an essay on pacifism

Most of the time I stay away from politics. I don't write about politics and am silent in political discussions, just listening. I do this because, most of the time, I feel unqualified to speak about politics because I am largely ignorant of "the issues", and if I know about them, do not feel that I know enough to give any sensible opinion on them. Also I'm such a pacifist and an idealist that I hold back my opinions, knowing that many people will just shoot them down right away as unrealistic.

So as a disclaimer, I am a young seventeen, quite ignorant.

But I'm going to try a bit tonight to talk about war.

I am against war. I know that some wars start in self-defense... I am not against the Allied powers preventing Hitler's Germany from accomplishing its goals, for example. But by saying that I am against war, I am saying that I am against aggression. Wars start with aggression on one or both sides, or aggression on one side and self-defense on the other. If there were no aggression, then there would be no war.

Aggression comes from greed or fear. Nations are greedy for more land, for an empire; they are greedy to assert prestige. Nations are also afraid. They are afraid of their cultures being annihilated - they are afraid of being taken over and suppressed by other nations. War also comes from fear.

Whenever I see on television, hear about, or read about war - the current war or any war in the past - I do not understand. I do not understand how, after seeing how beautiful the world is and how beautiful life is, after seeing new green leaves in spring, or the smile of a small child, or love between people --- I do not understand how, after seeing these things, someone can want to harm another. How a leader can want to harm his own people or the people of another nation.

They get away with it by generalizing and categorizing, creating "us" and "them". The government of any nation is far away from the daily life of the ordinary people of the nation, and secret. Complex.

Many may be thinking now that my views are far too simplistic, my "harm none" does not work when practically applied to world affairs. It is a simple view, very, very simple. But society and government are complex and relations between nations are complex. Aggression happens and fear happens; greed happens.

Where does greed come from, then? - this motivating factor of war? Many say it is the selfish nature of man, that people are by nature greedy, desiring more for themselves. People are greedy, but, I think, people also have within themselves the desire and ability to improve, to overcome greed. In my opinion, this desire should be cultivated.

Learning, the cultivation of ability and potential to improve, begin very, very simply --- with a child learning, from parents, from other adult figures (like teachers, aunts, grandparents). Abused children often grow up to be abusers because violent behavior was what they were taught. There is both good and bad in every person --- the important thing is which one of these is cultivated throughout life, the most important cultivation beginning very early. Someone may think that it is his right to have greed and his right to be bad if he wants, but this is how societal problems really begin.

Nothing you do affects only you; everything has ripple effects, however small they are. So it is really each person's mission to cultivate the good in himself, to make sure that it rises above and dominates over the bad. Compassion must reign over greed; kindness must overtake selfishness. If it does not, then your life can become either a waste, or a poison to those around you. The more power you have, the more responsibility and accountability to others you have to cultivate the good in yourself.

Society is often spoken of as though it were an outside entity --- people say that society imposes certain views, morals, opinions on us, and say that it is best to break away from society's domination over our thoughts. What is society, though? - It is only people. It is not an external force presiding over us - it is us. There are opinions formed through generations of prejudice that affect us every day, and it is a necessary goal to break away from these hindrances. However, society can be good because of the human desire to improve. To me, this desire is redemption.

Society is complex and government is complex and international relations are complex, aggression happens, greed happens, fear happens, and war happens. Complexity is necessary to convenience and to the modern system of nations and governments, economies and society. But my philosophy is still simple. Peace begins with each individual consciously choosing to work hard and commit to strengthening the good part of his nature --- when he actively practices compassion, kindness, unselishness, pacifism. Before the world can be improved, each individual must improve himself.

The problem is that many do not realize that this is necessary, are so set in their ways and prejudiced already against changing, or simply do not want to take the time and effort to improve. The leaders of the world do not belong to themselves, but are put on certain paths and pulled in certain directions by all those around them, by the people of their nations, by the other figures in power. And even if one leader is a good man, if he is a pacifist, then there are still other leaders who are aggressors, and who are dangerous and must be stopped. I do not know what the solution is to this.

I just believe that if each individual began to cultivate his good nature, then eventually the whole world would improve. What can we do, then? --- Just start today to diminish greed in ourselves, teach a child to cultivate his goodness, spread positivity around ourselves. That is all I have for now.

in defense of thoreau

A friendly post for Dr Hillman: Basically because I didn't have anything else to do. :)

Henry Thoreau is sometimes criticized (by Dr Hillman and others) for living alone by a pond and writing about the importance of nature - but going into town and getting pies from his mother and supplies from the shops. His connection to town life makes his devotion to a natural, close-to-the-earth life seem shallow. But - he was not shallow at all... because he met his goal, his dream, completely, and did not do anything insincere.

Thoreau never claimed that he was setting out to live completely away from society, or that he was going to rely completely on the natural world. He did not advocate man's return to 'savagery', but instead wanted men to acknowledge the uncivilized part of themselves and embrace this as a part of man connected wholly to the natural world. However, he also gave tribute to the civilized part of man's nature. He wanted to realize the uncivilized part of himself as a means of exploring his inner self, of truly knowing himself and understanding his own nature. An awareness of the uncivilized, untamed part would make the civilized part more enlightened - wiser.

But it was not the untamed that Thoreau strove for as his life's work. Many have an image of Thoreau as gruff and angry - and he could be these things - but more often he was not. His friends, family, and the townspeople of Concord mostly knew him as basically a kind man. He made popcorn over the stove for Emerson's young children and put gloves on Lydia Emerson's chickens to prevent them from ruining the rose-bushes. He and his family (parents and two sisters) hid runaway slaves in their homes; Henry nursed a wounded runaway back to health.

Aside from this side of him, he did have a rightfully angry side that came out as Thoreau the abolitionist and anti-war proponent. This side of him can be seen in speeches and essays like "A Plea for Captain John Brown" and, of course, "Resistance to Civil Government", later renamed "Civil Disobedience". However, Thoreau's anger manifested itself as a call to his fellow men to live out the principles necessary to support the causes of abolition and pacifism --- like his experiment at Walden called others to also simplify their lives into what they really dreamed of.

It would have been a meainglessly meanspirited and gruff thing to do for Thoreau to cut himself off from his family and friends and townspeople and live in isolation as a method of becoming closer to nature. This is what some think Thoreau set out to do, when really he did not. He did want to become closer to nature, but he had already been close to nature all his life and did not have to cast off society to do it.

Thoreau was not, like most of his transcendentalist fellows, setting out to convert all of society to his way, either. His "experiment" of living in the cabin at Walden was only a fulfillment of his own dream, not meant as an example for others, which he was sure to state in Walden.

Many other transcendentalists, like Bronson Alcott, were more interested than Thoreau in reverting back to a more untamed society - and hoping that such a society would flourish and become mainstream. Utopian communities like Brook Farm and Fruitlands sprung up all over nineteenth-century America, as thinkers set out to build new societies based on ideas like farming and living off of the land only, assigning each person only a job which he was suited to do, and eliminating manual labor in favor of thought.

Several times in his life, Thoreau was invited to join these communes, but every time he unhesitatingly and sharply refused. He did not believe in these utopian communities because he did believe in hard work and in living as a part of real society instead of running away from it. Thus, it only makes sense that, although Thoreau wished to live among nature and by himself in the woods, he also remained involved in town life. He valued courage and did not want to run away from the problems of society by rejecting society completely. Instead, he tried to live according to his dreams - what he thought of as independence - and hoped to improve in this way. His philosophy did not support wholly rejecting elements of society like economy and government and the Concord stores - instead, he wanted only to realize that these things are extra and not essential parts of real, natural life.

Besides, it would have been quite rude to refuse to take something like a lovely pie that his own mother had made for him, wouldn't it? Refusing a pie seems, after all, nine times out of ten, a sign of haughtiness! And the blindly utopian philosophy of his contemporaries was one of the things Thoreau wanted most to avoid.

high school

I think high school is pretty much just a place to keep adolescents while they learn and become. The stretched-out bridge between learning basic things (elementary and middle school) and learning advanced things (college). One long transition in preparation for a much larger transition.

In high school I've learned a lot. Most of it was never included in a syllabus or lesson plan, though. I've learned such things as how not to be afraid of being myself, how not to care what others think of me, how to follow my own intuition and beliefs instead of conforming to the expectations of others. High school is quite a good place to learn such a lesson - in the safety of private-school walls with watchful teachers - but in the whirling private world of students, half-formed opinions like toddlers crashing into each other, habits and prejudices spreading through the air down every hallway.

There are more specific, less gradual things I have learnt in high school too.

In tenth grade English class I first discovered the philosophy of transcendentalism, which is to this day basically the closest thing I have to describe my spirituality. I still get a thrill when reading about it, and remember the first time I saw headlines in Mr StJean's class like "Self-Reliance" and "finding the Divine in nature" and felt my heart beat a bit more quickly because it was exactly what I had believed for a long time. I found my favorite author, Henry Thoreau, who is still today the author whom I love the most.

Actually I discovered most of my favorite books in high school - books that I now can't imagine living without... Pride and Prejudice, I Capture the Castle, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Walden of course, and Swallows and Amazons, The Blue Castle, The Scarlet Letter and Lord of the Rings... I remember the first time I read each of these books and the memories are vivid and golden and friendly. Some of them were read in the back of classrooms, disguised as textbooks, their words enjoyed between glances at the teacher to make sure I wasn't being noticed. I read some of The Fellowship of the Ring waiting in the nurse's office to go home and whenever the seasons change I take to re-reading Walden on the bus-ride in...

In contrast, though, high school also taught me what I do not like and what I do not want to be. For one thing, I do not want to do things in the boring or stuffy way that much material was presented to us students in high school... I hope to never write a research paper in a precise choking format again... I will be colorful and exuberant because I have hated the dull grey tone of a lot of my high school education... And I will view knowledge as alive and growing and living instead of dead and dissectable because poking and prodding at it has depressed me all through high school.

And I cannot forget my high school friends. I have four very, very close lifelong friends who do not go to school with me, whom I have known since I was five, six, seven, and our relationships have become stronger throughout high school - but in school I also have a group of amazing friends whom I love. Some may say what they will about high school friendships, that they aren't deep or true, but we have all learnt from each other, I think, and given something to each other throughout high school.

So really, high school has been, totalled up, and including hours spent out of school, incredible. Often, classes got in the way of learning... But I think that really, looking at it, I learned something important every day, sometimes without even knowing.

mulberries

The mulberry.

A rather obscure berry. No one thinks of mulberries. You have probably eaten blueberries on at least one occasion in the past year and may be looking forward to summer strawberries. But you more than likely won't be going to shop for any fresh mulberries any time soon. When did you last hear someone say, "Man, I'm really craving some mulberries?" Um, never.

Mulberries are the furthest thing from most people's berry-contemplations. But they'll always be a quite special and lovely berry to me because - mulberries played a pivotal part in my childhood.

When I was little, my great-aunt and grandfather lived across the street, and my aunt lived next-door to them. One day I was with my parents where my aunt's backyard met the jungle-like bower that was my great-aunt's backyard; I was sitting on the top of an enormous brown cooler that was more like a small refrigerator, by myself as usual - an only child with dreams and lovely fancies for companions. I thought I was perfectly content like this but my parents thought otherwise.

Next-door to my aunt, on the other side of the chain-link fence at the end of my aunt's yard, there was a pink house with a green backyard. Inside the house lived two small children, one of them, a boy, almost exactly my age, the other, a girl, only a year and a half younger. My parents urged me to talk to the other children when we saw them playing in their yard, but I was obstinately shy and refused. It went on and on until finally my mom dragged me over and introduced me to the neighbors.

The boy was mischievous-looking and sporty; the girl was little with wispy hair and huge blue eyes but a clever tongue. I remember looking at them and being separated by that chain-link fence - then joined by my mom's introduction.

Summer spread out and I remember the bright green of the grass and the smell of it. The boy and girl from next door and I became friends and play-mates. I remember the boy asking me how old I was; too shy, I said, "I'm - " and then my voice stuck; I held up five fingers instead. He, cocky and confident, replied, "I'm - " five fingers held up " - too."

We played on the little slide and the wading pool and had picnics with Fudge Rounds under the big tree in the middle of my aunt's yard and scaled fences and snuck behind the garage and became jaguars. We made up game after game and ran and crawled and yelled about the yard as monsters or babies or spies. I was a tomboy to the core and the older boy and I struck up an alliance and became conspirators against all else. The younger girl tagged along and we pulled her through the yard in the big red wagon.

But the best friend of our childhood was not the wagon, not the slide, nor the wading pool --- it was the mulberry tree. It stood beautifully in the corner between my aunt's yard and my great-aunt's yard. Its branches were placed at the exact perfect spots for us to climb up. Each of us had our own branch that we would sit on in the tree. If we got high enough up we could reach over the fence and grab the best apples in the world off of Jim's tree. He was another neighbor, with a mysterious big yard and gravel driveway and a big black dog and even a tetherball that sometimes we snuck across the fence to play with.

Some days we would just sit in the mulberry tree with our binders of looseleaf paper and draw cartoons and comics - I admit, sometimes mean satirical ones. But even when we made fun of each other in the comics, it was no big deal. We were still friends and would still eat the apples and sneak over the fence to play tetherball together or go into my great-aunt's yard and peep into the clear water of the old birdbath.

But more often, we went on grand adventures. The mulberry tree was our spaceship, our pirate ship, our submarine, anything and everything, and we traveled the galaxies and the continents and the seven seas, held up by its friendly branches. We had the best times any little kids could have in the mulberry tree. We saw the world. We saved the world. We conquered and accomplished amazing feats in the mulberry tree.

There was another mulberry tree in the yard on the other side of my aunt's. One day an older lady who lived there, who also had a big black dog, had us help her pick the mulberries. We picked them and got the reddish-purplish juice all over our hands. We ate them as we picked them and tasted their sweetness.

Mulberries, quirky and unpopular and mostly unknown, are quite dear to me because of this. The mulberry-tree days are in my memory mythological and amazing but in some way it seems like those three little kids are still somehow playing in the mulberry tree now on another adventure. But in another way, a more tangible way, those days seem beautiful, summer-green and vibrant, but so, so far away.

The boy who was my fellow conspirator, spy, and adventurer grew up to be jocky and I grew up to be artsy and we don't know each other anymore. But the little girl, the younger sister, is still my best friend today. Although she no longer lives across the street.

The mulberry tree is still in my aunt's yard which is still just right across the street, but we're not close with my aunt anymore and don't go there. And the house that was my great-aunt's is no longer pink and the lush green shaded backyard there is no longer called hers...

The world of the mulberry-tree days is so expansive and vibrant and always, always full of color and laughing noise. The setting, the address, is the same, but the world now is not. But it will always, always stay with me - especially because I have my best friend to share it with.

happy easter everyone!

Celebrate spring and eat chocolate bunnies! ^_^ <3

child and adult

It's kind of interesting to think about maturity vs. immaturity, adult vs. child, when it comes to kids my age. Many of my friends have passed their eighteenth birthdays recently, but I can't picture them as 'adults'. I won't celebrate my eighteenth birthday for five months.

Personally, I think I'm pretty immature. Maybe about 70% immature. I tend to be irresponsible. I don't have much work ethic. (I don't have a job this year because I didn't want to be too busy.) I tend to blow off schoolwork; instead of working hard I just jot an answer down and say "good enough". I forget to do things constantly, and lose things like stray money and even whole bags of things quite often. Is this immature, or just absentminded?

But sometimes, I see other teenagers making scenes arguing against their parents about something like a too-tight T-shirt, and let myself think, I'm more mature than that. Really, I am freakishly close to my parents and would not even think of doing anything rebellious against them.

I suppose most people do have a bit of rebellion in there somewhere, though. Mine comes out in school. If a teacher tells me to be serious, I will want to be flippant. If a teacher tells me to lighten up, I will probably want to be serious. My tiny bit of rebellion comes out when I am assigned an essay in English class and just want to write a long biting satire of foolish-sounding academic writing instead.

In one way, I have strong beliefs and formed opinions and a definite outlook and full intentions. I think about religion and books and newspaper articles... and then turn to a friend and tell a really bad joke or suddenly remember to do the Physics homework I forgot before.

Really, though, I think everyone should keep some childishness within them. Going out and running about in the rain, twirling around in fields, making daisy chains and, most of all, laughing all the way down the road over the silliest things with close friends.

Without some childishness, life would be meaningless.

I am not sure how to divide good childishness from bad immaturity, though.

cold comfort farm: a kind of book review

I've just finished reading the book Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. It's a parody of the "rural novel" popular at the time when it was written (the 1930s) and basically satirizes overdramaticness in a very, very funny way.

I like Cold Comfort Farm because it makes fun of all the things I like to make fun of - pessimism, intellectualism, Freudian psychology.

The main character, the impeccably clean and brisk and light-hearted Flora Poste, goes to live with relatives in a terribly run-down and dirty farm, and then proceeds to straighten out the messy lives of the farm's inhabitants. Everyone who lives there thinks that his or her life is pretty much a deep dark pit of misery - and they are all presided over by Aunt Ada Doom, who pretends to be mad, providing only the explanation, "I saw something nasty in the woodshed!"

The character I liked to make fun of the most was one Mr Mybug, an intellectual who stops over in the country while writing his sweeping biography of Branwell Bronte, in which he proposes several very far-fetched theories, including one that says Charlotte, Emily, and Anne plagiarised Branwell's novels to pay for liquor. The author of Cold Comfort Farm also made Mr Mybug an obvious satire of the eternally annoying and aggravating Freudian outlook that everything has to do with sex. Mr Mybug wanders the countryside connecting disgusting metaphors to everything he sees, and is always promptly shot down by Flora's quick common sense.

And so, if you, like me, are tired beyond tired of reading long and unlikely theories filled with the densest academic language [ahem, that thesis on Hamlet] - if you also feel that reading one more jumbled and stretched thesis will be more like being repeatedly hit over the head with a sugar-spoon... then I do heartily recommend Cold Comfort Farm for a bit of very witty relief.

a story about people at a restaurant

He writes with a dull hum, like the sound of a drugged and droning honeybee. She writes with violence, words and syllables slamming into each other, leaving ugly, purple bruises on their limbs. He has just published three poems in a reputable literary magazine, his four-word lines and little stanzas joining their equally mellow and melancholy brothers on the top of page 14.

She went to a basement coffee-house yesterday and stood on stage wearing dark purple (the color of a bruise, actually) and read her violent poems to a tiny crowd of bored anarchists. Now, though, she looks over the top of her menu at a nice restaurant. She wears a black skirt and a pink shirt that is actually very pretty.

"What do you want?" she asks him.

Across the table, he folds his hands. He looks complacent, big droopy eyes like words that drone down to the ground in lazy spirals. "I want cake."

"Just dessert? No dinner?" (Her mother taught her that one should not have dessert without dinner; it simply is not done.)

"I don't want dinner, really," he says.

"Oh." She whips her menu back into upright position with a quick movement of her wrists, grabs the two wings of the menu with pointy fingernails. Scanning the lists of entrees is, to her, just like dissecting a bird.

Her fingernails make him a little uneasy.

Sitting silently, he contemplates meaning a little, and how it takes form in candle-holders and dimmed overhead lighting and – the possible aerodynamics of a table for two? He thinks of writing another melancholy poem, about used napkins.

He thinks about how he is an atheist. He wonders if she is one too. What else could she be? Under all those pinging, stinging words, it seems unlikely that one could find theology.

---

"But you never know," says the brown-haired girl one table over. She pauses, stretching out a word in her mind. "I mean, well, it could be the linguine marinara."

Her companion nods, nods, nods. It is a very long nod. She smiles a tiny bit. His nod looks like the last struggles of a man falling quickly to sleep in his cravat and coattails.

She sips her water daintily, thinking about ladies in fancy ballrooms maybe, or just the ride in the car on the way, with the sunset in the window-glass. "Huh," she says.

"What?"

"I just realized that spring was coming. The sun set so late today, didn't it?"

"Hm, yes, late. Very late."

"That makes me happy," she says in a skipping-voice, smiling again and moving her hands, two colorful bracelets on each wrist.

"It's a happy time of year," he says. He looks like he's waking up a little.

---



The purple anarchist poet wonders what would happen if she were to talk to the strangers sitting at the tables around her. What would she say; what would they say? What could they possibly talk about? They would not know she had read poetry last night – or that her date had published something – and she would not know if the strangers had been to Russia or if they had just recently gotten over their 80s punk music phase.

She thinks, would he talk to the strangers? But he only looks like he is thinking up one of his poems again, and she feels slightly bored at the prospect of having to read the result.

But really, he is thinking about the strangers too. And how to write a melancholy poem about their candle-flicker-lit eyes.

She is about to ask him what he is thinking, just to check – but the waiter comes. He takes out his pad of paper and little pen and grins and asks what they will be having tonight.

"The lemon-herb chicken, please," she says.

He says, "Eggplant parmesan."

The waiter nods and grins more and puts away his pen and says it will be out shortly thank you. When he walks away, she folds up her menu.

"Since when do you like eggplant?" she asks.

"Can't a guy try something new?" he says, jokingly, but really slightly irritated.

"Sure, sure," she says. "I just didn't think you were the sort who liked trying new things."

"I am!" he says – thinking, do I sound petulant? "I tried that new poem the other day – six words in the first line. But I don't like to think about structure; well, you know."

She nods. She thinks about her last poem – it opened with a swear word – should she have put something around that inflammatory word, to contain an explosion? Explosion… she could write about that – wait –

She smiles. "We're both always thinking about poetry, aren't we? I was just planning a new poem in my head. You looked like you were thinking about one too…"

"No. I was thinking about my eggplant."

The calmness drops out of her expression and thuds onto the table. (Aerodynamically, she looks like a crane, he thinks, a big black crane.) "Oh," she says.

"Well –" he pulls his thoughts away from birds "- well, I was thinking about a poem earlier. Napkins."

"Napkins." She wonders – a free-form poem about napkins, wiping messes, stashing themselves away, probably with psychological undertones of what people hide in the folds. How annoying, she thinks.

--

The woman one tables over begins eating her dinner. Delicious. She twirls some pasta onto her fork.

"How's your dinner?" she asks her friend.

"Good, good," he says, chewing some asparagus. He has not always liked asparagus – he remembers when he was five and his mother would fix it for him, over-cooking it. He thought then – and still thinks – that overcooked asparagus could be a very innovative method of torture.

But he likes asparagus when it is cooked the right way, really.

"How's yours?"

"Delicious," she says. She likes to say the word – delicious – it is savory and seductive by itself, in a way – she likes to pretend she is a daring lady who wears eyeliner when she says it.

Kind of like – she steals a sideways glance – the lady sitting at the next table. The brown-haired girl examines her out of the corner of her eye. The lady at the next table has short black hair angled toward her chin – the cut is very becoming, actually – and she has long fingernails. The brown-haired girl wonders if she taps her nails on counters and end-tables when she is impatient.

Then she looks at the men – her friend sitting across from her, looking tired (he's been working so much lately, though) – and the man sitting across from the fingernail woman; he looks lost in thought too, absent. He has a big nose and very soft-looking hair.

She wonders what would happen if they ever met in some way, and talked. The fingernail woman would speak in her deep rich voice, and she would say, "What do you do?", and the brown-haired girl thinks she would feel very small and mousy, but she would remember the word delicious, and feel a little taller –

But of course, they will never talk.

--

The long-fingernailed woman cuts her chicken like she always does on weekdays – deliberately, with thought, precision, plan. As the knife saws back and forth she thinks about the middle three lines in one of her poems, about government conspiracies.

"Eggplant's good," her date says.

"What happened to getting cake, anyway?" she asks – sawing, sawing.

"I changed my mind. They only had chocolate, anyway."

It isn't worth a reply, she thinks – anyway, she is cutting her chicken –

- He cuts his eggplant. A nice vegetarian eggplant parmesan. He looks at it and feels somehow relieved that he has forgotten how he wanted to open his napkin poem. After all, how dirty can one possibly get when eating eggplant parmesan?

They eat mostly in silence. She is glad that the restaurant is just loud enough not to be able to hear the sound of chewing – such a disturbing sound – not very dignified at all. And he is glad that he likes eggplant. Such a clean vegetable…

At the end of the meal, the waiter bobs in, grins around the table, and gives them their check. Her date pays, looking at the price so secretively. She likes that he does not show her the price. She thinks, maybe even poets can be gentlemen sometimes. When they eat eggplant, maybe.

He shrugs his coat on and she lithely wraps herself in hers, and he says, "Are you ready?"

She begins to say yes – to push her chair back – to stand up and turn and leave with him… but something about the half-empty plate in front of her just makes her hesitate a little, and look at the next table, at the strangers sitting there, who are still eating their dinner. While they still eat, twirl forks and cut with knives, and take sips of water or of wine, there is still time, still the hesitant opportunity to talk to them, to pull the two tables together and settle into a very awkward but very new conversation.

Why does it feel so imperative, suddenly? She feels a tiny bit frantic – like her coat is holding her back to the chair – like the chair's arms are about to lock her in and stop her from rising – like she wants to be trapped. She does not want to leave.

"Wait…" she says.

"What?" He has already stood, and looks down at her as he flips his coat collar, confused in a streamlined way.

"Wait a second," she says. "I want…"

She has not felt this frightened in a long time. She does not like to be frightened – she is never scared – she was not scared at all at the poetry reading, with all those spiky edgy people looking on –

(She is scared, maybe, of how normal the couple beside her looks. And of how abnormal they may really be.)

"What?" he says again.

"Sit down," she says. Her voice has become sharp again, commanding, edgy. She pretends that she is reading a poem. "I want to try something." She is always trying something – experimenting with new words and daring new painful colors –

He has exhausted his share of Whats and so sits back down again, eyes going soft.

She turns to the woman seated at the next table over. How strange it feels – a transgression – no one at a restaurant is supposed to talk to the other people eating there – strangers do not speak to each other – she breaks taboo. Her spine tingles and her palms sweat a little as she looks at the brown-haired woman. It is new territory, a new dare, something even she has not tried, not in any avant-garde sort of poem.

"Hello," she says. It is more of a shock than that first-line swear word.

The brown-haired woman does not realize that she is being spoken to. She says something to her date, who nods back, nods, nods. She eats some linguine.

"Excuse me," says the poet. "Excuse me," she says loudly.

The brown-haired woman drops her fork and turns quickly round. Her eyes are wide, incredibly wide, and (the soft-haired poet thinks) full of candles. Her face is covered in complete shock.

She does not know what to say. Finally, she squeaks, "Yes?"

The black-haired poet feels like she has discovered a frontier, or launched into alien territory. The restaurant suddenly goes surreal, all tables turn into candle-fire and rugs are burnished gold – the ceiling is many miles away, and the lights overhead are really only lanterns in her mind. Everything turns itself around.

"I figured," she says, "since we are sitting next to each other, why not talk? Why not?"

The brown-haired woman recovers a little, but her eyes are still enormous brown discs. "Oh? Well – I suppose - " she says.

"Ada Belridge," the poet says, extending her fingernailed hand.

The brown-haired woman reaches out her dainty hand, small fingers, little bracelets on tiny wrists, and clasps the other woman's large and powerful hand, feeling more unreal than she has ever felt before.

"Natalie Myers."

"Natalie," says the woman – the fingernailed woman – Ada. Their hands separate.

And now the men feel like they are being dragged along, to a party, to the cinema, and have nothing to do but shake each other's hands, and play the game too.

The soft-haired free-form poet extends his hand and says, "Hi. Allan Rills."

And the sleepy man meets the handshake, with a lazy exhalation that sounds like, "Michael Brume."

And they sit there, at their tables, and look at each other like little animals in bushes, or little children on playgrounds, or aliens in a cinematic restaurant, on a candlelit carousel.

---

"Adelaide, that's my full first name, so tiresome. Reminds me of grape jam."

Her voice is so voluminous – but the laughter of the others is tinkling, more thinly edged. It is a nice contrast.

"Well, I can never get over that my mother named me after some heroine in a five-cent spy novel…" Natalie says, and the rest laugh a little at her too, but not as much as at Ada.

The men sit and fold their hands, one thinking again about his poem – it was only so long he could go without thinking of the first stanza – and the other thinking about how tired he is; if only they would wrap things up and go home.

He does like the nice look in Natalie's eyes, though, and the glow in her cheeks. She isn't as shy as she thinks herself to be, now, is she?

Ada thinks, how long can they resist the usual question, the all-defining What do you do? She does not want to tell them she writes controversial, bruising painful poetry, nor that her partner's verses loll around like the chopped-off heads of front-yard dandelions. And she wants to think forever: Is Natalie a librarian? A secretary? A clerk? A deep-sea diver in her spare time? And is the man she is with – is Michael a lawyer? A doctor? A teacher? A store-owner? In inventory?

How long can they resist navigating through career banter, through the unmapped waters of where-and-how-and-who-and-when? No specifics – nothing – just keep the jokes coming –

How long can it last?

Ada thinks, Allan thinks – how long can they ward off thoughts of writing a poem about strangers and the restaurant-show? Michael sits and thinks, how much time until they leave…?

Natalie enjoys herself, expands herself, stretches out like a big black cat. It is so absurd, but she will always remember this night now. Unexpected and so terrifying – she has forgotten the taste of her linguine – but she looks at Ada and really does feel different. Delicious.

monologue of the purple platypus (platypus, aka laura)

Elitism makes me angry.

Clenched-fists, red-colored-thoughts, furious-scribbling, swearing-silently angry.

That's it; that's all I've been trying to say.

The elitism I'm talking about is only this: thinking that one way is better than another.

How not to be an elitist? Go down a city street, see the sharp-suited investment banker, the street-corner artist, the saxaphone player, the jewelry vendor, the lawyer - go through your thoughts, see the Yale graduate, the man who did not go to college, the Harvard professor, the woman who dropped out of high school -

- and think, they are all different, but none is better than the other. The elitist Yale graduate is not better than the high-school dropout, just like the anti-elitist street-corner artist is no better than the investment banker. Think, they are no better off or worse off than me; I am no better or worse than them.

Think, one does not need to know a set of things, to read Shakespeare, to be an academic, to talk a certain way, to know how to spell well or how to bring up Deep things and be able to navigate through academic banter - one does not have to do any of this to achieve that which is essential.

Education does not give a person that which is essential. And the essential is, when trappings and conveniences are stripped away, the only thing that really matters.

The essential is just love, boundless and nondiscriminating compassion.

Not pity - but compassion.

Degrees and titles are extra. They help with convenience. It's convenient to have a good job and it is awfully convenient to run the government. But the bare essential does not have to do with these things.

Interests and things should be innocent. Read a book because you want to, not because you 'should' read it to be able to reference it literary circles. It is insincere do things just to "get ahead" or to be recognized as part of any dumb top percentage.

Most of us judge people all the time. Subconsciously, inside; we see someone and place ourselves on a scale in relation to them: better off, worse off. But everything is at first more complex and eventually more simple than we realize.

My opinions come from who I am and what little I have seen. I was raised to live with common sense and feet attached to the ground - but to realize how beautiful that ground is, and dream about where it may lead.

That is why... elitism makes me angry. Arrogance makes me angry.

I can't get rid of it. I can only get rid of it in myself. I've realized very lately that I used to tend toward being a tiny bit elitist in thoughts - didn't I used to think I wanted to go to the college that would sound the most impressive, or that would get me the "furthest" because it would look so darned good on job applications?

I'm glad I caught myself and looked and realized I had done something really stupid.

I'm glad I came back to earth, remembered who I am and what I believe, what I stand for.

I'm going to live simply, honestly, purely. That's all.

watch out what "elite guard" can translate into

Blue Wolf: I get to rule the land because I'm blue.

White Rabbit: You don't rule, this is a democracy! I elected you!

Blue Wolf: Yeah, and I can eat you anyway. Because - I'm blue.

Blue Tiger: I spent years trying to dye myself blue... so I could join your society, Wolf.

Blue Panther: Me too, and it was hard! I went to Yale to dye myself blue.

White Rabbit: That's so expensive. Better to talk about green instead of blue – all the money's dye must have rubbed off on you after so long.

Green Turtle: I'm naturally green.

Blue Wolf: My tongue is green. [sticks out tongue]

Blue Panther: My tongue was green before I went to Yale.

Blue Wolf: Too bad. If you still had a green tongue, you could go far.

White Rabbit: I hate you.

Purple Platypus: Don't say hate. It's not good to hate.

White Rabbit: I can't help it. I hate them.

Purple Platypus: I'm angry, but I don't want to say 'hate'.

Blue Wolf: [sidles up to Platypus] You could be blue.

Purple Platypus: Hell no. I'm purple. Bright shiny Easter-egg purple.

Blue Wolf: If you shut yourself in a dark room you'd become blue, out of the light.

Blue Tiger: Yeah, that's how I did it.

Purple Platypus: You missed so much.

White Rabbit: You missed the lovely sunrise yesterday.

Purple Platypus: And every day.

Blue Wolf: Sunrises don't look as sweet as power.

Blue Panther: I just want to make the world better.

White Rabbit: You can't be completely honest when you're blue.

Blue Wolf: But I was born blue.

Purple Platypus: I'm sorry for you.

Blue Panther: He didn't have to work like I did.

Blue Tiger: We had to work to get on top.

White Rabbit: Hey, jerk, you're stepping on my foot!

Purple Platypus: Apologize!

Blue Wolf: This is how it is –

Purple Platypus and White Rabbit: APOLOGIZE, APOLOGIZE!

Blue Wolf: [silence]

Purple Platypus: You're not on top of me. You're not on top of my spirit.

White Rabbit: We know things that you miss out on.

Purple Platypus: I still pity you…

Blue Tiger: You're so not blue.

Blue Panther: Obviously not. So apparent who belongs to the lower gradations of society's spectrum.

Purple Platypus: Stop, stop!

Blue Wolf: You could've been great. That purple shade – could've been such a deep dark blue.

Purple Platypus: Never. I'll never give it up.

White Rabbit: Let's go, Platypus.

Green Turtle: [blinks] You know, maybe if you pick me up, some green will rub off on you.

Blue Panther: Blue doesn't rub off.

White Rabbit: We're leaving. You can come if you want, Turtle, but we won't take your color.

Green Turtle: That's okay. I'll stay.

Blue Wolf: [flicks green tongue]


White Rabbit: [hops away] Come on, Platypus. Let's have some cabbage for dinner.

Purple Platypus: Okay. But I need to take a shower first. I feel dirty after all this.

White Rabbit: No problem. Use the hose out back in the vegetable garden.

Purple Platypus: Then we can go in the cottage and have dinner.

White Rabbit: It'll be so nice to eat our cabbage by the window.

Purple Platypus: So we can look out at the moon and the stars.

White Rabbit: There's no pollution from the city there... far from all those factories, with their vats of blue dye and all.

Purple Platypus: If only all this didn't exist...

White Rabbit: If we tried to destroy it, we'd just fall in and drown.

soo, how 'bout today's class...

I've changed my mind from the position I kind of started off on today. I'm sorry for being a book-snob. If you want to read a modern English adaptation of Shakespeare, why should it matter? Not everyone likes Shakespeare. I don't like Sigmund Freud or Percy Bysshe Shelley, maybe you don't like George Orwell or Emily Bronte or Shakespeare. Just because an author is a big figure in literature doesn't mean you have to like his writing.

And it's not right to say one has to read or like Shakespeare to be intelligent or educated. Obviously, if you want to be an English professor, you should read and understand Shakespeare. But if you have ambitions completely outside of anything literary, it doesn't really matter and it is just elitist to think that everyone should cultivate an appreciation of Shakespeare as a necessary attribute of an educated citizen. What kind of terrifying society would it be if everyone were required to like reading Shakespeare? Everyone would just be a bunch of robots.

It was implied today that the number of students who don't read and don't understand Shakespeare is evidence that young people today are lazy or under-educated. But it's not. There are some high school students who like Shakespeare and there are some who don't. And it has always been that way in modern schools.

My mom, who went to public high school in the sixties, tells me that she didn't like Shakespeare then. And my mom is very smart. Modern high school students are not lazier or less educated than high school students thirty or forty years ago because some of them do not like Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is such a cultural icon that appreciating him can be taken as a sign of education, of literacy, but who cares whether or not you can drop lines from Hamlet at a party thrown by the literati? It doesn't matter.

The arguing that happened today pulled me down to earth. I'm really sorry that I've been snobby when it comes to books and literature in the past. I'm going to stop it for good now.

Disliking Shakespeare is not ignorant. Elitism is. Elitism is what narrows experience.

Why should it matter what books the people we know read and which authors they like? Why should it matter if they don't like reading at all? It doesn't matter. Everyone is different and that's beautiful.

Lack of devotion to Shakespeare does not cause problems in the world. Elitism does.

college news!

So, this is probably going to be called a "self-indulgent" piece of writing in class. But it's what's on my mind now so I'm going to write about college decisions anyway! Apologies if it is too selfish a bit of writing. A general and impersonal reflection on the college decision process might be more smiled upon, but that is not what I have a mind to write about presently.

I have "the list" down to two colleges now. All the college letters have come in. Among them were four acceptances (Wheaton, URI, Roger Williams, Quinnipiac) and one wait-list (Connecticut College). The only two that I really, really wanted to go to were Wheaton and Connecticut, and since I got wait-listed at Connecticut it's pretty much off the list... So it is down to two choices: Wheaton, or URI.

When it comes down to it, it is not really my choice which one it will be. It depends on just one thing: money. I never thought about money before this year beyond wondering how much it would cost to buy the three novels I'd been dying to read, but senior year the thought of it has been hanging about all the time. Wheaton is private and very, very expensive. URI, on the other hand, is inexpensive to begin with - and I got scholarships and grants that cover almost all the tuition.

I do want to go to Wheaton. I really, really like it. It was my first choice college and I was ecstatic that I was accepted, and that they gave me a scholarship. They gave me a really nifty scholarship too - some of the money goes toward paying tuition, but later on in college I'd also get money in the summer to pursue an independent project or use as a salary for a would-be unpaid internship or basically whatever kind of academic project-thing I want. Wheaton is small, and a small school was one of my top desires when choosing colleges to apply to. Everyone there, students and professors, when I sat in on a class (Anglo-Saxon Literature, definitely a class I would want to take!) seemed so enthusiastic about what they were doing. But, the scholarships still don't cover nearly all the tuition.

Then there is URI. The basic thing I don't like about URI is its size - it's so big! I spent a day there with a very good friend who is a freshman, and felt like I could get lost because there were so many students. And I wouldn't like it at all if my professors didn't know who I was. But I've met some professors at URI in my subject areas, English, History, and Journalism, who seemed really excited about their subjects.

I don't want to take out student loans and be in debt for years after college. Because - I'm not going into a big money-making career. Writers, journalists, artsy types don't have the most financially stable careers! And I want to have money to do things I want to do and not have to wait years and years because I'm held back by debt to my college. I want to have money to travel, to fund the art projects that wander into my head, and I don't want to have to be stuck working in a job I don't like just to pay the rent.

And I also don't want my parents to pay a lot for college. They've already made sacrifices to pay for my private schools since the first grade, and they also have dreams and ambitions, they also want to travel and undertake new projects and ideas and it wouldn't be at all fair for me to ask them to pay a lot of money for my college.

I applied for another scholarship (from a non-academic source) and if I get it or not will determine where I go to college. I'll just have to wait and see.

new things

The spring makes me remember things, the heated air and songs, the flowers.

Once it was winter, and winter is long; hiding, resting, introspection, cocoa and cloaks. And the snow out the window was fellowship and peace.

You know the spring is a challenge a bit, a nice one.

The warm wind pushes me outdoors and opens up the windows and puts thoughts of flight in the mind. The inclination to stay in, like winter, is blown away as the world turns outward and secrets are displayed as crocuses and breeze.

I trust it, but I have to get used to the spring a bit. Ponds smile, flowers wave, warm winds dance. The drawn-in world of winter evolves into exclamations and laughs.

Everything out in the open is freeing and intimidating at the same time.

I got my last college letter today. Connecticut College: waitlisted. There are four other acceptances but only one left that I want to go to. So it will be either Wheaton or URI. Depending completely on one thing: money.

It's a season of change, but aren't all seasons such? The only thing to do is live and love and enjoy.