The Problem with Starting Over

I’m in a place right now where I am slowly building a new network of friends, a new image for myself, and a new list of what is important to me and how I should go about making sure those things happen. And I do think that’s really cool. But, it is a little strange. Like, this past summer, I had at least one grad party to go to almost every weekend, and near the end of my time in Wisconsin, it was even more than that. I got kind of spoiled with the idea of spending lots of time with friends all the time, constantly going out and going to museums or restaurants or just hanging out. And then I came here.

Don’t get me wrong, I do actually have a decently sized group of close friends here. Because everything is so compressed, like the friend-making process itself, I’ve gotten really close with my roommates and the girls on my floor and even some guys upstairs. I hang out with them a lot. But then there comes weekends like this one where they all have places to go and people to hang out with because they are only making additions to the friends they already have, not substitutions. I spend a lot of time by myself right now. And it’s not because the people around me just ditch me or anything… a lot of times they just have things like work or family or friend obligations to take care of. I totally understand that. It’s just that right now I’m unemployed, I don’t have a ton of homework, and I don’t really have a ton of friends outside of my apartment. So even though I know I’m not as important to them, like I’m very aware that I’m not the center of their world or obligations, they’re kind of the center of mine, and I’m not really certain how to deal with that.

-k

Please Do Your Laundry

I kind of have the habits of a teenage boy. I’m not completely disgusting, I always have clean hair and I don’t ever keep rotten food or anything in my room. However, I don’t do my laundry every single week, I sometimes go to class without brushing my hair, and once in a while during the summer or a school break, I will wear the same clothes three days in a row. I like looking pretty and put together, but at the same time, as soon as I come home, I’ll rip off whatever decent pair of pants I’m wearing and scramble into a pair of pajama shorts. If I’m not going to go anywhere where I need to impress a person, I often won’t wear makeup, or I’ll just put a tiny bit of concealer and mascara on. I guess to put it nicely, I’m very low maintenance.

This kind of bit me in the butt this morning. I had a pretty important job interview today. It was technically a mock interview, but it was still kind of a big deal. I’ve had to jump through a lot of hoops to get to this mock interview, and I was kind of nervous about it. I woke up three hours before the interview, leisurely made coffee and ate a protein bar, and watched the very grown up show “Zoey 101” while waking up. I took a shower, shaved my legs (this is a very big accomplishment for me. I hate shaving my legs. I will do anything to avoid it), and I actually had the time to put lotion on, which I never make time for and I always walk around with white scratch marks all over my legs because they’re so dry. Then I decided to throw a load of laundry in quickly before I left, just because I had a little bit of extra time and I thought I would be super responsible and kill two birds with one stone. I was going to do a load of whites and my makeup at the same time, and wow, I’m a swell adult. So I’m doing my makeup, taking a little extra time with it, even seeing if today one of those days when I could rock red lipstick was. It was, in fact, one of those days. I was feeling super feminine, and I looked pretty hot, to say so myself. I had about 15 minutes to get dressed before I needed to head to my interview, and I was feeling pretty good. I went into my closet to grab a bra, and that’s when doom fell.

I HAD NO BRAS.

I don’t own a lot of bras. Because I hadn’t done laundry in a couple of weeks, they had all ended up in the wash and now they were all IN THE WASHING MACHINE, SOPPING WET. I pretty much had a panic attack. I didn’t have enough time to dry my wet bras. I couldn’t borrow any of my roommate’s, cuz I have the biggest boobs in the apartment. I couldn’t, like, wear a bikini top instead, because for some reason they do not fit. I don’t understand. I am a petite, 5’2’’ girl. I should fit into an XXL swimsuit top. I wasted 10 minutes running around the apartment and my closet like a crazy person, praying that I had forgotten to wash one bra, that I would be saved and the heavens would shine upon me again. I may be a bit of a mess of a teenage boy at heard, I am NOT boyish in any sense of my form. I can’t go out in public with no bra like some lucky girls can. These babies will float up into the stratosphere if I let them loose. But, I had no choice.

SO I WENT TO THIS VERY VERY IMPORTANT JOB INTERVIEW WITH NO BRA.

I put on a cami with a little sport-bra like thing sort of built inside. It honestly didn’t do much to help, but at least the beasts were somewhat contained. I threw on a pencil skirt, looked in the mirror, and almost screamed. The girls were not tamed as usual. I looked like a hippie woman trying out for a lawyer form, but still not wanting to conform to the laws of society. Luckily, I have this highly structured blazer in my closet, and when I threw that on, I looked somewhat like a human being instead of a cow with a swollen udder.

            So yeah, that was my day. The interview went really well. The woman kept telling me how cute I looked, so apparently the no-bra look works for me. It was just one of those crazy stories that I needed to write down for all of eternity. I, Kira Lange, went to a professional interview without a bra on. I usually can’t even stand going to bed with no bra on, and I went to this job interview with no bra. And that, ladies, is why you do not have the habits of a teenage boy, and please, please do your laundry. 

-k

There's No Place Like Home

There’s No Place Like Home

As I walk into the theater, the familiar smell of faded cushions and dusty curtains greets me like an old friend. Even though the room is shrouded in a velvety kind of darkness, I’ve gotten so good at navigating through the aisles blindly that turning on all the lights is more of an option than a necessity. However, I do slowly shuffle my way across the beat-up auditorium, fully aware of the fact that my heartbeat has picked up a little. I’m not afraid of the dark, I just know that a few sophomore boys think it’s hilarious to sit in the pitch dark before anyone else gets to practice and make the sorry soul who comes in first scream bloody murder by jumping out at her in the blackness. I have to walk slowly across the theater, despite my slight apprehension and desire to see exactly what might jump out at me, because the Little Theater is used by the entire school. It is especially abused the English department, as the students tend to leave the area in total disarray in their mad rush to get the heck out of class when the bell rings. The theater is bordering on ancient, and most of the seats have broken in some way or another, so often a student will leave the metal slab disguised as a seat bottom flipped down. As a poor unsuspecting drama kid comes through after school to turn all the lights in the theater, the metal slab will come into direct contact with that poor creature’s shin, in an experience I tend to label, “extremely painful.” The shuffling ensures that when I do inevitably smash into a seat, it won’t hurt so badly.

Honestly, turning the lights on doesn’t make much of a difference. Apparently, being able to read one’s lines on stage isn’t incredibly important to the success of a show, and so the school board decided that it would be more practical to spring for a new sound system for the wrestling gym than to be able to easily be able to find where the heck we are in the script. I guess there is a silver lining; practically blind people like myself learn our lines really fast. There’s no possible way we’ll be able to actually see our lines during practice, so we are forced into memorizing every single thing that happens in the show as quickly as humanly feasible.

As the theater slowly fills with loud, obnoxious, wonderful human beings known as the “drama kids,” I like to make myself a little nest in the front corner of the room, where I can look back on everyone and see them all laughing and talking with each other. Drama is why I come to school every day; it’s what I tell myself I have to look forward to when I feel like banging my head into my desk during Civics and Economics or Geometry. The Little Theater consistently contains my favorite people in the whole world, and I know I will always find someone I love to talk to in there, no matter what time of day it is. It’s a place where I can be as weird and awkward as I want to because the people who witness my ineptitude are stranger than I am. The theater has held discussions from which girl Jake would date if they were the only two people on Earth, to Sam’s plans for the future and what she wants to do with her career. Countless games of Never Have I Ever and Truth or Dare have been hosted in these smelly halls, and tears occur just as often because of laughter as sadness. We all love this small, dark hole with everything in our hearts, and heaven help anyone outside of Drama who would suggest the theater is anything less than perfect.

We actually do have a larger, kind of gorgeous Fine Arts Center to have our shows and some of our practices in, but the Little Theater is where most of the practices are held. I’ve probably spent more time in the Little Theater than any other place in Hamilton High School during my four years there.  At some points of the performance season, I spent more hours in that small theater than I did in my own bedroom. To the rest of Hamilton, the Little Theater is kind of an eyesore, a last resort for clubs and groups to gather, a place where it’s okay to leave your half-eaten bag of Fritos against the wall for six months because no one with enough influence will care.

However, to the Hamilton Drama kid, the Little Theater is a surrogate home. I know every nook and cranny of that place, from the hidden piano underneath the makeshift loft backstage, to knowing exactly which armrest breaks off the auditorium seat every time you sit in it because Zack tripped over it and smashed his head on the floor one year in the middle of auditions (it’s the seat closest to the aisle in on the farthest left section of the seats). When a student accepts her role in a production, she basically promises that along with sacrificing sleep, food, and grades, she will spend at least 10 hours a day at school, and that her new place of lodging henceforth is the Little Theater.

It’s funny… The more I think about it, the more I realize how many significant, precious memories took place in that theater. There was one show I was student directing, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory¸ and my body thought it would be really convenient to develop a raging fever the first day of auditions. Being the stubborn idiot I am, I came to school that day with a temperature of about 102, just so I could be present for the auditions. I sat in the theater for two hours that night, feeling like I had been run over multiple times by a truck and drinking from a jug of milk that I had somehow obtained. I probably heard the same monologue seven thousand times that night. But that’s how much that drama program meant to me: it didn’t really matter how gross I felt, because I wanted to have my input in what the cast list was going to look like, and by Jove, I was going to make my opinion known!

Speaking of opinions, I don’t have one on the classic movie, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was actually the first movie I ever saw with a guy I liked, and it was shown in that theater. Like I said, clubs met in the theater if they had absolutely nowhere else to go, or, in my case, if they were giant nerds and chose to show a movie there. I was president of the book club my senior year, which made me totally the coolest kid in school, and every year we showed a film adaptation of a book we had read that year. So, I guess seeing the movie with that guy doesn’t actually count as a date. He was too cute, and I was too much of a wimp to ask him out. During the movie, I decided to sit in the back of the theater to be able to see everything, and this guy, Matt, came up and sat right next to me, out of all the dozens of empty seats in the theater. I was so ecstatic and freaked out that I was probably incredibly awkward, but he started flirting with me as the movie was playing, and I started laughing, and everyone else in the theater started shushing us. He casually put his arm around me, and I think I may have had an actual heart attack in that moment. Because of him, I could not tell you one single thing that happened in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, despite the fact that I technically saw every single second of it.

I also cried a lot of tears in that theater. There was a role that I played at the beginning of last year where I had to be the mother of a soldier who goes off to war and dies in a minefield. Because this character had to come out on stage sobbing to deliver the news to her daughter-in-law about her husband’s death, I got the enormous pleasure of figuring out how to cry on cue. This entailed many hours of curling up on a couch backstage that smelled of the dust of a thousand years, dredging up every sad memory I could think of, whether personal or otherwise. It even got to the point where I would think about sad movies and try to cry about those. The assistant director wasn’t in the loop about the fact that I was making myself cry, and he got really worried about the fact that every time he saw me, I was sobbing. Explaining that I was in fact NOT in perpetual hysterics was one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had with someone.  I actually got congratulated a lot for that role, which was honestly a new experience for me. I personally have the opinion that forcing myself to feel so incredibly emotional every day, even though it was just for a part, was something that was very good for me, both because it gave me the ability to manipulate and measure my emotions, but also because it meant the cast got the fun sight of Kira with red, puffy eyes and tears running down my face pretty much every day for a month. I didn’t have any choice but to get used to the sensation of having people see me cry. All the time. Sometimes I got so worked up about whatever made me cry that day I physically wouldn’t be able to stop myself from crying, and a lucky few got the fantastic job of making me laugh hard enough to stop. And they were always able to. Because your family is always there for you, and those goofballs became my second family.

Right next to the very, very dusty couch, probably now salty from my tears, is this pointless alcove that has one purpose— to be a place where the seniors leave their mark. There is no practical reason for this alcove, but if you kind of crawl inside, you can see spray painted words all the way up the wall until the wall blends into the shadows. That sense of sentimentality, that sense of community, found a happy home in my sappy heart. I’ve always liked looking up in there and seeing the legacy of so many people who felt the same way about being part of this family that I did. As I began to transition out of Hamilton, it almost became a kind of sacred idea—to live on in the hearts of people who you love the heck out of, even if you haven’t been there for years and years.

The Little Theater is “well-loved,” in multiple ways. It’s kind of beat up. The floor is scuffed beyond belief. The railings of the stairs are practically peeling off, and pretty much everything smells like old man. Yet, the theater has this… vibrant personality that I think…. No, I know comes from the people who dwell in it every day, even if the rest of the school is on vacation. The Little Theater is my favorite place in the whole world because it’s the home of the people I love the most, and there is where we learn and grow and cry and laugh and just… live. 

-k

Being Crushed

I have encountered four kinds of crushes in my life. I’ve definitely liked more than four guys in my life, but all of them definitely fall into four categories: The Celebrity, The Unattainable, The Crush that Crushes, and the Mutual.

The Celebrity Crush: I have a lot of these. They range from David Tennant to Chris Pratt, from Harrison Ford to the guy who plays Hook on Once Upon a Time and I can’t remember his name but he’s won lots of awards and he’s super sexy. These crushes are probably incredibly unhealthy, but hey, what crush of mine isn’t? I get very excited when I hear these actors’ names and I do admit, I have spent a large amount of time looking at cute pictures of them on the internet. But, hey, what are the pictures take for except for people to look at them, huh? At least the guys I have celebrity crushes are good role models. Not like… I don’t know… Justin Bieber or Kanye West or whatever. But, I have probably watched Jurassic World more than any other movie in theaters (at least voluntarily), and believe you me, it’s not to watch the special effects or see the dinosaurs (well… partly. The baby triceratops are like, super cute).

The Unattainable Crush: This is the kind of crush where you just kind of pass by them and make a little inward sigh every time they glance your way. I usually never even talk to these crushes… Or maybe they talked to me once and I was like… whoa. What the heck is happening. These crushes happen simply because the guy is really really pretty, and actually he’s probably a little bit of a jerk, but that’s okay ‘cuz wow, his face is gorgeous.

The Crush that Crushes: I am SUPER familiar with this kind of crush. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually get feelings for guys that easily. Like, I’ll find them attractive, I’ll maybe blush a little when they tease me, but I don’t actually fall in “like” that easily. This last one… wow. It happened fast. He made me mac ‘n cheese… I mean, what am I supposed to do? I’ve always said mac ‘n cheese is the fastest way to my heart. And he’s sweet and funny and he loves Star Wars almost more than I do, and he plays the trombone and he’s always wearing Converse that are like, almost the same shade as mine, and he tried to buy me ice cream on my birthday but I wouldn’t let him and his eyes are super, super blue and he told me he would take me to Chick Fil A ‘cuz I haven’t been there in like, six years. And… and he likes another girl that’s like exactly the opposite of me. She’s really thin and athletic and she has these gigantic eyes that honestly take up half her face and she reminds me of Monica Geller from F.R.I.E.N.D.S and I’m really sad about it. Like, weirdly sad. ‘Cuz I’ve only known this guy for a month and why in the world do I look forward to seeing him every day? Like, jeez, I thought I was a little stronger than actually, literally PINING to see him if I don’t. I also have this weird thing where I know exactly where he is in a room without even looking, like, my eyes just happen to fall on him every time we’re in the same room. And when I learned that he liked another girl, it like, physically hurt. And it still kind of hurts every time I see him. Like, get a grip, Kira. Jeez. It’s not the end of the world.

The Mutual Crush: Apparently, this legendary state of being exists. I’ve never actually experienced it, but I’ve heard from other people that it’s like, this super cool thing where you BOTH actually have feelings for each other, and you like… continue having mutual feelings for each other until, and this is only myth, but SOMETIMES you have those mutual feelings for so long, people get metal bands that symbolize those feelings and call it marriage, and even produce small people that also grow up to have those mutual feelings for other small people. (you can almost taste the sarcasm. Jeez)

-k

I'm About as Scary as a Marshmallow

Fun fact about Kira: When I get into a confrontational situation, no matter how small, I will (without fail) burst into tears. I don’t know why this happens, and it could be something so insignificant as I don’t want to go to a certain activity with someone, and if they confront me about it and act offended, I will start to cry. This is actually really inconvenient and impractical, most of the time, because sometimes this fun fact means that I may burst into dramatic tears in the middle of a debate in history, if I feel the slightest amount of passion about the subject. While this often does make me win the debate because my opponent often spends his time freaking out about how to stop my crying instead of his argument, it’s also incredibly annoying. I feel like people don’t take me seriously, and I can’t take myself seriously, because anytime I have something important to say, something that I have coherent and well-researched and valid thoughts, I end up breaking down into a puddle of tears, and any credibility I have will go through the window as I’m reduced to an emotional wreck. This aspect of myself is probably due in part to the fact that I had to make myself cry on cue last fall for a show, so it became kind of a Pavlovian kind of deal, where any time I felt any emotion about anything, I trained myself to translate it to sobbing dramatically, and also probably partly the fault of He Who Shall Not Be Named (and yes, he should be compared to Voldemort, because, like Voldemort, he is the incarnation of pure evil).

Because of this fact, and because I’m a little upset right now, and because I’m feeling like being passive-aggressive and not actually dealing with the stuff I’m going through face to face, here goes a little exercise.

                

Dear Dad,

I love you. You know I do. But I’m sorry… right now, I’m not going to trust you with the things that I trust Mom with. You were kind of hurt today when I told her about a decision I was making and didn’t come to you first, you told me that she wouldn’t be able to do anything, since you’re the one here now, and you’re the one that can actually take action. I’m sorry, but I can’t do that right now. Mom has always been the one who’s been here for me, over the last six years. You haven’t been there. I know it partially wasn’t your fault, that you wouldn’t have wanted it that way, but that’s the way it was. I’ve always had Mom here to talk to through middle school and weird body changes and issues and how to put on makeup and what the heck to do when I get my period, and if boys will ever notice me. You weren’t here. Mom was here when we didn’t know where our next meal would come from, and she always made sure it was there. You were across the country. Mom was here when HWSNBN crashed through the house, slamming doors and telling us we were nothing, but she made sure Madison and I knew we were loved and valued and that it wasn’t our fault. You were silenced. And I know that you want to make up for lost time, that you want me to come to you with anything that bothers me or things that I’m wondering about or just plain thinking through. But right now, I’m not going to. Because right now, you’re kind of still a stranger. You’re a very important, special, loved stranger, but a stranger nonetheless, and because you weren’t there, I have trouble trusting anyone that’s not Mom. Because she’s someone who I can rely on, and though I know in my brain that I can trust you, it takes a little while for that information to hit my heart molecules. I just wish you would let me take my time, because I’m not going to be able to open up to you all the way, immediately. I’m not just that way anymore. Believe me, I would give anything to be able to go back to 11 year old me, where I was a lot more likely to tell anyone my story, to blurt my hopes and dreams and fears out to anyone who would listen. I know the person I am today wouldn’t be anything the same without the things I’ve gone through over the past six years, but I wish I wouldn’t have to deal with that wall that I’ve built to protect myself. I’ve tried trusting people, and enough people have let me down that it doesn’t come easy to me. I promise, I’ll get there eventually, and there’s nothing I want more than to feel safe telling you everything, but my wall has kept me safe where you haven’t. And the only person who’s inside the wall is God and Mom. So no, I’m not going to tell you everything right now. I will, eventually. Just give me a little bit. I might just run things by Mom first, because that's how things have always been. Until then, just know that I love you, and I’m so glad I get the chance to get to know you again.

Love,

-k

The Land of What Ifs

Living in the Land of What Ifs is a pretty dangerous choice of making your home, but sometimes I tend to visit there for a short time, just because I find it very intriguing. I shouldn’t stay there too long, because then I forget about how I need to live in the Land of Now, but it’s definitely a place I’ve vacationed more than once.

What if… what if my life was like a sitcom, where you ship different characters and you’ll have one or two episodes where the writer caters to the fans and makes an adorably lovely episode or two where they play with the chemistry and see how the characters react to each other? You and I have our fair share of sitcom moments, walking around together in one of the most romantic places in the world, dancing in a storm verging on a tornado and getting completely drenched, even practically going on dates together where you insisted on paying and I insisted on you NOT paying, and then running up to the cashier to get the check split before you could get out your credit card. What if instead of meeting her, I decided that I didn’t want us to be friends, and entertained the thought of us being something more than just fantastic dino buddies. You told me that if you weren’t dating her, you would probably end up alone because no one else understands you. I didn’t say, but I definitely thought, “I would date you. I understand.” But I don’t live in the Land of What Ifs, and she makes you happy, and us being together would honestly be such a terrible idea. I wouldn’t want to risk the friendship I treasure so much. But still… what if?

What if… What if I made an incredibly destructive mistake? Who would I be? What if I said yes to you instead of being strong in what I felt at that time, and still feel now? We would still be friends. I would maybe be trapped in something that I couldn’t say no to because I said yes the first time. Would I have the strength that I had to build after you showed me that there are very few people I can trust with the painful things of my life? Maybe it would have ended up okay. I mean, if I had said yes, you would still tell me everything, we would still have those late night conversations that lasted until three in the morning, conversations where you made me feel needed, where I talked you out of your anger and distress and felt like I was important to someone beyond anything romantic. Too bad that wasn’t true. If I said yes then, would the fearful, stubborn, independent parts of me always win out like they do now? Would you have dragged me down with you, or would I have inspired you to higher things? Would I be able to depend on others, or would these walls I’ve built because of you still hold fast?

What if… What if I were brave? What if I came right out and told you how I felt, disregarding the fact that you might not feel the same way? What if I knew that the ping pong games and conversations about space cats and British tea meant that you felt the same butterflies that I did when we saw each other, albeit in probably a more manly way? What if I stopped being afraid of rejection and opened myself up to the possibility of being hurt, because the alternative is too beautiful to resist? What if we showed our faces to each other, instead of always taking those silly, wonderful pictures of dogs and blankets and t-shirts? Would you have said yes? Would I be asking these questions now? What if you had said no? Would that have caused even more walls to spring up? What if I had just taken an action, any action?

What if I had…?

-k

Everything is Bittersweet

I'm so tired of being sad. I'm leaving for college in exactly a week, and I've been consistently sad for the past week and a half.
People always ask me, "Kira, why are you so happy all the time?" I think it's a combination of surrounding myself with people who make being happy easy, of having a relationship with God, and of doing things that I enjoy often, but I think the simplest explanation is that I live my life happy because happy is way more fun. I love being in a good mood, and even if I do end up getting upset about something, I can be coaxed out of my funk pretty easily. Because I don't WANT to be upset. I hate being sad. But I especially hate sad things that made me upset for a long time. I'm pretty sure that leaving home and saying goodbye to everything that makes me happy and walking into a situation that has nothing familiar about it can be characterized as an upsetting situation. I've been trying to cheer myself up, but every time I do, something reminds me why I don't want to go.
Like, I just got to talk on the phone today with my best friend for a long time, and that put me in a good mood, but then I remembered that I'm not going to be able to just... meet up with her at her locker to tell her a funny story that happened in class, or spontaneously get together to watch movies and eat pizza. Or, my mom got me ice cream sandwiches a couple of days ago, because I had absentmindedly remarked that I was really craving them, but then I remembered that I'm not going to have times anymore when I get surprised by little thoughtful gifts, because the only person that will really care about me in Colorado for a little while is me, and only me.
Everything I do is bittersweet, and that gets really hard.
I almost feel like I shouldn't try and cheer myself up, even if I could, 'cuz I kind of feel like I'm losing myself, almost. Like, I SHOULD be sad, because I'm losing a whole version of myself who got to chase her friends around the Fine Arts Center after school, a Kira who has a wonderful mom who gives her ice cream sandwiches when she's sad, a version of Kira who only has to worry about talking to her crush (she never will) and looking kind of stupid, but that's okay, because that Kira is clumsy and she makes mistakes and everyone around her loves her so much they hold her up when she falls. I loved being that Kira, and I'm incredibly sorry to see her go. Part of me almost feels like I should mourn her now, while I'm transitioning, because when I get to CO, I won't be able to curl up and cry, since I'll be surrounded by strangers and I have to take care of myself.
Don't get me wrong, I'm so glad I get to go out to Colorado. The practical, logical part of me knows that doing this is the right choice, that I'll grow and mature and have so much fun. I know that the pros of leaving far outweigh the cons. But the cons of leaving are the really painful ones. It may be the intelligent decision to go out to a place where I can pursue a career doing what I love to do, and I'm going to have so many more opportunities that I would encounter staying in my comfort zone, but my emotional side is also totally freaking out because I'm going to have to live without my mommy. I've dealt with a lot of crap in my life, and people have come and gone, and sometimes full out abandoned me, but my mom has always always been there for me, and it completely tears me apart that now I'm going to be the one doing the leaving.
I'm so thankful for being given this chance to work towards what I want to do, but it just hurts. I want to GO, it just really sucks that I have to LEAVE.

-k