Role Models: Lizard Lady sends me to college

In this series of posts, I'll be posting about people who've given me good advice and set me on the track to where I am now. I'll be using pseudonyms and pictures that describe them, but it'll be pretty much anonymous. You'll know who you are!


My senior year, I was pretty busy with drama club, journalism and songwriting, but otherwise I was a ne'er-do-well, padding my semesters with lots of "teacher's aide" hours that served as excuses for me to escape campus for lunch and guitar store hangouts.  My Fall semester, I got pulled out of my anatomy class* by my English teacher.  She and said anatomy teacher wanted to nominate me for the Earthwatch Student Challenge Awards. This was ostensibly a program to convince artsy kids that science wasn't scary, and involved a trip to some nature-y place to work with a scientist.  I was flattered that they picked me, but waited til the last minute to write an essay.  A few weeks later I learned I'd gotten in, and would be flown to Arizona for three weeks.  It would be the summer after graduation, so I'd already be getting ready to spend major time away from my family.   I was excited about traveling, but still not sold on science**.

Snowed in with the one I love

Bonnie "Prince" Billy and the Cairo Gang's The Wondershow of the World* is the album I'll be listening to on repeat all day.  I don't usually post about music, because I have no way of explaining why I like a certain song to convince someone to listen to it, but this is one that always makes my heart feel tender.  The line, "Will you love me if I change?" makes me think of Simply Bored's comment in the guest post a few days ago: would we have done the things we say we'd have done if we hadn't made a decision to stick to someone else? What would we find out about ourselves, when we really ask, What would I have accomplished otherwise?  Would I be here, with J, if I'd done the things I convince myself I regret not doing?  Would he still love me, or even have found out he loved me, if I'd gone away and come back a year later.  Who will I be if I decide to start being more honest to myself about what I can achieve?  If I am as successful as my what ifs? will it lead me somewhere that I can't be with him anymore?


Did passing up a good opportunity get me where I am today, and can I admit that giving something up and gaining a wonderful relationship isn't as retrograde as rationality tells me?  Can I not be ashamed to honestly say, If I had gone for it, I would not be here?  Here, where I don't have a career, am not multi-lingual, not fiercely independent, defined somewhat by my relationship?  Where being someone's wife can't be chipped out from what I truly am?  Why is being a woman, in love with a man, caught up in so many feelings of guilt and looked upon with condescension? I can't change the world in that respect, but I can change the way I react to it.  It is so much harder to learn to ignore something, than to rail against it.


With Cornstalks or Among Them


Where were you again tonight? 
(with cornstalks or among them) 
Moonless night my love burned bright. 
(o out among them) 


I'm not impressed by fields of cane. 
Our house is good to me, and plain. 
Happiness can live here still, 
if coming back you only will. 


Or I can fnd you out among 
(o out among them) 
and sleep next to you and hear it sung 
(o out among them). 
I have saved enough that I can go. 
But where to find you, I don't know. 


Please to fnd me, here I am 
(with cornstalks or among them),
 devoured by fields unmade by man 
(o out among them). 
You love me still, although it's strange. 
Will you love me if I change? 


There was one life with you before, 
and one life more, and one life more. 




*Follow the link to all those songs on youtube. If you are similarly snowed in, please listen to some of these songs.  And then if you are really sad on account of it, see him and Zach Galifianakis's version of Can't Tell Me Nothin' by Kanye West.  But don't watch this video until you've listened to some of his music. It is amazing to listen to that beauty and then see that video and wonder, "Who the fuck is this person?"