Dance dance

You know when you have something that makes you irrationally happy and you can't help but smile?  For me, right now, it's the song "Tonight, Tonight" by Hot Chelle Rae.  I really don't know what it is, but it's completely infectious and upbeat and I LOVE it.  It's really hard to keep from dancing when I listen to it.  Not that I restrain myself all that often, but when I'm out for a walk and it comes up on my iPod it's ridiculously difficult to keep myself from dancing down the street.

Some songs are just awesome to dance to in that I-in-no-way-care-what-I-look-like fashion.  I've decided that my top three are:
     Tonight Tonight - Hot Chelle Rae
     Bad Moon Rising - CCR
     Invisible Touch - Genesis

Now you can berate my taste in music all you like* but these songs are awesome and I frequently dance around my apartment like a lunatic when they come on.



*Just last night I had to defend liking Nickleback.  Have you ever listened to their b-sides?  Because they are all legitimate rock and are NOTHING like the singles the put out.  It's good stuff, you should give it a shot.

So annoyed. And so sleepy.

I officially have a new #1 on my Things I Hate list:  car alarms.

I do not know what the deal is, but for the last month there have been car alarms going of in the middle of the night about three times a week.  It is HORRIBLE.  There are two cars that keep doing it.  One just emits a piercing intermittent shriek, but the other lets of a series of ever-more infuriating noises and then pauses just long enough for you to think the owner has finally turned it off before starting the cycle all over again.  It's a mystery to me why these things keep going off unless some hooligan* is doing it for fun since they are obviously NOT being stolen given that they are screeching away two nights later.

So, theoretically, I know what car alarms are for, but do they serve any actual purpose?  I have never in my life heard a car alarm go off and then people jump up to go make sure it isn't being stolen.  It seems like they usually get tripped when someone bumps into the car or a motorcycle goes past or you accidentally hit the panic button on your keychain remote.  And BECAUSE that's why they usually go off, no one ever pays attention to them anymore.  I know my first thought isn't ever, "Uh oh, that car's being stolen!"  It's usually more along the lines of intense irritation that someone made a mistake and now I'm going to have a headache all day.

I don't even know if my car has an alarm on it.  I suppose it probably does, but it's never been set off.  Which is good because if it did, I'd probably be inclined to get it removed and that would cost money and I've already sunk enough cash into that vehicle this month.

Basically, I don't really think there's a point to car alarms anymore.  Granted, that's mostly because I'm dying for a night of uninterrupted sleep** but I'm going to go with this is an excellent idea.  No more alarms on cars!  Let's have a rally!  Please?

I'm so sleep-deprived . . .  snaetoiaetnkadghw4t nkjwe.l;kkga



*There is a pack of kids who roam my street and one of the hilarious antics they get up to is pulling the fire alarm for my building so that a migraine-inducing tone goes off until the landlord comes over to turn it off.  I can only hope we never ACTUALLY have a fire because I've never seen any sort of an emergency response apart from irate figures storming out of their apartments to hurl expletives at fleeing children.

**Apart from car alarms, there are also babies and dogs in my neighborhood to provide late night entertainment should the alarms be slacking for a night.  Usually I can sleep through those though; the car alarms ALWAYS wake me up.  Although I suppose that's the point.

Halloween horror

It's getting close to Halloween; that amazing holiday where you get to wear a costume and gorge yourself on candy.  Basically, it's a kid's dream come true.  I can remember back when I was really little, I loved it.  My mom always made the costumes for me and my brother and sister and they were always amazing:  Rainbow Brite, a dinosaur, a skunk, a spider, Ninja Turtles, fairies, Dorothy . . . You name it, she could make it.

But somewhere along the way, way too early, Halloween stopped being fun for me.  I guess around age 10, I developed this massive anxiety about having to pick what I was going to be for Halloween.  I don't really know why.  Sure, it only came around once a year so you wanted to pick something good, but it got to the point where I couldn't pick ANYTHING.  I know it had to be frustrating for my mom since she had three costumes to make and my indecision wasn't making life any easier, but I started to hate Halloween.  I remember one year I was huddled in my closet, crying, an hour before everyone was supposed to show up for our Halloween party because I didn't know what I wanted to be and I knew there wasn't any time to make me a costume anyway.* It was horrible.

This decision paralysis ended up leading to a lot of costumes for me that were along the lines of "a boy."  Stuff that could be thrown together at the last minute but that I was never really happy with.  The gleaming exception here is the year I went as "an accident-prone kid."**  The moms loved it and I got TONS of candy.

But I still don't know why I got so uptight about Halloween when I was a kid.  The entire holiday is just about having fun (or now it is anyway).  I quit trick-or-treating whenever my sister did, so I guess I was 12.  I just wanted to stay home and eat candy without having to dress up to get it.  And I haven't dressed up for a single Halloween since then.

And the thing is, I want to.  Come on, how fun is it to put on some ridiculous or scary outfit that you'd never normally wear?  But I could still never think of what to be.  (Plus I would have had to go hunt down a costume party, but it's not like that would have been hard if I tried at all.)  Now I feel like there's this additional pressure to not only have a good costume, but one that's clever too.  Although that's probably just because the costumes I'm most impressed with are the ones that're clever or have some kind of a twist to them.

This year I'm breaking that streak of not dressing up!  And I'm pretty excited about it.  I thought of a costume that was moderately clever, but then a bunch of my friends decided to get together as an ensemble and I'm jumping in with them on that.  I feel like I'm reclaiming those years I wasted as a kid stressing out about what I was going to be when I should have just picked something and focused on having fun.  Isn't that really what Halloween's about?  Well, that and giving kids a three day sugar-high.

Sometimes I just need to tell myself to relax.  I'm going to party with my friends over the weekend and buy myself some candy to eat while watching something (moderately) scary on Halloween night.  That sounds like an excellent plan to me.  And I didn't even cry in the closet, I'm such a big girl.



*I ended up being wedged into an old costume of my brother's (a spider with a bowtie).

** Easiest costume ever:  Put your arm in a sling, black out your two front teeth with a Reese's wrapper, and use face paint to add a black eye and some stitches.

The simple things

Do you ever get struck by something really simple that you encounter every day, but for some reason seems miraculous all of a sudden?

Like when you're really thirsty and when you finally get a drink, water is the most delicious thing you've ever tasted . . .

. . . Or when you're cold and then first blast of hot air from the car heater hits you and makes you shiver all over . . .

. . . Or feeling clean and fresh after you've taken a shower . . .

. . . Or the smell of apples when you walk through the produce section at the grocery . . .

. . . Or when you realize there isn't any background noise and you revel in the silence that's so rare when you live in a big city . . .

Sometimes it just hits me that it really is the simple things in life.

Being the best "you"

Have you ever sat and thought about when you became self-aware?  It's obviously not something we're born with, otherwise kids wouldn't be so cruelly honest.  And really, it's probably more of a gradual transition as we see traits in others that we don't like and start comparing them to ourselves.  But sometimes you have an epiphany moment; at least, I did.

In 7th grade (around age 12) there was a boy in my class who was a complete know-it-all.  He was new and essentially thought he was smarter than everyone which really annoyed me and a lot of the other kids in my class.  As the year went on he quit trying so hard to impress everyone and we became friends.  At some point during that year he asked me, "Would you be your friend?"  Meaning, if there was an identical copy of you, same personality, habits, manners and everything, would you be their friend.  I, of course, immediately snapped "Yes" but then I started to wonder.

Would I really be my friend?  And I started to take stock of who I was.  Looking at yourself objectively can be incredibly difficult, especially when you're a kid but I did my best.  What I came up with was I was bossy, imperious, had a horrible temper that would go off at the tiniest thing, and was really kind of a bitch.  I realized my answer was "no."  And that realization changed me.  I had never thought about "who I was" before, but I knew I didn't like the person I was being.  So I decided to change.

As it turns out, it is HARD to change behavior patterns that have become ingrained.  Every year I would pick the aspect of my personality or behavior that was the most egregious and I would consciously work on changing or stopping whatever it was until I didn't have to think about it anymore.  Some things took longer than others.  It took three years to get my temper under control and another two to quit cussing.  Some traits seemed to fade away while I was working on a different one.  Which makes sense, I suppose, since I was changing an entire personality and it was all connected.

Eventually, I was satisfied that I was a good person who I would indeed be friends with.  But I'd learned something valuable.  I decided who I am and who I will be.  So I kept looking at myself as I am and how I would like to be.

Throughout high school and into college I was cripplingly shy.  So one year I resolved to say "hi" and smile at every person I walked past that made eye-contact with me.  It sounds like such a little thing, but to me it was daunting and I'd be lying if I said I never cheated and looked at the sidewalk when I saw someone coming.  But I kept at it until it became my default.  I still do it today and it's kind of remarkable how happy some people are just to be seen and recognized as a fellow person.

I feel safe saying that I've conquered my shyness.  I am, at this point, very happy with the person that I've become.  Of course I have flaws, but they're flaws that I can live with.  I hold myself to MY standards for me. I don't expect me to be perfect or to be completely zen when I've had a horrible day.  And I recognize my flaws.  I know when I'm being irrationally angry about something, and often that's enough for me to stop.  Other times I indulge the anger because I think it's good to let emotions out.

One thing that I've decided throughout this journey of becoming the best "me" is that people have different visions of who the perfect "you" is.  And it's wonderful that they want you to fulfill your full potential, but what they are doing is holding you to THEIR standards of what a successful person is.  And that isn't really fair.  People have different opinions about practically everything and if you live to someone else's standards, are you really being the true you?  I truly believe that you can't change other people.  But, sometimes, you can make them want to change themselves.

I'm so grateful to that 12-year-old for not just brushing off some impertinent question from the annoying boy she didn't really like.  But I'm even more grateful to him for asking the question in the first place.  I mostly lost touch with him when we went to college, apart from a brief email exchange a couple of years ago.  He doesn't have any idea he had such a huge impact on my life, but I shudder to think what I would have been like if we had never had that conversation.  Hopefully, I would have figured it out on my own but you never know.  I should really thank him; he's the reason I'm the person who I am today.

Stop being buttheads

As a general rule, I don't bring up the topic of religion that often with people.  I think faith is a personal thing that needs to be respected whether you agree with the other person's point of view or not, but it seems like most people view religion as a black-and-white affair.  I actually really like to talk about religion if people can be reasonable about it because I think it's interesting to hear other view points.  But when you're talking to a Bible-thumping Baptist or a staunch atheist who looks down on you for admitting to any kind of belief, the conversation is considerably less fun.

I, personally, am Roman Catholic and I identify myself that way in spite of not going to church every Sunday, taking birth control, and not actually believing in the transubstantiation.*  Sometimes though, I get the sense that people have a certain pride in identifying themselves as NOT Christian.  The same way I think there's a pride to NOT be American.**  It's like people feel the need to disassociate themselves from groups that have been tarnished by the acts of a vocal minority.

In particular lately, I've been thinking about the Christian protesters who picket funerals of fallen military, known homosexuals, or murdered 9-year-old girls. (That last one they apparently agreed not to do in exchange for air time.  How noble.)  So while I'm expressly talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, I'm also talking about any Christians who are so cruel and non-Christian as to judge and harass any group of people you happen to disagree with.  It makes me sad that these people are giving Christians a bad name.  I suppose the potential is there in any religion (Muslims seem to have a few problem children in the ranks) but because it's MY religion it's especially distressing to me because we are clearly not talking about the same God.

I think part of the problem is that lots of people don't know the history of their religion and that is incredibly important.  (John the Baptist was not a Baptist people, he just went around baptizing.)  Catholicism began with Jesus and Peter became the first pope.  ("Catholic" means "universal."  As in, "one church.")  Then there was The Great Schism and it split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.  Then there was the Protestant Reformation and a BUNCH of Christian denominations split off and continue to do so.  The point is, you need to know where your religion came from and take everything in context.  I mean, a bunch of guys got together and decided after the fact that Jesus was divine (the Council of Niceae) and the Bible was written after the time Jesus was alive and a good number of books written didn't make it into the Bible.  During the Protestant Reformation several books were removed which is why the Catholic bible has more books.  These are all facts that are important to know because it gives you perspective.  Religion was created by man, who is fallible.  To think that religious success is to live according to the letter of the Bible is ridiculous.  Not least because, depending on which Bible you pick up, the exact wording changes.  And you can't count out mistranslations.

The thing is, I don't really care if Jesus was just a guy or if every story in the Bible is fake.  My religion works for me and the things I know don't affect what I believe.  I've taken the basis of what I grew up with, and tweaked it to fit my observations of the world and myself.  I don't think that makes a bad person or any less of a Christian because the Church does it too.  It's easier to see in Catholicism because the history is longer, but it has changed (I don't know enough about Islam and Hillel to comment knowledgeably but I imagine it's similar).  You used to only be able to print the Bible or say the mass in Latin, women had to cover their hair in church, unborn babies went to limbo instead of heaven, etc.  Jesus wasn't born on December 25, the Church just co-opted the date of Saturnalia to rope some pagans into the fold.

The point is, religions change.  All of these people protesting say that the changing world is destroying itself, but really it's just moving along like it always does.  You can't hold onto the past, in your personal life or on a grander scale.  And true, the acceptance of change grinds particularly slowly where religion is concerned, but do you know what happens to religions that don't change with the times?  They become mythology.



*That last one is a pretty big deal doctrine-wise, but when I was little I couldn't help but think that if the bread and wine at church were ACTUALLY turning into Jesus that meant I was a cannibal.  Besides, unless Jesus was made of wafer and alcohol, the taste just didn't add up.  Most Protestants believe communion is a symbol and that works fine for me.

**My parents and two of their friends went on a two-week hiking trip through France and were thoroughly flattered when they were mistaken for being French, English, and Italian at different times.  My dad was the only one singled out as American and they teased him for it.  I've also been advised that when travelling in Europe, Americans should always lie and say they're Canadian.