water in my shoes november 10th, 2000 You know, every single time my shoes get full of water, I think of John Puster. His shoes always made a light squish sound wherever he walked. It was a much needed rain. Something to ease the forest fires. Something to clear out the smoke. I danced in the downpour in a way I haven't done in years, laughed with my face turned upwards towards the leaking clouds. I got soaked to the bone, in that delightful way, when every pore feels refreshed. (Of course, later, in the chilly planetarium, with my throat getting sorer by the minute, I questioned the rationality of playing in the rain when you are desperately fighting coming down with Something.) My kick-ass modern/postmodern professor wants me to read something in the next edition of the environmental radio show. The excerpt is a bit of writing from Arthur Stupka, the Great Smoky Mountains naturalist guy who died last year, and it totally kicks bootie. I'm excited down to my toenails about all of this. I feel like I'm going to be part of something really big around here. That is, if I ever get off my ass and get my homework done. I've got no motivation - Where is my motivation I have no clue. I've not wanted to do anything this week except click all over CNN.com to see what the latest election results are. Maybe the general wait-and-see attitude of the country has just infected me. I'm just stuck in limbo, like every other American out there. And Florida has me royally pissed off, because I don't care who approved that butterfly ballot and who didn't, who thought it was straighforward and who thought it was misleading - Yes, I would expect a fully-functional capable adult to be able to follow those arrows and figure out the right button to push, but come on. Do you think your 87-year-old grandma could figure it out? Old Mrs. Dewberry who lives down the street? There is nothing that irks me more than people who take advantage of the elderly. There is nothing that makes me more disgusted than the way our country treats its elders. In hunter-gatherer societies, the elderly were revered and honored - they were the ones with the stories, and the wisdom. They were the one with the biggest amount of life behind them. Their advice was treated like gold, their contribution to the community was valued beyond compare. And now we stuff them in boxed-up rooms and forget about them until their bodies waste away and their minds deteriorate and they die, alone and forgotten. And then we throw something like a butterfly-ballot at them, and expect them to know which button to push, and call them incompetent when they screw up. Isn't it bad enough that their bodies are betraying them? Do they really need the country they believe in doing it too? But anyway. I'll get off my soapbox now. My friends have often marvelled at my intense respect for the elderly. Many of my peers failed to have it, and could not understand why I was so feverish about it. And I, in turn, have been dumbfounded by their lack of it. I think it stems from the closeness of myself to my grandparents. I mean, as crazy as they can be sometime, I love them incredibly, and they are two of the coolest people I've ever met in my entire life. (And I could definitely see either one of them voting the wrong way in a butterfly-ballot box.) And I have homework to do. And I feel like poo. about me the starfish webcam poetry prose photographs quotations slambook grab bag credits elsewhere contact me the island of misfit toys november 10th, 2000 I slept in again. My throat feels about twice its normal size. And my shoulders hurt. But I actually got my homework done last night, which is always a good thing. The drive from Mosheim to Johnson City always puts me in a reflective state of mind. Memories pour out of the mists that hug the mountains. I put myself back in places I haven't seen in years, cursing the people in the back of the bus for picking on my little brother, folders that I passed around for signatures from friends that ended up having all sorts of horrible, nasty things written on them, about how I was an ugly hippie bitch who should just die (all this when I was eleven years old.) That awkward period of your life, when you're just beginning to come into your own. When you start having tastes in clothes, in music, in movies, in philosophies. Me with my peace and non-pollution agendas, dressing in costumes, writing notebooks of silly eleven-year-old poetry. When everyone in the world was either my friend or enemy. When my teachers really didn't give a damn. When everything at home was just crazy and weird and I didn't know what was going to happen to any of us. I was in counseling. I don't remember why, now. Maybe it's because I dropped from a straight A student to making C's and D's. They suspended me from the gifted program until I brought my grades up. I dressed in long black dusters and high-heel boots and rattled of lyrics from Prince and the New Power Generation. I engaged myself in games of pretend with my little brother. When I was alone, I had make believe games of my own. My Apple IIc became the computer terminals from The Abyss. I invented characters and fleshed them out in stories. I was finding less and less people to play with. I snapped out of it fast enough, I suppose. My mother left for New Mexico, my brother and I stayed with my grandparents, and I became the model straight A student again, though I still dressed in my pieces of neon and denim and silver jewelry, and I still decorated my notebooks in hippie slogans and environmental messages. It was the beginning of something that would continue throughout my life, I suppose. And everywhere I was humiliated and picked at mercilessly. In truth, however, it all began long before that. In the third grade, I was a huge Beatles fan, and I wore a plaid skirt all the time because it was the closest thing I had to a kilt (and I was a big Duck Tales fan at the time). And even before that, I always fell at odds with keeping my religious beliefs secret, because my peers would look at me so odd whenever I would voice them, because no one understood what I was talking about. Even in kindergarden, I was picked on because I became fast friends with the Brazilian girl who couldn't speak as much English as the rest of us. Her name was Alexandra, and she rocked. And that was me. My friends were always the weirdos, the outcasts, the underdogs. The freaks and the nerds and the people with whom the other kids would tease eachother by saying they were going with. The older boy who used to sit beside me and my brother on the bus. The bookworm I had a schoolgirl crush on in the 6th grade. The girly guys who were teased mercilessly because they liked unicorns and ponies and pretty stuff. The gaming, pro-wrestling, surge-addicts in high school. Sometimes I'd have hardly anything in common with these people at all, save that we understood that we were the Outsiders, and we had to stick together in order to survive. It's not like that anymore, of course. In fact, the desolate feelings of lonliness that had been sweeping over me the first few months that I was at ETSU have finally subsided - I've made a couple of new friends, and reconnected with a few old ones, and now I have conversations dispersed throughout my day, and people who geniunely like me. (And besides, the kick-ass modern/postmodern professor thinks I'm cool, so I can't go wrong with that!) For now, however, I need to run, or I'll be late for class.