Novels, and not novel ideas either.

So lately I've been reevaluating my life goals and trying to narrow my options for grad school. With a whole bunch of AmeriCorps education money, a decent IQ, and no student loans to pay off, I figure I just may as well go back for my master's degree. The thing is, I love reading and learning. Every program I look at is just so goddamn FASCINATING, I can't fathom how anyone would just KNOW what they wanted to study. I'm trying to be reasonable, though, and come out of this really knowing where I see myself in the long term.

For the time being, I've settled upon University of Baltimore's Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program because I've always and forever been a writer. If there are two constants in my life, they are my need to write and play music. Music performance doesn't seem like it's in the cards as a career per se, but writing and media management sure could be.

Lately I've been taking out old ideas and old writing, dusting them off, and seeing what I can make out of them. While rummaging through a bunch of old notes passed between myself and my friend Oli in seventh grade (yes, okay, I still have them), I found this. I might see what I can make of it for National Novel Writing Month, which is fast approaching and sure to go much more smoothly if I have a plot to write on from the outset. The bulk of the handwriting is mine, but the big "BOOK!" at the bottom is from Oli. Interesting to see what I was thinking from ages 12-14. Alternate realities, breaking spells, etc.

"Can't Touch This"

Today, I found a great example of how a hands-off approach can really work when trying to connect with my students -- and a few examples of how hands-on approaches work terrific, too.

Hands-on example 1: We took the kids on a field trip today to the movies: they had the choice of seeing either Ponyo or G-Force 3-D. Fortunately, I lucked out and got to see Ponyo instead of "the hamster movie." Unfortunately, my viewing was interrupted by several bathroom breaks and one frightened kindergartner. Where does the hands-on approach fit in here? Well, that kindergartner absolutely would not bring himself back into the theatre after we brought him outside in tears. Until I picked him up and promised him that he could sit with me and use my hands to cover his face, he refused to return to the theatre. My presence (and hands, because he insisted on using my hands to cover his eyes) calmed him and helped him to enjoy the rest of the "scary" movie without issue.

Hands-on example 2: After spooning sugary juice, popcorn, and fruit snacks into their bellies, most of the kids were ready to crash by the end of the films. We shoved them onto the bus and I had the luck to sit with two sweet little ones, Ashley and Chanah. Well, Ashley almost immediately fell asleep next to me, but Chanah was very wound up (as kids are wont to be, when sugared up and overexerted) and couldn't calm down enough to take a nap. She also would not speak to me, just shaking her head and grimacing if I spoke. Instead of letting her wallow and pout, I stroked her back and hair and calmed her down to the point where she was able to settle into a nap.

So, what do these two examples prove? That children respond well to physical touch -- that an embrace or a hand of comfort can speak many volumes more than mere words.
But what about when hands make no impact?
Enter the hands-off approach, requiring significantly more patience.

Keewon got off the bus feeling drowsy and hit another student. He didn't hurt her, but he needed to apologize and that, one top of his already sleepy mood, sent him into a downward spiral that resulted in him sitting and sobbing at a table in the lunchroom. Having just spent the majority of the day proving the hands-on technique, I tried to soothe Keewon by rubbing his back and speaking softly, but I couldn't reach him and he continually whined at my voice. After a while, I explained to him that he could continue sitting quietly, but that I would leave him alone (while keeping an eye on him, of course).
It took him almost half an hour, but he finally got himself under his own control again -- enough to take his hands away from his face. I verbally rewarded him for opening up ("Keewon, I'm so glad I can see your face again! I missed it!") and assured him that he wasn't in trouble, and then he went off to play with the other children as if nothing had happened.

So, why did I bother to relay those stories? Well, two reasons: one, I'm unwinding after a long day and, two, I want to reflect on and share what I've learned today. In trying to improve my teaching skills, I've been reading several books and websites about effective teaching methods and great teachers. Those materials stress flexibility as one of the most amazing tools I can have in my belt -- and I intend to use that tool to its maximum utility. Flexibility makes little difference, though, if you don't have the wisdom to know when to employ it. I'm hoping that frequent reflections will help me to gain that wisdom... and that I can drag you guys along for the ride.

Adjustments.

I found out yesterday I will need to have shoulder surgery. By need, I mean it poses the only real option for enjoying a proper quality of life through the rest of my days. I most likely have a labral tear, something that won't heal on its own and can't be addressed through physical therapy.

I had prepared myself for this possibility even before my first appointment with the orthopedist, so it surprises me how much I need to deal with this.

Much as I may try to downplay it sometimes, I'm still young. In fact, my youth provides a primary justification for the surgery itself: a progressively worsening joint injury shouldn't force someone to sacrifice hobbies and independence at age 25. I can fix this.

The reality is, though, I'll lose the use of my right arm for six weeks after the surgery. After two weeks of total immobilization, followed by four weeks in a sling without lifting it, I will begin physical therapy to regain use of my shoulder. All in all, this seems like a small price to pay to get a significant portion of my life back and stop living in fear of aggravating a new episode of debilitating pain.

Over the past 24 hours I have become acutely aware of how much life revolves around having two arms. Laying in bed last night with my right arm stretched above my head, I though about how much I love my body and try (sometimes not hard enough) to take care of it. I'm still in my years of being young, strong, resilient, beautiful. The thought of being crippled in such a dramatic way for such an extended period of time is so weird. I can't quite get my head around it.

For any able-bodied 20-something, I think this is probably sort of scary. We've probably never had to think about what it would be like to be unable to wash our own hair, dress ourselves, hug our partners with both arms, freely move our arms and legs in rhythm with our feelings.

After I've sorted all this out (I'm giving it a week), it'll be time to look at a calendar and ask myself "when is the best time to lose my right arm for a while?"

What am I doing with my life? Part 3

I am not a person to make plans. I mean, I'm an INFJ and yes I prefer to know where and when I'll be hanging out well in advance, but I don't run my life by plans. I'm a passive person and I like to sort of let things happen to me, things tend to work out like that. Other people seem to have direction and ambition; I just sort of float around. I tend take my life one "chunk" at at time: in high school, I didn't think beyond college. In college, I didn't think beyond moving to Stockholm to be with my boyfriend. Turns out that necessitated a move to Korea, and now that I'm in Korea, I'm trying to figure out what the next chunk is.

I've been dating my boyfriend for a while now, about six years. I definitely want to spend my life with him, I'm not suffering from cold feet. But...I really like Korea. My job here is pretty easy and fun (most of the time), it's very easy to save money, and honestly I like puttering around on my own. Being a grown-up in Korea is surprisingly easy. Additionally, I've made a few friends here that I will miss when I go home. I'd like to have more than one year with them. (It's hard for me to make friends, but once I do, they're really important.) I'm running out of time here in Korea, and the pressing question just becomes even more important: what am I going to do when I go home?

Part of me wants to go back home, work my old job, lose some weight (vanity!), visit my boyfriend, and then come back Korea in 2011. I've taken to Korean culture pretty easily (like a fish to water, or more appropriately, a Russian to vodka). Plus, as a weigukin, I could rock graduate school for an obscenely little amount of money. Not that I've ever been particularly enthusiastic about graduate school, but much like Jaclyn, I feel that as a "smart kid" I'm obligated to collect degrees like Girl Scout badges. At the least, I'd like to take some Korean classes.

At the same time, despite all my fun here, I miss my boyfriend. I know he misses me, too—to be honest, he's probably the one worse off during my contract. And while we've spent most of our relationship on different continents, I feel like one more year in Korea would be an unbearable strain on our relationship.

Unfortunately, he would be hard pressed to get a job here in Korea. You need a four-year degree to teach here, and he never went to university. And there's not much else for white people who don't speak Korean to do here, it's pretty much just teaching or military.

So I have before me: move to Stockholm, stay in Korea. Not counting my love affair with Indonesia, or flights of fantasy I have from time to time, where I spend a year or two just idling around with college friends in a new city back home. There's so much in life to do, it's impossible for me to pick.

What am I doing with my life? Part II

Graduate school, huh? Huh. Well here's the thing (and yes I overuse that phrase): my husband and a few friends are going to graduate school in the fall. Also, news flash: though I may have ADD and I may not always come off as very "with it," I'm not dumb. Being married to an engineer can make someone with an art degree a little territorial about brains and talent. Joke though we may, we BFAs have plenty of intelligence, we just didn't choose to major in math or science when we went off to school. But I digress.

I feel somewhat entitled to a higher degree, as if being gifted obligates me to earn as many academic achievements as I can. The thing is (see?) I like what I do. I don't want to give up a ton of time and money, cut back my hours at work, not audition for the symphony, and all that just to get a graduate degree in something else I'm not sure about. Because really, who of my close friends can really say I was sure about majoring in painting?

So as I sift through the options (I live in a major city -- there are many) and try to decide between Non-Profit Management, Sociology, Social Work, or Creative Writing & Publication Arts, I wonder: what's the point? What am I trying to accomplish here? Am I honestly just trying to use up my $10K AmeriCorps education award?

I feel like in your 30s you either raise children or find your calling. My hope is I can do both, and not alone. Another secret: introverted me really wants to go through life with a nice little group of friends, chasing (finding? just making up?) our dreams and weaving a crazy extended family. Given these admittedly pretty weird life goals, what do I see myself doing with my education monies and my mid-to-late 20s? Am I working for a performing arts organization? Am I at my current job and auditioning for the symphony? Am I starting a business? Moving to the country and starting an intentional community? Still living in the city, stubbornly raising children there to disprove the naysayers who said "oh, you say you won't, but you'll leave by the time those kids turn two"?

I have this feeling really awesome things are in store for me, I just can't for the life of me figure out what they are. Of course I just need to wait and see, but how much should I be waiting vs. actively moving forward? At what point am I just kidding myself, making believe that there's more to life than this? That I'm going to find something to do every day that's just so RIGHT I can barely contain my joy? Everyday happiness and contentment can make me so complacent, what is it going to take for me to risk upsetting the balance?

Achievement Gap and the Matthew Paradox

Two days ago, I received some pretty big news: I got into USC's Master's in Teaching program. Woo! The MAT program is something that I only learned about a few months ago, but I've totally fallen in love with the idea: take super-interactive classes online until you're ready to student teach, get your teaching practicum out of the way, and graduate with a master's and a California credential. Of course, it's always super exciting to get into the school of your choice, but I'm even more thrilled about USC's great history as a superb institute for urban education initiatives. My courses will focus on helping me connect with and understand the needs of urban students, the ones most stricken by the achievement gap.

So, in lieu of a "real" post, I thought I'd post one of my application essays, written totally in earnest, about my feelings about the achievement gap and how it ties in to the ages-old Matthew Paradox. As an added bonus, I'll also post a word cloud of the essay... consider it the lite version.

Here's that image (sorry guys, I usually have no problem posting pictures, but this one seems stubborn)

And, here's that essay:
The achievement gap is a perfectly apt illustration of the Matthew Paradox. In the Gospels, Matthew states that “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” (Matthew 35:29) That paradox precisely describes the cycle of failure in groups with low socio-economic status. The job of the teacher, then, is to distribute fairly, denying the paradox and ensuring equity.
So often, we find the students with all the advantages given every incentive to learn; they have after school activities, music lessons, and well-educated teachers. Instead of putting our most brilliant educators in the neediest classrooms, we reward our disadvantaged students with the most inexperienced teachers with the least training, the fewest programs. There are three things that we can and must do to close the achievement gap: we must be the best teachers possible, we must offer our students every opportunity to learn, and we absolutely must appeal to our lawmakers to pass necessary reforms.
One of the simplest ways to level the playing field is for great teachers to take work in low-end schools. Working in Compton is much more difficult than working in Beverly Hills, but students demand fairness and find inequity everywhere in depressed areas -- it is the teacher's place to offer equal treatment. Short of moving all good teachers to Compton, though, what other options remain? Teachers in tough schools need to work hard, harder than their peers in high-end communities, to continue improving themselves and keeping abreast of the latest advances in their fields.
Alongside polishing our pedagogical pedigrees, we must work hard to reach out to our students. We need to rely on practical strategies that we can employ daily to reach out to low-income students and their parents. If we are to connect to them on any level, we must begin to understand poverty and our student's lives. We can teach about the history of and current struggles with poverty and workers' rights. We can teach them about Che Guevera, explain the role of labor unions, and champion anti-poverty activism. We can teach them that “low-income” does not have to mean unprivileged and we can never assume that low-income students cannot achieve as much as any wealthier student.
Teachers in high-need areas need to be more flexible than their peers. We need to host extra tutoring sessions whenever students can attend, even if that means sacrificing a Saturday morning. Similarly, we need to involve parents using whatever means available: written notes, phone calls, weekend office hours. We cannot hold back when attempting to break our students free from the cycle of poverty; we owe it to them and to ourselves.
We must never lose sight of the intelligence of our students, understanding that poverty is a social disease, not a diagnosis of personal failure. Above all else, when working to bridge the achievement gap, teachers must not lose sight of their goals: to produce well-rounded, productive adults out of whatever students we receive. Though the Matthew Paradox has defined urban lifestyle for centuries, we can and will overcome the past.

Aspirations, etc

This could be one of those goofy bucket list memes, or it could be serious. You decide.

I've been thinking about what I really want to do in life... beyond just the next few years or today's passing fancy. So, I thought I might list a few goals and let the internet judge me (gently, please!)

1-2 years from now:

• get married (June 19, 2010... make your plans now!)
• obtain Master's in teaching + CA credential (sometime around Jan-Feb 2011 )
• start teaching in a high-need school that I can bike to
  

3-6 years from now:

• have a firm grasp on conversational Spanish
  
• buy a house
  
• start a family (later rather than sooner)

7-15 years from now:

• own property (not a measly front yard, but 1/2 acre plus)

15-forever from now:

• start a teaching farm for at-risk/urban/land-phobic young people

There, I've put it into print: I want to be a farmer. I want to be a teacher.
I see no reason that I can't do both. My plan is to start a small organic farm close to a city (Los Angeles..?). Ideally, it would be a mix of many different crops ranging from tomatoes and herbs to fruit trees and flowers. I would invite students to come a few times over the course of the year -- they would help to plant the seeds by hand, later they would help to prune and pull weeds, then a third trip would be a harvest day with fresh produce for a special lunch.

I want to spend the next decade or so honing my education skills and learning about practical farming. Then, I want to get my hands dirty and welcome little ones to learn that tomatoes don't grow out of supermarket bins and that bugs are just another lovely part of our ecosystem.

Comments? Judgments? Let me know -- this extrovert craves feedback!

Better Late..

Dear everyone,

I'm an extrovert.

That seems to be the theme of this blog, right? Introducing yourself by whatever characteristic most defines your interest in interaction. You'd think such a loud mouth-breather like me would be all over an open platform blogging space, but no. You see, I'm more of a "failed" extrovert, if you're feeling judgmental, a "blooming" extrovert, if you're feeling giving. I am outgoing and talkative and friendly and I don't really hold things back (more on that later), but I also fail to make friends easily and I prefer a quiet evening over a club or other external event. Yes, I speak ceaselessly -- I'm even talking to myself right now. But, conversations with myself or even ThatGuyAtTheMarket aren't bridges into friendship.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm an introverted extrovert? I am always more comfortable with a companion, but I'm not looking to be overwhelmed (just a friend or two at home, please.. not the whole club on Sunset, thanks). It's those friends, though, that are the trouble. I feel as though, after having moved to the most social city in the world (did I mention I live in Hollywood?), I should be reveling in the party atmosphere and sipping from L.A.'s glorious nightlife cup. Instead, I'm spending whole weekends without leaving the house (except to visit the farmers' market, aka. LOVE OF MY LIFE), accepting friends into my quiet home-sanctum. If you routinely spent your Saturday nights in Hollywood calmly cooking, cleaning, and watching Coppola films with a neighbor, would you worry? How about feeling a little inadequate?

Aside: what a lovely way to join a blog -- angsty ruminations (chewchewchew) on inadequacy. Don't worry, I'm getting to the happy part!

After months of trying hard to fit into L.A. life -- the parties, the glamour, the $20 cover charges -- I've finally realized that L.A. is just not fit for me. And I'm not gonna fight it. So, from now on, I'll stop being merely content, but actually proud, to spend my Saturday nights baking lasagna and my Sunday nights playing board games with TheBoy and our upstairs neighbor. I will RELISH my lack of hangover and saved cover charges and not-sore feet. And, most importantly, I will stop trying to make friends with the people who love L.A. and couldn't see themselves leaving (more on that later).

I'm coming to terms with my own sort of extroversion and looking forward to where it takes me.

Untitled.

Lately I've been doing that thing again where the whole world is set to a soundtrack and everything I see is a splinteringly beautiful scene in a movie. Watching passing cars, dancing on curbs, looking at the sky, wanting to reach out and touch the friends around me but feeling I'm in a way dancing within a set, free free free but at the same time just watching.

"What am I doing with my life?"

So, I feel a need to tell a story. I wrote a long-standing (oh whatever, one-plus-year) photography blog called Words + Images at my personal website. My family knew about it (not true of most blogging projects, including this one) and I handed out business cards with the URL. I spoke at a press conference as the writer for that blog and represented the art blogging community of Baltimore.

On top of all that, I followed a whole slew of art blogs, tried to keep up with the goings-on in Baltimore's art scene, and generally made a point of being somewhat of an expert on my subject matter.

A few months ago my life became pretty stressful. My employment situation was weird and/or uncertain, I had way too much on my shoulders at the office (notice how well those two mesh together), and I didn't do a lot of photographic work during that time either. Adding insult to injury, I had failed to create a vibrant commenting community on the blog, which I had defined as a primary goal in working so hard on it in the first place. Combine all that together and you get a whole lot of me not writing in my twice-a-week blog.

The thing is, since my family knew about this blog, I started getting questions. "Are you ever going to update your blog again?" "Well, I enjoyed reading it."

Why is it that family can mean so well, yet make you feel so much like you're not living up to your full potential? The plague of my adult life has been my consistent belief that most of what I hold in my hands is just that: potential.

Part of me wants to accept my broad spectrum of talents (i.e. lack of focus) for what it is and write a new blog about that...which is what I'm doing at the moment. The other part of me, the little voice of self-doubt, tells me I'm accepting failure. I should have persevered and kept doing something that felt like an absolute chore instead of moving on to whatever excited me at the moment. For now, though, I'm going to try embracing the fact that I'm not just a photographer, painter, writer, or musician. I identify as all of those things, and if I write a blog about my life as a creative person it needs to acknowledge who I really am. Even if I learn my destiny is to experience many things and truly excel in none of them at all, that's not something I can deny.

As always, though, I'm caught in the war between these two voices. I honestly don't know whether to accept my natural state of being or to insist upon something different, a singular focus that is both easily comprehended and readily congratulated.

Desperation for Nothing in Particular

I liked how Jaclyn started her first post, and since at heart I'm desperately trendy, I'm going to do the same. Well, almost the same, because it's obvious to everyone now that I've ACTUALLY begun my first post with a disclaimer about how and why I'm going to begin my first post ...

I'm Tyson. And I'm an INSJ. At least I think I'm an INSJ. I always describe myself as an INSJ. Well, at least as frequently as anyone CAN describe themself using their Meyers Briggs personality. I don't literally go around meetings disclosing this information to casual observers. That would be ... well, something I would consider inappropriate.

I think the thing I really need to say is that the reason it took me so long to look at and subesquently sign up and post to this blog is that I am an introvert, like the others who have written before me, but I feel I'm in a category all my own. I am a TECHNOLOGICAL introvert. Technological introverts do all the things normal introverts do - we shun frequent and overbearing social interaction, avoid trips to bars, complain about being at BINGO at the Hippo, search desperately for a reason to cancel our Tuesday night plans, and curl up in bed at night with that special someone (or pillow) feeling like we're fulfilled. But Techtroverts, as I'd like to call us (actually I wouldn't, except that I already did ...) feel the same way about the world wide webs of the internets.

Like you, I have a Facebook page. I've tweeted. I email my mother and family once a week. I EVEN have an account on MySpace with a page I'm pretty proud of. But here's the E! True Hollywood story about the whole thing. It stresses me the fuck out. Seriously.

I keep thinking - how can any person spend so much time in contact with everyone else? My partner spends a lot of time on facebook. He posts, he does those little application things, he chats. He loves it. And sometimes I'm envious that he has such a good time. But I log in, and in five minutes I'm completely overwhelmed and log out.

Also, I honestly think I found out that one of my best friends was getting married because I saw his facebook status. That's no way to live ... right? I mean, I guess I should just be expecting an Evite to his wedding. And then I keep thinking - if I had mattered that much to him in the first place, maybe he would have chosen to tell me in some other way. Maybe I've been relegated to the dreaded status of Facebook "friends" - so that despite our long standing relationship, he can politely put me on ignore, along with Kandy from Palm Beach, with whom he only shares a passionate interest in starfish on moonlit beaches.

Where are the letters? Not that I even want letters. I don't. My mother writes me a letter every week, and it doesn't make me think our relationship is somehow intrinsically more special because we're using an outdated form of communication. I think I mean that with letters, communication was special. You'd write a letter to your friend in California and send it on the pony express, or something, and they'd wait for it. They'd ACTUALLY wait for your letter. You know, in that oh-oh-the-wells-fargo-wagon-is-a'comin'-down-the-street-oh-please-let-it-be-for-me sense. Instead of sending you an instant message, and then emailing you 45 seconds later when you don't respond, and then texting. Only to find out that you took an extended trip to the bathroom.

But I think the point of all of this is that I feel like all of this just means that, not unlike Jaclyn and her summer of exploration (for which I congratulate her), I am trying to reach out and figure out what all this means. Maybe a techtrovert (god, did I really make up that word?) can still make sense of all of this communication, and have a good time. At least I'm going to try.

So, that summer when I...

Just now I took a step back to look at myself -- currently, pacing the downstairs singing in Italian and wishing the air conditioning would hurry up and do its job -- and thought, wow, what a good summer this has been! Or rather, spring and summer.

Despite being pretty much done and over with school for quite a while, I still use seasons -- often summers -- to gauge different stages of my life. You know, there was that summer where I lived alone just to prove I could do it. Or the one where I worked 60 hour weeks to try to forget how miserable and devastated I was over a breakup. Or the one where I moved to Maryland and tried to convince myself I enjoyed living in a lonely apartment in a town I didn't like.

Winter seems to be a time for settling in, for bonding with good friends over homemade soup and cuddling under blankets to watch a movie. Summer inherently requires me to get out more, to leave the house.

This summer represents an unprecedented level of that getting out, exploring, and reaching out, and I can trace it back to the reason I'm pacing the downstairs singing in Italian. At the beginning of the summer I signed up for a group voice class, as much to practice singing in the presence of others as to shake the rust off my vocal cords. I've learned to see our classroom as a safe space where I can sing in the same way I might do alone. On the first day I had to stand up and sing a song a cappella for the group, which broke my stage fright more by force than by desire. I feel like this six-week class provides a pivotal point around which the rest of the summer's events revolve.

For example, I've invited friends to the beach, made a pact of sorts to adopt a positive attitude/demeanor, reached out to make plans for spending time with people I like, gotten a real job, and so on. Overall, I feel like I've spent the spring and summer so far challenging myself to do things that scare me but also bring me a healthy dose of joy when it's all said and done. And maybe, just maybe, if I keep tip-toeing my way outside my comfort zone, I'll take a step back and say wow, my life right now is downright enviable.

How's that for a positive demeanor, free of angst and irritability?

Just a Thought

Brief musings:

I may be an introvert, but I routinely fall in love with my friends. Maybe that's why I don't have a huge number of them -- I want to leave enough room for everyone. One of my biggest fears about my close friends is that I'll never convey to them how much I really do care for them (I'm no good at that). Starting new friendships is a huge deal to me, especially with people I really like.

So...yeah. Sometimes I wonder if other people are this dramatic and intense about friend relationships.

Reading old zines.

I was about to post something else about social interactions and the introvert/extrovert dilemma, but found this from last week and decided to change the subject (for a day or two).

During a feeble effort to sort through the pile of boxes packed away in my basement, I unearthed one labeled "zine stuff." It contained all the original flats, plus a surprising number of paper copies, for the zine I produced from ages 15-19. I find my earliest issues rather embarrassing now, but the last two were both surprising and inspiring. 19 seems forever ago, but the last hair-under-six years represent a lot of personal growth and discovery for me.

For example, I was shocked by some of the views I held about my own sexuality. How "gay" was "just another label I [didn't] believe in" and how straight folks repressing same-sex attraction led to body issues. And how I could never be labeled/self-identified as bisexual.

To which now-me, sitting on the couch and reading this through, said: "WTF!?"

Recently I was with friends late at night, talking and occasionally dozing until the morning hours. Somewhere in there we asked, what if kids were brought up to be comfortable and open with their sexuality, no matter what it was? We represent all points on the Kinsey Scale and agreed our high school experiences were...less than encouraging.

Reading this makes me wish I'd had a venue to express and explore my sexuality at a younger age. That I knew and processed the term "bisexual" at ages 17-19 is actually somewhat surprising given my high school experience. Non-straight -- and non-white, for that matter -- culture/viewpoints were simply not represented. Period. Some of the words I heard about gay people are so hurtful I rarely, rarely repeat them. I think they're made more so by the fact that at the time, they passed like water under the bridge: no reprimands or consequences from those supposedly in charge.

For those of us who could/did experience opposite-sex attraction, adopting the heterosexual label was automatic and completely natural. At least in my case, any potential same-sex attraction was manifested in other ways, most of them negative.

So it doesn't surprise me that even at 19, I was still saying "it's not natural for straight people to only find the opposite sex attractive." No one had really taught me what "natural" was. I just didn't realize it was possible for me to own an identity other than straight.

In the end, I don't want gay children. I don't want straight children. I also don't want children just like me. I just want them to grow up knowing that whoever they are is okay. They can identify (or not) with whatever label they want. But nothing they feel -- beyond the stuff we all feel as teenagers -- should make them feel afraid, angry, or ashamed. It's hard enough already to figure out who you are, right? After all, I have a whole bookshelf full of old journals documenting my struggles with just being a young adult.

I'm a stranger here myself.

If, before I had departed the United States for South Korea, I had encountered a future version of myself in a phonebooth with George Carlin, telling me I'd spend the bulk of my weekends out in bars and clubs in the party district of Seoul, I'd have laughed uproariously. Uproariously, I say, even knowing full well that time-traveling prophets (especially ones that are you) should always be taken very, very seriously. Me? Out clubbing? Preposterous.

But yet, after four months in Korea, I've noticed a curious divide in myself. Under normal circumstances—which is to say, back home in the US—I was content to be by off by myself, doing my own thing. But now, some new, alien part of me looks forward to the weekend and the prospect of drinking and dancing and being with people. Even now, I'm typing this up when I should be getting ready to catch the subway into Seoul, where I'll spend the night at a friend's place, and from whence we'll depart for one of the biggest tourist events in South Korea.

It's funny that I'm willing to admit that I want to go out at all, when pretty much every "introverts" community on the Internet relishes its role as the wilting wallflower. Things can turn into a virtual pissing game of sorts, with people secretly trying to out-do each other as the most reclusive; the one who hates parties and crowds and people the most. (This is also related to the fact that extraverts are, among introverted communities, considered inferior or somehow dumber.)

But the key word in my earlier statement is part: another part still dreads how exhausted I'll inevitably feel afterward—even if I come out of the weekend with my dignity intact and another story to add to my repertoire. It's a weird sort of schizophrenia, the dance between the introverted desire to be alone and the extroverted desire to go out and have fun with people. And sometimes, what I say and how I act is so totally alien to me that afterward even I don't understand why I did what I did. I'm pretty much a stranger in my own head.

I think introverts shun that part of their desire—the desire to occasionally be with people and enjoy the company of a living, breathing person—and come out the worse for wear. They don't seem to get beyond forming communities of themselves, which are almost always fueled by intense, soul-searching discussion; while spontaneous and/or mindless fun and general silliness isn't exactly taboo, it's certainly not the norm—despite the fact that everyone gets silly at least once in a while.

So I pose a question to the introverts, borrowing from The Dark Knight as employed by /b/tards and all other kinds of netizens:

Y SO SRS?

Free Wifi What?

I'm writing this from a Greyhound bus. Not because I have any particular urgent need to do so, but because I can. Something about being on the internet while going through the Harbor Tunnel makes me laugh to myself about the state of our society. But my laughter doesn't stop me from partaking. No no indeed.

Hello World.

Hi, I'm Jaclyn and I'm an INFJ. Meyers Briggs personality types are important to me. Also, I always need to fight the urge to write angsty words on the Internet. Sometimes it's necessary, but not when we have only just begun. On another blog I found two little pieces I'd like to post here while I gather my thoughts, and this is the one that wasn't angsty. I wrote it recently while at work (don't tell!).

Today is one of those days I wish I could record all the little scenes in my head, the ones where instead of listening to ridiculous pop music on my headphones at my desk I am bursting into song in the lobby. It’s truly unbelievable what a good synthesizer riff and a catchy chorus will do to my general disposition.

If you’d like to get the full effect, queue up Aqua’s “Calling You” while reading this post.

My point here is, many of my waking hours are spent setting everyday life to music video or musical theatre-type situations in my head. To give an idea, I related very well to the scene in the last season of Six Feet Under where Claire sings the pantyhose song at her temp job. Secretly, when keeping company only with myself, I am bubbly and silly and full of song and dance. This is so totally me, and sometimes it’s just a shame that being me comes easiest when I’m not interacting with anyone.

But one of my favorite things about life is how laughing at yourself and being a little silly – even if not outwardly so – can be a lifeline between you and sanity.