Brittle and Easily Broken

After reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, a book about the year she spent trying to be happier, I made myself a list. One of the first things Rubin did was make a list of Twelve Commandments, things she really needed to remember to do in her quest for more happiness. And I figured, I need to be nicer, so why not make a list striving for that?

I made my list, written out in my favorite fountain pen, and filled it with things such as, "be kinder than necessary," "spread joy," and "don't pick fights," all useful things I tend to forget. I left the list just lying on the floor in my bedroom, because: A, there wasn't enough room on my desk, B, I was still adding to it, and C, I wanted it where I could see it. My family members generally don't snoop through my stuff (for which I am grateful) and I didn't think it was anything to hide.

Until. Until one family member not only saw it, but said something about it to me. Said something cutting about it to me. Probably the WORST THING that anyone could have told me about my list of things to do to be a nicer and better person.

"Those rules of yours seem to all come down to 'look out for Number One'."

I was shocked. Why, why would a person say something like that? Admittedly, this family member didn't know that the purpose of this list was self-improvement, but STILL... it wasn't a very nice thing to say. It wasn't constructive, and I don't know whether or not that comment came from a caring place.

It's hard to try and improve yourself, to work on being kinder and nicer and more accepting, when it feels like all anyone ever does is tell you, "That was unkind." "Please try to act your age." "Be nice, okay?" It feels like my struggles are going unnoticed, or worse, that I'm backsliding.

It doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying. But it does mean that I have built a wall around myself to keep from getting hurt. Walls aren't very conducive to open communication and general kindness; however, I don't know how much more of this knocking-down I can take without giving up niceness all together.

The Post In Which I Rant

I'm ashamed to say that I never used to understand why people freaked out so much about the portrayal of disabilities in books.

Now I get it.

I would never want to be blind or deaf. But I doubt most blind or deaf people wanted that either. It's just the way their lives are. Just like I never would have chosen to be unable to read music, I wouldn't want to magically snap my fingers and suddenly be able to read it. That's not consistent with who I am.

I would be SO PISSED if a book insinuated that a person with dyscalculia was useless. I wouldn't like it if part of the happily-ever-after was that the person with dyscalculia got it magicked away. I don't have that luxury, in real life. I have dyscalculia, and that's my reality.

I think part of the problem is that people who are uneducated (as I once was) on the realities of "disabilities" think that Person A is missing something vital from her life because she can't see. Same thing with Person B and hearing. Or me and reading music. And okay, I'm missing something from my life by not being able to read music. (Just like I'm missing something by being too tall for gymnastics or being too wimpy for softball.) But I can't wallow in it.

Music and the playing of musical instruments are really important to some people. Not to me. Same thing for some people and the ability to see and hear and play sports. I would never choose to  give up my sight, or hearing, or ability to read music. I don't have a choice in the matter. though. I can either work my ass off in order to compensate and pass as "normal" or I can ask for help. (Or not do things that require me to see/hear/read/music/throw a ball.)

You might think that my sheet music-less life completely sucks. That might suck for you, but I can't tell myself that it sucks, because it's my life. I didn't choose it, and I have to accomodate my life to the hand I've been dealt.

What society needs to learn to do is accept people's differences in ability and interest, and recognize them all as different-but-still-completely-valid ways to live.

Rant over, and happy 2013.

The Cellist

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved music.

In this girl's school, all 2nd graders learned to play the violin. In 3rd grade, they could choose to continue in Orchestra, either as a violin or as another stringed instrument, or they could quit.

The girl HATED playing the violin. Due to a host of medical problems, it caused her physical pain to stand and hold the instrument under her chin and the bow upright. (It probably didn't help that she was rather tiny for her age and the violin, in comparison, was kind of huge.) However, she loved the sound it made, so in third grade she decided to switch to the cello.

Her primary reason for doing so? She could play it while sitting down.

It was obvious to anyone who saw her lugging the gigantic instrument around that she loved it dearly. The cello was taller than she was, and quite heavy, but she managed it cheerfully. When she sat to play, she was good.

Her schoolteacher noticed her skills, and suggested to the girl's parents that she should get a private teacher and also audition for the local youth symphony. The girl did, and got in. Most of the other kids were older, about sixth grade, but the girl was at about their level.

However, the orchestra was much more rigorous than her music class at school, and soon the girl had so many pieces to memorize that quality suffered on all of them. For you see, the girl rarely practised outside of school and rehearsal. She just didn't, for whatever reason.

Her teachers noticed the downswing in quality. They lamented about her potential greatness, if only she would practice.

By now, the girl was in fifth grade. The stress got to be too much for her, and she quit the Youth Orchestra. For a while after that, it was easier. Still, she didn't practice. Her schoolteacher began giving the class more difficult pieces, and the girl gave up. She quit cello in October of her sixth grade year.

She missed the Christmas concert. She watched her classmates perform, and realized that she would rather be onstage than in the audience. Less than three months later, she was back. She loved the cello, but the class was sometimes a drag. She gave it one last shot. The first month of seventh grade, she couldn't take it anymore. She told her teacher she was done with the cello for good.

She didn't look back. She took an extra art class and helped in the library instead. Everyone was shocked. She was good, why did she quit? The few adults who knew she never practiced wondered why she didn't just practice more.

It wasn't until her sophomore year of high school that the girl told her mother the truth: she couldn't read music.

Sightreading, such an important part of an instrumentalist's life, was impossible for her. She was good at the cello only because she had completely memorized the finger placements and bow movements for every single song she'd ever performed. Music was a foreign language to her, despite the fact that she'd been studying it for years. It was incomprehensible, and she didn't know why.

Her mother was shocked. (Actually, she was a little more impressed by her daughter's memorization capabilities now.) She understood now why so many more pieces in such a short amount of time meant so much more stress for her daughter. However, she still didn't understand how the girl's inabillity to read music related to the fact that she never practiced. The girl couldn't explain it, and it remains a mystery.

No longer a mystery, though, is why the girl couldn't read music. The girl's parents discovered that she had a learning disability called "dyscalculia," which can manifest in an inability to read music and problems properly judging distance, among others.

As you've no doubt figured out by now, that girl is me. We discovered that I had dyscalculia only last week.

I was actually quite surprised to find out that I had this problem. I thought that my inability to read music was just a personal failure, maybe just laziness. I'm glad that it isn't my fault, but I'm also sad because I will never be able to understand it, no matter how hard I try.

It's like being told to translate a paragraph, sentence by sentence, into English. I look at the first sentence. It's German. I start translating the first few words, and look back at the paragraph to double-check. The sentence is now in Arabic. It is endlessly frustrating.

I've figured out workarounds for some of the problems dyscalculia has caused me, but some I just have to accept.

This post has gotten super-long, so the second half of this will have to wait for another time. (I'll be talking about "disabilities" and why I don't like the word.)

On Slutshaming, High School and Why People Are Mean

This post was originally written as a comment for Brenna Yovanoff’s post entitled “The One About How Girls Treat Each Other (Sort Of).” If you want to better understand the story I reference in the 18^th paragraph, read Brenna’s post first.

Paragraphs in italics are the questions asked by Brenna at the end of her post.

Have you or your friends ever run up against bullying or harassment? Did you feel like you didn’t know what to do? Or did you just do the first thing that came to mind? Did you do nothing? Something calculating? Mean? Something you wish you had done differently?

There was a near-fight in my Homeroom on Wednesday morning. This white kid – he’s probably a druggie, but in the very least, he’s meaner than a snake – came into homeroom this morning almost raging. He was terrifying. He’s a scary kid anyway, but this was truly frightening. (We’ll call him A.) Then a slacker-jock-disrespectful black boy came in the room (we’ll call him J) and A went BALLISTIC. He started bitching at J that the administration was being racist because while he, A, got detention for calling J a swearword, J, who did the same, got off scot-free because he’s black.

J started yelling (he has no volume other than yelling) at A across the room that he, J, didn’t get in trouble because he just called A a “bitch” after A called him a [insert the n-word here. Yes, he actually said it].

Our usually rowdy homeroom got really really scarily quiet. Our homeroom teacher, a really sweet, energetic, close-to-retirement-but-not-uncaring English teacher, who was on the phone, quickly hung up and tried to reason with the boys as they stalked towards each other. She’s had problems controlling both of them before, and she tried to talk to them for maybe ten seconds before she ran next door to get the coach who teaches History.

Thank God he came in when he did, because J and A were almost nose to nose, and I think they were about to slug it out. Coach came in and pulled the two out into the hall to hear their stories, and all of us in the room still breathed a collective sigh of relief.

It was very very scary.

~

I have run into bullying many times, but only realized it in retrospect. I have the wonderful combination of poor hearing, lack of understanding of sarcasm, and a thick thick skin, so if I’m bullied, I rarely notice. I notice when people are needlessly picking on others, and I try to stop them, but sometimes, I’m just stuck.

Like in my Economics class, there’s a boy, D, who I have known through Sunday School since kindergarten. I have never liked him because he’s cocky and annoying. However, a group of boys tease him mercilessly in this class. (About stupid things, but mostly about the fact that D’s family has lots of money, and D went to a private school before coming to our public HS. (These kids teasing him aren’t poor, for the most part. We live in a ridiculously, annoyingly affluent area.))

They also take his backpack, and either hide it or turtle it. (Do you know what turtling is? It’s where they flip your whole backpack inside out and then zip it back up with your stuff inside.) I don’t like D, but he just wants to belong, and the others torture him for it. Sometimes my sense of justice wins out and I tell them to stop, but I’m “just a girl” – and their leader’s enemy since fourth grade, to boot. Then their teasing focuses on me until I stare their a**hole leader dead in the eyes until he’s so uncomfortable that he walks away. But I can’t always come to D’s rescue. He’s eighteen freaking years old; he should know how to defend himself. And always being the rescuer – of everyone – is KILLING me. I can’t handle the stress here.

Also, anyone who has any thoughts about the unsettling tendency for girls to attack each other in ways that revolve around the having or not-having of sex, please feel free to share in the comments, because these thoughts—I want to hear them.

Obviously you’re aware of this, but it bears repeating: Teen girls are mean. I try not to judge people (and I definitely don’t torture them) about whether or not they’ve done stuff, just because *I* don’t want to be judged for that either. And most of the time, out loud, I succeed. But in my head, oh God in my head I’m so mean about this. Probably this is due to the fact that my friend group is comprised mostly of brilliant, slightly (read: really) off-the-wall girls who aren’t exactly what most boys want in high school. So we don’t generally get dates, let alone have sex.

But I know girls who have, and I don’t really treat them differently. I just think of them differently. I wonder, were they prepared for it? Do they think it was worth it? And, the question I never ask, because it’s shameful: Was it fun? (Also, I’m such a nosy-butt pragmatist that I want to ask technical questions, like, who bought the condoms, how did you hide that from your parents, where did you do it, WHEN did you do it, etc. etc.)(I also do this to people when I find out they’ve been kissed for the first time by their Significant Other. “I’m CURIOUS,” I tell them. “Is that really such a crime?” I want to know as many different takes on the same thing as possible. If I’m going to write, I need to know what it’s like to date in high school, because it’s looking like that will never happen for me.)(Also, I just want to know EVERYTHING, just to know it.)

Girls attack each other out of jealousy and out of fear. People won’t attack you if you can redirect them to a new target. Also, there’s this worrying trend of addressing people by slurs and renaming it as a term of endearment. I got called a slut and a whore in art today, not in malice. It’s just how one of my classmates (female) talks. We, as girls, are told by our parents to be responsible about having sex. We are told by our school that having sex in high school and before marriage is immoral (I live in Alabama). My Health class didn’t even COVER sex or STDs. All we talked about was stalking and schizophrenia. And we are told by the characters on TV that having sex at our age is normal. If you aren’t having sex, well then, you’re behind.

But in the halls… oh, in the halls, if you’re a girl and you’ve had sex without being in a super-long relationship – and sometimes even then! – you are dirty. You are worthless. You are Going to Hell. If you’re a boy and you’ve done the same, you’re awesome, you’re cool, you’re expected to move on. The double standard is ridiculous, and sad. Sex is normal and natural, and who the hell cares as long as you and your partner are responsible about it and prepared for it?

Also, this pervasive idea that the boy should (will?) save the girl—what is that? Because believe me, Delilah needed very little saving, but it still took Eerie wandering over to defuse the situation, which even now gives me this very frustrated feeling about who is allowed to be In Charge of Things.

Evolutionarily, males are wired to protect their harem. And if it’s a rogue female stirring up trouble, it’s her male’s job to get her under control. If she doesn’t have a male, she needs one as protection from being absorbed into a harem controlled by a male who wants to punish her for her transgressions.

Ugh, just TYPING that makes me sick.

Both genders, all people, want to be in control of their lives. It’s a struggle all people must go through. And part of that is control (of some sort) over your partner. Whether that manifests itself as a protective instinct, possessiveness, trust, or whatever depends on the people involved. If your partner is attacked, that is, by an extension, an attack on you, and you want to make sure that you and your partner are not attacked again. A singleton attack is far more dangerous than a partnered attack, because then the two will want to protect each other. The appearance of Eerie in Brenna’s story showed Jackal and Twitch that SOMEONE valued Delilah, and if they hurt her, they would have to deal with Eerie and his cohort as well, which presumably was a more threatening gang than Brenna, Little Sister Yovanoff, Delilah, and Gypsy were.

And also, I want to believe that none of what I just described in this post ever even happens anymore, but I don’t really think that’s true. So, I want to hear from you guys. About all of it.

When it’s you, you don’t want to say anything for fear of being labeled a bitch. But if you say nothing, you’re a wimp (or worse words). There is truly no way to win. People will judge you whatever you say or do, and you just have to go on your way.

(Many thanks to Emily for proofing this post for me.)

An Essay on the Hunger Games Trilogy

I'll start out with my most inflammatory statement: I hate the Hunger Games Trilogy. Well, okay, not the trilogy, but the people who love it so much that they've read all three books a million times and already know the movie by heart.

Now, I truly truly enjoyed both The Hunger Games and Mocckingjay, (Catching Fire, not so much,) but I can't reread them now. They changed my life, for which I am grateful, but they also left deep scars.

I first picked up The Hunger Games in October 2008, at my local library. Earlier that year (like in March? I think) I had read and loved Suzanne Collins's Gregor the Overlander series. So when I saw the words "Suzanne Collins" on a book in the YA section, I literally ran across the entire library and grabbed it off its prominent location on the face-out display shelf. (I might have looked a little like Gollum. But I was thirteen!) I tore through the book in about a day, I don't remember exactly how long.

I loved it. I loved Katniss, even though I could never have done most of the things she did. I loved Prim and Rue and Peeta. I admired Suzanne's vivid writing. (But secretly, I longed for giant bats to appear.) I loved that book from the first line to the last. "Dreading the moment I would have to let go," I remember thinking. "What a terrific ending! That is the best standalone I've read in SO LONG!"

And then my eyes drifted further down the page. END OF BOOK ONE, it proclaimed.

I was heartbroken. Now I knew that Suzanne was going to break my heart over a totally new set of characters. I'd already cried over Rue, and I knew what kind of body count was coming based on the back flap ("effect of war on children") and Code of Claw. (Note to other fans of the Underland Chronicles: It took me two and a half years to get over the ending to CoC. It was ROUGH.)

However, I loved the book, and I was going to read all three books, no matter how heartwrenching they were.

Fast-forward almost two years. I've changed from a sheltered eighth-grader into a tenth-grader with a year of public high school under her belt. My reading tastes had changed drastically, but The Hunger Games still held a special spot in my heart. I was so angry that Mockingjay was going to be released after we returned to school, and that I would have to wait an entire school day to get home and read it after a trip to the store.

Mockingjay broke my heart and turned me into a conscientious objector. Through it, I realized the horrors of war, and the uncertainty of life after. I cried for almost two straight days after reading it. (Maybe it's Mockingjay that started my downward spiral that year? I never thought of that angle...)

I have still never reread any of the books since.

However, I still went to the midnight opening of the movie. I watched it, and was horrified by it. I think the filmmakers did a terrific job of making the movie a warning about, instead of a glorification of, violence. My classmates did not see it this way. They all still think the movie was amazing, that it wasn't disturbing at all. They do not understand why Mockingjay horrified me.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's okay to love the Hunger Games Trilogy. It is okay to watch the movie, as long as you understand its real message. It is not okay to treat it as a glorification of violence. It is not okay to treat it as a trivial piece of literature. It is not okay to be blind as to why some people would rather not read it. 

And finally, it is not okay to be Team anything in terms of this book. It was not made for that, and to proclaim yourself Team Peeta or Team Gale is to demean the impact of this brave, brave work.

I raise my glass to you, Suzanne Collins, and I WILL read whatever you write in the future. I'm just not guaranteeing that I'll reread it.