Hanging in There Until #Summer2013

So, I'm going to try and actually update this thing more often because I feel bad. I am so hot and cold with this thing. I only ever post, like, once a month and I aim to do this once a week but it just doesn't happen because of one excuse or another.
I guess we could start with news before we do updates, huh?

This summer, I'm going to be awfully busy. Not only am I picking up the same job I had last summer (Working at Greenwood concession stand--come visit me if you want!), but I'm also doing a ton of traveling. I'm going to spend about a week shortly after the beginning of the summer vacation in Boston/Marblehead with my darling and beautiful angel Ms. Emily.


From last summer. Pardon my stoned expression

I've never been to the east coast and it should be fun to finally experience some of the older parts of the country, seeing as how I've spent my whole life in the Midwest and the South.
Also, this will be the first time that I've seen Emily since last summer, around the same time (early-to-late June) and she's been my friend since we were wee little kindergarteners.
She's coming back to Minnesota with me afterwards and she'll be spending a week in our marvelous and cold state before returning to her new home in the east coast.

Then I have, literally, five days of free time (if you can even call it that. I'll probably be working often throughout those days) before I get back on an airplane, this time to cross the Atlantic.
I'm going to the British Isles this summer on July 4th for nineteen days. I'm insanely excited as this will be my second time being in Europe. Last spring break, as some of you who have read my blog for long enough would know, I went to Scotland and Northern England. It's going to be awesome this time around because I'll get to go over to the whole island of Ireland and Southern England. I have been prepping for this trip for a couple of months now and I can't wait to actually see it come to fruition.


Me with my Scottish boyfriend

Granted, I won't be able to actually go to a Scotch brewery like I got to last time but I'm sure seeing the other island will make up for it.
Also, unlike in Amsterdam, there are no classy weed brownies casually hanging out in the British Isles (I'm totally kidding, y'all).

I come home later in July and the majority of my August is thankfully relaxed, especially as I have a sinking suspicion that my hook up was unable to sneak me into the Target Center's internships, which is totally fine; I had prepared myself for that.
Still, I haven't heard a definitive answer from her so there's always hope!


So, updates.
Somehow, I have managed to maintain an A in both of my English classes this semester. Math is a little rougher, with, I believe, a C+.
My math teacher is god awful. She doesn't teach us; she doesn't make herself available for questions on homework. I honestly don't understand how she hasn't been fired because her pass rate must be abysmal.
TAing is going well, but that's unsurprising as I love both chemistry and my teacher. At least I have managed to not burn a hole through a finger with concentrated acid.

I scored a 30 on my ACT (32-English, 32-Reading, 22-Math, 32-Science, 8-Writing) and, to be honest, I am really unsatisfied with that score. I know it was my first time and I know that I forgot my calculator for the math portion but my PLAN test scores from sophomore year predicted that I would get a 32 and I won't be content with my score until I get that. I blame the kind of schools that I've been to. They all put so much stress on being absolutely perfect and leagues above average that it's become hard for me to accept anything less than perfect.
Hell, I get one question wrong on my Grammar test and score a 97/100 (a score the rest of my class would sell an arm and leg for) and I get mad at myself. I have yet to score a perfect. While other kids played with coloring books growing up, I was sentence diagraming!
I have this huge intelligence complex because I grew up being told that I was good at everything to do with school and the grades to prove it.
It's hard to struggle academically when so much is expected out of you.

Wow, that turned into a rant I didn't intend for.
But, I think that's all I have for today. I'll hope to update more early next week.



/Rant

So, this drama is all over my Tumblr dash so I thought I would comment on part that is seriously bugging me.
This is a response to this post on Tumblr, discussing the public, social, racist, sexist missteps of award-winning author, John Green.
Now, I'm not going to talk about any of the serious issues because I'm not going to claim to know everything about John Green and I am a privileged white female so I cannot speak to the appropriation claims in a lot of their issues but there is one subject I feel very confident in speaking to.
The accusations that what he writes represents his views on the world.
This is outrageous and stupid. That is it. It is dumb to hold any offensive thing a character in a book, TV show, or movie against the writer. To say that John Green is slut shaming by writing a character who slut shames is ridiculous. To say that John Green would use the term "kafir" in casual and everyday conversation because two characters in his book do is stupid.
The same way that saying an actor who plays a slaveholder or a writer who writes that character is a supporter in slavery is stupid.
Literature is supposed to, in certain genres, mirror our world. There are racists in our world. Real sexists. Real Islamophobics. I'm not saying that these real people are okay. I'm saying that to ask a writer to write every character in a novel as perfect and inoffensive is unrealistic because that's not how the world works.
I have written several racist and sexist characters.
I have written characters who hate Southerners for their actions prior to and during the Civil War even though my entire family is from the South and I couldn't hate them if they tried to kill me.
Obviously, the views of characters do not (always) reflect the views of the author.

I'm Scared.

(Just a forewarning: This will be a stream of consciousness blog post so forgive me.)
I'm terrified.
We've talked a lot about my emotional projection onto things like TV shows and most recently, a basketball team.
Tonight was their last home game and I went because my dad realized how important it was to me. Their last game is coming up in the next couple of days.
And I'm scared about what will happen when it's all over. I've been projecting emotions on them for months at this point and as soon as that false reality that I've built up collapses, I'm scared because the last time it ended, I relapsed in my self harm and I stopped talking to friends and lost interest in everything again.
I mean, it was with Supernatural but I'm sure it'll be no different this time.
I am so afraid guys and I don't know what to do.

Real Talk About Real Sports.

When I hear people bad mouthing organized sports, it pisses me off.
Not going to lie, I used to be one of those people. I used to be an intellectual snob who believed that sports and those who watched and played them were just inherently lesser than me. They weren't smart enough to give them a job elsewhere so they had to become "I AM MANLIEST MAN IN THE BUILDING LOOK AT MY MUSCLES BLARGH."
I took a step back when I started actually watching sports, namely basketball, but I've been watching others like football and a little live tennis. The amount of skill it takes to actually play these sports is beyond my comprehension. And now, when I see hate on athletes on Tumblr or Twitter or I hear people saying it, it just pisses me off.
And not only that but watching basketball has helped me so much with a lot of the problems I've been having for years at this point. I used to do this with TV shows and I've talked about it a lot on my blog. I connect with the characters and even more I connect with the actors. The problem is that I often don't get to see actors for who they are or in person.
With sports, there are ample opportunities to meet the athletes and you see the real (albeit, probably far more aggressive) person.
I don't know.
This all just occurred to me yesterday.
When I met a Timberwolf.

Say hi to me and Alexey we're so cute, I guess you could say. He probably thinks I'm psycho

(Ignore the bitch PR lady)

 

Character Description Practice.

Her frame was willowy, an allusion to the once great Russian ballerinas, but while their steps had been laced with elegance learned through years of knowing their bodies, hers were like a newborn horses: Wobbly and unsure. And as sharp and catlike as their features had been, hers were weaker. Her lips melted into the rest of her face, a gradient of pink to white. With blonde lashes long enough to skin her brow bone, her eyes looked out-of-place, dark as whiskey and forever quivering.
The oddness of her looks was, all at once, discomforting and magnetic, with an emphasis on the latter.

Frustration.

So, in the last post, I talked about my new blog that I had made with a friend about a gay basketball team and how in love with the idea I was.
I still madly love this concept because I think it's fun and light hearted and a nice break from serious writing pieces.
However, I'm struggling. It seems like I'm the only one who cares anymore. None of my friends want to talk about the team--our made up one or the real team--and no one ever really reads it anymore. Some of the friends I told about the blog haven't even bothered to look at it once. And it's really frustrating because it's something that I've come to actually care about and whenever I bring either the real or fake up, people seem to shut down or get annoyed.
Even my co-creator seems reletively done with it.
And friends who say that they like reading what I write won't even bother to read one. They're not long. They take all of two minutes to read, even the fanfictions that are on the longer side.
I just don't know what to do anymore.
Do I continue posting when no one cares?
Or do I give up on this concept just like everyone else?
Agh, I am so frustrated.

Where I Have Been.

I have been writing, dear friends.
Not novel length pieces, mind you.
A little backstory before I proceed.
My dad's company gave him four tickets to our cities' pro basketball team's game (SO MANY POSSESSIVES) and I went with my mother, father, and friend. You have to keep in mind that my friend and I only knew two of the players on the team, both of who were out with injuries for this game, so we knew exactly nobody.
The natural progression of two obsessive fangirls happened and we sat in our seats, three rows from the court, making up homoerotic stories about all of the players. We got so into it that we decided to make a blog about it, which I will include a link to, and since we have been writing "fanfictions," if you will, based on these fake versions of real people.
God it sounds so creepy.
But it's really not.
Our versions of these people are nothing like the real ones; I would know because since that first game I--and to some extent she--have become an avid fan of this unnamed team. I even bought a jersey. Bow to my fandomness.
So, in the absence of serious other works, if you would like to read any of my most recently written pieces, go to this tumblr.
First, read the players and relationships page and then go ahead and dive headfirst into the world of gay basketball players!
That is what I have been up to.

We've Talked a Lot about my Sexuality But...

Before I start, because I have an unhealthy obsession with prefacing these things, I want to say that this is all true and all stuff that I have never told anyone. I hope that you all can respect and accept that.
As many of you know, sexuality is not the only thing that makes up a person. So, as I've stated a million and a half times before, I identify sexually as pansexual.
Well, while talking in my Sociology class yesterday about gender roles and what makes sex and gender different, it slowly dawned on my that, once again, there is something deviant about my brain.
I am physically a female.
I don't identify with being female though. But, on the same token, I don't identify as being male and that is when my brain slapped my hard across the face. I realized, only upon this discussion in class, that I identify as androgyne.
For those of you who don't know, androgyny or polygender or ambigender or a million other names it has is the gender identity wherein one identifies heavily with traits of both males and females. We display traits of the expressive (the female) and the instrumental (the male).
I think it started because I identified heavily as male as a child. When I say heavily, I mean I was mistaken as a boy up until probably the beginning of eighth grade. I dressed like a boy, talked like a boy, acted like a boy, did "boy" sports, the whole nine yards.
And then in middle school, I started getting bullied for it.
The song "Dude looks like a lady," or however it goes still gives me goose bumps anytime I hear someone say it because people used to say that to me. I was apparently this huge butch kid and I had no idea that it was wrong.
To make it stop, I grew out my hair. I changed, somewhat, the clothes that I wore. But I still catch myself sitting with my legs wide open, still hear the "boy" terminology coming out, still love the same damn sports, still don't wear makeup.
I don't identify as either because I don't think I ever thought of myself as wholly one or the other. Where was the fun in only playing with Barbies or only playing football? To me, it didn't make a difference what I was doing or wearing or saying as long as I liked it and believed in it.
So, here we are.
Avery, the androgynous pansexual atheist.
Could I really have asked for anymore traits worthy of discrimination?
Well, I guess I could be black.

Why I'm Afraid of All of That Lovey Stuff.

So, I'm going to preface this blog by saying that, no. No, I do not know any actors personally but thanks to this world wide web of ours, I think we can safely say that it is possible to have a pretty good idea about what actors are like in real life. With that, let us begin.
As many of you probably know, there are quite a few fictional characters/actors with whom I may or may not have a big, fat crush on.
When people ask me, who at my school do I have a crush on nd I tell them no one and they respond with nothing but disbelief and suspicion, I want to tell them the truth but I know that that would take too long and make me sound nothing but pathetic. And it is with recognizing that that I begin the journey of explanation to you, dearest blog readers.
I have such a deep, profound appreciation of these people--real and fake--that I'm afraid. I'm afraid that real, non-famous people can't live up to these expectations that I've built up because of the people in my books or on my TV.
I don't trust them and isn't the first step to falling in love at least trusting?
I wouldn't have the first clue, because I've never tried.
I don't even know if I'll ever try.
That's how afraid I am.