The Lights are On

"Teenage Love Affair" by Alicia Keys

...nothin' really matters / I don't really care / what nobody tells me...

It is a random, uneventful Wednesday, Hump Day. I have no class on Friday so my weekend starts tomorrow.

I was supposed to go to Yoga with Brittany at 9am but when I woke up, I was right tired so I decided to skip out. I feel a little bad about it because although when I wake up, I feel indomitably exhausted, no matter how much sleep I get, it subsides after a few minutes.

But I can never inspire myself to last for the few minutes it will take me to really wake up, so I go back to sleep.

Nonetheless, I woke up a little later and made my healthy breakfast, practiced my correct posture (good posture makes you feel important, maybe erroneously so), watched the news, and laughed. I feel playful today. I feel like I should have a good day. I want to have a teenage love affair with my life: happy, fulfilled, irreverent, and secure. That's what I felt like during my teenage love affair.

I'm not going to skip around downtown Richmond like a fool, but my heart will. I only have my one class today: English 215: Reading in Literature. My professor, Dr. Sharp, resembles George Carlin very much. It is some kind of creepy. He is a very smart, sarcastic, funny man too.

I know he will mention President Obama's inauguration. It's impossible to assemble a group of people on campus and the President is not somehow mentioned. My sociology professor sent us an email reminding us of the sociological significance of his election. Sociology is the study of society and society has changed immensely in recent years.

So, I'm off to have my teenage love affair with my life. Deuces.

Dante's New Beatrice

"Round Midgnight" by Ella Fitzgerald

...I do pretty well 'til after sundown / Suppertime I'm feelin' sad / But it gets really bad / 'Round midnight / Memories always start 'round midnight...

Nineteen days into this new year, I am quite proud of myself. Classes have commenced and I'm in love with my brain. I love school. I love to learn and I am taking the kinds of intellectually stimulating, humanity connecting classes that my mind was truly created for.

I am taking a World Studies class about the classic The Divine Comedy by the epic Italian poet Dante Alighieri. My professor is this balding, handsome, compactly built Italian genius who stolen my mind with his vast knowledge and my heart with his accent and animated English.

I imagined that this class would be messily boring (because I resent "the classics" written by these dead white men whose offspring annihilated what would have been African classics). But it is not. Dr. Piciche offers information about Dante the writer.

He provides historical and social contexts for many of the things Dante includes in his poem. He comments that times never really change. The technology gets better so more details are recorded and more babies are made so there is more to record. But times never really change.

Hence the term "classic". Classics survive time; remain relevant. Time gives us the illusion that things have changed so we hang on to very few things. And classics are the few things we hang onto.

Education sophisticates people. I do not mean sophistication in some saddidy, I-read-more-and-better-than you kind of way. Education sophisticates one into being humble. It reminds a person how big the world is and how small every person is...unless you decided that there is something that you can do to improve the world. That is what makes one grand.

In this new year, I have decided to discover and display my grandiosity. I have taken to praying far more often than I used to, eating as good as I know I should, being patient, and even more empathetic. I am calm.

I am still the same. I am uptight and I worry too much. I am pessimistic and I am dramatic. But I can calm myself down within a few seconds. If not, eventually, the situation dissipates totally and I think about it in a far less tragic way. It becomes correctable, manageable, necessary even.

I think I could be happy even though the situation has not changed. Beauty is a state of mind.

Like a Rock

"No Diggity" by Blackstreet

...I like the way you work it / No diggity / I'm 'bout to bag it up...

I found and read an article on www.CNN.com about a young boy with autism who was lost at sea with his father. I identified with all the things the father spoke about(click here to read it). The father kept track of his son as the boy drifted farther and farther away by reciting lines from Disney movies his son loved. (They were both rescued and survived).

My brother has autism and I often shout out beginning lines of catch phrases from different shows and movies he likes for him to complete them. He always laughs when I begin them. He understands it as a game and he loves it. I thought it was so cool that someone else does that with the child with autism that he loves.

It is a strange affinity. I love him because he is my brother. I love him because he is sick and I think if he knows he is loved, he can do much better than if he didn't know. I feel like I have to protect him, defend him, and save him from a world and culture that may not care about him.

I love a giggly, energetic boy with autism named Lima. He is the last of us to be born and the reason that we stick together, despite the tumult that is our family relationship. I was talking to Bri today and mentioned that. We go through a lot as a family and although our culture strongly emphasizes the unconditional love of family, I am not sure we would have upheld that without Lima Bean.

No matter what goes on within our family, no matter how angry we get with one another, we seem to be willing to reconcile for his sake. He is our atom and we are his electrons.

Even in this current tempest, his 18th birthday is this month and my parental unit is throwing him a birthday. Despite the fact that I don't really want to talk to them, I will definitely go because he is my sunshine, our sunshine. It hurts sometimes that the trials in my life have trumped my obligations to my brother. However, no life is without trials, so when court is adjourned, I'll return to my duties as his loving and attentive older sister.

We don't say things like "I love you" at my house, or show much affection at all, but we all tell Lima that we love him, when he wakes up, when he goes to sleep, when he returns from school, randomly when he passes through a hallway. Lima is the only thing we love more than we love to fight.

I love a child with Autism.