in better weather,
i reject socks and slippers, and
my bare feet kiss the tiled bathroom floor gently,
accepting the cold with an acquiescent shiver.

tonight, however,
the ragged edges of my cracked skin
glance off with an aloof “shh, shh”
only daring to breathe when occasional puddles
present themselves as moist sacrifices to greedy soles.

this lead me to think about the burden of caring.

i’m in my last semester of undergraduate study, and i’ve got plenty going on in my own life, but i cannot cease to seek out information outside the “bubble” of my school and even my country. it’s my nature. i like to be informed, not just about news issues.

however, up until a few weeks ago, my deep need to be informed and care about what’s happening, from the lives of my friends to the lives of people in countries, had been suspended (partially due to the grieving process, i believe). it was a me-me-me-fest, 24/7. i was a slave to heightened sensitivity and mood swings, with generally agreeable or good days but terrible nights that brought tears like clockwork. deadlines for schoolwork and for the school newspaper that i write for had no meaning.

i honestly felt like shit most of the time, despite–or maybe because of–being the center of my universe.

but now i’m feeling mostly normal again (well, normal for me). i can CARE.

caring takes time. caring takes energy. caring causes headaches and rants and broken hearts. apathy is easier. i’d probably get better grades, more sleep, and spend less time online about to tear my hair out in aggravation.

so why care? is it actually worth it to have a bleeding heart?

caring proves our humanity. that robot that just won jeopardy could sit with a single college-student as she anxiously awaits the results of a pregnancy test, weighed down with the possibilities that could disrupt her entire future, but a robot couldn’t absorb those emotions and be stressed out (unless you’re Data in that one episode of star trek: TNG). i doubt hearing the death count from libya would furrow its brow.

apathy allows those committing heinous acts to continue unabated, those being oppressed to remain silent, and the suffering to believe they are alone. it devalues those outside of your own universe and raises you, the individual, to the status of unreachable and self-sustaining island, which we were never meant to be.

it is because of this that i also have a beef with those who say “i don’t watch the news, it’s depressing.” guess what: avoiding world events doesn’t mean that they aren’t happening. taking the time to actually know what is happening is the first step towards eliminating personal apathy. if you can care about the life events of your friends displayed on your Facebook, you can take the time to regularly hit up a reputable news website.

i’m about to tear my hair out. my multitasking brain is attempting to analyze world events from the perspective of someone who’s finally attempting to learn why and how countries are interdependent. i don’t understand most of what’s happening, but i’m not going to give up. i’d rather get upset or up in arms about things happening outside of myself than spend an hour in a pity party. i take the burden of caring seriously.

1. i’m 21. that’s also how many facts will be present in this list.

2. i am an optimist at my core, despite having struggled with depression and self-injury and a current foray through the grieving process. this probably has something to do with my strong christian faith.

3. while i’m technically a registered republican, i also don’t really think there’s a political party for me anymore. i don’t like having to compromise some morals and beliefs for one and others for another. if someone can tell me how to register as an independent, i’d love to know.

4. all my favorite colors are neons. my very favorite is neon purple, with cerulean and scarlet making up the second and third places.

5. i am what i call an “englishy” person. words, in so very many ways, are my life and my trade and my contribution to society.

6. i’m also a “francophile.” i’m fluent in french. my maternal grandmother is french. i’ve been to france twice, the second time (if you’re a latecomer to this blog) to study abroad for a semester. i miss it dearly and hope to either have a job there someday or a job that will provide me with enough funds to travel there regularly.

7. i probably couldn’t give you just ONE favorite author, but if you were to give me a genre i can comply. for example, neil gaiman is my favorite living sci-fi/fantasy/etc author.

8. however, favorite poet is a lot easier. pablo neruda. i refer to him by his first name because that’s how comfortable i feel with him. i’m in the middle of a senior paper analysis of his love poetry. i even own a tshirt with his face on it. and so on…

9. i am generally distrustful of apple and their products. however, this did not stop me from purchasing my first apple product last week, an ipad.

10. i name all my electronics after tolkien-related characters or things, except for my phone. i’ve never named a cell phone. to date, i own a gandalf, shadowfax, ainulindale, and elanor.

11. my favorite musical is RENT.

12. i used to want to go to grad school right after my undergrad, but i recently decided that was the easy way out, so i’m going to try and find a job instead and then eventually get my MFA.

13. two sounds i hate more than the oft-evoked nails on a chalkboard: popping balloons and loudly flushing toilets.

14. i played violin from age 11 until i graduated high school. it’s exceedingly hard to make time for it when you’re not a music major.

15. i first read the harry potter books a mere two years ago, all seven of in ten days (in the middle of the semester, i’d like to point out). i am now what is commonly termed a ‘potterhead.’

16. i do calligraphy in my spare time. i’m pretty good at it.

17. making crafty/artsy things and attending dance concerts or plays mellow me out better than marijuana ever could.

18. i have, at last count, around 65 gbs of music on my zune. i’d say i’m pretty enthusiastic about music. i also have a boxful of inherited vinyl and a turntable, but i’m waiting on an adapter cord from amazon to make the turntable work with my zune’s docking speaker.

19. can i say laughing is a hobby? because it is. there are few “types” of humor that aren’t funny to me.

20. i have no qualms about sitting down with a box of triscuits and systematically consuming the whole thing.

21. no matter how messy my dorm or bedroom is, my bed is always made. i can’t really explain why.

i keep running into this picture. mostly on tumblr, but not mine, as i will explain.

now, i don’t mean for this blog to turn into one about the grieving process, but quite frankly, it’s been consuming my life and i can’t pretend that it hasn’t been. therefore the above picture irritates me for a few reasons.

i have wished for it. i have prayed for a thing dramatic and big and life-changing to occur. and life did make a strange sort of chaotic sense for awhile. retrospectively, it was nice.

my dad died. he wasn’t supposed to. [disclaimer: do NOT tell me any of that "he's in a better place now, he's not in pain" blahblahblah bullshit, because i KNOW. just don't.] he was actually doing better than he had been, despite still being in the nursing home. the last time i saw him alive he was feeding himself pudding, saying that he’d been having more of an appetite so he needed to eat to keep his strength up. i needed to get back to tulsa, i needed to meet my friends i was leaving KC with, i needed to go get through dead week [ha.] and finals and come back for a proper break from school, so i walked away, the whirring and clicks of hospital-esque machinery and the sounds of my dad eating slow and slowly behind me.

i walked away with no premonition of it being the last time i’d see him alive. there was an unopened pumpkin pie on my right, left by a family friend so he could have a bit of thanksgiving, and i hoped that he’d eat it before it didn’t taste good anymore. it was tippins, his favorite (homemade notwithstanding).

two days later i was at the movies with some good friends, back in oklahoma, when i got a call from my native area code but with a number i didn’t recognized. i was watching a movie. i rejected the phone call. my sister called. i rejected it too. she sent a text saying something close to CALL ME RIGHT NOW. i left the theater, exasperated, called, she told me that they’d found dad unresponsive and were trying to resuscitate him. that unknown call i hadn’t answered was from the nursing home. i stood outside the theater, not moving, feeling fuzzy pricks of pain at the edges of my vision that i did not know were going to come true or not. and then my sister called, hysterical, saying that they couldn’t bring him back. i fell to the floor. it felt like my life and my happiness had been cut down the middle, sharp and irreparable. it still feels like that sometimes.

i’m 21 years old. my life up until this point has felt largely out of my control. as a child with books for best friends and then an adolescent with divorcing parents, i’ve been a piece of cork on ocean waves until around the college years began. then it was me. this was MY life. and then it didn’t feel like my life anymore. perhaps even less so, because it’s well-documented and advised that grief is something that you HAVE to go through. you have no choice in the matter. if you manage to suppress it now, it will come and bite you in the ass later. so i’ve been yanked around by my emotions for a little over two months now, but that doesn’t mean i have to like it.

i’ll never stop missing him. it will hurt less and it will hurt less often, but it won’t stop hurting. when someone close dies, it’s like having one of those injuries in your leg or foot or whatever where doctors can do all the fixing they want, but you’ll still always walk with a limp. i walk with a limp. some days it’s hard just to crawl. i have a friend [eh, friend might be kind of a strong word here...] who lost a sibling when they were both young who can attest to this, and for some reason quite a few friends my age who have also lost their fathers in the past few years.

look at your boredom, your routine, your normal, and give thanks, because it can all be pulled out from under you faster than you can say “lolwut?”

the things that change your life aren’t always the things you WANT to change your life. i can’t send this message to the thousands of tumblr folk who have reblogged that photo, so i shall send it to the internet at large.

be thankful for the mundane.

the first is a “cracked” sonnet (so i call it), and i read it at the memorial service. i didn’t write it specifically for the occasion, but i was finally able to finish the last two lines beforehand, so i read it there. the other two pieces are free verse.

//A Sonnet Akin To My Father’s Right Hip (Cracked)

Someday I will bury you, my father,

and the ground will cradle your exhaustion

like the afternoon beds of spent toddlers

who run without grand design or caution.

If the Bible is right you’ll then receive

coordinated parts to fit your knife mind

that knows the saxophone, but for now thieved

of dexterity, your hands remain blind.

But it’s not that time; it’s not that time yet,

or this is what I tell myself to sleep.

I am not middle-aged, kids underfoot,

And you’ve not yet seen five decades complete.

Rest now, my father, rest and have peace.

Memories I’ll hold close as skin, but your hand I release.

//untitled #1

They can see it.

Death has left greasy fingerprints across my face

and I shine like cheap pizza under the glare of heat lamp eyes.

I’d rather weigh down my pockets with stones,

embrace a hair shirt with arms trembling for a lover I don’t have,

shield my eyes from searching gazes that want to know

if I am “okay”

than put the hole in me on display

for their condolences to supposedly fill.

I am alone when I see his still form,

I am alone when I cross dad off the Christmas shopping list.

I will be alone when the flowers die

in a burst of fragrant sacrifice

and leave their bright skeletons across the carpet.

And I will be alone when the pillars holding me up

dissolve into oceans without waves or a shoreline.

//untitled #2

It wasn’t meant to stay here.

A black box sits carelessly atop the microwave,

among napkins, cookie crumbs, and cast-off playdo—

the last transmission we’ll never hear.

Alone at home while my family endures work or schooling,

I reheat tasteless burritos under its watch.

It wasn’t meant to stay here.

The wreckage leaves dead flower petals underfoot

and I avoid them like a careful elephant.

I wonder if it’s like touching flour

or virgin sand

or silica.

I wonder if it’s like hearing a rough hand rub five-o’clock shadow

or the rush of a rain stick

or leaves slapping each other in a windstorm.

I wonder if it’s something more poetic

than the leftovers of a person’s incinerated body,

if I’d hear that too-loud laugh when I opened the box

or see the flash of a smile.

It wasn’t meant to stay here,

and I will keep wondering.

i even sorted them by genre [and year, but i'm not putting that here cause my energy has run out and it's in a different spot on each friggin record].

rock/pop:

-the beatles, 1962-1966 “best of”

-the hollies, greatest hits

-lettermen, greatest hits

-the very best of johnny rivers

-boz scaggs, hits!

-elton john, too low for zero

-the carpenters, yesterday once more (best of)

-neil diamond, gold: live at the troubadour

easy listening:

-the very best of roger whittaker

jazz:

-glenn miller plays selections from the glenn miller story and other hits

-the best of glenn miller vol. 3

-count basie and his orchestra, prime time

-buddy rich, drummer’s drummer

-nat king cole [just says "we proudly dedicate this album as a tribute to the man and his music" on the front]

-count basie, straight ahead

-bill pearce trombone with the dick anthony orchestra

-herb alpert and the tijuana brass, SRO

country/bluegrass:

-the world of flatt and scruggs

-lester flatt featuring feudin’ banjos, country boy

-boxcar willie, king of the road

-eddie rabbitt, horizon

-jerry reed, texas bound and flyin’

r&b/soul:

-donna summer, walk away: the best of 1977-1980

-jimmy ruffin, sunrise

christmas:

-london festival brass ensemble, the magic of christmas

-christmas with the lush strings of the hollywood symphonette

-john denver and the muppets, a christmas together

-a christmas festival [compilation album]

praise and worship:

-jim and tammy bakker present the PTL singers and orchestra

-jim and tammy present the PTL musical family

soundtracks:

-television’s greatest hits: 65 tv themes from the 50′s and 60′s

-henry mancini, the music from peter gunn

-henry mancini, the pink panther

-john williams, star wars

-john williams, superman: the movie

-leonard rosenman, the lord of the rings [the animated one, obviously]

-jerry goldsmith, star trek: the motion picture

-burt reynolds’ sharkey’s machine [compilation]

other:

-rockin’ around the house! 50 original hits

and the one vinyl i’ve bought for myself so far:

indie rock:

-arcade fire, the suburbs

I, Rachel Whitlock, am a hypocritical liar. For years I’ve said something like “learning any second language deserves to be commended, no matter what it is.” What I’ve ACTUALLY meant is “please learn French, but if for some reason you refuse, just don’t learn Spanish.”

Allow me to explain.

My maternal grandma is full-blooded French, and I’ve cultivated a love affair with everything to do with that part of my heritage for years. But a preference for French cannot really be blamed here. I blame middle school and my own stubbornness.

For a few years, while living in Kansas, I went to a magnet school in a slightly ghetto-ish part of town. We were required to take a foreign language, starting in 7^th grade, and for some reason Spanish was the only one available. I was a little bitter. I couldn’t take a language common in foreign language classes across the country, and the one that happened to run in my family. Aside from a unit on the basics earlier in my schooling, I hadn’t taken any before, and 7^th grade happened to be the year where you don’t actually learn the language, but the history of Mexico.

Additionally, there was a TON of Mexican kids at my school. They all hung out together, they all spoke Spanish to each other like a secret code, and they were all mean (I don’t know why). It was like a club that, as a 12-year-old bespectacled loner with her head always in a book, I didn’t want to join.

Fast-forward to high school. I finally got to take French! Oh but then I got to deal with every other person besides classmates and my teacher saying “Spanish is more useful.” More bitterness.

Junior year I was introduced to my first love (okay, yes, after Jesus, but you get what I mean), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Sure, he’d been dead since 1973, but his poetry worked/still works something magical within my soul. I was dimly aware that he wrote all of his works in Spanish, but since I was reading in English and for the first time, this didn’t mean a thing.

The summer after my junior year, I went on my first missions trip to Mexico City. Ten days of serving people in need, from those living in garbage dump slums, to boys playing football (soccer) in the street, to community centers, to dusty clumps of buildings full of smiles and food, to one room churches…I was moved in my heart, and yet blocked by language. Not being able to properly articulate beyond the very basics of my job functions—asking for the amarillo crayon from a child simply by pointing and saying the color—made me want to bang my head against the tent poles.

Then I left. I burned to help the big-eyed Mexican kids fishing for tadpoles in the grimy dump pond, but I did not burn enough to learn Spanish.

Various incidents from that point until today have encouraged my grumbling towards the Spanish language (the immigration debate, Spanish worship music, “please press one for English”…) but my love of Pablo continued unbound (I also discovered Octavio Paz). I’ve recently started researching him more in-depth for my *dum dum dum* senior paper.

Something odd happened last spring to foreshadow my recent epiphany. I was working in the English department and a (male) friend (who shall remain nameless) used the phone on my desk to call his mom. The entire conversation was in Spanish.

Now I don’t know if it’s because I was attracted to this male friend, but for the first time in my 20ish year-old life, Spanish sounded beautiful and special (and, I will admit, sensual). This was not mean Hispanic kids at my middle school talking about Hispanic things with other Hispanic friends. It was not fast and eager words eager to say something that I was helpless to reciprocate. This was love, which came across in the way he said the words, the way he accented them and funneled them through this language that I’d so belligerently resisted.

I was so completely thrown, but then I pushed it out of my mind, thinking it was wholly related to my attraction to that boy. Well, not completely. But it did plant a seed, which suddenly sprouted last week: my derision for Spanish, no matter what I called it, was just that, and the more I examine my favorite poet, the more it lacks sense.

I’m going to work on it. I swear I will. A language-based prejudice, especially for one like me who is quite interested in linguistics, has no place in my heart. First, my attitude, and next, I’ll try to learn.

Perdóname.

(um, I probably conjugated that wrong, but that’s what my translator thingy tells me.)

oh well.

since i’m such a book person, i don’t really have ONE favorite book. therefore i am going to approach the question like this:

if i could recommend a single book to anybody, what would i recommend? this usually means the life-changing ones. the ones that changed who i am as a person, how i look at the world, how i think about *things*…yeah.

the answer?

the poetry of pablo neruda

it’s a huge-ass anthology of selections from almost every published collection of his poetry, spanning his life and posthumous works. pablo, as i so lovingly call him, really did change my life. this started at age 17 in my high school creative writing class, and now, at 21, i’ve begun the preliminary research for my (college) senior paper. he’s shown me, probably as much as that passage from 1 corinthians 13, what love looks like. he’s taught me that political poetry isn’t just about pointing fingers at The Man. he makes me appreciate nature. and so on…this anthology shows all of who pablo is, and it’s well-worth both the cost and weight of this tome. if poetry is “not your thing”…well, you’re reading the wrong blog.

favorite quote…s.

a room without a book is like a body with a soul. [cicero]

music starts where the power of words stops. [translated, wagner]

and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays. [shakespeare, from a midsummer night's dream]

hope is believing in a world that does not exist yet, a concession towards the kingdom of the heavens. to hope is to believe that life could be better. it is ultimately our belief in this “unbroken totality” that allows for the potential of tragedy. for without this hope, tragedy is no longer tragedy — it’s simply expected. without a belief that allows for a better world, the tragic is fact. [jon foreman]

you are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. [ogden nash]

when heaven meets the earth, we’ll have no use for numbers to tell us who we are or what we’re worth. [sleeping at last, from "heaven breaks"]

we are only asked to love, to offer hope to the many hopeless. we don’t get to choose all the endings, but we are asked to play the rescuers. we won’t solve all mysteries and our hearts will certainly break in such a vulnerable life, but it is the best way. we were made to be lovers bold in broken places, pouring ourselves out again and again until we’re called home. [jamie tworkowski]

we’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust. [arcade fire, from "wake up"]

we’ll dance like flames for there’s no gravity, for now i’m just a candle trying to stay lit in this windy night. [matisyahu, from "silence"]

[okay, i need to quit with the lyrics. also, um, too many funny ones from shows and movies to even start.]

acting, script, cast, plot, characters…(more things that i can’t think of) i love them all. i got on the bandwagon summer of 2009 (starting with season 1, thank you very much) and i have adored it since then.

there is also, *ahem*, this:

ladies, say it with me: humminahumminahummina...

and this:

*ker-thud*

and this…

*cough*

and don’t even get me started on their real-life accents…

yeah, this is my favorite show.

(first three photos courtesy of http://vikingfangtasies.tumblr.com)