sometimes lack of a theme is the best theme

Okay, let's be totally honest.  The first B I ever received was for cutting out shapes in kindergarden.  In second grade I glued my Christmas project to the desk by accident and it ripped.  Monet is my favorite artist, followed by Picasso - not terribly original.  I can't talk about theatre or musicals beyond my high school production of Les Miserables and the few extremely painful times I was forced to sit through West Side Story and Grease.  I went to the opera once or twice, but the building was definitely the coolest part (sidenote: how do all horror movies not take place in opera houses?).

I'm a sophomore in Virginia, where I'm currently juggling the fact that I don't know what I want to do with the equally pressing fact that everyone tells me I have to know what I want to do.  I'm going to double major in English and Spanish, but my Spanish is bad.  I follow politics pretty closely but I would do many things involving broken glass and vinegar before I'd get involved in that racket.  I was into the journalism department for awhile, until the lack of mental stimulation combined with the overload of annoyance stimulation steered me clear.  Ironically, though, my life is still owned by them to some degree . . . I help run a website devoted to the media's coverage of poverty in the U.S., which we hope to cultivate into a forum for journalists so covering domestic poverty will be its own legitimate field.  I teach ESOL classes at the community library and I tutor elementary school kids.  I'm going to study abroad in Argentina next year, and hopefully intern at Pittsburgh magazine this summer.  If you can't find a connecting thread in all the random stuff I do, don't worry, neither can I.  Which is kind of the point.

I like to write.  A lot.  I have since I was three.  I'm not one of those really cool types who whips out a notebook at random times and starts scribbling away furiously, lost in the moment (typically, we all have our days).  Maybe I should be; they're the ones that will probably become famous.  I write lots of things.  Articles, papers, journals, novels, poems, essays for school publications . . . You name it, I've probably tried it (not necessarily well).  My goal is to experience the world around me, and I do this in many ways: The Economist, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, BBC, yes, but also Jack Kerouac and Bukowski and Ginsberg, Dostoevsky and Gogol and Solzhenisyn, Dante and Vonnegut and Augustine and J.D. Salinger and Graham Greene and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, beautiful Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . . T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, e.e. cummings, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.  You will soon see that I tend to lack themes in my interests.  If it makes me want to throw up or eat a peach or cry or write a letter to my senator or punch some random guy in the face or grab a car and go, go, go until I can't anymore, I love it.  I hate self-help books with a passion seconded only to that with which I hate Nicholas Sparks.  

So yes, books are my thing, but I'll dabble into music now and then, too; I'm one of those indie-scene chicks that walks around campus in plaid listening to their iPod before, after, and between classes, in line for the salad bar, waiting for the dryer, you name it.  I dig Seabear and Sufjan Stevens and She & Him, but my favorite band is the Clash, I really appreciate some good Pogues or the Sex Pistols, and I have a thing for Latin music and reggaeton: Wisin y Yandel, Franco el Gorila, Calle 13.  Juanes taught me Spanish, I swear.  

We'll see where this goes.  I'm really excited to be sharing internet space with so many different people who have so many different outlooks on life, and a little intimidated . . . my list of accomplishments in the art world is pretty slim.  I just like to learn about people.  It'll be pretty awesome sharing some of the discoveries I've made and checking out those my fellow bloggers want to share . . . And I've heard rumors of some original stuff being posted.  Can you say score?  I love original stuff.

I will leave you with one of those quotes that, since it was first published (of course it took years and years to get it published; ain't that always the truth with the best work?), has stirred a reaction from its audience, whoever and wherever that audience may be, whether the reaction be good or bad.  I think the only crime literature can commit is to leave you in indifference.  I hope it pushes something in you, too, one way or another:

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes, 'Awww!'"

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road