The weight of words
As an English major, I invariably deal with a lot of words. Poems, essays, short stories — whatever form they’re in, I’ve experienced them.
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As an English major, I invariably deal with a lot of words. Poems, essays, short stories — whatever form they’re in, I’ve experienced them.
Thanks to BuzzFeed, I now know more about myself than I ever wanted to.
I went down to New Orleans this past week to embark on a rite of passage every college student must eventually face: job interviews.
Throughout my entire childhood, I was convinced I was going to be famous. I spent an inordinate amount of time alone in my bedroom practicing my opera scales. I would call our voicemail and refused to let my parents pick up the phone, so I could record myself singing and listen back to it.
The other day while I was perusing my Facebook newsfeed instead of doing the million things on my to-do list, I came upon an article called ““Why Is College Dating So Screwed Up”:http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/relationship-advice/college-dating-screwed-up?” Normally, I wouldn’t have read an article from Cosmopolitan, but the person who shared it with me claimed it summed up everything problematic about relationships at schools like U.Va.
I clearly remember the day my little brother was born: Jan. 1, 1994. One of my favorite family photos shows me snuggling with my mother in the hospital bed, happy but blissfully unaware of the small, sleeping baby in the background.
It’s always funny how the smallest things — a certain song, a commercial on TV, or just a phrase from a book — can make lasting lifelong impressions on you.
I am the type of person that picks up her phone to call someone the moment I am left alone on my way to class or in my car. Whenever I get home and the house is empty and dark, I text my roommates right away to see when they will be home. Even back at my parent’s house, when they leave town I sometimes sleep in their room, as if this will somehow, nonsensically, make me feel as if I am less alone.
I have never been more excited or ready for Thanksgiving break than I am this year. I can say this with full certainty as I sit on the fourth floor of Alderman, my eyes feeling scratchy and dry as I stare at my computer screen for the sixth-straight hour, the little white squares on my iCal taunting me with the days left before I’m going home.
I’m the kind of person that needs to consult at least 50 other people before making a decision about anything. I don’t mean just about the important stuff like college, career choices or declaring a major, but literally everything. What dress to wear to a party, the kind of dressing I should put on a salad, if I should spend my savings on one thing or continue saving it for another — everything.
Out of the long list of things I feel like you’re supposed to have learned how to do by the time you’re out of college — including organizing your bedroom, paying bills, managing time and balancing work wisely — I still have yet to learn how to cook. Sure, I can scramble an egg and boil pasta, but the extent of my culinary domesticity really reaches its pinnacle when I chop vegetables for a salad or occasionally make a standard sheet cake.
For some reason I will always associate fall with the way it made me feel as a kid — clomping into school in my itchy, too-stiff, back-to-school clothes, carefully cutting pumpkins out of bright orange construction paper that smelled like cardboard and using my dirty fingers to stick them on the bulletin boards of my classroom.
I have been tall all my life. There is a box somewhere in my basement at home in North Carolina with a collection of pictures stretching throughout the course of the ‘90s. In each one I am, without fail, looming over the other children around me, my lanky form only complemented by the great set of bangs and Rainforest Cafe T-shirt I am unsurprisingly sporting. Needless to say, I was a little awkward.
There’s a strange mindset that accompanies the beginning of my fourth and last year here at U.Va. It’s a sort of inner pang or homesickness for something, but I don’t really know what. It could be that fresh sense of expectation that accompanied my first year, the feeling of newness mingled with uncertainty. It could be the cocky, almost self-centered mindset that came with being a second year – thinking I now know everything and that nothing can faze me. Or maybe it’s the quiet certainty of third year, the relaxed ease of existing in a place in which I felt established yet comfortable, the newness gone and replaced by familiarity.
Before every summer break I’m always secretly worried that I’ll go home and never come back. I worry that my entire college experience was all something I imagined, and that all the small, wonderful moments that I created and experienced here might become something like one of those dreams that you can never fully remember after you wake up.
This past weekend, I met my family down at our beach house for a few days. All my life, our place at the beach has been my favorite spot in the entire world. My grandparents bought it before I was born and I’ve been to it every summer of my life. I feel like I know it so well that it’s kind of like a physical part of my past, a concrete and tangible artifact of my childhood.
This spring break I spent eight days in Brazil with the Seeds of Hope trip, a much-needed departure from my life in Charlottesville and the anxieties and fixations that accompany it. As I write this, I am surrounded by a pile of dirty clothes spilling from my open suitcase, the books and papers from my midterm week of hell still spread across my bedroom floor, but in the middle of this chaotic jumble of odds and ends that is my life I feel a certain sense of balance, a calm inner-assurance that has come from taking a week to exist outside of my self.
There’s always a point in the middle of February, in the midst of the grey skies, cold mornings and early nightfall that I begin to feel like I can’t really keep up anymore. That all the work, the stress, the late nights, the pressure to do everything correctly is all too much, and a feeling of inadequacy and worthlessness overwhelms me and leaves me feeling as if I’ll never be able to handle it all.
I must have been living under a rock for the last six months, because I didn’t find out about E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey until a month ago. Unbeknownst to me, the novel detailing the torrid sexual relationship between Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey had evolved from a piece of Twilight fan fiction into a work with a notable cult following, tucked into the beach bags and backpacks of moms and teenage girls the world over.
Poet Jane Hirshfield recited her work in the Harrison Institute Auditorium at the University's Special Collections Library Thursday as part of the Rea Visiting Writer program, an initiative sponsored by the Creative Writing Department.