It is April 30th, so tomorrow, we are done with this blog-every-day thing (unless I decide to blog more regularly, which I might), and I will also be moving back home tomorrow. Which is somewhat traumatic. This room is very much mine—I am not looking forward to emptying it. I’m not looking forward to packing, I’m not looking forward to leaving my roommate.

You know, I thought I’d have some great last blog or something, but I’m out of things to say. I feel sort of numb, and I can’t really wrap my head around the fact that this will never be my room again. Weird, isn’t it? I don’t know. I forgot to talk to my roommate about our posters, about what happens to them. I’m afraid she won’t be here when I leave.

Wow. I just feel panicky. Yikes. I think, though, with that, I will bid you fine people, the month of April, the semester, the year, my room, and my roommate adieu. It’s been a good month. I hope you all have lovely summers.

Not doing my religious studies final until tomorrow morning.

It’s due at noon.

Challenge accepted.

I’m going to regret this.

And THAT is all of a blog you’re getting out me tonight. Happy penultimate BEDA…

Today, it occurred to me that I will only be spending three more nights of my life in this room.

Which is exceptionally bizarre.

I’m going to miss this room, because it’s familiar, but I spent about ten minutes last night just standing in a room that is identical to the room that will be mine next year and thinking. Thinking about how I’m going to make it my room. Because I undoubtedly will, because that’s how life works. This room has become my room, and it’s been an excellent home to Marissa and me for the past eight or so months. I don’t like having to worry about how all my things are going to fit in a new room, but I also know that, if moving in next year is anything like moving in this year was, it will all just sort of fall into place and I will make it homey and happy.

I hate packing more than almost anything, which is why I’m so unenthused about this move—I’ll be glad to go back home, but packing all this stuff up and then having to unpack it all into my bedroom at home is going to suck. I haven’t gained so much stuff that we just can’t get it all home, but I definitely have more than I came with. What are we doing with this bookshelf? I don’t know how to take it apart! I do have significantly more books than I did when I left. Textbooks, three rather large hardbacks, four smaller books. Eight seasons of the TV show Charmed. A bunch of papers. At least I didn’t buy any new notebooks after I got here! That vacuum cleaner came at Christmas, and I have so many new t-shirts. I really, really, really don’t want to deal with all of this, and I don’t know how many of my clothes I should bother washing before I leave (although I really think one load should do it…enough underwear to survive, and a few shirts I actually enjoy wearing) and I just don’t want to think about it, because thinking about packing makes me a lot more overwhelmed than thinking about the final I still have to complete for Religious Autobiography.

Crap.

Guhh. Only two full days left here, but so much to do! Although, let’s be real, most of the packing will happen on Tuesday. After noon on Monday, I can just sort of relax.

After a final that made me want to cry, I didn’t expect very much after this day.

Boy, was I ever wrong.

After this final, my friend Elena sat with me and talked to me about anything and everything else, and I got really distracted and started to feel better.

Then we had a sisterhood event (WOOO) and had popsicles and went to a pretty park and had fun and it was lovely. And then I went back to the dorms with Erin, and I got dinner at Panera (Erin accompanied. Our eating schedules were off from each other today), which is ALWAYS a good thing. Then we went to a BASEBALL GAME.

Admittedly, we’re not fab at baseball this year, but it was still really, really fun being there with Erin and Katie and, later, Angela, and sitting behind these moms of players who are there all the time and know Katie because she goes to every game. It was just fun and silly and it didn’t rain like we thought it would.

Then Erin and I went back to Blair for a bit and Erin ordered a pizza and we went to Katie and Angela’s Mayfield and watched a silly, silly movie with them and Bethany (who also lives there and is such a lovely person). And then we caught a Vandy Van (probably the last time I run for one this year, but it was fun) and I got to watch some drunk kids try to get past a sprinkler system without getting wet. And then I watched the last fifteen minutes ofMean Girlsand got on the internet and I am a happy camper.

Also, it was my last Friday here this semester.

What?

That’s actually a lie. I could be practicing for my keyboard proficiency, which is in half an hour, but I had my voice jury already and I sort of hate everything, so we’ll see how this goes. But for now I’m just on the internet. Casual.

I have officially finished all my classes of my freshman year of college. I have that proficiency, a Musicianship hearing, a final for Music as Global Culture, a final for German Diction, a final for Harmonic Idioms (of the Common Practice Period, we can’t forget that), and a final paper type thing for Religious Autobiography. That’s still a lot to do, but in a week, it will all be over. And tomorrow I barely have anything, so I sort of get a dead day (like everyone else gets today).

I’m just tired and I don’t feel very well and I messed up some stupid things on my jury that were avoidable. And I don’t want to take this proficiency, because I don’t know fingerings for arpeggios, which is so stupid. What if I fail that one section and can’t be sure that I can move on to KH4? That sounds way too stressful. At least there will be cookies. And I have my first chapter tonight. That should be nice. Except I forgot the secret words or whatever. So it’s kind of awkward. I guess it’ll be okay. Ugh.

I just want to sleep forever and ever amen.

I hope you’re having a better day than me. Good luck with your last weeks of school or finals or the first weeks of summer, and love and stuff.

P.S. Did I mention that when I was avoiding writing that paper yesterday, I didn’t just watch a couple episodes of Doctor Who…I watched seven? Yeah. That is a thing that is true. I have now completed all but series six. So I guess I have to cool off so I have something to watch with Alice when I get home…whoops.

Like Garrett’s Li’l Dragon that he painted.

Anyway.

I am frantically trying to complete a paper for my religious autobiography class, and that’s what I’ve been meaning to do since about 3:15 this afternoon. Instead, I’ve watched ALMOST AN ENTIRE SERIES OF DOCTOR WHO. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME. I AM SO FULL OF CRAP. AHHH. I HATE EVERYTHING. EXCEPT OBVIOUSLY DOCTOR WHO.

Okay. Yeah. I just have to write a bunch of journals. About books. That I may or may not have read.

Crap.

Ugh.

Best of luck to you dears going into finals week.

Hello, sweeties.

(I have, in fact, been watching Doctor Who all day, thanks for asking. Except for the bit where I watched Once Upon A Time.)

So, I had a rather nice weekend. Friday, I was all normal person-y social. I got dinner with a friend, went to a performance to see some of our other friends, and then went to a movie with a lovely group of girls. It was the first time I have ever been out with a group of just girls who were not my best friends from home. And it was fun! It made me miss my girls like crazy, but I’ll be back home soon enough, I guess. Even if they won’t be. But still. When I got back from that, I was going to go to sleep, but I happened across another group of my friends sitting in our seminar room watching YouTube videos. I am only really, really close to one girl in this group, but I know and like all of them, so I popped in…and ended up staying for an hour and a half. Which was also quite entertaining.

The next day, I had my audition for the Nashville Shakespeare Festival Apprentice Company, so I got up, got dressed, got breakfast, and took a cab with my friend Steven to our auditions. Afterward, to celebrate, we got lunch (and by lunch I do mean more breakfast food, thanks, Noshville) and went back to campus. After we changed, I went back to Steven’s room to watch the 25th anniversary concert edition of Phantom of the Opera, which isphenomenal, and we had a lovely time. I then came back and sat in fear as a wasp buzzed all around my room all evening, before I went to bed (rather early for a Saturday night, but that’s alright).

And today…today I was in bed until noon. When I got out of bed, I saw that the wasp had died, and I got on the internet and stayed on the internet. I finished up the Tenth Doctor and am a few episodes into Eleven. I’m in the middle of the two-parter with River and the weeping angels, which never fail to creep me out. There have been lots of tears today. And the return of OUAT was SO GOOD. My friends who don’t see all the Tumblr spoilers were FREAKING OUT and a wee bit angry or something, but yeah. I’m just glad it’s back.

So this weekend I had a sociable Emma day, a good friend Emma day, and a just for Emma day. Which sounds about right.

One more day of classes in this, my freshman year of college. Which is totally bonkers, bro. I will be completely done in a week and about twelve hours. Such a wonderful feeling. And now I suppose I should get the sleep to take on the rest of this semester. But that’s what’s going on here, I believe.

However, there is a third personthat was at my high school at the same time as me who has been found dead. Yesterday, Sarah Brittain, class of 2009, was found dead in her home. Again, I didn’t know her, but that’s one from ‘09, one from ‘10, and one from ‘11. It’s been a very, very rough week for this community. So Sarah, Audrey, and Austin, I hope you are at peace. I hope your families can find some sort of consolation—they’re in my prayers. Keep my high school in mind, please. We need the thoughts and prayers to find some sort of peace.

I AM SUPA TIRED. BUT I HAD AN AWESOME LAST NIGHT AND AN AWESOME TODAY. SO THAT’S GOOD. AND I’LL TALK ABOUT IT TOMORROW. BUT THIS IS TOTALLY A BLOG. SUCKAS.

After what was, for me, quite a mean-spirited blog yesterday, I am here with apologies to the author of the original posts that I took issue with. I think we just think about things differently,  you seem to contextualize more while I am much more of a theoretical thinker about everything, and it’s obviously not worth arguing about because we aren’t going to agree, because neither of us actually appears to be wrong. Different. But not wrong. And calling you an ass was unnecessary, uncalled for, and rude. Sorry.

Because two people I went to high school with have died in accidents in the past week. Two. It’s not like either of them were people I was exceptionally close to; in fact, I didn’t know Audrey, who died last week, at all, and I mostly just knew Austin through other people. We had one class together…we might have talked once or twice. But we had a lot of mutual friends, as I apparently did with Audrey, and Austin was a riot. Always causing trouble. Sometimes being a jackass, and he could be a lot to handle, but everyone loved him. Even though he had some bad relationships with girls I was friends with, it was hard to dislike him. It’s just shocking and alarming and deeply saddening to think about those deaths, both of which were caused by high-speed motor vehicle accidents very early in the morning. Audrey was in a car, not wearing a seat-belt, and Austin was on a motorcycle. He was wearing a helmet, but the impact was so great that it was knocked off his head. Audrey might also have been texting at the time of her accident.

I don’t ever drive much over the speed limit, even if I’m driving in the middle of the night or there’s no one around me on the road. It’s always scared me a little, and half the time I’m driving a minivan that is resistant to high speeds anyway. And I don’t text while I’m driving. That also scares me, and is illegal in the state of Kentucky. Which obviously doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but I shy away from most things that are illegal. Just a me thing. But texting while you’re driving is illegal for a reason. So many auto fatalities now are caused augmented by texting, and most of these accidents wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for those phones. It makes me so scared for my friends that I know text while they’re driving, because one day they could just not be here anymore. And that’s terrifying.

In addition to my two former schoolmates who have recently passed away, the son of my most beloved teacher from middle school passed away several weeks ago. He was thirty-four, I believe, and he has an eleven-month-old son. I never heard details of how his death came about, but it was very sudden, very tragic, and was another life that was ended much too soon: another set of parents who had to bury a child, and another child that will never remember his father.

We waste our time. We get mad at people too often without understanding it and trying to use it to improve relationships, we don’t spend good times with friends, we don’t take time to ourselves to avoid taking others for granted. We aren’t sacrificial enough of our time and our love and ourselves. We break plans, we make excuses, and we don’t look back or say we were sorry. Sometimes it’s necessary, but so often we don’t consider other people enough. We’re just friends when we’re around each other, and then when we’re apart, we forget about each other. We don’t try, we don’t make an effort, and even if we do, after so long, we give up. But we can’t. I can’t. I just have this overwhelming feeling today that I am running out of time, and I’m scared of everything. So I’m not sure how just yet, but something has to change.

To all my friends, I love you. To you lovely followers I don’t know, thanks for putting up with me and making me laugh and posting such wonderful things. I hope you’re all having a great day and a great week and a beautiful month of April, and I hope that you’re living your lives so that if you died tomorrow, or if one of your friends died tomorrow, no one would have any apologies to make. I hope I can live like that too.

So, up until very recently, I followed this blog dedicated to one of my favorite TV shows. They posted nice GIFs and spoilers and things.

Today, they reblogged a post that dealt with a somewhat problematic caption someone had put on a picture. That caption said something to the effect of “It’s not a big deal that there aren’t really any people of minorities in this show, it’s based off of Grimm’s fairy tales, and those are about Europeans, so calm down.” The subsequent posters had really good points about how a lot of those fairy tales actually had origins other places, and so if we were going to get technical, things should be different, blah blah blah. Right. So. Good points. But. Some problems here.

• Just because a folk story originated in one place doesn’t mean that subsequent tellings, adapted for other locations and groups of people, are not also true folk stories. Otherwise NO ONE WOULD HAVE ANY STORIES except like one very creative person.
• Stories with such broad moral stuffs can arise independently and still be very similar. Then when people hear the stories of others, they might add things to their stories or take them away, so you get an interesting fusion, but it is totally viable for multiple people to come up with very similar ideas.
• As an American show, it IS actually based on the traditional fairy tales brought down in the European tradition, and they’re also trying to have some continuity with Disney characters since ABC runs both things. So the point about the stories coming from other traditions, while informative and valuable, is not really…well…the point.

So then the person writing for the blog that I followed mentioned how you cannot be racist against a white person in the United States, it just doesn’t work that way. And he or she has some very, very valid ideas. He (for the sake of something like correctness and brevity, we’ll make that person a male) said that the way the system has worked in the US has made it so that minorities are the unfavored members of society, so racism is typically directed by white people at those other people. I guess he is also acknowledging that minorities can be racist against other minorities, but that was unclear. But his basic premise, that you can’t be racist against a white person because that’s not how the system works, is flawed.

Because “racism” is not a system. Institutional racism, now that can be a system. But racism itself is a belief. That’s all. In its simplest form. It is an -ism. It is the belief that a race has certain definite characteristics that make it intrinsically better or worse than another race.

So this kid (I have to assume he’s a kid, otherwise I don’t want to live on this planet anymore because this is why I hate people) starts getting a bunch of asks (except they’re not asks, he’s disabled actual asks so all you can do is send fan mail, which made me a little grumpy) about how you can actually be racist against white people, how that is a thing. Not super common and not often a problem, but just that his premise was not technically correct. I just wanted him to reword it, or offer some qualifiers. Like, I don’t feel like he properly understands what he’s talking about, and I think he’s a little confused as to what other people are trying to tell him, and I really just everybody to be on the same page and understand how definitions of words work. I don’t care that much about the argument itself, about fairy tales; I think there are a lot of things to that that don’t matter as much to me, but if you feel the need to discuss it a lot, go ahead. But I just hate seeing people being made COMPLETELY wrong by the fact that they won’t concede to being a little bit wrong and a little bit right. Which he was!

Because racism isn’t a system! The SYSTEM of racial discrimination that has prevailed in the United States is in favor of white people. This is so true. And morally wrong, but that’s how things have traditionally gone here. But. White people can be discriminated against here. No one would dispute that. It’s QUITE UNCOMMON on any sort of large scale but it obviously happens. So the system of discrimination doesn’t prevent the discrimination of white people. So his whole “system” argument doesn’t quite line up, but that’s okay.

But then you have the fundamental definition of racism thing. And that can clearly be used against ANY RACE ON THIS PLANET (OR ANY OTHER PLANET. I’VE RECENTLY BEEN WATCHING A LOT OF DOCTOR WHO). If I think I am better than someone who is ethnically Southeast Asian because they are Southeast Asian and I am white, I am racist against Southeast Asians. If I think I’m better than an ethnically African person because they are of some sort of African origin and I am white, I am racist against black people. If someone who is black thinks they are better than someone who is ethnically Middle-Eastern because that person is Middle-Eastern but they are black, that black person is racist against Middle-Easterners. If someone who is ethnically Middle-Eastern thinks they are better than someone who is ethnically Caucasian because that person is white, they are racist against white people. If a black person thinks they are better than a white person because the white person is white and the black person is black, they are racist against white people.

Racism isn’t a thing that’s defined by what country you’re in. The systems of discrimination andinstitutionalracismaredefined by what country or society you are in, but the blogger on this site did not say that and would not use that in his defense of his premise. If he had just used that bit of information, then he would be correct in what he was saying. If he had qualified it, I would still be following him (also, if he hadn’t been acting kind of like an ass about it; if you upset people about something controversial, you should just be like, “Hmm, sorry that upset you, seems there are some differences in opinion here, but it’s unlikely we will actually reach a consensus, so let’s just move on to something else, shall we?” Instead, he was like, “You’re all wrong and stupid. I think it’s funny how wrong and stupid you are and how you’re now attacking me. #lolsuckaz.” He didn’t do the #lolsuckaz thing, to his credit). But he didn’t qualify it, which shows that he doesn’t think he needs to qualify it, which just makes him wrong.

Ugh, I even hate to say that, though! He’s still only wrong-ish in his ideas, but he IS wrong because he thinks he’s completely right. And that is the problem.

Also potentially the lack of ethnic diversity in the show, but there are a bunch of reasons for that and it’s much more complicated than just saying “THAT’S RACIST!”

I just have a lot of opinions on people who won’t compromise at all or even entertain the notion that there could be more to something than just what they think is true. I think it’s the biggest problem in the world and it just makes me very frustrated because I want everyone to have answers that aren’t wrong and be happy.

Is that too much to ask?

Qualifier on my part: The person who was manning that blog at the time and said these things WAS NOT answering other people’s posts rudely, and then stopped answering posts as blog entries but rather answered them privately. That was a classy thing to do. You even replied to my ask, conceding that I had some right ideas but was fundamentally wrong. By this point, you sounded frustrated, but that’s because you had been saying the same thing over and over again to lots of people who were saying the same things to you. Which would be very frustrating if you thought you were right and that your right was the only possible right. So I’m sorry if this has been frustrating for you, but it’s because you need to stop and think that maybe, if so many people responded telling you that you were wrong about something, you might be at least a little bit wrong.

Also, if you are some big-shot sociologist/historian/psychologist who is an expert in this field, you need to tell all the reasonably reliable sources on the internet, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, that they are just wrong.

Now I’m done. Off to stay with Shaina for the night. I’m being sexiled. But my roommate was very nice about it. She asked, and she asked like three weeks ago. So yeah.