Wednesday, June 17, 2009

In which Facebook is not perfect, I demand equal opportunity insanity, and Emily Dickinson wasn't as crazy as you think.

Facebook, we need to talk. This quiz as fab as it is (and oh, it is fab) has one unfortunate flaw.

Crazy female writers are drastically underrepresented!

You can't tell me the world hasn't seen its fair share of female authors who were just a tad off-kilter. I'm demanding equal opportunity acknowledgment of insanity!

So here's a quick rundown of the crazier women who have put pen to paper.

(A note: I totally respect all these writers-- yes, even Bronte, much as I hate Jane Eyre. They all impacted literature, in one way or another, and they are all largely respected by the global community today. Seriously, they're cool. This is just meant to be fun.)  

Sylvia Plath:

Ms. Plath was a bit of a headcase, but honestly, she had her reasons. Her father died when she was eight, for starters. But that didn't stop her from getting her work published in literary magazines as a teenager, or from getting a scholarship to Smith College, where she continued to write successfully. Of course, successful writing usually just points to having some variety of tortured soul, and Sylvia didn't disappoint. While in college, she "suffered a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide."

Unfortunately for our heroine, the treatment for her nervous breakdown involved six months in a hospital undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, which basically induces seizures in its patients. Fun stuff, huh? So fun that Plath referred to it heavily in her writing. "
Now they light me up like an electric bulb. / For weeks I can remember nothing at all," is a line from "Poem For A Birthday," which explored her college suicide attempt. When Plath's husband left her for another woman, she kicked the writing into angsty overdrive-- we're talking, “Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time—”

After publishing
The Bell Jar, a novel that was basically autobiographical and focused on a young woman's suicide attempt, Plath killed herself by putting her head in the oven and turning on the gas. She was, as all really cool artists are, more famous in death than she was in life.

Virginia Woolf:

Virginia Woolf, who had a really cool last name, "strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life." Born in 1882, she was greatly effected by her mother's death in 1895-- she is believed to have suffered bipolar disorder from that time on. One of her more famous novels, Mrs. Dalloway, tells the story of two completely different people whose thoughts and feelings have intriguing parallels.

The novel ends with the suicide of one of those characters, and Plath's life ended in suicide as well. In 1941 she walked into the Ouse River and drowned, leaving a note behind that told her husband she was afraid she was going insane.

In 1962, years after her death, Woolf unknowingly lent her name to the title of an award-winning play, Edward Albee's
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The play is about dysfunctional relationships, and is full of scathing abuse, both verbal and physical.

Now there's an upper!

Charlotte Bronte:

In my personal opinion, the fact that Bronte's novel Jane Eyre is considered "partly autobiographical" is enough to doom the poor woman to at least partial insanity (we're talking about a novel in which a young Jane is misunderstood and abused by her childhood guardians, unjustly labeled a liar at school, falls in love with a-- rather overbearing!-- man who is keeping a crazy wife in the attic, hears voices, sees ghosts, and ends up marrying Mr. Rochester after Ye Olde Crazy Wife commits suicide by setting fire to the house and jumping off a roof).

That is all. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Gilman's life was no picnic, beginning when her father left the family; Gilman was an infant at the time. This left two children, our own Ms. Charlotte and her brother, Thomas, in the care of mother Mary Perkins, who was not the most affectionate or maternal figure in the world, considering the fact that she "forbade her children to make strong friendships or read fiction," believing that this would prevent them for getting hurt, as she had. I'm not making this stuff up! In her autobiography, Gilman claimed that her mother only showed affection when she thought her daughter was asleep. 

Truthfully, her relationships didn't improve particularly as she got older. Gilman married Charles Walter Stetson, an artist, in 1884 (she'd initially declined his proposal, which as it turns out would've been the better idea), and had a child with him in 1885. Gilman suffered from intense post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter, and contacted a specialist, who prescribed the "rest cure." This "cure"-- and yes, I am using dubious quotation marks-- involved bed rest, isolation, and complete dependence on others (we're talking being fed by someone else, not leaving bed, and oh, heaven forbid any speaking whatsoever). When she was sent home, Gilman was under orders to limit her "intellectual conversation" and to never write again. 

Be fair to the lady. She gave it a shot. Of course, it resulted in deepened depression and suicidal urges, and in the end she and her husband decided that a separation was necessary. It was only after Gilman left her husband and spent time alone, with her daughter, in a completely different town, that her depression began to lift.

Years later, Gilman would write a short story about her depression and its "cure." It was called "The Yellow Wallpaper." 

(I got you, didn't I? There you were, reading along, when suddenly...BAM. Wallpaper.)

And, winner of the, "Rumors of My Insanity Have Been Greatly Exaggerated" prize, Ms. Emily Dickinson

Best known to this year's AP Lit students (heeeeeeeeeey guys!) as a female poet who used random capitalization, and whose poems can all be sung to the tune of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song (thanks, Ms. Hallberg!), Dickinson is notable for a couple of other things. She did not, for example, like to leave her house, staying in her home in Amherst for almost the entirety of her adult life.

But, contrary to popular belief, she wasn't a total recluse. She had normal things-- things like visitors! Friends! Family! She had an extremely close friendship with her sister-in-law, threw parties at which she entertained many guests, and kept up steady correspondence with an impressive number of people. And though the bulk of Dickinson's work-- we're talking close to 2,000 poems, here-- were officially published after her death, she sent plenty of those poems to friends and family while she was still alive. 


Well. There you have it. Intriguing, intelligent, talented women who were, collectively, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Love 'em, hate 'em, or love to hate 'em, you have to admit they did, on occasion, bring the crazy. 

Silly Facebook quiz. You really missed out. ;]

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

In which BLERGH.

I'm scared, and mixed up, and sad, and frustrated, and it just kind of sucks.

But! I am glad it's summer. :] 

Saturday, June 13, 2009

:]

Awww, guys, we're all graduated and stuff. :]

Truthfully, that's about all I have to share. I mean, there hasn't been a lot going on with me lately except GRADUATIONGRADUATIONGRADUATION. Grad practice...was what it was, and besides that, I can't think of anything much to blather about!

Graduation itself was certainly very strange. I don't know about everybody else, but I was only worried while I was waiting to walk out of the expo hall/walk into the grandstand. Besides that I was pretty calm. I did have a moment in the expo hall when we were all lined up-- or, at least, supposed to be lined up-- when I got strangely proud of everyone I knew. I mean, I expected every single one of my friends to graduate, obviously. There was really no doubt. But it's still kinda cool, huh? :] 

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

In which people may need a little happy, you should Consider The Following, and there is something about Boris.

Just in case anybody needs a little bit of happy, please Consider The Following: 

o1. Remember, Bill Nye exists!



o2. The Discovery Channel wants you to love the whole world and all its mysteries. Me, I'm actually cool if you just do the first part. But whatever!



o3. The something of Boris...?



o4. 


In closing: how did I ever forget how much I love Douglas Adams quotes?

"I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."






"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."


Words of true wisdom, folks. So don't you forget them!

Saturday, June 6, 2009

In which the important things happen alarmingly fast, I'll never have to sit in Rogers' bleachers again, and my inner-grammar geek is devastated.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how close we all are to being done with high school, but I haven't thought that much about what we've all finished

Like, portfolios? We're done with those. Senior boards? Totally over. I feel like a barely had time to breath between passing my senior boards and moving on to the next thing, and because I expected to pass (come on, we all did) I didn't make a big deal out of it. But it's over. Those piles of paper people burned at the bonfire mean that no one is ever going to remind us to fill out a Reading Record and Reflections sheet ever again. 

Five page paper for Hallberg? Done with that. But between Commoner deadlines and worrying about Honors and Awards/Senior Assembly stuff, that due date flew by too. Guys, it's finished! Five pages, double-spaced, and you know that's the last time anyone will ever say synthesis to us in a high school setting. 

Our Senior Assembly is over. We've heard Brittain's, "you walked through that door as sophomores" speech for the last time, and this time it was directed at us, of all people. Maybe for some people that assembly felt a little anticlimactic (it did for me), but we still sat through it, and now it's done. 

In fact, am I correct in assuming that we're through with the last assembly of our high school careers? I think I am. Last assembly schedule day! Last time you have to crowd into the Rogers gym with your friends and try to figure out a space on the bleachers (or the floor) where you can all squeeze in without hip-checking the stranger next to you! Last time you have the privilege of listening to the gym sound system cut in and out! 

I don't want to let this same thing happen with the last day of school, or with Commencement. I'm still going to be super busy, no question-- between job-hunting, grad parties, and my trip to D.C., I'm sure I'll be feeling pretty rushed when I hop on the bus home on Thursday, June 11, or when I scoot through a line of family after Commencement, snagging a hug from everybody before I'm out the door.  

But I don't want the end (complete end! total end! full stop, coming your way!) of my time as a mostly willing participant in public education to go unobserved. I don't want this to be one of those things that sinks in later, when there's no one around for me to cry hysterically with. 

SERIOUSLY GUYS, DON'T LET ME DO THAT. 

Grab me for a hug any day this coming week, if you like. I seriously won't mind-- er, assuming creepy stalkers don't read my blog, because if you do you can totally disregard that invitation! I know it's mushy of me, but I'd like the reminder that I know spectacular people, and that we're all approaching the end of our high school careers together. 

In other news, reading senior quotes is ridiculous. And, at times, makes the grammar geek in me curl up into a tiny ball in the corner of my brain and die. 

Friday, June 5, 2009

My cat says:

"You could close your eyes! You can close your eyes, can't you? Oh no! Are you eye-lid-ily challenged?" 

Monday, June 1, 2009

In which I have rather a lot to do in the next four days, and I will not in fact be having a nervous breakdown, miniature or otherwise.

Mail the Cub edition, go to Mariners game, put together package for my grandma (and, you know, mail it), drop off more resumes, get frequent flier miles for new student orientation, figure out transportation to airport/to campus, do the sixteen Commoner things I am undoubtedly forgetting because I've been a space case lately, pick up shoooooes, Bio final, honors and awards night, final thank you circle (um, what am I going to say?), senior assembly (note to self: cry hysterically), get my picture taken approximately sixty bazillion times by my mother, final draft for Hallberg, proposal for Stats project, data collection for Stats, turn in Stats book, turn in Gov book, make sure all Early Human work is in (it's probably not, argh!), read Gatsby because heck, I actually want to read this book, solidify graduation plans, solidify graduation guests for once and for all, start buying books for next year, HAVE A MINIATURE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

Actually? I'll be fine. But it was nice to spew a giant paragraph of responsibilities and stress. Especially since I know a lot of you guys are in the same boat, at least partially. :]

This week is going to be so very, very strange. 

And lest anyone forget-- Happy June!