Hey, guys! It’s Stephany from Stephany Writes. I’m guest blogging today for Rebekah as she’s on vacay in not-so-sunny Florida. (Although I know that to most of your, 30 and 40 degree weather would feel WARM to what you’re experiencing now but to us Floridians….this. is. COLD!) Anyway, it’s my first guest blog and I’ll try to do a good job so Rebekah doesn’t hate me!

This is actually a old blog post I wrote in November 2008. It was about a month after I failed my final internship and the day I realized a lot about myself.

So, yesterday, I decided it was time to hang up my diplomas. I had a frame for my A.A. degree but was waiting to get one for my high school diploma. It’s much smaller than a regular-sized piece of paper so I needed to get the right size. And, you know, it’s been 2 1/2 years since I graduated from high school. It was time.

I framed my high school diploma just right, hammered in two nails, and made sure the diploma looked perfect. It did. So then I set to hammering two nails for the other diploma. I guess I’m not up-to-date on hammering techniques and didn’t realize that the movement of a hammer banging a nail into a wall would cause my other diploma to move and shift until it fell off the wall. The wood holding the frame together broke into 3 pieces.

I looked at it for a moment and said, “Man. That could make me cry.”

So I had a tiny, itty-bitty meltdown.

Fine. I had a huge, gulping tears “I have no purpose” cry. It felt kinda good. I’ve been holding in all my feelings for the past few weeks, pretending everything is OK. Sure, it’s fine that I failed my final internship and nobody thinks I’m ready to be alone with kids. A-OK. Hunky dory.

And I came to this realization: I don’t want to be a teacher.

I’ve had a blast in my classes. It was fun and then I got to my internship and while I adored the kids to bits and pieces, I wasn’t good at it. I rambled on and on about subjects, I never felt comfortable teaching, and honest-to-God, I never got a good evaluation.

All of my friends in their internships could whip out a lesson from scratch and have it be amazing. I would read their statuses on Facebook: “So-and-so had an AMAZING evalution, even though I had to make up a lesson from scratch.” And I was just like, “Seriously? The only way I could ever have an AMAZING evaluation is by practicing it thirty times before I did it.”

It wasn’t my path to take.

I think God needed to give me a wake-up call. Honestly, I knew teaching wasn’t where I was going to be 10 years from now. I’m a writer. I write. I love to write. I can write essays like it’s a day at the beach. I have so many ideas floating around in my brain that it’s hard to keep track. So why do teaching? I just thought it would be a good career before I got published.

Obviously, God nixed that idea.

So, I’m changing my major. I have to decide between English (emphasis on Creative Writing) or Mass Communications (emphasis on journalism or public relations). Obviously, I would want to do the first one because it would give me the best boost to become a published author. I don’t know if I want to do journalism or public relations. Journalism and public relations will probably give me a more stable job when I graduate but I already tried that with teaching. It didn’t work.

I’m going to have to take to the advisor in the College of Ed first to get the ball rolling to change my major. Then I can start talking to advisors on what to change my major to, either English or Mass Communications. I’m hoping to be able to sign up for classes for Spring but it might be too late. I hope it’s not. I need to be registered, otherwise my 6-month loan payoff period is going to kick in and I’m going to have to start making payments in June. Yikes!

I feel like I’m finally walking in God’s will now, or, at the very least, I’m headed there. I just need to keep praying that He’ll continue to direct my path. His way is a billion times better than my way – as we have seen! He’ll get me to where I need to be.

(I did end up choosing journalism over English. I’m hoping to graduate in December and I’m thinking seriously about pursuing a Master’s degree in English. But that’s all speculation. For now.)

E and I are headed to Palm Beach, Florida on an early flight on Monday. Vacation!!! And we get to stay FOR FREE in one of the Very Nice Hotels, courtesy of his job at the Very Nice Restaurant. How freaking sweet is that?! It means we have extra money to blow on deep-sea fishing, and golf and the spa… mmm, spa. Spa with a hefty discount.

*happy*

Oh, and say what you will about the cold snap in the South right now… It hasn’t been above freezing in St. Louis for over a week, so THIS is looking pretty good to me.

As long as I don’t have to wear long underwear on vacation, it’s all good.

And while I’m gone, you’ll have a wonderful series of guest bloggers to entertain you! Three lovely ladies will be posting here in my absence, and you simply must come by and see what they have to say.

Have a happy week!

They are just THINGS.

Just a dryer full of THINGS that caught fire at the laundromat last night.

It shouldn’t be such a big deal, I keep telling myself.

During the actual fire and the immediate aftermath, I was more mad than anything. What the heck kind of dryer catches wet clothes on fire? MY stuff! Expensive stuff! GAAAH!

So while we’re waiting for the fire department to show up, my four new friends in the laundromat and I realize a few things:

• The fire extinguisher does not work. All this time in my life I’ve wanted to try a fire extinguisher, and I get the one that’s been rotting for over 5 years.
• No one has a solid bottomed container to carry water from the laundry sink. We just have baskets. The utility closets are locked and there are no employees on duty. Not even an emergency number for a manager.

But the fire is not letting up and since the dryer where it started is attached to a whole wall of other dryers, we all figure we have to do something. Several of us dump drinks down the sink and one guy ferries the 20 oz. water bottles back and forth, fizzling the flames bit by bit. One girl empties the last of her detergent and uses the jug to douse some more flames with sudsy water.

By the time the fire department arrives, we think we have most of the flames out, but they give everything a good hosing anyway, just in case. The fire had been burning UNDER the dryer and had either gotten into or come from the electrical system, so it turns out it could have gone out of control at any minute. Goodness, says one nice fireman, didn’t you have a fire extinguisher?

I show him.

He writes down the number of the fire marshal for me, and urges me to file a complaint first thing on Monday. Major OSHA violations, big time fines, you all could have been exploded, big splort, etc.

We haul the burnt stuff out the front door to let it smolder in the snow. It was my duvet cover – my gorgeous, too-expensive duvet cover (which was entirely machine washable and dryable, natch). And my towels, my splurge-money fluffy towels with matching bathmat.

Things. A $350 load of laundry, but just things.

Until I pick away at the burnt heap in the snow, and then it ceases to be just “things.”

My favorite t-shirt. My all-time-awesome, bury-me-in-it, super mostest favorite t-shirt. 50/50, long-sleeved, white. On the front, the logo: 2000-2001 Writing Center Staff, Truman State University. And on the back, in black letters in Times New Roman, just this:

word.

That was my writing shirt.

And then I cried a little.

I have been pretty much obsessing about fires for the last 12 hours now. I cried over a t-shirt. I am pissed about three baskets’ worth of smoky laundry that I have to wash again before I leave on vacation tomorrow. I relived the other fires, the funny and the not-funny-at-all, in my head.

And while I fume and plot how I will recoup my $350, I am really just wondering, over and over, how people pull themselves together when they lose everything they have.

How can that work? How can they do it?

I can’t even begin to fathom. I’m shaken up by THIS? And people have to deal with THAT?

Memories are almost inextricably intertwined with the things we gather over the course of our lives. I wish my brain were spongy enough to absorb everything that’s ever happened to me so I didn’t need this picture of my old cat who died, or this rock from the peak of highest mountain I ever climbed, or this photo of me with my baby niece. I can still be me without those things and I can still remember all of those times, but the THINGS are a nice prompt. You can see them and smile because they can automatically remind you of something good.

Like my shirt. It said I was a writer. It might have been the only thing that made me smile when I put it on. Every. single. time.

This is why I’ll never be Zen. Things, things, things.

Blog, blog, high school, high school… we all seem to agree that there are a lot of things about the blogging community that tend to run parallel with the social hierarchy of high schools. I noted some things about that in an earlier post, but something struck me today about bullying in the blogosphere…

In real high school? Bullying could be a big problem. A serious problem that could lead to violence and even self-inflicted harm on the part of the victim. It was often met with a code of silence around the victims and helplessness from the staff who either couldn’t do something until there was a “real” problem, or brushed it off as kids being kids. Even friends and parents would say “just ignore him/her.” Often, no one would stand up for you. There were even rules in place that worked against a victim who tried to defend him/herself from a physical attack.

So bullies got away with it. They picked on people and made personal verbal attacks, which usually hurt more than any shove up against the lockers and demand for lunch money.

And sometimes there was no lunch money to give them. Sometimes you couldn’t just get up out of your desk and walk away. Sometimes you couldn’t just ignore it, so you suffered in silence and felt very, very alone.

This is where we, as a blogging community, diverge from high school.

We all write our own way and express our own opinions, and as bloggers we hold our freedom of speech and press near and dear. But we have standards in our communities, and those include respect for people and feelings as well as for opinions.

There was some buzz today about one blogger who allegedly (and I only say this because the posts are gone so I couldn’t check) posted a personal attack on another blogger, regarding the quality of her blog and its worthiness of an award she recently received. This was done in a public forum.

Other members of the blogging community came to this young woman’s defense. Whether she needed them or not, people made it clear to her – and to the person who was offending her – that she was not alone. Similar scenarios play out across the blog world every single day and prove over and over again that we stick to our principles and we have got each other’s backs against bullies and trolls.

Of course we return to free speech and our rights to express opinions. But in a public forum, especially a community forum, if you cross the line into personal attacks, do not be surprised when you start to hear from people you’ve never met or even heard of, calling you out for your treatment of another community member.

YOU will feel just how much words can hurt.

If you genuinely meant no harm and just really screwed up your wording on something and it ended up looking offensive, just make your apology and explanation. Everyone gets heated once in awhile and writes something that just comes out wrong. That’s okay. I’ve accidentally offended people through careless wording before. When genuine apologies are made and accepted, and we move on.

But you don’t accidentally tell someone their writing is pointless or that they do not deserve to be recognized for their work. And you especially do not do that on that person’s own blog or the public forum of a community to which that person belongs.

Although these things continue to happen and probably always will, I just wanted to put it out there that this is an area in which the 20-Something Bloggers community can really shine. The only people who should not be welcome (in MY opinion only) are those who make personal attacks on others, and good riddance to them if they are driven off by people who are trying to defend not only a person, but the integrity of a community.

Groups of friends and lunch tables, I see that parallel. And I think it’s a natural one. But in this aspect, it’s not high school. Bullies don’t get away with it here.

We will take care of our own.

—

(Huh. Maybe we’re actually more like a gang? Can we wear green? The 20SB website has a lot of green…)

This one is from Jess at Classy in Philadelphia. Every Wednesday, you’re supposed to post a picture of yourself from somewhere you’ve been in your travels. This is kind of an old one, but in the spirit of remembering a decade, I bring you a picture of me, up high on the London Eye, in March 2004.

Lovely weather in London in March.