I don't do casual well.

Let's talk about short-term/casual dating. What exactly is it? How does it work? Is there a difference between say, dating exclusively and being in a relationship? What level of emotional investment should be placed in it? It inherently contains a lack of commitment, right, so does that mean it's okay to be sort of ambivalent about it from the start? Is it, objectively, a good idea or a bad idea? Is it anything other than pointless to date someone who you know you don't want around for very long, who is cute and sweet and fun but not your "type"? [Is cute and sweet and fun and interested in me not enough of a type? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?] Is any relationship social interaction ever really entirely pointless?

The sitch: So there's this guy I've been talking to. We exchanged a few messages, then numbers, which led to these awesome really long text convos we've been having for the past few days. We've been talking about doing things like going on actual dates and cooking for each other. He's decently attractive, taller than me, sweet, cutesy in the way I'm trying to never get caught up in again, into learning even if he didn't go to a great school, and he is easy to talk to. I enjoy having conversations with him and he makes me smile. Oh, and he is arguably very very interested in me--texts everyday and has expressed his desire to "pursue this further" multiple times. 

Doesn't sound like a bad situation to be in, right? So why am I so hesitant? 

When I was telling K about this guy on Monday, I was halfway through my description when he interrupted me and said, "Maya, he is not the one for you." I gave him this look like, Well duh and said, "Yeah I know, but...". He thought that was hilarious, that I was fully aware of that fact but still trying to meet this man for a date on Saturday. And ever since then, either inspired by or unsilenced by this exchange with K, a part of me has been wondering what the fuck I'm doing with this. Am I wasting my time? Or am I arguably just having fun? 

I wasn't looking for any kind of "further-going" when I started this. It's flattering but... how much of this is me liking him and how much is me liking the attention? I am deathly afraid of liking being liked more than liking the person doing the liking. He is not by any standards my "type", though some would argue have argued that the standards one must meet to be my type are too elitist-ly high. I feel like it would be really easy to get into a dating-->dating exclusively-->somewhat like a relationship type thing with him...I just don't actually feel like this is something I necessarily WANT. I don't necessarily strongly NOT want it either. I'm kind of ambivalent. But this is not the place for ambivalence. (Is there ever a place for ambivalence?) As I know all too well, people's emotions and interests and affections and desires are NOT TO BE TRIFLED WITH. I don't wanna be triflin'.

I like this. It's fun. I'm enjoying everything that is happening right here and now. Maybe I should for once in my life make an active attempt to stop worrying so much about silly projections I'm making that may or may not have any relation to my life's actual events. Maybe I should "go with the flow". But going with the flow is what recently got me and someone who was once near and dear to my heart into so much trouble. As a result, going with the flow kind of frightens me right now; going with the flow can get people hurt. But only if you go with it past your comfort zone, right? Only if you go with it to places you know you shouldn't/don't want to be? So as long as I don't MIND what's happening, as long as it's putting a smile on my face, can I just chug along? What about the fact that he seems to WANT this so much more than I do? Am I being fair?

Maybe in light of recent events or maybe just in light of being who I am, I am not sure that enjoying something is a justifiable justification for doing it. But why not? Why can't the fact that i think i would enjoy something be reason enough to do it? Girls just wanna have fun. WHAT ARE THESE STUPID MORALS AND WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?!  What separates doing something like this from doing something like my I-suppose-you-must-call-it-a-relationship with J? (A few thoughts: I was using J mostly for physical attention, whereas this guy is entirely emotional crack [for now, at least]; I established an end-date for J before we started, whereas I just have the feeling that this won't last; this guy is 1000 times closer to my "type".)

I have an overwhelming desire to want to do things the right way. I don't believe that all is fair in love and war. I do believe that I could enjoy spending time with this man as much as I enjoy conversing with him, which is a good amount. I do believe in the value of reciprocity and in living my life with integrity, which includes being unselfish in my interpersonal relationships. I don't believe I'm giving as much as I'm getting right now. 

...Then again, we haven't met. Case in point: when I told F I was thinking about ending things with this guy, he replied that things haven't even started. So I guess I'll text him when I get off work. And I guess maybe we'll have ourselves an actual date at some point. And I guess I can make up my mind then? It can't be fair to shut the door in his face when he's only halfway inside, I suppose. I suppose I'll just have to make it very clear that, as excited as he may be, I'm just seeing what this feels like. I suppose I am learning to take chances.             

OH. MY. GOD.

This could either be wonderful or terrible. Either way I CAN HARDLY CONTAIN MY EXCITEMENT!!!!

THE 90S WILL NEVER DIE. NEVERRRRRR.

This dude is just not getting it...

So last night I was just minding my own business catching up on the 120ish blogs I follow when all of a sudden Facebook beeps at me and the tab flashes "J messaged you!" *audible groan* Evidently his now-live-in girlfriend discovered some old letter I'd wrote him before we were even dating that he kept all this time (damn near four years), and it got him thinking about me. And as ALWAYS, he wants to know when I'll be home next "so we can chill". Now chilling evidently means teaming up with the girl to play pool against him. I tried to seem marginally non-committal without being rude, but I just don't understand why this boy man boy thinks that we have a meeting up three years after we broke up to play pool with his new booskie kind of relationship. WE ARE NOT FRIENDS. We may have been friends before we dated, but I was a different person then. As the closest thing I've ever had to a regretted relationship with another person, there is no longer even the slightest bit of room for him in my life in any capacity...he just doesn't seem to be able to grasp that. I've only seen him twice since we broke up, the first time being my first break home, when I almost hooked up with him again, and then again the next summer, when I ran into him at the mall and he gave me a ride home, but nothing happened because he was already with his current girlfriend. He has asked me to hang out multiple other times, but I always find some way of blowing it off. It's not even a time heals all wounds scenario; nothing about him or potentially seeing him hurts at all--it's more like remembering him and us makes me feel awkward. I judge myself for having been with him [though my body doesn't, haha]. And I don't remember how I ever really related to him, and I'm not sure I want to. And maybe, just maybe, I don't know how to be friends with someone who knows what I taste like, even if I never want them down there again...

So how do I make it clear that I don't want to hang out when I come home this time, next time, or for the rest of ever? Or should I just bite the bullet and hang out with the two of them to show that I am a flexible person who can be friends with lots of different types of people, and so that I have experience having an amicable relationship with an ex? 
(...I suppose I should take it as a compliment that none of my three exes seem comfortable with the idea of not being able to have me marginally in their lives in some way, from C who came crawling and begging back [Negro please], this situation with J, and the things KO has said which may or may not come to fruition.)

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of ...Cool?

THE PURSUIT OF (COOL) - TEASER from R+I creative on Vimeo.

This looks like a pretty awesome documentary. I'ma hafta check it out at some point.

A Man After Mine Own Heart:

Reblogged from Until I Get Married:

"First of all, the only thing better than a fine woman is a fine woman who knows the value of a good deal. When I was a young lad, and could only meet women at the mall, I was all about going for the women who were browsing in the clearance racks. I loved that sort of thing. Found it sexy. And don’t even get me started on the women who would browse through the clearance racks and NOT buy anything. My heart would melt. To see a woman so tight with her money, she didn’t even buy an item that was 70 percent off, that was the kind of thing that made me want to buy them an Orange Julius and cover the costs of a game of air hockey at the arcade."

I'll admit it's hard for me to pass up a good deal just because it's a good deal, but I'm learning. And y'all know I don't buy anything full price. It's nice to see that some brothas appreciate it. :) 

Remember that algebraic expression from a few weeks ago?

lust < x < love? I came to the conclusion that [fuck the laws of algebra] x is love too, just another layer. Something more than puppy but less than MJB style real. My conclusion has been slightly corroborated by a crunk feminist:

"I often argue with my students when I try to explain to them that love is an action word, and that it is a choice, not an emotion.  Love feels like lust at first, during the initiation and honeymoon stage of a relationship, but after that…the real love starts, the love that is not based on the woozy feeling you get when that special someone walks in the room or calls/texts your phone.  Love is the decision to stay after your first major argument.  Love is coming home at night when you have an invitation to go elsewhere.  Love is seeing yourself with someone through the calamities and celebrations of life, through their good and bad moments, with or without vows.  Love is commitment."

All those big scary things at the end of this quote that I have yet to experience aside, this implies that there is something "based on the woozy feeling you get when that special someone walks in the room or calls/texts your phone" that can accurately be called love, and that's...reassuring somehow.

If you wait too long to be brave...

...you might as well have stayed a coward. The result is the same. 

I saw a foinnne specimen of handsome, well-dressed, well-groomed, slight fro, highly-intellectual-appearing black man at the student center today. Sat no more than 30 feet from him. I caught his eye as I was sitting down in the TV lounge, and for the first few minutes of having entered each other's peripheral spheres, we exchanged a few glances. I smiled hoping to seem coy, and texted two of my best friends to explain the situation. They both sent words of encouragement, and one asked What do you have to lose? The answer was obviously nothing, so I got up to go to the bathroom, reapplied my lip gloss, and thought for a moment about what I would say. I settled on the cute and hopefully not creepy I would have been mad at myself all day if I left for work without introducing myself. But when I came back, he had leaned back into the seat and closed his eyes, as 4:45 is evidently the stroke of naptime. It was like I hadn't decided to be brave at all. Life gives us chances. They are fragile and fleeting and if we want them, we cannot put them off. We cannot sit and debate the options as if time is waiting for us. I love to live in my head, but I have to remember that we humans are creatures of action.

See, I know girls don't usually do this, but uh, I was wonderin...   

Surprisingly feminine moment:

OMG NAILS.

I can actually barely handle how gorgeous these are. I could totally see myself rocking a nail style like that. It almost makes me want to grow my nails out and try. 

Wait. Hold on. Almost? Do we play almost, Maya? Almost doesn't count. 

CHALLENGE. ACCEPTED.

Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Dallas's housing assistance waitlist opened up for the first time in 5 years last week, and despite the fact that only 100 spots were being offered, over 21,000 people entered the lottery. They started lining up outside the office the night before, and the line was eventually near a mile long. This line was full of infants, children, women, and senior citizens (women, children, and the elderly are the most likely groups of people to be impoverished), and eight people were injured. More info here.
The only thing my brain can scrounge up to compare this to is all the crazies who line up for Black Friday sales within minutes of finish their Thanksgiving dinners. I'm thankful for...this 80-inch flatscreen I'm about to stay up all night waiting to buy. Right. I remember my freshman year, an employee was TRAMPLED TO DEATH opening the doors at Walmart on Black Friday. 
Death by American greed and reckless desire for all things shiny on one hand. Injury by American poverty and reckless desire for decent living conditions on the other. The disappointment shared by those who weren't first in line binding them together. Two sides of the same sad coin.

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 30--Letter to a Place that Feels Like Home

Dear Princeton University,

I suppose the easiest way for me to say this is that nowhere (with the possible exception of P's house the summer after my sophomore year of high school) has ever felt like home to me the way you do. Professor Glaude, who I have never actually had a conversation with but feel close to thanks to AG, stresses the importance of being able to feel ownership over you, and unlike many of my peers, I have never struggled with this. I never mumble that I go to "a small private school in Jersey" when asked what college I attend; I speak your name proudly. Less two brief academic freakouts during Freshman Year, I have never felt like I don't belong with you or like I'm not enough for you. Less one incident involving a bunch of students from other institutions and a bunch of anonymous comments on the Prince's website and one precept full of jocks, I have never felt anything but accepted by you and all your various representatives, even if I'm not what they expect when we first meet. 
I love my friends from my life before/outside of Princeton, and many of them will be integral parts of my person til I am dead and buried, but sometimes I feel like you have given me people who get me in a way no one else ever has. With you, I can get closer to a person in 2 months than I did in 14 years of living in Mays Landing. No matter the season, turning onto Washington Road from Route 1 and driving through the trees that line the road makes me feel like all is right with the world. You are beautiful in both the exquisite, ornate, timeless sense, and the modern state-of-the-art setting-the-pace-for-the-rest-of-the-world sense. You've taught me so much about myself. I've tried being various people here, as I settle into who I actually am, but I rarely if ever feel like I have to try to be anyone but me. I can be unabashedly nerdy. I can also be more ethnic than I had ever been previously, and get in touch with an urban side I'd never had before. I don't feel like a walking contradiction when I'm with you. I don't feel weird.
I've been told that I glow when I'm talking about you. My first words whenever anyone asks are invariably I absolutely love [you], and it is the truest of truths. I'm not going to lie: you are undoubtedly the hardest thing I have ever done, though probably not the hardest thing I will ever do, and you are worth every minute of it, even the bleakest. You are my life. There is no way for me to convey to you how validated you made me feel. There is no way for me to tell you about the panic attacks I had for months during the spring of my Senior year in high school as I felt like an idiot for not having applied to any safety schools that wouldn't have been painful to attend, and no way for me to explain that on that fateful first day of April, 2008, I sobbed with something greater than joy sitting in the computer chair in my mom's office after reading the word Congratulations, feeling as though everything I had endured in my life had combined with a hell of a lot of luck to get me to that exact moment. I don't know how to say thank you in a way that even approaches appropriate, besides the facts that I will a) donate to you in increasingly large amounts [maybe not an incredibly noticeable increase every year, but an increase] every year from 2012 until I am dead and buried, b) be fully decked out in my orange and black at reunions every year from 2012 until I am dead and buried, and c) providing that I don't have any children, you will be the greatest recipient in my will. Any conference, event, anything you might want/need my presence for, I am yours. And even all of that isn't nearly enough, but reciprocity is impossible in this circumstance. You're in the process of giving me an entirely new world, more than anyone in my entire family could ever have dreamed.
I know that when I walk out of the Fitz-Randolph gates on June 5th, I won't be leaving you forever. Like the director of the Honors Program at Columbia told me on my visit, I am a Tiger. Now and tomorrow and for the rest of my life. I still don't know how I'll manage it without breaking down, though. I'll never be without you and your resources, I know, but I still can't imagine life without you surrounding me. With centuries' worth of alumni, though, I guess you'll always be surrounding me...

May the rest of our life together be as glorious as these past three-and-counting years have been,

Maya 

Big Scary Topic Time!

Three images:

A statistic: "while black women make up about 13 percent of the U.S. female population, they account for 30 percent of abortions performed in the U.S." This may be true--The Guttmacher Institute sounds kind of legit--but even so it results from a lot of systemic problems like the options presented to African-American women by both the heinous conditions of the cycle of poverty and government initiatives like Planned Parenthood, whose agents don't always tell women about all the choices they have.

And a confession that I am not comfortable with: When it came time for the ex and I to talk about protection and whether we'd been appropriately safe, one of my very first thoughts was What makes him think I would keep it, anyway? I legitimately stopped and looked around to see who could possibly have thought that, because it certainly couldn't have been moi. ...But it was. Almost instantaneously. From some place deep within me that I didn't know existed. And it was unequivocally the truth. If by some incredibly unlikely series of unfortunate mishaps happened that caused both of our forms of protection to fail and me not to notice in time to take a Plan B pill and I found out I was pregnant, I who have always been pro-life (having been a perfect candidate for abortion myself) to the point of the most heated of debates with people I love and respect, would not have carried the pregnancy to term. Although there are some who would argue that if all that happened to get me pregnant, I was "meant to have" this hypothetical child, I don't believe in anyone who's up there making up "meant to"s, and in that instant I understood the right to a choice. The right to not have my entire world turned upside down irrevocably. The right to live my life by my design. The right to not be screwed over after having tried to be safe. The right to not be sacrificed to a biological system I never asked for. The right to bring children into this world when (if ever) I am ready for them in every way, and not a moment sooner.

Go ahead and call me a hypocrite. I feel like one. My only defense is that I didn't understand until I could legitimately see it happening to me and could visualize all the other lives that would be affected (ruined?) by such an accident. If we had done everything we could and been failed by that which we relied on, I just...I couldn't give up my whole life, everything I've worked for. I've come so far. I don't even like kids. And I know what it is to grow up and feel like you ruined your mother's life, what it is to have a single mother who wasn't ready for you, what it is to be afraid to get too close to the men your mother brings into your life because there's no telling how long they'll be around. And come on, me, with a kid? I AM A GROWN-ASS WOMAN KID! 

...So why do I feel like such a bad person?    

Hair crushes

Reblogged from Natural Belle:

When History-Makers Meet

This warms my heart a little. The iconic Norman Rockwell painting, entitled "The Problem We All Live with", depicts little six year old Ruby Bridges marching determinedly between US Marshals on her way to her first day of first grade at New Orleans's William Frantz Elementary School. Her mother's staunch support of the Civil Rights movement led her parents to respond to a call from the NAACP for young Black children to take a placement test to determine if they were academically eligible to integrate the all-white school district. Though five other students passed the test, only Bridges enrolled in a new school, thus becoming the first African-American child to attend an all-White school in the South. She was met with an angry mob outside the school, who cursed, shouted, and threw things, but she never showed an ounce of fear. She was the future. 
And on Friday, she met someone I'm sure she never imagined being able to meet within her lifetime--Barack Obama, the United States's first President of African descent. 
I will never forget the night of November 4, 2008. I will never forget being in Pennsylvania with the College Democrats, going door to door trying to get the last reluctant would-be voters to the polls before they closed, and witnessing what can best be described as an explosion of joy as the state was called in Obama's favor: shouting could be heard from the surrounding households, people in their cars honked their horns and screamed out the window. It was a huge victory. Upon getting back to campus I ran to the Carl A. Fields Center, where they were having a watch party for the election results. As the night went on, and the blue began to outnumber the red on the map of the country, I felt an excitement unlike anything I had ever known--all my campaigning, all my postering, all my voter-registration-drive-ing, all my phone-banking, all my HOPE aside, I don't know if I ever really thought he would win. But there it was, unfolding clearly before my eyes...I witnessed history. When the final decision was announced, the joy and excitement in that room was palpable. I will never feel emotion like that again in my life. I have photographs that do some justice to what happened...I don't have the words to describe it. We, roughly 18-22 year old fairly privileged (as Princeton students) AfroCarribedescendedfromslavesandmaybeAmericans, felt like the world had opened up and something great had been achieved.

And if that's how we, the young and only somewhat aware, felt at this moment, I cannot imagine being Ruby Bridges. I talked with my father, who marched with Malcolm X, and my grandmother, who marched with Dr. King, about this moment, and I can barely understand their reactions. They have witnessed much more history than I have. We have all played small roles in shaping history. Ruby Bridges, much like Barack Obama, molded it with her own two hands. They have gone boldly where no one before them had gone, and Norman Rockwell's photo can have no better home than the walls of the Oval Office.  

I'm a Queen on my throne! I'm magnificent!

A friend's facebook status asks, "If there was a soundtrack to your life, what would be on it?". I want to dedicate a post to answering that, but that takes more time than I am allowed to procrastinate with right now (I have a meeting with my independent study professor at 3), so for now just enjoy this song off Jill Scott's new album (have I mentioned she's next on the list of people I need to see live?) that seems appropriate for my life right now, in more ways than I've told you all about. [You guys might get a surprise on Saturday. Be excited.] 

You don't have to be who you were.

From an article entitled "Reconceptualizing Personality: Producing Individuality by Defining the Personal Self," by John C. Turner and lots of other people:

"Personal identity is not a fixed product of past socialization, learning or maturation but a contemporary product of social, societal and psychological forces. It depends inter alia on current group identities, social contexts and the goals, motives, expectations, beliefs and knowledge which are shaped by social influence and social ideologies. An individual's past experience, individual and social, may certainly affect how he or she reacts to and cognizes the contemporary social world, but present social realities, norms, values and ideologies, and reference group memberships are decisive for producing personal identity. Personal change is made possible by social change which impinges on the factors influencing the creation of personal identities."

 Be who you want to be. Who it feels best to be right now. Who you were doesn't matter nearly as much as who you can be right here and now. 

My best friend asked a guy out on a date

and I just want to take a small moment of time to say how incredibly proud I am of her. I made a small suggestion about something she should do last week, not thinking for a second she'd actually go for it, and she has already surpassed my wildest expectations. This is called grabbing this bull called Life by the horns and making it be your bitch. This is called having control, rather than a passive say. This is called taking a chance. This is called LIVING. I'm so happy for her, regardless of what comes from it, just because she took the initiative and did this.

I feel like I need to catch up, haha.  

Through Distance and Time...

When I told two of my co-workers that my best friend from middle school was coming to spend the weekend with me in New Brunswick, they were shocked that I still TALKED to such people, let alone arrange visits. I told them that we had never really lost touch, despite the fact that she moved away when we I was thirteen (she was still twelve. baby.) and we'd never lived in the same state since. Even as I was explaining this, I realized how downright weird it was. I don't talk to the overwhelming majority of even the people I graduated high school with--only about two on a semi-daily basis. There are more I'll have occasional catch-up convos with or hang out with while we're both home, but on the whole most of my once-best-friends and I have grown apart. 'Tis unfortunate, but that's life, man...and we can still hang out from time to time, so it's not the worst thing in the world. 
But SP...it's different with her. She was whisked away out of my life before we had cell phones and regular internet access...we actually mailed letters back and forth for years. We tried to have hours-long conversations but 8 people live in her house, so tying up the landline for that long was nearly impossible. She didn't give up on me even when it looked like our trio could never reunite because T and I weren't speaking. Going to visit her the summer after our freshman year of high school was my first independent non-familial adventure. Enter facebook: she's someone I actually have regular communication with, not just a random status-like or whatnot. Through elaborate schemes of lying to our parents, she was with me the first time I ever got drunk, and when I found out that Greg and my mom broke up. And now she was here with me again this weekend. We combined childhood--water gun battles, swings, and sidewalk chalk--with grown up games--drinking Jenga, Dirty Minds, Uno with the added rules that you have to drink every time you draw a card--and like every other time, it was like no time had passed at all. 
We're such different people from such different backgrounds. It would have been ridiculously easy for this friendship to fizzle out. But it never has, and it never will. We've been friends through the miles for wayyyy longer than we were ever close while we lived in the same town. And we're luckily not one of those multiperson friendships that can only function with the whole group; our trio has awesome reunions, yes, but SP and I and SP and T can each have separate awesome hang out sessions too. And the best part is, it has never felt like it has taken a lot of effort or like we're fighting against a world that tries to pull us apart...we don't get to see each other as much as we'd like, and we don't always talk super-regularly, but something right found us in the hallways of William Davies Middle School and we're never going to let it go.
You never know who's going to come into your life. You never know how they're going to change you by doing so. You never know if the person you rely on today will still be around the next time you need a shoulder to lean on. You can bulldoze your walls and let people in. You can share and trust and love all without quite knowing if the person you're sharing with and trusting and loving is giving as much to you as you are to them. Relationships of all kinds have as much power to hurt as they have to heal, and you never quite know which will do which to a larger extent. What I'm saying here is the strength of this friendship never ceases to surprise me. May you all have such ride-or-die chicks.     

Talk.

Reblogged from Max-Logic: 

"At the end of the day, we would all be better off if we erred on the side of over-communicating. Too many situations in life get fucked up because everyone is making assumptions about what’s going on in everyone else’s mind instead of just growing some stones and speaking on it."

More Scholarly Reasons to Put Yourself First:

Still reading Cooley (I've been slacking, I know....): 

"In every higher kind of production a person needs to understand and believe in himself|the more thoroughly the better. It is precisely that in him which he feels to be worthy and at the same time peculiar|the characteristic|that it is his duty to produce, communicate, and realized; and he cannot possess this, cannot differentiate it, cleanse it from impurities, consolidate and organize it, except through prolonged and interested self-contemplation. Only this can enable him to free himself from the imitative on the one hand and the whimsical on the other, and to stand forth without shame or arrogance for what he truly is- Consequently every productive mind must have intense self-feeling; it must delight to contemplate the characteristic, to gloat over it if you please, and in this way learn to define, arrange, and express it...

Who does not feel at time what Goethe calls the joy of dwelling in one's self, of surrounding himself with the fruits of his own mind, with things he has made, perhaps, books he has chosen, his familiar clothes and possessions of all sorts, with his wife, children, and old friends, and with his own thoughts... At times even conscientious people, perhaps, look kindly at their own faults, deficiencies, and mannerisms, precisely as they would on those of a familiar friend. Without self-love in some such sense as this any solid and genial growth of character and accomplishment is hardly possible...

Self love, Shakespeare says, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting..." Human Nature and the Social Order, 111-112

Reblogged from Post Secret:

TRUTH:

Her fiery balloons make me sad though.

 

So these came in the mail yesterday

They're handmade by an artist in Singapore and I ordered them the night before the illusions about my life were shattered. 

Getting them didn't make me sad like I'd feared, which is good, but still I spent $19 on them and I don't want to just throw them away. They might be a little heavy to make into earrings, which is my only idea so far. So, +10 awesome points to whoever can come up with something I can turn these into.

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 29--Letter to a Mythical Creature

Dear Kendra,

[Readers, before you go scouring the interwebz on a quest to find this Kendra of which I speak, relax. She doesn't exist on the internet. She exists only in the minds of me, S, and our other friend whom neither of us really speaks to anymore, M*****. She was a character in a book S and I spent most of 8th grade coming up with the storyline for.] 

You were just a baby. The daughter of a mermaid and a sorcerer, you had powers the likes of which your world had never seen. A blank slate, you weren't inherently good or evil; you would end the battle once and for all, but whose side you were on depended on how you were raised. And so, under the cover of night, evil stole you from good's protected castle and whisked you away to a fortress dug deep inside a mountain in a long-forgotten range. A team of students was assembled to rescue you. They never made it. 
I loved you so much. You and everything you stood for. Looking back now at how obsessed we were with you, your protectors/defenders, and the forces of evil who held you captive, I have to laugh. But it was all so real then. Your entire world was the greatest figment my imagination will ever know. Your parents' parents, we were the masterminds behind both the plot to steal you and the quest to get you back. We made every minor success and major pitfall along the way. The unexpected detours that threatened to be your would-be saviors' undoing were our doing. We spent hours on the phone and in the library with this every day, planning the most minute of details. Children in our world, we were the ultimate masters in yours. If the guy who wrote Eragon could do it when he was a young teenager, why couldn't we? [Oh how I miss the days when 'Why not?' was reason enough to do something. Though I suppose there's no reason it can't still be.]
Your story never ended though. Sometime around the beginning of high school I simply lost interest. I looked at the unfinished 68 page outline [yes we were that serious] and couldn't believe how naive we were. I had this cold hard world moment where I didn't think anyone else would ever take us or our story seriously and I gave up on you. And I hated myself for it, so I tried to make up some ridiculous story about how writing the outline was boring me and I wanted to spend some time writing actual chapters, but no matter how hard I tried to dedicate myself, I couldn't give you the attention and love and respect you deserved. I just wasn't into it anymore. Maybe it stemmed from not being as close to S once I wasn't seeing him every day, maybe my life just got in the way, maybe I just grew up...I told him I didn't like what I was writing and that I needed to pick up some better writing skills before I could keep going. That I was going to develop them in the Creative Writing class I was going to take sophomore year and then I would start back up again. I took the class...but I never started up again.
I lost all interest in fantasy [at least, the magic and dragons and quests kind of fantasy] at the same time that I gave up on you. I couldn't bring myself to have anything to do with the genre. I don't know which loss of feeling came first. It was so bad that I could barely even finish the last Harry Potter book--I had to know what happened, but I wanted nothing to do with wands and wizardry anymore. I couldn't. I don't know why, but I just couldn't. I couldn't take it seriously anymore.
I'm sorry. I wish I had done better by you. And now you're gone, extant only in our memories, because my mom threw away the computer everything that related to you was stored on without asking me if there was anything I needed on it. I just came back from Princeton one break and it was gone. You were gone. So I'm sorry I couldn't do right by you. And S, I'm sorry I couldn't tell you the truth. I couldn't explain it then, and I still can't. Something in me disappeared and took you with it, Kendra. That's all I can say.

Maya 

Things that make me feel like a bad person:

I've gotten into the habit of unfriending people on their birthdays. I mean, if facebook announces to me that it's your birthday and I don't recognize your name, let alone care enough to write you a 15-character message, we don't need to be friends.

So something y'all might not know about me

is that my Google Reader be POPPIN. I've never been a magazine or newspaper kind of girl, but I subscribe to 81 blogs and counting. Though my little corner of the blogosphere isn't really that big a deal (12 followers, I'm sorry to tell you that I do this more for myself than for any of you. Please don't be offended, I still love you.), I do lots of lurking and some occasional commenting on blogs that are followed by hundreds of people. And one of the blogs I've picked up most recently is The Black Snob. And I love it. And they have these tote bags and I'm very strongly considering buying one, because I think it's just about the best thing ever:

But if I purchase this bag, which given my proclivities towards shopping, is very likely, I will have to come to terms with something I've been trying to deny about myself for the past few years. I...might be a snob. If not an out-and-out snob, definitely a little bougie, a little uppity, maybe even a bit elitist. I don't always play well with others, particularly others who have had less opportunities than me--I want to, I try to, but it can be hard for me to relate. [I broke through to the kids at the school I worked at last summer with the fact that Renegade is my favorite rap song. They grudgingly accepted this as proof of my cultural legitimacy.] It's not that I don't value those who are less fortunate than me--on the contrary, I'm a sociologist--the people who get fucked over by society are my bread and butter, literally. I know that I'm an exception to every single rule in the book and if even the tiniest thing in my past had gone differently I wouldn't be where I am. I am thankful every day for the circumstances of chance and happenstance that got me to where I am. But still...I'm here. And I don't know what it's like to be anywhere else, really. 
I feel pretty similarly to the guy who wrote this article--I can shoot the breeze with professors and high-ups at financial corporations like my mentor last summer in Chicago, but what to talk about with the plumber? I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes I feel disconnected from the larger world...all that ivory tower shit and whatnot. It's the same thing that happened at the Black Solidarity Conference when I wanted to come together with this group of people I identified with and feel like a part of something bigger than me (I love that feeling), but I couldn't because I felt so isolated from everything they were pushing for. It's the same thing that happened at the one and only MCIC (Multi-Cultural Interest Club...our closest thing to a minority-focused group) I went to in high school, at the beginning of my sophomore year; the advisors were trying to convince students that the SAT was worth taking and I had already broken 700 in one of my scores. 
I've talked to some friends at Princeton about this and they say their families got them used to interacting with quote-unquote "regular people", statements that just highlight the degree to which I've always felt isolated from my family. The vast majority of the people who are related to me live in the South and are practically strangers; the small bit of family I grew up with always treated me as different, causing me to self-isolate. Part of it was being an awkward age--my mom's oldest, I'm only 11 years younger than her youngest sister, and as she was the first of my grandmother's five children to have children of her own, there's no one my age in my family (besides two step-cousins in Georgia)--but more of it, I think, just stemmed from a sense that no one knew exactly where I had come from. So they gave up on trying to convince me to play basketball and gave up on trying to convince me to run around outside and let me read. No team sports for me. Very little interaction with others as a child outside of school, in general. My imagination was my childhood playmate, which led me to grow into an adult whose greatest activity is mental.
I often wonder who I would have grown up to be if I Ms. Lambkin hadn't realized that I wasn't a troublemaker by nature in kindergarten, I was just bored. If they hadn't bent the rules to let me start SEEK (Special Educational Experiences for Kids, a program my elementary school did) early. If I didn't have the kind of mother who was willing to take the bus to the library with me and help me carry home huge stacks of books. If I had been involved in some activity that wasn't primarily populated by other students who were very similar to me in their academic focus. If my friends hadn't been pre-screened by simple virtue of the fact that we were in all the same classes for 8 years. If my mother was as lax with her expectations of me as she has been for my siblings. Would that alter-Maya be able to relate? Could she shoot the breeze easily with people who don't consider themselves to be intellectuals? Would she have been friends with black people before Princeton? Would she draw fewer distinctions between black people here and black people "out there"? Would she have said less there instead of fewer? Would hip-hop be a choice rather than a crutch? Would books be a chore rather than a joy? Would she still be curious or would she feel like the questions she can't answer aren't worth knowing? 
On my thesis-reading-list right now is Charles Horton Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order. On page 7, he says,

"We are born with the need to assert ourselves, but whether we do so as hunters, warriors, fishermen, traders, politicians, or scholars, depends upon the opportunities offered us in the social process."

I agree with him 100%. I know that with any of countless slight changes in my history and those of my parents and their parents etc. I could have ended up on the management track at Wawa store 488 as my career as opposed to my job, or I could have ended up a hustler, a dealer, something worse. I could have gotten a two-year degree in something that would turn into a skilled job, and scoffed at the idea of a liberal-arts-college with a degree that doesn't technically mean anything. I don't blame the people that do, but the system that withholds from them the same opportunities it conferred to me, and above that I recognize that even in a world where everyone starts on the same line, not everyone wants or needs a life like the one I lead. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with choice as long as it leads to fulfillment. 
But despite all of that, I still don't know how to interact. One could look at my education life history (they're really one and the same until I finally get that PhD) as a process of gradually weeding out persons whom society would not deem exceptional in any way. A removing of the masses. I want to be able to dance with a guy at a party and not have him instantly know I go to Princeton as opposed to one of the 10 other schools that are represented. Sometimes I wish I had a diction and a set of mannerisms to fall back on that let me blend in in places like the South Side of Chicago. I wish I had ever felt like I truly belonged in any circles other than the ones I currently frequent. I want to find a way to at least visit peacefully without any inner turmoil.
But at the end of the day, I will never want to be anything but "bougie, brilliant, book-reading, Chai Bigelow brand Lemon Lift tea sipping, uppity, degree-earning, ignorance-eviscerating, talented, tasteful, witty, saddity, uncompromising, revolutionary, daring-yet-caring, in-your-face..." Does that inherently make me a snob? If so, am I allowed to embrace it? Does it have to have a bad connotation? Most of those qualities aren't bad! They're things I strive towards! Can I flip the script somehow like people do with nappy and bitch and the other n-word I don't tolerate?
Can I buy the bag?

I love music videos that are like films.

And this little boy makes me want balloons. And this voice makes me want to snuggle. And life is good.

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 28--Letter to Someone You Did Something Crazy With

Dear M**,

I'm pretty sure most people, or at least most of the kinds of people I know and am close to, would describe what we did one evening after dinner in my dorm room last semester with only my makeup mirror on as mood lighting as pretty damn crazy. Most of the friends I've told judged me. If my parents ever saw the evidence, they'd kill me. I never actually got the reaction of the person I ostensibly did it for, but I'll bet he was rather surprised. Hell, I was rather surprised when I emailed you to say I'd do it. 
It was just a favor for a friend, in theory, and I had no obligation to volunteer, but no matter how many times I saved the email as a draft instead of sending it, I just couldn't resist. It seemed so naughty, so taboo, so downright wicked. It seemed like something past versions of me would never have done and that just made me want to do it more. This was a private act of rebellion: I waged war against timidity, a war in miniature, behind locked doors (you checked). It was an awkward cross-campus walk, as you asked whether I had any props and we discussed who'd get to see the results. You are officially the only person I've ever let browse through my underwear drawer. It felt silly, considering what we were about to do, but I turned my back to you to strip. With my back arched and my hands undoing clasps came the first click.
It was easy to take your directions and to offer suggestions. Like this? No, like that. It was easy to stop caring about trying to suck my stomach in or whether I looked good from that angle. It stopped feeling scandalous almost immediately. It stopped feeling wrong. All I needed to be was me. All I was doing was being me, being me in front of you. Talk about losing inhibitions... Subject rather than object of affection or desire, more than skin and scars and flab, I was art. Little old me! Now that's crazy...and it's a feeling I haven't let go of since.  I have the evidence in a box in my closet, and though I haven't seen all of it in all its glory, I can already tell these are some of the best of me.

So thank you for letting me get a little crazy,

Maya

Small successes

I was waiting for the train, minding my own business, when I noticed my lips felt a little dry. So I fished in my new wristlet for my Blistex and noticed it was pretty low so I went to turn the dial on the bottom so more would come out...and it didn't move! It was all the way at the end of the tube! I successfully used an entire tube of chapstick! This NEVER happens. I always lose them or accidentally put them through the washing machine/dryer long before we approach this point. I threw the empty tube away and bought a new one when I got to campus. This feels like an accomplishment.

It's sad when you lose things you've come to take for granted

RIP Amazon Prime Membership

Having you in my life was lovely, and you will be sorely missed. Amazon did a wonderful thing to recognize the struggles of a college student's limited-real-world-shopping-opportunities experience and gave a free prime membership to anyone with a .edu email address, and the site and I became much closer friends once I could magically get things in two days with free shipping. Even my mom took advantage of you. And now I log back in today to recontemplate whether I'm going to buy Jill Scott's album or just pirate it (arrrrrgh!) and I am saddened to no longer see evidence of you on the site, brightening my Amazon experience. I almost wonder whether it's worth it to buy a real Prime membership like a grown-up. *crosses fingers in the hopes that Amazon will love students again real soon*  

Walking home last night

I saw a few well-dressed non-thuggish-looking black men at the Rutgers bus stop. This excited me. I knew I looked cute, so I tried to walk past all cool as a cucumber. As I got up beside them, though, I realized that the two that were standing had been blocking my view of a verrrrrry cute guy who was sitting. I smiled at him. He smiled back. I thought about stopping to introduce myself, but felt too awkward. *is annoyed with self's self-consciousness* I just put a little extra sway into my hips as I kept walking and hoped I'll see him again tonight (not likely because I've never seen them before, but hey, a girl can hope.)

Self-Concept Thursdays is my favorite feature on Curly Nikki.

The lines that are grabbing at me today:

"Don't limit yourself to being what you have been. You owe it to yourself to embrace all that you have inside of you to become." Full post here.

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day 27: Letter to Someone Who Taught You Something New

Dear KO,
The breadth of this topic means I could have written to lots of people, but it just feels most accurate to write to you because of how much you've taught me since February. I recently read somewhere on the interwebz the line, "I don't want to come out of a relationship feeling like I haven't changed much," and regardless of the misalignment between the levels of seriousness with which each of us regarded this, I've certainly changed a lot. Maybe I'll expand this to include things I learned about myself via being with you, which may not be the exact same thing as you teaching me, but oh well.
I learned that if grown-ass-woman-Maya wanted someone badly enough, I could take action steps to get from Point A to Point B with said person; I hadn't been brave enough to do that since I was little just-barely-a-teenager-Maya. You taught me what it feels like to be swept off my feet. You reintroduced me to anticipation and infatuation, 12-year-old schoolgirl style: will I see him today? Is he gonna text me? What will he say? I learned to prioritize something that was bigger than just me, even if my friends thought I was crazy. I learned to dismiss my friends' opinions/advice, which I hope I have unlearned just as quickly. 
I learned a new level of happiness, a level that evidently constantly showed on my face and got commented on all the time. You helped me see that striving for independence doesn't mean I can't ask for help in moments of need. You taught me that my ex (before you) may have been right on two counts: 1) that I just might have been a nympho waiting to happen, and 2) that the best thing two people can do in bed is to wake up together. You taught me the bliss that comes from waking up happy with the arm of a man I adore slung around my ribcage in casual protection, and that there are better reasons than schoolwork to only get three hours of sleep. There were more tangible things: you taught me how to two-step, that Campus Club sells $2 milkshakes, and that the ears are a very erogenous zone (among various other lessons in physics and anatomy that we learned together). I learned new levels of physical comfort, both with myself and with another person. I learned how to stretch the tiniest events as far as they could go, a whole new version of time management.
You taught me that I was wrong about myself in so many ways: I'd always abhorred cutesy, gagged at over-the-top romance. I always told myself I never wanted anything like that, but from the moment you gave it to me, I reveled in it. You taught me that, against everything I'd ever believed, in my heart of hearts all I want is a routine of togetherness, regularly shared meals and molding myself to fit into someone else's shape night after night. I know now that you never meant to, but you taught me how to dive into love: to weigh the options upon the shore and make the conscious decision to Get. In. The. Water! [Notebook reference]. Even if the two-way street was only a very well-put-together mirage, you taught me how it feels to be in love. With you, I learned to abandon all but my most important reservation: reservedness about my reservations; I'm working on it in your absence. I wish I had learned how to tell you when I was worried; instead, I learned to put my worries on the back burner and live half in the moment and half in a larger picture my silly little heart had concocted. I learned to be carefree in a glorious but potentially dangerous way. I learned trust and security at deeper levels than ever before, in the I wanted to put all of me in a box with a bow on it and give it to you and say This is yours now, take care of it, and I remembered again what it was to want to share myself with someone completely. 
I have since learned the true value of honesty, the sting of hypocrisy, and what exactly constitutes a lie. I have learned to be more open in my questioning. I have learned that a person's intentions have no true bearing on the effects of their actions on others, and am in the process of learning which component (the intentions or the effects) hold more weight in the course of this life we live, which I should value more. I have relearned the weight of shattered expectations, along with how to hurt, how to feel like I've been fooled, how to be furious, how to doubt, how to blame, and how to over-analyze (though I'm sure I never forgot that last one).
Most recently, I am learning to enjoy the memories of the past for what they were when they were, and to not try to tear them apart by applying later feelings. I am learning to stomp out dread with determination. I am learning to reprioritize myself. I am learning to forgive. 
It seems only appropriate to end with my our girl India:

"I'm only human
Let's shake free this gravity of resentment
And fly high, and fly high
You're only human
Let's shake free this gravity of judgment
And fly high on the wings of forgiveness

I've searched for romance
Flowers and affection
What I found is a lesson
Of what love really is
Found the game of love is
Not about how much you can take
In fact authentic love is about
How much you can give

...

And I wanna let you know how much you changed my life
I wanna let you know you taught me how to fly
And I wrote this song to tell you this
I'm better cuz you taught me how to give"

--India.Arie, "Wings of Forgiveness" 

Maya

Things that make me feel like I am not actually a member of my generation:

The last Harry Potter movie premieres tomorrow at midnight, evidently. Facebook is all atwitter (can one still use that word without referring to Twitter itself, which I'm sure is also abuzz--gah, Google Buzz!) with statuses counting the very hours til the premiere, and I'm flashing back to photos that were uploaded of some close friends of mine fully decked out in costume for the last premiere. Though I still recall being absolutely undone by anguish when one of the books arrived at my house (because I pre-ordered it on Amazon) while I was on vacation, incidentally visiting the same awesome friend who is coming to visit me and T this weekend, I can't say I was more of a fan of this series than any other. In fact, I waited a while to read the last book, and read it leisurely instead of devouring it because by the time I was in high school, there were more important things than wizards and wands and the never-ending battle of good versus evil--I had just already devoted so much time and emotional energy to these characters that I had to find out what happened.  
What I'm trying to say is, despite having read all 7 of the books growing up, I couldn't possibly give less of a shit about this movie, and will never watch it of my own volition. In fact, I have only ever seen 1.75 Harry Potter movies: as a child, I walked out of the theater when they did not include Hermione's potions scene as one of the tests to fight Voldemort near the end of the first movie, and I saw the third one on DVD because my aunt put it on after Thanksgiving dinner when the family went to Georgia for Thanksgiving my freshman year of high school and there was nothing else to do. It wasn't inherently bad in any way, if anything else was similarly omitted, I had either since forgotten the plot to the point that I didn't notice, or simply no longer particularly cared. The chapter of my life when I appreciated lived for magic and castles and mythical creatures and a way out of my under-the-staircase life has long since closed. The circumstances of my life that made books like Harry Potter and every other tween-aged fantasy series appeal to me are not circumstances I like to revisit. What exactly is this movie supposed to do for me? What is it doing for bazillions of people like me?

What we're all traveling:

 

because

Mixed? Me? No! Well...Kind of. Technically. Should I care?

Racialicious posted something today that brought up a topic I struggle with from time to time, mostly whenever I'm filling out some form that asks about my racial identity and asks me to select all that apply. 

I am a black person. I prefer to identify myself as a Black American, though I can accept multigenerational African-American (Imani Perry term), and will respond to African-American more broadly. I don't like the term African-American because I don't have very strong ties with Africa culturally or otherwise. I am somewhat Afrocentric, with my style of jewelry and sometimes clothing, and my hair to a degree (but that wasn't the original intent), and how I try to celebrate Kwanzaa. I think I prefer to think of it as ethnocentric. But another part of my reasons for disliking the term African-American is the simple fact that some of my foremothers and forefathers [yo, why is forefathers a word as recognized by the internet and foremothers isn't? Sexist and rude.] were not of African descent; their inclusion in my family tree was done through a mixture of choice and domination. This means that technically, despite the fact that I and my parents and my mother's mother all identify as black people, I am an individual of mixed race. Is this an identity I should embrace? I am a black person [with bits of German, Portuguese, Native American, mysterious-probably-white-Canadian, AND NOBODY KNOWS OR CAN EVER KNOW WHAT ELSE]. It is an inherent part of the process of having descended from a people who were not regarded as people. Am I denying the other parts of my ancestry by claiming only my blackness? Is this doing my ancestors (moreso the ones in my family tree due to love) a disservice? Or does claiming a black identity automatically include all the various mixings that produced black people, because to be a multigenerational African-American means to have been mixed? I don't ever check anything but Black/African-American on forms that say to select all that apply, because I don't identify as anything else. Should I? 

Etsy is going to be the death of me

And by "death" I mean "best thing that's ever happened". I've been getting lots of hair accessories from Etsy vendors for a few weeks. Look at the earrings I bought today:

 

I am all kinds of loving these and can't wait to get them in the mail! Yay presents for me! :) 

[Additionally,]

 

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day 26: Letter to Your Bed

Dear Beds,

As part and parcel of the fact that my life is broken into various pieces in various places and none of them feel very permanent anymore, I have three of you, and will address you each separately.

Bed in Mays Landing, we've reached a stage where you don't really even feel mine anymore. I'm just as comfortable sleeping on a couch in the living room as I am in you--the room you're in is A's now, not mine or even ours. Despite the fact that you're covered in my pillows with my teddy bears, I feel like a guest in you. [I sometimes feel like a guest in that whole house; a crazy feeling considering it's the best candidate for the title of house I grew up in.] As far as beds go, you've led a pretty dull life: you have had exactly 1 minor two-person adventure, one night when I was 18, my family was gone, and I was feeling brave. Now you're rarely even slept in. Someday in the not-too-distant-future you may officially become a guest bed in a house that almost never has guests, unless I steal you to come live with me and be mine again when I need to have a real place of my own. We'll see. Maybe you'll get to lead an exciting life yet. 
Bed in New Brunswick, you don't actually belong to me, but rather to the girl I'm subletting from, so I can't speak to your history of adventures (though we've had some fun times on our own ;) ). Your frame is too big. You aren't spectacular in any way, but you get the job done and I'm grateful to have been temporarily given you. You are very uncluttered, and our first few nights together being all alone in you was driving me crazy. [It still is to an extent, but I'm trying to pretend it's not.] I guess our time together is about halfway over (hmm, I should change your sheets), and during this first half I have given you a lot of sadness, and for that I apologize. The rest of our relationship should be comfortably neutral.
Bed in Edwards Hall, you are the only of these three beds I have ever made impeccably; a place that required invitation, you needed to be presentable. You're one of the things I worry about when I get into dreading September mode. [I've never dreaded school starting in my entire life. This feels weird.] This will be my last Princeton move-in day; part of me wants it to never come so that my last Princeton move-out day doesn't have to come either. One of the reasons I chose to stay in the same room next year as I lived in this past year was to help me deny the fact that time is passing and effectively running out. It was a strategy to pretend that nothing had to change. But now...sooooooo many things happened in that room, and you supported adventures on the regular. Adventures and sweet whispers that I am torn between remembering fondly and cringing at the thought of. You're a crime scene I'll have to return to every day for months and months, and I'm scared that getting back into you will make me relapse. I'm terrified of places like you--things that felt like home that might now become thoroughly uncomfortable, possibly even unsettling. How can I lay in you without thinking about all the history?

 "Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed." --Mason Cooley

-Maya

Some things don't change

Like the fact that this is good advice:

 I wasn't being calm about love for entirely different reasons when I ordered this about two and a a half weeks ago. [insert sordid details of what went down here] When it came in the mail last week, part of me wanted to chuck it right into the recycling bin at the student center and keep it moving. But something stopped me, and ever since then it's been sitting on the far corner of the desk in my room taunting me to figure out why I kept it [besides the fact that I spent $8 on it]. And today it kind of hit me: when I bought this, I saw it as a way to remind myself that I was going to get through Situation A and everything was going to be okay. There's no reason the same reminder can't be applied to the current Situation B or future Situations C-Z and beyond. Since I live according to the inalienable rights of love, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness and nappyness, this is solid life advice. A brave little footsoldier, my heart can never go into hiding. I care too much about everything, okay...but that's me and I don't really want to change it, even if it hurts. It's my philosophy that transience is no reason not to enjoy something--to the contrary, it's more of a reason to give yourself entirely to things, because you may not always have the luxury. So I will keep using the l-word liberally, with an understanding of its many varied levels, and continue to live with my heart wide open. Above everything else, everything that happened here showed me how dangerous it is to not actually be open about my feelings in real-time. So cheers to love and carrying on with it.  

I want to start meditating daily again.

It's that time of the summer again...

Eeyore mood.

That time when I realize that I spend way more time alone than I'm comfortable with. If my co-worker handles the one person who wanders into the library during our four-hour shift, I don't have to say a word to anyone besides my mom when I call her to say I got home okay and possibly ask for directions on how to cook something. Splitting my awake-time fairly evenly between Princeton and New Brunswick means I don't really have the time to hang out with anyone in either location on a regular basis. Remind me to never work nights again--it's terrible for one's social life. Part of me feels like I should "meet people"...then I begin to wonder how one successfully does that if one doesn't have a seed group to start from. And (rather ironically since I'm a sociologist) social interactions with new people really really intimidate me. But my big empty house in this small anonymous city is starting to feel really lonely. I think this is what I'm most worried about after graduation: the sudden disappearance of a social circle to fall back on. I'm a small intimate circles kind of person; I'm the kind of person that can easily happily devote all of her spare time to one person or a very small group of people. My ideal party has ten friends, a few bottles of alcohol, and some board games rather than a bar/club scene or anything involving a keg. So what do I do in a new place? I miss having people around to just hang out with. I guess that as a person who has shared a bedroom for the majority of her life, then lived in quads Freshman and Sophomore year, and then began spending her every waking moment at Quad Junior year, solitude is something I am neither used to or comfortable with for extended periods of time. 
In somewhat related news, I am craving physical contact sooooo strongly. Y'all know that I'm a very touchy-feely person: in the course of my normal (read: on campus [or previously, in high school]) life, my day is full of small touches in the midst of conversations, hugs and/or arms around shoulders, resting my head on others' shoulders, massages, people playing with my hair, etc. Now, I go days without hugging anyone. I'm the only person who plays with my hair on anything close to a regular basis. I may never get re-used to sleeping alone, but more on that in tomorrow's letter (which will be to my bed(s)). There are certain kinds of intimacy I miss that I can take care of on my own, but Aijuswannasnuggle.

2nd 30 day Letter Challenge--Day 25: Letter to the Last Person You Took a Picture with

Dear K,

Grrrr...I find it very unfortunate when in the course of these challenges I have to write to the same person twice. I briefly pondered who I could see in the course of the day and take a picture with so that I could write to someone else, but the only really viable options were E and T and I've written to both of them already too. So, as we took a small break from the course of E's party because we "needed new profile pictures," this letter is also to you.  Actually, even if I hadn't snapped that pic, this letter would still be to you from when we saw Erykah Badu, haha.


In the week and a half since I last wrote to you, we have partied (not unusual) and we have been shopping twice. I'm glad this has finally happened--we've been talking about shopping forever. You're a good shopping buddy: not above giving me opinions on things, willing to try on lots of hats and debate how they make us look, and evidently you're the only one of my friends who has the good sense to tell me not to buy a shirt just because it's kind of cute and ONLY SIX DOLLARS. [Yo, I still kind of want that shirt though. It was SIX DOLLARS.] Shopping with you tends to bring up questions about changing styles and like, whether the way each of us dresses fits our personalities; this could be me but is this me? It's fun and makes shopping like, more intellectual or artistic or something. It's cool.  You make me think about shopping for the future, as opposed to shopping for the now, which has led to all sorts of wonderful wonderments about how Professor Maya Reid will dress.
KO said you sound like a good guy for me to have around. I think he meant in terms of the fact that you seem to give good advice and be entirely correct about the circumstances of my life when I can't see them, much like T. I learn a lot from you. And who knows, maybe the quickness with which you went from semi-random acquaintance to one of the first people I turn to when something goes wrong is just yet another example of my tendency to care too much about everything too fast, but too bad. I like it. You're semi-stuck with me now.  :P


:D,


Maya


PS--We're supposed to watch American History X sometime. I thought about that when I woke up in the TV room on Saturday. Let's make it happen.

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day 24: Letter to Your Favorite Character from a Childhood Cartoon

Dear Chuckie Finster,

You were such a little nerd baby, with your chunky glasses and wild unruly ginger hair. As much as I wanted to identify with brave adventurer/explorer Tommy, I was always hiding behind my hands every time you were. You made me feel like being a little worrywart child was okay. And you hated clowns as much as I do. You were really close to your daddy, just like me, and you had asthma too. You were always getting into trouble for things that weren't your fault, just like me. I wanted to punch Angelica in the face on your behalf multiple times. I remember being kind of jealous when you got a sister. I was glad you weren't going to be lonely anymore, because I'd always thought you were kind of a lonely melancholy child like me, but somebody else got to spend all her time with you. All in all, even though you were always two as I got older and older, I always wanted to be your friend.

In fact, I've come to realize that my imaginary friend when I was 7 was based largely on you. His name was Melvin. He had orange hair and wore a purple shirt and dark green pants. He was older than me, maybe 12 or so, and he wasn't a wild adventurer either, but he looked out for me just like you looked out for Tommy and the twins.
Further confessions: I was even a little jealous of Samantha in All Grown Up! You hadn't changed at all and being my age-ish finally, I still thought you were absolutely adorable...but now in the if you were a real person I just might eat you up kind of way.

;),

Maya