tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38266088878273389512024-02-06T19:22:19.286-08:00that brave, unbalanced womanJulie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.comBlogger168125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-26586771880978397562012-07-19T20:52:00.001-07:002012-07-19T21:34:34.084-07:00Things I've been learning.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2kepvLH9WpbGVtCLZJXAHc0f2GiITQsr-eEwZB0AAkANFYryP8gfS5JmpdQjk4nRPXVlHguK6Z5l81EQWngsfgnPtcKLQPsVrYjE9vw-TXyWGaLbqySP5PEy4fV1GO7mAHZ0JWRxY3QS/s1600/tumblr_kp48etNfnB1qzyrwvo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2kepvLH9WpbGVtCLZJXAHc0f2GiITQsr-eEwZB0AAkANFYryP8gfS5JmpdQjk4nRPXVlHguK6Z5l81EQWngsfgnPtcKLQPsVrYjE9vw-TXyWGaLbqySP5PEy4fV1GO7mAHZ0JWRxY3QS/s640/tumblr_kp48etNfnB1qzyrwvo1_500.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I
have been learning that sometimes, after a long, run-of-the-mill Thursday, a couple tears
squeeze themselves freakishly out. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I'm
making a normal face. Completely expressionless, actually, which is nice, and
restful--and I'm staring at my computer screen because I, the internet lady,
have to do at least one more round of every site when I get home from my
(computer) job every night.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So,
I'm sitting making this normal face at the screen, which is on its lowest light
setting. I'll only be looking at this guy until two weeks from now, when in my
last days as a student, I'll buy myself a spanking new laptop. Old whitey will
be going to laptop heaven where all the other old MacBooks are already
rainbow-wheeling for eternity. I think he's embarrassed that he's still hanging
around. Heaven knows I am. I don't take him to campus. I'm also embarrassed
that I've only cleaned him three times in the last five years. But he's served
me well. And all the crumbs 'neath his keys have squished down into some spots
that for me are comfortably sticky. The "c" key has had a goober of
some kind on the top of it for months.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I'm
making this normal face while reading some stuff and listening to some stuff,
and eating a giant bowl of Cocoa Krispies, which has often been my
appetizer for dinner lately. They used to be better. And they make chocolate milk.
Suddenly, in no relation to the music I'm listening to (The
Rolling Stones) or the thing I am reading (the Netflix cue and <a href="http://moviestarmakeover.com/blog/"><span style="color: #001de0;">this</span></a> and
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/chromosomes/features/2012/blogging_the_human_genome_/blogging_the_human_genome_why_do_we_have_two_fewer_chromosomes_than_our_closest_primate_relatives_.html"><span style="color: #001de0;">this</span></a> and <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/emmy-nominees-matthew-weiner-of-mad-men/?smid=tw-nytimes"><span style="color: #001de0;">this</span></a>), my top and bottom eyelids crunch
together, unbeknownst to my nervous system except for that I can't see for a
second, and out of each eye flap comes a giant, salty tear, before I even realize what
is happening. My lips press together and flatten out, and then the tears hit my
jaw while I momentarily blaze up like a demented tomato, and then I'm done.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">At
least I used to know when I was about to take the Moment of the day. Granted,
it's been years since I last had Moments, but from that experience I have
learned that they're going to happen for a few months and there's nothing you
can do about it. And that they feel kind of good. It's like emotional burping. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Not that it doesn't completely blow.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">These days, it's deciding to happen whenever it wants. What if I'm in the
middle of looking poignantly interested in class? We talked about salsa today. What if I'd had a
wet facial seizure in the middle of my super hip teacher's comments about garlic?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It
seems to be that the more things happen, sadness for me becomes less about
me. It doesn't get any easier, but it becomes less stabby, because I know
it's not ever really going to go away, and that food is still going to taste
good, and that I'm still going to sleep a little. It's a dullness, a
nothing-will-ever-feel-normal-again, a screamingly uncomfortable tickliness,
like I slept on my arm funny, instead of me running around whimpering my
injustices to everyone and feeling sorry for myself, like it used to be. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Does
that make sense?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">You
realize that you're at fault too, even especially. That you're the one who made the big mistakes. You pray that you'll never be that stubborn again. That somehow you'll forgive yourself for missing that chance. You wish it hadn't gone the way it did, but you're glad that you got brave and tried for what you really wanted, in the end. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And now you try your hardest to just let things be
the way they are and miss, miss, miss away.</span><br />
<br />
Two
nights ago, I fell asleep with my arms up over my head. I woke up in the middle
of the night hysterical, thinking they weren't there, because I couldn't feel
either of them. I proceeded to hit myself in the face with both elbows repeatedly while
trying to jiggle my froggy arms back down by my sides where they belonged. And when my hand hit the side of my face, my dead, fishy, still-sleeping hand, I scared the shit out of myself. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Something
sad happened. But at least I've still got my arms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It
was nice, that a couple tears came out. One for you, and one for graduation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Miss
you. </span></div>Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-65436307840859836962012-07-08T09:52:00.001-07:002012-07-08T09:55:55.244-07:00Things I've been doing.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxOvM-harIoUf5h4UPj0beJPiDC8tbZFARGmSgiGxDcOKDXQVwvDaq8ADO2YT6jjGadAS3tS9xuTemR3FfekaSz0sSIndNHgPHMgTqUCc81PMo1gGkzrVFjwsMGR2v13G-aPYHEMmVzjIl/s1600/83105555593900657_RjnWOnv2_f.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxOvM-harIoUf5h4UPj0beJPiDC8tbZFARGmSgiGxDcOKDXQVwvDaq8ADO2YT6jjGadAS3tS9xuTemR3FfekaSz0sSIndNHgPHMgTqUCc81PMo1gGkzrVFjwsMGR2v13G-aPYHEMmVzjIl/s640/83105555593900657_RjnWOnv2_f.jpg" width="436" /></a></div>
<br />
Every night, I return home to my freezing bedroom. It's the only part of the house that's like a freezer, because it's directly under the swamp cooler, which has to remain at full blast to keep the rest of the house cool and damp and breezy. I have a yellow patchwork quilt that I crawl under, and my desk lamp is on the floor next to my bed because the light is less harsh coming from below than from eye level.<br />
<br />
Every night, I fill my humidifier in the tub, holding it under the faucet with one wobbly hand. I put warmer water in it than I am supposed to. I return it to my room, to its little plastic stand, I plug it in, and I close my door to the swamp cooler. I push my window two inches open and close the blinds. Lately, I've been unable to sleep as soon as the first sliver of sun creeps down the carpet into my room and pokes me in the forehead. To sleep long enough these days I have to trick my mind into thinking it's the middle of the misty, humidifier-filled night.<br />
Sometimes I wear socks.<br />
My throat has as of late seemed to grow one large, bean-shaped tickly spot on the right inside of it, about halfway down. It hurts. I had laryngitis last weekend which I initially thought was just a smoke-induced raspy Emma Stone voice that would make everyone be interested in listening to me talk longer. I learned my lesson by nine o'clock last Saturday evening, sitting at the <a href="http://www.freedomfestival.org/events/freedom-awards-gala/">gala</a>, when the glands in my neck had swollen to chameleon proportions and it felt like a large damp tennis ball was lodged in between them. By most nights at nine o'clock I am coughing a lot, but during the day, I'm fine.<br />
<br />
Every day but the last three of the week, I attend my last two undergraduate classes--one in which we discuss food and history, and smell and rub and taste things passed around, and one in which I am ecstatic to find that I can understand half of what my teacher is signing, even though I can probably only sign about twenty-five percent capacity. Last week in the food class we tasted a medieval recipe that was presented to help us understand the scope of spice and how much more important it used to be. The pepper and clove burned my eyes, and my nose, and my stinging throat, and I was delighted.<br />
<br />
Every day I have frantically been trying to soak up as much of my coworkers as possible, been trying to play as much Super Smash and eat as many Cool Ranch Doritos as I can with them, because I lose my job with them as soon as I graduate. I love them with every tiny particle of my being. I imagine that it's similar to what parents feel when all of a sudden they have grownup children. I had no idea and every idea that I had so little time left with these people.<br />
<br />
I arrived at my intramural softball game last week, ready to roll myself in as much mud as possible, only to find that only three of us had shown up. The rain had kept everyone else inside, sure that the game would be cancelled. It was heavy enough to soak me on the twelve-step run from my house to my car. But for some reason, I drove through the pounding downpour, just in case. And it cleared up as soon as I got there. I wore my cleats.<br />
<br />
Every day, I have been at home, making a lot of those single-serving desserts you find on Pinterest. My favorites? <a href="http://kirbiecravings.com/2012/01/peanut-butter-mug-cake.html">Peanut butter mug cake</a> and <a href="http://lacreativitedelafille.blogspot.com/2012/06/single-serving-deep-dish-chocolate-chip.html">single-serving chocolate chip cookie</a>. The first with a tall glass of milk, the second with vanilla ice cream. Both best before eleven AM.<br />
I graduate in 31 days.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-72772878965005075642012-03-14T20:49:00.000-07:002012-03-14T20:49:06.629-07:00For Paige.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxvahh0IOAlpr8eIr47dIsiAJR4zDiQFmUCMWyck6KBH0q7X27zwX3e8p7fj89ezs1octBqJZihJzZhC7A3ZOjCSc4q4D-zupAUB52SoafBazwDDtTrvF_1WkoB0I7SY260CzVscYNA3bF/s1600/dogs28altalt.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxvahh0IOAlpr8eIr47dIsiAJR4zDiQFmUCMWyck6KBH0q7X27zwX3e8p7fj89ezs1octBqJZihJzZhC7A3ZOjCSc4q4D-zupAUB52SoafBazwDDtTrvF_1WkoB0I7SY260CzVscYNA3bF/s640/dogs28altalt.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I often have to remind myself that I am not my attention span.</span><br />
I wonder if mothers of children whose brains wiggle too much and who may be a little abrupt have to remind themselves of the same thing about their children--that while their outsides might be bursting in a thousand directions all the time, especially at church, especially in big open places, while they've got crusts on their shirts and dirty drumming fingernails, that their minds are working away in there just as well as everyone else's are.<br />
Even if they strap a toy helicopter to their head and try to leap off the roof.<br />
<br />
That even though those kidlets ask a thousand questions a minute about why blue is so many different colors and do giraffes call each other something, or planets, or where is Gringotts, or which part of the vending machine holds the chocolate and which part holds the heat and which part holds the cup--even though this is all going on eighty pascrillion lightyears a minute, and even though they also fail at holding still while asking these questions, and even though they ask these dry, completely legitimate questions even to strangers at the grocery store--that the kids of these mothers are just as smart and ponderous as anybody else. This probably helps when particularly obnoxious questions are being asked in particularly public places.<br />
This is something I have to remind myself of. A lot lately. Because I continue to ask questions whenever I have one. And think about how the hot chocolate machine works instead of where I left my phone, or names for different shades of blue instead of pretty much anything. And leave food in my car until I could probably bury it in the exploratory fossil sand at the children's museum. Or until it's actually become cheese. I continue to stare at people and forget that I'm a foot away from them on an airplane. I laugh conspiratorially at jokes between people who I am only standing near, not interacting with. This morning, in the park, I was driving a car that is not my own and I needed to sandwich it between two other cars. I was the roast beef and they were the bread. I tried three times and then a man and his dog came walking along, which man I immediately decided had the perfect collateral and I ask the man to park the car. For me. While I held Betsy. Because a man wouldn't leave his best friend to steal the expensive car that I am driving that's not mine. Right? And serial killers don't keep pets.<br />
These two thoughts happen in a quarter of a second and I am already out of the car holding the dog.<br />
And then I thought, well, they never said anything about car burglars keeping pets.<br />
<br />
I feel so often that I can do nothing thoroughly, that I flick the tip of my toe into the surface of everything, just the warm part, and then flitter away to the next thing.<br />
I find myself trying to accomplish everything at one time, and when I fail, I just giggle maniacally and assemble a to-do list that's even more impossible. Which, I think, causes me to fail in judgment sometimes, because I'm too busy trying to juggle three teaching assignments, two tests, a jackhammer, seventeen articles-to-read, and the entire cast of Modern Family.<br />
Why?<br />
<br />
You who study hard, you who can sit in one position for more than four minutes, you who don't feel like big HARDEE HAR HAR speech bubbles come out of your mouth every time you open it, you who think through one thought from start to finish without eleven others trying to stick sharp little pieces of themselves through the side of it, you who can finish a thesis without getting emotional enough about it that your teacher writes "calm down" in the margin of your last page, you who do not blurt every single incoherent phrase you ever think, you who want to make cookies longer than the instant the dough is mixed, you, you happy few, please enjoy a perfectly soft-boiled egg and ironed skirt and organized notebook and a deep, meaningful conversation for me.<br />
Please and thank you.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-80436466145850786282012-03-11T15:17:00.003-07:002012-03-11T15:17:20.250-07:00Yes, she looks for me-good.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcZfu6_jJ0dIEY36ev5xLTwM0jw5jkmWwrgc4rNvMfWyR6BBTKQQOhqT-aw-G_VwFBFHXGEgNeKeqCTxH2z9DPUMuu910pd1YT-vlpW_Cch2zMfvi9Wf0SYPdnePMlAbQJYoqSwpYgNhPa/s1600/80b68e4e6bc011e1a87612313804ec91_7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcZfu6_jJ0dIEY36ev5xLTwM0jw5jkmWwrgc4rNvMfWyR6BBTKQQOhqT-aw-G_VwFBFHXGEgNeKeqCTxH2z9DPUMuu910pd1YT-vlpW_Cch2zMfvi9Wf0SYPdnePMlAbQJYoqSwpYgNhPa/s1600/80b68e4e6bc011e1a87612313804ec91_7.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
Now, it's just me.<br />
It's just me and sixteen months of buying one soda at restaurants to share. After we did I wonder why everyone doesn't. We probably saved over two hundred dollars drinking out of the same cup.<br />
It's just me and my cat. I'll say it.<br />
It's just me and a few books, and a new pair of shoes. Ok two.<br />
It's just me and a multitude of stranger people.<br />
It's just me, and the flour I smear off my hands onto the sides of my face as I roll out the dough at least once weekly and then eat all of it except for the six cookies I send you in tiny boxes. I guess I'll be eating those too.<br />
It's just me and the people I work with. The best people. And my other boss--she's pregnant with a little girl fish banging around in there. I felt her move. Her mom calls her shark bait and it makes me nervous that something's going to eat her. She won't tell us the name, in case the fishie comes out looking different.<br />
This she said to me while we rooted through a box of girdles. <br />
It's just me trying the studying thing in my last few classes, because my botany teacher was sent directly to me from God--he gives essay exams.<br />
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It's just me being able to explain well, in red goopy pen, about the hormone that makes plants grow toward the sun. How the hormone actually grows on the side of the plant where the light doesn't get to directly, swelling the colder tissue just enough to bend the little shoot into feeling up to the stretch.</div>
<br />
It's just me and those little baby buds on the noisy tree outside my window.<br />
But they're there. And they'll bud.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-51358021374419057302012-02-03T12:35:00.000-08:002012-02-03T12:38:36.782-08:00Alohomora!!!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
This morning, I am working on some Harry Potter posters at work. I am eating a soggy turkey sandwich, a bag of chips that expired the week after Halloween, and I am drinking a lot of unfiltered water because I see pointlessness in refilling the Brita in the fridge back up and would rather just drink it from the tap. There's nothing wrong with the tap, people. It's cleaner than the bottom of that filter thing you keep scraping your water bottles along whenever you refill them.<br />
I'm getting a cold that has been creeping around my edges for two weeks, which means my nose is tickly and I'm looking forward to lying in bed all day on Sunday after contracting more cold from the nursery kids. I'm in a really good mood and I haven't blooged since November. I don't know why that is.<br />
<br />
I am happy because I've gotten a hang of a program that makes my heart and color palettes in my heart sing, even if I'm only very simply making things for myself and the classes I teach. I love <a href="http://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/rating?time=30" style="color: #660000;">color</a>. I love fonts. I love radial gradients. <br />
I've been making lists the last couple weeks of things I love and things I am good at. I love blooging. I am good at playing the piano. And so on. <br />
I've been thinking a lot the last couple of weeks about being good at something. What makes you good at something, besides practice? I've watched a lot of people get worse at things they practice. What makes you Good At Something? Outside attention? Skill? Are you better at it when you <i>deserve</i> to be good at it? What you produce being more popular than what other people produce? What you produce being different than what other people produce? What you produce being thriftier or more expensive than what other people produce? You thinking you are awesome?<br />
<br />
It seems like people feel the need to refresh themselves with attention in their skill area at different levels. It seems like it's happening <i>so much</i>. It seems like there are some people who need constant gratification from strangers through their art, or just even gratification about how awesome they are, and don't necessarily become dysfunctional without it, but don't function at full capacity. I get loved ones, but I don't necessarily get the strangers thing. Maybe I do. I don't know.<br />
I guess what I'm wondering, why don't you just do something <i>you</i> like to do? And, if every once in a while, something awesome happens, share it! But maybe, just let the awesome things happen on their own?<br />
<br />
The ones who really puzzle me are the older ones--the ones who are younger I keep figuring will learn it's not satisfying unless <i>you yourself</i> like it and move onto something later. But then, I think about how I feel when I am walking the eternal death march to my car from campus, and I see something beautiful, something really warm or something hard and gray and icy, and put a color and an adverb to the description of whatever beautiful thing I am seeing and it sings in my head and it makes the sides of my head by my ears tickle, and I <i>know</i> it's good, and usually I don't even write it down, but the roundness and juiciness of the phrase in my own mind is enough to get me to my car.<br />
<br />
And I guess that me laughing crazily to myself about sentences I tell to myself on my walks, because I know they're good, is just like those people.<br />
<br />Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-904323258931425772011-11-02T22:06:00.000-07:002011-11-02T22:06:37.028-07:00The Dinner Table ThingI used to read a lot.<br />
<br />
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Golly, I used to read a <i>lot</i>. I couldn't be bothered to show up to the dinner table unless I had at least three books under my arm--the one I was halfway through, the other one I was halfway through, and the next one in case those two weren't enough in the eleven minutes it took to hold my nose and gulp down the steamed squash pinched from the watery vegetable dish that I had to finish before I could leave the table. Sometimes the eleven minutes would pass and I'd sit there for an hour or more with one edge of my barstool bumped up against the counter and the squash or salad or whatever it was growing slimy and cold on my plate.<br />
Reading was the background, the wallpaper of everything I did growing up. I pined for books in the car at night when it was dark and I wasn't allowed to turn my reading light on for my parents' fear of lower quality night driving vision. I read them at intermission in plays. I spent entire vacations in a house on the beach filled with rambunctious cousins reading paperbacks I had brought, and then reading all the paperbacks they had brought, too. At the end of <a href="http://ohjulieanna.blogspot.com/2010/12/ode-to-mr-leeper.html">A Wrinkle In Time</a>, I cried for days. When I came upon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Girl_of_the_Limberlost">A Girl of the Limberlost</a> in sixth grade, I checked it out weekly until I had practically memorized it. I finished Les Miserables, unabridged, 1800 pages, in the middle of a peer tutoring class in eighth grade and slumped over with the weight of it, both front and back covers of the cheap Penguin copy having been replaced with packing tape. I bought Harry Potter 7 at midnight, barefoot, in a Wal-Mart, and was still awake, nauseated with sleepiness, by 4:30 AM, playing the just-one-more-sentence game. I took <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn_(novel)">A Tree Grows In Brooklyn</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(novel)">East of Eden</a> in as my own, MY books, respectively, and hoarded three or four copies of both. When I'd meet a person, a new person, anywhere--rehearsal for a play, a new class, work, anywhere--I would automatically relate them to somebody I knew in a book. Contrary to popular belief, I was incredibly and still am incredibly shy. I would much rather watch you than talk to you, most of the time. No offense. Really I'd rather just <i>read</i> about you. I still really, really, really, really love you. I just know much better how to interpret dialogue than to participate in it.<br />
<br />
The dinner table thing kept happening until I was about eighteen, when my grandmother looked across her water-repellent tablecloth at me and said, "Hey, Julie, you're eighteen. Stop." And I thought, "Ohhhh, this is going to suck" as if something hadn't clicked until then, as if I hadn't realized that I was a big Grownup who wasn't supposed to be reading teen historical fiction over my baked potato and ham. I put my book down, painfully, and spent the next few weeks trying rather pathetically to learn to eat without reading, which was hilariously unfun. Chewing only came naturally with the flipping of pages. Conversation-while-eating was a whole nother awful thing to learn. Do you know how many conversations you can read in the time it takes you to actually <i>have </i>one?<br />
<br />
So, I stopped reading at the table. And then there was college. And then I kind of stopped reading altogether.<br />
I was still reading 500 pages a week--I'm an English major, after all--but all the smelling and touching and feeling and seeing went out of it. Suddenly I wasn't reading the books I was still checking out of the city library. Suddenly I was required to remember not <i>what</i> I had read, but the exact words, and the "syntax" and the "cultural significance", and page numbers, and "themes", and I was so angry, so angry that I couldn't seem to absorb the life of books the way I had used to. I got over it, eventually, the disconnect I felt from my old world. I still enjoyed things occasionally. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Member_of_the_Wedding">The Member of the Wedding</a> hit me hard my sophomore year, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_(novel)">Possession</a> and Th<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried">e Things They Carried </a>had me lying in bed until 12:30 on a rainy fall Sunday crying over the both of them. But otherwise, I was racing through books, scratching quick, indecipherable (even by me) notes in the margins, and trying to think in a flash to make the most insightful comment about them every fifty-minute class period. And the worst part was, I never went back and read any of them again. I forgot a lot of them. Left them, embarrassed, on my bookshelf, to collect dust. Reading's been a pain for years.<br />
<br />
This weekend, I was in San Diego. I almost missed my flight there and as a result had nothing to do on the 1.5 hour long plane ride, other than write a letter to Financial Aid and read through two hyper-depressive plays that I'd chucked optimistically into my bag. Both had already been read, quick, for my English 495 class. I got it. I got the themes. Got it. Done. Done with them, no rereading, what was I thinking. Window seat. Clouds. Boots. Hungry. I looked at the two sleeping married guys next to me, out my window, drummed my fingers on the back of my other hand, mangled a pen with my teeth, drank a ginger ale, wrote a list on the back of a study sheet, and considered pulling out some of my own hair and braiding it. Thought about turning my phone on to see if it would crash the plane. Finally I gave in to staring into the distance, boring my eyes into the blue vinyl seat in front of me.<br />
<br />
And then I felt a familiar tickle. A rusty tickle, but a familiar one.<br />
I just wanted to <i>read</i>. Read about somebody. Read something with colors on the cover, with pages that made my hands too dry. Read something that snapped me out of my life into someone else's for a while. When was the last time I read something without thinking about the stale mint gum smell wafting from my school bag or the kid sitting next to me or the class I was teaching in an hour? Why hadn't I bought an $18 book at the airport? Why hadn't I bought a book lately. Wait, when was the last time I <i>bought</i> a book? I had bought several at a campus booksale three months before, but had removed them from their shopping bag and robotically placed them onto my bookshelf. One was about the Yellow Fever, and one was about..what was it...someone named Calpurnia or something? Carolinia? The cover was yellow. Before that, what was the last thing I read and liked? I shook my head. Oh, I disgust myself. So many blogs. When did I start watching so much TV? I don't even take a book to school anymore? I have fruit ninja on my phone? I saw three previews for movies based on books last trip to the movie theater, none of which I've read? The last eleven books I've finished were for a class? Falling asleep after surfing the <i>internet</i> for hours? Pictures of patriotic pinwheels and puppies on Pinterest have become more interesting to my feebled mind than even a basic essay or two? What happened to Francie, to Cal and Aron, to Cosette and Meg and Charles Wallace and Frankie and Maud and Roland and Elnora, for crying out loud?! To PHILIP?!<br />
<br />
I smiled stupidly at my bewildered seatmate. "I need to buy a book," I said to him. He continued sleeping.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, a trip was taken to a seedy Barnes and Noble just before departure, on Monday, on Halloween, and a book was boughten, and I spent my flight home with a pile of airport candy, an entire row to myself, and an entire book.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-71424168870751376142011-09-29T10:38:00.000-07:002011-09-29T10:40:14.843-07:00Here<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
“Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the
earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and
brings beauty with it. There are few prophets in the world; few
sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my
love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those
feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the
foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I
touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.”
<br />
― George EliotJulie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-73849153932690978222011-07-13T09:40:00.000-07:002011-07-13T10:51:16.362-07:00You.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Last weekend,<br />
when everything had calmed down,<br />
you--you left me a half-gallon of Graham Canyon in the freezer at work<br />
and I bought a fresh pizza on the way to the theater, mouth watering at the combination.<br />
Pepperoni, with garlic dipping sauce I'd probably put on waffles it's so good <br />
<br />
I clocked in, punching my yellow striped card<br />
And you--you smiled brightly down and let me talk to you about yoga, now that we went together,<br />
and you noticed my greasy cardboard box<br />
jumping enthusiastically into an explanation of the pizza oven you built in your backyard<br />
<br />
My sandals were unbuckled<br />
and you--you invited me out to the raining parking lot<br />
to run my hand over the smooth black shell of your new car<br />
and laugh excitedly and nod my approval <br />
and after that<br />
I clutched the warm pizza box to my chest, the ice cream freezing under one armpit,<br />
gripping a fistful of spoons<br />
and tromped down to the office I work in, and plopped onto the carpet<br />
in a safe space between the desk and the wall, next to the mirror<br />
<br />
And you--you followed me quietly down to the basement, and sat on the other side of my pizza<br />
as I wolfed it down, cross-legged on the carpet<br />
and you ate my crusts and asked me how I was<br />
And you--you sat in the computer chair next to us, eating spoonfuls of ice cream from the carton<br />
and laughing.<br />
<br />
I looked at myself in the wall-sized mirror next to me, marinara in the corners of my mouth, ice cream in the lines between my fingers, observing myself, and I thought<br />
You--you are lucky. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-91144508629161988782011-07-05T23:03:00.000-07:002011-07-05T23:19:37.985-07:00Mr. Bundles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
On Thursday I was at a fancypants dinner, wearing a blue dress with purple roses on it and orange high-heels. I thought I looked nice. My hair was clean and I shook everybody's hands and led over two hundred of them to their tables.<br />
The dinner I was at is held in the ballroom of the hive of my college campus, and there were eight hundred people there. As is customary, I sat at a table near the back center of the hall with my sister, grandparents, and four strangers who are different each year but always surprisingly good at holding sincere but temporary interest in conversation with me.<br />
I appreciate that.<br />
<br />
My parents sat nearer to the stage--the stage where the usually threeish men and oneish women that my mother has carefully selected receive their awards.<br />
The dinner is for recipients of an award that comes in the form of a crystal eagle mounted on a wooden pedestal, and is for freedom. It's pretty neat. The dinner was long, and good, and there was some kind of mango salsa on the salmon that was making fireworks in my mouth. Could have used another roll. I was there alone, without you, sitting next to Jenny, who sat there in a comforting way, that way that sisters are comforting in, with lacy sleeves on her black dress and a ready smile for the overstarched mothers of beauty queens that kept coming over to exclaim about and run a hand through her waist-length blond hair. <br />
Dessert was a disappointment this year--some kind of pear with almond paste inside a pastry crust--and I hacked at it with my fork, licking the powdered sugar off the dry pastry bits that I then sucked at until they slid back into and down my throat. Jenny eyed the uneaten dinner roll of the squinting man next to me, its perfect pat of butter leaning into it a little bit as it accustomed itself to the room's temperature. I read the program three times. The awards went on, and on, and my feet found themselves aching inside the stiff brown leather of my shoes. It was suddenly unbearable to sit, and I pressed my fork into a blob of sticky almond goop and quietly moved back into the clacking hallway behind the ballroom, where I could stand next to a blue polyester curtain with my shoes off and watch the end of the ceremony with my head against the wall. <br />
Two others were in the hallway as my red, pounding feet found relief pressed into the cold stone floor. I kicked my shoes into an orderly position next to me. A bald man stood against the wall fifteen feet away, watching the proceedings with a lolling neck, and another young man with bright blue eyes carried something as he walked back and forth, ten feet to the left, ten feet to the right. A little bundle held in front of him. My feet hurt, and they were getting stiff and swollen against the ground, and I saw red behind my eyes for missing you so much. But my head cleared from the standing and I thought once more about sitting down in my seat for the remaining ten minutes of the program, after which I'd be off to the hospital cafeteria (open all the time) for a raspberry shake with some cheshire hipsters from my freshman year who winked ironically at me from across the ballroom floor, in their unironed tux shirts and bowties and sequined, thrifted dresses.<br />
The man with the bundle passed in front of me as my chin started to tremble and I recognized him from years previous, from other patriotic awards galas, because of his strange coloring--white skin, black hair, and bright blue eyes. He nodded at me, vaguely recognizing me too, and passed the opposite way in front of me again as the speakers in front of us blared with the sounds of old war clips. It's not like we've ever exchanged actual words, me and this strangely glowy pale man--just that we're always at the same events. He'd gotten married over the last few years, I think. But I didn't really know him or his name, just that he was always around at these things. Just that he was related to somebody on the board like I am. Just like a hundred of the other people there that night. I feel indescribably lonely at these moments.<br />
While I bit my lip and sucked in a breath, licked my hand and smoothed the flaring baby hairs on my forehead, ready to sit back down at the table you weren't at, I glanced at him one more time, and noticed a tiny pink and white hand, wrist encircled by one of those infinitesimal baby bracelets, reach up and out of the bundle he rocked back and forth and tenderly place itself on the upper park of his neck. He smiled down at the bundle and hugged it close to him, smiling and closing his eyes as the tiny hand patted his cheek.<br />
<br />
And my heart ached. <br />
<br />
But at that moment, I knew things would get better. Because they always do. Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-16836786390924402282011-06-24T07:27:00.000-07:002011-06-24T07:41:31.484-07:00And it's contagious<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Sometimes you just wake up and feel<br />
better.<br />
sometimes the wind is blowing through the trees outside<br />
and your hair tangles and blows around your head<br />
and you finish the half-full ginger ale on your desk from last night, sweet and flat<br />
and you miss your morning run because you're just smiling out the window.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-54492535430739834852011-05-17T08:04:00.000-07:002011-05-17T08:10:26.616-07:00Brrring brrrring<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrA1LRRAvdKfcOa8c9U-mN-k39jiMb-xMLGct4cdRUGSlOPiSPCXSlXNy8XxUfX6X89ICk_YNypl_qUNeiOqTJHx2ZmZOWLNC8wvvGnglwtME1yz22S2p9OTxgl3xYhiXln3EfHaqiPG_P/s1600/Photo+483.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrA1LRRAvdKfcOa8c9U-mN-k39jiMb-xMLGct4cdRUGSlOPiSPCXSlXNy8XxUfX6X89ICk_YNypl_qUNeiOqTJHx2ZmZOWLNC8wvvGnglwtME1yz22S2p9OTxgl3xYhiXln3EfHaqiPG_P/s1600/Photo+483.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The other night I was having a phone conversation and hanging up clothes.<br />
<br />
I have this giant computer phone, about as big around as one of those packs of playing cards they make especially for little kids, and I squish it between my shoulder and ear ever-so-lightly because it has a touch screen and hangs up on itself more often than not.<br />
<br />
The other night I was having my customary phone conversation while my person drove home from their evening engagement and I hung clothes up in my closet. Whenever I take something off, I can't help but place it on the floor. I don't even toss it on the floor, or smoosh it up and throw it into a corner-I take it off, over my head or over my feet, and carefully put it on the floor. I can't put anything away.<br />
<br />
But, weekly or so, I scoop piles of clothes up from my brown carpet and hang them while I'm talking on the phone. <br />
<br />
I was having this phone conversation and hanging up clothes, trying to move things off the carpet and balance the phone ever-so-lightly under my ear, and I was putting things on the dowel that hangs on the inside of one of my doors, and I was maneuvering tight collars around hard plastic hangers, and my phone was just beginning to get too hot on my shoulder, and I was smoothing the wrinkles out of pants. I watched the hangers clacking all over each other in the closet and everything blue all over the floor, talking, hanging, talking again, then hanging. My room is so small that if there's two things on the floor it's covered, and there was ten times that amount. I was surrounded by things to clean up.<br />
<br />
His drive home continued on and I continued to clean up, keeping it all together and close and tidy in the closet that I never close. As I continued to move things into one corner of my room, the phone service started to cut out. It happens all the time when you talk on the phone far away and one of you is currently in motion. The conversation began to spatter, and we stopped making sense to each other. <br />
<br />
We can never tell if it's me or him, sometimes it's the Spot (we call it the Spot at this one place when service always goes out) but usually, who knows whose phone it is. I don't. I wish I did.<br />
<br />
Sometimes the call drops automatically and my phone makes a dull beep. Sometimes he can hear me and I can't hear him, or I can hear him and he can't hear me. Sometimes when I can tell the call is going to drop I take the phone away from my face (once we can't hear each other) and stare dully and patiently at the screen until the red call button turns gray, which sometimes takes almost a minute. <br />
<br />
There's always this period of time right after the call drops that neither phone can call the other, which is usually spent trying to hang things up without the brick wedged between my head and my hot shoulder. <br />
<br />
This night, I hung, and chatted, and smiled, and stopped in the middle of a response to the familiar ring of whiter noise across the phone line, which meant the call was about to drop and that he probably couldn't hear me. My face got hot. I stopped in the middle of what I was saying, hearing him say<br />
<br />
<br />
"Jules?"<br />
<br />
<br />
and then, quiet.<br />
<br />
<br />
I dropped my hanger<br />
and I said<br />
<br />
I'm here.<br />
<br />
"I'm here," I said, louder, more impatiently, more to myself than him or anyone, more to the lonesomeness I felt, hanger at my feet. I said it again as the call dropped and my voice bounced off the insides of my room and screeched in my ears.<br />
"I'm here," I whispered. <br />
I'm here.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-6302741500024536552011-04-07T13:55:00.000-07:002011-04-07T14:24:30.529-07:00He Keeps It Out Of Sight<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4xhu_RLiDI_0x3gH9mkzbPTaj3-QufylgYGufvb07LXOndZPdF6dk_wfvgyPoNSlkRj6u8vhWTHR9FUEfVXH2tq6Kw0vXmquEZmcRGoa2c6IzNpCTW48ZWDqkq6QL5WgCCwPjXuF1eH2z/s1600/Alexandre-Deschaumes3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="560" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4xhu_RLiDI_0x3gH9mkzbPTaj3-QufylgYGufvb07LXOndZPdF6dk_wfvgyPoNSlkRj6u8vhWTHR9FUEfVXH2tq6Kw0vXmquEZmcRGoa2c6IzNpCTW48ZWDqkq6QL5WgCCwPjXuF1eH2z/s640/Alexandre-Deschaumes3.png" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> (photo <a href="http://www.photodonuts.com/alexandre-deschaumes">via</a>)</span></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">How do you feel about starting over?</span><br />
Here it is the beginning of April, and this entire semester has felt like one big long day of, unfortunately, getting absolutely nothing done. I have no steam, I have no idea where the steam went, I don't know if I ran out of steam at some point and didn't notice or if I've never really needed general human steam until now and have just discovered my natural lack.<br />
When I was a kid, we had our rich-person Christmas tree in our front window every year, super-tall and covered in little mini wreaths and birds and garlands of sparkly gold stars. Underneath laid a circlet of quilt batting and a lit-up porcelain village. A train choochooed around the village, on the batting, under the tree, and real steam came out the top. My sister and I were equally thrilled each time the train came around the track, puffing its white fluffy steam into the air.<br />
The rich tree still goes up every year. A fresher layer of cotton snow and the glowing village have been relocated to the hearth a few feet away, and the steam-puffing train hasn't been out for eight years or so. The steam stopped working, and while the train still chugged around the track, we just never got it out of the box again. I feel like the train.<br />
None of this means that I haven't learned about seventeen invaluable lessons this semester (as usual) or that I haven't been able to push through at work and in most of my classes (luckily). <br />
In so many ways every day of this semester has felt like Groundhog Day--when I wake up in the morning, it's as though I've always been waking up on that morning. Each walk from my car to class is identical, and the rice cakes I crunch down at work are the same rice cake, over, and over, and over. Every habit I've made this semester I seem to make daily again and again. (The amount of chicken burritos I need from Taco Bell to eat through each hour at work explodes exponentially every day that the sun doesn't come out and the breeze doesn't blow warm) (my morning and evening prayers become an auto-tuned droning blur in Middle Utahn English) (every comment I make in class contains the same five adverbs) (I wash the same three shirts every week and feel sheepish wearing my pretty bright scarves). I try this semester to break out of mundanity, out of sleeping on my floor because I don't feel like moving all the stuff off my bed, out of underachieving in the classes I planned so carefully to get into, but I end up sliding back into it every morning as I wearily put my earrings in and trudge to the bathroom to slide on a headband and wash my face. All my energy is elsewhere. At nights I attend a Bikram yoga class, hoping to sweat out the semester and wake up in the mornings with a desire to do my homework. And it helps. <br />
I know it's just a part of spring, and especially spring in Utah--that gray unending dizziness that was finally and relievingly broken yesterday morning, after the snow melted, after <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Conference_%28LDS_Church%29">conference</a></span>, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw that the soft little caterpillars had all fallen from the cottonwoods and been replaced by tiny, green, nourishing buds. In that flash of green outside, that little gasp of color, I snapped out of the grayness for a second and thought that maybe it wouldn't be so bad to shove the clothes and papers off my bed and lie in it for a while. I laid there, in the bed I made, thinking about the amazing opportunities I've had this semester. I thought about the ones I've taken and the ones I haven't. I'm thankful that I have chosen to spend my time in the way that I have this semester. All of it. And I'm thankful especially to those who have helped me to know what I'm worth. So thanks, you. You know who you are. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://lds.org/general-conference/watch/2011/04?lang=eng&vid=879844073001&cid=9">Things are getting greener</a></span>.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-43387173020718464742011-02-25T16:02:00.000-08:002011-02-25T16:05:21.685-08:00The Moon Upon A StickI turned 22 last Monday morning.<br />
I wondered for weeks beforehand what I'd buy myself for this landmark, what <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=0Oicfyth8sQC&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=the+last+doll+little+princess&source=bl&ots=OfW7PC_sHP&sig=Q8EGSmPmT2jqiGuSH52n9T4s_2k&hl=en&ei=3DRoTfL4IofEsAPE9_imBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20last%20doll%20little%20princess&f=false" style="color: #e69138;">Last Doll</a>-type item would transition me from Birthdays to The Day Every Year That I Was Once Born. A veil? A dramatic haircut? Something that wasn't a present.<br />
Chuckle at my solemnity, go ahead, smile knowingly at the unearned age I am loading onto myself, but it really feels as though I have been projected into ageless space. Up until now, I savored every birthday, waited for them in the morning, planned them, felt them, smelled them coming. When I turned nineteen, I <i>felt</i> nineteen. Eighteen scurried off immediately upon my waking. When I turned six, I<i> felt</i> six. When I turned fourteen, I unfortunately<i> felt</i> fourteen, and it felt uuuuuugly.<br />
I've always been very uncomfortable about pictures of myself, and shied away from them being taken unless I was smeared in sweaty stage makeup or had at least one fist in my mouth. If there is a picture of me looking directly at the camera, I'm usually grimacing, or guffawing, or smiling and popping my hands.<br />
It's embarrassing, but I practice (and often) the habit of bringing pictures of myself up onto the computer screen. I stare at myself, getting close to the image, looking at my face, at my teeth, at my eyes. At all of them together. I wonder where I am, in there.<br />
If you friend me on Facebook, you'll notice that I am grimacing like an overexcited baboon in a good number of the photos tagged of me. Do you all feel comfortable in your own skin? I certainly haven't, up until recently. Up until the last few months.<br />
<br />
This February fourteenth I smelled coming as usual, but it didn't smell like a birthday. It just smelled like a day. This confused me. I've always anticipated my birthday for weeks beforehand, self-importantly glowing at the piles of red and pink cellophane and the candy cropping up in grocery stores towards the end of January. I've always picked and taken home a birthday shirt each year, and laid it out on the chair next to my bed, I've waited for balloons to show up in my room early the next morning, and daydreamed of cheese enchiladas and chicken chimis from Los Hermanos until arriving there at five pm to avoid the date rush, and I've expected twice the birthday messages than your average person receives throughout the day because my birthday is on such a miserable, lovable holiday.<br />
<br />
Last Monday morning, it was Valentine's Day again, my birthday. <br />
And I woke up, and instead of feeling twenty-two, I suddenly just felt like me.<br />
Twenty-one didn't scurry off into the recesses of learned lessons, but it also didn't do a flashy dance in the front of my mind like it's been doing for the last year.<br />
And that was that.<br />
And that morning, I decided to buy myself something that would remind me how comfortable I gratefully feel with myself.<br />
And something that would remind me of who I was when I was 22. <br />
<br />
(what I ended up purchasing for myself was a chronicling of me, feeling like myself. At 22.)<br />
(a <b>huge</b> thanks to<a href="http://www.justinhackworth.com/"> <span style="color: #e69138;">Justin Hackworth</span></a>, the most genuine human being one ever met, for shooting me, looking like myself, at 22.)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSar8n0R27Ct9kQinKG6EUnU3wvPoiT6XFYX6II55q8gzHc8fUHg3uS4x1gpkV_9YNnKRO5bGOfBScNV0b2h76uHQ-4rnzpHNRqM2K8EQJjqegouU56cgEfdlxjV84acMr02bmMtKLHoLy/s1600/LAST.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSar8n0R27Ct9kQinKG6EUnU3wvPoiT6XFYX6II55q8gzHc8fUHg3uS4x1gpkV_9YNnKRO5bGOfBScNV0b2h76uHQ-4rnzpHNRqM2K8EQJjqegouU56cgEfdlxjV84acMr02bmMtKLHoLy/s640/LAST.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<i>best plan ever,<span style="color: #e69138;"> </span><a href="http://justinhackworth.com/blog/headshots-for-bloggers/" style="color: #e69138;">here</a>.</i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-7013141412095110182011-02-09T21:41:00.000-08:002011-02-09T21:43:59.526-08:00An Opinion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-pGDwpPJUNS8v58JajsIJ4h3v28ZFRqCn-ffsZwvH371KnOshL6cDG34xEvr8KKJDyOwTPcZdabM8-Ey6nXCIjEFOD5GpMFprPlXJgXnc8HKXMSaQpbEbH9NM2l1Qz-Ojt0Y3hTQD2mL/s1600/ungrateful.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-pGDwpPJUNS8v58JajsIJ4h3v28ZFRqCn-ffsZwvH371KnOshL6cDG34xEvr8KKJDyOwTPcZdabM8-Ey6nXCIjEFOD5GpMFprPlXJgXnc8HKXMSaQpbEbH9NM2l1Qz-Ojt0Y3hTQD2mL/s400/ungrateful.jpg" width="250" /></a></div><br />
We're reading <i>Oliver Twist</i> in my English Novel class, as you can see by the unecessarily large cover art lurking down there under what I'm currently reading. <br />
The beauty of this book, besides the uncharming fact that it causes me to burst into unfortunate bits of the musical (within my own head--WHOOOO WILL BUUUUUUUY or FooOOOOOOOooood, GLOOOOrious FOOOOOOooOOOd) every ten minutes or so, is that its chewy, farcical center helps me to laugh even when I feel completely and totally in over my head, or discombobulated. While Oliver is being whaled on by childish adults, and people are starving all over the place, and whaling on other people, and missing most of their teeth, and building coffins (whe-eh-eh-eh-ere<i> is</i> love, anyway?), funny things are happening in between enough of the terrible bits that I can keep reading. Things in the book are so bad that they can't get much worse, and it's self-appreciative enough to turn around and laugh heartily at itself every few chapters or pages. <br />
I mean, I have to keep reading anyway, because it's the only grade we're accountable for in this class, but I have the gumption to do so because of how worth it life is to not complain between the hard parts. And even during the hard parts. I just don't have that much to fuss about, do I?<br />
<br />
The other day I was facilitating my Facebook addiction through several dozen consecutive minutes of refreshing my home tab and looking at pictures of people I feel like I've missed out on, when a friend posted a status (that she's since removed, rethinking her position, like the <a href="http://www.heraldextra.com/sports/college/byu/darnell-dickson/article_6d214a18-348f-11e0-801f-001cc4c002e0.html">Jimmer girl</a>) about how tough it is that she had to grow up in Utah county. <br />
Thirty-plus comments followed, rallying comments, anger directed towards all kinds of bubbles we've been delicately encased in for years, poor us, lots of "hells yeah"s and "I know, I gots to get outta here"s and so forth. Other commenters popped up, brave, uncomplaining people, defending their bits of home and scolding the others for expecting imperfection (read: everything and everyone) to be perfect.<br />
<br />
In no mean way, can I just say that perhaps we should all take a look around us again at clean, running water, and loving people who may occasionally parent us in an imperfect way, and spring coming, and opinionated colloquialisms that we allow to bother us, and flu shots, and <i>literacy</i>, and the internet, and rubber-soled shoes, and just shut up for a while? <br />
I'm an overreacter--you know that monologue that Steve Martin does in <i>Father of the Bride</i> at the bar about how he comes from a long line of overreacters? So do I, and so am I, my life is apparently falling to pieces at any given moment as I thrash dramatically about the grocery store, but no one is accomplishing anything by whining about anything. Everyone's trying their hardest, and if they're not, they have before, or they're taking a break to be awful, or, they'll try hard later.<br />
As some TV writer once wrote, and Hugh Laurie then lisped in his strangely attractive American accent,<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">"People don't get what they deserve, they get what they get. And there's nothing any of us can do about it."</span><br />
<br />
Sitting here in bed on a Wednesday night, missing something I really really wanted to go to because of an ear infection running rampant through the right side of my face that probably came from the cute and totally viral cherubs I assist Sundays in taking their snack sabbatical, two episodes of Glee and no homework down, coffee Heath bar crunch peeled open, feeling guilty about asking someone to sub for me tomorrow, long weekend of not much to look forward to coming up, can I tell you that my ear really hurts and that I'm a little unsure of myself and feel way less intelligent than my coworkers and love my latest religion professor and am not looking forward much to school tomorrow, but that I'm feeling pretty pleasant anyway and that this ice cream is super delicious and that my homework will get done and tomorrow the sun will rise and it will be Thursday?<br />
I just wanted to tell you that.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-40166592683601488552011-02-05T22:55:00.000-08:002011-02-06T20:57:45.722-08:00I wore hard contacts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuf2uexOHyrK43wXhjaEIuIqPb0NpEVLaJ15kFfQpGXmj8IucGjZ80N29xRx8ptdyVW-qHmMrSt8qEp6tqRMORoAOJf9ih_8U8z2me8BFM3dJF6yY0Kg4aCfaEGHIMNaUPtJu1RFb_8uyC/s1600/out-hard-contact-lenses-800X800.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuf2uexOHyrK43wXhjaEIuIqPb0NpEVLaJ15kFfQpGXmj8IucGjZ80N29xRx8ptdyVW-qHmMrSt8qEp6tqRMORoAOJf9ih_8U8z2me8BFM3dJF6yY0Kg4aCfaEGHIMNaUPtJu1RFb_8uyC/s320/out-hard-contact-lenses-800X800.jpg" width="273" /></a></div><br />
all throughout junior high school.<br />
<br />
My eyesight was declining steadily and rapidly enough that my soft-spoken optometrist decided to place me in iron lenses that hurt like hell and had to be cleaned before and after use with this stinging white solution that came in a bottle with a red lid. <br />
I, being thirteen and uncomely, ignored the pain, because I was just overly excited about the shedding of my spectacles. I could do nothing immediate about the state of my teeth, hairstyle, wardrobe, height, or propensity towards immediately bursting into tears when scolded for talking in class, but I <i>could</i> do something about my four eyes, and I was finally allowed to when I entered the seventh grade.<br />
<br />
Having grown up in the town next to the college town, I go to college in the college town with everyone from the town next to the college town. Every fiftieth person I see on campus is someone I grew up with. I enjoyed this thoroughly as a freshman, and continue to do so, kind of, because it's nice to remember that you have people.<br />
Lately, though, it's become a little sad to run into everybody every few days like we are all wont to do--because the more time goes by, the less our teenage sleepovers and vandalizations and shared class projects and school dances and extracurricular activities seem to matter. People don't seem to gush animatedly over each other's accomplishments anymore, engagements, kids, degrees; even those have somehow become routine, (yes, I know I'm barely beginning this phase of my life) so that when I see my oldest, dearest acquaintances on campus, we share a short greeting and not much else. Sometimes there's a dual lack of effort to go even that far, and either a small smile is exchanged or we both promise ourselves to stop and say hi another time. It's like we're all afraid to be kids now, or something. Further and further away are the weeks of six-hour rehearsals we danced through, the traffic cones we stole to place around a favorite teacher's car upon inspiration at three am, and the choir classes, dressing rooms, and rolls of mic tape we all picked off of.<br />
<br />
In rehearsals for a junior high version of <i>The Pirates of Penzance</i>, I played one of fifteen or twenty daughters of the major general. The boys played pirates, the girls played daughters, and the boy-girls and girl-boys that could dance played the policemen. I walked about the stage, happily snuggling into groups of each of these categories on breaks, rubbing my new contacts with the heels of each hand like mad until I looked perpetually dazed. Man they hurt. And everyone else had soft contacts, because their corneas could be trusted.<br />
I see or speak to, on a regular basis, about a dozen people from this cast. Two of them work in my office. It was ten years ago, this play, and I could probably tell you what three-quarters of the entire ensemble (about forty people) are doing with their lives at this very moment. Alas--few of us ever see each other, or talk. We Facebook, and text sometimes, but it's like this unbroken stretch of non-communication, because while we've shared all these experiences, nobody has time for experiences anymore. You know what I mean?<br />
<br />
One of the policemen in our show, a girl, with long brown hair, was named I think something like Ashley. I think that's what it was. We had our first conversation, I remember, sitting along the false garden wall at the back of the stage, touching the edges of the scrim shyly with the tips of our feet. I pressed my fingers into my eyes as we talked, drawing the lids out to the sides of my face and snapping them back, itching my vanity-blinded eyes until the discomfort receeded for a few blurry seconds. Ashley asked me if I had contacts, and I proudly said yes, and she proudly said me too, and impulsively I blurted out that mine were different though, they were smaller, and harder, and hurt all the time, and turned my eyes from a muddy hazel to a muddy blue, because hard contacts are bluer.<br />
Ashley had hard contacts too, and really blue eyes in a cheerful round face, and we laughed over the lavender tint our eye bags had taken since we'd gotten our lenses and begun twisting our eyelids around to itch at any available moment. <br />
Finding another person doing the uncool version of the cool thing was intensely comforting, and we developed a quick bond to each other based on nothing but the fact that our corrective eyewear was identical and like no one else's.<br />
<br />
In the hallways at the junior high, the two of us began signaling to each other whenever we passed--never talking, never really delving into a friendship--but every time we saw each other, she would raise one solemn forefinger to the soft skin beneath her right eye and draw it downwards to wackily reveal the wet red eyesocket beneath the eye itself. This I would quickly mirror, and that was it. <br />
<br />
About a month ago, I walked quickly, late as usual, from my office to the library, across a hundred-foot span of cement, clutching a flying swirl of lesson plans and frantically magneting my nametag to my right chest. As I looked up, a flash of face caught my eye, my old friend, or whatever we were, Ashley, walking briskly in the other direction, a bright recognition in a sea of Tuesday. We made eye contact.<br />
Without thinking, I raised my right forefinger immediately to my eye and made our signal, the wacky one-eyed mad scientist-type thing we'd expressed our frustration and fellowship through ten years ago, and without blinking an eye, she nodded ceremoniously and returned the signal, and then she was gone. <br />
<br />
It's happened a couple more times since then, over a month, and we've never stopped to talk or even to make sure we ever knew each other's first names.<br />
<br />
Whatever your name is, probably Ashley, thank you for remembering.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-6126878617054117092011-02-03T20:54:00.000-08:002011-02-03T20:54:44.516-08:00Flavor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTimfBX1lI-Jy6A4pd5JJYR6hAabja6sikNt1AkiURHTlk1VCYVwTFg95K-doXyKjTvtBeh8cOS28-pFLEvOXS0AuRkB4AGUziFqW4NypB5sCQwWFunDDkyBt0vQImBhs5dJFMn5yDeeJo/s1600/Picture+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTimfBX1lI-Jy6A4pd5JJYR6hAabja6sikNt1AkiURHTlk1VCYVwTFg95K-doXyKjTvtBeh8cOS28-pFLEvOXS0AuRkB4AGUziFqW4NypB5sCQwWFunDDkyBt0vQImBhs5dJFMn5yDeeJo/s1600/Picture+1.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Last night's frosty walk from campus to car</i></span></div><br />
Ever been to <a href="http://www.sfmarkets.com/locations/utah">Sunflower Market </a>in Orem?<br />
I haven't been there very much either. I can't really cook. I'm a great bakeress; I can whip you up something bake-ed pretty much any time without high levels of anxiety. I like my hands to be covered in flour. When I was a kid, I loved the taste of raw flour so much that when my mom was making cookies, I'd grab the flouriest handfuls of dough from the outside of the bowl instead of the mixediest ones from the inside.<br />
I can't really cook because I've never taught myself how, or been taught. I also find great conflict in the fact that as soon as I've started to cook something, I lose appetite for it, or by the time it's finished, I've eaten enough cookies not to want it anymore. This especially happens with foods cooked in skillets. Stir it around a bit, and I'm done. For some reason.<br />
But for someone who can't really cook, I sure enjoy grocery shopping.<br />
Especially when it's beyond scentless outside. Nothing growing out there. I crave the days when the temperature creeps hesitantly above freezing, when the rotting leaves and mud become thawed enough for me to smell. In organical grocery stores, it smells delicious all year round. <br />
At Sunflower Market, it smells like Good Earth, which is where I used to go in high school to get mango smoothies. Like henna and pills and raw honey and dirt and fruit and recycled packaging. <br />
Ending up at Sunflower Market last night after work, phone squished between ear and big woolen coat, I took a little green arm basket from the front and pranced back to Cereals.<br />
I always skirt the Asian Flavors table and all the actual Food. Sometimes I buy things like fruit and trail mix at Sunflower Market, and sometimes I buy (and then eat with my fingers in my car) the "fresh" sushi, but what I usually buy is this Irish oatmeal that I really like to eat at work. Last night I also picked up some slippery little Vitamin D capsules, because apparently I'm <a href="http://www.vitaminddeficiencysymptomsguide.com/">deficient</a>, three organic yogurts, because they're delicious and have kangaroos on them, almond milk, and a soy lavender candle that was in the sale cart.<br />
<br />
I lit the candle in my room last night before a shower, so that while I stood in front of my mirror listening to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WONNbS3_hz0&feature=related">this</a>, brushing mascara onto my eyelashes, I was wrapped in a clean, purple, springy smell that absorbed itself into my drying hair. Made it easier to go out into the cold again. Having a candle to light is almost like having a pet to feed. Makes walking into my room to do anything more like a ritual. <br />
This morning, on a quest to eat more D and to eat more in general, I peeled the thick foil off the top of a kangaroo yogurt while driving with my knee, ten minutes late to a test, still squishing my phone to my ear with my shoulder. Licking the sweet yogurt off the foil, I resisted the urge to then stick said foil to my marbled dashboard, sat it gently on the floor of the car (progress) and pulled a spoon from my pocket to enjoy the rest of my breakfast.<br />
<br />
Five dollars and eighty cents for the candle and the yogurt, and a lavender evening and strawberry morning because of them.<br />
Hear hear. Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-38394223914568745172011-02-02T14:12:00.000-08:002011-02-02T14:32:43.469-08:00Here You AreSo little has not been going on around here that I have forgotten to blog. <br />
I often tell myself that I like writing, because I know that I like writing. I often tell myself to blog every day, and follow up with myself the next day by blogging. I've <i>accomplished</i>, I think. But then, the next day, I end up brainstorming layers of sweaters to fight the Superman cold that's happening in Utah right now, or teaching, or reading, or nibbling on the abundance of snack foods that make up a mountain in my work cubby and have completely overtaken my diet, or lack of, or walking out of the office to pick up a call on my Fancy New Smart Phone that I bought myself for Christmas and still hate, or plotting how quietly I can play the music at my desk without a yelp of impertinence from the guy across the room who I love to teach Illustrator with but who unfortunately listens only to crap. <br />
And who just came over to try my poncho on and who threatened to teach his next class in it and asked me if it was alpaca. <br />
But the point here is.<br />
I'm taking a writing class which is incredible but has also made me realize how incredibly scary it is to write about yourself.<br />
I'm also taking a reading series where I go listen to people read their publications every week.<br />
So I should be writing, even if it is mostly blogs about my own mundaneaeity, or snack foods. <br />
I learn lessons every day. And I should talk about them, because that's why I was here in the first place. I sit through classes, some of which I have problems with and some of which I am completely enthralled by, and I am always late to class, and I learn lessons driving in my big car, and sitting at home reading, and I learn lessons at night, where I've had no time for anything but falling in love.<br />
<br />
POINT IS.<br />
I am here, to blog, every day. I'm back. I'm doing it. And I'm telling all of you six people who're here, so I have to do it. I want to do it; I miss it. I read <a href="http://mandymadson.blogspot.com/">Mandy</a> and<a href="http://brittanyaustin08.blogspot.com/"> Brittany</a> and<a href="http://pacingthepanicroom.blogspot.com/"> this guy</a> and<a href="http://kasm.blogspot.com/"> whoozit</a> and I'm back, so.<br />
<br />
Read me.<br />
Tomorrow.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/tenniel/alice/1.4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/tenniel/alice/1.4.jpg" width="234" /></a></div>Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-43420759770469321502010-12-30T10:40:00.000-08:002010-12-30T10:40:55.734-08:00StrollingI've always been afraid of being alone, and then I learned differently.<br />
Not afraid like Black-Swan-paintings-rolling-their-big-white-eyes-at-me-afraid, just afraid like I'd burst into a thousand pieces over finding Something To Do, With People. Nervousness would send me over an edge into a fast-moving river of people who consoled my loneliness as long as they were people and I was with them and I was a person with people and we were doing something that people do with other people.<br />
<br />
But like I said, I learned a little differently. To crave solitude and the quiet usefulness of wandering alone and uninhibited through great crowds of people.<br />
I took a plane, two planes, four planes, two layovers, to and from Florida. I took these planes alone, in jeans and a white t-shirt and sandals and a little gold necklace belonging to my mother. <br />
<br />
I was visiting two friends.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihng15h6BSlExsJDgpobCmPUmxlaWK9dMIFIqFhFW1nUDP9lNuP_vn6iYzhM0_RAfKAVdYEbfsvvHRCefgHEQLefhXBAdl0Rigle5Q8EQqafdQGwo-w4CkBRCXHw-WDy4QIJJrBWuc0ur8/s1600/DSC02634.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihng15h6BSlExsJDgpobCmPUmxlaWK9dMIFIqFhFW1nUDP9lNuP_vn6iYzhM0_RAfKAVdYEbfsvvHRCefgHEQLefhXBAdl0Rigle5Q8EQqafdQGwo-w4CkBRCXHw-WDy4QIJJrBWuc0ur8/s640/DSC02634.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br />
By generous gift of a wonderful woman, I was treated to a week in Florida with two people who are dearer to me than mostly anything in the whole world. The minute I ran into their arms, everything unpleasant got less unpleasant. Huge release.<br />
We went to the beach, to breakfast, to drag night, to a club, and to a confusing delicious restaurant that served nothing but appetizers. During the day, we did Disney. <br />
These two friends of mine were working like mad, dancing their faces off in the stifling heat of the parks, and I was left with most of most days to walk about alone in these gigantic terrariums. <br />
<br />
I was in Disneyworld for a week. It was really hot and really overstuffed with people wandering determinedly in and out of lines and stores, enjoying the bajillions of dollars per family they'd shelled out to dream the dream. I was there for free, beyond giant Mickey-shaped suckers and other food, and felt unpressed for time or experience because of this. I stayed in thin dresses all week and kept my overhumidified shrub of hair held back by a stretchy drugstore headband. Each morning I would have breakfast with Bryant, having slept astoundingly well, and then we would head to one of various parks. We'd part at the gate and I'd have an entire day to do as I pleased.<br />
<br />
I milled about the parks, fanning myself with a colorful map of my surroundings. Sweat poured off of me like it did off of everyone else. For some reason, the heat didn't bother me. Every morning was cool again, and while I was warm during the day, it was comforting. It wasn't the killer dry heat of home, but a softer, wetter, enveloping heat that kept me sleepy and smiling for seven days without sunburning me or sucking my energy. I walked slowly for hours, turning brown, sometimes circling the entire park several times without entering one gift shop or ride or attraction, just walking and walking through so many people on my own with nothing but a map in my hand. It was there, in a totally foreign place, with no pressings for time, that I first experienced the deliciousness of being alone. Alone with my thoughts and my ever-fanning wrist, taking a slow gait through thousands of people.<br />
<br />
While I still love a good gathering of people, this casual turnaround in my nature allows me to crawl out onto my roof with myself and a quilt and the radio, and to study in the library, alone for hours, on a date with my brain. And while those two things may sound like things you already do, or are good at, they are new for me and I marvel at them every day. <br />
Happy New Year you guys.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-71399257794780522032010-12-28T11:27:00.000-08:002010-12-28T11:43:23.466-08:00Simple Lists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKN9UjPchZpY6-a4pQ8ID8qgRpVHZuKpIuxkItw3kEEebKvHYZ5FDbteQ3_dzN8RZD3vh-BYXnT2LpTS2EPmvyQvE6B65PyQ0TfhiDmA2Fo1eR3EJAjsRCWaU7pvEpbL8Es3KpTf69XXpl/s1600/mondrian2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKN9UjPchZpY6-a4pQ8ID8qgRpVHZuKpIuxkItw3kEEebKvHYZ5FDbteQ3_dzN8RZD3vh-BYXnT2LpTS2EPmvyQvE6B65PyQ0TfhiDmA2Fo1eR3EJAjsRCWaU7pvEpbL8Es3KpTf69XXpl/s640/mondrian2.jpg" width="372" /></a></div> I have all kinds of goals for the new year.<br />
<br />
I always do.<br />
<br />
Something I like more than mostly anything and that makes me feel more productive than mostly anything does is to make lists in nice, rectangular handwriting (which takes some concentration) on either long yellow post-it notes or clean pages of a notebook. These lists crop up around finals week, in doldrumous weeks of boringness, at the beginning of summer and at the end of the year. Sometimes I tape them to the wall next to my desk, where hangs a picture of a ladybug and my tag from running a 10K, and sometimes I leave them in my work shelf so both I and my shelf-sharer can see RUN EVERYDAY, READ YOUR SCRIPTURES, HAVE HOPE, BE NICER hanging next to his ties and my big white mug. <br />
Very often three or four or five of these lists go by with no accomplishments, no lines through them, and then I bust out the big accomplishment guns and surprise myself by finishing an entire list. Does it really take two weeks to make a habit? I can never make it past day six or seven, heaven help me. What is it like to be one of those people who accomplishes things easily? Do you exist? Can I meet you?<br />
Sometimes the gigantic dash of my Buick ends up peppered with my precious post-its, and that kind of works, too. At least as a sad cubist reproduction for the passerby, if not so much as a reminder to do things I'm not doing. <br />
I've often wondered more than a little frustratedly how people seem to do all of the things they do. <br />
At the advice of a friend, I tried making a simple goal of one word, wrote it landscape on a piece of printer paper in red marker, and tacked it to my ceiling right above where my head hits the pillow, hoping that it would stick better.<br />
It did stick better. I took it down after a while, but even now that spot of sandpapery ceiling reminds me of the one word that reminds me that life is simply good and should for no reason be lived as though it's not. I went by one word for months, and it stuck. And now I always go by it. <br />
That's one thing I've learned in 2010. That things stick better one at a time. <br />
<br />
I'm still working on my list for the beginning of the new year. Ironically, by force of habit. Adding a few things every day, crossing others off when I realize they're entirely laughable.<br />
<br />
Like vegetable consumption.<br />
I have a multivitamin. <br />
<i>Tomorrow, the second half of the two most important things I've learned this year. </i>Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-71500455075743093512010-12-09T12:12:00.000-08:002010-12-09T12:32:26.288-08:00Ode to Mr. Leeper<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglXmF_frxKVI2u_S_p38-k_xC3R3IG4I5k1bza7t5F3cs6Ikcs5TvXOSLo9F1bOj4EkOlYAhw-IMnFaR-kwHt7lNI0jYOICHZ84hlBYizQIurlumDxpaIUcyVBg6YZGziBXnXIU4vBB1sA/s1600/2318325567_1fd594eccb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglXmF_frxKVI2u_S_p38-k_xC3R3IG4I5k1bza7t5F3cs6Ikcs5TvXOSLo9F1bOj4EkOlYAhw-IMnFaR-kwHt7lNI0jYOICHZ84hlBYizQIurlumDxpaIUcyVBg6YZGziBXnXIU4vBB1sA/s640/2318325567_1fd594eccb.jpg" width="456" /></a></div><br />
In the third grade I had a teacher who wore red plaid shirts and corduroy pants. He played basketball with us at recess. He read <i>A Wrinkle in Time</i> out loud to us. Smelling like tater tots and basketball rubber, we would settle back into our green plastic molded chairs as Mr. Leeper circled the front of the yellow-lit classroom with the waxy paperback folded open in one hand.<br />
<br />
His reading voice was like the voice I used in my head to read to myself. Either that or my reading voice originated in his. It was a deep, quiet, rollicking voice. Nobody would budge. He read that book to us for a month or so, "It was a dark and stormy night," and I longed for a farmhouse and a dog named Fortinbras, an attic bedroom and a little brother in blue pajamas. I fell in love with Calvin and adopted Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which. The tesseract was real, and Meg's mother had violet eyes. "No, Meg. Don't hope it was a dream. I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be." "Oh, my darling, of course not," Mr. Leeper would read, in Mrs. Whatsit's soft voice, and "the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers." I sat quietly through Camazotz and cried when Meg found her father in the transparent room. I couldn't look for too long at the Man With Red Eyes on the cover, or I'd get too scared. I was dually terrified of and comforted by Aunt Beast. Perched at the edge of my seat, I gasped in terror at the description of the giant, seething brain, in joy at Meg's triumph in saving her brother, and at the end of the book, I collapsed onto my desk, face to the spongy-smelling wood, and breathed hard. <br />
<br />
It has always been easy to pay attention in English 380 this semester because we arrange our desks in a circle every day.<br />
It has always been easy because I like reading and talking, and we read something and then we talk about it. And because the classroom is two feet from my office, and because the class is at one, which is an easy slot to make it to and a difficult one to not be around for. <br />
<br />
But the real reason it's been deliciously easy to pay attention in British and international English literature from 1950-present this semester is because my professor reads aloud like Mr. Leeper.<br />
Not exactly like him, you see, he's louder and rolls the words around more in his mouth, but he reads with the same enthusiasm. <br />
I don't know quite how to describe it, but this professor of mine reads out loud, in a rollicking voice, like I'm still eating a hot breakfast every morning and having trouble zipping up my own coat and don't have funds to worry about, and like I still have art class once a week to paint watercolors of peaches in. It's like he still reads because he likes to read. Like I could plausibly believe that this man would go home and pick up something recreational after grading our papers all day. <br />
<br />
We finished class yesterday by his giving a little presentation on each author we'd read this fall, and by his reading a segment from each book.<i> Return of the King, Midnight's Children, A House for Mr. Biswas, Omeros, Possession, The Famished Road, Translations, </i>and<i> The Cure at Troy</i>. As my teacher read out loud to us this semester, I was happy to find myself perched unconsciously on the very edge of my chair, feeling like a nine-year-old again.<br />
<br />
Thanks, Mr. Leeper.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-80660796856696202412010-11-30T11:04:00.000-08:002010-11-30T20:01:56.045-08:00TeatimeShow's over.<br />
The question I get the most when shows end is if I miss them.<br />
The answer is, no. <br />
Of course, I would like to dress up in 18th-century finery every single day, and have long curly hair that hits me mid-back and is exquisitely styled atop my head, and I like to go to balls, because they're beautiful, but today I am happy to sit here at work being a little dull with my hair in a ponytail. I will miss the little girls looking wide-eyed at me after the show, touching my dress. I already miss the people I shared a dressing room and eyelash glue with. But dullness, I think, facilitates more creativity for me. There's time to think about lint and piles and the piles of paper on my desk and the way things sit. I embrace dullness this week, normalcy, cereal in the morning. Life will return to normal little by little over the next few days. There will suddenly be all this time in which to really focus on things instead of skimming them between scenes. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI9gUOmF_Z8KgyN_cmIUXJPOkVFq7JFNr153b2q20LZ0MWVXKh9yMKBlpP8NeX7kXiMz8EBqvzRJK-NZ5OGgm_c4RjppOC4D5ATqleYo_cPE401I9yXR5ToBpskna1dvRmZQD-xxjB9pnR/s1600/64912_10150098324844428_832744427_7344914_5669196_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI9gUOmF_Z8KgyN_cmIUXJPOkVFq7JFNr153b2q20LZ0MWVXKh9yMKBlpP8NeX7kXiMz8EBqvzRJK-NZ5OGgm_c4RjppOC4D5ATqleYo_cPE401I9yXR5ToBpskna1dvRmZQD-xxjB9pnR/s640/64912_10150098324844428_832744427_7344914_5669196_n.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> getting down with our maid selves, dress rehearsals</i></span></div><br />
Last week I had my first real onstage blunder. During a garden-related scene filled with topiaries and tea cookies, I played the part of a maid. There were three of us maids, me, Misha, and Melissa, bopping about in our green calico dresses and white aprons. We were on and off the stage, back and forth, laughing and listening to the gossip being shared by housemates. The south side of the little theater we performed in has three exit/entrances, one in the middle and two on either side. The middle entrance is ground level, and the two side doors are up five stairs apiece. As we made our beribonned exit up the southwest stairs for the last time in the scene, I did what I have had the goal not to do for the last four months, which is to misjudge the height of the step in front of me and trip in my giant pilgrim-buckled shoes. For 55 performances, in pitch blackness and high-heeled shoes, I never tripped. But then I did. <br />
<br />
I tripped, mid-giggle, and fell a short distance onto my forearms and elbows. Curls flying, white hair ribbons flapping, yards and yards of fabric, <i>thunk</i>. As I landed, my shins smacked the step below me, unfortunately un-padded by the voluminous petticoat I was wearing. I plopped to the ground with my face inches in front of the red exit curtain, and somehow, thinking quickly, using my first logic, I decided that it would be quicker to simply crawl off the stage and draw less attention to myself than standing back up and exiting like a human. So, gigantic green calico backside in tow, I proceeded to slither immediately offstage, under the curtain, and tumble down the stairs on the other side of the curtain, face to the blue plaid carpet. <br />
<br />
This is ponytailed, purple-shinned Julie, signing out to dullness for a while.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">ADDENDUM: Meagan M. Downey is the greatest stage manager and dancer of all humans. </span>Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-19392397758665592892010-11-25T07:59:00.000-08:002010-11-25T07:59:18.842-08:00Brighten my northern sky.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3WoGmm8jm9GmaUWK5sJFfDS0ABJ_07tyMdDW2XiksNXHjfnIR1sup_jjxUd3kpfLswkSWRJLaTECwCNfMoPbHDr1A3Ewpnr2ylQh4l6UXSeOwjiKXlCMCUgXqMCJFGD1b2KSRGNB0k6Fn/s1600/21jst4z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="496" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3WoGmm8jm9GmaUWK5sJFfDS0ABJ_07tyMdDW2XiksNXHjfnIR1sup_jjxUd3kpfLswkSWRJLaTECwCNfMoPbHDr1A3Ewpnr2ylQh4l6UXSeOwjiKXlCMCUgXqMCJFGD1b2KSRGNB0k6Fn/s640/21jst4z.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Happy Thanksgiving.<br />
<br />
I am thankful for my infallible mother, my resilient dad, for my sister and for my sense of humor which seems to match nobody's but hers and that we could make a nest of blankets in the family room last Sunday to watch <i>Inception</i> together, I am thankful for the gold Rococo mirror hanging in my bedroom, for my down comforter, for my boots and the three books I got in the mail yesterday; I am thankful for a kind and understanding boss, an amazing job, and outstanding co-workers who bear-hug me, occasionally tease me, and who help me learn new programs. I'm thankful that miss Josie, miss Michelle, and Mister Tom came to visit at intermission and Josie told me about wearing big girl undies and clutched my fancy green mask and petted the damask of my dress excitedly for ten minutes while I got to chat with my outstanding sister and her outstanding husband who got diagnosed with leukemia two months ago and for whom things are looking far up. I'm thankful for lessons I learn and the bamillion bits of useful knowledge honed from blogging. I'm thankful for Casey and David and Bryant and Jeffrey and Trevor. I'm thankful for my birthmother and for the life that she has given me. I'm thankful for hope. I'm thankful for Kaitlyn Flanagan for making me write. I'm thankful for growing up and laughing and noodles and Emily. I am thankful to have spent the second half of this year in league with a cast full of good people that make me laugh and hold me up every day while we're performing together. I am thankful for the friends I know I can call in a pinch, the friends I admire so much I could explode, and the ones I see every few weeks or months that I wish I had entire lifetimes to hang out with. I am thankful for my grandparents and their raspberry bushes, for writing, for the DI, for A.S. Byatt, Derek Walcott, Brian Friel, Salman Rushdie, Zora Neale Hurston, and Emily Dickinson for making this semester dreamy, for enamel jewelry, for teas of the cinnamon apple spice and tension tamer persuasions. I'm thankful for prayer and oatmeal squares and all simple carbs while we're going there and House and for <span style="color: #b45f06; font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db8YCFkG44Q">this song</a></span>, which I would like you to imagine I am singing to you, but in a woman voice, because if I could, I would sing it to you. Because I love you. And I'm thankful for you.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-73101158237801361182010-11-07T23:52:00.000-08:002010-11-07T23:54:20.906-08:00I'm not a speed reader. I'm a speed understander. Did you ever repose in your rocking chair on a Sunday morning before 9:00 with bright yellow leaves outside the window of a room covered in dishes and syllabi and race hungrily through the last couple hundred pages of a book because of how good it was? Today I did.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM8dhfoRYgP8M9fXcS0GC8o0Mmj9J1-W7LzNtdE1Lfw28R6YFL3FFxCNvgj6ND4_AUo_ke1pz8ya93YBlI2QzP-6qjjONFSi6vfjI_2hUhBCcr4BRhT4u8lYyKjjhZd5s4o8jYLMckNCqA/s1600/in_the_conservatory-edouard-manet-1879.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM8dhfoRYgP8M9fXcS0GC8o0Mmj9J1-W7LzNtdE1Lfw28R6YFL3FFxCNvgj6ND4_AUo_ke1pz8ya93YBlI2QzP-6qjjONFSi6vfjI_2hUhBCcr4BRhT4u8lYyKjjhZd5s4o8jYLMckNCqA/s640/in_the_conservatory-edouard-manet-1879.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> "Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, <span style="font-size: large;">when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark</span>--readings when the knowledge that we <i>shall know</i> the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by <span style="font-size: large;">the sense that it was<i> always there</i>, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have <i>always known</i> it was as it was</span>, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge."<br />
--A.S. Byatt, <i>Possession</i><br />
<br />
(To everyone that has raised their hands in reader-friendship, thank you for your sweet words and camaraderie. Please accept this tingly bit of a book as a symbol of my love and affection. I hope it brings a lightness to your Monday that I know it will be bringing to mine.)Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-3778037904356127822010-10-30T11:08:00.000-07:002010-10-30T11:11:36.410-07:00People and Their Blogs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivywrNHEz2-sySggmUSSi8RFA5omDvVPZmGnVzxCCozN2t24oNE1KnppvEYAxRyolv7rZ4HuV98rb2668jIWr8W9gbK6-W0PVccDUtuNitNsmyjWxyr6q0_CV18A0vdViXE49RYIGQ2gnU/s1600/tumblr_lazqr12Oqd1qzyrwv.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivywrNHEz2-sySggmUSSi8RFA5omDvVPZmGnVzxCCozN2t24oNE1KnppvEYAxRyolv7rZ4HuV98rb2668jIWr8W9gbK6-W0PVccDUtuNitNsmyjWxyr6q0_CV18A0vdViXE49RYIGQ2gnU/s640/tumblr_lazqr12Oqd1qzyrwv.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
I have run into an astounding number of people over the last few weeks<br />
whether I've been standing in line after the show greeting patrons in a three-cornered hat,<br />
or walking around on campus twirling and avoiding being inside,<br />
or whatever<br />
and people keep telling me that they read my blog.<br />
Sometimes people that I didn't even know! <br />
And I know what usually happens is like this:<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>You</b>: I read your blog!</div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>Me</b>: [Ducks head into right shoulder or covers face with hands, lets out embarrassed, excited, nervous, kind of unattractive snort while attempting to take in this incredibly loving moment] </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><i>Silence</i></div><br />
Those of you who have contacted me via e-mail or Facebook have had the advantage of missing out on my awkwardness and receiving a much more polished e-mail reply. <br />
But how it should go when I see you, is:<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>You</b>: I read your blog!</div><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>Me</b>: </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[Screams] Thank you for reading because I love your guts and I love to share something with you, you magnanimous individual that I am lucky to know! [Screams again and hugs you] </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>I think sometimes I at least get the hug in there. <br />
<br />
Thank you thank you thank you for reading.<br />
It makes me as happy as a clam that you come here and read my way-too-long sentences and extreme exhaustion of the word awesome. <br />
It's awesome.<br />
<br />
If you ever come here to read, and I don't know you, or I don't know that you've been here but I know you because I know you in real life, please come out of the woodwork and leave a comment or follow or call me or hug me in person or <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#%21/julie.garbutt" style="color: orange;">friend me on Facebook</a>--and most importantly, if you have a blog, please link yourself in the comments! There is nothing I love more than people, and their blogs. I would love to know you.<br />
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And on that note, I am going to go eat some <a href="http://www.quakeroats.com/products/oat-cereals/oatmeal-squares/brown-sugar.aspx" style="color: orange;">oatmeal squares </a>and a banana and then I am going to carve some pumpkins with my family. I suck at carving pumpkins, because I am impatient.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3826608887827338951.post-38125150195449632002010-10-23T11:07:00.000-07:002010-10-23T11:26:18.976-07:00Two smells and a baby<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgewBUGVyMtCF-zjbW1HSRg2pct8RYsjIn0w-lJH7nxIpLMrHoXS6K-Mg20OgRpNqFkTj9_P9z0ydIKAY957X_-C9ARiaIC6j3hDZW2my4_tNWmHSU0NMH_dDh1tc94w-oo2dkI6Ms6CzS8/s1600/Edward_Gorey_1_43023b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgewBUGVyMtCF-zjbW1HSRg2pct8RYsjIn0w-lJH7nxIpLMrHoXS6K-Mg20OgRpNqFkTj9_P9z0ydIKAY957X_-C9ARiaIC6j3hDZW2my4_tNWmHSU0NMH_dDh1tc94w-oo2dkI6Ms6CzS8/s640/Edward_Gorey_1_43023b.jpg" width="640" /></a>Something about sleeping late always brings the prettiest dreams. <br />
I ran my hands over my stomach and it was round and tight and there was a little person greeting me with their hands and feet from inside of it. Strangest feeling ever. Best feeling ever. I woke up elated, missing that little person who doesn't even exist yet. And loving them to pieces. <br />
I just woke up after a long week and a beautiful dream to drizzling, tapping rain on my half-open window and windowsill and to the smell of baking applesauce swirling up from my basement, where my mother, grandmother, and aunt are churning away at it until the entire family has enough to last through graham crackers and pork chops and granola and cottage cheese for another year. I woke up with a hankering for a pumpkin to carve and a scarf to wind around my neck, because fall has finally completely arrived, with a rain shower, applesauce, and a dream of a future nugget.<br />
So lovely.Julie Wildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907423399859518990noreply@blogger.com3