Super Simple Action Plan

For information on tracking, you can find SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one.
SOPA is currently in committee, which means it could still be tabled and killed for good, or could pass. PIPA has just passed committee, and is up for vote in the Senate on January 24.

Help kill these bills. Email your senators, look up their contact information on senate.gov.
Take another step, and email your representatives,look up their contact information on writerep.house.gov.

The emails I've sent have gone something like this:

I'm writing to you about SOPA and PIPA.

As a student, I'm an avid consumer and user of the Internet, and I oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act in their current forms. I know it's important to protect copyrighted material online, but these bills are flawed.

Congress should focus not just on the goal of protecting copyright owners, but also on protecting the speech rights of consumers, like me, who are reading and producing wholly non-infringing content.

Please set aside these bills in their entirety or reformulate them to protect my rights.

Thank you for your time.

By the way, if you're in Connecticut, like me, both of your senators are currently sponsoring PIPA. Go do something to change that.

Blog Rambling

It's not really smiled upon to butt into random conversations with fun facts, but lucky for me, it's totally acceptable to post random fun facts on a blog.

Today, I overheard someone say "A tumblr is an online blog," which made me cringe slightly, like when I hear "ATM machine."

Firstly, a tumblr is not a blog, unless you write your own blurbs or take your own pictures. By definition, a blog contain's the writer's, or group of writers', thoughts, experiences, collected information, etc. If it's all someone else's work, and not original, I wouldn't call it a blog. Though, I suppose if you collected a theme  and put in effort to keep things in that theme, it may be technically "collected information" or something.

Anyway.

"Online blog" is redundant. The word "blog" is short for "web log," or a log on the web. If it's not online, it's just a log.

Weblog. Isn't that cute?

It may not always be so; and I say

It may not always be so; and I say
That if your lips, which I have loved, should touch
Another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
His heart, as mine in time not far away;
If on another's face your sweet hair lay
In such a silence as I know, or such
Great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
Stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

If this should be, I say if this should be --
You of my heart, send me a little word;
That I may go to him, and take his hands,
Saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then I shall turn my face, and hear one bird
Sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

I stumbled on this poem by ee cummings. This strikes me as so sad and beautiful that I just wanted to tack it up here. 

Be Italian

She's spewing something about my heritage. How I don't know it and don't appreciate what she went through. How I don't know anything about her. I don't point out that she asked me what my middle name was this morning, which I figure is something a grandmother should know, so admittedly, I'm indifferent to learning anything I should know about her. She rambles on about how her grand-kids should know her story to carry it on, about her 17 cousins and nephews and nieces and so on, none of whom I've ever heard of before.

As she babbles hysterically, I just stare, a tad accusingly. And all I can think is "Gee. It would've been really nice to know some of this in third grade, and not get a check minus on that family tree project."

Deserving

"You deserve better than that," they say together. And they seem to mean it, staring intently at me, "You don't deserve anything they put you through." I stutter a bit, trying to come up with a nice way of explaining this that won't lose me my friends, or at least, that won't stop the tangled hug keeping me warm. It's interesting to me that I can pass as a normal, deserving person.

They don't see what I see, what's so glaringly obvious just beneath the skin. I'm a bad person. There, I've said it. Shame on me for nearly thinking differently. Shame on me. I thought maybe today, I was good. I thought singing at the retirement home was good, but I just fooled them too. I got my reminder before I forgot.

My phone lit up. Glancing down and flipping through the unread messages, there's a new text. "Look in a mirror," it advises, "You manipulate and control people for attention," and then goes on to explain that I'm self centered, I've alienated every friend I had, and of course, that they hate me too.

I look up, still smiling, and click the phone off. That's a skill I've mastered. To keep smiling. Even when it hurts enough that you want to fall to your knees and beg them to stop hurting you. Please. But that's a privilege reserved for people who were wronged. Still smiling. That smile bothers me. There's something so wrong about it. There's something so wrong about all of it.

It's not that I don't deserve it. I must, mustn't I? Or maybe I've just gotten used to it.

Patchwork Mind

Brooding, I tangle my fingers in my hair as I stare at the blinking cursor, and fiddle with the latch above my ear. Out of habit, I press the catch, and my head falls open with a pop. I drift over the familiar ridges of my mind, the bits I know so well of myself.

Absentmindedly, I play with the stitches I put in long ago, in a chunky, uneven line. I've gotten used to the thread there, how I fixed myself to be. I prefer it that way.

I pull gently on a loose end, and it gives. Caught by surprise, I keep pulling, letting them all unravel. Pain tears through my head as the last thread pulls out. Horrifyingly, it hasn't healed, just as ugly as I remembered. I grasp at the kinked and crusted thread, hiding it in my hands, and shove it deep into my pocket. Quickly, I latch my head shut again, and try to pretend nothing happened.

Stories

These are their stories. They carry around their quills, still dripping with ink, as they share and write over and over again. Together, their fingertips are ink-stained in the same colors of shared memories.  I wrote stories too, before, stories to share and tell, but they're sealed up in the leather bound books of others, on shelves far away.

The stories of now have been written here, a setting novel to me. I can read them as many times as I want,  rub my fingers on the pages, but the ink has long dried.

Wish Upon a Star

Walking back from the theater, I balance on the curb, teetering gently to either side. The darkness is young, exploring the world with quiet fingers. Dusky charcoal dusts the sky, blending out to the edges of the world.

The slivered moon shyly peeks out from behind the blackened branches of a bare tree. Elsewhere in the sky, there's a single star with the same whispered glow. I grab it quickly, and close my eyes. Wobbling on my toes, I keep walking, one foot in front of the other on the narrow asphalt. I wish on the breath that leaves my mouth in soft wisps of white.

A misstep, and I stumble off. Opening my eyes again, I glance upward at my wishing star, but it's missing. The sky is black now, even the slivered moon has hidden behind the thicker branches.

I can't help thinking I used it up. I walk inside under guilt and an empty sky.

Thanksgiving

I'm happy. It feels amazing to say that.

I'm thankful. For happiness. For my family. For friends who let me drool blood on them and check on me when I'm drugged and silly. For romance. For writing. For you, dear reader. For love. For everything.

Wisdom Teeth

I promised myself I'd blog once more before the surgery.

Honestly, my secret is that I'm not scared of the knife or the needle. I'm unnerved by the recovery, yes, but it seems manageable. My fear is born mainly of the lack of consciousness.

How precious and intricate our thoughts are, perfectly balanced chemicals in perfect ratios to give us all that we think and do. Everything I'm thinking now, everything that lets me write this to you, is so tiny and perfect, a billion tiny reactions in my mind. So what happens when that gets messed with?

I'm scared of turning off those synapses. I'm scared of being completely gone. I'm scared of realizing that turning my mind off means it's utterly off, and there's nothing I'll remember, aside from a gaping black where I should be alive. I'm scared I'll never come back from that gaping oblivion. I'm scared my thoughts won't line up again. On the smallest level, I'm scared I won't be exactly the same person, though realistically knowing every moment we live changes those thoughts and reactions, and we're never perfectly the same person we were moments ago.

Ridiculous, that all sounds ridiculous, and I know I'm wrong, and I'm sure I'll be fine. Fear is a rather irrational creature.