Rascal

I've been dreading writing about this, but I must. I won't feel complete closure until I do. Offer up my little piece of tribute, of eulogy. Anything that takes up such a piece of your heart, mind, and time deserves a few paragraphs penned in its honor.

People who don't have pets think it's silly when their owners grieve them with the intensity of a lost human loved one. Even some people who only display a casual relationship with their animals look down on the people who perform funerals for gold fish and dogs and gerbils.

But then there are the people who regard their furry (and scaly or slimy or whatever) friends as members of their families. The frequently crocheted quote "Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened" rings true. It's a special kind of relationship. Cats love unconditionally. No one can dispute the comfort a purring cat perched happily on his or her owner's lap, eyes slightly closed and paws kneading, provides. There's no question of the unfailing love behind the green oval eyes.

Rascal sat on my lap for ten years, his love never failing and his paws never allowing a morsel of food to make it to my mouth with an attempted interception. He dined better than most people, preferring bacon above all else. Though he was largely governed by his stomach (and easily manipulated by the all-important word t-r-e-a-t), his heart is the most memorable part of his kitty personality. He was a very sweet animal, not at all bowing the general cat stereotypes of disdain for humans.There is no disputing that he loved us from the moment we extracted him during his first days of life from between Grandma's porches to the last time he exited our house.

He punctuated my child- and teen-hood with the needed experience of pet ownership. With animals comes the responsibility and companionship necessary to growing and maturing. Though I was devastated to learn of his disappearance, it seemed somehow darkly fitting that he died a mere week before I returned home for my first break from college. One of the largest pieces of my childhood now divides my life into childhood and adulthood, life with and without Rascal.

The night I returned home, the first thing I saw was his little dry food bowl sitting sitting expectantly and full. That sight coupled with his abandoned toys and scratching post littering the living room floor drove the reality of his disappearance home. But as I sat crying in the midst of his things, I wasn't mourning just my precious pet. I was mourning the loss of my life was it was before.

Rascal was the best first pet anybody could I have, and I'm incredibly for the ten years he brought joy to my life. I refuse to think about what terrible fate he most likely met and relish the many, many memories he gave me and my family. He was a remarkable cat and my best friend for half of my life. I will miss him.

And many years from now, when I have a family of my own, we will have a precious family cat too, so my kids will know the all-important love of an animal.

I am. I am. I am.

My friend was wondering why people continue to exist, and so I started thinking about why I bother to continue existing.

It's a question some people ask me when they find out I'm an atheist. Why would you keep living without the promise of heaven at the end? Or without a distinct system of reward and punishment? The guarantee of a soul or of seeing your dead loved ones again?

Well, it's a pretty easy answer, considering I'm still very much alive. At least, it seems that way. But when you really get down to it, I only keep living because I don't know what else to do. I'm just supposed to keep living; my body is designed to avoid death at all costs. It's second nature to try to survive.

But if you don't considering surviving the same as living, really living, then what makes me keep living? Am I even really living?

There's a Ropes song that goes "My life doesn't mean a thing to me/the only reason I haven't put myself in the ground already/is I don't like to get dirty." Maybe it's sometimes it's the smallest things, if not necessarily as cynical as the song describes, that keeps us adhered to our mortal coils. You don't have to have some grand reason to wake up each morning.

My philosophy dictates that people ascribe their own meaning to life and spend their time trying to do the best they can to adhere to the lifestyle they think is most appropriate. All this cliche, semi-hedonistic stuff is what I think makes life worth living. It's different for every person, and that's what is beautiful about it.

It's a whole list of cliche things that keeps me wanting to breathe every morning. I think I've written before about how I use to think of one thing to look forward to that day before I got out of bed every morning, just to make the walk to the shower a little better. I've gotten bad about not doing that anymore lately; it's a testament to a good life that on any given day, I could think of something positive that would probably happen. They are almost always really small things: an especially appetizing lunch item, getting a paper back I worked really hard on, a meeting of a club I enjoy, getting to see a friend.

Even though each of those things doesn't really add up to much, together they create a life that is positive more often than negative. I couldn't possibly quit living if there was one little thing I had to look forward to. "Oh, I will just go and die after this... oh but then I would miss this!" The sheer fact that I would be missing things is something I can't stand.

My somewhat ironic but reoccurring dream is that I've slept through important things: when I was younger, it was trick-or-treating. Now, it's exams and interviews. But the theme of sleeping through important events remains my biggest subconscious fear. Being dead for all of them would kind of suck, too.

When Christians ask me why I bother to keep living, I usually respond something to the effect of "there are amazing books I haven't read yet, interesting people I haven't met, beautiful sights I haven't seen, funny jokes I haven't laughed at. There are classes I haven't gotten to take yet, words I haven't written yet, and smiles I haven't smiled yet." Missing any of that would be too sad to bear. That's why I bother to wake up each morning. It might be cliche, but each life affirming breath reinforces and justifies my roaming around the earth.

As my darling Sylvia Plath wrote, "I took a breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am."

Family Dinner

I hate when the mix of dinner crowd forces me in the middle of a group full of loud personalities, taking up the conversation with their empty, echoing words. They fill up the chairs with their bodies and the conversation with their bellowing, and those of us small in both voice and stature are left to sit quietly by, spooning rice into our mouths and wishing we were anywhere else.

It's not that I don't have input. It's just my words seem to emerge from my mouth, a few octaves lower than I intend, and escape into the battlefield that is the colliding sound waves above the dinner table. Mine are small, feeble warriors and quickly surrender to the pulsing sounds reverberating around the plastic cups of Mountain Dew and Diet Pepsi. Frustrated, I just sit there, replacing the words on the tip of my tongue with the bland food that people seem to think defines my personality.

I am so close to the people next to me that we can hardly eat without our elbows hitting; we are so close I think they might be able to hear my thoughts, tearing each new loudmouth comment apart for its ignorance and depravity, but it's really just envy because people are looking at them when they speak and responding, and that's all I really want. But I know my neighbors can't hear what is happening in my brain because they don't even hear what I choose to vocalize.

I know it isn't true. I know that some personalities are always going to win out, claiming the entire market, making it seem as if they have the only personality worth having. The only way to be. Social, exhaustively happy. I know that I'm as valid as them, as interesting as them, as important. But somehow that certainty just isn't enough to make that hour bearable; I just wait.

I wait until I can pour all the bottled up thoughts onto a page, onto a screen. Sustained by an eternally captive audience, I can release what nobody else cares to take from me. Perhaps I don't have a voice in a crowd so I have the words necessary to move my pen across the page. Maybe I'm meant to be reclusive, and I'm just fighting my nature to no avail. Maybe my dinnertime companions are unwittingly providing me with a livelihood, a reason to live.

Cautiously optimistic, I must accept my fate. Channel Salinger. Write because it's so hard to talk, and maybe one day, they will be sad they never listened, and finally read.

Justice for All

For the past week or so, I feel like all I've been doing is arguing. It's exhausting, really. But I would definitely be more exhausted if I didn't argue because I wouldn't be able to sleep soundly at night knowing I didn't defend what I believe to be right.

But the thing that angers me more than any of the bigots, religious zealots, and just plain ignorant people are those who claim the argument doesn't matter.

Of course it matters. Just because you aren't immediately affected by something doesn't mean it isn't worth worrying about. We are debating our state's Constitution; constitutions are documents by the people, of the people, for the people. We are the people, and it is our duty and obligation as citizens to have opinions and voice them about our government.

Further, if you cannot find it in yourself to care about somebody else, especially people who are being discriminated against, then you are exceedingly selfish. If you cannot care about people's rights being ripped away, about the pain and suffering of others, about grave injustices in the society you take part in, then there is no saving you. You are worse than those fighting on the immoral side because at least the opposition is taking a stand for what they believe. At least they have emotions.

Do not try to patronize me for passion. What is the point of living if you don't care about anything? Apathy is not cool; detachment is a mental illness, not a fad. Do not lay passively unless you agree with every single thing in your world. There is always something to be bettered, somebody that needs help.

I will argue until I can't argue anymore. I don't care if I'm defeated, if the amendment makes its disgusting way into our law. I will still fight it because I will still be right. Those who claim it doesn't matter are the truly wrong ones.

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
-Elie Wiesel

Heelprint

I love my college; I really do. I haven't regretted coming here for a single second. I still haven't tired of the ubiquitous blue, the unrelenting (and sometimes downright rude) school spirit, the vibrant community.

All the little concerns that keep college freshmen lying awake at night before they move to their universities disappear within days of arriving. The bathroom arrangement is fine; it's not hard to get along with your roommate; friends will come fairly easily if you smile and say hi; classes are difficult but not impossible; the food is pretty good; the campus layout will unfold itself to you in a few days.

But that is not to say college life is not without concerns. They're just new concerns. What was important in high school is replaced by something bigger, more pressing. There's always a pit in my stomach when I pass a flyer advertising some amazing opportunity and I keep walking. I know I can't do everything; that would be impossible and suicidal. But I have to wonder each and every time if I'm passing up my one great opportunity; maybe that was where I was going to meet my future employer, future passions, even future husband.

But that is ridiculous. I don't believe in fate. We make the happiness we seek. I have actively reached out to organizations I know I will love, and in turn will have an automatic connection with others involved. When I do my homework, I worry I'm not reaching insightful enough conclusions, like I need to force something that simply isn't there. Reach a higher plane. I'm always afraid I'm not stretching enough. Not challenging myself enough, not growing enough.

It's a weird feeling. Everything just seems higher stakes. When once a GPA got me into college, it now gets me a job. Before, most friendships (at least at a high level of intimacy) were only for the duration, now they have the potential for lifelong relationships. I have to make connections, make roots, make a mark. A "Heelprint."

But I know, just as I was freaking out the night before I moved here, that one day I will look back on this moment and tell myself that everything eventually was okay.

Your Becoming

This is absolutely beautiful.

I can't write anything else here because it will distract me from that column, and that'd be a disgrace. I'm just sticking the article here so that I can read it later, where I know where to find it.

"The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming."

Sex in the City

My mom idly put the tv on Sex in the City 2 this afternoon. We were waiting for my dad's imminent arrival so we could partake of her spaghetti (mine consisting only of noodles, making my waiting kind of pointless...). Though it didn't dawn on me then, that we were even doing such thing a rang of the patriarchal society of the past, born from ideas that produce such things as Sex in the City.

I've watched bits and pieces of the show over the years, never even a whole episode. I only watched thirty minutes or less of the movie. But these small snippets told me everything I needed to know: this show is one of those female-empowerment movies that aren't really about female empowerment at all.

On the surface, the four privileged ladies own New York City (or Abu Dhabi, the movie's setting), strutting around, checking out young male models, and generally being what a mainstream male lead would be. This could be construed as progress.

But that is only on the surface. Yes, the women choose to sing karaoke to "I Am Woman." But they were singing the powerful words to impress a supposedly sultry man staying at the hotel. They change into new sets of elaborate, expensive clothes every scene. They ogle a sweaty men's rugby team in the pool. They perpetuate the common myth that women must either be frivolous and slutty or subservient and boring. Their kind of "feminism" means using sex as a bartering tool, manipulating men with the promise of their bodies. Then sitting around drinking Cosmopolitans and complaining about that very quality in men. Double standards are not broken by simply flipping them around.

This false sort of feminism is everywhere, and it's learned young. The summer before sixth grade, my male cousin and I were rooting through all the random junk collected in the nooks and crannies of my grandma's house when we stumbled upon a small collection of what I assume were my grandfather's Playboys.

I flipped through them, intrigued by the novelty of the things; I read some of the articles, even laughing at the desperation ringing through the questions posed in the advice column. But my cousin sat spellbound. The naked images swarmed his consciousness; his hormones glazed his eyes over with a creepy kind of hunger. He asked me for some scissors. I helpfully pointed out pictures that seemed the most practical to remove and conceal, but many were rejected for focusing too heavily on one half of the body or the other.

As he expertly chose the money shots of women draped suggestively over chairs, lying on their backs wearing nothing but stilettos, cradling their boobs like they're precious cargo with faked innocent faces, I began to squirm in my under-developed flesh. I knew I hadn't the power of those pictures, but thought one day I might, but even then, so young, it just felt so wrong.

It wasn't the general society-frowned-upon conscious catching that weirded me out. It was the nature of the power of sexuality, something I hadn't really contemplated before. It seemed somehow unfair, to both the models on the page and eyes feasting upon them. The awkwardness of being an impartial observer to the interaction (and implying the future of the relationship...) made me see how powerful sexuality can be.

Sex and the City tries to show that, but they only really portray superficiality and manipulation. I think maybe a more genuine feminism respects an equal sexual dynamic. It's a powerful tool, and we're not right to give it completely to one sex or the other.

Nor is feminism completely tied up in sex, In the City or elsewhere. Soon, Mom realized that the first preseason football game had started, and we flipped the channel and observed the game with an enthusiasm usually reserved for men. It's this small give and take, realizations that no qualities should be masculine or feminine. That is what a true feminist show would promote. Not snagging the pool boy with the most impressively filled Speedo, as Samantha Jones might think.