Big Changes Afoot!

I’m always shocked to the core when I discover that people read my ramblings on here. The reason I started this blog not too long ago was to be able to express myself, and for the past few months, I have not done just that. I plan to change that, invariably with the increased free time I will have to write during the school year. Today marks the second day of my second semester of my final year of undergraduate at WSU. I’m exhausted, enthused, and apprehensive, and terribly impatient for this semester to take off. The future is often terrifying, but this future is entirely unlike any I could have imagined.

When I was young, I remember being of an age where 6th graders appeared huge. 8th graders were practically in high school. High school and college students appear as full size adults when you’re a five year old in a wind breaker. At that age, I could barely imagine myself in high school, let alone in college. Now, I have 12 years of Catholic school and almost all four years of undergraduate behind me. Yet, I don’t feel terribly different than I did at the start of this journey.

I still remember the cool misty morning on my first day of kindergarten. I remember my partially wet mop of curls and too-big skirt that I wore on my first day of high school. I think these final few days of undergrad will be ones that I remember for the rest of my life. To be in grad school would be a pretty big adventure, and one that I cannot wait to undertake.

To those of you that have cared for me and supported me, from Sammie to Samantha to Sam, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Life updates sorta

Goodness, I haven’t posted consistently to this blog in while, so prepare to be bombarded! Roar.

To be honest, not much has happened in the months it’s been since I last posted. Apart from the big things like the trips to London and Canada over the summer.

Ohio cannot seem to make up it’s mind whether September should actually feel like fall or the middle of July. Rolling up to class a sweaty mess is never pleasant.

I’m adapting to apartment life with me, myself, and I. It could use some decor (I’m working on that), but my God it is liberating to have a kitchen. I’m realizing I eat some weird stuff when left to my own devices. The later it gets in a day, the less likely I am to want to cook! I realize more everyday just how hard my blessing of a mommy must work to take care of her family. I have a hard enough time taking care of myself alone sometimes!

I suppose no news is good news in the romance department. I dread talking about this; there’s never much to report. I get asked about it by family members and it’s frequently embarrassing. My own shyness tends to paralyze me and I tend to embroil myself in my own little world. I sometimes feel like I pass unnoticed by a lot of people, boys, girls, and otherwise. So I act out, and I get goofy when I get nervous. I either turn into tour guide Barbie, Batman, or Wayne Campbell. There’s no real middle ground there.

I don’t want to sound like I’m lamenting being single; I’m not. Sometimes I’m grateful for it, when I see how unhappy some people in relationships can be. At the same time, I try to roll with things like Selina Kyle, except without the love/hate relationship with Batman dynamic (AN: Would that be a blessing or a curse? Worth debating.)

The way I see it is, I might as well get comfortable with myself. After all, the self is often our most frequent form of companionship. It’s hard to like yourself all the time. I know I struggle with it at least a little bit most days. But, at the end of the day, you can’t mope about not liking yourself. You have to FIND something to like, even if it’s something small, like you made a boss cup of coffee in the morning, or you unloaded the dishwasher. It boils down to celebrating the little things, because they add up to our successes.

Thanks for listening. This blog has become like a diary of my inner monologue. More to come later. For now, it’s time to roll to campus and find some lunch.

Be good.

Oh, sweet blog. I’ve cruelly neglected you while summer has called me away. Now, my summer is dwindling away, and I find myself crawling back to your expansive pages. How are you? I promised London travel updates, (even though this was months ago whoops) so I thought I ought to share them.

I mentioned my impending trip to London a while back. Let me tell you all, magic exists/ And London is awash with magic, it’s practically in the air.  There is something incredible about walking through a city that has existed for hundreds of hundreds of years. But, I’ll start at the beginning. We took an afternoon flight to Detroit Wayne Metropolitan Airport, an expansive modern necropolis of air travel. Certainly not a bad place to spend a brief layover. Interestingly, the DTW airport receives arrivals from Tokyo Narita airport, and has a few flights to the airport that leave daily (secretly, I am an air travel nerd.) It’s amazing to see the influence this has had on tour terminal; signs throughout in English but also Japanese, and the most genuine looking Japanese sushi bar I have ever seen (but alas did not have time to enjoy) parked right in the terminal.

Apparently, tunnels between terminals in this airport light up like Saturday Night Fever. I wish I’d gone to track one down and ran through it like the overly hyped child I was that day.

This was the longest flight I’ve ever taken; I think it was even longer than our flight to Vegas. The plane itself was massive, with rows of two, three, and two, and beautiful blue lights in the cabin, reminiscent of an evening on board the Starship Enterprise.

Screaming babies kept us up most of the night, but the flight attendants took good care of us. By the time we arrived at Heathrow, to a massive customs line staring us in the face, we’d had a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep. Customs dragged by, and we took a network of trains until we made it to our London flat. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how I felt when we came out of the tube tunnels at Warren Street station.

The most fascinating thing I’ve noticed about travel in general is how life just goes on when you arrive in a new place. In London, this city I’ve dreamed of my entire life, arriving in the city felt to me like walking on the moon. You could practically see the stars in my eyes. But, amazingly, this was a normal day for those around us. People were chatting on cell phones, little flags plastered with Prince Harry and Megan Markle were in the windows of most stores (this was the Thursday before the royal wedding). I was amazed at the normalcy of it all.

I can’t wait to share more with you all about the trip, but I’ll post more when I have time to share what we did with pictures. Life updates to come in the next post.

Peace,

S

A Step Forward? Or Will I Lose My Mind Along The Way? Stay Tuned!

Isn’t amazing how easily an hour can pass when you’re doing something productive?

This is the day before my hell week begins, so I’ve been trying to make the most of it,  by being productive and at the same time enjoying my time at home, where I can decompress, before I go back to school and will invariably be able to smell stress in the air like cheap men’s cologne in a crowded elevator.

 

Two presentations, two research papers, a final, a video project, and a final draft of an essay. All due at various points this week. Gee, is that all?

The stress comes and goes like waves and a tide. I’m praying to God I’m not forgetting anything, and that I have time to do it all. Is it acceptable to skip class to work on assignments for the class being skipped? Nah, too many presentations during classtime to do that. It feels a lot like standing on one foot while trying to keep a scale in balance. Is it possible? Sure. Will you lose your balance and fall on your face? Probably. But hey, as long as it isn’t on my ankle, I’m good.

This is why I try to take each day, each assignment, each moment of stressing over one thing or another, an hour at a time.

For each moment that you do something productive, take that time and give it back equally to yourself. Take a break. Eat leftover curry in your PJ’s. Read something other than that story about aliens with dreads that you have to analyze somehow.

Don’t stress, just decompress. Draw that line between what you have to, those pressing deadlines, and what you need to do, to keep yourself going. Focus less on that journal that needs to be done by Tuesday. Focus more on that cheesy 90s movie you’ve seen a thousand times. And, when you’re ready, sit down with a cup of coffee and a stuffed animal for emotional support, and get that **** done.

If only it was that easy to take my own advice! I’ll live. But keep my GPA in your thoughts. Hopefully he won’t need resuscitation!

Peace,

Sam

Thorsday…

There’s always something to look forward to on Thursdays. It’s kind of the day of the week where I realize I can start to take a break from the pressures and due dates of the week, and just breathe. (Hopefully that keeps up next week, when I have two presentations on Tuesday, and two papers due on Thursday! I love college.)

Thursday’s are also my game night, where I can make a pretty decent trek to not-so-far from home, and camp out around a table with some of my closest friends, and focus on my character, my friends characters, and the occasional role of the dice. I think I’ve taken to tabletop gaming like a fish to water. (I don’t think I can thank my awesome friend Jordy for giving me that push to give it a try. I was scared out of my shorts at my first session! It was like a sort of stage fright.) Now, after about a year playing the same character, it’s so easy to return to the world of our game, and get lost in the story for a few hours. I sort of require the disconnect from the world.  I’ve noticed if I go a long period of time without that disconnect, I get way too into my own head.

For a few hours each week, my problems are no longer my problems. I lose my worries about school, family, the future, all that jazz, and I take up the personal motivations, concerns, and story of someone else, who I’ve built from the ground up. As a writer, it’s truly a wonderful feeling, to immerse yourself in the mind of someone you have literally built from the ground up. I know tabletop gaming, and other sorts of role-play, have really aided me as a writer.

So much of a story is built around characters. If your characters are dis-interesting, what else do you have? I encourage you to think about the most flat character you can think of in media; I actually had to look up an example of this, because I always forget the flat characters. The only ones that really make a splash are the most dynamic. Flat character aren’t always forgettable though, and the internet uses Hagrid from Harry Potter as an example. He doesn’t really change, but he sure is memorable.

I’ve noticed that the more time you spend in a characters head, the more you can pull the reader into an adventure.

As for great books recommendations, I encourage those of you with an interest in fantasy to pick up works from the”Polish Tolkein” Andrzej (pronounced like Andre I think) Sapkowski and his books in the Witcher series; you’ll want to start with the first one, The Last Wish, which is a collection of short stories. Interestingly, the books were the inspiration for the (absolutely fantastic) video game series. I love seeing game developer’s take on a literary world. As far as I can tell (I’m about 3/4 of the way through The Last Wish), the books are almost 100% accurate to Mr. Sapkowski’s original tale.

I can’t wait to get into the rest of these books; I’ve got the second book in the series (the first few books are collections of short stories, the rest, including the most recent, are full on novels). And is there anything better to read on a long trip by plane than fantasy?

I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy as well; the first book Dawn was assigned reading for class, and I ate it up! Something about the humanness of the Oankali, the alien species throughout Xenogenesis, is fascinating to me.  They sort of brought back some old memories of the Klingon’s from Star Trek, except inherently less evil! Haha.

I’m even writing a paper (or going to start writing a paper) on the main character Lilith from Dawn, and I’m not feeling particularly daunted by the task either. At this point it’s just a matter of sitting down with a cup of caffeine   tea and telling myself I actually know what I’m talking about!

Enjoy your day, reader. More to come, after I’ve saved the world of Kyme with my favorite dudes.

Love,

Sam

My favorite anime…might be coming back?!

Evening, humans.

Something that’s been on my mind today is something I saw one of my favorite cosplayers post a few days ago. They’d cosplayed the main character from my favorite anime/manga series (the manga is almost as old as I am!) and mentioned that they heard the manga was going to be continued after an extraordinarily long hiatus? If you’ve seen DNAngel, or ever talked to me about it, you know why this is such a massive deal for me. I had two first real animes; Princess Tutu and DNAngel. Princess Tutu was sufficiently girly, and had a pretty fairytale ending. Absolutely gorgeous, with inspiring characters (one of them I’m convinced I grew up to become. More on that later.) It was surprisingly emotional for an anime with such a girly title. I even got my mom to watch it with me recently, and she’s really enjoying it.

Take a guess which ballerina I preferred.

I always thought I would look a lot like Rue on the left if I was in an anime. Big ol eyes, curls, pale as a ghost. Of course, I can’t dance to save my life! Haha.

But anyway, back to the matter at hand, DNAngel  was the anime that came into my little 9 year old brain when I was just beginning to realize that I wouldn’t be a kid forever, and a lot was changing around me. It felt like a transitional period. I’d always felt a lot like the main character, Daisuke, and I still feel a lot like him today. It’s a certain feeling of maybe what they call split personality, a duality of spirit, darkness in light, and light in darkness. Like Yin and Yang, two halves to a spirit. They even mention a similar concept in the lyrics of the Japanese version of the theme song. At one point Daisuke looks into a mirror, and doesn’t see himself but sees his alter ago, the phantom thief Dark, who is everything Daisuke isn’t. He’s handsome, where Daisuke is cute (he has massive ears). He’s confident, where Daisuke is sometimes awkward and shy, etc. Check out the first few episodes (and forgive the first episode it’s cheese) and you’ll see what I mean.

But he grows up over the course of the anime, and not just in the traditional coming of age story type of way, but in a way that’s stuck with me down the line. I have yet to find an anime that’s ever made me feel that way, so much so that I think it has changed not only my life, but who I am as a person. Ask me about my signed DNAngel box set. Go on. Ask me.

Anyway, the author of the manga, who was also consulted when making the anime, ran out of steam and stopped the manga volumes somewhere in the mid-late teen numbered volumes. She was sort of a one hit wonder with DNAngel. Nothing she released after DNAngel went on hiatus really scratched the surface in popularity. Lately both anime and manga have undergone a sort of Renaissance-like rebirth in the anime community. I now know more people than ever before that love this anime, this story, and these characters as much as me. No longer am I asked “What’s that?” when I tell someone my favorite anime, but I am usually greeted with a fond chorus of “Oh my god, you too?!” It’s a fantastic feeling. ❤

(Fun fact: I wanted to kill this chick by the end but…Lucy Christian is a great voice actress. And look, hazel eyes! And obsessed with Phantom Dark like a certain someone (me). So it was impossible for me to hate her completely even when she drove me up a wall. Because, whether I liked to admit it or not, she was a lot like me. xD )

I think the manga stopped anywhere from the 15th-18th volume some time in the early 2000’s, before the anime came out. There weren’t even official English translations for the last few volumes of the manga. I remember scouring the internet like a nut trying to find extremely crappy fan translations of the Japanese, with terrible broken English. But when you’ve been devoted to a series since you were 9, you’ll do just about anything. So I devoured those last few volumes, only to be met with a massive cliffhanger, akin to the ending of the first Iron Man movie, where the reader/audience is left thinking…”What the actual fresh hell have you done?!”

So when it’s all said and done, I really can’t help but hope that Sugisaki-sensei picks DNAngel back up. Even if it’s a lost cause, or a false rumor, it would still give me the hope that something I treasured from my childhood would be returned to me. Who knows? You’ll probably hear me screaming from across the country if this comes true!

Thanks for suffering through my nerd fueled passionate rants. Halfway to Friday!

Love,

Sam

Gratitude

I hope I tell the important people in my life how much I appreciate them and how much they do for me. Sometimes I  feel like I can never thank them enough. When an important person in my life supports me through a moment of weakness, it always puts into focus just how much I treasure them. I had a bit of breakdown in a class today, panicking because I couldn’t find a journal (a freaking journal) worth 20% of my grade for a class. My dear good friend Morgan took me out of the classroom right away and talked me down, made me breathe. She’s the Jim Halpert to my Andy Bernard. Truly a beautiful soul.

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My super sweet professor Pascale even came out to check on me. She’s the main reason I have a new fire lit within me to keep going with French. A great teacher can inspire, and be more than just a teacher but also a caring friend. 

I am so incredibly grateful to both of them for supporting me because it’s proven to me that emotional vulnerability IS a key part of being human.  It’s hard to bottle up emotions, but often we are encouraged to do so by various media. We have to look tough, and hold in our moments of weakness, because even in progressive 2018, weakness is still discouraged, and sometimes it just bubbles out like water from a hot spring and is seemingly impossible to control, unless you have the right friend there to diffuse you. I’d like to also mention that it’s impossible to be strong all the time. We are human, and sometimes we just need a moment to acknowledge that we are human, and that we are enough. Sometimes I just need that reminder that there is always, always someone who cares, and that is enough for me. ❤

Take care & keep carrying on through your Monday!

Love from your Sailor Mars,

Sam

Let The Madness Ensue…

Greetings pals and gals. I don’t anticipate two people, let alone anybody to see this first post of mine. But regardless, I was inspired to start this blog after a particularly enlightening conversation I had, of all the places, on a plane with a wonderful lady named Holly, who convinced me in the span of just a few hours that a blog was the place I needed to put all of my thoughts into words. I hope to use this space for a lot more than just personal updates, and I’m excited to think that there’s so much I can do with it. Hope you like memes! Haha.

Anyway, for those of you that don’t know already, I’m a second semester junior in college. Trudging my way through this last chunk of the semester trying to keep my head out of the sand it seems perpetually buried in sometimes! It’s coming up on the point in the semester where everything seems to be due all at once. This is 100% not my forte. And yet I bounce back and forth between panic, and the unusual calm before the storm. Today, I drove myself back to my college campus after spending a weekend at home. I’ve been eating away at an audiobook of Great Gatsby in the car. Because what better way for an overly excitable English major to kill an hour in a car than by drowning her sorrows in a classic of American literature about love, loss, and the American Dream. Brilliant, no?

I admit, I’ve developed a sort of strange fascination with Fitzgerald, his life, his works, and his wife Zelda. I watched the tv show Z about her life (tragically canned after only one season. Amazon, you astound me.) and found it fascinating. There’s certain sense of true humanness to the relationship Scott and Zelda shared, despite it’s tragic end. And if I tried to capture my fascination with Gatsby here, I’d probably be up all night typing! But, I think I understand Nick Carraway and Gatsby so well because I see myself in a sort of intermediary space between the two of them. Sometimes, like Nick, I too feel like I’m on the outside looking in; I get sensory overload quite easily, with some of the beauty I see in the world. Other days, I feel more like Gatsby, surrounded by magnanimous, the ostentatious, and gutted by deep torrents of emotion at sometimes the silliest things.

 

Anyway, it’s getting a bit later in the day; about 9:00 right now, so I’ll try to stop running my mouth and wrap things up for now.  There’s about a month and a week until I take the trip of a lifetime with my best friend, my mommy.  To be an Anglophile in 2018 is a wonderful thing, because there’s just so much to look forward to. I’ll be waiting in the wings somewhere in London when Prince Harry gets married, just in case he needs a backup bride, of course. 😉 And then Prince William and Kate are having their third baby soon, I think a few weeks from now, shortly before our trip! Now, it’s just a matter of wiling away the days, and getting through these last few flaming hoops that my professors have put up. Good stuff, right? For tonight, however, I’m going to probably get some comfy clothes on (I’m still in my monkey suit formal clothes from chapter meeting with my girls today) and run to the grocery store for a few snacks or a bottle of wine, then settle in with a good book to brace myself for Monday and the adult responsibility I try so hard to avoid but that ends up roundhouse kicking me in the face, come Sunday night and Monday morning! LOL. 

A good evening to all, peace, love, and thanks for putting up with my shenanigans.

-Sam

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton