Shoutout 2.0

This is a shoutout post, inspired by the pretty fracking good Thank You post by Kathryn Cua in Advo (If you go to Central and you have a copy of the Devil's Advocate, read her piece. It's amazing) I think I've made a post like this in the past, but the wonderful, if messy senior year requires more thank yous than ever could fit in one page.

Ahem.

Shoutout to my friend & family, who keep alive and relatively sane on a daily basis with their amazingness, and ability to rock on. Ya'll shall not be named, but you know who you are. You are fantastic, and I would hug you via the Internet if it were a. possible b. not creepy.

Shoutout to Aerobics for providing me with precious svesnah time. Oh svesnah, your coma-inducing naps give me joy every Friday. That, and the opportunity to not do any real exercise in gym. We appreciate your work.

Shoutout to journalism for providing some of the best experiences of my life. Advocate, The Mash, Solstice-all that is related to you, so I must thank you. Without you, senior year wouldn't be a roller-coaster that only went up.

Shoutout to yolo. You may be outdated, but you are the perfect excuse to spend six hours watching How I Met Your Mother instead of say, actually doing my homework.

Shoutout to Divergent for not failing the YA-movie adaptation world with yet another butchered movie that the world would yet again ignore. You give us hope.

Shoutout to The Fault In Our Stars for being itself despite 90% of my friends not liking it. Don't let the haters get you down.

Shoutout to Netflix for, you know, being Netflix.

And lastly,
Shoutout to you, for being cool enough to read this. Also, if you've stuck with this blog since the emotional train wreck of last year, you are either really cool, or a secret stalker. If you're the former, keep rocking on. If you're the latter, hi! Please don't kill me.

Wanting the impossible

Here's the thing about wanting the impossible.
It's not possible right now.
That's why you want it. Because it's not here right now, and waiting for it to happen is never going to work because it simply isn't possible.
You're job then is to make it possible,.
That's what makes it the integral part of like, any great story or life. Because you're fighting the odds to get what you want, which is pretty admirable.
I mean, Harry Potter and Rose Hathaway and even Bella Cullen have one thing in common: The things they want aren't easy to get. Voldemort is impossible to defeat, it's impossible to have a baby vampire, it's impossible to reverse the love of your life back to humanity after becoming (without their will) evil.
It's kind of crazy.
I guess that's why the Spectacular now is going to be such a good movie, but a not-so-great novel (which already exists).
The main character is too scared to dream, so he's obsessed with living in "the spectacular now". It doesn't get better in the end of the novel, but it's still a hell of a novel and I highly recommend it, but the point is that when I heard that the movie's screenplay writers were going to change the ending, I completely agreed.
It's not about loyalty to the story, but about what the reader is gonna get out of it.
If you're going to write a great story (like the Spec Now mostly is), you owe it to your reader that they can take something out of it so that they can move on in their life more confident.

What I've been doing over the summer AKA THE TITS OF LIFE

I have a new philosophy about life.
It's called being derangedly optimistic.
Life isn't going to grab you by the neck and tell you that things get better. Life isn't going to just get better.
You have to make it better.
We all live pretty privileged lives, but we let tragedies drag us down and distract us from our dreams. We forget what it's like to be ourselves.
Honestly, it's a matter of perception.
I don't want to be the type that sees only the bad things, or the type that gets paralyzed if life doesn't 100% thumbs up what I want to do with my life.
Because guess what, life will never do that. Ever.
You have to make your life the way you want it to be, and fight for yourself.
Screw logic and trying to understand everything you do because you won't, ever. Stop convincing yourself that magically you'll get better and life will transform into a wonderful movie-like experience.
It'll get better by itself.
Try being alive for once. Really
Tl;dr Aggressively happy>passively sad
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There's this really funny post on Tumblr that's like about "YOU HAVE TO GRAB LIFE BY ITS TITS and i know its really vulgar, but OMG I AGREE.
SO GO ON AND GRAB THE TITS OF LIFE MY FRIENDS.

A monologue about owning books and other thoughts from moi

It was missing for about two years and then I found out.
Actually, it was sitting on the green, small table next to my dad's couch in the basement, underneath a notebook and another book.
Keep in mind that once, I had been desperately seeking out this book, and then had to settle with the notion that I must have sold it or given it away.
I had no inkling that I would find it.
It reminds me of that line from the Order of the Phoenix movie when Harry looks up at Luna's shoes, her Converse shoes hanging by their laces as put their by bullies, having been lost for quite some time, and then his friend Luna says "Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect."
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That reminds me, I've been rereading the Harry Potter series.
I don't know why really. I decided early September or October last year that I was going to freaking do it, one way or another, and then from there I slowly made the assumption that I would streak through them in the heat of summer. Every time I heard a blasted reference or read an amazing gif analysis on Tumblr, I reminded myself that I was going to read this series no matter what and finally remember everything that I needed to remember about the books that were once so dear to my heart.
They weren't that dear to my heart as much anymore. They were dear to my memory and my childhood, but present (at the time) 16 year old Danah hadn't reread (I "read" the series for the first time in 4th or 5th grade? So everything has been a reread since) any of the books in the series since the very last time she was in Syria, which was right before freshman year. I'd lugged three pound copies of the Deathly Hallows and the Half-blood prince, and risked (and received) a gigantic library fee only a few years earlier for bringing a library copy of the Order of the Phoenix with me.
But I had no bond with them, you know? High school changes you, alot, and you start thinking about other things and reading other things and you lose interest in a series you put alot of stake in.
So I decided to put a stake in them.
I didn't even pick them up purposefully at first. It was mid-July, I had nothing integral to do, and...I knew I should. So I pushed through every book, pushing past through Harry's adolescent years in a matter of days, and tolling through Harry's teenage years.
And boy, they reminded me of my own (still going) ones.
It's really freaking weird.
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So I'm sitting in my bed, with two books I'd never really though I'd read together. One is a relic of my childhood, a book bought the day after its release (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) that's older than several of my cousins, and then there's the sleek, old copy of Looking For Alaska that I thought was gone but wasn't really gone, but hiding in my house this entire time.
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It's strange how books start to have their own appearance to you. You love a book long enough, and you start to see that copy of the book, that bundle of pages in your hands, as something other than the countless editions you find in Barnes and Noble or you find online.
Which is why I'll never buy a new edition of the Fault In Our Stars. My copy might be temporarily lost, out on the outskirts and hopefully returning to me because of a bad lend, but hopefully it'll come back. Because that edition, torn and ugly and not as sleek as it was at the start, is still my bright blue book that I got signed by the author. It's still my book.
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Yeah.

A Girl (Fiction/First Short Story On This Blog So Woop Woop)

Once upon a time, there was a little girl.
This girl loved loved books. She lived for books. She lived to live in books, to come alive and become a princess or a magical warrior or something. She lived for those words that could make her come alive and become the super secret badass that she really believed she was.
This little girl loved books because they were her home when nobody else was. She knew the lives of the characters more than she knew the lives of the bare acquaintances she had, and she knew the stories of their lives better than she understood the dynamics of her peers. She lived in books because she couldn't live among her peers, as one.
This girl had lots of problems, and she grew up to be one of those brave girls that does whatever she pleases. She learned to disregard suffering and pain, and she learned to ignore the glares and, too often, sheer turns of faces when seen in her direction.
One day, she got sick of this.
One day, she threw a revolution over herself. She was going to change. She was going to be the type of girl everyone loved and wanted to be friends with.
She started wearing lipstick at a age too young, and put dye in her hair so it seemed shinier, better, even though she was fourteen. She learned how to flirt and wink and make suggestive comments because what else did boys want? They didn't want an awkward, stumbling girl who hung around books.
She became the sort of girl other girls hated and envied, the sort of envious bitch who others swarmed around for attention. She knew they wanted her attention, and she refused it, blessing it only to a few people to keep her power.
This doesn't mean she still didn't live in her books and find solace in fiction. It just meant that, for her, the type of good, earnest lives those characters lived ultimately weren't for her. Because she wasn't like them.
She got used to this idea. She fought back against every stereotype and insult hurled at her, every "whore" and "bitch" that got slapped at her, because she built up walls nobody could tear down, walls made up of words.
Her attachments got her in the end.
She got attached even though she swore to herself too many years ago she never would. She got attached the simplicity of being something she was not, of being a warrior made out of snide words and easy glares that she could never really aspire too. Her mask had become her weapon, but even now that mask was failing her.
She was alone.
Alone.
Always alone.
The girl put on another swatch of Russian Red lipstick and went to her Freshman P.E class feeling like crap. Nobody would notice though, not if you kept your smile wide enough and your jokes open. Not if you kept your battle suit on.
Except she forgot.
A boy walked up to her. She smirked, an easy touch of the lips that meant that she was prepared, ready to take you on.
He said, "Your friends are complete bitches, you know that-"
She kept the smirk on. He must have been referring to when she snidely told some seniors that he'd been the one who scratched their shiny new BMWS, and the one that told the principal they were smoking pot behind the drama room in the school every Tuesday. She'd been expecting something like this. So she smiled.
"So? Not my business if you screw around-" She turned around to see him, and paused.
He had a purple bruise on his cheek.
She froze.
This usually didn't happen. Usually her victims knew to cry in the refuge of their homes, and to hide their battle scars from public notice.
He wasn't.
And she knew, she knew she did this. One way or another.
She froze, unfroze, and continued.
Things were different now.
She thought that when she got home and put her purse on the kitchen counter. She set it down and stared off into space for a minute, staring at the white kitchen cabinet five feet away from the kitchen table she was leaning on. It was grey, bespeckled, and marble. She felt like she was going to collapse against it, but she didn't want to faint either. She just wanted to sag.
She did not read a book that night.
She went into her room, closed the door, and wept. Wept for not being what she used to be, wept for not being the little girl she wanted to be, wept for not being "me" anymore.
She cried for awhile.
And then, she wiped away her tears, and sent an email.
Typically, the girl wasn't the type to apologize or make pity letters. But she did send this.
"I'm sorry. I screwed up. You shouldn't have done that to my friends though. But still, yeah, you didn't deserve that."
She left it vague because when and if the principal got a copy of that message, she would have nothing against her. Not really.
Just an apology.
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I wrote this in half an hour with no edits. Someone forgive me.
And no, this not based off real life. I just got this idea and it swirled into me typing non stop and publishing it.
So yeah. Hoped you liked it.

Bravery

Making decisions is arguably one of the hardest parts of being a person.

You have to purposely, honestly, force yourself to make a choice about something. 

It's easier to close your eyes.

Closing your eyes is relatively easy. You can hide in details and fantasy worlds and neverending newsfeeds. It's easy to say whatever comes to your mind. It's hard to write something worth writing. It's hard to be a person instead of a reaction to a hundred different stimuli.

I think that's why I love heroes in novels, movies, whatever. They are the people that make their decisions and go forward without hesitation. 

Being yourself, unabashedly yourself, is really damn hard. You have to try though. You are who you are, and no disguise can change that. A mask can blend in perfectly with the persona you've created, but you are still in there. 

Don't forget that.

Peace.

A Dedication and A Debt (This has been sitting as a draft for awhile so I might as well publish it)

(This has been sitting as a draft for awhile so I might as well publish it)

***
A Dedication

My first coherent thought during graduation.
"Really? They're quoting Steve Jobs?"
I was expecting the whole ceremony to be a life-changing roller coaster of emotions as goodbyes were said and proper endings were made. I was expecting the ending of a fairytale, or at least a YA novel.
That wasn't the case.
People said bye in their usual social chatter. I didn't see any breakdowns or emotional goodbyes. Just goodbyes. Happy endings. It's like at the very end of a story when you expect to see a plot twist, except things really are happy and good and there is no more conflict to introduce or things to wrap up. The characters make their final appearance and you see them leave, but you don't feel anything particularly. It's a conclusion. The characters make their last wave and you wave back but you're feeling only a little nostalgic.
I suspect the climaxes, the big emotional rollar coasters that define high school have already happened. They happened over the four years, over the little fights and social squabbles and grade anxieties...The transformations are completed. Graduation is the end of all that for high school. It's not the part where the bad guys come invade and ruin everything right before the big showdown of the end of the season. (I'm looking at you Vampire Diaries)
I guess I should blame High School Musical for this.
***

A Debt

But what is the case is that I owe these seniors alot.
I owe my sister, for being amazing and wonderful and tolerating my never-ceasing wave of bad moods. I owe my sister for having my back and showing me that school isn't all that bad, for letting freshman me tag along with her friends so I had somewhere to belong to for awhile. I owe her for being a pretty damn cool sister.
I owe the DVP seniors for reminding me that appearances aren't a big deal and that it's okay to feel like shit sometimes. They reminded me that you can be whatever you want to be, and you don't have to follow what you think everyone wants you to be. They helped me learn how not to always be an awkward social turtle, which I'm internally grateful. Most of all, they were there for me even when they barely knew me. Hell, I still don't know them. But I owe them.
I guess I learned that you have to be kind and understanding because people are screwed up too.