Author Archives: alicewithpaper

Education, Part I

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I just got back from meeting with a woman who might hire me to tutor her son. I told her my two biggest passions are books and people. That’s how it’s been for while now…maybe all my life, though I have come to care about good clothes and good food too. But there is an extra little bandit of an interest who has been crawling his way up to the top of my affections for a while, and now that he is settled in comfortably, I suppose I shall finally have to acknowledge him.

I love what happens when one puts people and books together, that is to say, I care deeply about education. I want to both learn and teach for the rest of my life. And I have lots of opinions about how to do it. Lots. I thought I might as well share them here in several parts, a la Mrs. Liebmann. They are a hodgepodge of discoveries and decisions I’ve made throughout my last year of high school, and the beginning of this year. Thanks to Senior Thesis and Dr. Edward’s Found Ed class for making me think.

Let me just say that I think the single biggest problem with education today is that students take it for granted. Really, most of them outright resent it. They have no idea of the huge blessing being conferred upon them when they are simply taught their letters. They are being given learning, the biggest gift a human society can muster (though not all of it is quality…) and they choose to, well, just not. Even those of us in college often forget. Here, I so often want to take people by the shoulders and shake them, and say, “Why are you here?!?  What, because it’s the next step, and you didn’t know what else do the year after graduation? Because you wanted to be qualified?” There is no sense in going to college unless you plan on loving learning. It makes me really quite angry to think that there are students, even at Grove City, who hold assignments and hard tests against their teachers, as if it was not something they were paying thousands of dollars fo, as if these people with their PhDs and scholarly books were simply dumb.

Well, now that that is out of the way, I’m going to run in the opposite direction. Some professors (a very few, mind you, and certainly not my dear Drs Hodgkins) are dumb. Some kids’ college tuition is being paid for by their parents, and they have no choice in the matter. And many, many people I know would probably rather just go ahead and start their career now,  but no one is going to hire them without a bachelor’s. Stupid college. It’s just unavoidable for all us middle class kids, who care about getting anywhere in life. I, currently, have a dumb professor. That’s a cruel and maybe untrue thing to say, but it’s what I think every time I walk into his class. It is too late to drop it, and it’s a necessary credit. But I will never ever have him again, so could I maybe possibly try a little benevolence and patience? Mmmmm, yes. I could. I could also try to learn a little history despite his jumbled teaching, and be thankful for the opportunity to…well, I haven’t figured out to what yet, but maybe that’ll come. Anyway, just remember that it is no sin to be patient when the person or situation probably doesn’t deserve it, and neither is it unholy to pretend interest in class which extends beyond the tested material. Isn’t it true that if we act Christ-like for long enough, we will begin to reflect him?

Next entry, I think I’ll bash the school system. Aren’t you excited?

The Fam Pan

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Every other day Emily tells me that someday I’m going to get rich and famous writing a book about The Family Pantry, so I figure the time has come to get started.

I live on this hall, see. We’re the little extra freshman hall stuck over in MEP with sophomores and sororities. We are, courtesy of our RA, Alyssa,  The Family Pantry or The Fam Pan, (that one’s probably courtesy of Laura.) Our walls are decorated with cut-outs of eggs, plastic signs that say things like “Jello”, and cereal boxes that are always falling down. It’s so great. We’re probably the only freshman hall left on campus without t-shirts, but hey! that’s okay–we have aprons! So we also don’t have a couch or dual-flush toilets like everyone else, but we have the Share Chair and who needs to flush up and down in the bathroom, when there are dance parties to be had?

I like to think that the name of our hall is just the most devastatingly appropriate thing in the world. First off: (*ahem*) We are a Family. There’s Mamalyssa, and her boyfriend, Papa John. We have whole halls of brothers and cousins on campus, and some of us even have adopted grandparents. And I was just thinking today that our living space really is just like a house, except it’s all bedrooms, and one huge bathroom, and has really ugly carpet. Anyhow, we love each other a lot. I, personally, am always in everybody else’s room, and have already begun to borrow people’s clothes. There are people on the hall to crack my back, lend me coloring books and come knock on my window in the evenings to scare the crud out of me.

And secondly, we are a Pantry. I know what rooms to go to to get tea, cookie dough brownies, and most of all, snow peas. We’re very big on the pea. And last night Maddie and I cooked The Best Dinner I Have Ever Had. And…it was. We made souffle, stuffed chicken, green beans, and crepes. It was a smashing success, and it’s going to  be happening again. Don’t you wish were there? Yes, you do. But it was Fam Pan only (except Maddie’s boyfriend.) We are our own sisterhood! Who needs sororities?

Basically, I’m in a silly mood tonight, but I usually am around them. I love y’all. Thanks for loving me. I don’t know what I would do without you dears: gingers, music majors, and all. I expect lots of comments.

Changing my Mind

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Within the next month I have two term papers due. For Brit Lit, I was going to write about George Herbert for my daddy, because I like him, and for Civilization I was going to write about characterization in the medieval mystery plays. It was all decided, then I put away the ideas and forgot about them. But now warm, compact things have been happening which are forcing me to learn one of those wuthering life lessons college so eagerly shares. I am learning how to change my mind.

It all began several weeks ago when Dr. Brown was teaching the mystery plays. She was talking about the role of guilds in the plays’ production and performance and that was when this sort of hazy glow began. At first, I couldn’t really tell where it was coming from. It certainly wasn’t the powerpoint, and I didn’t think it was Dr. Brown herself. Maybe it was her words. Yes, that was it, they were  shimmering visibly in the blank semi-circle at the front of the room, busily building a medieval village out of their own translucent gold letters. I watched the mussed organization of the little whoville take shape. Clattering bright wagons, laborious heirloom costumes, then the strange timbre of one voice projected loud over a silent, crowded street. “…the piece was then judged by the guild, and if they approved it, he became a master, a member of the guild. Therefore we have master…piece…” And that was when the singing started. I knew exactly where it was coming from this time. A soft, angelic cooing, right from the center of my chest. The village in front of me picked up the pace. The master masons (masters of pieces!) ran round behind their wagon half in and out of costume, clutching treasured bits of script and calling to their overwrought apprentices to “Make haste!” There was a smell in the air as if everything had just been dragged out of the attic, and every villager was taking short, arid breaths, and thinking colorful, interested thoughts. I felt a whelming sense of scarlet and brown belonging. It was magic. I wanted in.

So, I basically had to change that particular thesis. I had already had my original, boring topic approved, but how could I write about characterization, for goodness sakes, when there was a bustling village inside my head? So I came up with a very correct, and secretly exhilarating thesis, spent quite a while emailing back and forth with Dr. Dupree. And…then it was approved. And I rejoiced.

The paper for Dr. Brown is tremendous. It is not long in reality, but it casts a huge shadow. I’m not frightened. I love all papers without exception, but everything about it must be beyond my highest standards, and that includes the topic. As for Herbert, who I had planned to write on, well, he is dear, but there is someone else. He is a comfortable cousin, whose company and wisdom I appreciate,  but John Donne is my lover. If you have ever read any Donne, you will consider that a highly appropriate image. “We can die by it, if not live by love,/And if unfit for tombs and hearse/Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;” I realize he is quite dead, and wrote every poem for a woman other than I, but such separations mean nothing. “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / No hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” You laugh, but “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,”  “For love all love of other sight controls,/And makes one little room an everywhere.” Humph. So there. And I haven’t even mentioned “To His Mistress Going To Bed”. In comparison, George Herbert is “Most poor:” and “Most thin.”  “He is a crazy brittle glass,” “A broken altar,” who merely “did sit and eat.” I cannot “love both fair and brown.”

Of course, I am being quite silly, and it has been fun, but be assured, I am really not throwing Herbert out with the bathwater. I promise. It’s just that Donne has found his way into my eternal soul and made himself comfortable there, or at least his words have. “Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun/A year or two, but wallowed in a score?/When thou hast done, thou hast not done,/For I have more.” I am not a poet, and these are words I could never write, but, at the same time, they seem to have been born of the most secret, quiet part of my being. “Batter my heart, three-personed God…/Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” That is almost worthy of ink and needle and permanence on my skin.

Herbert is home and dinner and small, palmable books. He is “a ragged noise and mirth,” and “a box where sweets compacted lie.” But…I got a ninety-five on the Donne quiz today. He and I are meant to be. The two are brothers, though, in a sense. My two metaphysical darlings…I will write about them both, mayhaps. I do know I have changed my mind, (or rather Donne has, or God,) but I’m not sure what to. We’ll see. Dr. Brown will tell me what’s best. I’m flexible.

Home

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This weekend I did everything I had planned except my homework. I did laundry for free, ruffled my baby brother’s hair, ate sushi, ate chikfila, ate my mother’s cooking, drove all around Greensboro on my lonesome singing as loud as I could, had a sleepover with my best friend, and went to see the kids with whom I used to act  beast their Shakespeare. That was all great, but my primary activity was hugging people. I am always hugging people wherever I go, but this was different. One-armed hugs, spinning hugs, hugs where you scream into each other’s ears, and collapse into each other’s arms, and hugs where it’s just cozy. So many endorphins. Walking into school and hugging one person after another after another until you forget who you’ve hugged and who you haven’t. That is coming home, my friend. Where you hug, and eat, and still have time to think.

But now…I’m back. I’m back at school. It is not home but it is partly so. It’s a halfway house for kids like me. Kids who are neither here nor there, who can vote but not drink, get married but not rent a car, whose paper soul is beginning to rip down the perforated line as huge invisible hands tug it gently in the simultaneous directions of Greensboro and Grove City.  Because now everybody I have to love is no longer in one place. I have to drive hours and hours to complete my rounds. Ah, well, thank God for long, cramped car rides, because now there are hallmates to be hugging.

Me, Myself….and Not Much Else

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On the inside of all the stalls in my hall bathroom, there are flyers from the counseling center about “Transitions”, and every time I’m in there I diligently try to make sense of them. There are, apparently, three stages to a transition: Endings, a neutral stage, and New Beginnings. Basically, you feel sad, you transition, you feel happy.

Well, not me. I felt sad, I felt happy, then I was…lonely. And I’ve found  that’s a terrible thing to admit. When a friend asks what’s wrong when I’m crying, (because, of course, I have been crying…) I cannot say, “I’m strangely, desperately lonely late at night. I thought there would be people like me at college, and there aren’t. I miss being around people who I don’t have to explain myself to, and on top of that, two of the people who know me best are overseas, and I can’t call them like I want to every other second! That’s all…”

It sounds like such an accusation, and it’s a little overwhelming. I don’t know exactly how I got it into my head that Grove would be full of little personality twins, but it’s not. It is populated with happy, easily stressed people who like to abbreviate their words and have dance parties. They remind me of the people I’ve known all my life. They are lovely and I should be thankful, but I wonder. Where are the rest of the kids who care more about books than about grades, who don’t mind hard teachers if only they are learning, who only become more stubborn with extra pressure, and who still believe their lives can be a storybook? I thought I would find them here, but I haven’t. They do exist, don’t they? I suppose I am unique, but please, God, not that unique!

Of course, I am being overdramatic. I do have friends here, good friends, even a few dear ones. I think my sudden desire to be a type, to have those like myself, who know my secrets without being told, has just happened to coincide awkwardly with my first semester of college. But that rationalization unfortunately doesn’t really make me feel better. Late at night, I am still just me in my little box of me-ness, which is tiresome and sometimes frightening after eighteen years.

So, anyway, that is how I have been feeling. Yesterday I went to Discipleship Group and had myself a lovely little breakdown. I had a talk with my leader, and told her most all of it, I think, and a few other things about my state of mind which I am too ashamed to share with cyberspace. Not that she was anything less than kind, but I came out of that conversation with the distinct remembrance that I am very, very self-absorbed. Why do I feel that I must find people like myself? Oh…probably because I think I’m pretty great. Ya think, Alice?

And then, last night I had hall bible study, and a friend of my RA’s read a quote from C.S. Lewis’  The Weight of Glory, which I desperately wish I had on me, and cannot find in its entirety anywhere on the dumb internet, but here is part of it: “At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.” I was momentarily comforted with the thought that on the other side of that door I would be sure to meet legions of people like myself, and the stuffy little box of Alice would be busted up and forgotten. Everyone or most everyone, anyway, would be like me!

Then, for the first time in…well, eras, really, Truth hijacked my thought process. Everyone would be like me, but only in the ways in which I was like Christ. Anything in me which was not a reflection of him would be lost, burned away, drowned in death’s great river. I, in myself, am not worth being. Why am I desiring to find Alice in others when I should be looking for Christ? Lewis again, in The Problem of Pain, each “soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance…” He is there for the finding. Why am I only trying to learn about myself from others, when I am surrounded by those who have the image of the God of the universe painted in relief in their very souls?

So, I am not only self-absorbed, I am self-obsessed. I learned at an early age that the world at large does not revolve around me, but now, at eighteen, I am finally learning that neither can I revolve around myself. Certainly, I was not created to be lonely and miserable, but neither was I created to be the silly, vain creature I am at present. My Lord loves me enough to have bigger plans. He must increase, but I must decrease. Otherwise, when I get to the door Lewis speaks of, I may not even find it appealing, and that would be very truly tragic, for that door, and what lies beyond, are precisely was I was created for.

Another Entry Sans Paper

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Good Morning! I love that phrase because, if you can bear to let them be themselves, mornings are always good. I seem to have forgotten that in college. Dragging myself out of bed has always been hard, but now I find it impossible to be cheerful until my second class is over. Sometimes it takes longer–till after I’ve completed my daily pilgrimage to Pew to practice cello. I get up, go breakfast with Liesel, and sometimes even have a fresh omelet with spinach and salsa, for goodness sakes, and still wish I were back in bed. It didn’t used to be like that. I used to be mildly annoying with my morningness, I think. In highschool I would appear in the hall sometime between 7:30 and 7:45. “Good morning, Good morning, dear, Good morning, darling, hello, hello, *chatter chatter chatter* My brother threw the cat after breakfast!” I would get long stares from darling and dear, and occasionally an, “Ugh, I’m tired.” Now, that is precisely what I say to the girls on each side of me in my eight-o-clock class, then we nod at each other, slow and mournful.

Of course, I have never been a night person. At all. Any time I am with people after ten o’clock or so, I tend to receive kind questions about the state of my health, mental and otherwise, because of the defeated way I stare at the opposite wall. I don’t mean to. I think it’s just the product of my mind shutting down to dream state without my eyes doing the same. (Though the other night during intervis in a guys’ dorm I did fall asleep on someone’s bed. Apparently my friend Becca woke me up, and asked whether I wanted her to take me home, and I told her, “No, of course not,” and went back to sleep.)

But then again, I think it is possible to find a way to love every minute of my day. Nights are dances and loud, friendly coloring parties and crazy escapades. For me, they are for people-watching, long thinks, and good conversations. The best entertainment comes after eleven, anyway. The other night I watched from my window at about one as a not-quite-couple said a long and  secretly reluctant good-bye. It took them fifteen minutes and was funnier than most movies I’ve seen recently. And while it’s true that mornings are only sometimes bright, they are always, always new. Your exam could be cancelled, you could win the lottery, or you could even find that magical “noreply” email in your inbox which says, “You have received a package. Please report to the mailroom to collect it at your earliest convenience.  You must present your College ID to do so.” What’s the word for morning again? Oh, yes, possibility… or maybe just faërie.

The Beginning

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I am sitting in my room, writing my first blog entry and feeling cold. This is  not the first time this has happened this week–maybe this one will actually get posted. I’m strangely nervous about the whole scenario. I mean, I wanted to start a blog. I set it up one day on a whim, when I should have been doing homework, but now I’m having funny little doubts, which is odd. I usually make sudden decisions, then cling to them stubbornly–good or bad. Maybe it’s because I miss paper– a lot. Or maybe because I feel like I have to update it regularly. I don’t know. But anyway, Hi. I’m still Alice, and I’m still writing, but I’m entirely out of my comfort zone. Weird, huh?

The purpose of this blog (I think) is so I can write and so the people who like to read what I write can do so without my saying, “Hey…so I wrote this…wanna read it?” I need this outlet. Writing helps me think, and though I am very comfortable at college, I don’t have all the long conversations like I did at home to marshal my thoughts. It is a lovely autumn here, I had a blueberry muffin for brunch, and there is a scattering of people whom I like very much, and who like me back. But still. I’m lonely. Here I am in this Christian community, but as terrible as it sounds, so what? I’ve had that all my life.

So I am scared, and I am starting this blog in good faith. Good faith that posting on it will soon feel natural, good faith that people will read it, good faith that I will have something worthwhile to say, good faith that God will grow me, and good faith that Dr. Brown will bully my writing into something unbelievable. I’m starting this in good faith that I will put down roots wherever I go and be able to feel as if they’ve been there for always.