Ring Around The Rosie

A pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down.

We all fall down.

I saw ghosts of cars today. In the reflection of the bus windows. Car ghosts running head on and crashing into their originals. The car themselves come out unscathed. The car ghosts disappeared.

Did the cars know they were driving into their haunted selves? Did the car ghosts know they were driving into their demises?

Did they know?

Did they care?

Yuma took me to the orchestra room today, and played Imogen Heap's Speeding Cars on the piano. He sang too. I had looked at the lyrics once before but had not noticed them. This time, I realized it was talking about suicide.

Suicide. Such an easy word to say, such a hard word to swallow.

In my dreams—or are they nightmares?—I have been chased many times. I have been on the run many times, from presumed enemies, to win a race, or for the sake of running.

But I have never fallen. Not once. Falling dreams are the ones that haunt my daydreams.

I am suddenly in possession of objects I would deem too dangerous for me to hold. Too dangerous for someone who has such a strong morbid fascination with these objects. But I accepted them with as much grace as I could muster.

What will it be like?

Do I want to know?

My scarf obsession started in fifth grade. Or grade five, as I used to say, before someone pointed it out to me and I subconsciously changed the way I spoke.

My youngest cousin and I were on the streets, with my aunt. We had finished shopping for something, and I cannot remember what it was, but it must have been important because why else would we be out at night in one of the coldest winters I could remember?

My cousin spotted a hat she wanted. We went over, and I, in classic little sibling manner despite the fact I was an only child, decided I wanted a hat as well.

She bought one for herself and one for me. I, in turn, bought the matching scarves and rabbit hair gloves.

My aunt later asked me, “Why aren't you wearing your scarf?”

“It's too short,” I told her.

So she got me another scarf, a long chocolatey caramel vanilla ice cream scarf. And perhaps that was what went wrong. I should never have two frivolous items, because what else could I do with them but want more?

I still remember the Fairweather scarf.

The tube scarf.

And every scarf that caught my eye afterwards.

I gave Yuma the chocolatey caramel vanilla ice cream scarf. It is one of four scarves I still have. He looks nice in it, I think. And anyway, he should have something for his throat, because sore throats are awful, especially for a singing throat.

We shared our favorite songs before. And found out how different our musical tastes are.

I am a melancholy-lyrical-rhythm dependent girl. One who grasps onto the melody and threads it through the lyrics in a silk weave. I do not know how he likes to describe himself musically.

Perhaps not as I describe myself.

The other day I was walking down the street and the trees seemed like plastic toys. The sky was so low it bordered surreal. I remember the air as biting cold, as it always is in December. I had only one year of warm December, where the snow fell as light dustings and winter was just as rainy as it was snowy.

The houses were some laborious decoration. Not real.

I walk alone from the mailbox to my door. No one walks down that path with me, except for Yuma sometimes, and even he does not reach my door.

On that stretch of road, I can be anything. Anyone.

I can twirl the air and pretend I am holding onto Lillian. Slash slash jump. I pretend Prescott is there, and I am telling him off yet again. I even sing sometimes. I start off with songs I know and twist the lyrics to my liking. Then I change the tune.

Then I reach my door, and halt the show.

As I write, I wonder, will I ever be well known for my writing? If I will be, will they who read my other, more famous works look back on these simple thoughts and try to assign some deeper meaning to them? Will they think, “Now here is a real thoughtful piece, here it reflects some profound theme.”

Death. Life. And everything in between.

But perhaps there is no real reason for this piece. It is not a statement, nor is it a message. It is merely an expression, a method to consolidate musings.

It is, after all, what came to mind first. And as I am listening to Speeding Cars right now, and re-imagining the car ghosts yet again, I wonder if they are at peace. Ghosts freed of their curses, free to go wherever they want.

How's Life?

I have been asked that question so many times today, I'm wondering if my face says, "Ask me how my life is going?" If you're curious, it's going by really well, although I would prefer a few hours more of sleep and a good 40% decrease in workload.

Sleep. Is. Good. And I'm not having enough of it lately.

I saw Mr. Coffee today, who asked me if econ was in the math department or social studies. I sometimes wish econ was in math. Then we'd get a smartboard, and, if we're lucky, we can shift the graphs like Mr. Booth does, and the econ graphs would make so much more sense.

Then, as I made my way over to econ after the bell, I saw Clay's French class outside the language lab, blocking the way. I think there is something about world language teachers (or at least the French ones) not arriving to class on time. Or maybe it's just classes that require stairs-climbing.

And I saw Joss too, who asked me, "How's life?"

Gah.

In econ, Yuma and I played go because I was too not motivated to do any work. Yuma won, of course, and then we started playing connect-five, and Joss then joined in, and Joss and I started playing connect-five except with gravity (like the connect-four game with the checker-like pieces). I won that game, surprisingly.

Somewhere in the middle of the class, Ali asked me, "Are you going to the Pink dance?" Which was really random, and kind of freaked me out because people are already talking about it.

Seriously. I don't know what I'm going to do about it. Stop making me more stressed.

Anyway, fast-forward after econ, multi, and some random wandering around the school. There was ultimate frisbee after school today, which Tea and I joined, except the running lasted much longer than I could handle, so after Tea left, I just used some random guy's backpack as a pillow and watched people play. Or mostly watched one person play, but whatever.

Then Brian started talking about how some sci-fi book claimed that humans are inefficient because we're intolerant, or something to that effect. We were in the courtyard at that time, searching for any abandoned frisbees (because Yuma could not find his). Then we looked up and saw Clay waving from a window on the second floor. We also saw Mrs. Pointy, but I don't remember if she waved at us or not.

We saw them again as they left out the side door while we waited for Brian's mom.

If you were to ask me how my life is right now, I think you'd know the answer.

(P.s. I left out the more creepy parts. To at least make myself appear more, uh, normal, if only on the Internet.)

Life Is Strange.

I probably had already concluded this some time prior to today, but I feel there needs to be a reassertion.

Life is strange. Bizarre. Weird. Odd. Completely wacko.

What has made me come to this conclusion (again)? Well, it all started . . .

(-cue person sitting in a wicker chair reminiscing about the past-)

Anyway, this Wednesday, sometime in its glorious sunny afternoon, my mom received a phone call from the Superintendent informing us of the extremely likely possibility of school the next day. The exact words were more along the lines of, yes, there is school tomorrow, but after last weekend, anything could happen.

I was psyched. I wanted to go to school really badly. Staying at home for a prolonged period of time was not my idea of fun.

However, it appears that my body had a different idea.

I spent an entire Thursday, home, sick, stomach hurting and drowsy (although that could be a side-effect of sleeping too much). It was miserable. I went to the doctor's on Friday, received some general information coupled with fancy words, but I was too out of it to comprehend. My mom took me to the pharmacist's to get my new medication, and then we went to Barnes and Noble's somewhere to just "wander around," as I had suggested.

When we came home, it was already late (3pm-ish), so I decided to ask around and see what I had missed.

Lacking phone numbers (not that I use my phone regularly anyway, besides the occasional call to my mom to pick me up), I went online. Bryant was, as I suspected, there, and so I asked him about chem and physics.

"We learned titration curves in chem," he said. "They're not that bad."

Well, for the past most likely every time I've asked him about anything schoolwork related, he has said, "It's not that bad." Not sure how much his words applied to me.

"What about physics?" I asked. "Was there a lab?"

"No, we learned about series and parallel combinations, and how you would go about solving them."

"How do you go about solving them?"

And thus he launched into a very long near-monologue about the complexities of solving circuits, interrupted occasionally by my odd, "Oh, it's like in that video we watched!" or the ever-so-common, "Okay." It got to the point where I decided, no, I wasn't ever going to memorize everything he said, so I went ahead and copied our conversation and pasted it elsewhere for future reference.

Then, Bryant said, "There's a couple questions about circuit breakers on UTexas."

Wait, what?

I hurriedly checked my Quest account, and, there they were, 45 brand new questions sitting there, waiting for me to unravel their evilness mysteriousness. With a nice message at the top reminding us that the network will be down over the weekend due to maintenance, so we should print out a hard copy to work on it instead.

Before I had a chance to start on those questions, Dora started a conversation with me.

"Hi Ginny! Why weren't you in class today?"

"I was sick," I said. "Did I miss anything?"

"Yeah, we handed in our papers today. Mrs. Tallchief thought you gave your paper to me. She was surprised you weren't there."

Oh. Oops. Right, research paper.

"Don't worry about it," Dora said. "Just send her an email. You should be fine."

Which I did later on, but I haven't received a reply yet, so I'm not sure how that's going. I also have several books I accidentally left in my English classroom, all of which are in danger of disappearing.

I saw Dino as well, so I figured I would ask him about calc. Except, of course, he disappeared right after I attempted to start a conversation. He and Owen both seem to do that a lot.

So I went back to UTexas, fiddled around with the questions, and arrived at a section where there was quite a number of bizarre diagrams that made no sense at all. Frustrated, I checked back to see if anyone else was online to provide useful class information, and I saw Dino again.

"Dino," I said. "You are very elusive. Anyway, what did you guys do in calc today?"

"Where were you?" Or, in Dino-speak, "where werw=e u?" (I find it amusing that he actually noticed his mistake, attempted to hit backspace, missed backspace, and decided to go on regardless.)

"Home," I said. "Sick."

To my surprise, Dino made a frowning face and said, "Feel better."

"Thanks," I said, grasping with this new, nice side of Dino as he reassured me that we didn't go over anything new in calc (yay, because I had thought Mrs. James would go crazy due to our unexpected "break") and told me to let him know if I needed help. Wow.

And this time, Tea, he did say something along the lines of goodbye before he left, so I think there's either still hope, or he's really picked up a "Easy Steps to Being Nicer" book somewhere in lieu of the "Compliments for Dummies" we suggested he get.

I went back to my physics problems, finished all of them except the ones with the weird diagrams, and spent the rest of night watching Youtube videos recommended by Gretchen and Stella (after I found my headphones), and deciding that vocal trance is really nice, and I feel kind of sad I had never explored this genre further before.

The next morning (well, this morning, really), I received an email from my physics teacher (too lazy to search up his nickname) telling us that he's sending over the diagrams for the eight-part question that I had trouble with yesterday. So the weird diagram problem wasn't just me!

On the not-so-bright side, UTexas is officially under maintenance right now, so I don't feel motivated enough to do any of the questions.

For All It's Worth

I had been bored lately (as I've discovered I'm prone to do whenever a deadline is fast approaching), so I went--what else?--blog-hopping. Blogger makes it easy, with its "Next Blog>>" link. It automatically finds similar blogs for me, so I don't have to go through the hassle of sifting through endless upon endless blogs of boring material (I don't know what this would be, actually).

The downside? There's no "Dislike" button to tell Blogger that, no I don't want to see another blog about making papier-mâché pigs. Really.

When this happens, I usually go back to Gretchie's blog (the only blog I was following at the time that had the Blogger header at the top) and start all over.

So far, my adventures had taken these routes:

1. A Japanese lady who wrote about her life in a combination of English and Japanese-->a pregnant lady and her family-->a mother who had lost her child.

2. A self-employed mother who custom-made lunch bags-->a knitter who also takes on other fabric crafts-->a graphic novel artist who loves to use Winston brushes.

3. An magazine editor with a dying scooter-->a debut novelist who also promotes other people's books-->a young man living in Brooklyn-->a group of students assigned to write creative stories every week.

I followed a few of them, because they sounded interesting, and began reading through the old posts of the collab blog. Their latest (and, apparently, last--but it doesn't matter because they have hundreds upon hundreds of earlier work I want to read through one day) assignment was "Complicated."

The last author wrote:

The word “dead” echoed in my head. I could not believe what I was hearing. My poor beloved mum’s soul was under the sheet. My dad murdered her. I dared not to lift the sheet. But then I did and gave her a soft kiss on her cheek.

It leaves me wondering--what is death to each of us?

I have often written about death. In my second-to-last story on this blog, I wrote about a male protagonist who died in the end. In my other stories--stories of Nephria, where my blog's name comes from--death is a major, resonating idea. It's as if I can't write a story without having someone die, somehow.

But what is death?

Perhaps it is easier to first examine what happens after death. True, everyone has a different interpretation. I have read about the Christian view of life after death: heaven. A place where the little sins are forgiven--where people are given a new chance and a brand new hope. Mitch Albom writes, in his book, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, that heaven is a place where you find out what your life meant, both to yourself and to others. In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, heaven is the stark opposite of Purgatory, where everyone who does not conform to the social and religious norm goes until they learn to rid themselves of their sins or until someone prays for them enough.

My youngest cousin, who lives in China, said she believes that when people die, they go to a sort of afterworld--regardless of what they've done in their lives. Once there, they start new lives--lives whose prosperity in part depends on their living relatives' propensity for burning them paper afterworld money. My grandmother still burns folded gold-paper pieces for my grandfather every April. The dying protagonist in Nŭktae ŭi yuhok asks his grandmother if reincarnation exists--if people could have a second chance at life to right the wrongs that they've committed in this life.

So many possibilities, all because of one simple event. Death.

Death, to me, is the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. I don't know if reincarnation exists, or heaven, or an afterworld, or if we will land in front of Allison Saint-Cross's doorstep, asking him to grant our last wish. I don't know what will happen.

I do know, however, that it will be the end of life as I know it. It might have different connotations for different people--dying at the hands of Peter Houghton in Nineteen Minutes or the boy next door would be different from dying at the hands of cancer or old age, and different from dying because you decided to take a knife, force your way into the apartment on the fourteenth floor, and jump off the balcony.

Death, therefore, is defined by life and by the method of death.

And yet, some lives are defined by deaths. JFK was well known for his political achievements, but he is perhaps even more well known for his assassination. Cissy Pike of Second Glance is only known because of her ghost--a figment of her inevitable death. The Yan prince of ancient Chinese history is only famous because of his attempt to kill the emperor Qin, and his death after failing his task.

Life and death obviously goes hand in hand. As I've heard from somewhere else (I can't remember exactly where), "we're never guaranteed a wake-up call the next day." But until I die, I will probably never know what it really means to die.

So I'll keep on writing my stories of Prescott slipping from his grasp of self-nobleness, of Carter fighting his way to make the impossible come true, of Rena wishing for the exact opposite of what everyone else would wish for, and amidst that, I'll keep on wondering what death really means.

Procrastination and Another New Beginning

If it were completely up to me, school would assign no homework at all, and we would only have to do work in class. It's totally plausible, with after-school group study sessions to review materials covered in class, without the plethora of distractions home (and, quite often, my laptop that happens to have internet access) offers.

I would never, ever finish an assignment five minutes before it's due.

Argon would know. He's very concerned with my current ability to handle schoolwork right now. It's a little disconcerting, actually, how often he says I seem so stressed out.

I'm not. Really. I just mock-complain a lot, because my mind goes blank every now and then and I don't know what to say. Interesting, coming from a girl everyone thinks is really quiet.

Anyway, the point of this came from my current status of procrastinating instead of doing my English notecards, as I totally should do, had I been the good little girl I was back in... uh, seventh grade? I finished my homework ahead of time back then.

In fact, I still blame that guy in eighth grade, who always did homework in class and got caught (as opposed to me, who always did homework in class and never got caught) as my major corrupter. I did get a key chain as compensation though, but that's another story.

As I was saying. I had been procrastinating, when I roamed upon my Gmail tab (not accidentally) and spotted Tea. I immediately made myself "visible" and said hi.

"Hi," Tea said. "You know I blog, right?"

Oh, Tea blogs?

"I know now," I typed. Blogging reminded me of all those semi-attempts I had at blogging prior. And my half-hearted posts that collected dust.

Oh yeah. Pleasant memories of a self-proclaimed princess of procrastination.

"Well," Tea said. "Read this."

And she promptly sent over the link to her blog.

Which, I have to say, looks all amazing, partly because I myself have never accomplished such prolific projects of such massive scale. (It's also amazing otherwise, but I've always been uncreative with praise and such.) I scanned through the latest post--mentioning me as Ginny, which is evidently where I got my screen name from--and the quite... interesting turn of events. This, on some scale, is sad, because I had been there half the time, and I caught on to only two parts of the conversation, namely Irving's ad and Dino's bot-like voice. Oh well. I was always slow to react.

But this raises a very valid question.

Why am I not blogging?

Or, to phrase it in terms that strike my conscience the most:

Why am I not continuing to blog on those blogs I've started?

Posing that as my "Question of Subconsciousness" as I work on my remaining six notecards, I realize that it's because blogging had never been fun. It's always been something I wanted to do when I wanted to write about all the things that troubled me, but I channeled those into stories instead.

Oh, and this reminds me, I'm a little upset that I didn't get even an "honorable mention" in the Reflections contest (Boris did get second place for his poem, though, which I remembered him printing off on the day it was due, probably because we were both in the library that morning with last minute edits), but then I realized that winning wasn't the reason I wrote. I write because I want to visualize my emotions.

It's why most people don't get the things I mention in my writing. I use a lot of references (I like historical ones the best). I describe things with a novelty that is only completed because of the connotations of the words themselves. And I write with how it sounds in mind, because to me, the words are often more important than the plot.

But those were stories.

This is real life. And real life is supposed to be fun, because it's pointless if I go around being moody all the time.

(I had a discussion yesterday, as it chanced, with Stella, a friend of mine back in a world far, far away, about the meaning of life. Or lack thereof, I suppose. We ended up mulling over what existence meant, why we still lived and hung on to our lives, and the rather disturbing thoughts Stella had.)

Real life, and Ginny-world (Nephria, as it is called, for the Unenlightened), are two drastically different things. I've forgotten that writing could be just, purely, unequivocally about fun, and that's where I had gone wrong on my Quest O'Blog.

So, a fresh start?

In 2010.

Maybe.

But first, my five remaining notecards. English teachers may not be able to count, but NoodleBib unfortunately can.