Toms season

I felt pretty jazzed this morning as I skipped to my bus stop wearing my stained, worn, holey Toms. The soles are slowly disappearing from wandering all down the West Coast and back. The heels are a little folded and looser than they once were. Yet I had that feeling of success that I was going out without needing a hardcore tread to keep from slipping. I'm not even wearing socks.

I remember the last day I wore my Toms in November. It had snowed that night but I wasn't ready to let go yet. Then I had to cross the train tracks climb a gravelly hill out of a parking lot. Spoiler: I made it up without falling. Still, it was a little iffy a few moments and I knew it was time. I put my olive green shoes in the shoe bin and exchanged them for a pair of boots that made everyone ask me if I was taller.

After a solid weekend of lying in the sunshine and walking from one end of town to another wearing a tank top, my feet feeling claustrophobic and sweaty inside my leather boots, I decided to revisit the shoe bin. I can't get over how great it is to not have to hunt for two clean socks in the morning. Not being as tall is a little disappointing but it's worth it for the lightness my feet feel with every step.

I just hope it doesn't snow again.

a simple post

I know I don't know you. And even if I do, I don't really know you. I don't know what you eat for breakfast or what song you've been listening to on repeat most recently or what you think about in the shower. I don't know what unexpected thing made you smile today and I don't know what you're most looking forward to. I don't even know that anyone is going to read this at all.

For that reason, among others, it's hard for me to explain why exactly I've been posting things to this blog for the past five years. Yeah. Five years. My first post is dated March 12th, 2008. Back then, I wrote about Twilight and what an excellent procrastinator I was. Thank god my taste in books has evolved, if nothing else.

Five years. I still can't get over that. Today was not unlike one I probably would have experienced at thirteen, however. I slept until 10:30, the first time I've managed to sleep in all week, and then stayed in bed for most of the day reading a book (Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler). I feel like starting and finishing a book in one day is something I did more when I was thirteen but I could be wrong. 98% of the posts I wrote in 2008 were about Twilight so I don't really want to go back there and poke around. I should probably take some of those posts down but there's something appealing to me about leaving them for the world to see. I am a person who legitimately loved Twilight for at least eight months and I am not ashamed of that. Okay, maybe I'm a little ashamed of it, but not enough to make my blog posts private.

This way, you can see how I've developed as a person, right? A ton of stuff about me has changed in five years. For example, most of my cells have replaced themselves. In two more years, I will be made up of a completely different arrangement of cells--nothing will be the same. Since 2008, I've written two novels, a screenplay and countless poems. I've fallen in love. I've travelled the West Coast of the United States. I've won a poetry slam. I've played music at an open mic. I've hosted a Philosophers' Cafe. I've been to a wedding. I've jumped off a telephone pole. Most importantly, I've stopped believing Twilight is the pinnacle of young adult literature.

I'm irrevocably grateful for that last one.

It's nice to have some written evidence that I have grown. I'm evolving as a person--check my blog for proof. And even though I don't really know you, reader (at least not in the same way that you know me, if you read this blog), I plan to keep writing. Maybe I'll figure out some more reasons why in the next five years.

Stolen (a book review)

Psychoanalyze if you will, but I have been wanting to read this abduction book for a long while. It came out in 2010 in North America and I'm pretty sure I've had it on my to-read list since then. I even got pretty close a couple months ago in a book store when I illicitly read the first twenty pages sitting on the uncomfortable carpeted floor. It wasn't until I walked into teen section of the library after finally getting a library card yesterday that I got to take it home. It was all mine. Three years later.

The plot of the book is pretty simple. There are two characters: Gemma and Ty. It's written from Gemma's perspective as a letter to Ty, who kidnaps her in the Bangkok airport and takes her to middle-of-nowhere Australia.

I don't know what I was expecting. It's a kidnapping story, complete with a drink being drugged and a girl being put in a trunk. About a hundred pages in, I was half ready to stop reading, both totally creeped out by Ty but also invested in knowing where it was going. I kept reading.

I was worried it was going to be some twisted version of Beauty and the Beast where the victim falls in love with her captor. But it wasn't. Ty kept talking about how he was "saving her" from her life because he loved her and, though she started to trust him at the end (or, at least, trust that he wasn't going to kill her), she never really believed him.

I kept thinking about how I would react to the same situation. Would I be as feisty and venomous as Gemma? I feel like I wouldn't take on the same generally loathing tactic. I think I would take a more amenable, reasoning approach. She made a lot of biting remarks to him and I get that he kidnapped her and she hated him but he was also her only way out of the desert. She didn't really try to talk him down. Having said that, he was seemingly mentally unwell and I think Gemma did considerably well with her coping mechanisms and escape attempts.

The writing was excellent. I believed Gemma. She was real and strong and she didn't give up. She told the story from a place of confusion--she didn't really know how she felt about Ty--but that was represented and she felt reliable. And I was confused, too. Obviously, I realize that kidnapping is bad but by the end I was sympathetic to Ty. He really wasn't a terrible person. Crazy yes, but not evil. Ty was a fascinating character, if a little incomprehensible. I can't say I ever really liked him, but I felt really sorry for him. I was also afraid of him.

In addition to the beautifully handled character dyamics, the setting was exquisite. Lucy Christopher paints the desert with such life and vitality that you can see why Ty loves it so much.

It was worth the wait. Maybe a little bit slow for a psychological thriller novel but if you take away the thriller part, it's does an exceptional job. It's provocative and raw and if you're in the mood for an emotional rollercoaster that takes place outside of your own life, I recommend Stolen.

*As a friend said last night, "If I was lonely, I would get a dog, not kidnap a girlfriend."

I like to make things

TARDIS pumpkin

Puff pride pumpkin

Untitled earth art

Henna!

Making stuff is really satisfying.






Whether it's carved TARDIS pumpkins or henna designs.




Or branches leaning up against a stump that you convince yourself is earth art.

Spot the rainbow button I made

Taking something and creating something else is one of the best feelings ever.

More henna!

 Look, buttons!

This is model DNA made out of sugar and wood

This blog post doesn't have much of a point.

Dalek sculpture from clay-like stuff

Besides saying that creating things is cool.

I like bowties. Bowties are cool.

And I want to keep doing it.

Artichoke or lotus? Who knows?

Even when my lotus flower snow sculpture turns into an artichoke.




Especially when my lotus flowers turn into artichokes.










The end.

losing count of my existential crises

ni·hil·ism  /ˈnīəˌlizəm/

Noun The rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless. Extreme skepticism, according to which nothing in the world has a real existence.

Maybe this isn't the right word to describe my thoughts over the past week. I haven't rejected moral principles or been extremely skeptical. I have, however, spent a lot of time thinking about how tiny and insignificant I am, and--by extension--how insignificant the entire human experiment is.

It kind of started with a presentation at school. This presentation set out to explain a bit of local geology but with the Carl Sagan inspired idea that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. To describe the formation of a lake in BC, we needed to start with the Big Bang.

I don't remember enough to go into it in detail but suffice it to say that the universe is unimaginably big. Literally. I reached a point where I couldn't imagine the universe having no edge but I also couldn't imagine an edge. That was the end of my imaginable consciousness. How can something expand if it's already infinite?

Inhale. Exhale.

If you can picture me lying on the cork floor of my school on a Wednesday afternoon, laughing in odd spurts to myself as a classmate whispered, "She's having a breakdown," you will have an accurate depiction of my life last week.

Why am I even writing this? I don't really understand. Really, what is the point of anything? I am a trifling, albeit multicellular and complex organism, living on a rock that is both huge and comparably minuscule, rotating around a ball of gas, that's spinning around a galaxy, that exists among an infinite number of other galaxies, in a universe that never ends.

Suddenly, my life doesn't seem to matter anymore. Or maybe it does matter, despite everything. Or maybe it doesn't matter but it also doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. But no, I think it matters. It matters but then at the same time it doesn't and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.

"what's your name anyway?"

It's just a name. I want to say I don't understand why it's such a big deal but I do. People aren't their names, yet we're certainly very attached to them. We take on the symbols and labels we have--some are chosen, some are assigned to us. They become us and we become them. So it goes.

Around the time of my eighteenth birthday, I started to play with this idea. I wanted to try being not-Alex. I was ideally situated at the beginning of a two month road trip, travelling to places where no one (save for my three companions) knew my name.

I went for it. I started to introduce myself as Lexi to our Couchsurfing hosts (I was persuaded the 'i' was better than a 'y' like I wanted). It was hard because I wasn't completely unknown, travelling with my mom and sisters. It's not the best for your name change when you introduce yourself as Lexi and then your mom tells a story about this girl named Alex and no one knows that it's you. Even when my mom referred to me as Lexi, it felt somehow wrong. I didn't like the way it sounded in her mouth.

The other thing that bothered me was how close it was to my mom's name, Leslie. I would have chosen Lex but my sister and I decided if you were going to change your name you should do more than drop a letter.

Anyway, it didn't really work. Starting school in September with a boy named Alex that everyone knew, I decided to try again. It bothered me to turn around whenever I heard someone say Alex and realize that nine out of ten times, they weren't talking to/about me.* "I'm Lexi," I said. "My name is Lexi."

The weirdest part was hearing people use it. The "Hey Lexi"s were strange for quite a while--still kind of are. I was surprised at how easy it was, though, surprised that no one questioned it. I shouldn't have been, but I was. I felt like everyone should have been able to tell that Lexi wasn't my real name. As far as I know, they couldn't.

After a couple months, I decided I didn't really like it. I didn't hate it but I also didn't feel like Lexi and Lexi didn't feel like me. I gave myself an adjustment period but it wasn't sticking. I kind of gave up on it a bit, introducing myself to new groups as Alex again. Then all hell broke loose.

Do you know how annoying it is when people start an interaction with you by saying, "What's your name anyway? I'm so confused,"?????

It's pretty fucking annoying. Excuse my language. It's one thing if someone asks you what you prefer to be called, or which name you want to go by, but to have someone tell you that your multiple names CONFUSE them? Annoying as fuck. I feel like the appropriate response is, "Do I look like I care that you're confused?" Because, for the most part, I do not. I'm not yet the girl that would say that with attitude when confronted, whether you call me Alex or Lexi or Axel. Maybe one day.

I want to relate this to gender expression and those who get asked to clarify their gender on a regular basis but I don't know how to do it in a respectful way. I'm not saying that my struggle with this is on the same level as anyone whose gender is regularly questioned. I guess I just wanted to say I'm sorry that happens to people because my instinct reaction is to hit someone or curl into a ball. And that sucks.

I'm transitioning back to Alex in a slow, mellow way. The most amusing part of this story was that a girl named Lexie joined my (tiny) school last week. It goes to show that you can change your name to avoid confusion but in the end, it is futile. I don't know what's happening now. I don't police people using my name/s. As long as I realize you're talking about me, I don't really care.

Maybe that's weird. Maybe I should care more about the four letters that are supposed to represent me. But I don't. What.

*I still do this. It turns out it's hard to not react when you hear your name. I do also respond to Lexi, though, so that's progress.

just because

I've been wanting to post something for days. I think about writing poetry and a phrase will wander across my desert island mind and take up in a palm tree hammock. Something like this.

I fell in love in the rain drenched
months of winter and 
ever since,
I have been struggling to untangle
my fingers from her hair.

I never write it down. This is probably a combination of laziness and an appreciation for the uncatalogued thought. Which seems ironic when you think about the two hundred and thirty posts on this blog, full of nothing but my cataloged musings (and the occasional F. Scott Fitzgerald quote).

Here's to two hundred and thirty-one.