queJimenez...a pieced and quilted writing life

Just Fly.

 

A reminder to have a lovely Sunday!

Paz...Ki

Heart 2 God

We         

           should

    always      

   honor  

    our          

             dreams.

      -Ki

 

Go dream wildly today and

share it with 

every living soul

you 

encounter.

Go ahead.

I dare you to make them

come true.

 

Roller coasters can be fun.

*Study aids. Click for larger, uncut picture.

Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I learn that I don't and that I need more time and life experiences.

Hop aboard the greatest roller coaster of all time. We've got twists and turns and loops and speed and sudden stops. Guaranteed fun, thrills, screams, laughter, excitement--soon as you sit back, strap up, and settle in. 

Picture me riding this roller coaster called life.

At the end of last week, after I settled on my plans to pursue the MFA Creative Writing-mind you, I scooted an email out to my creative writing professor from a couple of semesters ago telling her my decisions, and asking her opinion. It was a long email. A vent, if you will. I told her I wanted someone to be honest with me. And that I needed to know if it was truly worth it and potentially helpful for me to pursue an MFA instead of the others. I also told her that I wanted someone to be honest with me--the reality is that most writers won't publish, I'm fine with that--where should I focus my energies to position myself to not be "degreeful" and jobless in five years. I also told her I need someone to be honest with me.

Before I tell you how she rocked my world, let me remind you what my life goals are:

-Full-time, at-home, homeschooling mom till kids are well into double-digit ages (teenagers or later).

-Writing life (both academic and creative).

-Artist life (showing in select shows once or twice a year).

-Maintaining an edible garden year round.

-Part-time adjunct professor teaching composition, literature, and creative writing.

-Baking extraordinaire.

-Teaching textile art classes, when life permits.

Basically, when I grow up I want to be a stay-at-home, homeschooling, mom, artist/writer, part-time professor and full-time gardener and baking extraordinaire.

I know, not complicated and highly probable. ^__^

Back to my wonderful professor (who has a Ph.D.). She told me that I needed to think bigger, brighter, higher, and further. She told me that I was capable of more. She told me that no matter how academic I become, I would never loose my creativity. She told me I didn't need an MFA to become a great writer--as I am already on my way. She told me that I had something special to offer students. She told me I can. I can. I can.

I can get a Ph.D.

And that I should seriously, as in stop thinking everything your thinking now, put thought into what I can accomplish, and what I should accomplish--again, a Ph.D.

Hold on, whiplash. Let me fix my neck.

I never allowed myself to think that high. MA English? sure, I can accomplish that. Ph.D.? Oh wait, pump your breaks, you do know my name is Kiandra, right? You do know who you're talking to, correct?

*Where I school, click for larger, uncut picture.

Before I type on for another thousand words, because let's be honest, I am going to discuss this thoroughly; let me tell you that you must never set your goals at what you "think" you can do. No, you must set them higher, further, out in the realm of Jupiter, Saturn, or dare I say Neptune. What ever you think you can do, you can do--plus about 75% more. 

She is an amazing professor. Loving and gentle, but also insightful, wise, and willing to challenge you with honesty. She sees the you that you don't see. Every student should have one, five would be great, professors like this. And I urge you, cultivate relationships with those professors who care, are wise, and are willing to offer guidance. Stay after class. Ask them about their life/academic/professional experiences. Let them know who you are. Express why you are pursuing what you are pursuing. Build relationships. 

But first you need to get clear about who you are, and what you want. Gosh, here I go again--I know it is getting old--but this is one reason why I stepped away from fb. I found myself defining myself through outside influences. And, let me be the first to tell you that I am not that impressionable. But, something happens when you watch or are keen to what others are doing. You start to define yourself in relation to them. "Oh, I don't want to do that...Oh, that's what I want/use to want...Oh, what if I did that then/now/in the future." Please don't get me wrong, I do think this is healthy, and is a normal part of human behavior, but the problem is comparing ourselves to too many people, and people who are not truly aligned to our life goals. 

We don't think we do it; the comparing sneaks up on us--perhaps through the back door, or a crack in the window seal of our psyche. Before you know it, you start to synthesize who you are based on others, society, etc.

Let me go off on a meaningful tangent here. I wrote a paper last week about a book I'm reading, Moll Flanders--Daniel DeFoe, and I wrote that her identity was a synthesized identity based off her constant reactions to what labels society (oppressive to women at the time-17th Century British) places on her. Moll becomes a prostitute, a criminal, she marries her brother, the list goes on and on, but all of these reactions to her situations is because she lacks identity.

That is what I do not want for myself. I want to make career and educational decisions because I am following passion, innate talent, and drive. It is hard to see your true reflection when you allow so many fingerprints on your mirror. This does not mean we don't need others, but that they should be reflective of who we are. In the best way, those people should be a reflection--a mirror if you will--of who you are, not fingerprints.

So?

I've done my research. I've dug deep down inside. I've written out who I want to be and what I want to become when I grow up. I've talked to the people who know me, love me, and have been a part of my life journey. I've talked to my kids, my most honest reflections. I've prayed and held a few conversations with God in the shower. I've focused on what I'm most grateful in my life.

And through all of that I still don't know 100%, but I am very close, 95%. The other 5% is me waiting for the continual direction from God. I believe I know, but I could be wrong. I won't know until God makes it possible.

With that I am preparing myself for everything. After all, luck is when hard work meets opportunity, right? Although I leave it in God's hands, I do know that I must do my part. I must take the first steps. I must work hard. I must be grateful. I must be mindful. I must be honest. That is me doing my job, so that God may do his/hers.

I will be applying to two different Ph.D programs, one based solely on English and another where I would get a dual Ph.D in Cultural Studies and English (getting MA's in both along the way). I'm also applying to my current Uni for their MA English Lit program along with another Cal State's MA program. I will also apply to a couple of different MFA programs. None of this is entirely set in stone; during this year I may change preferences of Universities after I visit and talk with counselors. But the point is I am not limiting myself to just what I think I can do, I'm aiming out there towards Neptune.

There are fears. GRE anyone? But, I've managed to turn those fears and pieces of apprehension into excitement and pieces of anticipation, expectation. I tell myself these mornings, "What will it feel like to pass the GRE with high scores? What will it feel like when I get accepted everywhere and I have to make a choice? What will it feel like to graduate with honors?" And then I close my eyes and experience it.

I learned this trick from my best friend Cosme. He accomplishes so much. Well, years ago he told me his secret. He says he imagines himself doing it. He lives it, sleeps it. Walks himself completely through the experience--sees the sights, smells the smells, hears the sounds, feels the feelings--all of that. And when it happens, you know what he told me--he's already lived it and is busy living the next experience. Sounds familiar, like the law of attraction, the Secret? Well, he told me this years before all that came out, he's extremely dyslexic and does not read--at all. He doesn't know anything about "The Secret" outside of what he's done his entire life. He is an artist by the way, and taught me almost everything I know. He has also created the entire arts culture, which is city-wide, in our city. 

I'm getting verbose here, but these are things I need to speak out into the world, if nothing else but to remind me when the roller coaster gets scary.

We can never know what we are truly capable of unless we try to accomplish it. It is as plain and simple as that. Nike says "Just do it," Cosme told me "Jump off the bridge," I'm telling you, "Set your standards high and cultivate your own life."

It is all different ways to saying--Own your life.

In the 12 days since I've stepped out of my comfort zone I have learned so much. I have opened myself up to new possibilities. 

Did you know you could CLEP out of GE classes for $80 a test? Neither did I; I'll be taking College Algebra, American Government, Sociology, and Western Civilization I.

Guess who's going to be an art show, April? Me.

Did you know you can pass the GRE by studying and learning the tricks? I didn't either.

Did you know there are resources online that can teach you Algebra, I mean really teach you, for free? I know, coolio.

Guess who's entering her university's excellence in writing contest? That would be me.

Let's Own this life of ours, and do the damn thing!

Ki 

This week in literature reading...this week in moving past fear.

Have you ever read Homer's The Iliad--in one day? I did that Saturday, and in some literary sense I know I am the better for it. Not the one day, but the reading.

I am reading "classics" this week, also last week, and probably next week. And at the same time I'm reading Moll Flanders, by Daniel DeFoe, perhaps more famous for Robinson Crusoe, which I have never read, nor heard of till the first week of this year (along with Moll).

As I was reading Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Wollstonecraft last week I fancied up a long post in my mind about the importance of reading the classics. Necessary reading for writers was essentially my thesis, my point. But then I started hating it. And then I got to class, after I had read all obscene amount of pages, and learned from my peers, my contemporaries, that they gave up and didn't read it all. (The horror!!) Then we had an hour long talk about each reading and me, the girl who LOVES to talk and discuss, me, started to get bored, then annoyed, and finally indignant that I was getting out of class at 10pm. I might even dare to say that me, yes me, the girl who LOVES to speak up in class (and has been reprimanded for it--unjustly--my classmates were being stale and not talking) was pissed. I also need to add that I think I might have possibly, if E is right in all his manly wisdom, had a small, teeny-tiny panic attack in class. An hour before she let us out--at 10!!

10 pm does not sit well with me and my student colleagues.

All that dampened my spirits for talking about the classics, because at that point, in a class where I and a grad student (who is taking the graduate equivalent of my undergraduate class) spoke most of the time (along with the professor--whom despite keeping us an hour past the decent hour of learning--I like) and I ended up having nothing else to say about the classics.

And then today I read Plato, The Apology of Socrates. (For another class.)

I could string together a necklace of word pearls of wisdom, knotting the red silk after phrase and phrase and phrase, place a golden clasp at the end of them all, and wear those *few* phrases around my writing neck forever.

Picture me sitting with legs crossed, blanket around my cold shoulders, fan whirling motes at a corner wall in the background, sunlight shining in on me and my colorful bed...writing

(Excuse my exaggeration; I have read over 200 pages in the past 36 hours. That doesn't include the 150-200 pages I read the days before the weekend.)

I really enjoyed reading Plato's defense of Socrates. There were moments when I stopped, underlined, starred, and then said, "Ohh, that's where that comes from."

If you've read Hamlet (for the first time--after high school or whenever most people read it) you'll know what I'm talking about--those moments when you realize where certain sayings, quotes, thoughts come from. Well that was my experience with Plato's Apology--not with On poetics, which I read (and hated) last week.

Here are the pearls I gathered for my writing necklace:

"So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,--for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know."

"I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that the others less esteemed were really wiser and better."

"Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them."

"A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong--acting the part of a good man or of a bad."

And here is where it really got good, and I started thinking of you--my lovely blog:

"I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil."

"You, my friend,--a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens,--are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?"

"For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul."

"...no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."

 Maybe it's just me, but these "quotes" moved me. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has heard that "the man who knows anything knows he knows nothing at all." I've always loved that saying. 

But take a look at some of the other quotes...the one on poetry, the one about doing right, the one about fear. Are these not pearls of wisdom, great guidance for those of us who like to think, ponder, wonder about things like inner soul, life & death, good vs. evil?

I've talked about my decision to pursue an MFA in creative writing so much, and though I stand firm in my decision, I have to be honest--I'm scared. Scared of rejection, failure, debt. Is my voice developed enough? Do I know enough? How do I compare with other writers? Will I go into debt for a useless degree? How will it change my life? Will I get accepted--anywhere?

I really can go on, but I rather not. Plato (& Socrates) tells me that it is not good to fear a possible good. And is not that graduate degree a possible good?

For sure it is a certain evil to deny myself that which I love, writing, telling stories. What would be more awful than denying yourself what you love for fear? Living your life with that fear and knowing it got the best of you.

A year ago me and E were hemming & hawing over our decision to go back to school. Him to pursue his MBA and me to finally finish my bachelors. It was such a monumental, engrossing decision. There were spreadsheets, and visits, and informational meetings, and price comparisons, and FAFSA's. I was scared. E just informed me he was not. (But he's never scared about anything.) And look at us, a year later, in the swing of it and all the better for it. I have maintained a 4.0 and he has a 3.8 or 3.9. We are doing it and doing it well. A notch on my confidence belt.

I'm hoping my shared quotes will mean something to one of you. They pushed me a little further past my fear and opened a world of understanding about Socrates for me. I must admit that after reading On Poetics last week, I didn't hold Socrates in high esteem; I didn't care for the way he bashed poets, artist, carpenters. 

Moving past fear feels delicious. Even though somewhere up under my skin, perhaps under my arms or legs, it swims and festers trying to work its way to my brain, heart. But I fight the good fight. I tell myself that I will and can do that which now seems so far and impossible. 

Tell yourself the same thing.

Ki

The secret life of books.

 

For the love of book covers, reading, photography, music, and color...this is amazing. 

I just had to add to the craze...and share! 

Enjoy fellow nerds!