Rumination 12

WHY. Why do I have so much stuff? I used to be able to fit my life into 2 pink totes and a suitcase. Now I have a whole house worth of things without a whole house to put them in.
I have TWO cupcake makers. WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND NEEDS TWO CUPCAKE MAKERS? Like 10 different candy molds, a cake pop maker, (have I ever even used it? WHAT?) FIVE CUSTOM CAKE MOLDS. The one that is shaped like a book fits into a tote and it will be mine forever. I will be buried with it.
I have 3 sets of GOBLETS? THREE? Buffet patters (I HAVE LITERALLY NEVER THROWN A PARTY. EVER.) AN EIGHT PERSON CUTLERY SET. WHAT? (Edit: I just looked at the box, it’s from Macy’s; it was $80) When am I going to use these? A SPICE RACK?!?!
The note cards and journals. I love them, I really do, but they only add to the clutter around me. Journals, I intend on slowly giving away to people I find fascinating. I’m going to miss them, but I know I would much rather they find use and not storage. There are journals that are nearly 15 years old.
The note cards will always find use. I have so many people to thank, and there will only be so many more.
I just can’t find it in me to throw anything out. Even when it’s obvious I don’t need it. I’m holding on to things better left in the past. Sure, I might get my own place again one day. But today isn’t that day. I can sit here letting the toxicity of this place ruin me, or I can venture out and find that forever I’ve always dreamt of.
I won’t let depression keep me. I won’t let my mistakes define me. There are symbols in this hoard of the person I was expected to be. Someone I never was, no matter how hard I tried.
I can’t sit still. I need the quiet comfort of lonely wandering. It’s maddening to think I can’t just be a wander. I can’t just pack up and hop a plane to nowhere. I don’t want the things everyone around me wants. I don’t want to get married, I’ve been on this Earth a while now and I’ve yet to find someone I could even fantasize a family with. I don’t want a place to which I am bound.
It’s lonely I know. But I crave the silence of a long drive. I yearn for the books read on wordless flights. I ache for places I’ve never seen.
I’m not naive enough to think two lives can run parallel eternal, but for the times some will run next to mine, I will offer the one eternity I can give; a space in my heart.
I am selfish, there is no defending that. I will wear it proudly. I am selfish. I think of my own happiness before progeny. I am selfish, because I want that which is most difficult to give. I want a space in your memories. I don’t want any more to be a passing glance on a sidewalk or a subway. Sad eye contact until the next bus stop.

I want to arrive at my death with open arms. Welcome embrace from a friend foiled twice. There will never be enough time; I just want to do enough in my time.
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Influence

I don’t talk enough about my influences, so I’m going to start at the top with the writer that changed my life.
Ursula K. LeGuin was the first science fiction writer I ever read, but it wasn’t her science fiction I read first. It was EarthSea, where a red skinned boy named Ged (Sparrowhawk) found his way to a school of magic. Where he learned the word and true names. Red skinned Ged who spoke to dragons and traveled the archipelago after the shadow he had cast upon it. Ged who looked like me. I was nine; it was before I found Harry and Hogwarts.

The Lathe of Heaven was pure raw science fiction that set my mind on fire. Every rereading of George Orr’s plight with his powerful dreams, the doctor who chose to right the world, and the power of our individuality; leaves me more enlightened than the last. It remains the one book I will consistently recommend.

The Left Hand of Darkness found its way into my hands when I was sixteen. In a suffocatingly narrow minded small town library. A story that defied gender and our obsession with it. Showed me a grand planet where we were the strangers. The human protagonist was the dark skinned stranger on a world where biological fathers could be biological mothers, and spent their days as an undefined third gender neither feminine nor male. The Lathe of Heaven is my favorite work, but The Left Hand of Darkness changed me. While I am happy to identify as female, it opened my eyes to people who didn’t conform to any of the roles cast upon them. It is fittingly upon every list that would have you read the great works of humanity.

The last four are from LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle, of which The Left Hand of Darkness is a part. Beginning with Rocannon’s World it paints the cosmos as humanity’s playground. Pure and simple science fiction written with an anthropologist’s eye; turning fictional futures into text book realities.

If you ever get the chance, read her work. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.
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Rumination 11

Sometimes you have to remind yourself that one of the reasons you aren’t a part of something anymore isn’t because you didn’t like the thing itself, but because you didn’t like the people involved.
Not just because it clashed with your science or your personal research, but because people who are fanatical stop listening the moment you tell them you disagree. They are convinced you aren’t there to teach them, that you’re there to yell at them for being wrong.
I will admit I learned my extreme patience from these arguments, however, butting heads without any support is the most difficult experience of my life. And honestly, going through depression without ANY help from my “faith,” caused me to lose it. To be told over and over again that I just needed to SNAP out of it. Now, the faith itself isn’t to blame, and I need to be very clear about that.
My depression became a catalyst for the change I needed to make in my life. I was going to end up in this place anyway. Studying Astrophysics was already leading me in that direction. My faith was too small. It couldn’t stand up to the questions I had. It fell before me like all of the others when I had questioned them. For some people, faith is necessary. It is good, it keeps them good. To call it a crutch is a false equivalent and cruel. I don’t care if the fear of an afterlife is what causes you to be decent. As long as you are decent.
I was lucky enough to be raised in a religion that promoted equality of caste, gender, race, and denomination. One that was adamant “God” was the center and we were all on paths home. If anyone says otherwise they’ve made a habit of misreading the texts.
My mother explained the analogy best to me when I was 14. We were driving back home, and she decided to take the opportunity to teach us something; by taking a different road. It took a little bit longer, but we got to see another part of the landscape around our house. While driving she explained the roads were different, but if used properly, they all lead to the places we wanted to go.
That is what the faith I grew up in taught her, so she taught us. But people corrupt it and spin it into shadows of what it could be.
I don’t care to argue this. I’m not here to inform you about things I no longer practice, I just need to get the words out. Because I’m sitting alone a room, unable to do anything. This is the last I will speak of faith, or lack of, unless it is to answer a question that delves into why I am the way I am. I’m not here to tell you to believe or not believe. I write because I want you to think for yourself. Don’t let “traditionalists” get in the way of reading and learning things on your own. If you’re going to argue with people like that, you have to know more than they do.

One day you might find after you’ve learned as much as you think you can, that you don’t know anything at all. That the arguments are petty and small. That there is beauty in our insignificance. We tiny people, who may fade without a whisper, should spend the limited time we have learning and doing as much good in this world as we can. Because there will never be enough time.

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Rumination 10

The past couple of years have been a trip. I still have a tough time getting out of bed in the morning, but at least I recognize that something is wrong. Before I couldn’t even manage that.
 
I don’t know what’s happened in the last two years, honestly. My old blog just has posts from 2011 and a smattering in 2012. My online accounts were basically dead.
 
I went to India at the end of 2012 and came back in 2013 with this overwhelming dissatisfaction with the way things are. Why we are willing to accept injustice just because that’s the way it’s always been. I would talk about the ancient taste in the atmosphere of India, and completely ignore the vast and equally important ancientness of the American atmosphere I was born into. How awful, to feel as if the land itself has been made to forget.
 
In India, things are the way they are because that is their tradition. The poor have always been poor, the rich are rich and the ones that inspire change. Bards are born when the land deems it so. There is so much that needs to be changed there, but much more that needs to change here.
 
I went to India and came back disappointed in the country I was born to, because we weren’t better than the worst I had seen. We weren’t better and we should be.
 
We pretend.
 
I pretend.
 
I’m so tired of pretending.
 
I am part of a land that violently stomped out the ancientness of the air and built something new upon the graves. I am born into the country of change. There is no tradition here. How can there be? Tradition is born of history, of which remains here but a few hundred years. In 1914 there were only 48 states. Even our current flag isn’t tradition.
 
In the United States, there is no such thing as all way things have always been. This is dragged me out. This thought saved me.
 
My parents did something that hadn’t been done, and if they hadn’t I wouldn’t be here. And I am living in, I was born in, one of the few places that aren’t bound to tradition.
 
I get to flail and fail, and then pick myself back up. Try again, fail better, fail harder, and maybe one day succeed. This needs to be our tradition. Because life is too rare in our present universe to waste on “the way things are.”  
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We Are

Here we are at the end; 
It seems as if we’ve only begun!
Sunrise was a moment ago; 
Sunset seems a far ways to go.

We’ve ended the way we began!
In Darkness we were born, 
Raised to live in the light, 
Forevermore afraid of the night.

We came so far together, 
But it’s almost midnight.
The Princess facade is fading; 
It’s time to face my demons alone.

You were my Prince Charming, 
I your Princess, darling.
At the stroke of midnight, 
I fled into the darkest light.

We are the broken and the beaten,
We are the loathers and the lovers
We are the fallen and the forsaken
We are the warriors and the solders

We are the story tellers,
We are the we are the legend makers.
Doomed to wander forever, 
Looking for the ones we remember.

We know more than we care
We dream more than we dare
We dance in a lament of fire, 
Forever lost in the fight of desire.
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Don’t

Don’t fall into me,
Don’t lean on me,
Cause I’ll leave you,
I’ll bind you into me!

With sorrow filled words,
With hollowed promises,
I will tear into you,
I will break your world!

So don’t trust in me,
Don’t rely on me,
Cause I’ll lie to you,
I’ll turn you against me.

Don’t fall into me,
Don’t lean on me,
Cause I’ll leave you,
I’ll bind you into me!

I’ll be kind,
So long as it suits me.
I’ll be there,
So long as I need to be!

Don’t believe in me,
Don’t have faith in me!
Cause I’ll disappoint you,
I’ll break your soul into mine!

So don’t fall into me,
Don’t lean on me
Cause I’ll leave you
I’ll bind you into me!

Don’t think twice,
Don’t look back,
Go forward and onward
Forward and onward!

Take yourself away!
From me!
Take yourself where
I can’t see!

Don’t fall into me,
Don’t lean on me
Cause I’ll leave you
I’ll bind you into me!

Don’t fall into me,
Don’t lean on me
Cause I’ll leave you
I’ll bind you into me!
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Utopia

Star Trek Into Darkness is by all means a great film in a wonderfully vast and diverse universe marred by the outcry against the “Whitewashing,” of certain iconic characters (One iconic character).

Like many science fiction writers, Gene Roddenberry and his team created a character with all of the great advantages that evolution had to offer humans. The result was a man given the impressive sounding name of Khan Noonien Singh. And like a great many science fiction characters, the description fit a man of color. Ricardo Montalbán brought the character to life first in Space Seed and most popularly in The Wrath of Khan.

The casting of Benedict Cumberbatch into the fold of Khan isn’t an issue of the character’s ethnicity. Khan has no ethnicity. Nor is it an issue of his being classified as Sikh, thanks to his very telling last name.Sikhism is a religion in Northern India, practiced almost exclusively by the people in Punjab. I would know, I grew up in a Sikh family. Actively practiced the religion for many years. My grandfathers were both Singhs. Singh is a title given to you when you take vows to follow the faith. When you become a warrior for god. It preaches goodness and kindness, giving when you can, protecting those that need to be protected.

It is also one of the most inclusive religions. At least on paper. Anyone can become a Sikh, anyone can become a Singh. Or not. Sikhism is all about finding your way to the one true being. And because the aim is to return from where you came, it is held that all people have a different path. Be it Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, ect. You make your own way to the same central place, with your own guide.So a man with Cumberbatch’s face can be called Khan Noonien Singh.

It is disappointing on a different grounds.

As a child, seeing a man of color on the screen with the name Khan Noonien Singh was a godsend. He was incredible, intelligent, different. In a time when everyone that looked like me played a bumbling terrorist, Khan was evil incarnate. And that was okay. Because he was a villain you identified with. He was(is) a badass. IN SPACE.

I’m not angry that the character is now portrayed by Cumberbatch. Hell, I’m even a member of the CumberCollective, he’s phenomenal. But he doesn’t look like me. I will root for the character, because I love villains (my heroes are just good villains), but I won’t want to be him. If I was a child watching this character, I wouldn’t be inspired. That is the issue.

So no, it isn’t wrong, but it’s disappointing and I will get over it.

This isn’t about ‘whitewashing.’ It is about how we present the world, how we see the future, and what we want to inspire in people.

Khan Noonien Singh influenced the type of person I am in some ways. Not quite so powerfully as Ursula LeGuin’s red skinned, Ged from EarthSea. He and characters like him, helped make me the type of writer I am. Not afraid to make a woman of color my main character.

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Rumination 9

Young Adult or New Adult?
I don’t know? Maybe? What qualifies as Young Adult? What makes your character too old for it? And what is New Adult? How is it different from Young Adult, how is different from just regular Adult?

What is my book? All of the major characters are over 19. Does that disqualify it from Young Adult? But it’s not quite adult either. Though I might be going on stereotype there. Does the fact that it’s science fiction change anything?

See, I understand the concept of the query letter and I understand what I’m supposed to write in it, but I don’t know anything about the marketing or the audience. The audience is me, I think.

All I’ve ever been is a writer; it’s strange to think that isn’t enough. No one tells you how to be a writer. If a kid says they want to be a doctor, all of the adults they tell them everything that goes into being that. When a kid says they want to be an author, they get a “good luck.”

It’s something you can’t teach.

So why are so many of us consumed by it?

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Rumination 8

I don’t know how other writers get ideas for their books/tv shows/movies/comics; I realized some time ago, that I don’t really care. Why? Because their methods are not mine, they only work for them.
No one can teach you how to write. Sure, you can learn the turns of phrase, proper syntax, those devices that made English boring. Devices many writers won’t admit that we weren’t aware we were using. A writer is separated by their ideas. Everything else becomes important after they get that idea.
My ideas come to me like aches. It tears through my psyche, leaving behind a ravaged mind that would give a great deal to live in that world. A world that hadn’t existed hours ago.
These ideas only come once or twice in a decade.
But the pain it brings is almost enough to sink me into a depression. Almost.
The fact that I can write all of it down saves me. If I couldn’t write, I don’t know how I would deal with the instant feeling of not belonging. Not belonging to the world, being in a nightmare: going to sleep and expecting to wake up in the world my mind invented.
But everyday I wake up in this place. Everyday in the same place.
When another writer can make me feel that way about their world, it only showcases their talent. And every time I read something by them, I go to sleep wanting to wake up in their imagined place. But I never do.
It’s why I write, to go to those worlds in the daylight.

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