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.

My Life, On The Oregon Trail

As a small child in elementary school, I would tune myself out from the rest of the world and invest everything I had into the teal Apple computer in the back left corner of the classroom. Nothing anyone said to me was of any importance because this was a special time. For an hour or so, I was God. After the computer actually got started up after about 10 minutes, I double-clicked it: The Oregon Trail. And even from early adolescence, my inability to let trivial disputes go and my speedy attachment issues prevailed--exclude me from playing Four Square? You're going in the wagon. You told me we were best friends while we were learning about multiplication tables? You're going in the wagon.

Yeah she does. And she probably deserved it.

A lot of different things could get you in the wagon, but the most important factor in a venture on the Oregon Trail was the mood I was in that day. If it was a rough day at school, you could be sure as shit that I was going to ford the river every time. Looking back, if anyone had found out that I was using The Oregon Trail as a virtual means of revenge, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to play it anymore... actually, I probably would have ended up on a list somewhere. But in the end, I never cared too much about finishing the journey--that took like... four more hours than I had, and I never cared enough to save it to my floppy disk (YEAH, that was a thing). The Oregon Trail was my fix, similar to what I imagine someone feels after doing cocaine.
But after my seven to eleven year old vengeance was completed, I realized that there was no Oregon Trail in middle school, and that's a shame because middle school is definitely the time that you need some revenge-Oregon-Trail. The game persisted in my mind though, and even through college, sometimes I imagined who I would put in my wagon. I would assign people roles, and I contemplated which weak friend would be the one to come down with typhoid of dysentery. But when I moved up to DC and started living in an apartment and doing more adult things, I realized that The Oregon Trail, much like life, is not something that you plan. The Oregon Trail is something that happens to you. Life is pretty much reflective of everything on The Oregon Trail: sickness, lost materials, negotiating with people you meet along the trail, gathering over 200 pounds of food and having to leave some behind. But most of all, I realized that the more alcohol you add to the situation, the more out of control the trail becomes.
So one night, all us pioneers (Jill, Andrew, Ben, Nicole, Catherine, Catherine's brother, Nicole's boyfriend--yeah, I know you can only include five people in your wagon. This is my Oregon Trail, I do what I want) decided that we were going to go out for a night in Arlington. Everything seemed to be going well:

Weather: Fair
Health: Excellent
Food: Enough, I guess
Miles Traveled: 0

We all met at Jill and Catherine's and started to drink before going out to a nice place called Clarendon Ballroom, an establishment that houses a good 85% of Arlington's frat boys and hipsters. They only play 45 second clips of songs, and epileptics are not encouraged to go there. But while waiting for Nicole and her boyfriend to show up at Independence, Missouri, or the apartment, everyone had imbibed enough that we decided no one was going to drive, and thus, our first game move: wait for a ferry (taxi) across the river.

Weather: Fair
Health: Silly
Food: Less than before, but still okay
Miles Traveled: 1.2

We had to take two ferries to get to the bar because apparently Arlington doesn't have ferries big enough for everyone. After we got to the establishment, I regretted choosing farmer instead of banker because I needed to stop at the ATM. (By the way, why was farmer ever a good option?) I walked with Nicole and her boyfriend to retrieve money, and then soon after we entered. With me at my resting annoyed-rate of 4, I decided not to drink but rather watch those around me. I made people come out to the dance floor, and eventually, everyone started consuming more and more alcohol. People began to get more and more intoxicated, but it didn't matter because that's how you play the game--at a grueling pace. Nicole told me that I didn't know how to dance, and then her and her boyfriend left. I can only assume they were eaten by a bison or perhaps contracted cholera and died. Either way, they were off the trail. RIP.

Weather: Whatever
Health: Fair
Food: This will be more applicable later.
Miles Traveled: 1.2

Because Arlington is comprised of mostly rich, old people, the bar was closing at 1 that night and by that time, it had become painfully obvious who was going to be hung over and who was not. As I was ushering people out of the bar with Catherine and her brother, it was apparent that some members of the wagon had lost some wheels, axles, and approximately 45 pounds of food along the way. Soon after we got everyone outside, Catherine and her brother left, probably in passive disgust that they were even on the wagon to begin with. So, there I was--sober as could be with three people left: Andrew, who ran across the street without looking, Ben, who looked as if he had contracted typhoid, and Jill. Jill seemed to be fine, so while Andrew and Ben went inside a 24 hour diner, Jill stayed outside while I smoked.
Jill began to tell me about her life and how everything seemed to be different. At that point, she asked me if she could have a puff of my cigarette. By this time, I was just happy to have someone to talk with who could speak in complete sentences. But after just a couple of puffs, everything changed. Jill began to cry, and I asked her What's wrong? And with smoke still seeping out from her lips, she announced, Please don't tell the boys, but I think I'm pregnant. And then I went into panic mode. This is that point in Oregon Trail when everyone's dying, health is poor, no one has food, and the weather is hot. I immediately grabbed the cigarette from her and instructed her to go inside.

Weather: We're inside the diner, doesn't matter
Health: Terrible
Food: Way over the 200 pound limit, everyone ordered too much
Miles traveled: Too many

Within the first five minutes, Jill announced her "pregnancy," Andrew wanted breakfast, and Ben didn't have his debit card. So I had to go negotiate with the people at the bar, Indian style, to get the debit card back. By the time I returned, the food had arrived, and Jill was taking a leave of absence in the bathroom. She had forded the river, Virginia Woolf style. At this point, she was a goner. For my troubles, I left a substantial tip for the waitress on Jill's card because she was still in the bathroom, and then we got another ferry to take Jill home. Finally, it was just Ben, Andrew, and me. As soon as we got in the car to drive home, Andrew "fell asleep" in the front seat, probably from measles, which left on two surviving wagon members: Ben with typhoid, and me. I managed to get the wagon back to our apartment, but only after losing six of the original wagon members, seven oxen, all the food, and at least 4 boxes of bullets.
But that's the thing about The Oregon Trail, and life in general... you don't really play to be a hero and make the highest score--you just play to survive. We found out the next day that Jill was not pregnant at all--apparently that was just something she needed to say whilst on the trail. Andrew's measles nap was apparently completely premeditated, and everyone else's departure was made with clear minds. However, what happens on the trail is nothing to be ashamed of, and it's nothing we should hold over one another's heads for revenge because the Oregon Trail is a messy place. If life were as easily planned as a game that can be saved on a colorful floppy disk (mine was yellow, for those interested), then it would probably be a lot easier than it is. But we ford rivers and lose axels and sometimes people get cholera, but it's not about what happens on the trail--it's just about making it to the end.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Cat Toy

Yesterday, when I was sitting in class, two girls were up in front of the class giving a presentation. Meanwhile, I was on Facebook, Twitter, my email, my school email, and by chance... the same website that the girls presenting were on in front of class. All of a sudden, the girl's computer died and she was stranded. The military guy sitting next to me looked over and saw the similar website and volunteered me, or rather my computer, to be the proxy in the middle of their crisis. Immediately, I started minimizing tabs, but not so many that it would uncover the up close shot of Jennifer Lawrence that is my wallpaper. Right as the girl got to my computer, I had an unreasonable number of windows minimized, and then it hit me. Dear God. What if they get on Google?
These people weren't my roommates or a best friend... this was a giant class of people looking at my computer screen, which by this time, was reflected on a giant projection screen. And of course, they didn't just need it for that website--they needed it for two or three websites. So, they opened up tab after tab revealing my most visited pages, which happened to be much less revealing than I had anticipated. But it wasn't the most visited pages that I was worried about... it was what happened when you type that first letter into the search bar. There were safe letters and... well... not safe letters. And I sat there going through the alphabet in my mind, saying a silent prayer that they didn't need the letters G or O or P or L or F or K or N or Y or S or T in particular. What if they found my Neopets account, or the one time I searched "How to Make Meth?" There were too many Google searches I worried about, and not a damn thing I could do about it. My life was on display and the only thing worse than typing one of those letters was the sinking feeling in my stomach that those letters might get pressed.

I'm sorry, Skeeter. I'm just... sorry.

And it reminded me that I've always been that way... the guilty one. That was my computer, and it didn't matter what came up... But the embarrassment of what happens if people find out my personal details is something that has always haunted. And one of the first occurrences of it happened when I was 11 years old.
As an 11 year old, I was pretty much pure of heart. I attended church every week, and it was actually my preacher that gave me my cat, Skeeter. Middle school was rough, so Skeeter was my best friend. We would hang out together all the time and do cool stuff like watch television and walk around the house. Skeeter's favorite toy was a small mouse that cost about 1.99 from Wal-Mart. The way it worked is that you would pull out the toy mouse's tail and it would vibrate around the room, and Skeeter would chase after it. One day, Skeeter and I were doing our thing, hanging out in my room, and tossing the vibrating mouse. He would chase after it and then carry it back to me, like a dog. I'd pull it's tail again, and we'd repeat the cycle.
But on this day, everything changed. I pulled the mouse's tail out, but because of my fantastic coordination, I dropped it. In my lap. And all of a sudden, I felt something. I started to pick up the mouse, but then, well, you know... I just kind of left it there. The mouse stopped vibrating, and I stared down at my lap, then I looked at Skeeter. He didn't need to be there for this--actually, I'm pretty sure that I didn't need to be there either. Skeeter waited there in front of me to throw it again, but I wasn't sure what to do because I wasn't really sure what was going on either. I picked Skeeter up and put him out of my room because even at a young age, I really wasn't feeling the whole voyeurism thing. I sat back down in the butterfly chair in my room (because we all had butterfly chairs... don't lie) and held the mouse in my hand. As an 11 year old, I think that was my first insight as to what it might be like to do cocaine, or heroin maybe.
I went and listened at the door to make sure everyone, including Skeeter, was away from the premises. With no one in ear shot, I pulled the mouse's tail again and "accidentally" dropped it again in my lap. And this is the point in the story where I move on to more pertinent things...
So, two weeks later, no one in the house knew where Skeeter's favorite toy had gone. We had searched and searched, and when they asked if I had seen it, I remember becoming really defensive, Why would I have seen his stupid toy? I don't know where it's at. It's no where that I could find it. My skills and persuasion and lying had obviously not began to fully develop at this point, so I might have well said, Hey guys, go check in the pocket in my butterfly chair--it's there. Promise. But other than that, I kept my mouth shut. We all have our secrets, mine just happened to vibrate in ten second intervals at the pull of a tail. But even with all the secrecy and, um, other stuff, there was this sinking feeling that what I was doing was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Nothing was making sense anymore because I had been introduced to this new, shaky world of happiness and confusion. But with all the positives, the negatives seemed to always outweigh the positive. I couldn't look at Skeeter because I took something that he thought was innocent and made it into... whatever I made it into. So after the longest time, I broke.

I don't think the brand name is a coincidence.

One night as I was going to bed, I called my mom into my room. She turned the light on, and I sat up in bed--already crying, because that's what I do--and she asked me what was wrong. I broke into confession mode: Skeeter can't play with that cat toy anymore. I did something to it, or with it. I can't let Skeeter play with it anymore. My mom wasn't quite sure what to say because from the way it seemed, I was just really irrationally upset about this cat toy. I continued. Mom, I took the cat toy, and I put it on my lap. And then I kept putting it there, and then "something" happened. And then my mom pressed her lips together--at the time, I thought she was going to kill me in the same way that I imagined God was going to. Looking back, I'm pretty sure she was trying not to laugh. And God's mad at me too because I'm pretty sure this is a sin. I shouldn't be doing this. I know I shouldn't, but I can't stop, momma. And then I burst into the dramatic tears, and she hugged me.
After I calmed down, she asked for a little more of a thorough explanation of what was going on with the cat toy, and then she calmly tried to explain that all little boys eventually did what I did--albeit not with a cat toy, but that's neither here nor there. I wasn't quite sure how you happened upon the same effect without a cat toy, but that's not what concerned me at the moment; I was more concerned about my eternal damnation via cat toy. My mom had to explain that God doesn't send 11 year olds to Hell for assaulting their torsos, and even after the fact, it took months for me to be okay with it all. My mom ended our conversation with, Just be careful and don't bruise yourself, which is advice that I hold near to my heart to this day. I never gave Skeeter back the cat toy, mostly because that just seemed like a really weird thing to do. I threw it away soon after the conversation I had with momma.
So zoom forward. The presentation ended yesterday and no critical letter was pressed. A sense of relief flooded my body, but a small part of me still felt guilty that there could ever be anything on my computer that I would restrict the world from seeing. But when I think back to the conversations I had with my mom about the numerous acts I thought would send me to Hell over the years, I think we both came to the conclusion that sometimes secrets are best kept secrets. And with that revelation, I closed my computer and left class.

Most Likely to Succeed

In life there are three categories of aspirations we have: what we want, what we need, and what we don't really say out loud because it's silly. For some of us, learning how to approach the latter one is more difficult than it is for others. For instance, in elementary school, there was a group that would meet at lunch once a week called "The Banana Splits." Because of my early-onset fascination with exclusivity, I insisted in my seven-year-old mind that I should be in The Banana Splits. I mean, these kids got to talk about themselves once a week, on a Wednesday I believe, while... wait for it... EATING ICE CREAM. As far as I was concerned, I met all the qualifications: I loved to talk about myself, almost as much as I loved eating ice cream. So, one day, with all the courage in my curiously malnourished looking body, I approached our guidance counselor and asked for membership.
I'm sorry, Justin, but this is a group you can't be a part of. This would be the first of a laundry list of groups that I would be excluded from, including, but not limited to: the Girl Scouts, Black Student Association, any baseball team, people who can afford to attend "Restaurant Weeks," the New Hopewell Baptist Church youth group, varsity-level soccer teams, the sorority at my college, and people who qualify for food stamps in the state of Virginia. Completely abhorred at the idea of not being included, I sternly asked, Well, why not? Ms. Cruz went on to explain, Well, Justin. The reason we get together is because their parents are divorced. Divorce is a hard thing for someone your age to go through. You should consider yourself lucky that your parents are still together. She finished with a warm smile on her face. I did not. I was not lucky. I was not getting ice cream. My parents didn't give me ice cream. They gave me hominy, which is arguably the most disgusting food that God created. I don't know what kind of crazy world this woman was living in, but I was most certainly not lucky, and I let my mom know as soon as I got home.
Mom, I need you and Dad to get a divorce. My mom was stunned by it. I went on to explain how they were holding me back from ice cream, and how the only real solution to this horrible discrimination was for them to get divorced. I'm sure if I were older, I could have pulled together some statistics, a chart perhaps, but after my main argument of "ice cream is really good" had quickly become tiresome, I decided to give up. It was the first time in my life that I had truly come to the idea that sometimes, people were going to get things that you wanted, and there's nothing you can really do about it.
Fast forward a few years, and I was in high school. Middle and high school were not particularly fun places for me. I wore wind breakers most of the time and I had these thick glasses and people casually called me all kinds of slang terms for homosexual: most of which I had to go home and Google, which really led to some awkward Google search results. To this day, I thank God my parents don't really know how to use the Internet, otherwise I would have had a lot of explaining to do. But then toward the end of high school, I began wearing real pants and I got contacts and all that bullying had equipped me with a really edgy personality that often resulted in me saying awkward/mean things that other people thought were funny. I like to refer to that point in my life as "coming into my Tina Fey." There's really only so many times that you can try to persuade people that you're not gay before you just kind of decide to focus your energies elsewhere, so I began honing in on my storytelling and the commentary of all those pregnant girls we went to school with, and I haven't stopped since.
But my senior year, superlatives nominations came out. For all of you who live under a giant rock, superlatives is a popularity contest where you choose people that didn't really speak to you through high school and assigned them to glorified labels. Then, they would live in the back of your yearbook as a reminder that you're really jazzed that high school is something that only lasted four years. In the midst of the nominations, I rallied for my brother to be nominated as "Friendliest," because Casey really is the friendliest person I've ever met. He's much nicer than I will ever be, and it's not even in a fake way. If we could get Casey on the ballot, he would win because not voting Casey friendliest is like watching a cat video on YouTube and saying, Eh, I guess it's funny. Eventually, Casey would not only appear on the ballot, but also go on to win Friendliest. To my surprise, my name appeared on the ballot twice: once for Most Likely to Succeed, and once for Mr. South-Doyle (with or without the hyphen, which is a point of contention in the South Knoxville community). I had always assumed that Josh Wesley would take the coveted third spot; after all, he was one of the most attractive guys in our class with one of the most dashing personalities. He beat me for the coveted role of Othello in our AP Senior English class, and I don't even think it had to do with him being black. Josh Wesley didn't need affirmative action. Josh Wesley was affirmative action.
But even Josh was not competition for the two other nominees. In essence, I was just the wild card vote that happened to slide in a solid performance of quirky commentary and self-deprecating humor in the final hour. Competitor one, Ryan, threw all the great parties at his house. I had never been to one, but rumor had it that there was alcohol there sometimes. I had, sadly, never been around alcohol up to this point. Even at 18 years old, I became slightly paranoid when I swallowed some of the mouthwash while brushing my teeth. I once saw an episode of Dr. Phil where teenagers would drink mouthwash to get drunk, and then they started doing other stuff like crystal meth and watching porn. I admired Ryan from afar, but I knew that I could never be Ryan... not in high school, at least. Competitor two was Jonathan, who was Ryan's best friend. I never remember him playing football before, but he was the quarterback of our football team senior year. He broke his leg or did something really bad to it, the details escape me, but he managed to return for the final game. That year, he led the team to its best record in five years. In addition, they had been quite popular for some time. They were a part of the popular-Christian circle, which goes a long way in East Tennessee. I could never break into that circle because my opinion of Passion of the Christ learned more toward a horror movie as opposed to "an unbridled cinematic depiction of Christ's love." (I threw up afterward.) Obviously, in this equation, I was going up against Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain for the Oscar. I, of course, was Quevenzhane Wallis. It was really more of an honor than anything to be considered for the prized role.

I would go on to win the category of Most Likely to Succeed, which is the equivalent of a BAFTA in the high school superlative circuit. And as I'm sitting here working on this in Washington D.C., three cigarettes, two Cokes, and a piece of cake in, I'm kind of wondering if the voters got it right. Sure, I made it to D.C. and I'm working on my Master's, but the biggest accomplishment of my day was getting everything I needed from the grocery store after three attempts in six hours. That doesn't quite scream "Excellence in Life." I'm working on solidifying a job for after my internship ends that doesn't require me to take food from one location to another. I give myself a high five when I remember to pay my utility bill before they send the late notice, and I purposefully schedule my work and academic duties around new episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I don't know if that's what would qualify me as "successful," but I guess in the grand scheme of things, I've done most of it kind of right.
But I guess after 99 blog posts and 22 years of life and multiple successes and failures, I have learned one of the Rolling Stones' most important life lessons: You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. And as for the things that we want, but we don't talk about them because they seem silly... well, I think it's kind of silly to not talk about them. No, not everyone can be a singer or an actor or an astronaut or a writer, but if no one ever took the time to say the silly thing that they wanted, then no one would ever become any of those things. I didn't get my banana split, and I've lost a decent number of popularity contests in my day, but that doesn't stop me from announcing to the world what I want anyway. If it means enough to you, you'll figure out a way to make it happen. (Unless it involves you scheming to get your parents divorced. Don't do that.)

The Art of Rabbit Hunting

When I was younger, I used to go rabbit hunting with my dad. It was one of my favorite of all the hunting genres because it didn't require you to be quiet, and you got to walk around and do what you want for the most part. We would also bring along all of our hunting beagles (Andy, Alison, Gunner, Jimmy, Ed, and Coleen... the WIVK on-air staff) and they'd run around and bark and sniff things and when dad wasn't looking I would pet them or try to feed them leaves... you know... because it's funny to watch dogs eat leaves, especially when you're bored. But it wasn't until I got older that I realized how much I learned from going on these trips with my dad. Though I never got the itch for going out and shooting things, my love for stretching metaphors and meaningful life experiences ended up making the hunting trips way more applicable than I thought they would be.

The lessons would always come up in the most unpredictable of ways, and it was senior year of college that I realized exactly what it meant to be a good rabbit hunter. When it come to running around with a gun in the woods, I was always a little overly cautious--I always had a fear of shooting my dad in the face, or more likely, shooting one of the dogs. Once I actually shot a rabbit, I told my dad I was done; I kind of considered it more of a feat that I shot a rabbit and nothing else, and that's kind of the way that I went about the rest of my life. Get in, get out, call it a day.

And that's the exact approach that I took to my last Cinco de Mayo. My senior year was winding down quickly and after thesis and comprehensive exams were over, there wasn't really anything to do but show up to class and then celebrate with people in our spare time. The drink of choice at Maryville College is arguably a toss-up between boxed wine or margaritas at a local Mexican restaurant and considering that it was Cinco de Mayo (and a Saturday, mind you), margaritas were the obvious choice. I had decided that because it was too predictable for seniors to get drunk and make bad decisions, I would tread lightly in Margaritaville, but it didn't take too many margaritas for all of us to start reminiscing about the three years that had gone by. Then, someone inevitably said that we were all probably never going to be in the same place again at the same time, and that's when we all ordered more margaritas and ended up posing "Last Supper" style.

But after the initial margaritas, I had decided that tonight was the night: the night to go rabbit hunting. I was fresh out of a relationship and had been eyeing someone in particular for some time. I knew the follow up party that I needed to go to, and I knew that this would probably be my last chance to even solidify a decent conversation, let alone anything further than that, so I set off for the chase. Once the party had started, I wasn't sure how I would accomplish my goal, and like most of the hunts that I went on with my dad, I was pretty much ready to give up and go home after thirty unsuccessful minutes. Even as a senior, chasing after a freshman rabbit, I didn't have much confidence, and I didn't believe in my hunting skills. After all, this wasn't just a rabbit. This was a pretty rabbit who was transferring to a college in New York; everyone wanted to shoot this rabbit, metaphorically of course. (Disclaimer: I neither condone, nor encourage, anyone to shoot another person. Maybe I should lay off the metaphor for a bit.)

So as the night continued and the bottle of tequila grew less and less full, I committed to my cause. The funny part about guys is that we're stupid when we're interested in someone. We do things and say things that we would never have otherwise, so of course, I made sure that we were interested in all the same things. And I guess, in a way, the same logic applies to hunting. There's a specific way that you walk when you're in the woods, even if you're rabbit hunting. You tread lightly, and you try not to make yourself too obvious because you don't want the rabbits to run before you get within eyesight of them. And there's two types of hunting: the kind where you sit and wait, and the kind where you're constantly moving, and of course, last Cinco de Mayo, I was constantly moving.

After the conversation had run out, I was running around the party trying to entertain in any way possible to keep my rabbit's attention, but nothing seemed to be sealing the deal. When the rabbit suggested that we should jump into a pool with all of our clothes on, I went for it. And when the pool was only three feet deep and I scraped my knees on the concrete pool bottom, I just kept going because it seemed like that's what you're supposed to do. But then, toward the end of the night, I had noticed that the rabbit had disappeared, and there were only two explanations as to what could have happened: the rabbit had left the party or someone else had shot the rabbit.

Disappointed, I went from room to room looking/sulking for the rabbit when I knocked on one of my friend's doors. He barely opened the door and put his face in the crack and asked what I wanted. Don't get me wrong, everyone deserves to get with whomever they want, but there's an ethical code to every hunt, and my dad's words suddenly shot back into my head: Justin, you should never shoot a sitting rabbit: no matter what. There could be something wrong with it, like wobbles. (Just in case you don't know, "huntchat.com" explains that wobbles are actually warbles, and warbles are parasites that cause white lumps in squirrels and rabbits. If they have warbles, you can apparently die. Congrats, you learned something today.) So when he barely had the door open, I had this gut feeling, almost like a mother's intuition, to push the door open farther.

When I pushed the door, I saw a pair of feet laying on his bed; they didn't look like normal feet though--it was more like, Hey, I don't know the floor from the ceiling, I think I'm just going to pass out now feet. And when he gave me the "get out of here, I have a job to do eyes," I channeled my dad the best I knew how and said, You know, my dad told me you should never shoot a sitting rabbit. There could be something wrong with it. I decided not to include the part about the wobbles because it didn't seem applicable. My friend just kind of stared at me confused, and as he did, I forced myself a little farther into the room to see the girl passed out on the bed, and I repeated myself, It's not ethical for a hunter to shoot a sitting rabbit. It's unfair because something might be wrong with it. I looked back over at the girl, You just can't shoot a sitting rabbit. And just like that, it was like saying "rabbit" three times awoke her from the dead, and she awoke from her slumber and excused herself from the room. I could tell that my friend was about to kill me, so I decided to excuse myself as well, but in the midst of my own hunt, it meant more for me to stop and make sure that we weren't going around shooting rabbits with wobbles... sure, we were in college and we all know what's on everyone's minds, but there's always a moment when you have to pull back and ask yourself, At what cost am I doing this?

So, I had given up on my own plans for the night, and I was getting my stuff ready to leave when I looked up and saw the rabbit again... my rabbit, that is. I had spent the evening doing shots and taking pictures so that the rabbit could put them on Instagram and talking about things I didn't care about just so that I could impress someone who ultimately, was just another person. I had set myself up to believe that this was the moment, and after all of that, I didn't even get to have a truly meaningful conversation, so as I saw the rabbit go into a room alone, I walked in, and announced I've been following you around all night doing shots and talking about stupid shit, when all I wanted to do was kiss you. I had caught the rabbit off guard. Look at my knees. This is stupid. I'm going to have scabs on my knees. Why? Because I'm not the person that's just going to come up and kiss somebody. I jump in pools after people--shallow pools. And then the rabbit asked, So, why didn't you kiss me? All of a sudden, I began to feel like the rabbit instead, gun pointed at me and everything. 

My dad always used to ask me why I never shot at more rabbits, and in the end, it was because I was scared... scared of shooting him or the dogs or just missing all the way around. I thought that maybe if I didn't shoot at all then it wouldn't be a failure. If you don't shoot at anything, you can't miss. But in the same respect, you can't take anything home. So in one of the bravest moments of my life, I closed the door, and I went in for the kiss. I. Shot. The. Rabbit. And it was the best fifteen second ending to a hunt in the history of all the hunts I've made.

So, in the end, the rabbit ended up deleting me off of Facebook, I went to DC, and the rabbit went to New York. I don't think my dad's intended lesson was to draw metaphorical comparisons between shooting a 4x10 and trying to kiss people, but that's just kind of how life works out I guess. I doubt I'll ever see that rabbit again, and I'm kind of cool with that because that night of hunting can teach a person a lot. There's always a code to go by. You can't just go around chasing anyone you want, especially if they're unconscious, but on the other hand, for hunters like me... you have to be willing to take the shot. You may not hit the target every time, and even if you do, the target may delete you off of Facebook, but you can't be afraid of pulling the trigger. After all, you don't know exactly how many hunts you're going to have in your life.