I hadn’t read a novel in years. Since before I married Talon. But yesterday I finished Where The Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens, and suddenly my whole body is full and empty at the same time. The eerily familiar feeling of something being ripped from my insides, a piece of me taken with the closing of the book, my soul forever entwined with that of the characters. My heart is so full with their beautiful love, the struggles of humanity and nature and life, and the happy-sad ending that is both so unlike anything I’ve ever read and so normal. I hadn’t forgotten what reading was like, but I had let the importance of that feeling slip away. I am so fulfilled by simply knowing the stories someone else wove, experiencing their words in a way that breaks from simply words and becomes something I can be immersed in. I’ve missed reading. Now I want to gobble up every book in my apartment (which is a lot). I can’t get the stories of Kya and Tate and the marsh out of my mind.
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I wrote the following as part of an assignment for my Environmental Biology course this semester. This is a topic that I am quite passionate about and could write about for days, but I only needed one page, and here it is. Part of my personal brand is hating cows. The initial reason for this is multifaceted and honestly a little embarrassing, but it has since evolved into a deep distaste for the cattle industry. After learning about the scope of related destruction to rainforests in a class in 2018, I even stopped eating beef for a year. My husband’s dairy allergy has limited the amount of “baby cow growth fluid” I consume. Of course I had to watch Cowspiracy the second I discovered its existence. It was an interesting documentary. For the most part I already knew the base facts, but I did learn a few things. For one, no environmental officials seemed to have expansive knowledge or interest in the topic of agricultural destruction. Unlike the documentarian, however, I don’t think this is part of a mass conspiracy. There may be an element of fear in the lackluster reactions—agribusiness is powerful, and as I also learned from the documentary, can be murderous in South America—but I think it has more to do with the fact that animal agriculture is so important. America—civilization in general—depends upon agriculture. Humanity depends upon agriculture. Environmental organizations and government agencies can afford to go after big oil because it is not a fundamental component of the human existence. We’ve only dealt with fossil fuels for a couple centuries. Agriculture has been around for millennia. This extends past the fact that all humans have to eat, and towards the fact that attacking agriculture attacks the everyman. There are no small family oil rigs. There are, always have been, and always will be, small family farms. Fighting the negative environmental effects of animal agriculture is not just hard to market and fundraise with, as said in the documentary, but also political and social suicide. I'm a sucker for a good metaphor. When I was in early high school, I was surrounded by the kind of people who read simply for pleasure. They were, as the writer of my twelfth-grade English textbook would say, escapist readers. They propagated the idea that we shouldn't shred books down to their individual parts to find deeper meaning. The curtains are blue; the curtains are blue. Their crowning sentiment was that books say what they mean, and no more. And while I would still argue that my twelfth-grade English textbook writer was a pretentious prick, I'm quite proud that I've moved on from that crowd. Because although maybe when an author says that the curtains are blue they say that simply because why not blue, there is absolutely nothing wrong with also deciding that the blue means something to you. Because, as YA-giant John Green so often says, books belong to their readers. And this reader wants to think about things. She wants to take the world for more than just face value, she wants to dig deep and pull people apart into their component pieces and try to figure out what makes them tick. She is so deeply unsatisfied with so many people's answer to the question of "why?" because people never pull the truth out from inside them, explain the whole background and every bit of reason to it. They just go with the easy, even if they believe it's the hard. She's been told that science explains the how and religion the why, but "By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability." People get really into that whole New Years' Resolutions "new year, new me" kind of thing. And although I've never really been someone to give myself elaborate (or at the very least, formal) goals about things, I love the idea of it. I love the idea of that whole "start fresh" mentality. In early January of 2013, I would end a lot of sentences with "but what the heck, it's 2013!" In the social media world, I suppose this is called "rebranding."
And so, I am rebranding. Junior year of high school I took a break from learning AutoCAD to take some web design classes. I learned HTML and CSS, and became somewhat familiar with JavaScript. This summer, it is my intention to become intimately familiar with JavaScript, and refresh my memory on the other two, and then finally create my own website... or revamp this one. But I got sick of waiting for this summer. New year, new me, right? Love Letters and Blog Posts is no more. I would like to formally welcome you all to The Glitter Bonfire. When I was in elementary school, we would often watch a short animated movie in the days surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This movie is called Our Friend, Martin, and it's about a couple of kids who go back in time and -- you guessed it! -- meet Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was their age. If you haven't watched it, please take the time to. You won't regret it. When I was also in elementary school, I had an issue with MLK. I couldn't tell you why, and I'm still not sure, but I didn't like talking about him. I'm the same way with Anne Frank and 9/11, or at least, I was until I watched the movie Selma. (Which, apparently, is streaming free on both Amazon Prime and Hulu for today's holiday, and I strongly suggest watching it.) I saw the movie in an old theater in a neighboring town, and the tickets were at a discount and I probably cried. Around the same time in school, I was learning about Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience, which strongly influenced King's actions. I'm a sucker for blatant shows of humanity, and that's all Selma was. I was touched. Not to mention that police brutality and segregation by incarceration were gracing every headline; Selma appeared incredibly pertinent. And it was, of course. Now I have a new thought on my mind. It's no secret that I'm a pacifist. I hate war and anything to do with it. There's no moral excuse for it, and all sorts of other issues. But that's a discussion for another day. Anyway, I realized last night that we do not remember the people who did amazing things or accomplished great tasks or implemented revolutions through violence. I can remember General George Washington, but only because he was also a president. I remember Robespierre, but nobody likes him. I remember Hugo Chavez, but we look down on him. And of course I remember violent events, such as the American and French Revolutions. But the people we remember are Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. All over our world are violent, violent revolutions, some of which we support and some of which we actively disagree with, but who do we have a bank holiday named after? That's right. Martin Luther King, Jr. And so, as we embrace this day off, it's important for all of us to remember the point of this holiday: to remember and to celebrate the accomplishments of the man it was named after. Not only his efforts to reveal the fact that everyone is equal no matter the color of their skin, no matter where they came from or who their great- great- great-grandparents were, but also the idea that great things can happen without violence or weaponry. You can get what you want without having to hit anyone. If you feel like you do, then maybe that thing you're trying to get really isn't what you need. Thank you, Martin Luther King, Jr., for revealing that to the world.
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I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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