Your Smile On Fire

I am back and I am back with internets that I am not stealing from the neighbors. (Unlike last night when I emailed Erika.) And just where am I? you ask. Well. I will tell you. I am sitting on my bed. In my bedroom. In a house. In a neighborhood. In a town.

     But ha! It is a different bedroom in a different house in a different neighborhood. But not a different town. Yay! I have my own bathroom! I am attached to the kitchen! I have windows that look out over the town! And even more importantly, MY RADIO NOW GETS MY FAVORITE RADIO STATIONS. Woot woot!

     And that, my friendlies, is why I've been gone for a while. I've been moving. I've been unloading, unpacking boxes. I've been rearranging furniture with the help of my Taylor. I've been running up and down the stairs (Stairs! We have stairs!) and then sliding down them like I did when I was a little kid. Yes, I am very immature. I realize this.

In book-related news, I just finished The Friend Who Got Away, a collection of personal essays about lost friendships. Very sad but good and also it made me want to write an essay on the same subject. Also I'm reading Paper Hearts, which is odd because I rarely read adult books (to be honest a lot of times YA seems to be written better), but omg this book is AHMAZING and I recommend it to all. Oh, and to Jocelyn, here's the link to serafina67 *urgently requires life* (which, yays, Tay is now reading!) which I managed to get an ARC of. But it is so good. Seriously, I heart it.

I have other things I want to write about, so I'll be back around shortly.

Over the last few years a remarkable thing has happened to me. Specifically to my friendships and the people on the other ends of those friendships. It began, of course, with the event that tears my life into two pieces. Both seperate and distinct: a before and an after, except that unlike in all those makeover shows, the before still seems a bit more appealing. And that event, obviously, is the move.

Before the move I had an abundance of friends. I was never popular, per see, but I was not popular in the best way. Or, as Emily Knox would put it, I was the best kind of popular. The people I considered friends weren't all extremely close friends (though some of them were), for the most part not people I would tell my deepest secrets to or anything. But they were good friends. I could count on them to notice when I missed a day of school, to let me borrow their notes, to always have a partner for group projects and plenty of tables I'd be welcomed at during lunch time. Outside of school there were the friends I had from church, the friends whose houses I'd visit, the friends I went to see movies with. Except for Mich who always lived on the other side of the country (which may as well be the other side of the earth), they were all centrally located in our cluster of small towns. They went to the same church or the same school, or both. I ran into them when I went to Wal-Mart and my parents knew their parents.

Then I moved.

     And now, suddenly, the people I count as friends are spread out across the continental US. I've kept in contact with some of my Arizona friends, at least sporadically, but only two of the friendships have survived the effect of time and distance to become friends that I consider close. Apart from them there are girls I've met through Red, located in seperate corners of the US, nowhere near me.

     Do I have friends here? Kind of. Not particularly close ones, none who can measure up to the friends I've known for years and years, the friends who know my whole history and with whom explanations are rarely needed. Now I mostly hang out with my little sister although on rare occasions there are girls I go to the mall with or to the movies with. But for the most part my friends are nowhere near here. And I try not to let that bother me. I try to remind myself that no matter where they are, they're the most amazing friends and I'm lucky to have them.

But it's hard to keep that attitude all the time and sometimes I feel lonely even though I know I'm luckier than most, and definitely less alone than most.

See? I am so Pixarified.

So guess what? I don't think anyone has it all figured out. I know I sure don't. I used to think, back when I was an itty bitty kid, that teenagers had it figured out. I mean, they have their own lives after all.

     But then I became a teenager and not only do I not have it all figured out, but I'm not even so sure I have my own life most of the time.

     So then I thought that grown ups, what with their insurance and mortgages, and careers and whatnot - they must have it figured out.

But now I don't think so. I kind of think that no one really knows what they're doing, no one really ever figures it all out. I'm eighteen but I go around feeling like I'm not even old enough to drive. I see my friends and acquaintences getting married and falling in love and when I go out it's with my little sister. To the outlet mall. I see them looking at universities, getting scholarships, talking about UCLA and BYU and I'm all, huh? So yeah. Most the time it feels like everyone else has it way more figured out than I do. But then I look at myself how others - strangers - see me. And I see this girl who's got it all together. Or I talk to my good friends and realize that, oops, they don't know what the heck they're doing either.

     And one time I told my dad that I still don't feel grown up, or even partly grown up. I feel like a kid. And he said I'd go my whole life feeling that way, that you never really feel as grown up as you want to. That you always see others having the life you think you should have and it makes you feel like, hey, what's wrong with me? I guess it's true. When I was younger I thought, naively (sp), I suppose, that once I got out of high school I'd be kind of adult. Not all the way adult, I mean not married pushing my little kiddies in their pram or anything (hee hee, look at me all knowledgable of the word pram!), but at least grown up enough to not feel like a little girl playing dress up in Mommy's clothes. (Not that I ever played dress up, because I really don't remember ever doing that.)

I think I understand now why some kids totally mess their lives up. Because life is hard and when you get to the point where you're kinda supposed to figure it all out you realize that YOU HAVE FIGURED ABSOLUTELY NONE OF IT OUT. And losing control is so much easier than going on doing what I'm doing and faking it like, oh yeah I totally know what I'm doing. Words like finals and insurance still seem so grown up to me. Like a game I'm playing at, like something I'm not ready for. It's like there's exclusive club, only the coolest get to join. It's the YOU'RE GROWING UP club. And somehow they let me in and I'm just waiting for someone to come up to me and tap me on the shoulder and be all, "oh, you don't belong here little girl, sorry."

So a question to the all-growed-up Amy, if she's reading this: are you ever really grown up? Do you ever really figure it out and not feel like you're in over your head? Is this just the inane weirdness that is Jordyn or am I really onto something here?

You wouldn't think losing the journal I kept when I was fourteen would make me sad, would you? I mean, aren't we supposed to shun the girls we were at fourteen? Isn't that supposed to be a really whiny/angsty/blahblahblahlifesucks sort of age that we want to just forget about as quickly as possible?

     And most importantly for those of us who adore the written word, aren't we supposed to disown what we wrote back then?

Well I haven't. Any of it. Not that my life was perfect or my writing was great or anything like that, but aside from the whole catastrophe of omg-part-of-my-life-is-gone-now!, my age fourteen was actually not awful. It was interesting. It was good.

I was in AcaDec!

I was in high school!

I had a group of friends!

I liked a guy who really was very full of awesome!

I spent hours with Bradley and Madley and my marvie sister playing Monopoly!

I discovered The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants!

     So as you can see, what with the acadec/school/the boy/friends/cousins and Monopoly/books, my age fourteen was actually not so sucky. It was kind of awesome. And sometimes my eighteen year old self still misses my fourteen year old self. Is that pathetic? (No answer required.)

Maybe I'll eventually find it. Hopes so.

Ok so I am at school and omg these keyboards are like ten times louder than the normal keyboard should be, as decided by Jordyn, the Keyboard Master. (Although to be fair the keyboard on my laptop is pretty loud too.)

      But yeah. I'm at school, between my Child Development class and my English 120 class. AND TO EVERYONE, MY TESTS ARE OVER AND YAY FOR THAT! Also, my apologies for my writing sounding a bit funny lately (or maybe it just sounds funny to me...) it's cos of the book I just read that was written (wrote?) in blog form with almost no punctuation and lots of lolcat language. (Erika if by chance you are reading this [and have figured out how to sign in, *crossed fingers* and leave comments] then you should know that the book I'm talking about is one of the ones we got at the bookstore and you have it too. serafina67 *urgently requires life* and it comes out in August and when it does you should all read it because it is hecka amusing.) (And thank you Dani for getting me to start using that prase, much like Becca got me to start saying "oy".) (And thank you to Jake, if she's reading this, for giving me ARC in the first place.) Oh hey. Look at all the name-dropping I just did up there. Yay me! Or pathetic me, depending on how you look at things.

So ok. Awhile back (actually not THAT long ago) a certain someone called me negative. You know who you are. (Haha, she doesn't even read this I don't think, so no use talking to her in the blog.) But anyways, since then I've been kinda trying to dial down the negative. And up the positive. Because even though I don't totally agree with her - I think I am a pretty positive person - I do see where she's coming from and yeah, I've become more and more negative in the last... er... couple years. So here goes my list of GOOD THINGS HAPPENING.

• I am checking out Freakonomics from the library because I started my haitus when I was on page 120 and so now I'm really looking forward to actually FINISHING the book. And did you guys know Amy actually knows one of the authors of that book!? Omg awesomeness! (And oh yeah, check out my impressive nerdiness because I'm actually reading a book about economics.)
• My tests are over for this week.
• I have a big pile of brand-spanky new books sitting on the floor of my room, just waiting to be read.
• The secret thing which I cannot yet talk about but it includes very possibly not having to share a bathroom with my marvie little sister anymore. Yay for being able to do my hair in the actual bathroom instead of bringing the hair straightener into my room!
• The other secret thing, related to above secret thing.
• Yay very happy for Mich for a number of reasons.
• I turned in gobs of job applications, which hopefully means that sometime in the nearish future I might actually be employed and not be a very literate bum anymore. (Although no worries, I will still be very literate.)

And what else?

• Yay for emailing Dani!
• Yay for emailing Jake!
• I finally finally finally found a Yes cd at the used music store Erika took me to when I was staying with her. I've been looking for one of those ever since the car my mom's Yes cd was in got stolen. (And ok, yes, Mom, you did convert me into liking Yes.)
• The Writer's Strike is over! Which for those of you who don't know my television viewing habits as well as I do, means MORE EPISODES OF THE OFFICE!
• I went to Nor Cal!

And now I have to get to class. More blogging later, friendlies.

I like the word friendlies.

Firstly, you should all clap for me because I studied THREE SOLID HOURS for my Psychology test tomorrow. So I better do good, or else Jordyn (who does occasionally refer to herself in the third person) will be way upset with herself.

     In other news, I found another quote. This one from Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl which I just finished. And it goes like this...

Forgetting isn't enough.

You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone.

But they will keep floating back, again and again and again.

And isn't' that true? Sometimes a memory I think I've forgotten will come back to me. In a dream maybe, or while I'm taking notes in class, or when some undefinable thing triggors it. And depending on the memory, it changes me in some small way. It changed my mood or my outlook or my window of reference on things. It makes me better or worse, happier or sadder.

     I guess we don't ever really forget things. We just think we do or we try to or we push the memories back and convince ourselves they're gone. And the thing is... a lot of these memories aren't bad memories, they're good ones. But sometimes that's the thing - good memories have the power, messed up as it sounds, to taint the present, to make you (or at least Jordyn) long for that memory, for the time it took place in.

I went up to the Bay Area for one of the readings - the one in Oakland at the Great Good Place for Books (AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO'S READ THE GREAT GOOD THING!?) (oh hi Jake, if you're reading this, I swear I'm going to email you soon). So anyways, I, me, Jordyn T., went up to Northern California.

     And it was different.

     It was good.

     Besides the fear I have of a major earthquake happening when I cross one of the bridges, I really loved it.

And though there is much more to this post that I've written beyond this point, I'll end here and send Mich the rest.

Ok so I was totally going to make a post from the library at lunch today. But seeing as how it was practically pouring outside EVERY SINGLE COMPUTER was in use. So I went to eat lunch in my car and by the time I got to my car my jacket was soaked and my hair was so wet it was all slicked down to my head. It was quite the sight, I tell you.

     And this post comes in two parts.

Part one: my two-week hiatus. It was not entirely my decision. It was really my dad's "suggestion" for me to take a break (a complete, clean, no-looking-back break) from writing and reading. The deal was actually for three weeks, but come on, I'm amazed I made it this long. I was starting to go a little insane. I mean seriously. Not being able to write about the stuff stressing me out was making me cranky and angry like you would not believe. Writing might be an obsession, but it's an obsession that helps keep me sane.

     So what did this hiatus mean? It meant no blogging, no working on my in-progress novel or any short stories or poems. No writing in my many (many many) notebooks. No writing in my journal. No emailing. Which, truth be told, was quite probably the hardest part. I mean my best friend lives on the other side of the country for crying outloud. Email is one of my life lines to her. And all my other good friends? Um... Florida (hi Becca!), Northern California (Erika!), Arizona (Ash, Sarah! Bradison and Madison!), So the only one that really  lives close by is my adorably adorable sister.

     So yeah.

     Saying this whole project was "difficult" would be an understatement of gigantic proportions. And you want to know why? Because my life takes place in words. These random lines will come to me during school and I'll write down stuff with my psychology notes that have absolutely nothing to do with Freud! (exclamation intentional, Friends reference) or Pavlov and his dog experiment (I could make an Office reference right now, I really really could).

     But hey! I'm back now! My dad's hope was that taking a break would make me better or more creative when I got back at it. I'm not sure if it's worked or not because I think writing is one of those things that you have to consistantly be doing to maintain your ability. Like when I started writing again, yesterday? I could tell the words weren't coming as easily as they should have been. It was a weird feeling.

Part two: cheating. You know what? Cheating is wrong and I know it's wrong and we all know it's wrong but at the same time... I can kind of understand it. I mean honestly, why do we go to high school or junior high or college? In its simplest terms, whatever schooling we're doing right now is merely the means to an end. I want to teach kindergarten so I'm stuck taking these ridiculous general education classes that, I'm sorry, will never be of use to me once I leave the classroom. As my dad is fond of telling me when I get stressed over classes or grades or school in general, "You just have to play the game. It's all about checking the boxes." True. I just barely passed my World History class last semester but I did pass it. And now I never have to go through it again. (And trust me, that is a huge relief.)

     But here's where the snag arises, and where I can really kind of understand cheating, especially (see below) if the person's not copying someone else's work. If it's all about checking off the boxes (and so often it is), if this is just a means to an end (again, it is), then the only thing that matters is getting through. No matter how you get through. I mean I'm not talking about med school or about your NCLEX exam (nurses), I'm talking about the classes (and there are oh-so-many) that don't actually matter but that you have to pass anyways. Without getting into the "unfairness" or the "ethics" of it, if school is just a means to an end then cheating is just a way to achieve what you've set out to achieve. No harm, no foul.

     But then on the other hand, cheating grates at me. It annoys the heck out of me. Why? The classic response, really. And that is that I work really hard for the grades I get. I'm not getting valedictorian-worthy grades or anything, but I do pretty good usually, and it's no accident. I do the work. I show up for class, I study, I do my homework, and I do extra credit when the professors offer it. I put in the time and every A, B, C, D, or F that I get is a result of that. Today in art class my professor (who I think is awesome by the way) was talking about how she tries to make her tests difficult to cheat on so it will be "fair for the A-students." I thought that was an odd way to put it but I was glad that she brought up the subject of cheating.

     And then I heard the girl sitting next to me - my "friend" (note the air quotes) - mutter,"F--- you," under her breath. Nice, huh? Later on this same girl took my take-home quiz that I'd just got back so she could copy down my answers for the ones she missed. And I took it back from her, which I'm sure suprised her because everyone's gotten to the point that they just let whoever wants to copy their answers and we barely even think of it as cheating anymore. But I put some serious effort into that quiz (which I then forgot at home and turned in late for reduced points, but that's beside the point). I probably spent over an hour on it and I wasn't just bsing my replies either. Maybe it's a selfish way to put it, but I hate the idea of someone else benefitting (sp) from the time and effort I put into my work. THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THEIR OWN DERN WORK!!

Oh and PS. Omygosh why is nobody blogging lately? Seriously. Practically no blogs have been posted SINCE I LEFT. I'm severely disappointed in you guys! (Haha, kidding. But for reals, what's up?)

Oh hai.

I'm back. And I know it's only been two weeks and not three but I'm back. And I'm SOO glad. So tomorrow, a post. That's what I intend on doing with my lunch break. Oh yays!

But before I go, movie quotes? Because Mich gave me a really excellent one yesterday and then today I thought of another and then I watched A Beautiful Mind and heard another.

Sometimes we don't do the things we want to do just so others won't know we want to do them. --The Village

If you were waiting for the perfect opportunity, that was it. --Pirates of the Caribbean

You are all my reasons. --A Beautiful Mind

So there you have it. Quoties. (Like cooties, but different.)

     If I'm going to do this thing, I'm going to do it all the way. And it'll be... well, interesting to say the least. So don't expect to hear from me until March.

     YIKES!

     Ok, kidding. Nathan Bransford's blog (you guys are reading it by now, right fellow Red girls!?) is still the ultimate favorite. And probably always will be. But this new one I found, The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, delights me to no end. Few things in life are funnier to me than misused quotation marks.

     How sad is that?

     Jordyn is rather tired. And yeah, she likes to talk about herself in the third person. But because she's so tired and doesn't feel good and this post probably won't make much (or any) sense as it is, she's going to stick to first person.

     I always thought it was stupid to regret things that we have or haven't done in the past. Time travel not exactly being HERE YET, it seems fairly stupid to cringe over saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. Over messing your words up or saying something you didn't quite mean.

     But come on, we still do it, right? Go over it again and again in our minds, wishing we could go back and say something that would have sounded better? Or even more, wishing we could go back and say what it was we wanted to say (but didn't have enough guts to) in the first place?

     We think to ourselves, Oh, they probably don't remember. Nobody actually remembers what I say anyways... right? Right? RIGHT? But we can't ever convince ourselves enough to really buy into it. Because there's always that little voice in the back of our mind, the one that shouldn't be SO MUCH LOUDER than the one urging us to forget about it, but still manages to completely drown it out.

     And can we all agree that a lot of the things we want to get a "redo" on (remember how when you're a little kid you get redos on everything? Like if you don't roll the dice good enough or pull the right card in Candy Land... you always call a redo.) don't really matter. At all.

     But then there's the other stuff. Stuff that maybe does matter, that there's a chance another person does remember. And you wish you could go back and call a redo, like when you were a kid, and be all, No, no! That wasn't what I meant to say at all! And fix it on the spot.

     Yeah. Those are the times when time machines? They'd come in real handy. (And REAL time machines, not the pretend kind I used to "build" in Horizons.)

     Want to know a sad fact about moving? All those friends who said they'd stay in touch with you, the ones you planned on still being friends with despite the distance of a few hundred miles between you?

     They aren't going to stay in touch with you. Probably not the news you want to hear, I admit. But it's true. The staying-in-touch thing is immediately going to fall on your shoulders. The one who moved. Because all your friends? THEY STILL HAVE EACH OTHER. Sure, your best friend will likely stay in touch. But eventually even that might dwindle down to a few letters a year that, while telling you the details of her life, never really give you the full story. And the others? Eh. So often our friendships are built on WHO IS CLOSEST, who we can talk to the most and hang out with the most and more often than I'd like to admit it's not really about who you are at all, except that you fit the "friend" mold.

     You are going to be the one calling your friends. Emailing them. Texting and IMing them. Telling them what classes you're taking and sending them pictures of your new puppy, etc etc. You will miss them with an aching feeling long after they stop missing you. And I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but one day you will be talking to one of the people you used to (and possibly still do) consider a friend. One of the people you've missed so much. And guess what?

     THEY WILL LEAVE YOU FEELING MISERABLE. Because you will be all lonely for your old friends and they'll be all, oh-everything-here-is-great-and-we-are-all-such-great-friends-now-and-blah-blah-blah-sorry-nobody-misses-you-and-you-have-no-friends-because-you're-such-a-loser. Only they won't be so mean about it. But you'll get that same general feeling and you'll be all, woah. I guess we're not really friends anymore, huh? Only of course you won't say that either.

     You will realize though, that all the while you have been missing your friends from back home, they've all been moving on without you and there's nothing you can do about it. And then you will think, well-that's-the-past-and-time-to-move-on-so-now-I-shall-pull-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps.

     Except you will still miss them.

     And one day maybe you will come home from your glamorous new life that really isn't that glamorous (at all) but still includes there being a Barnes and Noble within twenty minutes from home (which, trust me, more than makes up for the lack of glamour) and there will be this glowing little orange msn message on the bottom of your computer screen. And you will click on it. And it will say something completely awesome like, for instance, hey i know you're 'away' but i just wanted to say hi! i haven't talked to you in a while hope you're doing well!

     And then even though your $200 Barnes and Noble gift card just came in the mail (thank you many years of Dad staying in hotels and racking up reward points), THAT will be what totally makes your day because you'll realize that the people who really matter to you have stuck around, eight hundred miles of distance between you or no.

     So, uh, thanks Ash. :)

     This may not come as much of a shock to some of you, but I don't exactly need oodles of social interaction. I'm kind of a loner. And I kind of didn't realize this until yesterday.

     I didn't realize until yesterday that I am PERFECTLY FINE being alone. Really I am. I'm not lonely. I'm not desperate for attention from other people. I. Like. It.

     This isn't to say I don't like being with people, because I do. I love it. But I don't love being with just anyone. I love being with the people who I actually want to be with. Recently (and I'm using that word very loosely here) those people happen to be hundreds of miles away, which makes me very very very thankful to live in the twenty first century, seeing as how the only way I communicate to some of them is by email, msn, and texting. But really I'm fine with that.

     I would rather be alone than hang out with people I don't actually want to hang out with.

     That all being said, sometimes I am lonely. But lonely in a very specific way, not just a general gee-I-wish-I-had-someone-to-talk-to way. Because I could find people to talk to if I wanted to. I have people I could talk to or hang out with if I wanted that. But no, the way I get lonely is in a sadder, nostalgic kind of way. Like I'll miss the comfortable lunchtime conversation from my old school, or the insanely good time I had with Mich in New York and when she came out here. Or I'll miss the wonderfulness of being with the four, of playing Monopoly for hours on end and watching America's Funniest Home Videos.

     So basically I don't just miss "having friends". I miss having the right friends. And I'd rather be alone than not have the right friends because really, I don't mind being alone. I like it.

     Everyone has their happy music. The stuff they listen to when they want to cheer up or dance around (not that I dance because I really don't) or when they need their music to be just as happy as they are (assuming, of course, that they're in a good mood).

     My happy music happens to be really really redneck honky-tonk hillbilly country. Like right now I'm listening to Tim McGraw's song Down on the Farm. Realizing that this sort of stuff is my happy music strikes me as a wee bit ironic, seeing as how country music is known as the depressing stuff. (Joke: What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your truck back, your dog back, your hubby/wifey/gf/bf back, your house back, etc.) But seriously, nothing I ever listen to makes me as happy as when I turn on the radio and find a song like How Do You Like Me Now? (Toby Keith) playing. And before now it never really struck me as odd. But then suddenly I was listening to Kate Voegele's song Wish You Were (which, by the way, I seriously need to find her CD because I am like in love with this music) and it was making me kinda sad (yeah... I tend to like sad music) and so I was thinking, wow, I need to listen to something happy. And I found a bunch of redneck stuff.

    And then I thought, wow, this is probably really weird.

     So now I'm asking y'all (haha): what's YOUR happy music?