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Kaislynn
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Name: Kaislynn
Country: United States
State: California
Gender: Female
Interests: Frilly ladies
Spin and twirl
My fashioned
Exquisite hall
Is filled with
Guests wondering
If I’ve called them here at all
Mysterious and dangerous
Maliciously polite
They’re waltzing
To the melody
Of patrician
High delight
They’re laughing
And chattering
Gilded, odd
And fine
One too many
Strangers
In this mind
Of mine
Expertise: And here the words
Stopped coming
They failed and were
Swept away in the face
Of the beauty they
Sought so vainly
To capture in
Themselves
Occupation: Student
Industry: Art
Message: message me
AIM:  meirsmgltte
Member Since:
10/21/2005
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| Once again I feel the urge to be vague and nostalgic.
I have been perusing my old computer--the one which I had for three good years of college. It still works. The only problem is that the logic board has some unfixable problem which boils down to always needing to be plugged in just right in order to function. Otherwise, I love the little bugger. They don't make powerbooks or macbooks in this size (12in) any more and the size was one of my favorite features. In any case I was paging through old poetry and old writings while I could and noticed patterns which have recently come up in a deepc conversation with a dear old friend.
This friend and I have only met for two relatively short days in person but have been emailing, lettering, and phoning each other on and off for more than seven years. In some ways we are more intimate than family and in others complete strangers. It is an odd and blessed mix.
On this particular night we were conversing--this means fighting--spiritedly about politics when suddenly we began to talk about me and my life. I told him some things which angered him and I turned around in the middle of his rebuke and caught him off guard by not only responding to his rebuke but by pointing out something that had been an unhealthy note in our friendship. I was shocked by his almost immediate acceptance of my argument and even more surprised by the way he then listened to me as I began to describe not only my situations but my worries and fears about myself. This is not to say that I came out of this situation any smarter or more virtuous than he did--in fact I'd argue the opposite--but much of the conversation made me remember just what problems I had been dealing with and just what decisions were helping and not helping me. It was a wake up call.
Usually I think of wake up calls as unpleasant, loud, and jarring. This one, however, was wrapped in love, humility, and a quest for understanding. It was a pleasant and Christ-like surprise. This is not to say that it makes my life any easier, but I understand that wake-up calls do not have to be excessively hurtful. I understand that love does make a difference and that God can reach us in ways that we do not expect.
I still have to make my decisions every day: trying to be better as I circle my problems, trying to come up with the best angle to battle them with. I am coming to believe once more that God is the best way to battle them. Not in pedantic and Bible thumping, white-knuckle fear, but in the peace and knowledge that I am neither alone nor without respite. Knowing that when things get hard, I can reach out and say: "what do I do next?" without fear even when I am afraid. Knowing that I can fail, and still I am not lost.
I act. And I have studied with some amazing actors (from Russia-- :) great stories). One thing they impressed me with was the importance, legitimacy, and non-deadend of failure:
When you fail, you can learn from it. You are able to see where you went wrong. Often when you succeed, you have no idea why and therefore cannot learn so well from it (perhaps this is why there is so many stories of failure in the Bible).
It is a form of success by negation. Like describing God by what he is not because to say what he is would put boxes around him. Instead of limiting our success or God's ability to help us succeed, we simply work to understand our failures and move towards that light which he has given us.
I'm going to start teaching this year. I pray that I will be a good teacher. I pray that I will be able to open the hearts and minds of the students and teach them at least a little to be able to truly say what they want and need to say. I hope I can let them know at least a little that they have intrinsic value and their voice is just as important as anyone's. What they say has value, they should be able to express it.
It's all very big and I can't begin to see the whole picture. Sometimes, I'm quite sure I don't want to see it. But I believe that someone does see it. I believe it does exist. I believe that it doesn't exist in a void. I believe that we do not exist in a void: that I do not exist in a void. And I believe to my core that we are, I am loved and cared for if I will reach back to the hand that is reaching for me.
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| I am angry.
I feel cheated out of a friend. I feel cheated by fear, by computers, by other people. I feel cheated by myself.
Today I visited, on a whim, the xangablog of someone I was once in love with. For years I would check this blog and always it seemed the same abandoned final post was there. I had this sense that the blog and the person were not there. Today, when I checked it. I founded pages and pages and pages of blog entries that I had never seen: blog entries of depth and silliness and breadth and time and energy and emotion. The entries seemed like the sea to me in their complexity and range. All I could think was how unavailable that whole vastness had been to me. I can't understand why I didn't ever see it. Why did I never know it was there? Why was I never able to connect with it? What the F*CK?!
It's an impotent rage, because I know there's really nothing to be done. I don't want to go backwards. I don't want to be where I was. But all I can do is look at what I missed--regardless of the reasons for missing it, they are many and complicated--and be angry with God, angry with myself, angry with him, angry with the universe for a few seconds out of my day.
But finally in my mind is a secure knowledge that I didn't miss it completely. And the fact that endings are also beginnings. Also the knowledge of the goodness of people's hearts and the God-given ability of that goodness to triumph at the most unlikely, strange times. It's not a perfect goodness. It's also not always a wise goodness (which can cause as many problems as it solves). But I believe that good can come. And I know my friend isn't gone. Reality has only rearranged and that rearranging takes some getting used to--not fun. So, I suppose that my final feeling is one of hope for and blessing on the future.
Anger is strong, but Love--though vulnerable--is stronger for it's vulnerability. Hence do I work to give up my anger for hope.
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| Ok.... so my name is Kassy. And my email is kaislynn--it's a name i have used for myself and alterego since some time long ago long long ago, still in this galaxy. And now they have been stolen!! and placed in a story which in spite of several good points is .... hideodiously driveliscious. It is another epitome of teenage drivel-y romantic unrealistic grossness. in which everyone's dreams come true and nothing really important happens and if that was the point: you know like making a statement about that, then it might be ok. But when the girl that our hero likes--you know, the one that he is sure has never even noticed him--is named Kassy, which is short of Kaslyn. And then she totally jumps him with a kiss from silken soft lips and accepts "I love you" from him after one bare exchange of stuttered questions and a note, slipped in her locker, written by his best friend... I start to feel a little offended especially since the person who wrote this story has a copy of my name next to my email address. S'foot! It's from class, from writting class. I had high hopes for a story titled "Apathetic Death" but you know, they were dashed.
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| I think it's interesting that a blog will sit dormant for a couple years and wait until it's writer is once again struck by this strange impulse to record thoughts on a live page where anyone, anyone at all, can read them. It's almost like a favorite book or a favorite window that waits, gathering electronic dust while storms happy without but the curtains are drawn. When will the sun reach it's insubstantial fingers through the glass and push the curtains once again out of the way? What will that view expose? Is it the mess it always was? Is it a new mess? Is it clean and new like spring? Is it the middle of a sunny day with flower petals strewn across the grass, the concrete, the dirt, the tarp? Where is the slipnslide? What happened to the pepper tree? Why are there two dogs instead of one? How does our moment change? In a blog it's like looking at slides through a microscope. Each entry is another slide. You never quite see the whole picture. But you can see the changes happening. Blink, blink, blink.
Today, I'm back on a website I thought had forgotten about me. It's a website, I hadn't checked in years. And yet suddenly the mood took me and my fingers flew across the keyboard striking the site address and here I was, wondering how to input again. I took comfort from the inactivity of the blog. I took comfort in the relatively few people on my list of subscribers. I took comfort in the relatively few of them that still use the site at all. Not because I want this to be private, but rather because I like the sense of sending it into a void of the past. I like the sense of writing a new letter and pressing it between the dusty pages of an old book in the library. There's no pressure. There is no worry that someone will read this and suddenly feel that they must help me solve my problems, or ask me what has happened and what is wrong and how shall they help me when I haven't seen them in months. It is an empty room with a chalk board and on it I will write. A fixed temporal. A working stranger sitting on a plane, staring out the window with a lazy smile. A blog has no fixed purpose, no fixed list of entries. It is. The way that the Dao is.
Anonymity is a blessing and a curse, but today it is a blessing. It is a blessing to sit beneath the waves and gently sway back and forth with the pulse.
There I things I worry about. Things that I pull myself to the surface for and fight against the waves around me to create and to stare and to scream into the storm or the clear air. The things next to me: work and school and applications. The things around me: my friends and family. The things surrounding us all: the country and the world. And those things that are beyond everything: cosmic and metaphysical.
I know this is all very vague and I realize that doesn't make for great writing, but the calm and floaty feeling of sitting in the wave instead of on it is sweet today. Possibly only today, but just in this little slide on the microscope, I am here.
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