Cyber Petals

Okay, so I haven't posted anything in...ages. Anyway, this is a short story I wrote for Commercial Fiction. I don't claim any responsibility for the plot or anything; it was all the character's doing. Let me know what you think! It's called "Cyber Petals."

The lights went out, and the world turned upside down.
Rosie wondered why teleportation had become such a big deal to the outside world. It always made her sick.
Her stomach lurched in reaction to a particularly nasty stretch, and she cursed her grandfather.
Finally, the wretched transport ended, and she stepped off the pad and stumbled through her house to her room, where she flopped groaning on her bed. She reached for the mug on her bedside table, selected a peppermint stick from it, and popped the end of it into her mouth, hoping to soothe her stomach’s complaints. After a few minutes it was sufficiently calmed for her to roll over and contemplate her ceiling. She couldn’t remember the first time she’d taken Smart Markers to her room and proceeded to doodle all over her walls, ceiling, and furniture. She reflected that it was about time to erase her artwork and start over, as she usually did two or three times a year. She’d almost memorized her ceiling again.
She turned to examine her closet door. It needed more pictures. She’d have to remedy that soon, too. Oh, well, tomorrow began the weekend....
Suddenly, she woke up to, “Angelique Rosiere Moriset, this is the last time I’m going to call you! It’s time for dinner!”
“Coming, Mom.” She sighed and forced herself to her feet.

Supper at the Morisets’ was a simple affair as usual: TV dinners with her parents on the couch and Rosie curled in an armchair, watching some sitcom about a dysfunctional family. As she did every night, Rosie mumbled something about homework and shuffled off to her graffiti room across the hall from her parents’ clean white one. A few hours later her mother’s head poked through her doorway for a reprimand about her open window, with the night being so cold and all.
“I need the fresh air. I’ve been stuck in stuffy classrooms all day, you know,” Rosie answered.
Her parents’ bedroom door closed.

On Saturday afternoon, the sun reached down through the long grasses to wrap its rays around the short supermodel figure of a young woman with long black hair. She focused her camera and zoomed in on the spider monkey examining a mushroom. Rosie snapped the picture just before the monkey dropped all pretense of meditation by snatching and devouring the fungus. Then it loped over to her and complacently dropped itself into her lap.
“Yes, Charice, I’m very proud of you,” Rosie murmured to the monkey. She moved Charice enough to stretch out and thoroughly enjoy the sunshine. Why couldn’t the rest of the world be like this? Soft grasses blew about her, one leaf stretching down to tickle her nose in a completely random yet somehow rhythmic fashion. She could smell violets, daisies, and all other manner of flowers in full bloom. The sun’s rays warmed her face, making her skin feel like it cracked like a clay mask when she twitched her nose to avoid the teasing leaf. What made people think that any kind of technology was at all superior to nature in any way?
She cursed her grandfather again. Why had he had to go and invent the teleporter?
But there. She was ruining a perfect afternoon by ignoring the beauty around her in favor of the sour cybernetics that ruled the rest of her life. She closed her eyes and soaked.

Monday morning found her back in school. Rosie, oblivious to the teacher’s lecture, gazed around at the classroom’s prison walls, remembering a distant history lesson which had introduced the idea that classrooms had once had windows. She couldn’t imagine being able to stare out at the trees, waters, and wild beauty of the world outside while trapped in a “learning environment.” She decided that it would be sweet torment, seeing the freedom so near and being unable to reach it.
“Angelique. Would you please tell us what implications the teleporter has had for mankind, as your grandfather was instrumental in its invention?”
Rosie sighed and rattled off the answer the teacher wanted to hear—something about efficiency and more jobs, the minimization of waste and other such nonsense.
“Thank you. And consider detention your motivation to keep your mind on the lesson, rather than wherever it’s been for the last half hour or so.”
“Yes’m.”

She walked home that day, where she was welcomed by a lecture on her tardiness. After all, she was a Moriset. She of all people had no reason to be late. Rosie locked herself in her room, alternating between Smart Erasing her walls and mindlessly stroking Charice on her bed. Once her room was hospital-white again, she picked up one of the Smart Markers and held it up to a section of wall, then sighed, dropped it, and returned to her bed.

The following weekend, when she tried to go out to her meadow, she found her mother blocking the doorway to liberty.
“What? My homework’s done.”
“I’ve been getting disappointing reports from your teachers. They say you’re daydreaming in class and ignoring the lesson.”
Rosie said nothing.
Her mother waited for a moment, then prompted her. “Well?”
“Not like it’s the first time you’ve ever heard this.”
“You should have left these days in third grade, and they weren’t acceptable then.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll work on it.” Her tone bared the lie. She tried to get by her mother, but the older woman moved to block her.
“I think you should stop going out. It obviously has adverse effects on your education, your thinking.”
“No!” She shoved at her mother’s body. The freedom called to her just over the woman’s left shoulder.
Her father appeared and pulled her away. Rosie struggled and kicked, shrieking. Both parents forced her into her room and shut the door. She collapsed on her bed, her world in shards which cut her to bits. A despair beyond tears gripped her, and she dully reflected that she could not remember the last time her parents had touched her before that night.

She awoke in the blackness of midnight. Consciousness of cold, careless metal, of heartless machines, of imprisonment and slavery pressed in around the flame of hope and love of liberty. She felt herself fighting desperately, slashing at the lies and iron bars, feeling them retreat just out of her reach and return to the suffocation once more.
Rosie rushed to her window and flung the curtains apart. A full moon flooded her face, stars twinkling around it. The world, illuminated by the cool light of the metal moon, looked even wilder, in a barbaric way. She heaved at the window and smelled the iron of blood and smoke of Beltane fires. She heard the cry of a bird, and it was a scream of the innocence dying under the crushing weight of truth. Lady Moon poured herself out on a harsher world than she’d ever seen before, giving and expecting no warmth either of anger or love.
Yet something about this new outdoors was more life than behind Rosie in the black death of the house she shared with her parents. She turned around and looked at her bare room in its clutching glory, the tightness in her chest one of fear.
Better to be part of that other world. The barbaric life is better than the numb death.
Rosie stepped away from the window and felt the darkness swallow her. She gasped and staggered back into the light, shaking. I can’t.
Yet the moon stroked her cheek with fingers that burned with the cold. It called, commanded. She would survive for a little in the hideous monstrosity of the darkness. She faced the window, inhaled as much of the light as she could, and, turning again, slid through the room to the door. Hurry, her thoughts whispered as she opened it. The moon’s rays bled from her eyes.
Rosie paused outside her parents’ room and listened to the ignorance of their steady breaths—only for a moment—and then she’d slipped off down the stairs and to the last barricade between her and the wild freedom outside.
She didn’t look back as she crossed from the dark death to the bright life.

Feeling the moon sliding into her pores gave her such a feeling of exhilaration as she had never known. Rosie sucked it deep into her lungs and ran. She had finally surrendered not to the structure and numbness of the cyber world she left behind but to the pounding passions of the wilderness where she belonged.
Her feet—or was it the moon?—took her down a path she did not know, thickly overgrown and barely visible. This led her through a field and into a wood, where she slowed out of respect for the ancient wisdom in the trees’ sap. But the adrenaline still pounded in her temples, and she sped to a run again, bursting out of the trees and stopping just in time at the edge of a precipice.
Rosie stared down the cliff at an ocean which raged against the world that had spawned her but no longer held sway over her. Here, then, was liberty, for who could tame the wilds of the seas? If she were to be part of such a violent disregard, who could ever tell her no?
She glanced back over her shoulder, where the trees watched her. She turned her eyes to the moon, which pointed her back to the waters crashing below.
She spread out her arms and leaned forward, a laugh which heightened to a joyous scream tearing her throat as she fell.

Yeah, I hate the ending, too, but like I said, I didn't have anything to do with the plot. Hope you liked it and forgive me anyway!

Disney: Successfully Distorting America's Ideals of What Romantic Love Should Be Since 1937

Ladies and gentlemen, love is a great big load of crap.
Or, rather, what everyone thinks love to be is a great big load of crap.
Hollywood does a great job of lying to us and screwing over America's dating and marriage scenes. Your one true love will have a perfectly sculpted body, an annual salary of about $30 million, and will be an absolute moron who makes you "feel right." Well, maybe not. Maybe some of those things will be different. But who cares? It's the feelings that matter, right?
No.
Newsflash: feelings fade. Love is not just feelings. It's a lifetime commitment to actions. Marriage is a promise, which no one seems to understand these days. Commitment doesn't mean you quit because you "don't feel like it" anymore. It doesn't mean "I've fallen out of love with you." It means, "I'm going to do what's in your best interest, whether I like you right now or not, because I promised I would." It means you work through the tough parts, instead of giving up in the middle of them. Those tough parts enrich the relationship. Those tough parts are what you look back on in forty years and hold each other that much closer because you came through it.
True love really does conquer all, but you have to work for it. I'm amazed at people my age and younger who are making that commitment already. I just pray that they're more mature than I am, more ready to settle. I'll be the first person to admit that marriage does not sound like my cup of tea. It sounds like a lot of work, followed by a lot of heartache, and the rewards it offers don't sound as good as the rewards I would get from a single life (e.g., freedom, the ability to be my own person, etc.). And I'm really shocked that people are ready to settle right out of college, during college, or even before college. But I can't expect everyone to mature at the same slow speed I do. I just hope they know what they're doing. However, the divorce rate in this country is definitely telling me otherwise. I have a theory on this. Part of the divorce rate is from lack of sexual abstinence. People just keep remembering that Someone Else who was "better." Sorry if that's graphic; I never promised to water things down. The other part, according to my theory, is that people don't understand love as they're signing up for it when they get married. They're driven by hormones, and they don't think through what they're doing at a wedding. It's crazy, now that parents are no longer arranging marriages, marriages are failing, because people don't apply logic to a situation. They don't assess every part of their potential spouse, as the parents do with a clear, unbiased mind. They go with what they feel, and when those feelings are over, they want to back out. Another newsflash: Marriage is NOT just a dating relationship; you can't just "break up" when you're "tired of it." In the words of my friend Phillipa Gordon, "You've tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that. There, that's the first sensible things I've ever said in my life. I wonder how I managed it? (Anne of the Island--L.M. Montgomery)"
How to avoid the soon-to-be classic romantic blunder? Don't settle immediately. There's more to life than romance. Find out what it is before you sign your life away to that one special person, whom you better be sure is worth it in your mind and soul, as well as your heart. Just the one can steer you wrong. Prayer and logic are needed along with that "feeling". Don't be a statistic. Live first, and then take that life experience with you into marriage. Prince Charming doesn't exist. Nor does Cinderella. Don't look for that perfect person; God will put him or her into your life when you're ready. Focus on living, really living the abundant life Christ meant for us (John 10:10). Romance is not the greatest adventure life has to offer. God is. "That lovin' feelin'" will disappear. God won't, and a marriage centered on Him cannot fail, though it won't always be a bed of roses. Fairytales aren't real. "Happily ever after" is an overall assessment which means "And they were mostly happy in the knowledge that they could get through anything, because they had promised to love each other and serve their Lord, rather than marrying because they were 'in love'." Don't trick yourself into the belief that being single means you're not good enough. It just means you're not ready yet. And that's ok. Go enjoy your freedom while you can, and settle down when God says it's time.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go and enjoy my independence some more.

More wisdom

There is one word that successfully and completely sums up all of my feelings with regards to life as of late:

Rawr.

A Lesson on Accepting Pathetic

Being human is frustrating for someone like me who want to fix everyone's problems. It is beyond my ability to heal someone's dying grandfather who is approaching death. I can't even speed along the process in order to end his suffering without being imprisoned. I can't solve world hunger or save the environment. I can't cure AIDS, cancer, or even a common cold (though Theraflu does wonders for that--serious recommendation on that one, folks). I can't end all my friends' family problems. I can't fix my boyfriend's body when it aches and stops him from doing things he wants to do. I can't force my best guy friend's crush to fall in love with him, too. I can't stop my best friend's depression, which just kills me. I remember that demon quite well, and I might never forget him. I can't even force myself to focus on God and the good things I should; my mind always slips off unbidden into some dark corner of which I'm ashamed later. There are so many limitations to being human. There are so many situations where I have to be content with fighting the enemy as best I can and leaving the rest up to God. There are even some where I have to admit complete defeat and go running to my Father in a rout. There are situations that are so big I can't wrap my mind around them, and all I can do is pray.
That's it.
All I can do is talk to someone I've never seen in person (literally, here. We're not talking about seeing Him in people's actions. I mean a legit, face-to-face confrontation) and wait for one of His usual three answers in those cases: Yes, No, or Not yet. God knows I'm the most impatient person ever born, and I really don't think I'm exaggerating on that point. It amuses Him to continue to tell me, "You don't need to know yet," when I ask Him what He wants from my life. He's been giving me that same answer since last November. Instead of teaching me patience that way, I wish He would've just zapped me with it when I first asked Him for it. And thus we reach a paradox.
Actually, I'm not sure that was a paradox. The sentence just sounded cool.
But I digress from my initial frustration.
I've always believed in actions speaking louder than words. So quite frankly, I'd rather start breathing life back into the dying grandfather than take my knees to the floor and my pleas to Heaven's door. Praying in and of itself doesn't feel productive to me, which, I suppose, is why I don't do it nearly as much as I probably should. There's so much to be done in the world, and I don't want to waste God's time by telling Him what I think He should be doing about it. I'm under the impression that He already knows. Being omniscient will do that to you. Frankly, I get irritated when I'm doing about 15 different things at the same time, and someone comes up and reminds me what I need to be doing in regards to problem #6. Really, I'm on it, just give me a second! And God's holding together a whole universe! That means he's got to make sure these two galaxies don't run into each other and this star's death won't trigger the wrong reaction, and these planets keep rotating around the right star and, seriously, who's going to bother worrying about our little podunk planet, not to mention the tiny, broken people within it?
God does.
Who do we think we are, putting demands and getting impatient with the God who not only created and maintains everything we know, but also everything we haven't been able to see far out enough to discover yet? As we expand our ability to turn our vision out into that teeming void called space, we just keep finding more and more mind-blowing wonders from a mind-blowing God. He's so far outside the tiny box of what we can understand, and we've got the nerve, or rather the stupidity, to think we have the right to rule anything.
And yet, somehow, He has lowered Himself so we might approach Him and actually ask Him for things we need help with, as children ask their father.
Sit back and try to wrap your mind around that.

I don't know when that turned into a sermon, but it definitely put some things in perspective for me.
He's so good.

Oh, hey.

Hey.
This is me.
Posting a blog.
Because I haven't for quite some time.
I have more to do in life than weigh people down with what I'm thinking.
Oh, the irony of that.
Happy face.

You know, I just realized that that could totally be taken as a poem. I love accidental happies like that.

Hello, confusion, frustration, and a whole bunch of other emotions I don't want to deal with....

It all started at 1:30 this morning with a phone call from my father.
Let me make two things very clear:
1) I never get phone calls at 1:30 in the morning.
2) My father usually goes to bed at 10, 11 if he's feeling rebellious and night-owly.
I remember very little of the actual conversation, being half-asleep at the time, but I do remember that he was speaking matter-of-factly about life-changing matters. My grandfather is currently in the hospital, and that's really tearing my dad apart, because he's been hurled against the brick wall known as reality. He's finally had to face the fact that his parents aren't immortal, and that's been really hard for him to accept. But he told me this morning that God had told him Grandpa might die, but that was ok. That in itself is good. The weird thing was that my dad doesn't really believe that God speaks to today's generation except through the Bible. But he was talking like he and God had just sat down over a cup of hot chocolate and gotten everything all worked out. Then he asked me to pray for a friend of his, who was going through some really rough times. And then my father wrapped up the conversation thus: "I think it's time to really start living for Christ. Will you do that with me?" Ok, my father doesn't really do the "radical faith" thing, but something's changed. I called my brother, who'd gotten a similar call not long before, and we tried to figure out what was going on, to no avail. God bless my boyfriend, who took a 2 AM phone call to hear a very confused girl tell him absolutely nothing except that her father needed prayer and might be off his rocker. In any case, I'd appreciate loads of prayer on that front. It's super-confusing. My mom, who could dissect the psychology of a rock, can't even figure this out.

Ok, now on to the rest of the day.... It took me 20 minutes to print off one piece of paper in the library this morning. Woohoo for wicked-fast technology. This left me about 5 minutes for breakfast before my 8:00 class, so I was stressed from that. Fortunately, the prof let us out early, and I had time for an hour nap before chapel, which was good. I woke up refreshed, but still totally weirded out about my dad. Things went relatively smoothly until I tried to take another nap around 3, being totally exhausted from my doings since my earlier nap. But the world woke up and decided to conduct a rather noisy symphony...or cacophony, rather. I gave up the nap in a bit of frustration and went to take a shower, which served to soothe me.
I got a new phone about a month ago, and the representative told me I might be able to get unlimited texting for $4.95/month, which I'm totally on board with. But I've called him about 4 times since then about it, and every time he hasn't checked. So I called him today, determined to get an answer. He had me call the phone company itself, and I jumped through a whole bunch of loops to find out that the request for texting had been denied. *sigh*
I recently interviewed Dr. Gary Chapman (the Love Languages guy--big deal!!!!) by email. However, I completely misunderstood the assignment and thought that his agent was the editor I was doing the article for, and she also happened to be the go-between. Leave me alone; it was Liz Johnson (the agent) vs. Lin Johnson (the editor). No joke. So I emailed the editor (now that I've got all the right answers for an article that would focus on Dr. Chapman's new book, which would be par for that particular magazine) asking what she wanted for the article, and she tells me she wants an article about Dr. Chapman himself. Both Dr. Chapman and his agent are currently on vacation now. Go figure.
My neighbor just came in, saw me glaring at my computer screen, and kissed my cheek (no, that's not weird; it's just a college-girl thing) by way of asking me what was wrong. And then she and her roommate listened and sympathized while I ranted to them. Then they made me laugh, told me they loved me, and left.

You know, looking back on this post, I was writing it to vent, but God has used it for His glory. Everytime something happened to frustrate me, He provided something to calm. Great is His faithfulness! I'm still stressed (it is the end of a college semester, after all), but I know He'll pull me through. I may resemble Laffy Taffy when He's done, but I'll make it, and be better for it, I'm sure.

Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens.
Your faithfulness stretches to the sky.

What a God....

Snickers

No, this post has absolutely nothing to do with the candy of that name. Though that particular sweet is slightly a favorite with me. I could go for one right about now. Then again, I could usually go for chocolate.
Now, wouldn't you know it? I was just so derailed by the thought of Snickers candy that I totally can't remember what I was going to write in this post.
It might have had something to do with the fact that I told my boyfriend about half an hour ago that I was going to sleep. But then I was going to watch "just one more video" and Youtube takes forever to load. Not my fault. Though I am feeling pretty sneaky, which generally leads one towards feelings that cause snickeryness.
And that made a heck of a lot more sense in my head.
Which currently feels thoroughly vacant.
As it is Spring Break, my brain has left me behind and gone to Florida or the Bahamas or the Vatican or somewhere, without my knowledge or permission, leaving me even spacier than usual.
Ironically, I think this post has better syntax and higher diction (CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE THOROUGHLY INVADES MY LIFE) than my other posts.
Hmmmm....
This leads me to the completely logical conclusion that I write better without a brain to hold me back.
And I'm quite sure I'll be as baffled by this post as the rest of you.
I should lose my mind more often.
Much love, and God bless!
I really am going to sleep now.