When you’re in college, you have a huge number of choices in what to study. You can study traditional things like math or history or biology or you can study things that designate themselves clearly as “useless hippie liberal arts programs” by the addition of the word “Studies” at the end of them, like Victorian Studies and Farm Studies and  Star Trek Studies. Most of these programs are interdisciplinary, meaning that they are cobbled together by integrating history and English, or sociology and economics, or psychology and film. I’ve always been intrigued by these programs, especially the media ones, which seem like a nice separation from the reality of more traditional majors and minors in some ways – I mean, sitting in a college lecture hall learning about the psychology of Star Trek? Does anyone not want to do that at some point? – but I’ve never felt that I have time to explore them on even a one class basis and I certainly can’t justify majoring or minoring in any of them. They’re interesting, but they’re not “serious” and they don’t connect even vaguely to “jobs” or “real world knowledge.”

It is for this reason that I advocate moving these programs. Instead of trying to engage students in scholarly discussions through media or interdisciplinary studies in universities, where students are supposedly already engaged in their schoolwork, public secondary schools would do well to integrate media studies programs into their curricula (I don’t think that’s the right plural, but there it is), especially in the humanities. Students in American high schools are supposedly apathetic and disinterested. They might improve if teachers were to discuss character arcs in “Gossip Girl” at the same time as those in Jane Austen’s “Emma”  Though this might seem like an elaborate method of dumbing down school, when discussed appropriately, modern media can facilitate the same rigorously academic discussions (and assignments, I suppose) as traditional subjects of study. In fact, media studies could open the door to more inter-disciplinary analysis and critical thinking in secondary school.

Media studies tend to emphasize de-trivialization, which is a word I just made up describing the phenomena that follows when students who are asked to think about things they once thought of as trivial in a non-trivial way find themselves thinking outside the box and performing critical analysis at a high level. Essentially, media studies trick people into thinking. Some modern media forms do this more effectively than others.  ”90210″ does not have a vast number of metaphors or narrative artistry and study might have to end at a discussion of character development arcs and social norms. However, I often imagine writing lengthy and imaginative papers on the parallels between the Gothic movement in American literature and “Buffy: the Vampire Slayer,” which could become a very complicated discussion if I were allowed to go on for any amount of time. If teachers are even one/eighth as geeky as I am, I assert that they could definitely manage a decent discussion of modern media, whether within the context of English, history, psychology, philosophy, or political science.

That context is, of course, important. When media studies are integrated into “regular” subjects, they function at a higher level than they do by themselves. The real academic discussions are going to become sidelined if a unit is entirely based upon Star Wars. But, in moderation, secondary education programs could benefit from putting modern media into an academic light. As I said earlier, media studies encourage inter-disciplinary thinking. You know what else does? Interdisciplinary programs! While media studies in secondary school are a special interest of mine, holistically, I think that interdisciplinary learning is important too. Understanding of a subject is doubly increased when the extra dimension of another subject is put beside it.

If you are learning about Thomas Jefferson’s political theories in your American Government class (seniors in high school take such a class in Virginia), you won’t fully understand where the dude was coming from unless you have some background. You want to know what the social conditions of the era were, who and what influenced his ideas, and the influence that his ideas had. You might want to know what he was reading at the time and what his writings looked like. You might want to examine the factors in his life that inspired him and check out what “kind” of a person he was. Academic understanding is improved when teachers make a point of the relationships that subjects or ideas have with each other. In media studies, those connections are naturally drawn. In some other humanities subjects, like English and history, those connections are pretty inherent too.

However, I feel that I have to at least touch upon math and the sciences, which I have neglected. There is a lot of dispute right now about the way that math and science are taught, and though I don’t at all feel qualified to go into a discussion of how math and science should be taught, I do feel that the interdisciplinary approach could be beneficial to students in these subjects too. Math and science are easy to combine at a secondary school level in either chemistry or physics; math and art or music make good combinations; science and history can be combined. Media studies might be more a distraction in anything else in the sciences, but used sparingly, modern media could still work as a tool to engage students: watching science-fiction and analyzing the inaccuracies or the scientific principles behind things like Doctor Who’s Tardis would inspire inquiry and application of knowledge.

Integrating radically interdisciplinary programs, especially media studies, into public schools would be a gamble. Students might not enjoy the media franchises that are chosen, emphasis on important concepts and subjects might be lessened, and teachers might dread taking a day to talk about “Star Wars” instead of Jules Verne (I don’t know, I honestly kind of doubt it). But in conclusion, I ask you to imagine one thing. A classroom of eighth grade girls asked to talk about the gender relationships in “Twilight.”

I’ll do some real posts in the coming days, but because tonight is a diary night and not a dubiously “academic” rant night, I have only a list of things I did on my accidental hiatus in roughly chronological order:

• wrote a novel and a half (110,000 words, to be exact, which is the main reason why I have not been here. It was profoundly fun and it even let me live in a hypomanic state for more than a month, but now I’m permanently sleepy).
• had a chat with my adviser, in which I awkwardly said, “uh, my classes here are not challenging me like I want them to; I might transfer” and she said, “oh, I get that, but don’t transfer, because I can fix it. Want to do some specialized one-on-one direct inquiries?”(I then came to understand the true meaning of ambivalence and now I don’t know where I’m living next year)
• decided that I’m going to become an editor of children’s fiction by day while I write literary stuff by night (which feels so innately right that I swear I won’t change my mind again)
• wrote way too many papers
• picked up an Emily Dickinson obsession
• decided to minor in European History and obsess over medieval English royalty every day while I stand in the bread line
• took and passed final exams
• took and passed the GED test in the fine state of West Virginia (cue the temptation to go on Facebook and make a bitchy status implying that, “gee, looks like those three extra years of high school really WEREN’T needed”)
• took and passed MORE final exams
• took and maybe didn’t pass the ACT (In the course of one semester, I forgot everything I ever knew about math. Eight years of instruction cannot be relearned in the span of two days, it turns out.)
• sleep
• Broken Bells
• toaster waffles
• Birthday Massacre show in a scary scary Goth club
• baths
• the library

…and that is what you have missed. (Unless you read my Tumblr, in which case you’ve missed very little and you also have the gory details of every annoying homework assignment I’ve ever done, since I mercilessly liveblog my homework via Tumblr).

For a while, I thought this was a me-specific problem, but I’ve found over the past few years that it isn’t. There are a huge number of kids who hate public school. They don’t all hate it for the same reasons as me, but they have other reasons that are legitimate and important and need to be thought about. Public school is problematic for multiple groups of people in multiple situations. Some of these people are like my little sister, who is frustrated because she had to do four hours of homework a day in the fourth grade because she has pretty severe ADHD and rote memorization doesn’t come easily to her. Others are like my little brother, who came here from Vietnam when he was four years old and has been written as off as “dumb” by his teachers because of his inability to read at grade level, a problem he has because he didn’t even speak any English until he was halfway through preschool. Others are like my neighbors and classmates, who were treated like free peer tutoring all through elementary and middle school because they were ahead of the game.

I’ve written a lot about the problems that I see in American public schools, so much so that I might start to look like I’m down on the  idea of the public school system. In truth, I’m not. I honestly think that public school is one of the best things that has ever happened to America and that every child deserves a free, easily available education. We need public school – most people do not have another choice for primary and secondary education besides public school. Even though I had the privilege to leave when I wanted to, I recognize that my situation is not the norm (and in full honestly, I wouldn’t have the privilege either without some pretty hefty scholarships and abnormally trusting parents).

So, to off-set the massive amount of complaining I do on this blog, I’d like to write a post series on all the things that I think American public schools could do to improve themselves. I don’t know how practical any of these things are ’cause I’m not a fiscally responsible tax-payer nor an education reform expert, but they all sound wonderfully groovy and groovy is a thing that I think anything that takes up seven hours of your day should be.

Ability Grouping

If you are seven years old and you go to an American public school, you are in second grade. It makes no difference if your IQ, educational background, and social development match second grade standards. If you are cannot read a full sentence because you have an un-diagnosed learning disability and you are seven years old, you are put into second grade. If you can read at an eighth grade level because you are highly gifted and you are seven years old, you are put into second grade. Because schools are crowded with kids of certain ages (it’s a weird phenomena, but there are always some grades that are disproportionately crowded), there might be 30 children in your class, all of whom read and think at different levels.

This is fine, in theory, but your overworked teacher is desperately trying to make sure that everyone passes at a baseline level so she pays little attention to the learning styles and educational backgrounds of each student and instead teaches the entire class at a level that schools have arbitrarily deemed to be “second grade.” For some children, this is excruciatingly dull: they will learn nothing all year. Their boredom will make them become unmotivated and convinced that school is a waste of time. Their grades will drop as they focus less and less on their work. For other children, this is an incredibly time-consuming challenge that never rewards them with the positive feedback that children so desperately need. Instead, it convinces them that they are stupid and cannot learn as well as their classmates even if they try their best. They too are at risk for losing motivation and feeling that school is a waste of time.

Schools have tried to fix this with special-ed and G&T programs, but I don’t think it’s enough because it doesn’t reach the whole population. For every kid who has a diagnosed learning disability, there are five kids who have learned to mask their problems by cheating or picking up the slack with long, grueling homework sessions at home.  For every over-achieving perfectionist, there are five kids whose high intelligence is turning up everywhere besides their math homework.

The reason that public schools put children together based on age is social development. Of course, this is faulty too: just as no one develops academically at the same rate, no one develops socially at the same rate. It’s like expecting every star student to also be a star athlete or expecting everyone who reads at an eighth grade level to kick a ball at an “eighth grade level” (I don’t think that exists, but you catch my drift). Those things aren’t correlated to each other. Similarly, academic ability is not correlated to social maturity. My little sister is drawn to younger kids; she’s in fifth grade and some of her friends are in the first and second grades. I get along well with people both younger and older than myself, but not people who are my exact age. There are a lot of factors that go into social maturity – emotional IQ, regular IQ, the intangible “culturedness” that goes along with personal and familial background, sense of humor, hobbies and interests, social skills development – but most of these factors have less to do with age than they have to do with maturity.

For this reason, I think schools would do well to get rid of age-grouping all together. If children were grouped purely on the basis of ability, I theorize that they would feel much more satisfied with school and perform better. This would change the way that schools function in several ways. If I had infinite cash and all the power in the world (which, as a narcissistic teenage blogger, I sometimes pretend that I do), this is how my system would work:

1. Children coming into the system at four to seven years old would be assessed by a panel of counselors, teachers, and administrators through parent interviews, intelligence testing, and a portfolio-ish collection of drawings and writings (which, as any good educator should know, demonstrates WAY more than their ability to draw or write)
2. They would then be grouped into classrooms of around ten to fifteen children who had the same academic abilities, which would not be designated by numbers, letters, or implicitly judgmental adjectives, but by more cuddly terms (perhaps team names would be fun? I would have liked to go through third grade as “the Lions” or “the Shooting Stars”)
3. Breaks throughout the day including phys ed, art/music/theater education, and unstructured free-time would provide “overly” active children (you know, the ones branded as ADD “behavior problems” or most boys)  with a chance to unwind. More importantly, they would provide children with a chance to socialize with those who are at the same place as them emotionally and socially, if not academically.
4. Reassessments of individual children through portfolios of their schoolwork (and maybe a chance for parents to give feedback) would be done at the end of every year so as to account for developmental bursts or regressions.
5. For this reason, standardized testing would be made obsolete. A school that is vigilant and careful in hiring teachers and creating curriculum has no need for the overfed watchdog that is the state test.

Stay tuned for more posts of this nature and let me know what your thoughts on these ideas are! I think I’d actually be open to guest-posts in this series if anyone is interested, so if you are, please leave a comment or email me.

I don’t feel that we’ve been communicating lately, so I thought I’d write you an open letter on my sorely neglected blog and see what happens.

In gentle, lethargic August, when I was reading (for fun!!) and staying up until three in the morning watching old Buffy episodes, I think you promised me that you wouldn’t beat the living hell out of me because freshman year already did that. Two years in a row? For real? Taking fifteen credits – five courses at three credits each – was supposed to mean that I wouldn’t have so much work. I imagined myself going to sleep early, turning things ahead of time, over-achieving on assignments, maybe even reliving my “Hair is a Variable That Should Often Be Manipulated” phase where my hair changed colors and styles every other week. I used to have time for that stuff! Can you imagine? No, sophomore year, I don’t think you can. You haven’t seen me when I’ve had so much time, of course. You’ve only seen me when I don’t know what my hair looks like, much less what color I think I should dye it next.

But, you know, I have to admit that you’ve sincerely been a bucket of fun so far. Unlike freshman year, I’m taking engaging humanities classes that aren’t “Intro to…” anymore. Abnormal Psychology is wonderful and Romantic Era Music has gifted me with a pretty intense Chopin obsession and American Lit has inspired several good papers already. Women’s Studies has taught me that scrolling through the “social justice” tag on Tumblr can be more educational than a 100 level college course, but I guess every year has to have its weaknesses. And hey, we’re only halfway through fall semester. Who knows what marvelous things you’ll have me working on in the spring?

Speaking of which, I think I’ve found the root of my time-lackage problem. You and my flow of artistic inspiration have come together in a collaboration straight from Hell to destroy my life. You know what happens when I’m inspired? I start walking around in a dreamy half-fugue and staying up forever writing/playing because I’m not so much into dealing with this dimension when I’d rather be living in my latest Word document. I don’t get enough sleep and I stop focusing on making myself stay mentally stable, so then I have panic attacks! And pervasive, severe anxiety! You know this already, sophomore year, because you know that there is a steadily growing list of things that make me anxious now that didn’t make me anxious a month or two ago. Oh, you and my psyche have gone for some cheap shots. The dorm elevator? Really? I don’t know what that’s about. When I’m anxious over silly little things that I have to deal with every day, my head isn’t in my work. I start seeing B’s on my tests, and that won’t do when I’m going for a transfer at the end of this year. Is this some grand scheme you’ve arranged with junior year, sophomore year? Or maybe with my present college? I don’t know what it is. I didn’t think you had it in you to be so diabolical all alone.

On the transfer front, I’d appreciate it if you could make it a little easier to shoot for entry into Dream School #1 or #2 for me. I’m taking my GED this winter and becoming a Real High School Graduate (well, only in the loosest sense of the word, but still!) and then I’m taking my ACT so that I don’t have to show Dream School #1 and #2 the SAT scores I earned when I had finished a mere three months of ninth grade (I mean, that’s hardly fair). Still, even with those things, things that are making you so much stressful than you need to be, I don’t know if it will be enough. I’m not in a rotary club, I don’t play tennis, and my GPA is still sitting at 3.85.* That was freshman year’s fault. You’re better than that, sophomore year. The power is in your hands. You can fix my life by:

• not making my anxiety flare up every other minute
• taking away my artistic inspiration and my Netflix subscription
• increasing the number of hours in the day (thirty might be good?)

Now that we’ve agreed upon those conditions, get to work. I can’t stand seeing you hurt, sophomore year, and I think I might bludgeon you to death if you don’t shape up by next weekend.

Much love but also much chagrin,
Kay

*yes, I am one of those awful people who cannot stand having anything less than A’s. I’m aware that it makes me a douchebag, but it’s an idiosyncrasy I’m not going to try to shake.

Write them that best-seller you’ve always dreamed of.

“But I don’t know how to write a best-seller!” you may plaintively whine. “How can I ever compare to the literary giants of today? That Stephanie Meyer and her topaz. I can’t beat that, man, I simply can’t.”

That’s okay. You don’t need to be a literary giant or have an understanding of “sentence fluency” or even know what “plot” is to write a YA best-seller (though you might need topaz). With these simple steps, you’ll be well on your way to publication within hours.

1) Treat your readers like the illiterate imbeciles that they are.

None of these kids read for an appreciation of language and artistry or even because they want a good story. They read because they don’t know what else to do with themselves. In fact, they don’t even read books anymore. Instead, they read free fan-fiction on the Internet. This is because “real books” in the past have been clumsy, dull inventions that make use of words longer than three syllables in a context that makes sense and feature romantic leads with 3-D personalities. You can see why this posed a problem. In fan-fiction, flat characterization and tired plot tropes are staples of what has become a well-respected genre. In case you weren’t yet convinced, awkwardly-placed gratuitous and cryptically worded soft-core sex scenes that interrupt the plot are another, even more important staple of this genre. Learn from these writers and put such characteristics into your own work. It’s not as if anyone is going to read your lump of paper unless you do something to make it sparkle.  And writing a thought-provoking, twist-riddled plot or engaging characters is an archaic idea, so don’t waste your time with those things. Instead, remember that you are not writing to real readers – you are writing to the lowest common denominator. By that, I mean teenagers. Fan-fiction writers may not waste time with “spell check” or “character development,” but teenagers like them! More than any teenager would ever like an amateurish, self-indulgent writer like Hemingway or Kerouac. Throw these influences out the window, at least until you have to give an interview on your influences. Then you should become blissfully unaware of the fan-art riddled sites you have been trolling and dig out that Norton Anthology. I know, it’s been a while, but you only have to scan the Table of Contents to make yourself sound like you’re touting literature.

2) Forget everything you ever knew about the teenage experience.

Remember, your demographic is ages 10 to 14, even though your protagonists are all 16-19 years old. These are mere children. Tiny, grubby things who are going through puberty and haven’t yet come of age and are depending on you(!) to explain adolescence to them. You can’t expect to say anything honest. You might want to learn from watching ABC Family for a few hours. First, present your characters with situations that would never realistically occur until they were at least twenty years old. Then, for good measure, make them look twenty eight years old. Bless these characters with speech idioms and wardrobes that you wish you could have had, back in the day! And then have your one-dimensional antagonists mercilessly bully them for these charming traits. Scenes with obsessive romantic gestures gone wrong, heavy drug use, and angst-ridden journal entries are the best ways to hammer in the point that Adolescence Sucks More than Being Stapled to a Ceiling Fan By Your Eyelids. Which is what you’re trying to hammer in, of course. You don’t want to let them know that Adolescence Is Pretty Okay if You Roll With the Punches; your readers might stop wasting their money on your beautifully written works of literature and instead find a hobby.

3) Do your best to shoot their self esteem to Hell.

Teenagers already have a thousand reasons to hate themselves. Reason #1 is that they are simplistic, watery imitations of real humans who waste their time on tomfoolery instead of reading more books. And with the literary market in the condition where it is now, there’s no reason why they aren’t reading more! Anyway, 1,000 reasons is not enough. So give them another and take out your underpaid rage on them at the same time by writing protagonists who work as mirrors for the readers themselves. And then make the protagonists hate themselves. For the entire book. No, it makes no difference if you wanted your protagonist to be a redeemable human being with flaws and strengths like everyone else. Your protagonist can be a flawless, purple-eyed warrior princess if that’s what you want – she just has to hate herself. In fact, it’s better if she is a flawless purple-eyed warrior princess. The reader will then notice that they are neither flawless nor a warrior princess and become even more desolate. If your character’s depressive digs at themselves are getting on your nerves, write a foil who also operates as a romantic interest. The foil should be flawless, and they should love themselves for it. So much, in fact, that they make the protagonist hate themselves even more. You have reached YA author nirvana if you can get your readers to fall in love with this foil and notice that they are way not good enough for him or her. Why? Because then your readers might hate themselves so much that they’ll withdraw from their social lives and buy more of your books!!

With these three simple tips, you can become a best-selling YA author in no time. In fact, you might even revolutionize the publishing industry. Anything can happen when people are buying books electronically and downloading them to tiny, portable screens that cost more than one hundred dollars! It’s a brave new world, my friends. A brave new world, indeed.

The problem with this assumption is that most of the people who make it have never really heard classical. It’s one thing to dismiss a genre or sub-genre of music as “not your thing” if you have a fair sample (the sound of salsa music makes me want to go into a sensory deprivation tank for a few hours) but it’s another to dismiss more than three hundred years of radically eclectic music as dry and meaningless when you’ve only heard a symphony or two. I made this mistake, and I still regret it.

I became interested in rock music when I was twelve-ish. I wanted to play the stuff I was listening to but I wasn’t especially fond of the guitar, so I decided to play the piano again. My new piano teacher (who is still my piano teacher, but also my friend, mentor, and sometimes therapist) indulged me in some Radiohead, but she also made me play classical on the side. I think I played a few Beethoven sonatinas and half of a Bach prelude before I was fully and irrevocably hooked. I did not want to play rock music anymore. This is because, as it turns out, you can only go so far in rock music before you’ve done everything that there is to do. There are a few song-writers who are clever enough to make their music worth playing around with, but only a few. Classical, on the other hand, is an infinite universe of theory and art and experimentalism. You never stop learning.

I still listen to rock music around eighty percent of the time but I don’t have the same reverent devotion for it that I did when I was thirteen – my angsty lyric-doodling and promotion photo collages have become a thing of the mostly past, sad to say. As a musician, I have been forced to recognize that classical is where it’s at. Chopin preludes do much more for me as a pianist than anything by Nirvana or Hole ever did. They take more work, more time, more thought, and more patience, but they have an incredible pay-off. I’ve learned that I become myself most when I am either writing abstract prose or playing classical music. The second outlet didn’t exist for me until around two years ago. Most musicians I know are forced – at some point – to come to a grudging respect for classical because it has that universal effect on people who work with it.

But if you are not a musician or even if you are, you might find that classical is inaccessible and boring and not worth your time. This does not mean that you are unsophisticated or unable to appreciate great art. It also does not mean that you should not try classical because when you do, chances are good that you’ll find some pieces or composers who appeal to you. I don’t like Brahms or Mozart because their patterns and grandeur drive me insane, but I worship Beethoven, Bartok, and Chopin because I like cacophonous, sometimes discordant, but always beautiful melodrama. My taste in classical music is more over-stated and perhaps “flamboyant” than my taste in modern music, but the two share parallels. There is a lot of different stuff in classical music, but there is also a lot of “same” stuff that you may recognize from modern music. There are catchy hooks, crazy instrumental solos, underlying beats, and minor-key melodies that you can funnel your teenage angst into with the best of them. And in this case, the best of them may mean the composers themselves, who were neither always happy nor entirely square.

The composers that we think of as ancient cultural relics who wrote genius songs and then went to sleep at a reasonable hour were very much into partying, alcoholism, and fashion trends. They were angst-ridden white boys not unlike Fall Out Boy and Panic At the Disco, except for that they refrained from wearing eyeliner and wrote extremely complicated symphonies instead of three chord songs. They lived fast, died young, and some of them even left pretty corpses (according to a sociology professor I had last semester, that is the penultimate goal of any rock & roll musician). Many of them were rich, but some of them lived in poverty. They were not always the founts of privilege that we assume they were.  They composed popular pieces as young teenagers, they composed beautiful pieces as they went deaf, and they composed revolutionary pieces on their death-beds.

Classical music is the intense soundtrack to hundreds of wildly diverging lives. Don’t be so sophomoric as to assume that there is nothing relevant to modern life left in such a genre.

Listen to it with the volume way up:

Silly me.

Since I’m only doing fifteen credit hours, I’m transferring after this spring, and I have a chronic case of death wish, I’ve been cramming my afternoons and evenings with things that make me happy and hopefully make Brown and Vassar happy at the same time. As of now, that appears to include a representative position on the honor council, an editing position on the literary magazine, my old position as Reviews Editor on the ever-dysfunctional newspaper, and an entanglement with the school’s chapter of the Let’s Erase the Stigma club.  I’m also working on another novel (I’m at 30k, which means this one is a keeper) and prepping for a piano recital in early October, which means that I have to eat, breathe, and dream Beethoven (like I don’t already). I also occasionally have homework. And I’ll be working on transfer applications in a few weeks.

In short, school is overwhelming!

But there’s good overwhelming and bad overwhelming. I sometimes have problems finding the line between them, but as long as I stay on the peacefully exhausted side instead of the agonizingly drained side, I think this year will be wonderful. I’m not a joiner by nature and (not to sound like a total tool) I feel that I have artistic obligations to myself that joining things might impede, but I’ll have to get over it if I want to get into a good school. They’re already taking it on faith that the three years I skipped and my total lackage of a diploma don’t impair my ability to do good work (okay, not on faith exactly, I have a 3.85 GPA but still), so I have to stand out in extra good ways to make up for that not-so-good one.

My blogging may be one of the first things to go if time gets tight. By go, I don’t mean get lost completely. But I do mean that lengthy posts with good points and clear arguments may not happen more than a few times a month in the near future. Much as I hate icky grown-up words like “priorities” and “time management,” they do seem to come up a lot.

With any luck, my blogging won’t get too lost in the shuffle.

–

Most people know an abbreviated version of Sylvia Plath’s story. Her name is perhaps more closely linked to “white girl problems” than any other writer. An angst-ridden, auto-biographical novel on drug use and suicide, some dark and moody poetry, a head stuck into a gas oven after a lifetime of close calls – these are the snap-shots that characterize Plath to us. We don’t like to think of her as anything more than that. Though “The Bell Jar” is sometimes assigned in classrooms and has enjoyed some critical acclaim, it is stereotypically the favorite of every melodramatic teenage girl and most other readers equate Plath’s first and only novel with the overwrought plight of the spoiled, upper-class, white… manic depressive.

And that is where we hit a problem. Most of the ‘melodrama’ in “The Bell Jar” stems from Plath’s struggle with mental illness. This means that our laughable sad little girl stereotype is founded on the suffering of a woman who was in and out of mental institutions through her entire life and never got the treatment she needed. But even as she created a stereotype that sticks with us to this day, Plath played the phoenix in a really admirable way: she flung her problems at people and didn’t so much as hang around to see if they stuck. The reason we don’t like Plath is because we find her whiny, angst-ridden, and self-important. She’s in your face with her problems and she doesn’t care if you don’t think they’re real problems. She knows that (at least some of them) are real, and they won’t go away, and they need to be addressed. ”The Bell Jar” is for this reason a manifesto that is at its’ very best when it’s being sullenly self-indulgent. It may not be much fun to read through, but that’s the point. Why?

The 1950s, when Plath wrote most of her work, were a time of cultural suppression when people – ESPECIALLY women – were not supposed to talk about being sexually oppressed or having mental illness or any of the other things that Plath so boldly addresses. In this decade, confessionalism – which is the fancy term for spilling your guts on the printed page – was the most counter-cultural literary idea possible. It made a huge difference then that it cannot make now, if only because the shock value is no longer the same. I think that’s why we struggle to understand why Plath is so important. But the truth is that she is still important. The confessionalist writers (besides Plath, other notables include Anne Sexton and Allen Ginsberg) speak to more than their era. Confessionalism has always been and will always be relevant as long as there is cultural suppression.

In Plath’s case, daring to describe even the goriest details of an experience with mental illness forced people to open their eyes to its’ reality. The medical community has not historically been good to mentally ill women; for much of the  eighteenth and nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, emotional and neurological abnormalities in women were blamed on “hormonal imbalances” or even described as acts of God. Those suffering from manic depression or clinical depression were often treated with ineffective and damaging drugs or not at all. Studies have shown that depression rates in women are close to twice as high as they are in men (social pressures + hormones, in case you’re wondering), and maybe for this reason, these disorders have been ignored and misdiagnosed time and time again. When Plath wrote “The Bell Jar” and put her mental illness front and center, she implored readers to listen to a story about a young woman’s experience with mental illness. And people did listen. That would not happen in most other arenas.

So confessionalist literature is important! But why am I telling you this? Poetry and even “literary fiction” aren’t read by much of anyone anymore, so it’s not as if we can all be Sylvia Plath 2.0 and hang our problems out to dry on the shoulders of the masses. Sadly, this was also true in 1993, but that’s okay because Tori Amos released “Little Earthquakes.” “Little Earthquakes” is “The Bell Jar” of the grunge generation. In the span of twelve songs, Amos’s beautiful baroque-punk debut puts confessionalist poetry into the blunt, abrasive, darkly humorous terms of 1990s college rock. This is not the easiest thing to do. But she does it effectively.

Like Plath and the other confessionalists, Tori Amos writes poetry (or rather, lyrics) that makes audiences powerfully uncomfortable. Though Amos’s music is mostly accessible, her lyrics are raw, demanding, and not to be read lightly. What’s more, she knows it. And she makes conscious choices to put the things that make listeners most uncomfortable right in front of them. Most pop artists do not choose to put an acapella memoir of being raped at knife-point on their first album. Amos does this and releases it as her first single. Since then, Amos has written hundreds of songs that use the words we’re most afraid of and address the issues we’re most afraid of and never hesitate to make any of it personal.

I don’t see so much of that anymore. Though I happen to think Amos did it most powerfully, there were a pretty significant number of song-writers in the mid nineties (Ani DiFranco, Courtney Love, Liz Phair, Fiona Apple) who addressed sexual violence and gender identity through confessional lyrics. I’d love to go into how they did that, but I’m trying not to write a thesis on here every time I post. Anyway, as far as really mainstream music goes, confessionalist themes seem to have dropped off the map. In written literature, they’re all but gone. But this doesn’t mean that confessionalism as a social practice has to or should die.

A while ago, fellow blogger Brittany and I were having a conversation about “going there” and telling people what they think they don’t want to know. Since then, I’ve noticed that we’re still very much a society of suppression, of locking things up and pretending that they don’t happen, of choosing which problems we want to deal with and when, of getting squeamish when something complicated or unpleasant comes to light as part of the human experience. I’ve also come to the conclusion that we should not wait for the novelists or poets or musicians to “go there” – we can do the same things that Sylvia Plath and Tori Amos and a myriad of other incredible artists have done simply by being confessionalists in conversation and in our personal writing. If we don’t acknowledge ourselves, you can bet that no one else is going to be interested in acknowledging us. Everyone has skeletons in their closets – some bigger (if that even makes sense with the cliche, which is truly doesn’t) than others – but when they start coming out, everything can change.

I can’t prove that there is any correlation between the confessionalist accounts of mental illness in the 50s and 60s and the improvements in the treatment of the mentally ill that have come since then, but I can notice that a connection between the two variables is not impossible. Confessionalism has made a positive difference in the past and can make a positive difference in the future. At the very least, it creates an atmosphere of honesty and openness. It’s one of the effective forms of catharsis and it’s a wonderful educator.

TL;DR: Like Sylvia Plath and Tori Amos and a lot of other marvelously bad ass artists, we all have problems. Also like them, we have the choice to talk about those problems and urge people to confront the existence of those problems. And that’s a great choice to have.

For a while, this upset me because I didn’t understand why extroversion is so deeply ingrained into everything we do. I wondered if extroverts were superior or if they were simply bullies who shaped society around their strengths so they could get ahead. But the truth is that extroverts are no more superior to introverts than cows are to horses and most of them don’t ever intend to be bullies. Extroversion and introversion are operating modes, not lifestyle choices, and part of the celebration of innate differences that I do my best to promote on this blog is accepting that the traits that appear as “dominant” or “normal” are okay too. In short, there is nothing wrong with being an extrovert. But the fact is, as an extremely introverted person, extroverts have been responsible for a lot of discomfort on my part. And I think it’s mostly because they’re oblivious to what they’re doing – it isn’t malice or stupidity.

For this reason, I’m writing this post as a primer for extroverted people who don’t know how to deal with introverted people. Why not the other way around? Because let’s face it – introverted people have been putting aside their discomfort and dealing with extroverted people since the dawn of time. Introverts in school, work, recreational, and even home settings must make accommodations to fit the social norms created by extroverts. Rarely do extroverts find things reversed. As a result, most extroverts know very little about the inner-workings of their less outgoing friends, family members, co-workers, and peers. There are a number of myths that we have all been fed on what an introvert is like and how an introvert thinks. When extroverts apply their knowledge of these myths to social circumstances, they end up making introverts even MORE uncomfortable than they would be in the first place. So I’m going to dispel them and then list a few important truths about introverts. I’m only one introvert out of millions, but I’ve had enough experience to know the deal. I also think it’s worth mentioning that most of my friends are fellow introverts.

Myth 1: If we’re not talking animatedly and articulately to you, we don’t like you or we’re bored with what you’re saying.
Here’s the thing about introverts: we use less words. Especially when we haven’t known you very long. In cases like this, sometimes we either can’t think of anything else to say or don’t feel the need to say anything else. If you’re having a conversation that you feel is one-sided or not reciprocal with someone who you know is an introvert, don’t assume that something is wrong. Give them time to talk. Many extroverts are fast-talkers who have a lot to say – introverts are more likely to pause before they talk and talk slowly and softly, giving their extroverted friends the impression that they don’t have a reply. If that doesn’t make a difference, it’s likely that you simply aren’t there yet. Many introverts are “shy” (though not all introverts are shy and not all extroverts aren’t shy!) and it may take them a while to feel comfortable with you.

Myth 2: We don’t want to have friends or go on social outings.
It is true that many introverts seem to like being left alone with their thoughts. But that doesn’t mean introverts aren’t interested in friendship or in going out – they simply want it in moderation. At the root of the introvert/extrovert differences is the fact that introverts derive energy from being by themselves and extroverts get it from being with other people. More than a few hours in a chaotic mall or bar is exhausting and draining to an introvert, though it may be an extrovert’s perfect night. Because people are innately social creatures, though, introverts brave many of these things for the sake of making friends, and many do, in fact, enjoy going out. When trying to befriend an introvert, read their social cues differently than you’d read an extrovert’s. If they’re being quiet or not saying a lot in conversation, defer to Myth 1. If they’re acting like they’re having a bad time when you’re out, they might be tired or overwhelmed. Don’t take it personally, and ask them if they’re feeling okay rather than assuming one way or another.

Myth 3: We don’t speak up because we don’t have anything worthwhile to say.
Consciously, no one thinks this. But some of the extroverts I’ve encountered say (more or less) whatever comes into their heads and imagine that introverts must do the same. By this logic, introverts who do less talking must also do less thinking. Psychologists have found that this is by no means true – in fact, there is a positive correlation between giftedness in children and introversion in children – but many extroverts seem to assume that their introverted co-workers and peers are boring or static people and have nothing important to say. The same line of thinking, taken another direction, can become malevolent when extroverted people assume that introverted people are too weak-willed to do anything about being taken advantage of. Don’t do that. Don’t think like that. Give them a chance to say what they’re thinking and you’ll find that they can be wonderfully thoughtful people.

Truth 1: We don’t like being engaged in random conversations with strangers.
This may be even more true for me as a sufferer of social anxiety than it is for most introverts, but the vast majority of us are almost never interested in talking to strangers. In the grocery store check-out line, at a party – even in a classroom or work environment – we are disoriented and confused when a stranger initiates some out-of-the-blue small talk. For extroverts, talking to strangers they’ve never met before is thrilling and engaging. The possibilities seem endless and the act of conversing gives a feeling of instinctive comfort. For most introverts, the opposite is true in the wrong situation. If you’re really interested in getting to know an introvert, ask a mutual friend to introduce you or at least skip the small talk and choose a specific topic instead. It’s ridiculous to ask you to know which strangers are introverted and which aren’t, but if someone seems uncomfortable in your spontaneous conversation, please back off.

Truth 2: We do sometimes get lost in thought and “keep it all bottled up.” 
One of the reasons that introverts tend to be quieter than extroverts is that many of them are doing a lot of thinking when they’d otherwise be talking: my mom, an extrovert, insightfully said that an introvert is someone who is more comfortable in their own mind while an extrovert is someone who is more comfortable in the outside world. As I said before, neither is superior and both have their strengths and weaknesses. In this case, the introvert’s tendency to live inside their minds can be a weakness: we have a lot of emotions, opinions, and thoughts that we don’t or won’t share with you even when you need to know them. You may have to work harder than you would with an extrovert to engage us in a deeply personal conversation about our emotions. It doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings or that we don’t want to share them. But it DOES sometimes mean that we don’t want to share them with someone we don’t know very well. Again, defer to Myth 1.

Truth 3: We tend to have less friends.
Note that this truth does not collide with Myth 2 whatsoever. Less friends does not mean no friends. Most of the extroverts I know like to make new friends and they’re very good at it. Hanging out with multiple groups of people (or large groups of people) is fun and energizing for them. Introverts, on the other hand, prefer smaller groups of people. They also feel more comfortable hanging out with the same people every time. Naturally, most introverts end up cultivating fewer friendships. This does not mean that they’re lonely or socially awkward or that they need to be saved from some self-imposed social isolation. Please do not assume this when you’re getting to know an introvert who only has a few close friends. It’s also good to remember that extroverts may describe someone as a friend when an introvert would describe them as an acquaintance or simply as a co-worker/classmate.

If you’re an extrovert, I hope you learned something new about your more introverted peers. If you’re an introvert, maybe you learned something about yourself. As an introvert who has spent a lot of time thinking about the way that these two groups interact and the myriad of problems that come out of it, I know that I’ve learned a lot about myself in trying to untangle the real meaning of introversion.

Oh, and was this not my most polite rant ever? I don’t think I’ve ever ranted with less profanity and more “pleases.” It might not happen again.

With this in mind, imagine my surprise when my roommate called me on Monday and asked me what day I’m moving in. Or yesterday morning when my mom insisted that I pack. For some reason, it still hasn’t hit me that school is literally around the corner – I move in on Saturday and classes commence Monday so I’m hoping it’ll hit before I literally turn up at the dorm – but that glumly nostalgic end-of-summer feeling has penetrated every layer of my consciousness, resulting in zombie-esque behaviors and sleep schedules. Playing the Sims ’til 4am is something that Normal Me would not do. But it has become apparent that it is something that Summer Zombie Me absolutely does, with full gusto.

I’m adapting, though. I’ve calculated that I’m at least 60% done packing, which is impressive given the anecdote I’m about to share. Here’s the TL;DR: a fucking earthquake hit.

In case you don’t know, I live near Washington DC but I’m technically in Virginia (we’re one of those fun suburban areas where the hip kids set their Facebook hometowns to a city where they don’t live and the coke-heads describe their awful bands as “DC punk” when they don’t know who Jawbox is) and so the earthquake that you most likely felt as a slight tremor hit us with apathetically medium-ish strength. I lived on the West Coast for thirteen years so I’m no stranger to earthquakes, but everyone promised that they didn’t have them here. In fact, I forgot that they existed because they so much don’t happen here. When the ground and furniture started shaking, my first thought was, “Oh, did something explode in the basement?” Then I remembered that my life is not a TV show so I crouched in the doorway with an instinctive expertise that is truly almost embarrassing. It only lasted around 45 seconds, but it took us at least an hour to find out if anyone else had felt it – you East-Coasters have horrible earthquake protocol. Whatever happened to post-earthquake block parties? You stay in your houses and wonder what hit you instead of indulging in herd behaviors like healthy mammals. It’s disturbing – and then make sure it was safe to go inside again.

After that, I pretty much assumed it was over so I waited for my adrenaline rush to go away (my asympathetic nervous system is both lazy and defunct) and concluded that this certifiably horrifying disaster had been a sign from God that I should not pack anymore that day. That was fine and good but then there were aftershocks. I also forgot that aftershocks exist. Aftershocks, though lighter and less damaging than the real thing, have the predatory advantage of holding you in suspense because you think they might come but you don’t know when or how bad they’ll be. You only know that they could happen. Two real ones happened, but then my anxiety hit warp-speed and I deluded myself into thinking that I  felt more aftershocks throughout the rest of the night (spoiler alert – I didn’t). So I stayed up until 5.30 in the morning and got around two hours of sleep for no discernible reason.

For some reason unbeknownst to me, I then got up, made pancakes for everyone out of a sleep-deprived stroke of culinary genius and packed around 50% of my belongings into tidily organized boxes and duffel bags while suspiciously checking Google for more reports of aftershocks every thirty minutes. I am still shaking almost 24 hours after the last aftershock. If anxiety isn’t fun, I don’t know what is. Packing on two hours of sleep with Shaky Syndrome is a little like trying to solve one of those Impossible Equation things while being thudded in the head repeatedly with a mallet, but through lots of Diet Coke and more than one Sims break, it worked out okay.

Aside from natural disasters and unhealthy gaming binges, my week has been pretty exciting. I love school and I’ll be a sophomore soon and I’m rooming with my best friend and so life is going to take a turn for the GOOD. And sometime this century I may write a real post that you wish to read instead of something like what I wrote above. If this turns into a childless mommy blog, I promise to mercifully lay it to rest.

Note: a hurricane is supposed to hit us on Sunday morning because I guess it’s End Times now, so if I die or get Infinite Shaky Syndrome and become unable to type words larger than two syllables, there will not be a coherent post. There might be another one like this, though.