheerful puff in the morning. If I did remember a dream that wasn't a nightmare, it was unbelievably boring, like a re-run of the particularly dull parts of my day. This was not the case for my new school's friends, who frequently had creative, fascinating dream worlds in which magical adventures with talking animals occurred, or hilarious, incongruous happenstances with schoolmates took place. They could spend entire recesses discussing their dreams, while I said little and thought resentfully about my dream closet of horrors.

In high school, we learned about lucid dreams, in which you could harness your brain to have whatever type of dream you wanted when you became aware that you were dreaming.

I. Was. Thrilled.

No more beloved family members turning to me in the car before turning into carnivorous monsters and devouring me! No more creepy strangers breaking into my bedroom at night and almost stabbing me! My nighttime horrors were over, now that I realized I could trick my brain into not being a terrifying fount of hellish imagination!

I tried for weeks to have a lucid dream, before I mostly gave up. I didn't have many nightmares any more, only the dull ones, so it wasn't really that big of a deal. And then one night. I was dreaming about walking to class at school, trying to remember the date, when I realized that the date was during fall break. So I couldn't really be at school. I MUST BE DREAMING, OMG.

What should I do what should I do what should I do? I could do anything! I could fly off into the air! I could conjure a unicorn from thin air and ride it all the way home where I would dig up buried treasure in the yard and build a castle of rainbows and laughter! I could remember all the rules of algebra and not forget them five minutes after I learned them! I was paralyzed in the courtyard with joy and indecision.

It was then that I remembered vaguely wishing I could play an instrument well. NOW I COULD, BY GOD, MY WISHES COULD BE GRANTED. So I immediately started a bluegrass band in my school chaplain's office with me on banjo, some guy I had a crush on for like, two months on guitar, and a random girl on violin. We were intense, probably the best bluegrass band that school had EVER SEEN. After we played a few songs, I drove home in my car to watch TV and take the rest of my dream day off.

Because ANYTHING WAS POSSIBLE.

The Monologist

Although I am now pretty much a nervous 21 year old senior in college with no solid life destination in mind, when I was a somewhat confident eight (?) year old second grader, I was going places. I'm not saying I was always sure of everything I did, I was still pretty nervous with anything that wasn't familiar, (even fun things like field trips could set off my panic instinct), but when Ms. B let me read to the class for the last hour or so before the last bell rang, I was THE BOSS.

I would arrange everyone on the carpet while I took the teacher's stool, and generously let them choose which one of the two chapter books I had been reading from lately; usually a Boxcar Children mystery or an abridged kiddie version of a Jack London novel. Then I would settle down to let them bask in my reading prowess. I didn't do different voices for the characters, but what I lacked in voice acting, I made up for in enthusiasm and emphasis. It was my favorite thing. When I was an adult, I thought, I would definitely make this a regular thing. Maybe even a job!

I liked being able to hold people's attention with a story, even if it wasn't my own, and even better if they laughed. Mostly I wanted people to laugh, even though I wasn't daring enough to be the class clown. Anyway, Ms. B obviously thought I had what it took, or she wouldn't ask me to read aloud so often.

A few years later I found out the reason Ms. B either let me read or showed so many movies to my class was because she was severely depressed after the death of her mother and sister earlier that year.

But I still love reading aloud. David Sedaris is my specialty, so hit me up if you're depressed, I guess.