Today I finished reading a wonderful book called My Name is Memory

Ann Brashares is on the road to becoming one of those authors I read everything by (like Jodi Picoult) because of her ability to be taking me along through a beautiful story that I can get lost in, developing characters whose pain and joys I feel as if they were my own (or, at the very least, those of someone I'm close to), and then all of a sudden hit me out of nowhere with a line or a phrase that brings me up out of this delicious book-world and back into the real world and makes me question something major in my life and the world at large. 

All her descriptions of the eternal undying lasting love and devotion between the two main characters nestled warmly into the depths of my heart like someones snuggling under a blanket, but they're not what I want to talk about. That happens a lot these days. 

Example A

The little tiny afterthought-like bit that blew me away was as follows:

"It took a half-dozen of those lives for me to recognize the difference between a means and an end." --Ann Brashares, "My Name is Memory" pp. 154

I suppose I first wondered some semblance of this towards the end of high school, when Student Council president came around to ask the Top Ten graduating seniors to fill out this sheet with some questions on it for little blurbs about us that would be put in our yearbooks. One of the questions was "What is your favorite memory from your time at Oakcrest?" or something to that effect. The 8 other members of the Top Ten who were sitting in AP Calc with me started laughing and remembering awesome times they'd had in this club or at that party or whatever, and I was struggling majorly to come up with anything worthy of eternal glorification in the pages of my yearbook. It dawned on me then that these people, my friends, had legitimately enjoyed high school to some extent. Particularly after my personal life exploded at the beginning of junior year, I had been treating it and my experiences in it like a means to an end. It was one more thing I was ready to get the hell away from, til it was over and I realized I had never really experienced it at all. 

And so I made a vow to myself that I was going to start living my life differently. I was going to stop taking my life and my day-to-day experiences for granted, I was going to treat each day like an adventure, I was going to do x-thing and y-thing and become an awesome person. And to varying extents at various times, I have done those things, I think. But although I pause to look at my life with wonder more often, and I meditate, and I occasionally walk around Princeton just to look at its beauty and marvel at the fact that I'm here, and I tell my friends just how much they mean to me, and I have begun to take chances...just like college was the end-goal of high school, grad school has been sneaking up as the end-goal of college. Professorship as the end-goal of grad school. And yes, these things are my goals, they are what I want to do with my life, and I'm okay with that. I like them. I actively chose those goals over the other options and am happy with my choice (for now, at least). This is what I want. 

...But what is the end-goal of professorship? Can that be the end-all be-all of the end-goals? Should it be a means? What end would it serve? #BigImportantLifeQuestions  

BIG Questions

I'm wrestling with two pretty big and somewhat linked issues right now, as I move towards a better and deeper self-understanding. I suppose it's somewhat impossible to study college's effect on student ide entity without pondering my own identity and the way Princeton is molding it. Anddddd I guess one of the purposes of even starting this blog was to get back in touch (or perhaps even in touch for the first time) with who I really am. 

Well I can't know who I am until I can definitively answer these questions:

1) Is my blackness or my womanness more important to me? Which comes first, and is that firstness justified?

2) Fact: I might actually be more non-black than I am of African descent. What does that mean for my identity as a black person? And for my ideas about black people in general?

Relatedly, I identify as a Black American. I don't like the term African-American as relating to ME, because I feel it should be reserved for first/second/third generation immigrants, like most other -American groups use the hyphenation, and that does not apply to me or my people. Not to denounce my African roots in any way, but I'm not even sure the majority of my blood comes from the motherland (I'm also German, French Canadian, Native American, Portuguese, and probably a few other random things). .I feel like the term African-American doesn't give respect to the fact that my ancestors are not all just from Africa. They come from... all over the world. My skin is not that of an African's. Neither is my hair. I know from conversations with my African friends, neither are the vast majority of my ideas and perceptions of the world. Those things and more all come from the eclectic blend of cultures and heritages within me, and within most of us who have descended from slavery--we all know that wasn't an institution built upon preserving the separation of the races--and I believe "black American" is the most fitting term (of those we have to choose from) to represent that blend. I also like "multi-generational African-Americans", a term Imani Perry tossed out in precept last week...

Pondering the Possibilities of the Possibilities

"Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe. Falling in love with love is playing the fool..."

When I know a guy likes me, I have trouble figuring out if I like him too, or if I just like being liked, you know? Which is a pretty big issue, because I may be a flirt...okay fine I am a flirt, but the guys I really care about I care about deeply. I don't want to hurt them...and I don't want to hurt myself by hurting them.
I'm scared that I'm getting too caught up in the possibilities to really think about the person they're based on. I mean, really think about him; not just about something he said or the way he held me. If I could succeed in shutting out all the circumstances and possible consequences and the inside of my head was just this big empty white room with Me and Him, what would I want?
But is that even the right way to think about his? Maybe my head should be as crowded as the Printer's Row Literary Fair I went to yesterday, where there are thousands of people milling around. Would he be the one to catch my eye? Would I gravitate towards him in the crowd?
Do I have to know all of this now? I feel like I focus so hard on what could go wrong, like Tantor in Tarzan standing on the edge of the water asking "Is this water sanitary? And what about bacteria?" At this rate I'll never go swimming, you know? But do swimmers ever wonder how the water they're pushing out of the way feels? Is getting my feet wet worth possibly murdering scores of animals I can't even see?
Is wanting to be held the same as wanting him to hold me? Is liking things about him probable cause enough to try? I don't think it could work...would I be using him? No, I suppose I'd be giving as much as I'd get...I'm not that kind of girl.
Nope, I'm the kind of girl that's only impulsive when she's overly emotional...or when she's drunk...and the rest of the time over-thinks and rationalizes and beats things to a bloody pulp inside her own head...

...and I guess what everyone's telling me is I should take the chance, if it's offered.

If we do the unthinkable, would it make us look crazy? Or would it be so beautiful...? Either way I'm sayin, "If you ask me, I'm ready."