Again with the writing...

Hello, again, Internet. It's been awhile.

In 2010, I started a blog because everything was happening to me. In 2012, I attempted a few blog posts to encapsulate life filled with college.

Now, for the first time in months, I have a stretch of time in front of me. Time which I am filling with work. With service. With fun. With summer.

Hopefully, I can fill it with blogging as well.

Balance is so important, and recently my writing has been unbalanced to the side of term papers and essays and emails. Blogging, and the thought process that runs with it, has been sorely lacking.

So here goes to a new chapter in the blog!

An essay

This was my scholarship essay this year...I think it kind of describes some of my thoughts at this time in my life pretty accurately so instead of writing "Variations on a theme" I'll just post the original.

Out of the Box

When I was little, I had a huge cardboard box. I loved it. I would crawl into it, close the lid, and find myself in a slightly stuffy, well-defined space. Who is in the box? Valerie is in the box!

Boxes are great on a physical level. But compartmentalizing myself isn’t so easy anymore, because once I was old enough to understand metaphors, I learned that boxes are ways we separate and organize elements of ourselves. Big or small, crazy or serious: we copiously label mental boxes with adjectives and usher in every noun that fits inside.

Labels are helpful. They give us structure, organization. However, what happens when a single label isn’t an adequate description? I was a sponge-like child who soaked up knowledge instead of salt water. Learning to read wasn’t a chore; it was the gateway to understanding road signs and backs of cereal boxes and cookbooks. I loved science: it meant understanding nature. I loved math: it meant understanding distances and time and quantity. I loved everything.

Then came boxes. My sister developed into an “English” person, denoted by her disgust with math classes and love of writing. A friend advanced rapidly in the arena of science; streamlined for a career in biology amidst the natural environment he loved. Everywhere I looked, people expressed their own special talent, a box with a distinct label. I excelled in school, but had no single talent to show me a box I would fit into.

I am lucky to have both innate gifts and external circumstances that give me a broad span of opportunities to pursue. However, it sure makes declaring a college major difficult! That was one of my incentives to take a gap year in Ecuador last year instead of immediately enrolling in college: I hoped taking a step back from the role of a “student” would allow me time to discover who I truly wanted to be.

Ecuador did guide me, though not in the clear-cut terms I was expecting. My experience gave me a new perspective on majors: Instead of confining boxes, it was studying something you enjoy and have strength in, that then branches into a career. This more organic view has helped me grow and answer the big question of What I Want To Do With My Life.

I like language. I have strong memory for words and patterns, two important skills for written and spoken languages. I like to think about how meanings differ between languages. I like science, interpreting patterns occurring in nature’s language.

I’m going to double major in Foreign Languages and Linguistics, with a minor in Marine Sciences, and see where my career will grow from there. Perhaps I don’t fit into the set of boxes I have been conditioned to accept and use. I am learning to leave those boxes behind, though, and revel in the unique mixture of essence that is me. I accept that I am not a math person or history person, and never will fit into a tidy box. I love being who I am, though, and I am happy that UAF gives me the opportunity to express the multiplicity of my interests.

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Anyways. Besides the fact that it was pretty close to EXACTLY 3000 characters (the max length) I feel like that was the first time I didn't filter things as much. Usually for a scholarship, I would make stuff up about how it would be a perfect fit and the attributes of the college/money-giving organization that I admire. And it's worked for me. I hope this works for me too on a financial level, but also a real level. Because I liked my other scholarship essays, and I was truthful in them, but I really enjoy the open honesty of just writing about what I want to write about.

The Fault In Our Stars

This morning, I exchanged a yellow slip of paper for a small package containing John Green's latest novel, The Fault In Our Stars.

It took me 13 hours to finish it.

I used to devour every book I was able to get my hands on, and read intensely in this focused, starved way. As I grew older and was exposed to more literature, I learned to take my time in reading. I had "school books" and magazines and I realized that chapters could be stopping points and bookmarks would hold the place for more than the few minutes it takes to eat dinner. I had a life outside of turning the next page.

Every once in a while, though, I get a book that reminds me of why I was that child that would curl up uncomfortably in the windowsill to read using the last glimmers of Alaskan twilight, since it was after lights out and according to my parents, I was asleep.

The Fault In Our Stars is one of those books. It is filled with John Green's humor and style. It has an interesting plot, and the well-written characters in this book add to the long list of Fictional People I Would Want To Be Friends With.

Anything John Green writes will at least be mediocre-good, just because he's an excellent writer (I'd read his grocery lists). What makes this book special, though, is the way it expresses very real parts of very real life. It acknowledges the clichés without falling victim to them. It finds the line between poignancy and cheesiness.

I don't have cancer. I don't have people near to me that are suffering from the terminal illnesses that are the plot of The Fault In Our Stars. So I can't know this for sure, but I believe that this book depicts, at least emotionally, the effects of Cancer (Capital C) and its presence in life pretty well.  I like that it diverts from the "Constant Stoic Graceful Cancer Fighter" stereotype while still allowing its characters their share of virtues and strengths. I like that Hazel's relationship with her parents is not bad, and not a problem in her story. I like the lack of ambiguity in the ending, and that it ends in a full sentence. I like the title, and that the title is from a quote, and it actually fits into the book's themes without pulling the book out of shape.

Basically, you'll want to read this.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering...Mine is signed in BLUE SHARPIE. Which was only signed on 2.96% of the 150,000 books signed total. So that means this book is one of roughly...4,440 books signed in Blue Sharpie. Woo!!)

A new name

I changed the name of my blog!

It is now a phrase in Spanish; "Lo que quiero decir". In English, it means "What I want to say" or "What I mean is..."

Now that I'm not living in Ecuador, life is...different. Not bad at all. Its the natural progression for my life, and I love the direction I'm going in now. But my life isn't as exotic-sounding as it was. So, "Experiences at the Equator" really didn't fit it anymore.

This new title fits me in my current place in life. My blog is just that: what I want to say about whatever is on my mind.

What I'm thinking about now is the trip I just got back from: a 2.5 week journey through Turkey, and a whirlwind trip to Israel, finishing with a brilliant, fleeting three days in the Baha'i World Centre. And all of this done with Elika.

I was so lucky to be able to do this for my winter break. There are so many moments I want to recap, but I'm writing this during the commercials for the Golden Globes, and I don't think I can accurately talk about it without mimicking the sappy acceptance speeches on TV.

So, another time. For now, I hope everyone adjusts to no-more-vacation, back-to-school and that they enjoyed the break as much as I did.

Testing 1, 2, 3,

A song that's been on my mind recently...Also, this is actually a test because I changed my url (so if you had it bookmarked, it won't work. This is the right one!)

Testing 123 by the Barenaked Ladies


Thanks!

Time to get back into blogging...

Hey everyone...

I have been not writing recently.

That's a lie. I have been writing. I recently wrote 16 pages for my English final. Which made me remember how much I love blogging, especially in relation to writing silly scholarly essays in MLA format (I actually have a rant about MLA format, but I'll leave it to later because I want this to be an upbeat post).

I have not, however, been blog writing. And I really like to. A lot has been going on. I write things in my head a lot, think about how that blog post would look, all formatted on the computer screen. But college is one of those places that there's always something going on, and I haven't really sat down for some good, down-to-earth writing. So now, with finals next week and everyone holed up studying, I can finally write about what's been going on.

So: the basics. I am about to finish my first semester of college at University of Alaska Fairbanks. I'm studying foreign languages and started learning Russian this year, which is cool! I really enjoy the cold weather and windlessness of Fairbanks.

I am surprised at how much I like Fairbanks. I really love college here. I have so many wonderful, amazing friends, and its so easy to become involved with something exciting or random or meaningful or silly.

I like my classes too! I keep having confirmations that studying foreign languages is the right way to go. Some are little, like getting good grades on my Russian final (yay!) or realizing that the reason I like the Disney movie Atlantis so much is that the main character is a linguist who speaks a bajillion languages and then discovers a whole other civilization!! Not that I think this is plausible, but...I would like to be that guy. Some confirmations are bigger. I really, really like Russian. And I really, really like Spanish. I thought my approach to Russian would be "Oh, hey, Russian is one of those languages that is really good to know because a huge percentage of people speak Russian, and since there's a lot of Russian influence in Alaska, UAF has an awesome program." But as it turnes out, I love saying Russian words, and listening to people speak Russian, and writing in Cyrillic (after an initial WHY CURSIVE moment), and...I really like that its so different from Spanish. I'm just very excited about Russian. ето отлично!

Don't worry, everybody, I still love Spanish. This semester I was in a 300 level conversational Spanish class. It was awesome to finally learn some words I had been searching and searching for last year, (like cheesy!) and I feel like I'm actually advancing a lot more than I thought I would in terms of speaking. I'm sure that I still hago muchos errores, but I feel like my level of speaking has gone up. So that's happening...

I was also in a pretty exciting English class (and all three of my languages were on the same day! whoo!) that focused on Detective Fiction! So I got to read lots of Sherlock Holmes stories, and lots of less-famous detective stories. Probably the best required reading I ever had for a class.

Because classes do not make up the majority of my school experience (I show up to class and do my homework and pay attention and even get good grades and all, but still) Here are some other things I do on a regular basis:

1. Volunteer at a soup kitchen on Sunday Mornings with the Bahai club. This is really amazing and I really love to do it. I usually cut potatoes and onions (I am becoming a super fast chopper with amazing knife skills!) and then make about 300 sandwiches to be used throughout the week. Its one of those good-feeling experiences, but its also a fun thing to do in itself. I am learning/solidifying some things about me, and one of them is that I like working in big kitchens.

2. Sleeping in. 9:45 was my earliest class this semester. I kind of love it. Because you get enough sleep on the average night! And sometimes, on days like today, I decide to wake up early, and then you can get SO MUCH DONE in the morning! Also, early morning is the best time to do laundry because of the lack of other people doing their laundry.

3. Crazy things. Not like Animal House crazy. Just stuff like wearing a banana suit to hockey games, playing capture the flag in the snow at 2 am, being a lumberjack at the lumberjack show, etc.

4. Broomball, because it deserves its own number. Its a pretty awesome sport, because if you're not very good (like me) you can still have an amazing time sliding around on ice and "accidentally" sliding into your opponent. And even though I'm still not very skilled, I've definitely gotten a lot better than when I played my first game. Also, I have the element of surprise on my side because I just slide around like a ditz sometimes, and then I decide to start playing so they don't expect me to be able to run or steal the broomball from them!

5. Acting like a cat. This is self explanatory. Everybody wants to be a cat.

Anyways. One of the things that is absent from that list is taking pictures. I recently realized, when looking for a photo to add to this post to make it look less scholarly, that I have no good pictures of myself since this summer. SO, my mission is to take photos that are less "hey look at this weird face I can make" and more of "this is what my face actually looks like" in the next few weeks. I'm also going to try to blog more, because I'll be going to TURKEY AND ISRAEL AND I AM SO SO SO EXCITED! So, expect more photos in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, since you probably forgot what my face looks like:

And, because jumping photos are AWESOME:

Photo by Karl Schleich

So, thanks for reading! Sorry about the length of this post. And the narcissistic nature. I can talk about other things then myself next time.

Love to everyone who has stayed up with my blog! Or even if you never read it and just accidentally clicked on the link. Or even if you are just randomly google searching and landed on this blog. Because everyone deserves a little love!

I miss Elika

I think I'm going to become a vlogger...I just need to figure out how to work imovie.