I enrolled in a History class this semester about the Middle East. I read four books and a 200 dollar course packet about conflict and power struggles in the Arab East in the 20th century. The class was specific, yet thrilling. I learned all about dictators and totalitarian regimes. I learned that Jerusalem is a problem most Americans have no clue about the depth of. I learned why everyone hates Assad but still loves Nasser. I learned to think, in the most basic sense, like an Egyptian.Today I will have lunch with a good friend of mine who currently lives in Egypt studying Arabic. I am certain that she will tell me how wrong I am.

I do not think that most Americans care about Memorial Day.We get the day off of work. Most of us eat some hot dogs, celebrate summer, and relax in the sun. Americans have not been drafted to war since Vietnam. We see war as a distant unnamed thing that others sometimes take part in and that we read about in the New York Times and make judgements about. Maybe I should speak for myself. I see war that way. I have never felt close to war. No one in my family, that I know of and have met, has ever served in the armed forces. The closest I’ve come to war is the war narrative and that preview for the TLC show where they bring home soldiers without telling their families.

I would like to have a lot to say about the brave, strong men and women who have fought valiantly for our nation’s freedom and protection. I don’t.

I have been a headless chicken for the past couple of months. I posted last in February about how life had been a marathon of sprints. It turned out to be more of one long continuous sprint. My breaks were few and far between. Between my classes and work I neglected the public social media aspect of my life. Yesterday, my google reader had 2567 unread items in it. If you knew how much I love my google reader, this would say a lot to you about my state of affairs the past months.

But summer, in all of its glory, has arrived.

My google reader is back at 0. Life has slowed to an relaxing crawl, and the recovery process has begun. Today begins the second week of summer, and my ducks are just beginning to squeeze back into an uneven line. I spend my mornings reading the New York Times, drinking coffee, and replying to the mass of emails, letters, and voicemails I neglected during finals week. I finished the short story I spent most of the semester sporadically working on. I finally have time to plan my time in Europe this summer. I actually know what is going on in Syria.

In a way, I feel like I’ve crawled out of a very exciting and busy hole and back into the world of the internet.

To finish out a few months of internet black-out, here is a brief update of events:

I did more than survive  Plan II  physics, the class from hell. I learned to calculate relativity, use dimensional analysis, and read three non-fiction books about the universe. Surprisingly, my liberal arts self thrived in physics, scored above the curve on the test, and was exempt from the final with an A in the class.

As of last week, I am halfway done with my undergraduate career. The University of Texas is the perfect fit for me. I cannot imagine my last two years anywhere else. More than that, I cannot believe that it has already been two years since I decided to don burnt orange and become a longhorn. It is surreal to grow up.

More surreal than my own year finishing is Trey’s graduation. On Friday, the boy graduated from the University of Texas with an undergraduate degree in Architectural Engineering. Luckily, his studies continue here for the next two years as he pursues a Master’s in Civil Engineering, so I don’t have to confront being a real grown up just yet.

My internship at the Ransom Center concluded a couple of weeks ago, and I left reluctantly with heavy boots. I loved my time at the Ransom Center. Several of my articles for them will be published in the coming months, but my physical time in the building is over. Next year, though, I have scored a stellar editorial internship at the Alcalde which is the alumni magazine.

By the end of next week I will have read every book Toni Morrison has ever written. I am currently midway through Paradise, and starting Love soon. I may write my thesis on her career. I have loved every book that I have read by her, some more than others. There is nothing more beautiful to me than a well written book about tragedy. Morrison’s books are a cocktail of abandonment, loneliness, hardship, brutality, and discrimination. They are my kind of cocktail.

My own work has slowed to a brutal honing. I have written two short stories this semester. The earliest of which I have moved past at this point, and the newest of which is too new for me to evaluate for quality.

I’m currently preparing for my study abroad program this summer at Oxford University, and my 10 days of play-time in Europe before hand. I hope that I will chronicle my adventures and the events leading up to them better than I have catalogued the events of this semester.

For now though, I will update my iPhone software, send some mundane emails, drink TopoChico from the glass bottle, and relax in the free time I forgot I could have.

This is not a mushy post. 

In January, when this semester began, I took off at full sprint. I do not regret it. It did not wear me out to early, or make it impossible for me to keep running. Simply put, that initial sprint was great foreshadowing for this semester.

While every week, every day, is a full sprint at full speed, the semester is 15 weeks long. It is really a “marathon of sprints”; one after another for the entire semester.

My physics professor gave our class these “I love you” balloons on Valentine’s day. Physics is a miserable class. Our homeworks take approximately 23 hours a week to finish, and on top of that we have to learn the material. He gave us the balloons in order to do a homework experiment (stand on a bus, tie keys to the end of the balloon string, what happens?)

I should have gotten rid of this balloon a week ago. It is not a profession of real love. It does not hold sentimental value to me. It is not even the type of love profession I normally enjoy. Write me a note and read me poetry any day. I think balloons are tacky, and Valentine’s Day even tackier. But the balloon stays.

I like the balloon because it has something to say and it’s bold about it. I LOVE YOU it screams at passerby’s. I LOVE YOU it yells as it is loosing strength, deflating into my bedroom wall. I LOVE YOU it will say long after it is flat and tired, and has been unwillingly trashed and driven to a place where it will never, ever decompose because it is made of weird plastic cellophane.

I like the balloon because it is deflating, and so am I.

I had a glorious winter break. I relaxed with my family. I read some really incredible books. I even wrote a short story. I came back from winter break a full balloon, ready to take on the semester. Like the balloon, things have been consistently hard. No one is trying to stab me with scissors or snag me on a door-frame. I have not run into a field of cacti or children who squeeze me too hard. For me and the balloon, the hard part is simply staying up.

But we are getting there, me and the balloon. We are continuing to hang high in the air, and though we are deflating, we are still proclaiming.

I LOVE YOU says the balloon.

This morning I have been thinking about what it is exactly I am proclaiming. What am I yelling at the people on the street? What kind of encouragement am I offering those around me? I LOVE YOU says the balloon, but what do I say?

I ate a donut for brain power.

I think I’m proclaiming, from the middle of the marathon YOU YOUR BEST THING, YOU ARE. Which is, most obviously, a tribute to the encouragement I wish to contribute and my most favorite author Toni Morrison.

In this marathon of sprints, I want to be like the balloon. I want to proclaim things that are encouraging and uplifting as I deflate . I want to encourage those around me. I want to remind people that the marathon ends in may, and that we are almost there. And I want to remind myself.

So dear readers,

I LOVE YOU. YOU YOUR BEST THING, YOU ARE.

This year, I forgot to make resolutions. They are not in my blog archives, or my journals, or the box of scrap writing I have. They simply, don’t exist. Which really is a shame because this year, I think I might have done really well resolution wise.

I read 62 books. I moved into my first apartment and decorated it well. I avoided the freshman 15. I became more active. I did not buy a puppy. I ate healthier. I finished my novel-and it’s readable.

The lessons I learned this year were forceful. Despite my artistic past, I am not a visual learner. I do not learn from pictures or sound or reading. I learn by experience, and this year I experienced plenty.

I learned to be disciplined. This summer I was a full-fledged writer. I created my own schedule, worked my own hours, and fought my own battles. I wrote every day, and I wrote well. I learned to work even when I didn’t want to.

I learned to use wisdom even when it hurts. I made decisions this year that were not easy to make. I hurt feelings, I changed my mind, and I discovered aspects of my personality that were hard to reconcile. This year, I learned to be confrontational with reality, and to make decisions in wisdom, and not in convenience, ease, or emotion.

I learned to be rejected. Which hurt, and sucked, and grew bitterness and frustration in me. I know i haven’t fully learned this lesson, but I’m getting there.

Most of all, I learned to stop placing my identity in milestones. In 2011, the biggest lesson I learned was to be satisfied with myself no matter how little tactile substance comes with that. Sometimes, I will not get the A I think I deserve, or a full request on my novel, or the perfect plan. I am learning, slowly and painfully, to be happy with where I am, and to be proud of myself no matter the response from others: be those people literary agents, or professors, or friends.

2011 has been a hard year, and one that I would rather not have had, but progress doesn’t come from easily accomplished goals and lack of trial. Progress comes from struggle, and heartbreak, and stacks of rejection letters.

Toodles 2011.

2011 has been a great year of reading for me. Totals will come in tomorrow’s post, but overall I read just over a “zillion” books. Now, as someone who takes book recommendations very seriously, I’ve reduced my top-ten list to five for this year. Anyone can read five books in a year, why not make them great ones?

5.All The Living by C.E. Morgan. All the Living is C.E. Morgan’s debut novel. It is a short, meandering account of Aloma’s decision to move to an isolated tobacco farm with her young lover. This is a story about loneliness in intimacy, desperation in love, and man’s constant battle with the earth.

4.Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I read Gone With the Wind in the two weeks after I finished my novel. Cassie Jo recommended this to me, and as an avid reader you know I can’t deny a good recommendation. Mitchell’s story of heartbreak, brokenness, and the ever famous Scarlett is well worth the 600 pages you have to leaf through.

3. History of Love by Nicole Krauss. When I finished History of Love I laid on the floor of my apartment for twenty good minutes. I felt the emotional equivalent of the two hours after Thanksgiving dinner. This novel is so packed with emotion, so overwhelming in its beauty and character development, that Krauss cannot help but leave her readers as full as her plot.

2. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Morrison is gripping. From her first line “124 is spiteful” to her crushing prose and heartbreaking story, Morrison breaks her readers hearts again and again. I will quote this book for the rest of my life. “You your best thing Sethe, you are.” I will read this book again in 2012.

1.Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. My English professor this semester, whom I came to greatly admire, recommended this book to me. Despite Robinson’s pulitzer winning second novel Gilead (which I am currently reading), I had never heard of her. Housekeeping is a carefully penned and beautifully structured novel that tracks the abandonment of two young girls in a small idaho town. I read Robinson’s sentences out loud to my unwilling roommates. I gasped for breath at her descriptions of even the mundane. Housekeeping is the only book that I have ever read cover to cover-in the sense that that the second I finished it, I flipped back to the beginning and started again.

I’m not a huge Christmas person. My mother claims that this makes me a “scrooge” but it’s not really that I hate Christmas, or that I make an active decision to acquire distaste for everyone’s favorite holiday. I simply don’t feel the mushy excitement that everyone else seems to have this time of year. I am frustrated by the excessive purchases. I am unenthused by the decorations and the music. Generally, I just don’t feel the Christmas spirit. I am not my sister who, despite her age, is up at the crack of dawn bubbling with excitement to open presents every year.

The only part of the Christmas hulabaloo that I genuinely look forward to is snowflake making. I love to cut my printer paper into snowflakes. Even more, I love to do it on the internet where I don’t have to pick up tiny pieces of white paper for weeks. I like it because it is easy and anyone can do it. I like it because I can transform something bland and boring into something beautiful. I don’t add anything. I don’t glue glitter onto my snowflakes, and I don’t go crazy with colored paper. I only cut.

This has been a year of cutting in my life.

Not to say that I have been doing any of the cutting, but simply that it has been happening. My pride, my ability, and my confidence have all been cut. 2011 has not been an easy year for me by any means, and as I approach the holiday season it is easier and easier to look back and see the cuts.

I see the rejection letters darted to the wall.
I see the years of hard work that have yet to pan out.
I see the long hours with little rest.
I see the endless days, and the constant work.
I see the writer’s block that I have created.
I see the times where I have been a jerk for no reason.
I see the ways I’ve failed and the areas I’ve struggled.
I see my pride.
I see my impatience.
I see my lack of generosity.
I see my lack of grace.

But I’m starting to step back from my microscopic, daily evaluations and look at 2011 from a broader perspective, and from far back, this year doesn’t look so bad.

It is easy for me to get caught up in my failures and missteps. Even easier for me to dwell in them. Stepping back shows that those cuts and failures are not without purpose: that this period of waiting–this period of rejection– is creating beauty.

All those cuts are making me into a pretty okay snowflake.