birthday blitz

Today, April 15th, kicks off the birthday season in my house with my oldest sister turning twenty two. For the first time, I just realized that my sister's birthdays take place in chronological order throughout the year (my oldest sister having the first of the year in April and my youngest sister the last in September, with Rachel and I in between). WEIRD.

Anyway, because my mother was crafty, she planned for us all to be earth signs so that we would be compatible with and like her, zodiac-wise. And so we have the yearly string of spring birthdays, April 15th (she was born early and is an Ares, thus failing THE PLAN), April 20th, and culminating in my birthday, May 10th.

Fascinating, fascinating trivia, Alex. Thank you for sharing that with the internet.

No but seriously. Birthday season is here. When I think about my immediate friend group, it intrigues me to report that five out of eight of us are Tauruses. Five out of eight! Meaning that when I read my horoscope, I tend to think about it in relation to the majority of my friends. And I realize maybe that is a little weird.

But it's true. And now you know.

See, see? This right here is the downside of BEDA. Rambling pre-bed posts about my zodiac sign. What am I even?

I love metaphors like a love song, baby

I love metaphors. This love has been growing for a while now but it felt especially prominent after my first encounter with The Fault In Our Stars. Reading about Augustus Waters and his use of metaphorical resonance, I was ensconced in the magic of metaphors, the seemingly endless possibility that lies within them.

I started to use metaphors in my life as a way of talking about things without actually talking about them. It was easier that using the real words and maybe it was a bit cowardly but I still managed to access the same conversation, even if it was hidden behind a facade. It was even fun, finding the right analogy and trying to fit it into the situation, all the while avoiding the admission that this was my life I was discussing. It was easier for me to compare my life to a game of Clue than to openly say that I had no idea what was going on and I was stumbling around in the dark.

John Green first introduced me to the power of metaphor and I'm extremely grateful for that. He showed me how metaphors, particularly in literature, give us an easy entry point to asking the hard questions we have to ask if we're going to live examined lives. Metaphors are like the simple machines I learned about at Science World when I was ten; they make the heavy lifting a little more manageable.

I'll be continuing with my use of them to tackle the tricky stuff. When actually talking about stuff is too hard? METAPHOR!

Now, kids, go forth and conquer your challenges with metaphor clutched in your fist. I strongly recommend it.

my turn to leave

y brain gets the fact that you come as much as go,

though this logic exists incognito.

The rest of me is the tender skin under a band-aid,

and I’m not sure if what you were covering up will heal,

or if anything was ever broken.

But, damn—it hurts coming off,

regardless of speed or efficiency.

I don’t want you to stay forever,

wouldn’t ask that you’re always around.

But I’m jealous, okay? That you get to depart,

choose when to leave, and how.

I feel a bit stuck, like a ship run aground,

while you come and you go as you please,

never thinking of the transparent privilege you have

to ever so simply just leave.

I stand in my doorway

as you dish out your hugs

to my family members at large,

sink into the frame,

out of place in my skin,

not knowing where

in this puzzle

I belong.

You slink towards me,

I’ve forgotten I exist.

But I still garner the last embrace.

Your exit resembles the quick untying of shoelaces,

to me it feels like a corset pulled tighter.

I’m selfishly wishing to strip it off,

untie my own shoes and run barefoot

towards the ocean

until the tide and my own inhibitions

bring me back

effortlessly

to you.

See,

You don’t have to lie alone

in a bed that not the smoothest conman could convince you is half full,

nostalgia replacing the heat in your cheeks,

as your body forgets

what it was like to conform to another.

You don’t have to remain,

air stained

by my lingering presence

as I go off to conquer grander maybes.

Perhaps that’s not quite fair,

I hope you’ll forgive me

for looking at this through my own eyes, for now.

I hope you’ll forgive me

for asking you

to give me my chance,

to walk out the door,

Plant kisses and wish you goodbye.

Step slow with regret, out of sight, out of everything,

leaving nothing but memories behind.

But wait.

I want the pleasure of coming back too,

I want to not have to wait.

To show up at your door

when I want, when I’m ready,

swagger up with my unmemorized gait.

Not always be peering out windows,

and shuffling around empty rooms,

trying to convince myself I’m not waiting

for anything

for anyone.

for you.

Is there a way I can grasp hold of this balance,

not always be the one left behind?

Or should I accept my fate as the beach

give up hopes of becoming the tide?

forever in our fingertips

Today you get a poem.

It felt like forever in our fingertips,

Rocks flung from commitment-phobic palms

into a cacophony of water,

indifferent to our suffering.

And as we screamed obscenities,

unforgotten injustices,

into the river,

there was peace for a flickering moment.

A contradiction,

one second of feeling broken and whole;

empty and everything.

It was like forever in our fingertips—

 A feeble forever that we tied to those rocks

and half hurled from our bodies.

A forever that was sucked away,

involuntarily dismissed,

like the laughs bubbling from our lungs,

like the tears leaking from our eyes.

It was like forever in our fingertips,

slipping away because it never existed.

sitting in a tree

Today I went on a walk with no real destination in mind and ended up sitting on a tree for a couple hours.

Life is nice. It's nice to go on a Sunday stroll and find yourself in a forest that isn't the park you were aiming for. It's nice when you have someone to do this with, someone to hold your hand and follow you down the ravine.

Just sayin'.

The Hunger Games

So I just returned from seeing The Hunger Games for the second time and I think I'm a little more scarred than I was the first time around. This may be because for this show, I managed to keep my eyes open for pretty much the entire movie. And there was some scary shit that I blocked out at midnight on the 23rd.

My first not midnight, not falling asleep observation is about the shaky camera. This may have been pointed out to me by several sources between my two screenings but I picked up on it tonight and it kind of bothered me. I appreciated the artistic use of it when they were actually in the arena and I felt like it portrayed the hectic, panicky theme quite well (also, the fact that I couldn't tell what kind of violence was going on was nice for me) but, earlier in the movie, it seemed unnecessary. Why, I ask, did we need the shaky cam vibe when Katniss was hunting in the woods with Gale? The woods is the place that Katniss is most comfortable and at ease. The shaky, uncertain footage seemed contradictory to what I know from reading the books--not to go all book elitist but, um, yeah, Katniss in the woods should have been calm and steady.

The other thing that really stood out for me was the violence and it might have been because I'm generally sensitive to that kind of thing or because of the blog post Maggie Stiefvater wrote about it (god, I love Maggie Stiefvater). In her blog post, she talked about how people expressed wishes that it would have been more violent and I was aghast, mostly because that's not what The Hunger Games is about to me. It's not supposed to be some graphically violent portrayal of kids murdering each other. It's about, well, a lot of things, on various levels but to me it's mostly about Katniss, trying to stay alive for her sister. And yes, there's Peeta's qualms about his humanity and that leads Katniss to want to show the Gamemaker's that they don't own her but this is a story about love* and war and the kids affected by it. It's not supposed to be some depiction of gratuitous violence for the sake of it. I thought there was more than enough violence. Maybe it could have been more personal but maybe the point is that it wasn't**.

I'm pleased with The Hunger Games movie. There's not much I would have changed and nothing is really worth mentioning. I'm pretty excited to see what Jennifer Lawrence does with Catching Fire. And now we wait.

p.s. Okay, the real thing on my mind is the cave scene. All I could think about was how dirty Peeta's face was and then after Katniss got him the medicine and they fell asleep together, he woke up and his face was practically clean. I bet the medicine took care of that for him, right? Because it's magical, sexy face medicine. I see what you did there, Gamemakers. I see that.

*coughcough of the sisterly variety. Keep your pants on.
**I've read reviews where people said each tribute death felt like a punch to the gut. I didn't feel that way.

why I like buses

Whenever I hear people complain about how much they hate buses, I can be found making myself invisible on the fringes, trying to keep my mouth shut. You see, it's not exactly easy to convince people of the merits of public transit.

But the merits exist.

Mostly what I like about buses is that for however long, all the passengers are going the same place. Ever since I was younger, whenever travelling in cars, I find myself staring at drivers in other cars, wondering where they're going, what their lives are like, if they're late or on any kind of schedule. On a bus, it's like that only amplified. Everyone is confined to a certain place and people get on and off as they please. You could argue that a temporary camaraderie is created, as everyone inhales the same scents of too strong perfume and body odor and tries to ignore the same crazy people.

Then you get off the bus and the sense of unity disappears quietly, like maybe it never existed at all. And hey, maybe it didn't.

adventures in fate*: meeting Vita

I'm going to admit what you may already be thinking: I'm not very good at this BEDA thing. Like... I have good intentions and all and then I get locked in a lab room with my mom and there are blood pressure machines on us and we're supposed to talk about feels and everything falls to chaos.

That's basically what happened.

I also went to Seattle to meet a girl who I can basically sum up as my soulmate. Platonically. Don't make it weird.

So that took up some time.

Crossing the border both times, the inspection guards asked me what I was doing in Seattle and when I replied that I was meeting a friend and her mom, they wanted to know how long I'd known my friend and how we met.

Both times I tried not to sound sheepish when I said we've known each other for three years and we met on the internet. But it's hard not to sound sheepish when you tell people you're going to visit someone you've never technically speaking met. In my defense, meeting people from the internet doesn't seem as sketchy today as it did to me when I was eleven years old.

In short, it was lovely. Am I allowed to say that Vita and I have great chemistry without crossing a line? I said it. For two people who have never been in the same physical space at the same time, I think it's fair to say we hit it off. We literally just walked around and talked for hours and it was beautiful and surreal. The weirdest thing about the whole experience was definitely how not weird it was. I imagined it would be a little more awkward so I was surprised when it just totally wasn't. At all. Period.

It's been a pretty nice two days, travelling on the bus included.

*for comedic purposes only. I don't actually believe in fate. My view on soulmates however has changed since my encounter with the ever-amazing Vita. How could it not?

BEDA is going to be a thing

I feel like this month is a kind of precipice and I want to chronicle it in some way.

And it's April so... the answer seems clear.

BEDA.

For now I am tired. I'll write more tomorrow, friends.

:)