HELLO.
{author's note, circa 36 minutes in the future: this post is very long, and potentially tedious and absurd, and I'm sorry, and I ask that you not feel obligated to read it all if it turns out to be nonsense or just plain boring, or for any other reason which seems conscionable to you the reader.}
{author's note postscript: Apparently "conscionable" is not a word, and I just invented it retroactively(?) from "unconscionable".}
SLEEP ELUDES ME.
Sleep is [insert witty, poetic, and eternally quotable metaphor here].
And what did I do?
I fell asleep in the middle of writing an essay around 5:00 this afternoon.
I accidentally drank three and a half cups of caffeinated tea at 9:30 p.m. (Because the mint tea was decaffeinated! But it was also nowhere to be found in the labyrinth of our untidy kitchen. Thus, I drank vanilla caramel instead. That turned out to be a mistake.)
And now—I sit. Awake. Alert. My frenetically typing fingers the only endless sound in the oddly soundless night. (Why isn't the furnace running…?)
And now my imagination wanders bravely through a dark and stormy night, a night rife with simmering resentments; events forgotten that may have changed the world, had we only the maturity to recognize them for what they were; plots that you thought were hidden from the world; musings about spiritual wealth versus materialism; theories about the potential of dreams of inventive metaphors for our deepest fears; vicious truths about sibling rivalry and debt and the nature of guilt and forgiveness; ambiguous endings; and the ultimate dilemma between true forgiveness and spilled orange soda as a metaphor for childhood fratricide.
Don't'cha just love writing abstract essays about 20th-century college literature?
Me too, folks.
Me too.
(But not at this time of the night.)
BUT I DO HAVE a working printer!
You know, the free one that they gave me with my expensive computer way, way, way back in July! I finally set it up seven months later so I can print documents without having to convert the file, save it to a flash drive, drive 40 miles, and wait in line for a working computer.
So i can print out all my rambles (not these, the other abstract ones, roughly in essay form, about the college literature) and give them to my peers to review in class tomorrow, and they will tell me how brilliant the writing is but that its patent subjectivity places it completely outside the parameters of the assignment. And they will write in purple pen, because honors students have been properly warned about the possible psychological danger (to the recipient) of using a red pen to give criticism on a school paper.
I actually know none of this for certain (save the part about the working printer, though who knows how long that will last?). I rarely jump to the same conclusions about my 3-a.m. essays as other people do. Last year I wrote a five-page essay on the pros and cons of living life as a short person. I prefaced this essay with three-quarters of a page about stratus clouds, including one very bad pun that made for a horrifically fabricated segue with possibly abused italics. My entire class thought it was a brilliant opener. Four hours later, I thought it was nonsense, even if the rest of the essay was pretty decent.
I have Parmesan cheese stuck between my teeth, because I just ate about four ounces of it. I hope all the expensive protein is worth it.
I keep writing these things ("things" meaning all the rambles of my mind in the middle of the night) down, because I hope that insomnia creates something worthwhile. I think that insomnia makes me a lot of who I am. i used to dream about archaeologists someday discovering the lost civilization of Kalamazoo, and my journals would become the definitive source of history for the early 21st century. Now…um, I don't think much of that idea (to summarize a lengthy paragraph, which involved my writing a will and someone committing arson, which I decided wasn't worth the effort to translate for the non-Kiersten reader who has staunchly trekked through this post to this point).
If you read this post in its entirety, you win major points. I don't know what sort of points. Not "awesome" points, because that sounds somewhat presumptuous because this post probably isn't that awesome, because my brain is functioning on sleep deprivation and caffeine and English literature (that prosaic fiend that consumes the mind in molehill-to-mountain analysis). (George Orwell would be doing the polka in his grave if he could see me breaking every rule of his seven-page paper on concise writing.) But you are awesome, so perhaps they are just rain check points. Rest assured, you may at some future date be able to cash them in for something awesome.
Baaah. I cannot compose poetic gems of wisdom right now, as much I wish I could. But that's already redundant, because I essentially have two concluding paragraphs, whereas Tobias Wolff has none. Is it too subjective to discuss the inferred fratricide/reconciliation results of the ambiguous ending in a plot abstract resolution?
That might be the one sentence I've written all night that I know meant something, even if was something boring.
G'night.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
I think I am going to write a novella this weekend, even if it's utter nonsense and too farcicial to be revealed to the eyes of any but the limited sector of humanity who are already well enough acquainted with my idiosyncratic (occasionally just idiotic) brand of insanity that I can trust them not to draw unreasonably pessimistic conclusions about it from reading said novella.
Just thought you ought to know.
Just thought you ought to know.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The American Dream…version Two-Point-Kiersten.
Something to add to the Ultimate Accomplishments of Awesome Life Bucket List:
I am going to build a tower. And it's going to be freaking amazing.
Dad and I schemed it all out. Obsidian, with some metalwork on the outside and a fiberglass core (which Dad says will be on the cheaper side, and more stable & versatile than plain stone) with a dungeon, roof access, a spiral staircase, a dumbwaiter (in case I can't find the heart to put in an elevator, hahaha), an entire floor devoted to a library (complete with one of those sliding ladder-thingies), and a chandelier which runs continuously through every floor. And a wrought-iron fence in some really sweet design, and a great scenic view. And maybe a couple of spires.
WOULD THIS NOT BE AMONG THE MOST ÜBER FANTASTIC THINGS EVER? (In every sense of the word?)
So now—to add to one of the items on my 2011 Accomplishments of Awesome list—I have to learn to draw well so I can design all of this for a good architect someday.
And finish at least one novel (referred, item #1 on the 2011 UAoAL), and maybe live off ramen for a while (this is not on the UAoAL) once I get an $80,000-salaried editing job after college, so I can make enough money to do this. (Imagine what kind of mortgage I'd have to take out if I actually wanted to furnish the place, too. *sarcasm*)
And marry somebody whose American dream is not a white picket fence (e.g., nerdfighter).
(Note & explanation of title: in my honors humanities class today, we discussed the American dream, and when I was telling him about it on the way home tonight, Dad posed the question of "What if…" to me—what would my "American dream" be? And this is what came out. Apparently we're both a tad bit on the eccentric side?)
I am going to build a tower. And it's going to be freaking amazing.
Dad and I schemed it all out. Obsidian, with some metalwork on the outside and a fiberglass core (which Dad says will be on the cheaper side, and more stable & versatile than plain stone) with a dungeon, roof access, a spiral staircase, a dumbwaiter (in case I can't find the heart to put in an elevator, hahaha), an entire floor devoted to a library (complete with one of those sliding ladder-thingies), and a chandelier which runs continuously through every floor. And a wrought-iron fence in some really sweet design, and a great scenic view. And maybe a couple of spires.
WOULD THIS NOT BE AMONG THE MOST ÜBER FANTASTIC THINGS EVER? (In every sense of the word?)
So now—to add to one of the items on my 2011 Accomplishments of Awesome list—I have to learn to draw well so I can design all of this for a good architect someday.
And finish at least one novel (referred, item #1 on the 2011 UAoAL), and maybe live off ramen for a while (this is not on the UAoAL) once I get an $80,000-salaried editing job after college, so I can make enough money to do this. (Imagine what kind of mortgage I'd have to take out if I actually wanted to furnish the place, too. *sarcasm*)
And marry somebody whose American dream is not a white picket fence (e.g., nerdfighter).
(Note & explanation of title: in my honors humanities class today, we discussed the American dream, and when I was telling him about it on the way home tonight, Dad posed the question of "What if…" to me—what would my "American dream" be? And this is what came out. Apparently we're both a tad bit on the eccentric side?)
Saturday, January 8, 2011
It's a moment of time, both hurtling and frozen.
It's a moment to live.
Do you ever have that moment when you feel like the world is yours? Maybe it's just a moment when you feel utterly yourself. You're in your own skin and you know beyond all feasible doubt that your skin is something worth being in, whether anyone else is there to see it or not. I'm sort of having one of those moments, for no apparent reason. It's one of those times when I wish it was a gorgeous day, autumn and just a bit windy, in the late afternoon when there's sienna sunlight tumbling over the treetops and sporadically pooling on the ground below, so you can just hear the faint riffling of a piano in the breeze, and I'd go outside in a skirt and bare feet and stretch myself out to the sky and just breathe. Because I am someone. I am a living poem, and the world is a poem, and God did a *insert a profoundly but not vulgarly emphatic adverb here* good job inventing poetry.
Do you ever have that moment when you feel like the world is yours? Maybe it's just a moment when you feel utterly yourself. You're in your own skin and you know beyond all feasible doubt that your skin is something worth being in, whether anyone else is there to see it or not. I'm sort of having one of those moments, for no apparent reason. It's one of those times when I wish it was a gorgeous day, autumn and just a bit windy, in the late afternoon when there's sienna sunlight tumbling over the treetops and sporadically pooling on the ground below, so you can just hear the faint riffling of a piano in the breeze, and I'd go outside in a skirt and bare feet and stretch myself out to the sky and just breathe. Because I am someone. I am a living poem, and the world is a poem, and God did a *insert a profoundly but not vulgarly emphatic adverb here* good job inventing poetry.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Century-old postcards, and fractal doodles
Today has been lengthy and blurry because I have felt rather sleepy for the last eight or so hours. I got coffee with Leah and Rachel D., and we hung out in a Catholic bookshop and an antique store, where I bought (or rather, Rachel purchased for me) a 100-year-old postcard addressed to somebody named Ralph from his aunt Vira, who has uber cool handwriting of which I'm jealous:
People used to write the oddest things on postcards. We spent probably more than half an hour reading them in the antique shop, and people wrote things like
"Aunt Julia is dead, at 4 a.m. today. They are coming to move her body this afternoon."
"This church looks wonderfully majestic on the outside, but it's as gloomy as a dungeon on the inside." (That was the entire content of the card.)
and "Why haven't you written? Are you all dead? We're having very pleasant weather, and the wind is howling something fierce. Went to visit Fred today. He asked why you haven't written." I even found an old dental reminder from the '40s that said, "It's time for your dental appointment! You need to brush up on your smile!"
Almost all of the ones with writing one them were at least 90 years old. They were really funny and sometimes very sad—and bizarre, because nowadays nobody would send news of a death in the family and/or tragic illness by postcard…
People used to write the oddest things on postcards. We spent probably more than half an hour reading them in the antique shop, and people wrote things like
"Aunt Julia is dead, at 4 a.m. today. They are coming to move her body this afternoon."
"This church looks wonderfully majestic on the outside, but it's as gloomy as a dungeon on the inside." (That was the entire content of the card.)
and "Why haven't you written? Are you all dead? We're having very pleasant weather, and the wind is howling something fierce. Went to visit Fred today. He asked why you haven't written." I even found an old dental reminder from the '40s that said, "It's time for your dental appointment! You need to brush up on your smile!"
Almost all of the ones with writing one them were at least 90 years old. They were really funny and sometimes very sad—and bizarre, because nowadays nobody would send news of a death in the family and/or tragic illness by postcard…
With Mom on the way home, I traversed Target, where I got some balloons and a journal, and ambled through Aldi, where I got some Kleenex and chamomile tea (I heard it's supposed to help you sleep/destress) and a berry-flavored Bolthouse, because it was on sale.
Also,
Vlogbrothers + Vi Hart + me + four hours of sleep + doodle mania = a fractal made out of a giraffe shaped like a llama. (Of which this is a rather poor photo.)
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Wonder I
Sister, cast a shadow (Brother, tell me why)
You're holding back the sun (No, it can't be done)
We're towering to these spiders (But I feel so small)
Is it all right (Is it okay)?
It's okay; I feel small too
Wonder, wonder I
If I stood on your shoulders
Could I touch the sky?
————————————————————————————————
There are (sort of) three kinds of people in the world: the Lack-Awesomes, the Contagious-Awesomes, and the Intimidating-Awesomes. Lack-Awesomes are self-explanatory and not the subject of this post. Many of the people I know are Contagious-Awesomes, which means they're so awesome they're just lots of fun to be friends with, and proximity to them helps draw out your innate awesome. I know a lot of these people. I love them a lot. But I also know several Intimidating-Awesomes. These are people who are just as—maybe even more—awesome as/than the Contagious-Awesomes, but instead of spurring on your awesome with their awesome, they unwittingly scare your awesome into a cowering in the corner, condensing it into a forgotten little puffball of tangled deoxyribonucleic acid. It's like one of those stacked bar graphs: there's a set amount of awesome to be split between two people, so the more awesome the Intimidating-Awesome displays, the less awesome you can show. The heat of their awesome evaporates your awesome (or at least that's what it feels like). I know a couple of people like that. I feel miserably inarticulate and and juvenile and boring around them (even if they're younger than me), which is ridiculous, especially since they're all uber nice folks. I've always wanted to be friends with the Intimidating-Awesomes, but it's kind of hard to do. I always get a tad bit starstruck, and starstrickenness makes it decidedly difficult to be (feel) awesome.
[EDIT, approx. 12:27 a.m.]
…I just had a realization (I think with some help from God; late-night prayer rocks)—I think a lot of the cause of Intimidating-Awesomes is that they tend to be either
1. really extroverted, or
2. just like me. (That is not meant to be a brag on myself at all, by the way.)
~ Extroverts tend to either be great for holding up a conversation with an introvert, or terrifying to to an introvert, because they naturally tend to emit awesomeness in their interactions with people instead of bottling it all up and quietly channeling it into things, like introverts tend to do. Thus, it can feel like a standard I have to measure up to in my side of the conversation/interaction. And I'm usually incapable of doing so (or feeling as if I am) because I usually have a completely different mode of self-expression than those sorts of Awesomes.
~ People who are just like me (in terms of personality and often hobbies and talents) are people I'm really attracted to (friend-wise) but also feel a natural sort of competition with because we're so alike. I REALLY feel pressure to measure up to (or over) their portion of awesome, but it's quite difficult due to the fact that's our types of awesome are usually very similar, or at least similarly expressed. Thus, it's hard not to subconsciously view this sort of person as a rival, even while really wanting to befriend them.
[Wow, I wasn't expecting all of that.]
[ From the retrospective semi-objective viewpoint, it's an interesting phenomenon. ]
Now I have to figure out what to do with all of that. (I apologize; this is a hazard of impulsive real-time blogging. My "deep" posts are not neatly packaged.)
You're holding back the sun (No, it can't be done)
We're towering to these spiders (But I feel so small)
Is it all right (Is it okay)?
It's okay; I feel small too
Wonder, wonder I
If I stood on your shoulders
Could I touch the sky?
————————————————————————————————
There are (sort of) three kinds of people in the world: the Lack-Awesomes, the Contagious-Awesomes, and the Intimidating-Awesomes. Lack-Awesomes are self-explanatory and not the subject of this post. Many of the people I know are Contagious-Awesomes, which means they're so awesome they're just lots of fun to be friends with, and proximity to them helps draw out your innate awesome. I know a lot of these people. I love them a lot. But I also know several Intimidating-Awesomes. These are people who are just as—maybe even more—awesome as/than the Contagious-Awesomes, but instead of spurring on your awesome with their awesome, they unwittingly scare your awesome into a cowering in the corner, condensing it into a forgotten little puffball of tangled deoxyribonucleic acid. It's like one of those stacked bar graphs: there's a set amount of awesome to be split between two people, so the more awesome the Intimidating-Awesome displays, the less awesome you can show. The heat of their awesome evaporates your awesome (or at least that's what it feels like). I know a couple of people like that. I feel miserably inarticulate and and juvenile and boring around them (even if they're younger than me), which is ridiculous, especially since they're all uber nice folks. I've always wanted to be friends with the Intimidating-Awesomes, but it's kind of hard to do. I always get a tad bit starstruck, and starstrickenness makes it decidedly difficult to be (feel) awesome.
[EDIT, approx. 12:27 a.m.]
…I just had a realization (I think with some help from God; late-night prayer rocks)—I think a lot of the cause of Intimidating-Awesomes is that they tend to be either
1. really extroverted, or
2. just like me. (That is not meant to be a brag on myself at all, by the way.)
~ Extroverts tend to either be great for holding up a conversation with an introvert, or terrifying to to an introvert, because they naturally tend to emit awesomeness in their interactions with people instead of bottling it all up and quietly channeling it into things, like introverts tend to do. Thus, it can feel like a standard I have to measure up to in my side of the conversation/interaction. And I'm usually incapable of doing so (or feeling as if I am) because I usually have a completely different mode of self-expression than those sorts of Awesomes.
~ People who are just like me (in terms of personality and often hobbies and talents) are people I'm really attracted to (friend-wise) but also feel a natural sort of competition with because we're so alike. I REALLY feel pressure to measure up to (or over) their portion of awesome, but it's quite difficult due to the fact that's our types of awesome are usually very similar, or at least similarly expressed. Thus, it's hard not to subconsciously view this sort of person as a rival, even while really wanting to befriend them.
[Wow, I wasn't expecting all of that.]
[ From the retrospective semi-objective viewpoint, it's an interesting phenomenon. ]
Now I have to figure out what to do with all of that. (I apologize; this is a hazard of impulsive real-time blogging. My "deep" posts are not neatly packaged.)
Saturday, January 1, 2011
A song about British bowler hats and yellow snow and lack of organs and dance parties and recurring bipolarity.
I made an amazing playlist for New Years and am throwing a one-person dance party in my newly clean room. (The linked version is missing a couple of songs, one by Glowfriends and two by Charlie.)
The Demskes are AWESOME. My family is also AWESOME. And putting them together makes a SUPERFABULOUSGREATUNFORGETTABLESPARKLYEPICDOUBLYAWESOME bonanza for New Year's! YAY! Movies and food and goofy camera moments and arguments over board games and food and movies and Nerf gun wars and food (including snowman-shaped marshmallows and chocolate cream cheese balls), and even sleep. ILOVEIT.
Ordinarily, I would be one to write a very lengthy and nostalgic and idealistically futuristic post, but I have too much energy to at the moment. Also, I did a lot of that in my Christmas post. Suffice it to say that 2011 is going to (what rhymes with eleven? Besides the number seven, and a couple of proper names, and heaven, which I can't use without saying something ridiculous and/or presumptuous.) be…purposeful (at least, as purposeful as Kiersten can get), with the help of my Ultimate Accomplishments of Awesome list, which I really need to write up somewhere. And I hope to enjoy school and better my friendships and go crazy for Jesus and get in shape and do some thinking about the future and have lots of dance parties, one-person or otherwise.
I'm now, because I wrote this post three hours ago and my computer wouldn't let me post it, watching Miyazaki movies on YouTube. Yay!
…One more addition to my Accomplishments of Awesome list:
74a. Get down to business to defeat the Huns.
74b. (Possibly with a wonderfully choreographed musical number.)
The Demskes are AWESOME. My family is also AWESOME. And putting them together makes a SUPERFABULOUSGREATUNFORGETTABLESPARKLYEPICDOUBLYAWESOME bonanza for New Year's! YAY! Movies and food and goofy camera moments and arguments over board games and food and movies and Nerf gun wars and food (including snowman-shaped marshmallows and chocolate cream cheese balls), and even sleep. ILOVEIT.
Ordinarily, I would be one to write a very lengthy and nostalgic and idealistically futuristic post, but I have too much energy to at the moment. Also, I did a lot of that in my Christmas post. Suffice it to say that 2011 is going to (what rhymes with eleven? Besides the number seven, and a couple of proper names, and heaven, which I can't use without saying something ridiculous and/or presumptuous.) be…purposeful (at least, as purposeful as Kiersten can get), with the help of my Ultimate Accomplishments of Awesome list, which I really need to write up somewhere. And I hope to enjoy school and better my friendships and go crazy for Jesus and get in shape and do some thinking about the future and have lots of dance parties, one-person or otherwise.
I'm now, because I wrote this post three hours ago and my computer wouldn't let me post it, watching Miyazaki movies on YouTube. Yay!
…One more addition to my Accomplishments of Awesome list:
74a. Get down to business to defeat the Huns.
74b. (Possibly with a wonderfully choreographed musical number.)
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