Never Walked In High Heels

When I was little, I used to love when summer was finally winding down. In June I would come home from school crying and asking, “What will I do for three whole months without school?” Back then, life followed a plan and June/July/August represented a purposeful part of that plan. Worse yet, the rhythms of the year were definite. September meant new shoes and colored pencils as I was heading back to school. Then came Christmas, Valentines Day, and when I was just beginning to give up hope, came the dreaded three months without school. Now that I have twelve months a year without school, I’m not exactly sure what the end of summer means anymore.

The truth is, without consistently being in a classroom with the dates splashed on the bulletin board, I have difficulty telling what time of year it is anymore. The holidays marked by paper cutouts with snowflakes and candy canes stapled to the wall come and go without much recognition in my own life. There aren’t spring themed words or seasonal linear graphs that turn out to be in the shape of Santa Claus. Now the months just slip by and I am surprised on October 31^st, my doorbell rings and there are children asking for candy.

This of course is the crux of the change from childhood into independent adulthood. Your life is no longer well defined. You don’t have guide posts and deadlines to set. Grades, when you are a child, are a form of currency so that your first year out of college one can’t help but be a little bit confused when they hold cash in their hand rather than a report card. There is no rhythm to the seasons; there is no plan in what you are doing in your life and perhaps most disturbingly, there are no awards for perfect attendance.

If you are working in one of the creative fields such as a visual artist, actor, or writer, the situation is even worse. The days slip through your fingers as quickly as water until you realize you have spent the entire day looking at a blank computer screen and only managed to type out a few words. Here in this adult life, one is forced to quantify oneself not by merit or test grades, but by inner thoughts and actions. It’s the conversations that an individual has with themselves and the results thereof to give you an idea of their self worth. The rest of the world’s actions are justified by paychecks. When someone is an actress or writer, there is no such thing as regular paycheck and so the end of summer. As I continue to go to auditions and look at my blank screen while attempting to figure out what comes next.

Were it not for a gradual shift in weather, needing my jacket at night, pulling out the fall fashions and looking longingly through catalogues, I might not even notice the shift in seasons. This is one of the many reasons why I consider it a blessing to live in a place that has winter, spring, summer, and fall. For me the end of summer doesn’t mean the end of free time. As much as I miss the rhythm and cadence that comes from the school year, the product of it is actually a huge blessing. Western education teachers say money is the most precious form of currency, it does nothing to acknowledge the expensive nature of the economics of time, health, and happiness. I will continue to work on whatever, even if the year is ebbing away unnoticed. Nothing reminds me of that blessing now, more than the end of summer.

Last week I was watching my next door neighbor head off to her first day of school; her bright pink backpack and pigtails almost made the entire image look like a cliché rather than real life. Even though I swore I never would be, I was slightly jealous of her returning to the structure that comes at this time of year. But most of all, I was jealous of all the discoveries that lay ahead of her within her own time.

The year is more than three quarters of the way finished and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world. As a challenge to myself I have decided as a new years resolution back in January that I would go an entire year without watching a single news update. As a result, it would not be too much to say that from my point of view, the entire world has changed. I find that as a result of not listening to the news I have much more love to give and many more experiences that I cannot help but think of whenever I enter a pub and hear the men arguing back and forth.

The people who are directly in front of me in my life, I am able to look at and think of more often. I am no longer interested in what their argument is and how I can persuade them to agree with me. I watch people as they talk to me and become concerned with their news and their lives, realizing that what the media constantly puts on as being crucial doesn’t matter so much as examining the lives of the people directly in front of me and seeing what exactly needs to be done to improve our own condition. The most important people in the world are not the ones with the power that live in big houses and have three different secretaries, rather they are the individuals who go out of their way to show me love and are able to experience life in tandem with me.

Furthermore, not watching the news ended all hopes of there ever being any sort of justifiable television watching. The news is the appropriate form of procrastination when one really stops to think about it. It’s the pretense of being actively concerned with the world and hoping to reshape it combined with a sense of false charity that allows an individual to feel good about himself and remaining educated while still sitting on the couch all day transfixed with what the news reporter is saying.

And finally as a result of not watching the news, I worry less; or at the very least, I worry about different things. I realize that the over hyped and manufactured fantasies that scroll across the bottom of one’s television screen are just another turn in the cycle of history. And while technology, products and quite possibly the fashionable length of hem lines differ from generation to generation, the major debates do not. What is the role of the government in the life of the individual? How can we remain safe, protected, and free? What needs to be done to make the world better and what is being done to provide fewer amenities to those who actually need more?

I think with three quarters of the year already passed and myself blissfully unaware of what exactly has gone on in the news, I am forced to realize that the media hysteria which is masterfully fashioned as some sort of guerilla psychology is simply a form of socially acceptable attempts to change the world. Changing the world has never been something that is particularly well thought of or thought out within the drawing rooms of society. Talking about altering the world might be popular, but actually doing so and evading peoples’ minds and attitudes in order to see a necessary revolution is undoubtedly frowned upon. And so the people who watch the news are able to start off repetitively that which reporters have said with a twinkle in their eye, hoping that the rest of America will earn their trust and see current events from their own point of view rather than actually going forward and discovering how to improve conditions and make changes themselves.