For those of you who didn't know, I try to post writing inspiration, or Writspo for short, fairly often to keep those of my readers who are also writers galvanized and hopeful.  After all, inspiration to write can come from a great many places, such as a newspaper article, a picture, or anything else that might spark the imagination.

Oscar Wilde is known for spouting almost impossibly witty and profound things, so here are a few of those things to consider.  Enjoy them, and if you want to read about the kiss shield his tomb received a couple of years ago, you can check out my post on it by clicking here.

Picture Source

Picture Source

Picture Source

Picture Source

Yesterday, June 12th, marked what would have been Anne Frank's 84th birthday.  It was also on this day in 1942 that Anne Frank received a diary for her 13th birthday and wrote the very first entry in it.  The life she wrote within those pages has touched millions of people across the globe, not just as a chronicle of the terror of the Holocaust but as a candid look into the life of a teenage girl trying to understand herself. 

The first page of Anne's diary, courtesy of AnneFrank.org

Recently, a mother in Northville, Michigan, filed a complaint, demanding that the definitive, unedited version of Anne's diary be banned by the school district for its, well, frank language when talking about sexual matters.  Here is one passage that has her worked up:

"Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside. They separate when you sit down and they're very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris."

Anne's writing desk in the Annex, courtesy of AnneFrank.org

Well, this is quite a description.  When read in this blunt block quote without truly appreciating the context or the young girl who wrote it, it is easy to see why someone might become uncomfortable.  However, I have two points to make about why it would be wrong to remove this passage or any other passage like it.

The sexual content in this book is of the nature of a young person being curious about sex, as every
young person is around this age.  In her diary, Anne is has depicted her own self-discovery, and part of discovering herself is discovering her sexuality and sexual identity.  Everyone goes through this at some point, and to censor Anne is to deprive today's young readers the opportunity to see that being curious about sex and one's anatomy isn't freakish; it is something everyone goes through and is completely normal.  It removes the guilt that might be associated with wondering such things, and it gives young people the opportunity to learn a little of what Anne learned without having to ask an embarrassing question. Anne even describes giving the "sex talk" to her crush, Peter, who has questions himself.

To remove these sorts of things is to also to remove a part of Anne and to make her seem other than she really is, to place her on a pedestal of sainthood.  It removes her humanity and her realness.  Editions leaving out Anne's more racy entries aren't depicting the real Anne but a false version of her altered to conform to society's mores.

Secondly, removal of sexual content from school books in order to "protect" children doesn't actually protect them; it instead makes them more vulnerable.  In places where young teens don't receive proper sexual education that helps them understand the process and the risks and are instead told only to abstain from sex in order to protect themselves from pregnancy and STDs, rates of HIV contraction and unplanned pregnancy are higher.  Let me just throw this chart up there for you:

Source

When teens, who are going to probably become sexually active whether adults like it or not, are uniformed about sex, they are unable to make informed decisions regarding it.  Censoring what Anne says about female anatomy amounts to pretending that it doesn't exist and telling children to just stay away from it.  It is overall unwise and unhealthy to suppress what a young girl has to say about her own questions about sex and the answers she found.  Pretending sex, sexuality, and sexual anatomy don't exist doesn't make them go away.

But this story has a happy ending.  I honestly can say I've never been prouder of our education system than at this moment, even if it was only one school district.  Instead of giving in to the pressure of uninformed parents, which has been a regrettable trend among states and school districts over the past several years, Northville Public School officials have stated that they will not remove the book.  Their reasoning?  Taking away the unedited version amounts to censorship.  If only certain portions of a book are banned, it changes the book altogether and presents it as something it's not, like those idiotic editions of Huckleberry Finn that censor the n word.  This is fundamentally wrong, and these school officials see that.

If you've not been fortunate enough to read the unedited version of Anne's diary, it really is an enlightening treat.  Anne becomes almost a whole new girl; she even has a period, talks candidly about the subject of sex, and forms sometimes harsh opinions about the people around her and their choices.  If you'd like to have a copy for yourself, new or used, just click here or look under the Shop tab at the top of the page.  Happy reading, and don't ever let book banning stop you!

In my previous post, On Modern Illiteracy,  I mentioned that conquering the failure of our education system to produce functionally literate adults who enjoy a good book might begin with self-education.  This could mean learning a new language, taking risks, learning about another culture, watching something educational instead of reality TV, or reading a book.

I consider reading the most important item on that list.  However, not everyone has learned to enjoy reading.  I don't think it's a matter of people simply not liking to read and therefore never wanting to (although I'm sure this is the case sometimes), but rather a matter of people having never learned that reading for pleasure can actually be fun and entertaining, just as good as watching a movie or television.  Because of the way reading is presented as part of school curriculum, people lose the drive to read and begin to view it as a chore.

So if you're someone who is interested in bettering themselves through self-education, pursuing the things you enjoy and want to learn in order to improve yourself and your life, and learning to view reading as something enjoyable and beneficial instead of boring and forced, I've got a few good suggestions for you!  Here are five books that won't be too challenging for a non-reader but will still be able to capture imaginations and spark interest.  If you're a reader, don't hesitate to suggest these to your non-reading friends; you just might change their lives!

1.) The Giver by Lois Lowry - Alright, I know I've recommended this book so much for everything, but it really is a great and important book!  A lot of people get assigned this book to read in grade or middle school, but how many people really read it or paid attention when they did?  The Giver is about Jonas, a boy in a utopian world of no war, no pain, and no choices, who is about to turn 12.  12 is the age when people in his community are assigned to the job they will perform for the rest of their lives, and Jonas is mortified when he isn't called onto the stage with the rest of his classmates to receive his job assignment.  Then he is told that he will be given the most important job there is, the job of Receiver.  Receiver of what?  Memories of pain, war, pleasure, and the dark truth about the society he lives in.

2.) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - Although not as commonly assigned as The Giver, Things Fall Apart is another book encountered in high school English classes that students might be inclined to dismiss.  If you're looking for a starting point for investigating other cultures, this might be the book for you!  Okonkwo is a prominent tribe elder in his Ibo village in Nigeria, and his strong, warrior-like attitude that abhors weakness of any kind has brought him great success.  However, when aggressive European missionaries invade his native land and uproot and destroy the beautiful culture he has always known, Okonkwo refuses to stop fighting the shattering of his fragile world to the very end.

3.) Deadline by Chris Crutcher - So you don't like romance, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, mystery, fiction, nonfiction, any genre!... But you do like sports.  Then Deadline is the book for you.  Chris Crutcher incorporates plenty of good sports action into this book, which just might lure you into a world much deeper than the next touchdown.  Ben Wolf is an 18-year-old high school senior who has just been diagnosed with aggressive leukemia.  He has elected to forgo treatment and won't be telling his family so that he can have the best senior year he could possibly have without the stigma of his disease following him and defining him.  He sets some goals: enlighten his closed-minded civics teacher, help the local drunk clean up his act, become the best darn football player Trout, Idaho, has ever seen, and talk to the captivating Dallas Suzuki.  But keeping his secret isn't going to be as easy as he thought.

4.) Cujo by Stephen King - Horror can be an amazing genre, but if you pick up the wrong book, you'll never be able to get into it.  There are some terrible dime-store novels out there that are just so lame, and if you pick up something too long like Stephen King's It, you might get bogged down if it's your first time and start to hate the tedium.  However, while it will keep you captivated for a long time, Cujo is relatively short.  It's like a concise version of what great horror writing should be.  Vic and Donna Trenton have a son named Tad, and Tad is terrified of the monster in his closet that he is sure will get him one day.  When Donna and Tad find themselves stranded in the countryside, locked in the hot car with a rabid St. Bernard outside, Tad knows exactly what beast they are facing.

5.) Dear John by Nicholas Sparks - Like the horror genre, the romance genre is riddled with terrible books that are just so bad, they shouldn't even exist.  And yet, this is the genre that most people read and that people find easy to read.  If you're ready to read, don't know where to start, and nothing else appeals, perhaps the strong emotions that a romance novel can evoke will capture you.  Not really knowing what to do with himself, John Tyree joined the Army after dropping out of high school, but when he meets Savannah Lynn Curtis, he knows his life is going to change.  Savannah is a college student who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity and loves horses, and although reluctant, she falls quickly and passionately in love with John, pulling him into a world full of meaning that he never had access to before.  They vow to wait for each other while he finishes his tour of duty, but 9/11 turns their lives on end.  John decides to re-enlist, and the extended separation finds Savannah falling in love with someone else.  When John returns home, he finds that Savannah is married and still the girl of his dreams.  Now he faces the hardest decision of his life.

42% of adults admit to buying a book just to look smart and never reading it.
The average reading level of adults in the U.S. is between 7th and 9th grade. 

All my life, I've been doing just this: burning bridges.  I'm a certifiable pyromaniac.  I end each chapter of my life with a fire ritual, breaking down every tie I made out of shame or hate or just unexplainable self-sabotage.

Then one day, someone wise said to me that burning bridges is the worst thing one can do to oneself.  It's simply not wise to leave a trail of fire in your wake instead of a trail of fond memories.  Sometimes simply cutting ties or in any other way severing yourself from someone without a single word may seem like the best course of action (and I will be the first to admit that this can sometimes be true), but is it really the best or does just seem to be the easiest when cornered by the prospect of actually facing our problems head on?  If we have a disagreement or mishap or falling out with another human being, does it really benefit either of us to just abandon that relationship on a note of bitterness?  No, not at all.

Every fiber of my being has always rebelled against confrontation, especially if I'm the one that's done something wrong, no matter how minor.  I also have the habit of blaming myself even when I realize later I hadn't actually done anything wrong at all, which has lead to extra problems for me that could have been resolved with some rational thought and confrontation of the matter.  I've ducked into rooms and around corners, practically run from people that I wanted to avoid, just to save myself from having to look them in the eyes or offer up some stumbling words of explanation.  I've gone to extraordinary lengths to cut myself off completely from people and to forget the problems between us, but it is surprisingly hard to forget bitterness, especially when the case for resolving it and healing seems hopeless.  The least I could have done would have been to end those ties on a positive note, to have faced my fears and dispelled that haunting taste on the back of my tongue.

Also, I cannot neglect to mention the bitterness that comes from cutting oneself off from someone for just no good reason.  We blow off our friends, we avoid phone calls and text messages simply because we don't feel like talking, and we make others feel lousy for nothing.  It doesn't take much effort to send someone a text later on when you're in a better mood or to at least tell someone as far in advance as possible that we won't be able to join them for something, but for some reason we don't do it.  Why?  Because it seems easiest, and it's easy to do the easy thing.

My point here is not that we should maintain contact with everyone we've ever met, even those that we'd like to forget, but that we shouldn't leave bitter.  If you're going to part, part friends, part positively.  You have no idea how it can hurt you if you don't.  Leave the bridge standing; you may never cross it again, but it is good to know that it still stands if you ever need it.  And if you've burned a bridge, all it takes to build it back is a little extra effort, some careful consideration, and some positive action toward resolution. 

I've made a little vow to myself that before I go on to graduate school, I'm going do my best to rebuild every bridge that I've burned in the latest chapter of my life like a flock of phoenixes from the ashes.  If you stop to really think about it, all it takes is a little maturity and humility to make things right.  There is no bridge that I've burned within the past 2 years that I cannot think of a way to rebuild.  I guess once the foundation is laid, there will always be something there to build a bridge off of.

I know it's been a while, but I'm sure all of you understand how busy one's schedule can get, especially when you're trying to cram in all your school work plus some into the first three months of the semester.  If I'm going to be able to enjoy my time in Germany at all, I've simply got to get those things out of the way.  With that said...

Last week, I decided once and for all to say screw teaching.  I'm changing my major to pure English <3  I've been flirting with this idea for a long time, and I've finally decided that even if it would potentially open up one more job option for me to have the teaching minor, it is simply not worth it in any way.  Tacking a secondary education minor onto my upward climb to professorship was quite possibly one of the largest mistakes I've made in my life, and I'm glad I've finally realized it.

I may have wasted time and money on education courses, but I learned a valuable lesson from it.  It's not that teaching isn't a perfectly honorable pursuit, but like many professions, it is under-appreciated, underpaid, and ultimately fruitless for being discouraged by the very country that needs these teachers the most.  As it stands, the degree just doesn't seem worth the outstanding effort to attain it, the job risks, and various laws and regulations that restrict the everyday freedom of teachers, even in their own private lives.  It's exactly the same as getting a nursing degree: you're going to work a hard, thankless job with the risk of lawsuits or firings coming down on you at the drop of a hat that will effectively destroy your teaching career for the rest of your life.

Courtesy of Toothpaste for Dinner

I understand that many states have different education requirements, laws, and regulations concerning teaching, but whether it be at the national or state level, something must be done to encourage students to become teachers and to save the education of our country.  As for Alabama, there are several teacher examinations that a.) do not test teachers based on their subject of study and b.) test both elementary and secondary teachers the same way.  Is that really the way to determine if people taking these tests are competent?  In every education class I've ever sat down in, the professors announced that the coursework we would do in those classes would never be used by us in the real world of teaching, that no school used the programs or formats encouraged by the education track, and yet Alabama requires potential teachers to fill a portfolio full of these pointless assignments to show that we learned how to do them.  That work isn't just pointless, it is repetitive and extremely time consuming, some of the hardest classwork I've ever done for 10 points or a check +.  No matter what class you are in, you end up doing the same assignments in the same order over and over with slight variations.  The classes are so cookie cutter, one is often able to just turn in an old assignment with some slight alterations.  For every education class you take, you are required to do a certain amount of community service and student teaching hours; the more classes you take, the more hours you must do.  In essence, teaching classes can become like a second job between those outside hours and the plethora of busywork one must do.

So what happens when a student decides to endure all of that, to take a million courses on how not to be racist then write a thesis on revolutionary ideals about what education should be before embarking on a journey into a world where none of those ideals will ever come true?  You enter a struggling job market, perhaps you become a teacher, and that's great, you've got a job, maybe you love young people or your subject, you're totally pumped.  However, think for a moment back to your own high school education, if you will.  Did you ever notice that not very many of your own teachers were truly "pumped" unless they were just starting out?  Did you notice the passion leaving their eyes after teaching the same thing 7 times a day for year after year?  Did you see some sparkle disappear when students learned to hate or mock the subject that the teacher wanted to share with them?  Every day, hundreds of faces passed before them, most of them more occupied with dating and gossip than getting an education.  No one thanked them for the wisdom they imparted, for their passion, or for spending money from their own pockets to try to keep their students captivated.

From the Berkeley Daily Planet

Teaching textbooks call it burnout.  Personally, I hoped I wouldn't burn out before I could escape.  Teaching is a thankless job, and many students consider public school a glorified daycare.  Parents don't come in on parent-teacher conference day to say thank you for educating their child, they come in to scream at you because it couldn't possibly be that their son or daughter was turning in blank worksheets; it must be that you're a horrible teacher who has failed their child and should be fired.  And how is it that the practice of firing teachers whose students make bad grades is incentive for those teachers to get better at teaching students?  It is more likely that that same teacher, fearing for their job, will dumb down the curriculum for the sake of allowing everyone to pass and to save their career.  I won't even get started on standardized tests, let alone mass standardized tests; if you're a teacher for the grades that take the graduation exam or the SATs or what have you, you will teach to that test instead of teach truly valuable things to try and save the school where you work, because if those students fail that test, your school goes on probation and loses funding.  It detracts from the quality of education simply to pass tests that aren't even an accurate measure of student intelligence, talent, or creativity.  School becomes designed to cater to the desperate need of teachers to have all their students, especially the ones with the lowest grades, pass standardized tests for various reasons, catering to the needs of the students who border on failing and leaving especially gifted students bored, burned out, and neglected.  People who have an especially high IQ who often go on the be very successful are consistently let down by public education.

It all sounds so backwards, but it doesn't even end there.  The first classes to get cut when the budget is low are enrichment classes, arts and extracurriculars that inspire passion and creativity in students and offer a welcome break to the monotony of everyday classwork.  Put simply, school does not encourage the pursuit of passion.  If you aren't good at math and want a career in history later in life, you aren't allowed to take extra or more advanced history classes or to drop advanced calculus.  If you play the trumpet well and know you want it to be a major part of your life, you aren't allowed to focus on music and your grades in music courses are meaningless because they aren't "core curriculum."  If anything, your music course is likely to be cut.  The current system not only punishes the teacher, it punishes the student.  Teachers often must pay for many things one would consider necessities out of their pocket, such as tissues, extra tools used for enriching projects, or even books.  You are already severely underpaid (many teachers work second jobs, some of the ones at my high school being farmers on the side), and you're forced to pay for many tools for yourself because of lack of funding.  And yet, just a couple years ago, a 1/2 cent tax increase that would fund schools exclusively was voted down right here in Cullman and continues to get voted down every time it comes up.

It gets better.  Your personal life is no longer your own.  According to one of my teacher education textbooks, courts have upheld the decision of schools to fire teachers for living with a partner without being married.  I'm sure many of you remember a few years back that a teacher (pictured right) was fired for having a second job as a mate on a charter fishing boat service after it was discovered she wore a bikini on the cruises and in the fishing boat's brochure.  After the brochure was exposed, several fishing patrons volunteered photos of her in her bikini.  While sexual harassment may be a serious subject and there should always be regulations in place to prevent it, if a student decides to accuse a teacher of sexual harassment under false pretenses, even if it is discovered the accusation was a lie, that teacher will lose his or her job and probably never be hired as a teacher again, and courts will uphold the decision of schools to fire these teachers and other schools to refuse to hire them.  One must also never forget the threat of student violence, whether it be with guns, knives, or fists.  It happens more than you think.  I know that many of you could say that in your high school career, there was someone, even more than one someone, who brought a serious weapon to school, seemed to have tendencies toward violence and lashing out, or you were sure was just going to snap one day.  Aside from instances like that, my own school saw two bomb threats during the school day, and the year before I moved to my high school, an arsonist burned it down.  All that and I just live in podunk old Cullman, Alabama.

Until new laws and regulations concerning the education of teachers (they should be educated with curriculum that will truly prepare them for the kinds of programs and methods used in normal schools), freedoms within their private lives, proper funding of schools, a dramatic pay increase that reflects the value of the service these teachers are providing, standardized testing, incentive programs, and a million other things, teaching high school is simply not worth the extreme hard work placed both on those pursuing the degree and those already working within the field.  I've got something like over 50 job options with my versatile English degree and never intended to teach for more than 4 years before moving on to professorship, so tell me, nation, what's my motive to teach high school?  Sorry, nation, I've simply got to follow my dreams, whatever the path to them may be.

P.S. -- To all the education majors, especially elementary, who want to make it a career and want to help children, truly help them and devote your life to the pursuit, I respect you so much.  You are giving so much for some children that really need a helping hand.  I admire your nobility and am sorry that I myself am not nobler.

Amy Bishop looking fairly normal before all this mess

Well, today is that day, so I suppose it only makes sense to talk a little bit about veterans and the American armed forces.  It's really surreal to think that when Mike gets back from his deployment, he'll officially be a veteran of a foreign war, lumped into a group with my nearly 67 year old father.  These two men in my life in quite the same way fought/ are fighting in rather pointless wars.  Now before you lose your cool over what I will go on to say, just hear me out and read to the end.  What starts with a bold statement ends with respect.

America seems to have a long history of provocation, media glossing, history book rewriting, rash actions, and just plain blatant venturism.  Under the guise of noble intentions like "stopping crimes against humanity," "overthrowing evil dictatorships," "stopping terrorism," and even "bringing peace to the middle east," this country has bullied its way into foreign lands and stamped on seeds of change that might bring one nation hope while setting the U.S. at a disadvantage.  It continuously thrusts its nose into other people's wars and acts surprised and innocent when there is retaliation.

Pearl Harbor was a tragedy, but it was a provoked tragedy, brought on by our fuel blockade on Japan.  They had two choices: use the last of their fuel to launch an attack against the overwhelming naval forces blocking their resources or use the last of their fuel to launch an attack against the nearest and most strategic part of the U.S. they could find, Pearl Harbor.

Fidel Castro is made out to be an evil villain, but he was just a revolutionary that wanted a better life for his people.  Sound familiar?  Also, for all of you with a Che poster on your wall that respect him for any of many reasons, I hope you realize he was Castro's close ally, practically his second in command, during the revolution.  You may be wondering why we get so many refugees from Cuba if Castro is so grand and all the little farmers cheer when they receive his grain to plant, and that is because of America's vicious embargo on the entire country that prevents any of America's allies from trading with Cuba.  While a handful of smaller countries honor and respect the effort port forth by this country, particularly in the tumultuous areas of Africa where the people want to be free of opression, it is not enough to keep a starving, crumbling economy alive.  The embargo is a terrible crime against what might have been a steady emerging nation, and yet so many young people aren't even properly aware of it.

The U.S. is the last super power (excluding emerging China), and it is a dying breed, the last of its kind.  It's scary to be the one and only elephant in a world full of mice: on one hand, we have the unfettered power of near global and economic domination, on the other we have the fear of sinking into quiet existence while other countries shoot to the top.  To be less than number one is not a feeling we're used to, and we must push like a blood-soaked minuteman to the top of a corpse mountain and plant our flag.

I'm hoping this latest presidency will bring about the promised change; so far, we've seen results, but with unreal amounts of resistance to real, true change.  America is a culture with a weak tolerance for change, so each citizen becomes each unruly crowd, like a swarm of locusts, wings brushing, dissent brewing, until finally, we bite off our swarm-mate's head to spite the perceived danger.  Why?  Who could really say outside of quoting a little of this and that from the media.  It's a frenzy that stops change, plain an simple, the brushing of the wings, the seeds of dissent.  And yet somehow, we're moving forward, slowly but surely, like a turtle tied to a rock, pushing through yet more rocks, nosing along and doing his best for the sake of his little life.  I have high hopes for our future and high hopes for the end to this cycle.

However, as we stand now, we're still struggling out of it.  Our armed forces are continually shipped overseas to occupy other countries, while as far as I know, no foreign country retains a military base or collection of military force on our own soil.  Sure, we have embassies, but we don't have forces of thousands of any foreigner occupying us.

 There are just so, so many reasons to disagree with where the leadership of this nation has taken us, with where the fear of our own citizenry has taken us, but there is one thing that I know that most people can agree on, even without supporting war or the handling of our armed forces or politicians, and that's respect for the troops, the people that comprise the phalanx that, on order from above, moves solemnly into danger.  While they are taught to view themselves as separate from civilian life, there isn't really a true separation.  They are tied to all of us, they are part of our families, part of our lives; they are people with a job, a very dangerous job, that they must do.  Like us, they must obey their boss, who obeys his boss, who obeys his boss, right to the top, right to the root of pointless wars.  Offering them our respect is not offering the war our respect, it is respecting the sacrifice they've made to move forward in life, to do what most people would naturally shun in order to protect the values as dictated from above, whatever they may be this season.

While I know many people plunge into the Army, Navy, or National Guard for various reasons, some being school, some being tradition, and some being just plain confusion about where life will take them, I know that no matter what the reason was for them entering this service, it puts a concrete permanence in these people, a career, a purpose, and a drive.  I've learned so much from having Mike in my life, and one of the things I've learned is to respect the Army is a relevant career choice.  While it is something I would never pick for myself or many of the people I know, it fits some people, and these have my deepest, most sincere gratitude and respect for making their personal form of sacrifice to do what must be done.

I will never think of Mike based on the war he fought in, because he's a person and someone I love.  I ask you all to do the same: recognize the effort of your loved ones as veterans, but honor them for being more than just veterans, honor them for being that important person in your life as well, for earning your admiration and respect through both service to their country and just being who they are, the person you love.

I'm not really one to gripe about people copying me or anyone else.  After all, we are scraps of everything and everyone we see around us that we either like enough to pick up for ourselves or absorb through constant contact.  I pride myself on my personal originality; I like what I like and do what I do, regardless of what anyone else does or thinks, but I do admit that all of my interests aren't unique and there are going to be people out there that like the same kinds of things.  It's inevitable.  However, no one out there can be a carbon copy of me because I am unique in myself.  The same goes for everyone reading this blog; you are you and no one out there can be exactly like you.

What upsets me is when people want to be that carbon copy.  I understand if you spend a lot of time in someone's company, you're going to become quite alike, but there just simply isn't an excuse for the deliberate attempt to become another person.  Wear the same clothes as me or clothes I might pick for you, fine, I have great fashion sense.  Say the phrases I say, fine, I'm totally imitable and funny.  Like the same things as me, fine, I tend to like good things.  But I do not condone a certain person's attempt to literally become me through the blatant (yet poor) imitation of all my personal traits and qualities that make me me on the inside.  It's downright creepy on a level I don't even know how to describe, especially when that person is of the opposite sex.

He and I spent years in each other's company, and I came away from the experience knowing that I'd known a very disturbed individual who also seemed to let his inner struggle with his own vain and exaggerated attempts to fit in somewhere and be his own person (all utter failures) translate into outward behaviors that I shudder to think of.  Nothing of him was his own, and his attempts at human interaction were awkward and fumbling to say the very least.

However, whatever he chose to do with himself all those years, I kept to my own path and continued right on doing the things I'd always done, loving the things I've always loved.  I imagine his tag-alongs and visuals of my own simple pleasures must have set something off inside him, but he wasn't exactly a  smart person nor capable of handling himself very well.  To be him, it must be like waking up in the body of a stork, surrounded by other storks doing stork things.  One creature cannot simply blend straightaway into the larger culture of another, whatever disguise he may adopt.

I know many of you have met someone at some point who is simply "trying too hard."  You instinctively shy away from this person, but at the same time, you feel a little sorry for them in their fawn-like naivety (although he was really no fawn at all).  I was in a position to tell him to stop being that way, to candidly offer advice, and though I did, it fell on deaf ears, like trying to talk down the bull in the China shop.

Still awkward and fumbling, I'm sure, this person has gone on to make some strange amalgamation of myself and that artless attitude of his own.  While I've kept evolving, kept moving toward new realizations and living my own life, he has taken what he knew of me a thrown it like a bone into water to make soup.  While I'm sort of a homebody now as a result of Mike's deployment and my choosing online classes and home time over work and school an hour north of here, at one time, I was feeling trapped and restless, ready to get out of the house and plunge myself headlong into stimulating activities that ran along the lines of my personal interests.  At one time, I would spend the last of the money I had on gas to drive to a political rally/meeting or on tickets for this or that play.  At one time, I struggled to always find new things and new attractions to fill my starving eyes and starving soul with the overflow of beauty those things offered.

He has become the imitation of those shaky scraps of happiness found in this girl's life at that time.  He has become my old language, the constant seeking of more, more, more to fill the holes of my life (although he could hardly know that is what provoked me).  He is what was my behavior in purgatory.  I suppose looking back, even in purgatory, I was an interesting person.  My life bustled and bristled with what anyone looking in could see as excitement and richness.  I thrust myself into history, and a hundred years from now, perhaps someone in a museum will look into a photo of a crowd at some political meeting in some town square and find me or find my box of ticket stubs and memories in some dusty attic, some scrap of paper bearing my name in a place of honor. 

It's eerie to know that he took that piece of my life and turned it to his advantage, applied his mask and used the outward projections of my formerly jumbled inner workings to feign his way into someone's heart and home.  It's eerie and should come to an end.  That piece of me is personal, and while I can do nothing to take it back, I hope that in time, he'll just drop it and let it settle to the dust of time.

I have sympathy for those that struggle with their personal identity.  However, the way to find yourself does not lie in absolutely adopting the personality of someone interesting.  It lies in true and real self-exploration.  And when you've finally found yourself, you'll finally be able to answer clearly, honestly, and validly why you feel the way you do and do the things you do in your own life.  Until the day when your answers are crisp, defined, and passionate in your mind, even when no one is asking, you're still searching, and that's okay.  Just let go of other people's skirts and coat tails and decide for yourself who you really are outside of pure imitation.