Are You There, Judy? It's Me, Justin

In most of my undergrad classes, I always prided myself on being the most prepared, or at least the one with the best ability to come up with things off the top of my head. In most of my classes, I made A's, so within my department, professors had come to expect a lot out of me. So, it really makes no sense why out of all of the classes that I decided to take within the English major that it was Children's Literature that I apparently decided to throw the towel, or the novel, in on. The class was unlike most in my major because most of my classes revolved around having to fight for a chance to speak--English majors, regardless of what may happen to use after graduation--like to believe that we are of the elite. We speak in metaphors and approach everything from a feminist of Freudian perspective. The author never means what he or she says, and there's always something more that needs to be evaluated. The job of a real English major is to challenge everything that is being said until the last minute of class, usually with a sexual connotation.
This class was different though; we shared the room with Child Development majors, people who would one day wade the depths of vomit (from kids like me), tears, and feces to teach the small children of the world what they need to progress into the future. But when you put us in class, things start to become messy. On the first day, we wanted to take Charlotte's Web and dissect it for its literary value and characterization and plot progression, while the other group wanted to use it as a segue to discuss the anatomy of a spider. We looked around at each other with disgusted looks, eye questioning each other with some pompous, philosophical question like, But what does the spider mean? It was at that point that I decided that I wasn't going to be able to take the class seriously, and I began to spiral through three major phases: the elitist, the absurdist, and the ignorant.
After Charlotte's Web, we jumped into The Giver, a book I read for the first time in fifth grade. Looking back, even though I was in the Talented and Gifted program, I wasn't talented or gifted enough to understand that book, nor the heavy themes that are within it... actually, I'm still probably not talented or gifted enough for it. But as we began discussion, our professor asked what we thought about the end when one Child Development major said, (spoiler alert), Well, I think he and his brother got on a sled and then they rode down to that house with the lights on and they adopted them and then they celebrated Christmas! And being the optimist that I am, I responded, Well, I'm pretty sure they died. Those lights were the end of their lives. They couldn't live in the world they were in, but they were capable of living in any other world either. You could hear a pin drop. The entire room fell silent.
The girl rebuked, Well, at least they went to Heaven. And being the Christian I am, I responded, No, they didn't. There was no Heaven. There was no afterlife. There was no God. They just died. And that's it. At this point, the professor was even looking at me as if I was some kind of ridiculously cold-hearted human. No one really had anything to say, but then through broken words, she asked one final question: Are you an Atheist? I didn't respond because I felt like maybe I had gone a little too far--I had turned a young adult novel into some kind of institution that puts all Christianity into question, even though I didn't do any of it seriously. I would expect if you checked any of those now-teacher's syllabi, The Giver probably did not make the cut.
I was upset with myself for what I had done--some kind of faux-Atheist persona had come out, beaten the Christian majority of myself to death, and released a very cynical view of what that red sled may or may not have meant. I ruined a book for people, and as a half-lit major, that was a giant no-no. I had to win them back because unlike the other English majors, I didn't look down at these people with disgust or contempt. I just looked at them as people that I could mess around with. So, I spent a good chunk of time figuring out what I could do to get them back on my side, and the day that our professor announced a special guest, I knew exactly how I could do it. As we were leaving class, I pulled some of the Child Development majors aside as they were wondering who the special guest is, and I said:

It's Judy Blume.

Lie.

I actually know her. I met her a while back.

Bigger lie.

My mom actually did some work for her at one point, so she's coming in to our class as a favor.

Biggest lie.

I couldn't stop myself because with every word I said, they got more and more excited. This was the woman who taught us that it's okay to have your period and talk to God about it. She was perfect--I, however, was not. I actually got the idea from Chelsea Handler, who once told her classmates that she knew Goldie Hawn and had worked with her at one point. But the difference is, Chelsea Handler was like... seven at the time. I was 19. I had no way of getting out of this, but I also had no way of producing Judy Blume. So, I pretty quickly came to terms with the fact that Judy Blume was definitely not going to show up, and I just hoped that everyone would forget.
But they didn't. They didn't forget at all. In fact, our class size doubled from the time I told the... not truth... to the time that Judy was supposed to show. Once I saw the class size, I took my professor aside and said, So, I may or may not have told the class that the special guest was Judy Blume. I also may or may not have told me that I knew Judy Blume, personally. The look she gave me will be one that remains engrained in my mind forever. She simply looked back at me and said, Do you actually know Judy Blume? I quickly responded, No. She looked like she was 50% confused, 40% disgusted, and 10% impressed, and she said, I'll handle it. She went in front of the class and announced,  I know you guys were expecting Judy Blume today, but she was unable to make it. She wanted to me to send her apologies, and maybe in the future, she could stop by. Why my professor came to my rescue, I'll never know, but now there was a class full of people who had been disappointed in Judy, and that wasn't right.

Correspondence between Ms. Blume and myself.

I didn't mean to do that Judy... I didn't mean to do that to anyone. So, naturally, I emailed her and came clean. I apologized for what I had done, without her having any knowledge of it, and explained that maybe it was the influence of Superfudge or Are You There God, It's Me Margaret? that championed such a lie into reality. I needed to confess though because it's a staple of us Christians, especially us Southern Christians, to be up front and tell people the bad things that we did in some desperate attempt to become clean again. To my surprise, Judy emailed me back. She's a sprite woman to be her age and apparently still very involved in the literary world, if you were curious. And in the end, she phrased the email in a way that I could pretty much take it into class and back up mine and Professor Coning's story about her absence. In short, Judy is a hoss, and I think that she saw that my absolute, boldface lie was told with good intentions. I won the other side of the class back, and for insurance, I used my final presentation to show how you can use literature to teach about diversity within the classroom.
But in the end, the lessons I learned in Children's Lit are probably lessons that I could have learned in elementary school if I hadn't been talking so much. Don't disrespect people because it might make them upset and call you and Atheist. Don't tell people lies, especially about celebrities or about events that are obviously not going to happen. But most of all, when you tell those lies, telling the truth to the right people might actually help perpetuate your lie in a different direction so that you don't get blamed for it nearly as much as you thought you would when you told it. Judy Blume, thank you for never giving up on teaching me things. Superfudge still is, and always will be, a treasure on my book shelf.

Digital, Digital Get Down

My friend Alex and I were talking over a nice dose of Fro Yo the other day and reflecting on our youth. Of course, when you're coming of age, you're bound to make mistakes. Bobby, of The Brady Bunch, learned the hard way why he shouldn't play ball in the house. Frankie Muniz found out why you shouldn't kick your dog during a baseball game in My Dog Skip. And I'm not saying that my generation had it any harder than the next, but if you weren't careful, coming of age could be really, really dangerous for someone our age. As we were thinking back to what it was like growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, I think we might have weirded ourselves out just by looking at the prospects. It was after that conversation that I decided that my children would not have access to the internet until they are least sixteen years old. Why did we not listen to NSYNC when they warned us about these "digital get downs?" Nothing safe happens online.
I had no business on the internet as a child, and if you think back, you probably didn't either. I remember when we got our first computer back in fifth grade--yes, it had CompuServe dial-up internet which allowed you to make a sandwich, walk the dog, and finish a Melville novel between page loading times, but it was the internet, and that was pretty friggin' cool back in 2000. My brother and I would take turns getting on it, and it's not like we could do too much damage because it was stationed in our parents' room. We lived in a very old single wide at the time, so even if my parents were on the other end of the house, if we had something naughty up that made noise, they could hear it without a problem. We never wanted to abuse having a computer... hell, we were just jazzed that we could play Minesweeper any time we wanted to, though neither of us having any idea to this day what that game is about, nor how to play it.
But it wasn't long until we messed everything up. We had grown tired of 50states.com, which apparently is no longer a website (sigh), so we decided to look up facts about Washington D.C. before I took my trip there with safety patrol. Casey and I gathered around the computer to look up whitehouse.com, and there it was for the world to see... naked. women. We were equal parts embarrassed, intrigued, and filled-with-sin. This friend we had known for such a short amount of time had become our enemy so quickly, and from there, it was clear that the internet was going to be the kind of friend that you just don't tell your parents about.
But the inadvertent porn via what we thought was a government website was not the problem. Alex and I decided that the problem really started once we got into middle school. Looking back, we were all over the internet in ways that we, nor our parents, really had any idea about. I remember back to my AIM days when I would sit on the computer changing my background and my layout and coming up with my screenname, and it all seemed so harmless... but then I think about all the chatrooms that I would go into and all of the "friends" that I would make on there. And when I talk to people my age about it, it really was not an uncommon thing for people to make friends and exchange screennames with people that we had no idea who they actually were. I had one friend who was 13 and lived in Ohio named Brittany, and we would ask each other all kinds of personal questions, and 12 year old me was on the other side of the computer screen throughly convinced that I had found my soulmate over the internet. In reality, there's a solid chance that I was not talking to Brittany, or possibly even a child. How we were not all captured by a man named Carl who had an affinity for Mogen David wine and My Little Pony, I will never know.

Honestly, if I were speaking with a predator, I'd probably
also ask for some M&Ms.

All of the conversations would start out the same: ASL? Just think about it for a minute--why in the hell did a 13 year old need to be telling another 13 year old his or her age/sex/location? Hi, my name is Justin, I'm 13/Boy/Knoxville, TN. Here's my address... now come grab me so that I can end up being another story told by John Walsh. We giggle at Chris Hansen because he's always doing the intercept between the pedophile and the decoy on To Catch a Predator, but I have no idea why I'm laughing and judging the idea that these kids' parents weren't paying enough attention because my parents totally let me do the same thing. And the one time that I did connect with a stranger online (on MySpace, may it rest in the shadow of Facebook), I suppose that I was lucky enough that the person I was meeting was an actual fifteen year old girl and not some strange predator because when I asked my mom to drop me off at the movies to meet her, my mom just agreed to it, like that's a normal thing. All I had to protect me was an absurdly loud voice, a twenty dollar bill, and a Nokia phone that was missing the * key and was really only useful to play Snake. I was one of the lucky few whose online ventures led to his first kiss, then friend, then girlfriend, then back to friend, now life coach... but everyone else doesn't always end up so lucky.
The problem with the internet being available to our generation is that we like to hope for the good in people, which is probably why it takes so long for us to learn lessons. Here I am, typing up a brief history of the dangers of the internet with my online dating profile open in the separate tab thinking to myself Hm. I wonder why I haven't met anyone of substance or sanity on here? Well, it's because the internet is where crazies go to hibernate. And then it's the ding of a Facebook chat, or the pong of a new message that wakes them up, and then we all go into full blown creeper mode. And it's something we learned from an early age... well, at least those of us who survived. But that's the scary thing, the chat rooms and the AIM and the time we spent searching the internet for the next weird thing to get ourselves into was just the beginning. Now we use it to keep tabs on our exes and people we don't like and to look up pictures and videos of cats doing human things. (Oh, you haven't seen Kittens Inspired by Kittens? Do it now.) I don't think that the weird dial-up noise that used to come on as the internet loaded was a lack of technology... I think it was more of a warning sign that none of us never listened to, and after some reflection, it's my very own mistakes that will keep future Kirkland children from accessing the internet until at least after puberty. Maybe longer.

God and the Stars

For Mom and Max and anyone who has ever been confused

I don't pretend to understand the world or how it works anymore because there's not a lot about it that makes any sense--I suppose that's something you learn as you get older. Every day is kind of a mystery, and it can get the best of you. Yesterday, someone in the world decided to set bombs off in the middle of a marathon... just athletes running for the sake of being alive, for the sake of being a human who can. And then out of no where, someone decided to change the course of too many lives to count, and we're left wondering what happened. There's still no one to blame, and even when there is, what are we supposed to say? There's nothing to say because life, again, failed to make any kind of sense.
The night I left to move up to DC, the car was almost completely packed; I hadn't shed a tear up until that point because I was more excited than I was scared. I was about to start this journey away from everything I had ever known, but then my mom told me to look up into the sky. I stared up and the night was as clear as it had been in weeks--every star possibly visible was shining brightly against the amphitheater of trees that surround our house. When I looked back down, she was staring at me with tears in her eyes, and she told me, When you look up at those stars, just know that those are the same stars I'm looking at, too. Look at them every night and know that I'm right there with you. And then I cried.
It's really no surprise because I've cried my entire life. I like to believe that it's become less and less frequent the older I get, but it's a recurring theme of mine that's haunted me since that first time I threw up in kindergarten. And a lot of times I've cried, I do it because I haven't understood what was going on in the world--things that other people come to accept pretty easily. It took me years to understand the concept that if my mom left me at school, she would eventually come back. Why that was such a hard concept for me to grasp, I really have no idea. It's like I believed that Kimberlin Heights led to Hell or Mexico or some other place that you don't come back from. But then, without fail, after one hour of throwing up and crying, two hours of learning, three hours of me showing people my puppy wallet that had a picture of my family in it, and an hour of recess, my mom would come back and get me, and we'd do the whole thing over again the next day. But when my mamaw died when I was six, I specifically remember crying once. I cried because, even at six, I understood that I wouldn't see her alive again, and after that, I didn't cry about it again.
The concept of death made sense to me because our bodies have a timeline, a specified amount of time that we are allowed to live, and then like all other things (puppy wallet included, though I miss it so), the wear and tear becomes too much. My papaw died seven years later, and I'm not even sure if I shed a tear. It was never the expected things that were difficult for me to handle, and at times, I had trouble relating to other people who cried when those things happened. We weren't meant to live forever--but we were meant to live for a while.
Things like Boston, or 9/11, or Newtown happens and the whole structure of things gets screwed up. The world's plan gets all screwed up, and we don't understand the whole of it. And though those events are devastating and stupefying, it happens every day. People are killed in car accidents or get cancer or drown or die in some other way that was never expected, and it doesn't make any sense why it happened, or specifically, who it happened to. And then I meet people, and occasionally they tell me that they are thinking about suicide. They've thought about ending their own life, prematurely, and it breaks my heart because I know they didn't decide that on their own. I know. My heart pours out for those people because it's another mystery of life--it's a catch 22 of sorts. And I know because I've been in that position where the only thing that breaks your heart more than the idea of being dead is the idea of having to stay alive--it's not a choice to feel that way. It is however a choice to choose life. But it doesn't change the fact that there is a God, or whatever force you choose to believe in, out there that allows these things to happen. When we're not being shaken by a freak of nature, we're attacking one another, and when we're not attacking one another, we attack ourselves.
So it makes sense when people give up on God or hope or life because, honestly, there's a lot of reasons to. But then with all the pain and hurt we experience, I have a friend who has been consistently updating Facebook with the status of her infant son, and when we're talking infant, we're talking baby. He had a lemon sized tumor at the base of his brain, and his chance of living was pretty much slim to none... but every day I'd get on Facebook, Jessica would be asking for prayers for Max and maintaining that God was watching over them. Max, against the odds, has steadily been getting better and better, and there's a very real chance that he could go on and live a normal life. And it's the first time in a while that I thought to myself, Maybe, in a way, God doesn't have so much to do with all the pain we experience in the world. No, I don't get it, but it's God or hope or whatever you believe in that makes life okay when everything else doesn't seem to be making sense. Yeah, there's the things in life that confuse us, but if we take the time we use trying to find someone to blame and use it toward finding someone to lean on or believe in, then it makes the healing time that much more bearable.
And then I return to the stars. I stare at them, and I know that scientifically the only thing that holds them up is nothing--the lack of gravity, and I've been told that the stars we're staring at have already burned out. But still, I use the thing that everyone says is already gone or non-existent as a way of finding my way back home. In that non-existant thing, I find love and comfort and peace, and whose to say that star that I'm staring at tonight is one that is already depleted. We see the stars in the same way that we sometimes look at the world: hopeless and all but gone, but when I look at them, I see something that isn't supposed to be. Something that defies the odd. Something that shakes me to my core and helps me believe in something bigger than me. And sometimes when I see them, I still cry.