"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." - Flannery O'Connor


After painfully trudging through Wise Blood in 12th grade AP English, I cannot give Flannery O'Connor a second chance. Yes, the dissatisfaction lingers and it's just as acute as it was 5 years ago. However, just like everyone and everything else, I'll probably take that "never again" thing back and read Everything That Rises Must Converge. At the expense of my own suffering, of course. Regardless of how much I loathe her writing, that quote up there is definitely one that I live by.

Nevertheless, this blog is not about her. It's about truth. Not necessarily truth in the "having to deal with the realities of actuality" sense as the quote would suggest, but more so (for the majority of this blog) in the Nathaniel Hawthorne sense that your secrets will EAT YOU ALIVE at some point. Unless you have a pathological condition in which you feel no remorse. Read up on antisocial personality disorder to understand how that's cognitively possible. I guess O'Connor kind of covers the "reconciling with your conscience" thing too, but doesn't she beat you over the head with it like Hawthorne does. I really hate both of them so I'm not sure why they're at the top of my thoughts right now to the extent that I feel like using them set up what I'm about to say here. Let's just stop that nonsense and get to the point.

I believe in truth and honesty and openness more than almost anything when it comes to the people that I love. I mean, if you're a random and insignificant part of my life, then fuck you, yeah, I'm gonna lie. If it's advantageous to me to conceal the truth and you're nobody to me then I'm gonna lie in a fantastically convincing way because I don't actually care about you so that sinking feeling of hurting you or getting caught by you won't be relevant.

And even when it comes to my loved ones, I probably tell the truth for all the wrong reasons. It's a survival thing. It's an ego thing. It's getting what you want at the expense of absolutely everybody else thing. As much as we think we're in this for each other, we're really in this for ourselves. We do things because they make us feel good. End of story. But that doesn't nullify the fact that we have real connections with people and that there are some people we care about getting caught by more than others because we care about them more than the others. Basically, we care about ourselves number one, but we care about other people at varying levels and it's easier to lie to those we don't care about.

Do I really honestly truly believe that I tell the truth because I think people deserve it or because if we all told the truth the world would be a better place? No, probably not. This is probably just a superego cover-up for the subconscious truth that I just don't want to get caught. Because it is my understanding (based on experience) that if you lie about something big enough that you actually dread the moment when you will get caught, then you will most likely get caught at some point or another. This is sometimes referred to as the instant when "the shit hits the fan." And the longer you go without getting caught, the worse it is in the end. Lie about something for a day, whatever. But lie about something for a month or half a year or a year or 10 years and you're in "failed relationship" territory with the person that you lied to.

And even if by some seemingly fortunate twist of fate, you DON'T get caught (even though you probably will), the fact that you live constantly under some degree of pressure in terms of dealing with trying to avoid getting caught is even more of a punishment than being exposed may be. As Hawthorne (hate you) seems to indicate, coming clean is actually LESS painful than living with your "secret sin," if you will. It will build and you'll feel more pressure every time you're confronted by it. If that confrontation is frequent, you're gonna end up throwing in the towel for sure. And if there are any other people that know your secret, you also have to factor into the equation their potential behavior and as a result, you're just pretty fucking screwed. All of a sudden your dealing with a huge mindfuck.

Let's take cheating as an extreme example here (in pseudo-thought experiment form) to illustrate some of these vague and unsupported ideas. Person A and Person B here can represent a slew of non-cheating situations also in the sense that the decision to lie is basically made as a result of being presented with a set of incongruent choices that can't coexist. Cheating is just a clear situation that almost everyone understands so I'm running with it.

So, you're with Person A and you enjoy their company. But there's also this Person B who is appealing to you in some way as well. You don't want to lose Person A for what you have with them but Person B is just too compelling of an option to ignore. You care about both Person A and Person B so you decide you can have your cake and eat it too. You live for awhile seeming to enjoy the fact that you have them both. But there are, of course, costs. Nothing is free. If you get caught, you lose one or both of them. So, you try to avoid getting caught as much as possible which is also a cost because it can be taxing. You have the stress of covering your bases, being more secretive than usual, arranging times to be with both Person A and Person B at different times, accounting for their erratic behavior (say one decides to surprise you with dinner or something one day while the other one is over), et cetera. Even though you may learn to manage the situation on some level as most people do with almost all long-term stressors, the fact is that it could become a burden. Close calls, having to think fast in certain situations, et cetera. All of a sudden, are you really having your cake and eating it too? And in that moment that you get caught and lose part or all of what you wanted anyway, was it really worth it?

Moral of the story (because I don't feel like rambling on about this anymore or trying to explain things any more clearly) is that you PROBABLY WILL get caught if your lie is significant enough. And this will TOTALLY SUCK when your loved one or friend or whoever that you care about finds out that you lied to them. You might lose them. If nothing else, it's gonna hurt you to hurt them. And even if you don't get caught, you're still going to have to pay some costs. I guess, you just have to figure out if the sacrifice of lying outweighs the reward.

Maybe this doesn't apply to everyone or even anyone. Maybe I'm just way too goddamn truthful. But to me personally, living with guilt is one of the worst states to be in and it usually never even pays off because THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT and it sucks because you're no longer getting what you want (what the lying was trying to achieve) and you've lost a lot in the process.

In terms of the secrets about people that I know, most, if not all, of them emerge and the truth is exposed. And you never think it's going to happen, but it does. Just be straight. Seriously.

Keep in mind that the truth doesn't always change according to our ability to stomach it and that it sucks to both give it and receive it a lot of the time. But as I said before, the longer the lie goes on, the more painful and difficult it is to reveal. The truth hurts. But goddammit, being lied to hurts even more. Ignorance is bliss until you know the truth. Then it's like finding out the truth magnified by 10 or 100 or 1,000.

We're not compelled to tell the truth because we think people deserve it. We're compelled to tell the truth because we don't want to end up getting caught in our lie because we understand that having to come to terms with the truth is an unavoidable and unfavorable fate.

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More experiences in post-grad life.

1) On the subject of choosing coffee table books for our new 30x50 coffee table that we bought from IKEA for $40...
Liz: Can I put these (Oh! The Places You'll Go! and Where The Wild Things Are) here?
Ryan: *sigh* I guess.

Clearly, I'm not really an adult yet. But these books are visually pleasing and communicate perspicacious and motivating life lessons. AND they're beloved classics so who wouldn't be excited to flip through one again! I hope that people come over and find inspiration for their lives from these. I also put my Calvin and Hobbes books there to smack our guests with wit and profundity. Ryan has sophisticated items for the coffee table book pile, like street art collections.

2) On the subject of flavor and nutrition...
Today's lunch: Ro*Tel canned tomatoes on my pasta for lunch because they were a charitable contribution from my mom and real pasta sauce costs money.

3) On the subject of daytime TV....
C-SPAN is currently showing a British House of Commons session from 1989 and I'm watching it because I already completed my required hours at the old part-time job for the day. Apparently, I don't understand British people at all. And Margaret Thatcher kind of depresses me. C-SPAN has never made me feel so despondent before. But it's better than watching Passions.

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I've officially moved on to the next chapter of the book called "My Life" and took the leap out of the nest. I'll now be writing in PQLC headquarters alongside co-author Liz "Fuc*ur gate". The lead up to the move was long but the journey short. The emotions I felt throughout were wild and free. Let me give you and analogy that sums it all up.

It was like going from your hotel down to the beach. You pack all your gear, snacks, and beverages and then gather the troops for the short march. You're excited as hell because living in arctic conditions for 3-4 months is bull and all you want to do is swim and play Godzilla. So you find the perfect spot to set up base camp and then take off towards the water. Before your toes touch the water you hear your mother's voice calling you back ordering you to lather on the sunscreen. "You wouldn't want to get burned now would you? And don't forget your ears." And then comes the talk about water safety. "If you're ever in a rip current swim parallel of the beach...blah blah blaaaah. Before she can finish you've already taken off towards the water, running and eventually tripping into to surf. Glorious! The sharks, rip tides and occasional dunking are in the back of your mind but you're too busy enjoying the waves. You finally walk out of the surf rubbing water from your eyes and with a faint taste of salt. Exhausted but happy at the same time.

This pretty much sums up moving out for me. I'm still really nervous about doing the things that were done for me and having to do them myself. Things such as cooking, cleaning, shopping, and laundry. What I'm most nervous about is transitioning into my new job. I hope the people are as cool as my last one and that taking the bus isn't as strenuous as I think it will be. I may be out of the nest but I feel like my wings are clipped because of the lack of a vehicle. We'll see though. I'm excited for the future and see great things this year and I can't wait to go swimming!



Until next time...

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"St. Jude’s Ranch for Children serves all abused, abandoned and neglected children and families, creating new chances, new choices and new hope in a safe, homelike environment." (http://www.stjudesranch.org/about_overview.php)

Which is why my 2009 holiday mission is to get as many people as possible to donate their holiday cards to St. Jude's. All the info is here: http://www.stjudesranch.org/help_card.php

As they point out, donating your cards serves two primary purposes:
1) It helps the kids
2) It helps the earth

So, please consider participating this year or making it a new holiday tradition! If you don't want to take the time to gather them and send them you can:
1) Get your mom or dad or grandma or grandpa or crafty aunt or easily coerced sibling or anyone else to do it
2) Give them to me and I'll send them out with mine. In fact, the less materials we use by combining shipments the better

They sell cards for other occasions and thank you notes and that kind of thing also (check the site for specifics) so if you have any of those laying around, send them along as well.

The deadline is february 28, 2010.

Even if you don't personally want to do it, consider mentioning this to someone else in passing. :)

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Bad boys, bad boys.
Whatcha gonna do?


I'm not handling the prospect of not working very well at all. It's an aspect of the Premature Quarter-Life Crisis that I haven't experienced until now. Which is why I've naively formed this defense mechanism mentality of "Yes, I'm going to get a job right away because I want it more than anyone else and I'm a hard-worker and powerful, independent woman who was born to have a successful career." The power of positive thinking? No, probably just filthy lies to myself which won't get me anywhere. I know how to do things. I don't know how to sit around.

Remix!

I love that I don't know what's going to happen. I love that I have nothing holding me back. I love that I'm going to have a job which will allow me to save for traveling to all the places I've wanted to go. Maybe not all. I'm not being foolishly optimistic here. But if I can take my two weeks of vacation and head to Peru for awhile, I'm there. I might not see the whole world like I've always dreamed of, but hey, I might make it to Cambodia at some point. Do what you can. Don't let the fact that you can't do it all hold you back from doing what you can. This is my ultimate mental obstacle. If a task seems too huge to take on and complete to perfection, I'm resistant to doing it. Sometimes you just have to dig in and get out what you can. No waiting 'til you have a million dollars and three years to see the whole world. Three new countries with whatever limited vacation time I have is just fine with me. And if I somehow get to see more, we'll consider that bonus.

I love that I still think it's possible for me to do anything. I love that if I find out that I hate what I do, I can do something else. I love that I've learned invaluable lessons from the jobs that I've had even though my work experience looks kind of limited and crappy on paper. I love that I'm willing to do anything and see where I end up. Maybe there's something out there that I love more than how much I love the prospect of policy research. I can't think of one field that I haven't been interested at one point or another so we'll see how many of those areas I end up working in.

I love that I have time to power through books during this interim period. Sometimes I wish I could live forever just so I could read through the whole library. Skipping the romance section, of course. And probably most of the Sci-Fi section. I have my own real-life romance going on and my own real-life sci-fi imagination.

I love that we're all so young and it's tough sometimes because of that. Most of us are struggling to make a reliable living. Maybe the economy's getting better and maybe it isn't. But these are lessons we'll learn that will make us appreciate the times when we're living comfortably. And this will be the baseline for the rest of our lives. I love that even though we don't have money, we still find ways to have a good time and head out on Friday and Saturday night to wherever life may take us. I appreciate those times we have so much more because we work so hard to make sure they happen. Not having what you want and even not what ou need sometimes makes you even more grateful for the surprises. People help you out. We're all still alive (Well, most of us. I'll take those odds). I can think of 10 people right away who've overcome some incredible disadvantages and I can think of 10 people right away who are currently overcoming some incredible disadvantages.

Last Christmas, Nonnie asked us all to go around and say what the best Christmas gift we ever got was. None of us could come up with anything. We had always gotten more or less what we wanted. If we didn't get everything we wanted, it never really mattered for very long because we never really wanted it that badly. We'd all been relatively spoiled. Nonnie proceeded to tell us the story of her all-time favorite Christmas present. She was relatively little and it was during the Great Depression. Her family, just like all the other families, didn't have much money and it was kind of understood that there would be no presents that year. However, for some reason, her aunt (I think it was her aunt. This part of the story is kind of vague) was able to buy presents for Nonnie and the siblings. That Christmas, she got a Shirley Temple doll and a doll baby carriage. Shirley Temple was her favorite then and probably still is on some level. Hearing Nonnie talk about how she didn't expect to get anything and understanding that it just wasn't possible but then being surprised with her most favorite thing of all was absolutely flooring to me. I realized that never in my life had I appreciated anything like that. Everything was insignificant to me.

Ok, wow. Regroup. I have no idea how I ended up at that. This was a very unplanned ramble blog. Well, it's a good story anyway so I'll keep it. And only proceed to say that I'm in love with this not-knowing thing. We'll see if my failure to find a job beats me down to reality. But until then, cheers to full-time employment and being 22 years old and finally a real person. For the first time, I'm not aching to be 17 again. 17 was so insignificant. 22 is where it's at. When I'm too old to have the energy to work full-time and have fun full-time, then we'll reassess. But for now, let's live it up.

PS - Ryan and I live together now. I'll coerce him to blog by threatening to eat his food and things of that nature.

PPS - Upon rethinking this and trying to connect the dots, I guess the Nonnie story was supposed to illustrate that things in our lives will be significant and we'll have histories and memories and experiences because nothing means anything if you always have everything that you want. I can't explain it in words. I hope you get what I mean. Not just financially. It applies to all things. For example, even though it feels like people have dropped like flies in terms of dying and leaving and that sort of thing in the last five years, I've come to appreciate every single person and moment that I still have. And in the struggle of trying to push people out and away to avoid the hurt, I've learned how good people are and how deep you can go with them in the most unforeseen ways. You can either obsess over what you don't have or you can kick yourself out of the pity party and focus on what you do have. And that way, you'll be ready to appreciate the surprises and treasure them. It's hard. I know. I'm guilty of all the pity-parties we fall into. The more you force yourself to kick them, the easier it becomes. I promise. So that I don't sound condescending and like I have it all figured out, here's a disclaimer: I suck at life just as much as everyone else. I hope that somehow I'm getting better and less bitter. Thank you all for making me want to try harder to be better.

PPPS - I love that I've moved out of the 233 house and away from people who haven't learned how to be adults yet. I'm not talking about the termination of painting stupid pictures and frolicking in parks. That's stuff for all ages. Basically, 24 year olds just shouldn't have temper tantrums. I think that's something we can all get behind.

PPPPS - Happy Holidays. Coming soon: Recycling your holiday cards to help some kids and help the earth.


Good Lord, what just happened?

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"Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle." - James Russell Lowell


This is a positive little upper about blessings which rise from the ashes of what you had once fancied to be misfortunes.

Today I realized that there is absolutely no way I can get a 4.0 during this final semester of my life.

Back story: Why did I think I needed a 4.0?
- To prove to myself that I could work and get a 4.0 at the same time because apparently I'm not good enough for myself just the way I am
- To graduate with a 3.5 and be able to put Magna Cum Laude on my resume because I am absolutely TERRIFIED of not being able to find a job immediately after graduation

Back story: The rationality which I ignored.
- What a stupid low self-esteemed capricious goal which is susceptible to external factors of all sorts
- I'll get a job and Magna Cum Laude isn't that big of a deal. And even if I don't get a job and Magna Cum Laude actually is that big of a deal, I'm sure I can count that "misfortune" as a blessing also. Because then I'll grow some balls and leave the U.S. for a bit and flee to South America because there will have ceased to be anything "practical" to hold me back which I might have foolishly considered to be tempting.

Now I can't get a 4.0. So, I can stop killing myself for it. I can sleep, I can relax, I can half-ass everything and be content with Bs and maybe even a C or two.

I'm in love. I want to devote time to enjoying that.
I self-educate. I want to devote time to developing my understanding.
I have other things to deal with. I want to devote time to fixing them.

The blessing is that now I can do absolutely all of that.

Grades are just numbers. Paychecks are just numbers. It seems so simple to understand, but so difficult to accept.

And now that the unfortunate circumstances of having an awful professor has bestowed upon me this forced reality check, I can stop, reflect, appreciate, and move forward in the way that I should have been moving forward anyway.

Sometimes it's better when your tunnel caves in before you reach the light at the end of it because then you can dig yourself out of the rubble and stand on the top of that fucking tunnel rubble/rubbled tunnel and feel like you've conquered something more than just getting to the end.

What a stupid metaphor elaboration that was. I floor myself everyday.

Well, continuing to the end, I'm not going to tell you to always find the positive things when everything looks bleak and I'm not saying that this is going to be my mentality for everything from now on and maybe this entire appreciation is really just a defense mechanism for dealing with the fact that I have failed at my goal. However, if these kinds of feelings do happen upon you and all of a sudden you feel good instead of bad, embrace that. It doesn't matter why or for how long. The comprehensive point here is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with feeling awesome every once in awhile.

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Ryan Repp is a good best friend to have because you can text him about pee and he doesn't mind.


For lack of time and topic, here's a quick little post about how we came up with our beloved URL.

Ryan and I were sitting around in the library trying to come up with something intriguing. Hipsters will talk all day about how they don't try. It's a lie. Everyone tries. Everyone tries very hard. Well, we tried for 10 minutes. But it was 10 minutes of very hard trying. (We're not hipsters by the way. I was just calling them out because they think they're the personification of awesome and that irritates me.)

"Push It" by Salt-n-Pepa is a motherfucking classic. Ed and Ashley disagree and considering that I respect their opinions way more than most people's, perhaps I should listen. I want to believe them, but I just can't. I love it way too much. But all tangents aside... on that day that Ryan and I were giving birth to this humble creative outlet, I just happened to be obsessed with it. And the lines

Yeah, you come here, gimme a kiss
Better make it fast or else I'm gonna get pissed

were ringing through my brain. "BetterMakeItFast" just seemed to fit with our vision (or at least that's how I fallaciously justified it because we don't really actually have a vision) and after testing several other options so as not to make a rash desision, we selected the best one. I told you, we really only tried for 10 minutes. It seemed unnecessary to waste more time than that on something as stupid as a URL.

We could have made it http://www.prematurequarterlifecrisis.blogspot.com but we didn't. I'm not sure why. We just didn't. Probably because it sounds lame as hell so I'm happy we didn't. I wish I could say that it was some planned and intentional thing, but it wasn't. What's more PQLC than not having a plan and coming up with something quick to fill the void?


I wish I could embed the video here but the people who run Universal Music Group are assholes and don't allow it. The only thing I can offer is the link: Push It (1988) - Salt-n-Pepa

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