January 2009

Having already written a sixteen-point essay explaining myself, I thought I would let other people explain me this time. These are not my favorite quotes from songs; I could fill an entire page with Mountain Goats quotes, and Aaron Robinson’s “Price is Right” gets no shout-outs. Nor are they quotes from the songs I listen to the most; only one of my top ten most-listened songs appears (“Murder in the City”). These are the phrases that I sing with extra force when they appear in songs, because they resonate with me.

1. “Ask me what it’s like to have myself so figured out; wish I knew.” – “Okay, I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don’t” by Brand New.
2. “I love you, Jesus Christ; I love you, yes I do.” – “King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 2″ by Neutral Milk Hotel.
3. “There are days I don’t believe the words I say.” – “Mockingbird” by Derek Webb
4. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” – “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” by Sufjan Stevens
5. “You think the world is ending right now? Maybe you should just drink a lot less coffee and never ever watch the ten o’clock news. Maybe you should kiss someone nice or lick a rock or both.” – “Ghost of Corporate Future” by Regina Spektor.
6. “You are much too young to be resigned.” – “All You’ll Ever Need to Know” by Actionslacks
7. “Hold on to your dreams till someone beats them out of you.” – “From TG&Y” by the Mountain Goats.
8. “I love love. I love being in love, I don’t care what it does to me.” – “Inches and Failing” by the Format.
9. “I’m so scared of being alone, that I forget what house I live in.” – “Table for Two” by Caedmon’s Call.
10. “I need someone who understands; I need someone, someone who hears. For you I’ve waited all these years.” – “+” by Coldplay.
11. “No one listens to her as she sings, but she sings what she means. I’m in love with that.” – “In Love with That” by David Shultz.
12. “When you get too close to beauty, you begin to see the flaws. But I really don’t think that’s too close at all.” – “The Flaws” by David Shultz
13. “Spend more time than money on everyone you love.” – “All You’ll Need to Know” by Actionslacks.
14. “Hit the road on a short road trip; though my plans were indefinite.” – “Travel Sick Blues” by ReedKD
15. “We are the cameras documenting the earth.” – “Natural” by David Shultz.
16. “We’re not twenty-one, but the sooner we are, the sooner the fun will begin.” – “The Swiss Army Romance” by Dashboard Confessional
17. “Everybody knows, it sucks to grow up.” – “Still Fightin’ It” by Ben Folds.
18. “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.” – “This Year” by The Mountain Goats
19. “Who cares about tomorrow, when everything is going on today?” – “Who Cares About Tomorrow?” by Philmore.
20. “You win some! You lose some! And you have got to be strong! You win some! You lose some! And you have got to move on!” – “Plan to Pull Through” by Bleach.
21. “And I wasn’t all the things I tried to make believe I was. And I wouldn’t be the one to kneel Before the dreams I wanted. And all the talk and all the lies were all the empty things disguised as me.” – “Sympathy” by the Goo Goo Dolls.
22. “If I get murdered in the city, don’t go revengin’ in my name. One person dead from such is plenty; no need to go get locked away.” – “Murder in the City” by Avett Brothers.
23. “Living things need to be free. You are free.” – “You are Free” by Mates of State.
24. “Life is a highway and I’m gonna ride it, and every day’s a winding road. My rollercoaster has the biggest ups and downs, as long as it keeps going then it’s unbelievable.” – “My Rollercoaster” by Kimya Dawson
25. “I’m writing the folks back home to tell them hey, yeah, I’m doing alright. Yeah, I’m doing just fine.” – “If Work Permits” by The Format

I banged the keys on my keyboard out of complete and utter frustration today. It did not make a good sound.

The world is not set up in favor of good men. Users, replacers, and advantage-takers have much more immediate success. I often wish that I could be like them; but my wishes are half-hearted. I don’t want to become them. I only want to have their charm, their way with women, their mysteriousness that makes them so desired and successful. I do not want the grinding emptiness that camps out in their souls and forces them to get more in an attempt to satiate their seemingly unquenchable desires.

During a snow day, I often wish that it would just snow forever. But I do not really want it to snow forever. I want school to be out and people to be playing in the snow every day. But if I lived in Wisconsin or Minnesota, snow would be commonplace, class would not be canceled very often, and the magic of snow would cease to be for me.

Because I love the magic of snow, it is actually better that I live in a place that does not receive much of it. It would lose its charm if I had much of it, and that would be one less thing that I could treasure about the world. So even though I may not enjoy the large amounts of women, wine and song that men of charm call up so easily, I know it is for the best. The woman who finds me to be charming, wonderful and mysterious will be treasured. The grapes that go through the hardest soil make the best grapes, as my friend Emma tells me. The songs that are sung in suffering sound the prettiest. The man who goes through trouble will appreciate calm.

I was slightly wrong at the beginning. The world is not be set up for the good man’s immediate pleasure, but the world is set up for the good man. The users, replacers and advantage-takers will all end up disheartened; the good man will be full.

In addition to having a column run in the Oklahoma Daily, I was in the Tulsa World’s Satellite section. Satellite–the section by teens, for teens and about teens–was my first literary digs. For their tenth anniversary edition, they ran a retrospective, and they included “Where are they now?” stories from old staffers. Mine is about halfway down the page.

To make the day even better, my high school is proud of me. They saw the article and subsequently posted a blurb on their website. It feels good to be claimed. Now, if I can get OU to someday to claim me in a good way, I’ll be good to go on awards.

This was written for the Oklahoma Daily, and can be viewed in its original form here.
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Thomas Jefferson would be hacked off if he saw protesting today.

This country was founded because of protest, and came of age with protest. It is a vital part of American life. When the people stop caring, the country will die.

When people express their concerns in a way that doesn’t matter, it’s nearly the same thing as not caring at all.

I was startled by several car horns while driving to work recently. I looked for the transgressor, praying it wasn’t me. I instead saw several people holding signs. At least one sign was scrawled with the slogan “honk for peace.”

I want to usher in Pax Americana as much as the next guy, but I don’t think honking car horns is going to do much to advance the cause. In fact, “honk for peace” is downright silly because the time spent standing on the corner getting cold and going deaf could have been used in much more productive ways.

Now that Nov. 4 has passed, there isn’t a significant election for a while. You can’t vote out that scum you mistakenly voted in for another couple (or six) years. But you can still make your voice heard.

Every senator and congressman has a Web site with his or her e-mail address, physical address and phone number listed. You can contact the person you voted into office and voice your opinion. In fact, you can do it repeatedly. If you feel strongly enough about an issue to go stand in the cold and get people to “honk for peace,” you can contact your legislator. The phone numbers and addresses for the senators are listed at senate.gov under the “senators” tab. The phone numbers for the representatives are listed at house.gov under the “member telephone directory” link on the right side of the page.

There are many who think contacting their representatives and senators will not create change, because politicians are immune to the opinions of the people and simply do what they want. Because there are more than 500 people in Congress, this inevitably is true of a few members. It’s human nature.

But even if every single person in Congress was corrupt (which I cannot, and will not, believe is true), talking to the people who can actually do something makes a lot more sense than honking our horns for peace. Will the air take shape and sign a cease-fire for us? Will our sound so frustrate Congress that it leaps to our aid, administering justice in accordance with our every whim? No.

If petitioning Congress isn’t your bag, there are more ways to encourage change. If you truly care about something, tell someone about it. My friend Melody wants to end genocide. She is tireless. She never passes up an opportunity to talk about genocide to anyone who will listen. I am disturbed about genocides now. Previously, I didn’t know they were happening in modern times. This should be a model to those who want to bring change. Do you want peace? Bone up on the horrors of war. Tell everyone you know. Get them offended. Maybe they will contact their senators and representatives. Perhaps they will tell another person about the horrors of war and the group of concerned people will grow.

Does a honking car horn tell you how someone dies on the battlefield? Does repeated tweeting relate the horror of urban warfare for combatants and civilians alike? No. Set up a table in the union. Set up an organization through the university. Write a letter to the editor of the newspaper (dailyopinion@ou.edu). Write a story. Send money to peace-loving organizations. Boycott companies that support war and tell your friends to do the same. Start a petition and see how many signatures you can collect, then send that to your representatives and senators. Get all the people on your signature list and all the people in your organization to picket in front of the Capitol – where you may get a photo in the paper, and maybe even a story on the news.

All of these things don’t cause change. But they are forms of protest. They clearly display that we are not happy with the way things are. This is what our forefathers did. They said, over and over, that they wanted things to change. It wasn’t all the people. It was a small minority that wanted it. They fired up the majority and changed the world.

Dumping tea in the harbor is a little more effective than honking car horns.

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

- George Orwell, “Why I Write”

It is disappointing when I think up seemingly clever analogies only to find that they have been already used in pop culture.

Today I was talking with a friend about the various states of activity in our lives. I live my life on the edge; there’s always someone to meet, something to do, somewhere to be, and an adventure to be had. Other people lead calmer, less frenetic lives. I compared it to a fire; my life is always on fire, and I’ve got one rug with which to try to beat all the fires out. As soon as I’ve killed one fire, I’m off to the next. Other people keep a fire extinguisher (or seven) on hand, just in case any fires break out. They like their life under control; I like mine more than a little crazy.

Then I realized that there’s a famous philosophical treatise named “All-Star” by the renowned philosophers Smash Mouth that goes something like this:

“My world’s on fire, how ’bout yours? That’s the way I like it, and I never get bored.”

They beat me to it, those rascals.

I’m told that the only real way to learn Spanish is to live in a Spanish-speaking country. The basics can be taught anywhere, but to truly become a fluent in Spanish, you must spend significant time in Mexico, Spain, or some other Spanish-speaking country.

This is true of any language; to finally put all the pieces together, you must immerse yourself in a culture that has no other way of communicating.

In a similar way, I am immersing myself in writing this semester. I am in a class called “Theories of Professional Writing,” in which we will be reading a book every week or so about writing. I’m working at Tate Publishing, where I spend four hours a day copyediting. I’m in a book circle at Tate that requires us to read Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing. When I’m finished being a copy editor, I come home and become a conceptual editor, editing pieces for Independent Clauses.

But that’s not the main course; that’s the appetizer. This semester, I’m writing articles for Independent Clauses and opinion columns for the newspaper. I write here on a semi-daily basis. I’m writing/editing a book of essays that I have written over the past three years. And I’m starting a new writing project with my friend Andrew Stephens.

Add on that the fact that I’m writing poetry in the form of song lyrics. I am entirely immersed in writing. I hope that I become fluent by the time this semester is over.

The nightmares won’t go away. I used to not have dreams at all, but about three months ago I started having nightmares pretty regularly. Three or four times a week I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and just be terrified. I rarely remember what was so terrifying.

That’s not the worst, though. The worst is when I have a nightmare at around the time that I am supposed to get up anyway; then I can’t let myself go back to sleep. The creeping, terrified feeling dissipates slowly, and I wake up with a bad taste in my mouth. The whole morning is messed up.

That happened this morning; I was scared to get out of bed. I don’t know why. I just didn’t want to get out of bed and do today. It was frustrating; it must be like having an irrational fear (like vomiting or something else non-life-threatening). I want to do something about it, but I just can’t make myself do it. My spirit was willing, but my flesh was weak .

I wish that I could just laugh it off; I feel like a little kid when it happens. But they are truly scary. The few I remember have to do with abandonment, and that’s one thing that gets me.

This is why I don’t watch horror movies. My life is scary enough as it is.