analyze this, sucka

What's so wrong with telling stories?  Our lives are just stories.  Maybe they have deeper meaning, but we can't find out until the end.  When we're dead.  And can't find out anything anyway.  Because of that whole being dead thing.  Seriously though, try to analyze the themes of my childhood.  Really, I dare you.  


I like to write things that don't need to have any sort of deeper meaning.  Maybe I want to tell the story about the girl waiting for the bus in the hot sun with four freckles under her eyebrow. Isabel Allende wrote The House of the Spirits to tell a story about her family, and she laughs whenever people try to analyze her work.  I saw her speak a couple of years ago, and she talked about a student who wrote some epic paper about why the dog in The House of the Spirits is so big, and what it represents.  She laughed, saying, "I just wanted him to be a giant dog! There was nothing behind it!"  As much as I love when writers plan their themes, motifs, symbols, whatever, I love stories.


My blog is my story.  It may not be interesting, or eventful, or funny or tender.  It probably won't change the way you think about the world.  It's just me.  


This is actually most likely inspired by my lack of enthusiasm for Paper 2 of the IB Lit exam tomorrow.  Ughhhh.  I can't believe I haven't complained about them yet.  Physics will kill me. 

headache

Literally.  I have a headache.  Think ax blade cleaving into the left side of my skull.  I feel empty or something, and a little sad.  My last week of high school, most of which will be spent taking exams, starts tomorrow.  This is not an "Omg, I'm going to miss you all so much!!!!" post.  This is different.  I don't know how to distinguish it from that.  I'm excited to leave school.  I probably will not miss a lot of people.  But I will miss the ones I love.  I don't know what is going to happen.  I don't even know where I will be this summer.  I need money for school, but I want to see my mom, and let's face it; how can I get a job in rural Virginia? I don't know what to do.  I'm writing like an emotional Meursault.  I wish I could write poetry.  I wish I knew the closest amtrak station to where you will be.


I have a headache and I'm missing you already. 

sermon

I go to a Unitarian Universalist church, and today, we had a youth service.  Long story short, it involved me writing a sermon.  Here it is:

My family first came to this church at the suggestion of my younger brother.  Both of our best friends went, and I think at the time, my mother wanted us to have some religion in our lives.  It was a month into my freshman year of high school.  On my first day, I nervously approached the door to the youth group room after following someone’s directions, and sort of peered in before I entered.  I was glad and kind of surprised to see so many people from my school in the room, and it definitely helped that my best friend was there.  The meeting that day was a week before a con in Rochester, and I remember being very confused and slightly embarrassed when everybody was talking about it.  I didn’t know what a con was, and I was too afraid to ask.  To this day, it is very difficult for me to make new friends, and even talk to people I don’t know, and back then, I felt nearly paralyzed with fear.  Even though I was really scared, slightly uncomfortable, and didn’t actually say anything on that first day, I wanted to come back, and I did, for the next three years.

My first day might sound like it a negative experience, but it really wasn’t.  I think I sensed a camaraderie and openness among the kids in the youth group.  It was something I was attracted to, something I wanted to be a part of.  I’ve come to realize that I didn’t join the youth group solely for the religious aspect of Unitarian Universalism.  If I had, I think I would have just gone to service.  I joined the youth group so that I could feel like I was part of a community, so that I could feel like I had friends.  And I got what I came for.  I am a part of a community, and I do have friends.  But I also have a place that actually allowed me to think about and develop what I truly believe. And though I wasn’t intending to examine what exactly it is that I believe, youth group gave me a reason to do just that. 

I don’t know whether I will continue to go to a Unitarian Universalist church, but I’m glad that I spent my high school years here.  It provided me with what I needed at the time, which I can’t exactly verbalize.  It’s the feeling you get when you’re sitting in church during the Christmas Eve service, when the sanctuary is lit entirely by candles.  I think what I’m trying to describe might be love.