Ginger-Who?

One thing I love about being a teen librarian is other teen librarians. They have so many awesome ideas, and are more than happy to share. One such way we do this is through an email listserv set up through the ALA where people post ideas or questions and others respond.

A couple weeks back, one librarian named Meredith posted about an event she's doing where they've decided to make gingerbread men and decorate them like characters from popular teen books. Another librarian named Joella adapted it into a display. I liked both ideas so much that I copied Joella, adding and changing some characters.

The idea is this: look at the display and try to guess which gingerbread person matches which character. Fill out a form with your guesses, and the winner gets a free gingerbread house kit.

Here's the display...



Can you guess them? Here are some close-ups...



(Katniss - The Hunger Games, Bilbo - The Hobbit, Cassia - Matched, Taylor - Beauty Queens)



(Top row: Cammie - Gallagher Girls, Harry Potter - duh, Stanley - Holes, Katsa - Graceling. 2nd row: Arnold - Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Karou - Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Brian - Hatchet, Jem - Clockwork Angel)




(Top row: Edward - Twilight, Jane - Shark Girl, Cassel - White Cat, Percy - Lightning Thief. 2nd row: Jace - Mortal Instruments, Mia - Princess Diaries, Will - Ranger's Apprentice, Lola - Lola and the Boy Next Door)

So far it's been really fun hearing people discuss while they fill out their sheets. Some favorite comments...

"They totally drew Jace's iratze wrong."

"Why doesn't that girl with the surfboard have an arm?" *peers down at list of titles* "Oh."

Girl: OMG! That's totally Cassel from "White Cat"! See? He's wearing gloves!!!! *scurries to fill out sheet*
Friend: Um, yeah. You know how I knew? The white cat...

"So if only some of them are wearing clothes, does that mean the rest of them are naked?"

I love teenagers. :)

Manifesto

If the path leading down through the woods in your backyard ever takes you somewhere unexpected, promise me you'll follow it.

The same with the doors opening into your house, or a closet, or an elevator. If they lead you somewhere that they didn't before, don't question it: just go.

If the highway numbers mysteriously disappear, or the signs switch to a language your online translator won't recognize, don't panic and don't put on the brakes. Go along for the ride.

It's the roads we take and the doors we open and the discoveries we make that should define our lives. Don't wear your world thin treading repeatedly down the same carefully-hedged-in pathways.

I'd rather regret having lived too large (a ridiculous regret, I assure you) than to be haunted by the dull pang of having lived too small, that swirling shroud of the ghosts of a million what-ifs.

Chance, opportunity, and eyes willing to look beyond the "merely probable," the "certainly possible" and into something more. These are the things you should grasp at and aspire to. Let your heart and your hopes grow as wide as the horizon.

I would like to truly see this world in what little time I'm in it.

Which means I will be watching for that odd turn in the path, for that strange light coming through the cracks in the doors, for the unsettling and unfamiliar to arrive at my doorstep.

And if - no, when - it comes, I will be ready.

I am ready. Are you?

The Man In The Moon

There's a man in the moon and he can't get out,
no matter how much he kicks and shouts.
But he dreams of a day when he'll roam free
and live his own life like you and me.

How long's he been there? Ages by now.
How did he get there? Magic somehow.
Can't he escape when the moon goes black?
He tries, but the night always grabs him back.

So if you feel trapped, like your world is small,
consider: at least you're not stuck in a ball.
Go out and live as only YOU can.
Think of the moon and remember the man.

How I Feel Right Now

I want to scream for as loud and long as I can. A wordless scream, the kind that rips you in half. I want the whole night to collapse with the force of it.

The Living, the Dead, the Undead

I found something I wrote about a year ago, shortly after the death of Esther Earl. I can't really explain why, but her death really hit me hard. In those weeks afterward, I was thinking about a lot of deep, heavy stuff: time, death, wisdom, despair... Anyway, this post is a bit emo (like most of this blog), but it ends on a decent note.

In my computer, the file was simply called "Esther."

--

I think the reason vampires aren’t scary to me is because despite all this nonsense about them being “undead,” they’re alive.

I don’t measure life by a pulse. I measure life in terms of… what, exactly? It’s hard to word it right. “Consciousness” was what I was going to say, but that’s not right. Life is being aware, awake. Having an identity. If our bodies are computers, being alive isn’t a matter of the power feed keeping the computer’s shell running. It’s the inner actions of the computer, the memory and data connections that keep the information processing. It’s the stuff on the hard drive. Even if the computer’s turned off, that stuff is still there, still inherently its own. It has an identity, a purpose, a unique quality of being itself.

That’s why, to me, zombies are scary. Not because they’re going to kill us all and rip off our flesh, etc. etc. But because they’re alive physically (or “undead” if you want to quibble), but they’re gone. Wiped clean. Whatever made them unique and special and inherently themselves is no longer there. They’re dead. They walk around like the living, but they’re gone.

That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s my biggest fear. Being gone. Not just me, though. That everyone I love and everything I’ve held dear, that everything from the smallest moments to the hugest lump sum of all our human experiences, won’t live on. That it’ll be lost. Time is the hugest enemy in this regard, because it erodes and erases and after a while it’s as if things that were once monumental and vast in their significance are mere grains of sand. Ozymandius, yeah, yeah, but more than that…

Death is a villain too. Death and Time, co-conspirators. One takes us away and the other slowly wipes our whole existence off the planet.

How, then, can there be any meaning? Why is anything that happens to me worth anything? Why do people matter so much to me, even people I’ve barely met? Why is the death of a girl from Quincy, Massachusetts who I’ve spoken to only a few times so hard to bear? Why is the loss so great?

Why do people tell stories? Those don’t matter either. As I wrote once in a poem about music, “I think we play to stave off the silence in our souls.” If, as Solomon so famously declared, “everything is vanity,” meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless, without purpose, without hope or value, then what else are we to do but distract and delude ourselves until Death and Time come and steal us away and render everything we once had or did or stood for as nothing but blank, empty, unimportant, void?

We’re very stupid animals, though, human beings. They tell us we can’t. The very Universe has set itself and its laws up so that there is ultimately and without doubt no chance whatsoever.

But we try anyway.

To hope.
To remember.
To stand for something.

To be truly wise is to live in a state of perpetual despair, because true wisdom is forced to acknowledge that everything is temporary and all things fail.

I’m going to be a fool. I’m going to walk into a hurricane with nothing but an umbrella and the sincere belief that I will make it to the other side.

To The Boy On The Ugly Brown Chair

I want you to kiss me.

I want you to kiss me, but you’re just sitting there in that stupid brown chair, the ugly one with the orange cushion that’s supposed to hide the stains but only makes them more noticeable. You’re sitting there on the chair, and I’m here on the couch, and there’s really only the space of a few feet between us, and it doesn’t have to be that way. In seconds there could be no space between us at all, and your face could be right next to mine, and you could kiss me.

But we sit.

Goddamn it all, we sit.

I didn’t understand until just now how you can be hungry with something other than your stomach. That it’s not just your mouth that has the cravings, or your throat that feels the thirst. This is in my bones, and in my organs, in my skin - every layer, every part. I didn’t know you could feel hunger with your body like this, and my mind is nearly numb with the fight for self control.

Your hair is doing this thing where it’s somehow springier than usual, like it has a life of its own. It’s begging for someone to comb their fingers through it. My fingers, my hungry hands! It looks so soft and dark. Your eyes are doing this thing where they crinkle at the corners, and you’re smiling this mischievous smile, and my eyes, my thirsty eyes, drink you in, and I can’t help it. I lean forward just a little, shrink the space between us by a fraction.

You say something wonderful, and I laugh.

Kiss me, you idiot. I don’t say it out loud, but it’s there, in the way I’m sitting, in the way I’m looking at you, in the way I’m nodding and smiling. Kiss me, you fool.

But that stupid brown chair. That awful cushion. This wretched air. There’s too much between us, and you’re standing like you’re going to say goodnight, and I hate the night, and I hate most of all the leaving. I want to punch something, but instead I pinch my thigh hard enough to leave a bruise. I want to scream, but I settle for a sarcastic comment as I lean in for a goodbye hug.

This is a good thing, at least. The hug. The space between us closes, your arms lace around me, hands resting lightly, briefly on my back. It feels good. Could I freeze this moment indefinitely? Your hands, that slight touch - the wobbly, tingly, unsettlingly-wonderful glow I feel all seems to stem from there. Or maybe it’s your chin on my shoulder, the way your rumpled shirt smells so much like you. Hungry. Aren’t you hungry the same way I am?

But we part, and you leave. The door shuts. I curse aloud.

I’m going to kick that ugly chair until it’s splinters and stuffing. I’m going to bite these unkissed lips until they bleed.

Shells and Stars

What's the first thing you remember? I mean, really remember? It's hard to pinpoint, right?

Most early memories are more like photographs of memory. It's something somebody told you once or you may have seen in an old picture that you're sure must have happened, but it's all a bit foggy or dreamlike. I remember riding a miniature train on the top of a skyscraper in Seoul, Korea with my cousin Debbie when I was two, but I don't really. I just remember it because I've heard the story told often enough. I remember how obsessed I was with my Tigger stuffed animal, but again - just hearsay, just something I've picked up from looking at handfuls of photographs with that little plush toy constantly at my side.

What I think of as my "first memory" is different from those. It's different in a way that has me convinced that it is real. Once you hear it, you may choose to believe or disbelieve as you will, but I think this is as close as I will ever get to my first actual memory.

First I will tell you what I don't remember. We were at a shore of some kind, but I don't remember if it was a lake or an ocean. Apparently back then we did visit a cabin by a lake with my Oma. There are pictures of us kids in a boat fishing. It could have been there. But I suspect it might be an ocean, because of something you'll see in a moment. I don't remember who was there, though I'm sure my parents were, and my older brother Zach must have been. I had found a seashell. I think it was a seashell, maybe a pebble. I'm not sure. I wanted to bring it home with me, to keep it. It was beautiful. I remember being in awe of how beautiful it was and wanting to keep it, to have it. One of my parents - again, I don't remember who - told me I had to leave it. I don't remember exact words, but I remember there was the sentiment that I should leave it because it wasn't important, that in a little while I wouldn't even remember it anymore. And it's true. Even now as I write this I have no idea what it looked like. I can't even recall exactly what it was.

This is what I remember: I left the shell, or pebble, or whatever it was, but I said over and over to myself, "I will remember. I will remember it. It is beautiful and wonderful and I want it so much, and so no matter what I will remember it. I will remember it." And decades later that's all that remains: not the memory itself, but the want, the desperate hope to somehow preserve this thing I loved. In trying so hard to remember, I lost it. Like grasping fistfuls of sand, only to have it spill out through the cracks of your fingers.

Is this the human condition? The desperate struggle to remember and be remembered, the idea that we can somehow be preserved, that all the things that were precious to us, the beautiful and important things in this world, will somehow last ? The attempt to make an eternal impact with brief and temporary lives?

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the death of a girl named Esther Earl. She would have been seventeen had she lived to see today. Those who knew her and many who, like me, only really knew of her, wear wristbands that say "This star won't go out," a phrase based upon her name's meaning, "star." The idea is that as long as we are alive, the memory of her life and all the things that were important to her will live on.

All this talk of stars reminds me of another star. In Tolkien's Return of the King, the final book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, hobbits Sam and Frodo find themselves following the untrustworthy guide Smeagol into the bowels of Mordor, the land of gloom and despair that is home to the only means of possibly saving their entire world. It's constantly dark. They're weary, everything seems hopeless. It's a huge gamble they're taking, and they're almost guaranteed to fail. And if they do, everything and everyone they've ever loved will be lost to this terrible force of darkness, pain and destruction. Frodo has fallen asleep and Smeagol is off somewhere else, leaving Sam as the only one awake to keep watch. The land is full of sly creaking and cracking noises. All is black. Then suddenly - a break in the clouds! And this is where my words won't do... I have to quote for the full effect: "There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

I like to think our lives are shells, but that they could be stars. They're these things we grasp at and love so very fiercely and try to wring as much meaning out of as we can, but in the end we have to leave them behind. But if we're lucky, Esther's wristbands aren't a lie. If we're lucky, Sam's star isn't a lie. If we're lucky, the lives we lead mean something, something huge and untouchable, something deep, something eternal. At the very least they're light in the darkness, hope for someone somewhere, a reminder, a comfort. By the time that light reaches someone else, the star it came from may very well be dead - for yes, even stars fade. But what they inspire lives on.

I don't know what I'll remember or how I will be remembered, but I grasp at shells and hope for stars and life flickers in between.