A dream...

Dreams don't stick with me. Sometimes I will wake up and I will remember a feeling or an emotion. Some of the characters might linger in my head for a little while, but I wont remember their role. And I wont remember the story. And really, what is a dream without a story? The Answer-not much. There is one dream, however, that I will not forget. It's a reoccurring dream, one I've had hundreds of times. Perhaps it sticks with me because most of this dream is a true story, not just a bunch of randomness my mind has conjured up. I would start it with once upon a time, but that beginning seems to require a happily ever after. This is not that kind of story.

...The clock has been rewound. It is now 2002. I'm a little twelve year old who has seen both too much and not enough of life. I'm back in Germany in the gym of the University of my hometown Mainz. A gym that is my home away from home. I spent more time growing up in this gym than I did anywhere else. It's the middle of competition season, spring time. I'm surrounded by gymnastics equipment. My coach tells my teammates and I, we need to stick five beam routines in a row(no falling), then we can go home. In the event we should fall, we get to start over again. It's easy to underestimate how hard this is to do. On the other hand, German Championships weren't all that far away, so the pressure was warranted.
I'm on routine three when I do my back handspring back flip and something goes severely wrong. I'm not sure what happened, I'm still standing on the beam, but I am in a lot of pain. Every step I take pushes me that much closer to tears. But crying is not an option, especially when I'm on a beam, especially when I only have two routines left before I can go home, and especially not with my coach watching.
So I suck it up, finish the routine and start my next one. And the same thing happens again, only to my left leg this time, not my right. This time I can't help it, the tears start falling. I have never been in this much pain before. Now, crying when you're standing on a four inch beam isn't very intelligent and it's not very safe either. But some things seem to be unavoidable. A natural reaction. Anyway, as much as I try to avoid it, my coach sees me. Everyone picks their battles in life. As much as I love and trust my coach, I will pick pain over fighting that battle any day of the week. The one thing she does not tolerate is crying. The last thing I want to do this late at night, when I just want to go to bed and start my day over again, is upset my coach.
I don't know how, but I stop crying. My legs feel like they are on fire, but I do what I do when I get scared in gymnastics, I give myself a pep talk. It goes something like, "You have to survive this, you have to go to school tomorrow." As if it would be completely illogical for anything but that to happen right now. So I finish the routine. One to go. I can do this.
I move slowly, since taking big steps is unbearable at this point. I get to the part of the routine that destroyed me the last two times and I have to be honest I am very scared. I don't know how much more of this I can take, but I go for it. Good fortune was not on my side today, I fall. Now, you might think it was nerves or lack of coordination that caused the fall, but it wasn't. When my legs landed on the beam they simply couldn't do it anymore. This I time I cry and I couldn't care less. I fell. That means I have to start my routines over again. Five to go, at least and I know I can't do it. I sit down on the floor because standing just doesn't seem to be an option anymore. I am hurting so much and I don't know why. I have no idea what I did wrong. I see my coach coming over, ad naturally she isn't happy. All I can do is look up at her.

This is generally when I wake up crying. I feel no pain most of the time, but the memory seems so fresh to me. I know how this story ends, I don't need the dream to show me. I pulled both hamstrings that night and spent the next six months recovering, my goal being to walk without pain. Sometimes the ending changes in my dream. Sometimes I get off the beam the second I get hurt and tell my coach and thereby keep my hamstrings mostly intact. But no matter how this dream changes in the night, the ending is never a happy one.

Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock and Eavesdropping

An interesting poem, to say the least. After reading the first two lines,

"The houses are haunted,

By white nightgowns."

I immediately picture a creepy, black and white movie where someone is sure to die by the time the story comes to an end. Then all of a sudden I am bombarded by color. Purple and Green, Yellow and Blue. Like the movie Pleasantville. It's wondrous and beautiful and completely imaginative but so out of place. Then things become awfully random. Just like dreams. And then it makes sense; this is a dream. And the dream is about a drunken sailor catching tigers in red weather. Makes perfect sense to me. I mean, who wouldn't want to catch tigers in red weather?


Eavesdropping...

I had the perfect opportunity to eavesdrop today. I was in line for the North Hedges Suite Line-Up(which is a seven hour line-up), and therefore had the most unobtrusive yet unavoidable position to listen to the conversations around me. I can't say the conversations were interesting, nor boring since they were strikingly similar to the ones everyone else was having around me. "What are the chances of us getting into the suites?" "Oh good...only five hours to go!" "This is going to be a looooonnnngggg night"
Naturally, after a while some conversations become tedious and a change of topic can be very welcoming. But, as we've discussed in class, if I think about I would realize my conversations would be just as boring to eavesdroppers. Mostly because the context isn't known. If I knew the people around me better and knew their backgrounds, the conversations would make more sense.

"Perusing" our Text

I looked, quite thoroughly, through the book before our first day of class and the first thing I noticed, was that I've read many of these stories before. I don't mean that in the sense that the themes of the text are familiar to me, but that I have literally read many of these poems, short stories and essays before. In AP Lit to be exact. Of these stories my favorites that we covered, that I would recommend to anyone are: Trifles by Susan Glaspell (this one will make you think twice before you underestimate a woman again), The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe (a classic), Cathedral by Raymond Carver (an eye opener) and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (twisted). Besides that though, titles that caught my attention were stories I have not read but have always been interested in. I have seen so many versions of Cinerella, everything from the Disney Classic to the dark German version. I thought it wold be fun to read the Three Tellings of Cinderella, which fortunately is a part of our reading assignment. The English Patient, Peter Pan and The Tempest by Shakespear are stories in our book that I have always wanted to know more about, or read the story rather than just know the movie. Maybe I can finally get a chance to do just that this semester.

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"

I feel like there are many ways to interpret this quote. I think about writing when I read this. Many times when I write, I don't concretely know where I'm going with it until I am in the process of writing it. That is when everything comes together for me. Of course it's entirely possible that the word "see" isn't supposed to be taken literally.
As to the story, "Where are you going, where have you been?", I thought it was odd. Since the theme of this course is retellings I can completely understand why this was chosen for us to read. It's like deja vu almost. You know what's going to happen though it's never actually happened to you before. The intro, long as it was comparatively, threw me off though. I had no idea how it was relevant or where it was going until Arnold Friend showed up at her door. I suppose it was written that way to give us some idea of how the girl might react to this situation or just to provide more depth for the character.

Our First Day

Well I think it's safe to say that I didn't expect to be laughing for a good forty minutes on my first day of Lit 110. If this is a preview for what is yet to come I can't wait for what tomorrow might bring. As far as ice breakers go, I think that was a great success.
I'm not a big fan of blogging, but perhaps I will think otherwise after getting into a routine of writing about our discussions every day. We will see.