… and the first thing that runs through my mind as I sit here writing this is, why the fuck is someone throwing something away… at FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. Unfortunately, my room happens to be the room that somehow got embedded with the garbage chute, so every time someone from a high floor sends their trash tumbling down I get the pleasure of hearing it. (seriously though, the trash chute is sunken into our room, only one thin wall separates us from all sorts of dust bunnies, used condoms, and stale junk food)

Second thing running through my mind is the fact that its four o’clock in the morning and I am actually awake to hear the lovely sound of trash scraping against the wall adjacent to my bedroom. WHY CAN’T I SLEEP?! 

Third thing skipping across the the axonal paths in my brain (actually this is probably not scientifically right at all, but I really don’t give a flying rats ass because its four o’clock in the morning) is a mixture of Luther’s adamant denial on the existence of free will, parametric equalizers, and how the hell I’m going to manage functioning in the real world tomorrow. Coffee you say? Maybe, I’d rather not look like I have a severe case of tourettes in the middle of social foundations tomorrow (coffee makes me jittery). 

I suppose I will figure it out and use my free will (yes Martin Luther, I believe in free will, and Erasmus DID write the better essay) to decide between a tall or grande London Fog tomorrow morning as I stand in line at Starbucks. Compromise ladies and gents, its all about the compromise (caffeinated tea does not make me jittery… in case you were wondering what the compromise bit was referring to… or if you weren’t, congratulations, you just snatched up another little factoid about me! I will warn you though, they’re like pokemon, you’ll probably never catch ‘em all).

On that note (yes, I am referencing the pokemon comparison) I have dubbed myself too delirious to write further. So I am now going to lay wide awake in my bed and hope for someone else to throw their trash away, so I can try and guess the contents of it judging by the severity of the scraping noise it makes along the wall. Goodnight to all. 

Over and out, 

Em

… why my URL name is so weird, it was my nickname in high school.

my mom wanted to name me rowan, and my best friends who were guys at the time found out, and since i was short they already called me the elf so it became rowan the mystic elf. i also had a knack for just appearing out of nowhere hence mystic

just explained that to a friend.

Dramatic Essay Submission: Do it Anyway

       When you look at me now, you probably don’t see it. I mean, you can’t possibly look at someone and immediately pick out all of the things that make them who they are. For all everyone knows I’m just a normal five-foot-three brown haired girl who goes by “Shmem” or “Rowan the Mystic Elf” depending on when you met me in life. You might be surprised to know that I have a passionate love for crossword puzzles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (when I was a kid I once refused to eat anything else for a two month stretch), but other than that I look and seem pretty average.  However like in the movies, not all things are, as they seem.  Despite all of the normalities people hold their name I believe that there is at least one event in everyone’s life that changes them, sculpting their being into a less perfect more human form. This is mine.

      I wonder how many people know what it feels like to stand in front of a mirror, naked, and hate yourself; looking over every inch of your body, pinching the limp skin sagging from your ribs. FAT. I never did catch a quiet moment, the voices that lived inside my head constantly chattering, insults the white noise I fell asleep to. FAT. Each and every day the salt I denied myself through sustenance I poured on my internal wound; hatred for my limbs brewed to be the strongest tea within the boiling emotions of my brain. FAT. From the outside looking in people don’t know what it feels like, the emptiness, the starvation rituals, the mental beatings. No one really knows what it feels like to be this way: to be eternally FAT.

     As kids we always learned that people came in different shapes and sizes, that it didn’t matter what was on the outside, just what good things we brought to the table as people. I had always been the chubby kid in elementary school, that shy polite girl all the moms’ wanted their daughters to be best friends with because she was sure to set a good example and be on her best behavior. Murphy’s law would have it that the girls did not exactly share this desire, leaving me to be that awkward lonely pea in some vast and empty pod. Unfortunately, the only thing that changed over time was the number of years I could call myself old.

     Feelings swept through my veins as if they were cars in an underground subway system, all the different lines making stops in my consciousness welcomed or not: middle school had begun. And with it: puberty. This hormonal train wreck hit me at one of the most inopportune times; although I suppose there never really is an ideal point in life to start growing armpit hair or learning how to use a tampon.  However, like most of the other girls I never did lose my “baby fat”, and therefore in the hallway heard whispers about my unruly curvature as I passed. So in the ninth grade, after two years of unsuccessfully trying to convince myself I was an acceptable teenager, I decided to make an unbreakable promise with myself: I was going to be thin and pretty and wanted like all of the other girls… even if it killed me.

     White lies, nonchalance, and the art of deception became my specialty as I whittled down my calorie intake to five hundred a day.  Mom was so proud I was finally eating my fruits and vegetables, not knowing in truth that that was mostly all I ate. I went to the gym once a day and tackled the treadmill for half an hour, then lifted weights in attempt to sculpt my flab into something more than what resembled Jell-O left out on a hot summer’s day. I even bought a food scale to measure, to the gram, the exact weight of the serving low-fat cottage cheese I put into my mouth; all food portioned out within an inch of its life. I took all of these precautions to make absolutely sure I was not one single calorie over my limit. If I was, I was punished.

     Punishment usually took the form of restricting my minimal food intake further. For instance the next day I would only be allowed three hundred of those, what I now realize as vital, units of energy.  If I was really bad however, I would get none. I learned tricks to subsidize the painful pang I’d often experience in my torso: the hydrochloric acid lapping up at the sides of my stomach lining searching for food that wasn’t there. Chugging a bottle of cold-water tricks your brain into thinking that you’re full, while diluting a can of tomato soup with water can provide enough fluid to last a whole day.

     This progressed on for about a year before anyone seemed to really take notice of the fact I was wasting away. About halfway through I was napping more often than not, my moods had taken a terrible turn for the worse, and pink fuzz had begun to develop on my belly. All of these being signs that I had lost too much FAT. The strange thing throughout all of this was that I wasn’t ever satisfied with my weight. I knew I never would be but continued to kill myself, one pound demolished at a time. Religiously I would step on the scale, and curse myself if I had gained even a tenth of a pound. No gain was acceptable, but all of the pain was included.

     After I had gone about the art of starvation for a little over a year, my emotional canvas full of black and blue, my mom confronted me about my weight. As a result, I was dragged to my local physician who called us into a white sterile room to reveal the diagnosis: I had a condition called “anorexia nervosa”. To break it down in simpler terms: I was starving myself because I thought I was FAT. I was forced to see a therapist and dragged (not kicking, but screaming) to see a dietician, both of whom I despised in the beginning. The therapist made me look into the deep…okay elementary and middle school… realms of my past to discover why I thought I needed to starve myself. I struggled at first, but slowly began to uncover the truth: I just wanted to be accepted by my peers. I was forced to dig up the skeletons and old haunts of my pre-teenage days, shedding light on them. No longer did they reside in the dark corners of my mind. Never once when I was FAT did I get a compliment about my clothes, a sincere birthday invitation, or attention from a boy. While other kids in middle school were being driven to their first “dates” at the movies on Friday night I was home reading, yearning to be apart of a world, any world other than my own.

     As time progressed on I upped my calorie intake, and therapy became apart of my life, a weekly breakaway where I learned to deal with my disease. Although the recovery process was difficult, and filled to the brim with emotional tumult, I am glad for every second of anorexia I had to work through. By going through this I have discovered myself. I’ve found my voice! I’ve come to realize that I am a one of a kind individual, and to embrace it! I now have something I can shout to the world: “I AM HAPPY WITH WHO I AM!” Having worked through this shows me that I can work through anything.  I am proud to say that I have recovered from anorexia, and I hope that my story inspires others to do the same; whether it is an eating disorder or other battle they are fighting. Take if from me, it’s not always easy to accept who you are. I’ve learned its best to defy the odds, and do it anyway. 

Okay, I love this. I was having a shitty day and saw this, immediately died laughing. 

no question

jackiecasiano:

At first I’m like…

Then I’m like…

then BAM

and the people I’m with are all like..

and I’m just like…

becausee…

(Source: sarahs-stash, via wombman)

     … a dark quiet room and the soft hum of a projector will comfort me. There is something about a story coming to life before my eyes that puts me at ease, the magic of cinema transporting me to another world for a couple of hours. Light-sabers clashing in a frenzy, ruby red slippers clicking together on cobblestone, childhood toys coming to life in order to save the day. These are all stories, creations, and in my opinion works of art. I happen to love the action and futurism of the Star Wars series. The Wizard of Oz is in my mind a classic everyone should see at least twice before they die, and Toy Story is essentially a reflection of my childhood. But that is simply what I think; those are my views and interpretations, their genesis from my mind’s eye. And although I strongly believe what I have said, I recognize that other individuals will disagree and see things in a new light. I believe that you cannot assign a “one size fits all” interpretation to a creation; such judgment, as is beauty, is always in the eye of the beholder.

     Looking back high school was essentially a blur of awkward school dances, Friday night football games, math tests inked with the letter F, and afternoon theater rehearsals that often ran late into the night… usually ending with a few choice words from our director. However, among the monotony of this routine I called junior and senior year there was one consistency that stood out: IB film class. I remember signing up for the class because I had a space to fill in my schedule and wanted an “easy A” class. So, naturally, thinking this was the class for me, I picked this one. However, what was meant to be just a simple space filler ended up being the most important class of my schooling career thus far.

     Her name was Ms. Stark. On the first day of class six of us juniors walked into room A104, myself being the only girl, sat down and were promptly asked to name the ten greatest films in cinematic history. Let me tell you, this was a daunting task. The only “classic” films I carried in my repertoire were the Disney classics, and as I found out about a half an hour later those did NOT count. Secretly I thought to myself “why the hell not?” The Sword in the Stone happens to be my third favorite movie, receiving fabulous reviews from critics in the 1960s when it was made. Ms. Stark however, living up to her so perfectly fitting name, abruptly listed off the films discounting any of the ones my classmates and I had written on our lists. Who were we to know if she was right or wrong?

     Other classes proceeded to go similarly. We would view “classic” films and give our different interpretations of them, for instance: what the lighting in one scene suggested or how a shot sequences demonstrated a struggle between characters. If our opinions differed even slightly from hers she would “correct” us, telling us we were close but in actuality entirely wrong. Again, who were we to know differently?

Everyone in the class being a cinematic novice we went along with her, correcting our mistakes and trying oh-so-hard to guess what the proper interpretation of the material would be in order to elude embarrassment in front of the entire class. In summary, we kept our mouth shut. 

     Be that as is may, nothing stays the same for long in the tumultuous world of high school and this demeaning and oppressive routine was no different. It all came down to the day we watched Citizen Kane. Everyone in the filmic world knows that “rosebud”, the dying word uttered by a controversial publishing tycoon, is the greatest secret in cinema. No one knows what that dying word is meant to mean; some people state even the writer and director have not a clue! Since the class had began I had retained a growing interest in films and began to watch and research them outside of class, and therefore was keen to this well-known fact of the cinematic world. Ms. Stark, however, decided to try and convince me otherwise. She insisted that she knew the actual meaning of “rosebud” and refused, for several classes, to recognize the fact that there are endless possibilities for what it symbolizes.

     At that moment I realized that all she had been telling me was only her interpretation, could only be, her interpretation of these movies. For the better half of a semester I was mindlessly under what Paulo Freire refers to as the “banking concept of education.” I was simply a student allowing a seemingly all-knowing teacher to deposit bucket loads of information into the catacombs of my mind, all the while not stopping to second guess the validity and reality of her teachings. Worst of all I was allowing this to happen in all of my classes. Why was I not questioning my teachers, injecting my own viewpoints, challenging what was thought to be the one and only explanation?

     The beauty of film is that it is constructed so that the viewer can come away with his or her own individual interpretation, and it is never wrong. Two individuals who are the same age, sex, race, and enjoy similar things can go into a screening and come away with two completely different opinions and perceptions of the film. However this does not just apply to the arts, it applies to everything we learn in life, everything on this earth. Education is a discourse between societies and individuals. We learn from the differing opinions of our neighbors and even become more solidified in our own beliefs because of them. Humanity thrives to defy what our ancestors thought to be the only truth. We live to search for more options, ways to self-actualize and make the world we live in a better place. Events in time are just like plotlines in movies, they themselves do not change, but our interpretations of them do… and should.

     Unfortunately, sometimes people believe education is a monologue; something they regurgitate to their listeners in hopes that their audience will take it at face value and not question a further meaning. However education is not this, neither is interpretation or opinion. These things are meant to be dialogues, conversations we have between one another, as well as texts and works of art. We are beings that should strive to, as the character Cobb from Inception says, “Create and perceive our world simultaneously.” We, in order to progress, must grasp and interpret our world concurrently. The beauty of it all is that even if we each do this at our own pace, and with our own opinions, it will be okay. It will be okay because we are each our own beholder of beauty in this world, and who are you, or anyone for that matter, to tell us differently?    

This is an essay I whipped up in about two hours for a writing class. I know I have not posted in awhile, I hope to change that I really like using this thing! But excuse the bad grammar hope you like it!