Caution: Tears and Insecurities Follow

Dear Reader,

Sometimes little things orchestrate themselves in such a manner… that they hurt a great deal.
Even now, with teary eyes, soiled Kleenex, and periodic sniffles, I recognize that the cause for the tears and sniffles is silly. And not really worth crying over.
...Unfortunately, my feelings sometimes ignore the prudence of my more sensible thoughts, and this is such a case. Nonetheless, sometimes it's good to weep a little weep and ride through the pain, even if it is silly.

Alright, so here’s what’s up.

A friend of mine posted pictures of me on facebook. A number of them are kind of fun pictures, and I’m not upset that they’re there. I don’t care. 

However, and this is very vulnerability-revealing, I will admit to being disappointed by them. Well, not by them- by me. This is going to take some explaining...

 See, I wonder whether there isn’t some caveat to the reasonable and hope-inspiring concept that attractiveness follows confidence. Hmm. It makes sense that, by and large, attractive people are confident, but, in my experience, it would appear that confidence -/-> attractiveness. That is, confidence is necessary (though that itself is suspect, as there are those who seem god-gifted with bounties of beauty), but not sufficient for attractiveness.

The thing is, I usually don’t mind picture-taking. This is kind of unfortunate. It is unfortunate because my internal representation of myself seems to match horribly with what is actually there.

It’s this terrible system, really. Annette feels confident à Annette confidently takes picture à Annette sees picture à Annette realizes picture does not at all align with her conception of beauty, nor with what she so well-meaningly believed it would look like à Annette feels incredibly STUPID. Needless to say, the confidence then breaks down and she feels like hiding in a small, unpopulated corner of the universe.

A classic, embarrassing example of these proceedings followed my senior pictures. When I took those pictures, I (foolishly?) believed I looked passably attractive. I was pleased, I was fairly excited. I still remember my growing feeling of disappointment, shame, and finally great pain when I finally received those pictures and flipped through them with increasing panic, as each one failed to be satisfactory. By the end of it I very quickly- but as calmly as I could- slipped to the bathroom, locked the door, and cried my heart out in a strange feeling of shame and pain. Pain for feeling unattractive and stupid enough to believe I looked good, shame for having the audacity to walk around feeling as though I was passably attractive, and an incredible amount of shame and disappointment for being so silly and superficial as to be crying in a bathroom about it all. It was a good time, really.

Happily, this time around flipping through those pictures did not end in tears and extreme pain. More like moderate disappointment at the disparity between what I hope I look like and what I actually look like. I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but when I take too long before a mirror, or on a day (such as today) when humidity has rendered my hair wild (in the not-attractive way), I’m glad that 1) I’m not the one who has to look at me all of the time and 2) at least other people are used to looking upon my very interesting form—and thus are not too surprised by it. 

And it’s fine. (Usually.) 

Perhaps it is a convenient self-defense mechanism,   but I can say that the vast majority of the time, I am unconcerned by my looks. Sure, sometimes I get frustrated and wish I were a bit thinner, etc. etc. but those are instantaneous concerns that don’t really get to me. I really just don’t care all that much, and my insecurities center much more on feeling like I don’t do enough or that I’m not sufficiently intelligent or that I am lacking sufficient quantities of x substance.
(Wow. I really am mostly about abstract concepts… it’s great!)

Anyway, back to the story. So flipping through those pictures, it was a little like “Well, that’s kinda disappointing. But they’re fun pictures. Oh well, keep moving through feed.”

AND THEN.

Someone decided to post this on facebook (you know, for the lolz):

Reaction #1: Jawdrop.

Reaction #1.5: …Are people really THAT douchey?

Reaction #2: What the fuck? Please tell me this is a fake add.

Reaction #3: People think this is funny… ? !

Reaction #4: Absorbs evilness and hurtfulness of ad and bursts into tears, with all sorts of unhappy thoughts flooding through, spoiling Kleenex whilst feeling that this is all stupid and not worth my time.

And at this point I’m not sure what to say.

I could say that what had been most disappointing about those pictures of myself was the fact that my ever-persistent and, at this point, hella annoying (I know. Hella is a terrible word, and I’m ashamed. But if the time calls for it…) acne remains ever-persistent and hella annoying despite my recent optimism that there may be hope for the near future….?  (Ouch.)

I could say that it prompted thoughts of, but I do have a boyfriend, and he’s freakin’ amazing! But that in turn prompted strange thoughts that seem to accompany my femininity—largely regrets/pain at then making him be the guy with the acne-ridden, not-quite-attractive girlfriend…

I could say that it prompted memories of bitingly hurtful comments from my mother- who I know loves me, even if she doesn't always do so in the way I would like...

Or I could say that it made me realize that in a very strange way, I was just bullied. I realized that I form part of the butt of that joke… that I am one of the shameful, non-beautiful members of society to be pitied or laughed at.

I could also say that it reminded me of the disappointment/despair I sometimes feel at the very strong suspicion that I will likely never fulfill the requirements of beauty. Maybe this is the foolishness of a twenty-year-old giving itself away, but my teens were "wasted" with, at first, being "not thin enough," and then the onset of braces and acne, my late teens/early twenties are embarrassingly acne-marked, and the future looks bleak between acne, scars, and aging.... 

Confession: All I really want is a beautiful wedding picture, and sometimes I'm afraid I won't have that.

In half an hour maybe I'll sit down and try to think of a list of my redeeming qualities, or of reasons why I can still try to count myself among beautiful people, or something nice like that....

For now, I’ll take a box of Kleenex and cry my heart out in a small corner of the universe until the pain bleeds away and I can return to a non-superficial, non-silly, and lovely world of abstraction.

Love,

Annette

P.S. Yes, I am okay. A little hurt right at this moment, but I'll be fine. I'm stronger than this.

Conferencing

Hello, hello!

How quickly life enters a whirlwind state!
That, or I have become incredibly lazy this summer. Certainly, relative to the school year, Northfield has become more of a sleepy rural town- in the correct way. Evenings pass by with a strange sense of leisure and rapidity, as though processing time has slowed down. It is a bit amusing that by 7pm the day feels largely over, whereas during the school year that would give me at least five to six more hours of ideal work time- essentially an entire work day!

But even despite this newfound slothery and small-town sleepiness, the level of excitement in my life took a sharp rise in recent days. This is due almost exclusively to the MU3C Conference I attended at the beginning of the week. (MU3C = Midwest Undergraduate Computational Chemistry Consortium). My relatively slow-paced workdays of reading papers, learning Fortran, and trying to get a handle on how things worked hastened considerably as the conference approached. I learned how to smoothly submit jobs for computation, worked on developing my talk for the conference, practiced said talk way too many times, learned how to lift data (not difficult, but it's amazing how things can get mysteriously screwed up...), learned how to use gnuplot (in retrospect, way better than Excel!), struggled to get a sufficiently good grasp of Ewald summation to be able to explain it to a room of people, and frantically gathered preliminary results to demonstrate to others that we (my research partner and I) are not fully incompetent and have actually achieved something during the last five weeks.s.

Consequently, the past week and weekend  were a little crazy and stressful, and the size of my to-do list was, at a point, rather alarmingly disproportionate with the time available for the completion of its items... but it all worked out just great.

The conference itself was very...chill. I would estimate (I am terrible at such estimations) there were 30ish people in attendance? Talks were given by undergrads presenting their research, and also from faculty members (mostly from University of Minnesota, our sponsoring institution), we got a nice tour of the University's Supercomputing Institute (which I know was impressive, but my ignorance impedes me from knowing just how impressed I should be. I suspect I should be pretty darn impressed though), talked to current grad students about computational chemistry at the U, and lunched and dined with fellow conference members. I was happy to be able to meet other students doing work similar to my own, and on the other hand, it was interesting to see how we all had different skill sets. Some people were using quantum mechanical methods, others molecular dynamics (which uses classical mechanics), and others (such as myself) Monte Carlo techniques (which are awesome and use random numbers to run everything!), in addition to a variety of unique systems being studied-- from collisions between CO2 and H, the chemical pathways involved in acid rain, the study of a protein key to a virus analogous to HIV, CO2 separation and sequestration, astrochemistry, and more. Exciting stuff. As for my own talk, in case you were wondering, it went much better than I would have hoped! I was fortunate enough to receive very kind compliments, and it was gratifying to know that my professor was proud of the work we had done. :D Huzzah!

Now I am afraid I must prepare for a new work day. The day promises to be demanding... Dani (my prof) is a strong advocate of the immersive method of education. To translate, it means she enjoys pushing us into the water and leaving us to figure out how to swim... while she stands in the sidelines and glances over every now and then to make sure we don't drown. Terrifying? A little. But surprisingly effective.

So au revoir for now, dear Reader. At some point I must sit down and compose something that is actually interesting and thought-provoking, but I felt it was necessary to explain the cause of my extended absence.

до свидания!     

Enter that Lovely Maiden, Beauty

Hello Reader-Dearest!

The summer is now well underway.

I am now a competent Fortran-er and somewhat literate in the zeolite world.
Wait, now that I think of it, I don't think I ever mentioned what specifically I am researching this summer. Well... as specifically as it gets.

A model of  LTA, one of the zeolites
we shall be focusing on this summer. 

I am working on simulations of these lovely aluminosilicate minerals called zeolites. "Zeolite" is a fairly broad category. There are a number of different crystalline structures and zeolites can have different chemical compositions, but we're mostly dealing with silicon, oxygen, and aluminum. The cool thing is, their microporous nature makes them good molecular sieves. In particular, zeolites have been found to selectively adsorb carbon dioxide over nitrogen, hydrogen, methane, and other gases. This makes zeolites very promising materials for a number of processes, most notably carbon dioxide separation and sequestration. In the past, my professor and her students have studied pure silica zeolites (well, Si and O actually, but the key point is no aluminum) with varying structural properties, so as to examine the importance of pore structure to selective CO2 adsorption. This summer, we are going to start working on introducing aluminum into the mixture.

A structural model of MFI, another cool zeolite.

As for my own contribution... well, I only just received "the code" on Wednesday... and was immediately utterly lost in the dense network of files and the endless sea of Fortran lines contained therein. Yesterday I managed to calm some of that despair and anxiety so as to make fair progress in getting a better idea of how things fit together, but there is a very, very long way to go. However, I did submit my first few runs today! Yay! Look for more updates in the future!

I must say that, overall, I have been rather pleased with the path my summer has taken. I think I may say that I have successfully rekindled my devotion to the fair goddess, Beauty.

I cannot assure you of the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, benevolent God, but I can attest to the presence of this lovely maiden. I have caught glimpses of her darting swiftly between trees, and placing blossoms in flowing hair strewn over sun-kissed prairie grass; I have seen her floating serenely on the river and heard her joining in on birdsong whilst I make my way through the arboretum. I have heard her at turns laughing at me and soothing me with her song as I feebly attempt to coax music from the keys of a piano. I have seen her hand in gorgeous sunsets and clear blue skies, in giant dandelions, and in graceful, swooping little birds. I have yet to see it myself, but I have heard that she has even taken some of her beauty and placed it within tiny creatures, that they may bring light to the summer sky even when she has gone to her slumber or joined her sisters in distant lands for merrymaking.

Yes, piano adventures and arb runs have made it a lovely, beautiful summer indeed. The arb runs are unfailingly splendid- the piano, less so. But I think I have fallen in love with it nonetheless. I cringe whenever I play a false key, and I feel terribly embarrassed when I stumble over pieces like the too-familiar "Jingle Bells," but my soul begins to thrill when a piece which initially sent a series of winces shuddering through me comes together to resemble something which I may call music. Granted I can only play short and very simple pieces, but I am easily enraptured by the lovely sounds which that instrument is capable of producing when properly encouraged to do so. All in all, I am pleased with the progress I have made in two weeks of playing for about an hour a day, and I am very excited for the next seven weeks! I dare not strive for beauty, for something deep and soul-striking, but I do hope that by the end of it I can play something which may be rightly termed lovely. Nothing crazy or complicated, but still charming.

In addition to the beauty of piano and the natural wonders surrounding Carleton, I have found great pleasure in the social benefits of a Carleton summer. It is wonderful to be at Carleton, to be learning new things and challenging myself intellectually on a daily basis, and to still have time for casual hour-long chats with new acquaintances, for skype sessions with old friends, for cooking adventures, for Sayles slumber parties, for movie-watching, and for pioneering a summer social dance club. I have great hopes for this Summer Social Dance Club (hereafter to be referred to as SSDC), despite what appear to be administrative attempts to crush it. Well, not exactly. But it is very frustrating that the school insists on shutting down all of the buildings after work hours. Nonetheless, this week was very successful in bringing together new and old social dancers, and I now feel like I have dance children to teach and tend to and befriend this summer. It is very exciting! Hopefully logistics will not prove disastrous... but I have high hopes. I look forward to making friends with these new people and hopefully incorporating them into social dance culture!

In short, summer is lovely and sweet. I have been reminded that life has great potential for beauty, if I only toil faithfully to seek her out. She is a shy creature, and must be treated tenderly, but she is sweet and devoted if you patiently cultivate her friendship. I do hope that we may become fast friends.

Happy Summer, dear ones!   

Hailing the Summer

Greetings, fair Reader!

The summer adventures have begun.

 After a brief, happy sojourn home, I find myself back at school for exciting chemistry research adventures. I have finally more or less settled back into my room, with a new roommate and a new set of challenges to conquer. Exciting!

My research adventures started yesterday, and it rapidly became evident that I definitely have my work cut out for me in the next ten weeks...
I have already gotten a tiny bit deeper into Unix, discovered and explored Emacs, and am expected to gain working knowledge of Fortran by the end of the week, since that is the programming language I shall be working in. So in the last two days I have gone through about 160 pages of Fortran.... only 200ish to go! Woo!
Oh, and let's not forget the 100+ pages of reading that I copied for myself today....
It seems quite daunting, but I am rather excited, to be honest. A lot of work means a lot of learning... and I feel like the amount of learning I will be doing will be slightly ridiculous. In a good way.

But I do love that my nerdiness is increasing significantly. I think I may have to start gaming. Or go crazy and convert to Linux. Somehow or another I need to affirm my transition into this particular realm of nerdom.
In my mind, female computer sciencey nerds have a nice edge of badassery, and while skipping through my Fortran book, I like to think to myself- yeah... yeah, I could do that. I could be a cool nerd-girl. I could totally do that!
...But then I realize that my carefully penned notes, general tidiness and prim&proper-ness do seem to disqualify me from playing the role of badass nerd girl.
But hey, that doesn't have to stop me from feeling super cool about coding, does it?

I don't know why I am so enchanted by coding. Maybe because I have been woefully ignorant of how it all works. Computers and programming seem to be shrouded in some sort of magical veil. In some way, computers seem to grasp at the magic of life- quite literally.
Computers stand at the border between physical reality and the wonderful world of abstraction. They translate between the "real" world and the world of ideas. They partake in the mystery of Meaning.
Magic, I say!

I have set about reading I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. He is, quite simply, fantastic. The knowledge that he is at Indiana University seriously tempts me to delve into Cognitive Science and ambitiously strive to end up in his lab, because it could only be absolutely awesome. But I digress.
The book builds upon ideas Hofstadter introduced in Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB), but focuses on the concept of I, or the self. Consciousness. That slippery thing!

To my extreme delight, I Am a Strange Loop has succeeded in weaving together essential philosophical questions with cognitive science, basic neuroscience, logic/mathematics, and computer science. (It's amazing how he manages to meld together so many topics and questions I delight in!)
He plays with questions like: What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be me?  What does it mean to know? What is consciousness? How might consciousness arise? How can something have meaning?

I think that, through GEB, Hofstadter really got me to appreciate the idea that structure is the key to meaning. Structure... ah, how magical!
I do not think I am yet ready to write out my thoughts on the subject... my thoughts are still hazy and unorganized, but the picture is slowly starting to come together. I just have unstructured words to throw at you.
Words like logic, and structure, and thinking, and meaning, and language, and binary, and beauty.
Wonderful, magical words!

But I should stop my incoherent rambling on Hofstadter's books for the time being.

The days seem to be virtually endless. There is an amazing fifteen-and-a-half hours between sunrise and sunset!
By 7am it is bright and sunny, and the world beckons me to be out of bed.
Thankfully, I obliged the world today. I went for a walk-jog in the arb, and it was a wonderful, wonderful decision. The morning light was gold-like and happy, the plant-life was gorgeous, and a little creek which I found along my path convinced me that I was part of an enchanted world. It was absolutely lovely.

I am not sure what exactly I want to achieve during these bright summer days, but I know that I want to partake in a curious mixture of gentle loveliness and nerd-girl awesomeness. I want to go for daily walk-runs, I want to improve my flexibility, I want to attempt a plunge into the world of music by making an acquaintance with the piano.... I think mostly I want to realize that I really do have a certain degree of control over my life. It is the sort of truth that lurks dangerously in the background. Dangerously, because it is so obvious it seems to evade belief.

I have spent a lot of time feeling small and incapable and boring... and done nothing about it.
But, ha! That is not how the game is played, World! Nice try, but I've finally caught on to your trickery.
The game is played by soaking in programming languages. By having the courage to try to learn piano. By having the discipline to wake up in the morning and greet a beautiful day. The game is played by realizing that you want to do something worthwhile... and then taking a step in that direction.
It's so terrifying, but so wonderful and liberating!

I may get lost in the arb, or fail miserably at piano, or cook the worst meals ever produced on the face of the earth, or feel utterly lost in the world of chemistry. The chances are pretty high that all of these things will happen within the next few weeks. But I have a suspicion that with a bit of time and a lot of work, it's going to be okay.

Maybe there's still hope for badassery. Hmm. Can I be both lovely and badass?
Well... I do love a good paradox.

On The Midpoint

Well, the second year has come to an end.

I remember old middle school days, when I felt safely sheltered from adulthood and "growing up" by the endless high school years before me... and now college is half-past.
It is a bit surreal.
The passing of time seems to have a very strange quality to it. The years seem to fly swiftly by on fairy's wings, and yet days and weeks can drag by in an impressive manner.

In the midst of this strange passing of time, I find it difficult to assess my growth. Surely I change in subtle ways between moments, days, weeks, months, years... But the gradualness of the process makes me incapable of detecting the difference.
I am reminded of when I first learned calculus. The concept of the integral made the tricky concept of life clearer to me: it is the accumulation of changes that occur on infinitesimal time scales. Decisions made from instant to instant appear so incredibly trivial and inconsequential, but the summation of the values of those instants make up a life. Magical.
It is fitting that the integral encapsulates the great, elusive concept of infinity. How do we ever reach the infinitesimal? How do we ever progress? When and where do we capture the fleeting Now? How is it that the minutes and days and years slip by?
The mysteries of life and metaphysics seem to me to be intertwined with the wonder of infinity. It is lovely.

Yet somehow the time does slip by. Somehow "life" does get accumulated between duration-less Nows. And somehow or another, I do make small bits of progress.

As the term approached its end, I came to realize that I have learned things during my time at Carleton. Shocking, right? It is the sort of thing one hopes will happen, but it is wonderful when you realize it is actually true.
There are the little things- like realizing that my knowledge of the Greek alphabet has expanded tremendously since my old high school days, where alpha and beta and pi and theta were funky things that you used in math every once in a while. By the end of Set Theory and Computational chemistry, Greek letters were being carelessly spattered all over my work. When did gamma and phi and psi and epsilon and sigma and lambda (etc etc) become a natural resource to tap into?

Additionally, I have come to realize that tossing myself into reckless situations can be a good thing.
(To clarify, "reckless" in this context refers purely to academic recklessness. Reckless, indeed...)
For the first time in my life, I had the experience of sitting in a classroom where the teacher could very well have been speaking another language, because I certainly was not understanding what she was saying. She was speaking other languages- the languages of quantum chemistry, kinetics, thermochemistry... Languages of which I only knew a few basic words. I was a tourist in a foreign country hoping to rely on words like "food" and "bathroom" for survival.
But I still remember the moment where I re-read a textbook excerpt that was being assigned for about the 4th time. And that time- I UNDERSTOOD what they were saying. Between re-readings and nearly impenetrable lectures and frustrated struggles with foreign words and concepts... the pieces eventually came together. It was a glorious realization- and it would not have been possible if I had not taken the risk of utter failure. And I shall admit, for a while there I was rather concerned.
But there is something wonderful about going in scared and mostly lost, with only a bedraggled roadmap for company, and to slowly gain your footing to ultimately emerge triumphant.
I can now tell you a story about quantum chemistry, I can model a baby protein for you, I can perform ab initio calculations and tell you a bit about a chemical system of interest- I can do quite a few things I simply could not have done ten weeks ago.

There is also the world of dance. Two years ago, I probably would have laughed and blushed with embarrassment if you were to suggest that I would find myself waltzing freely with others in a couple of months. "Ballroom dancing" was something magical, wonderful, and fundamentally unattainable to those not blessed with extraordinary grace. Admittedly, I have yet to achieve a satisfactory level of mastery, let alone claim beauty in my dancing (alas, I have not been suddenly gifted with heaps of gracefulness), but I have managed to learn a great deal during the last two years. Waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, east coast swing, west coast swing, tango, cha, rumba, samba... even some mambo and hustle and nightclub two-step... Two years ago I knew nothing, and in a few months I will have the privilege of introducing social dance to a new generation of future social dance lovers! It is terribly exciting.

I think that my understanding of things has also become more complex and subtle. Two years ago, I would probably have agreed with the somewhat vague statement that science is true. My understanding of models and scientific progress was limited. I was a naive empiricist.
I may still be a bit of an empiricist, but my appreciation for models has increased tremendously. I now value the utility of a good approximation and I understand the importance of knowing the limits within which a model can operate. I realize that there are ways in which our scientific knowledge is solidly grounded, and yet that there are more fundamental ways in which the scientific quest is deeply vulnerable to skeptic probing.

To focus on this spring, I think I can be proud of my accomplishments this term. Computational chemistry and set theory were both challenging and intimidating, but immensely rewarding. I did not expect computational chemistry to allow me to peer into the beauties of linear algebra. I remember the moment of wonder when I realized what my professor was explaining about vibrational modes- you want to understand how molecules move? Break down the motions in terms of an orthogonal basis set which will span the entire space of their motion, and now you can describe any movement your heart desires. Bam! Amazing.
I did not really expect myself to ever come to peace with quantum, but we managed to end on amicable terms. And set theory... ah, how to describe the beauty of realizing that you have built an entire world out of nothing? Or the beauty of the natural numbers, like infinite Russian dolls? Or the sheer wonder of successive limit ordinals, like dense black holes?

All in all, I am fairly proud of myself.
I do not think I have been able to say that in a very long time- I do not remember when. But I succeeded in achieving my goals for this term. No, I don't have a perfectly-filled goals chart- there are certainly a number of gaps. More importantly, I succeeded in fulfilling the aspirations underlying the carefully penned goals on my chart.

Three months ago, I was terrified: I really believed that this term was going to be painful, stressful, confidence-destroying, and unbearably lonely.
It has been painful. It has been stressful. I have been less-than-fully-confident at times. I have been lonely. These things are true. But they represent a small minority of my experiences.

I feared that I would have no great friendships during my time at Carleton, but I no longer have that fear. I have grown closer to a number of wonderful people, and planted seeds which I know shall flourish in the upcoming years.

I feared that I would sink into a pathetic fit of loneliness and moping. But I have realized that I am stronger than I believed. I do not have to fall apart when I am alone. Granted, on almost any occasion I would rather be joined by loved ones, but if I must stand alone, I can and I will.

Ironically, it has been one of my most enjoyable and fulfilling terms at Carleton.

I am still filled with fears and insecurities and doubts on a number of points. I still do not know what I shall "do" with my life. I do not know what exactly that mysterious thing called love has in store for me. I do not know what friendships shall blossom, what pains shall be suffered, what life lessons shall be gathered, nor if I shall ever attain beauty in my dancing.
But I am proud of what I have accomplished and excited for the adventures that are in store.

There is hope!
And for now, that's all I ask for.

Here's to the midpoint of my Carleton career. Huzzah!

A Portrait of the Artist- Of Sorts.

I am less than tall,
With dark, unruly curls,
Skin that burns not too easily
And eyes of mixed-color whorls.

I live in jeans-
Except when I move into dresses.
I love the golden hour:
Bare shoulders, wild tresses.

I like chocolate chip cookies
And pink lemonade.
My fingernails are long and squared-
They are not painted.

My ears are awkward.
My nose is strangely shaped.
My complexion does not conform
To the accepted topological range.

My favorite pain
Is that of a laughing stomach.
I have two tongues.
Most say I have one sister.
(They know only how to count in blood).

I am afraid of answering the phone.
I am afraid of scraping my knees.
I am afraid of spiders, beetles, bees-
Of far too many things.

I want to befriend a flower,
I want to scatter dandelion seeds.
I want to linger in a tree-
Someday.

I build castles in the air.
I get lost within my head.
My childhood is scattered
Among the books that I have read.

I am sentimental.
But I prize rationality.
I am romantic.
And I lack practicality.

I can tell you about
Ascending orders of infinity.
I can charm you with paradox,
I can enchant you with irony.

My friends are few.
They are beloved.

I read marriage

As souls intertwining.

My mind is filled with wherefores
And punctuated with question marks.

I think--

I love him.

I write long letters.
I do not tell great stories.
I want to be a good mother.
I hope to be lovely.

Reader, Meet My Letter Box

Greetings, dear Reader!

It is midterm break and I am being very foolish. The prudent thing to do right now would be to go to bed... but I shall be a rebel and stay up a while longer. Ah, the luxury of having a day off!

It has been a while since I wrote a nerdy blog post, and I suspect there may be something on the wonder of natural numbers coming up soon. (I do love the natural numbers. They are so very beautiful...!)

Yay! Spring Dreams!

But that is not why I am here now.
I am here because of a burst of inspiration to briefly share some personal treasures. I snapped a few pictures of some of my trinkets- my sparrow necklace, my letter box, my wall of love, my Latin shoes, my bookshelves, and my Spring Dreams chart- which is now at the halfway point!

It is interesting that I do not seem to have very many trinkets… not exactly. But my wall of love and my letter box hold a downright treasure trove. And I really enjoy my bookshelves. Old favorite books, academic books, my writing box, a cute teacup, my bow-bedecked pinecone, the Rubik’s cube… many little wonders fill its shelves :] 

But for now I shall focus on the letters and notes and tokens of love which most brighten my days, noting before I begin that a curious and courageous reader is encouraged to inquire further into the objects introduced here.

The "wall of love"

They may not look like much, but these little mementos mean a great deal to me, and I am rather proud of my small badges of love. I want people to “see” the people that I love- the cute and clever notes from Dylan, the sincere and whimsical letters from Brynna, handmade cards from my sea-star, short and sweet notes of appreciation from Tristan, cards which once accompanied Friday flowers, postcards from friendly travelers and well-wishing friends, dried flowers (a perfectly-tinted rose from Dylan and mini-roses for my sister), an eerily well-timed post-it note found in a bathroom stall, gorgeous drawings and happy notes from Becca… It is the best thing in the world to have a wall adorned with love, and mornings are made happy by glancing up at the beautiful wall by my side.

And then there are the wonderful items stored away in the letter box. Old love letters, sketches drawn on a whim with friends, wrinkled and torn sheets recording old memories, newspaper clippings detailing my epic room draw victory last year, the absolutely ridiculous product description from the back of a package of trail mix, programs from plays once performed in, pieces of paper filled with strange math things- including a particular sheet whose corner I almost ingested to prevent prying eyes from reaching it (however, that failed, and the very wrinkled corner in question was subsequently re-taped), and a host of other cherished tokens fill this box of wonders. Each note, letter, random sheet of paper, or miscellaneous object brings me back to a time and place of happiness, be it of the somber-and-serious or playful-and-ridiculous kind.

A peak into the letter box

Each object also makes a bit more tangible the connection I have to the people I love. I think that may be why I treasure these things so greatly- and why my letters and notes tend to be so infamously lengthy. I may not have very many friends, but the ones I do have I care greatly for, and the exchange of words allows me to let them know it. My hope is that, someday, when the ones I care for find themselves lonely or frightened or unsure of themselves, my notes may do the job they were intended to perform. I hope that my friends will be able to gather the words given to them with sincerity and affection, and to see that they are amazing, accomplished creatures deserving of (and in possession of) love. I know that their kind words and the records I have kept of old happy times spent in their company have certainly brightened my spirits on a number of occasions.

So, my dear Reader, know that your kindness, your smiles, and your words are remembered and cherished. Know that somewhere, someone who loves you carries those gifts you have given them in their own treasure chest.

Goodness, isn't that beautiful?

At any rate, I think so.