Looking Back and Moving Forward

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When I was in college (and even in the first two years immediately after), I was manic about keeping a LiveJournal. I did this because I wanted to chronicle every boring thing that happened to me every single day. A few days ago, I got the sudden urge to go back and start re-reading it. I haven’t pored over every single entry, but I read some and I skim some. I started in the middle of the spring semester of my sophomore year (early 2003) and at this point I’m up to where I have just started my last semester of my senior year. I have been driving my friends nuts over the last day or two (at least I assume this is the case since they’ve all stopped answering me) with memories and funny things I read and remember. Or things I read that make me smile or things I find touching. But as I touched upon in an earlier post, I am the kind of person who does stuff like that. When anything reminds me of one of my friends, I immediately want to jump to the phone or the computer and let them know I’m thinking about them. And okay, sometimes my feelings get a little hurt when they don’t care.  But I’ve also become the kind of person who eventually thinks “Ok, I’ve (texted/emailed/called/Facebooked) you (insert number here) amount of times in a row without a response so now I’m just annoyed because it’s your turn.” That’s something totally different that’s probably better left to another post when it’s not almost 3 a.m. I digress.

I quit the LJ cold turkey on my 25th birthday, calling it The Feast of the Quarter-Life Crisis (a joke that came back to bite me in the ass in the form of a true quarter-life crisis a few months later). It was time for a new chapter, and now that I’ll be 27.5 in a few weeks, I think it’s safe to go back and read what I had always considered such boring stuff. The thing is, though, that it’s not. I am constantly being reminded of how much I’ve grown and how much I am the same and yet still different. Some parts of my journal make me really sad, either because times have changed so much or because of the goings-on then. For example, during my junior year, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and borderline social anxiety. The journal entries in the month that led up to that diagnosis were so difficult to read. I pushed people away. I woke up in the morning, showered, and went back to sleep, missing days of classes. I left my room only to go to dinner and therapy some days. For all intents and purposes, I was in the bell jar. Stewing in it. Reading those entries brought me back to a lot of those feelings, but I realized a few things from it.  Continue reading →

The Brother

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When I was little, I always wanted a big brother. I think it was something I hoped would give me some kind of protection from the teasing; however, the closest thing I had was a handful of male cousins who were older than me, and only one of whom I was close to. He was a year ahead of me in school, and when my friends went through their bad boy stages, they all had crushes on him. He was nice to me, but he was something of a rebel. He could be scary when he wanted to be, but he wasn’t really protective the way I imagined an older brother would be. The one exception was when I was in 8th grade and mustered up the courage to let my friend tell this boy in band that I liked him. That boy replied by saying that he didn’t care, he didn’t like me, and that I was fat. After that, my cousin could be found staring this guy down, making threats in his general direction, and, one time, “accidentally” causing him to fall down the stairs. Whoops.

In the winter of third grade, my mom told my sister and me that she was going to have a baby in the summer. After two girls, my parents were certain that baby #3 would be a girl too. Girly things were purchased or taken out of storage. A pink dress accompanied them to the hospital. I was promised my own room because the baby would room with my sister. It was one of the perks of being the oldest. I remember waking up ridiculously early in the morning on the day my mother was scheduled to have the baby (I had to be born as a C-section, meaning that my sister and baby #3 were too). I was so excited. They took me to my Grandma’s house where my sister had spent the night and we waited. And we waited. And we waited some more. Somewhere just before lunch time, my dad called to tell us that we did not, in fact, have a sister. We had a brother (a brother who would remain nameless for a day or two because they weren’t really prepared with boy names). I started crying immediately. For all these years, I’ve been thinking that I started crying because I wasn’t going to get my own room now, and I’m certain that was part of it. But I think part of me was also just so happy to finally be able to say “I have a brother.” It’s almost 18 years later, and it still sounds somewhat foreign on my tongue. I still get a little kick out of saying “I have a brother.” I knew he would never be the older brother who would stick up for me, but I was still just happy to have him. I spent a lot of time taking care of him when he was little. I didn’t have a choice. My sister was 7 when he was born (I was almost 10) and both of my parents worked. By the time I was 12, I was home alone quite frequently with Mr. Terrible Twos.  Continue reading →

Enjoy the Silence

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Yes, I did just reference Depeche Mode in my blog title.

I have, on several occasions, mentioned how I like to think. I won’t get into how that is sometimes not really a good thing, but I’ve been thinking about thinking, so I decided to write about it (at least to some extent).

As I type this, it has just turned 2:00 a.m. For my entire life, I have been somewhat nocturnal. I love the quiet and the peace of just enjoying time to myself when no one else is awake, and I use this time to do a lot of thinking and reflecting (and, in college, homework). Sometimes I take this time to collect my thoughts and process them into something that will resemble a coherent blog. Tonight is not one of those nights. This is Renee Unplugged. And speaking of Unplugged, there is music.

I’m sure that when I was in high school, I used to stay up late and listen to music. It’s always been such an integral part of my life that I can’t see how I wouldn’t have done that. In fact, most of the time, I would rather turn on iTunes than watch TV. It wasn’t really until I got to college, though, that I realized the pure joy that comes from just lying in a pitch black room, thinking to music.  Continue reading →

Breaking News!

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First of all, for my sarcasm-challenged readers, I just want to begin with a disclaimer that the title of this blog is drenched with sarcasm. Moving along…

There is a picture of me at three years old, sitting in the front of a firetruck with my best friend. We are wearing fireman hats. His name was Peter. I don’t know his last name and I doubt if I’ve seen him since 1986, but if I were going to blame someone, maybe it would be him. I’m not going to point fingers, though, because that seems pointless. I hope Peter is having a great life.

In first grade, I started having a bit of a crisis regarding my dolls and my Nintendo. I had two best friends: one who would argue over Barbies with me, and the other who just wanted to play Nintendo and ride bikes. When it came to that point in elementary school when the clear divide between girls and boys started to make itself apparent, I started becoming something of a tomboy because I didn’t want to alienate that boy who was my best friend. The one who liked video games and bike rides. So I started pretending to be interested in basketball (a sport in which I truly have no interest. I honestly enjoy baseball and football, but basketball bores me to tears). I played video games like nobody’s business. In an effort to hide my weight and disguise the fact that I felt so ugly compared to other girls my age, I just started wearing guys’ clothing for a period of time, too. I developed an interest in what are generally thought of as boy hobbies, and as the years went on and I started to be treated like it, I started to feel like, well, one of the guys. Continue reading →

All the Concentration I Have

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In my last post, I talked about writing through blocks – writer’s block, that is. I was eager to try this out and had (and, really, continue to have) high hopes.

I went on vacation for 5 days and, knowing that there wasn’t a chance that I’d have time to work on the novel, decided it wasn’t worth lugging the computer through the airport. So I didn’t. This week continues to be very busy for me, but I am bound and determined to  work on the novel around my appointments this week and my weekend out of town. This writing plan will not happen between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Yesterday when we all woke up in our own beds, we got up and moved the furniture out of most of our first floor. This morning, with a pillow over my head, I could quite clearly hear the entire conversation happening between my father and the workers who will be refinishing our hardwood floors. Then the hammers started, followed by the tearing noises. About a half hour later, I came out of my room to discover that the carpet in the living and dining rooms was gone. I brought the dogs down to the basement, took some allergy medicine to combat the dust flying around here, and spent the morning with the dogs. When I emerged at lunch time to take a shower while the workers were out, the carpet in the hallway and the stairs was gone. There continues to be a massive amount of noise coming from upstairs. It sounds like my house is imploding. How will I write through this? I can barely focus on this blog entry. Continue reading →

Making and Breaking My Stride (I’ve got to keep on moving)

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When I crossed the 50,000 word mark to become a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) 2009 winner in November, I estimated that I would need somewhere around another 10,000 words to finish my novel. As of last night (I haven’t worked on it yet tonight), my word count was just shy of 67,800 words. Obviously, I grossly underestimated what it would take me to finish. I am, however, happy to report that I have the pieces coming together. This is good because virtually nobody knows anything about this novel. Literally, I think I’ve given only two people details, and even those were rather skimpy. Knowing that I struggle with endings, I’ve been very tight-lipped about it because I wasn’t entirely sure where it was going. Or rather, I didn’t know if it would work. Perhaps in the next few months I will get to a point where some of those who have expressed interest in reading it will be able to take a look at some of it.  Continue reading →

Feeling Old Vs. Being Old

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I have friends who think they’re old. These friends are mostly in the 26-30 age bracket, and in no way constitute as being such (unless you’re asking a nine year old), but it’s just what they think. I have never said that I’m old. I’m 27 and I don’t feel or look like I am.

There’s the adage “You’re only as old as you feel.” I don’t know if I believe that, either.

A friend of mine turned 23 on Friday, and we went out for her birthday to a local sports bar. After her mother, I was the oldest person there, and I found myself saying out loud that I felt old – something I don’t usually say. But I think there’s an important line to distinguish here: I FELT it. Sometimes I feel sick, but it doesn’t mean that I am. So saying that I’m as old as I feel makes absolutely no sense to me. My age would change constantly. I felt 27, but empirically, I was older than the rest of her friends there. Continue reading →

Dichotomy

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This past Saturday I had the unique experience of celebrating life in two completely contrasting ways: a wake followed by a birthday party.

Obviously the party was a lot more upbeat and happy; it was a celebration. The wake was exactly how one expects a wake to be: there were a lot of hugs and flowers, and there were a lot of people crying. Yet, in their barest and most simplistic forms, they each represented the same thing.   Continue reading →

I’m Sorry You Majored In… (anything other than teaching)

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Though I touched upon this in an earlier post, and I tried so hard not to bring this up, the abundance of snowy days this winter and the amount of whining and complaining I keep reading have driven me to feel the need to say something. First and foremost, I’m not saying any of this to be overly harsh and I’m not out to disrespect or alienate anybody. I’m also going to say right now that I’m using “you” in the most general sense because it’s easiest for my purpose. I am not yelling; I just want to make my side heard. That being said…

Look, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I’m sorry that you weren’t an education major, but until you’ve taught for three weeks in a school, I really don’t want to hear you say snarky things like “Oh, I wish I still had snow days” or “Gee, it must be so nice to be a teacher right about now.” People like me are becoming silently infuriated at you, and my guess is that you know more than one teacher.

I’m not entirely sure where the idea got started that teachers have this luxurious, easy life. Just because when you were in school you did nothing at night, on the weekends, over holidays, and during the summer doesn’t mean that teachers follow the same schedule. In fact, many of the days the students aren’t at school, the teachers are. They’re sitting through horrible professional development seminars and in-service presentations. The funny thing is that, in many districts, they have to sit through those same things periodically during the summer.

First, Pennsylvania has a really good teacher education program that permits reciprocity in something like 35 or 38 other states. That’s why we churn teachers out of here. It’s not an easy program though, and so while many people I knew of had light semesters of 16 credits and went out drinking and partying all the time or had a lot of downtime, I can think of two semesters in my entire college career where I had 18 or fewer credits. Usually I had a course load of anywhere between 20 and 24 credits so that I could make myself as well-qualified as possible for the job I wanted. You know how your senior year spring break was so awesome because you either went on some crazy trip with your friends or you just went home and relaxed? Education majors were still at school doing their student teaching.   Continue reading →

On Goals

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As I write this, I’m sitting in the classroom where I first read about Romeo and Juliet and Miss Havisham: my 9th grade English classroom. A new teacher came into this room the next year, and while the teacher’s desk is now in the back corner as opposed to the front center, while the desks are now facing the back of the room as opposed to the front, and the blackboard has since been replaced by a white board, this room is still familiar. The same sickly green paint typically reserved for hospital rooms covers the walls, and the view out the window hasn’t changed (aside from the house across the street that burned to the ground and was rebuilt). I can quite acurately walk to the spot in this room where I sat and read Great Expectations. I can see the spot where the new girl was sitting in study hall when I wrote her a note welcoming her so that she would feel more comfortable here. She looked nervous. Where I sit right now is very near the area where I would rest my head against the side board during 9th period and wait for the day to be over.

I wasn’t a stellar student in 9th grade. I could have had amazing grades if I had just tried a little bit, but I didn’t really care. My attitude toward academics would change in a few months, but I was a much different person in 1997-98. Once the fog lifted off of 7th and 8th grade, arguably the worst two consecutive years of my life, I was actually relatively happy. In truth, I had just as much of a love-hate relationship with myself in 9th grade as I did 10 years later with the 9th graders I was teaching. But in my mind, it is always springtime when I think about 9th grade. Everything seemed just on the verge of happening: softball season would be starting, school would be over soon, summer league would start up, I would finally be done struggling my way through biology with a teacher who seemed to hate me for reasons unknown. Junior high would be over and high school would be starting. More importantly, I was making new friends, coming out of my shell a bit. New friendships are fabulous because there’s always that sense of, well, newness. Continue reading →