only the young.

It's becoming a bit of a habit for me to write up a little blurb for my birthday, and let's face it, I love routine and tradition and nostalgia, but while the years before have been a little more humorous, I'm a little more subdued this week.  I'd blame it on old age, but seeing as the only thing I wanted for my birthday was the Bloomsbury Harry Potter set, I don't think that's it.  If anything, on this day upon which I hit that quarter of a century, I feel really young.

Recent events have had me quieter than usual, pondering how everything has come about and what my involvement has been, or in some cases hasn't been.

Yesterday was an exhausting day as I left Provo early in the morning with college friends and roommates to go help our college roommate and friend say goodbye to her beautiful and sweet husband.  His death isn't one I feel comfortable writing about, but I will say that it was tragic and happened far too soon for this world.  I sat marveling at the remembrance of such an extraordinary human being, and then marveled further at my friend's remarkable courage and strength.

I felt a lot of shame, too.  I've not always been the best sort of friend.  I don't always keep in touch, and sometimes I let my selfish desires get in the way, and there are times I'd rather be alone than cultivate those relationships.

It was humbling.

My 25th year was relatively easy.  I found a job that I love, made new relationships that I cherish, and rebuilt the support system that has been so integral to my functioning as a normal human being.  The mistakes I made were a little bit different than those I'd made before - to the extent where I feel as though I actually am beginning to grow up and be an adult.  In a lot of ways I feel as though I've come full circle.  My hopes used to be along the lines of finding a husband and making money and improving my makeup collection and learning how to do new things, and in a lot of ways I still hope for those things (although I don't have any room left for more makeup), but my desires for the year during which I say I'm 25 are different.

I'd like to become the person you can count on.  I want to be someone you can reach out to when you're troubled, or when you need a listening ear.  It means I need to stop talking so much, and I need to stop being so selfish, and I need to be a more charitable human being.  I want you to feel confident in your trust of me - that you know I will always be genuine and real.  I want to be more aware of my surroundings and those within the vicinity, that I can be an emotional force for good in the lives of those who might need it.

Don't you worry.  I'm not entirely just solemn today.  I bought myself new Pilates reformer classes and I got to help a girl for a pageant (and people, she's going to be a force to be reckoned with) and I ate a cupcake and I'm tempted to go take a nap and I get to see my unique and wonderful version of family later tonight.

Because in short, life is good.

c-thru

I confess that it's kind of nice to have someone see through my layers of plastic wrap without any assistance at all.

Some stories to come.

Stay tuned.

bad bad gulbrandsen.

For the most part I'm a fairly agreeable person.  And I get along well with people.  I just tend to like people, and conversing with them, and getting to know what makes them tick.  Unfortunately there are a few that I'm not particularly fond of.  Truthfully, there are three.  Yes, I recognize this makes me a bad person to admit that I don't care for three individuals out there in this world, but after 25 years on earth, and only disliking three other human beings who I know personally, I feel like that's kind of a success.  If I end up leaving this world disliking around 9-12 people in total, then I think that's a total triumph.

But here's the kicker: I love being a writer and sometimes I really love it because when I have to name a character (or give a pseudonym to a real individual for privacy) who I mildly despise... guess which names I have to choose from!

Ha!

snippets.

It was just one of those days.  You know, the kind where you have to go take care of an arrest warrant in your name and watch all of the people go before you who can't afford to pay and so they're carted off to jail with kids watching.  Thankfully I wasn't that person... and thankfully my dad doesn't want to kill me.

I hate when this happens.  I was spending all of this time in my car today, and I had all of this inspiration of things I wanted to say, and now it's just crickets.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that it's Monday, and Monday is the day my ghost writing entries are due, and Monday is my day off of work, and Monday is a more stressful day for me than I'd like.  It was particularly so today because I knew what I needed to write and it was eating at me.  First I was sitting at church yesterday, and I couldn't pay attention because I kept running the scenario over in my head.  Then I was falling asleep last night after typing out ideas and I felt a little ill because of the gravity of it all.  Today I was driving to pilates and I wanted to kick myself for letting the arc get to this point.  And finally I went outside to write.

I'm not really sure why I don't spend more time outside in our yard.  It's quite pretty back there.  The trees are the right sort of overwhelming, and there are plenty of places to sit, and it's actually relatively peaceful for the neighborhood we are in.  It's the first I've spent writing back there, and it took me back to this little area we had in our massive yard in Connecticut.  There was this tiny little grove of trees - I mean TINY - and it was perfect and it felt like it was all mine.  I used to gather up a book, a notebook, a pen, a water bottle, and an Oat's 'N Honey granola bar (or sometimes a Peanut Butter one) and just go sit there on the ground.  I would sit on the needled grass, and I would feel like I was in some sort of magical spot from a C.S. Lewis novel, and maybe even half expected to see my life transformed every time I entered and exited that small area.

Why am I writing this?

There are so many parts of me that are so insanely sheltered.  I read all of these teen novels and I'm amazed at what these fourteen year olds are saying and doing.  I was eleven and twelve in that house, and I loved feeling like a child, and to think that children are growing up so much faster freaks me out.  And then I have to go write as if I'm one of them and I'm even more freaked out.

A character made a serious decision.  I say that as if I didn't write it.  But really - she's so real in my head now, and it was the right direction to go, and it freaked me out because it is so outside of my comfort zone.

Whatever happened to just sitting in pretty little nooks of trees (can I call it that?), reading Nancy Drew, and listening to the bugs and animals in the surrounding wood?

lit.

While I was at Lake Powell (also known as Heaven, or That Place Which Makes Me Whole Again), I had four different books packed into my bag.  I'm sure it would have been much lighter, and I obviously didn't get through all four books, but ever since I was young, I've carried a book with me everywhere.  When I saw the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls and saw Rory always needed a book with her, I felt validated.  When I was eight and nine years old it was Nancy Drew and when I was twelve and thirteen it was Harry Potter and when I was sixteen and seventeen it was Fitzgerald with a little bit of Agatha Christie thrown in there.

I love reading.  I love love love reading.  I'll never stop.  And I love to read multiple books at one time.  When I was a kid and had the time to finish a book every two or three days, I'd be able to satisfy my need for multiple genres and topics and plots as they moved through quickly.  But these days I am lucky if I get thirty minutes of reading a day.  So instead of running through book after book after book, I read them all at the same time.  I've found I will get sucked into certain stories faster than others, which means I'll then finish it as quickly as possible in order to eat it up.  But I'm usually balancing some nonfiction, some fiction, and some easy reading.

There were quite a few of teen pieces I read at the start of the summer, mostly so I could get into the mindset of how different authors handle the voice of the teenager, and particularly the teenage girl.  I'm still trying to figure it out, and I think I'm a little cleaner than some, but a lot of that may just be that my teenage years were so innocent I can't dream of writing a slightly scandalous 16-year-old girl.

Here are the titles I've read this summer.  Any recommendations?

Surprisingly I never read this as a teenager.  There were a couple of days there at the end of May that I had away from work, and I sat by my pool and read this one.  What I enjoyed was the narrator being a teenage boy.  What I didn't enjoy is the landscape.  Don't ask me why, because I don't have a concrete answer, but I have never liked the American Southwest in literature.

I highly recommend this.  It's not for everyone - language is harsh and intense, and the subject matter is dark and difficult.  The honesty and the pain of what are essentially kids fighting off disease that will define them for the rest of their lives is told beautifully through a format that is stark and short and thoughtful.  This author understands how to explain without needing explanation.

There's a lot of controversy surrounding this one, and I know the validity is in question, but it was interesting and provocative nonetheless. 

Painful and frightening, the novel of a girl fighting her inner demons while she reconciles her feelings over her friend's death is haunting.  Haunting, mostly, because you know it actually happens.

Whitney and I were wandering through Barnes & Noble, saw this title, and I picked it up out of curiosity.  It takes a while to get into, and it's not nearly as strong as anything else that I read this summer, but it's an easy one to get through.  It's the Bachelor meets the Hunger Games.  And it's got some really unlikeable characters.

Currently Reading...

Saw this one in the bookstore and it immediately caught my attention.  It's what I read down at LP, and I loved everything about it.  It's fiction, but fragmented fiction.  The book is comprised of stories of different women in different stages of life.  They struggle through challenges, and they're a little uncertain, and they're extremely relatable.  I still have a few chapters to go, but my favorite thus far has been the story of two women who meet up in a posh NYC park; former working women who are now mothers and who feel like they have to be someone they're not, simply for appearances.  It's the discussion that feminism has given us: we have the opportunity and the freedom to be working moms or moms or working women but we feel so much pressure from ourselves to appear as something important.  I can tell you that I feel that pressure every day - do I focus on being an intellectual or do I continue with a job that makes me happy?  Who is to say what makes us better?

NOTE: The content and the language are harsh.  Not for someone who is sensitive to that sort of thing.

Speaking of feminism... I studied excerpts of this all through college and now I'm finally reading it in its entirety.  It is the ultimate discussion of what we need to develop our minds.

I'm pretty sure I'll be reading this for the rest of my life, until I finally finish.  I guess I could read the abridged version, but I feel like that might be cheating.

NEXT UP:

Same author as Clean.  I'm excited to see how she handles teenage mental health.

Perfect prose.  Can't wait.

Whitney recommended this to me.  Leslie just finished it on the boat (she literally had it on the ski boat because she couldn't stop until she finished).  I'm interested to see how compelling it is.

And finally, I love reading and re-reading my favorite titles, like the Harry Potter series, or the Chronicles of Narnia, or anything from Azar Nafisi.  The above photos are a lot to get through for the rest of the summer though, so I think I'll save my re-reading for Fall.