From 12.10.2009

Finals are over. I am biting my nails waiting for grades, mostly to see the damage in Civ I. This morning as I was submitting poetry for the spring publication, I found myself unknowingly bypassing an entrance interview and getting signed into the Magazine Publication and Literary Criticism class.

I wonder if it's a difficult course to get into? I wonder how I drunkenly stumble through everyday life, completely unaware of what's going on around me. Life happens only as my blurry goggles see it.

Today the Prof. told me "Transgender Barbie" is pretty much a shoe-in, because he has the final say in what ultimately gets printed. I thought, wouldn't publication be a helpful skill to have in the creative writing and psychology fields?

I asked if there was room left in the class. He said he didn't really need anymore students, but he could make room for me. And like that, a form appeared for me to give to the registration people, an instructor approval form to take a class.

All this evidence, physical proof in the form of teacher comments, grades, and it still feels like someone else is getting all the bonus points. I'm doing all the work, but not feeling any consistent reward.

It is completely and utterly ridiculous. Or I am.

Shriveled up bits of my old life remain, but I will continue to layer on the education and gifts I am acquiring, not to bury all the bad but maybe freeze dry it so I don't make the same mistakes over again.

On with the poetry.

This one was hard for me to finish, at least during the revision process. The first half basically came out perfect, but the second half was a struggle, as I like to carry a "soap box" with me and climb up to preach sometimes. I'm not even sure what that means, the whole "soap box" comment. I heard it a lot in class though. I think I made the second half easier to swallow, by letting the 'snarkiness' (I hear that a lot from the Prof. too) come back through. I get excited over issues that are important, what can I say? It was a blast to read aloud, I can tell you that! **This was a class exercise where we had to write 20 lines all in one sentence. Good times! It's not an easy feat.. The Sticker Racheal Whitley

For years, I tirelessly searched, hoping to one day catch for myself the Crayola blue square which surrounds a sunshine yellow equal sign, the sign of equality; and yet, rarely do strangers actually understand the emblem, or the meaning it holds so vast and so expansive: a proclamation of rebellion behind this sticker, which I insist on placing everywhere, like my car, my folders and notebooks I buy at discount prices because they are plain and I know I’ll decorate them anyway with this sticker, a glaring representation and bold declaration of what I believe, a message for the underdogs, a defiant swing at conservatives, the radical right-wing morons who robotically preach obscene messages that declare, ‘God loves everyone BUT you’ in the crusade they justify through literal

interpretations of historical literature, mostly metaphorical examples of Life’s hardships-- like the infamous story of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, where God [in his infinite wisdom] burned them to the ground, as they had become playgrounds of wickedness (what with all the rape and pillaging going on); this, the foundation for the Christian fight against homos: since God destroyed these cities that, statistically speaking, contained a percentage of gays, they leap to the conclusion that God must really HATE gays, and in this blind leap, they ignore other important causal factors behind the two cities “Gone Wild”: the rapists, for example, were not exclusively gay, and so rationally, it seems fair that God destroyed the sum of ALL evil, not exclusively the Rainbow Gang; hands-on observation shows when this cultural diversity migrates, drastic improvements emerge, with remodeling historic homes, sprucing up neighborhoods, adding pizzazz with rainbow flags, little adopted orphans now playing on cobbled roads-- still, I am baffled at the limited prospect of our evolution to a rational society, with our national mindset out of whack, but maybe the country will wake up and maybe give a go at the old ‘practice what you preach’ proverb, [“ALL men are created equal” my ass], I mean, hell, John Locke coined that phrase and even he didn’t believe it; but in this millennium, this age of information, our definition of morality should make more sense compared to centuries ago, yet, somehow it does not; so America, the land of the free, is not really free at all.