Letter to Me

Here is a letter I had to write to myself at the beginning of the year for my very dumb Integration class. Luckily, I am done with the class now, so I thought it would be interesting to open the letter. It amused me.

Hello me,

I am a freshman at CCU. Freshmen are annoying. They don't have any idea what is happening. I have no idea what is happening. Help me.

There are a lot of unknowns in my life right now-- about my job, my extra-curriculars, who will my best friend here be? Will I ever overcome my fear of relationships? Hopefully some of those unknowns will be resolved by the time you open this, otherwise you are royally screwed right now, Kira Lange. 

I think the biggest thing I'm scared about school-wise is the fact that I got 100% on my first English paper. Basically, that means the only way to go is down. Please don't fall too far. I like being up here. 

I also miss having a cat. If you don't feel the same way, you are no longer Kira and you have been replaced by an alien life form. Die, alien scum.

<3 Kira

-k

An Awkward Story

Just because life is stressful right now and I need a laugh, so I'm assuming you need one as well, and some of my recent stuff has been kind of serious, today I am going to tell you the story about the most beautiful guy ever, and how I drove him away.

The beautiful guy on the far left is Caleb Heinritz. He is the guy. Yeah. I know.

I had been going to this pretty big youth group that encompassed pretty much all of Waukesha County for a few months, on and off, but fairly consistently. He was a senior youth. He was beautiful. He had a deep personal relationship with God. He was athletic and smart and he had the CUTEST hair that had ever existed (it was different back then.. not so flynn rider-ish. he was cute then, he's drop dead gorgeous now). All the girls were totally into him, and I'm like, wow, I would never have any chance with him. He's so incredibly hot. So I never really tried to talk to him or flirt or anything, both because at that time (and still currently), I had no flirting skills whatsoever. 

And then, at our youth group Christmas Party, everything changed. I was looking dang fine, for once, and we all got together and mixed up and talked. At one point, I sneezed into my shoulder, discreetly, like a lady, and then kept going on my way. We all partnered up, and lo and behold, I was paired up with the legendary Caleb Heinritz. He was engaging. I was sugared up so I had enough energy to converse with someone so so far out of my league. It was an amazing conversation. We talked about life, and God's place in our destiny, and what our futures would be like, and our interests and hobbies, and school and people and love and laughter. He was so PRESENT in the conversation, like, I don't think he broke my eye contact unless I was being awkward and looking down myself. It was wonderful. I was smitten. And then we stopped having our little discussion time and I walked over to brag (a little... i mean, it was CALEB HEINRITZ) to my cousins who were standing around the concessions table, and I started gushing, when my cousin stopped me. "What is that on your shoulder?" she asked. I glanced down, and smeared into my shirt was the biggest wad of snot you have ever seen. It had been perched there all night, through all my discussions, and most importantly, with my conversation with Caleb Heinritz. My life was over. 

And that is the story of how I died. 

Patchwork Girl

she was a chameleon. she stayed the same inside, her core was a golden, strong orb, hard and pure and bright, but she found it was nice to take things she admired from the people around her. she had the wings of a leader, not afraid to fly and brave the heat of the burning sun for the chance to see the world at its most beautiful. she had the eyes of her best friend, able to look at the world in wisdom and in its best light, a gift she earned from years and years of silently observing and admiring. her sister had such giving hands, she even managed to give the Patchwork Girl her generosity itself. she had the smile of a carefree woman, the dance of a small child, the fight of an old father. her mother gave her the mouth of patience, her brother the heart of sensitivity, her enemy gave her the choke of fear. the singers gave her passion, the storytellers gave her tears of happiness. he gave her the words to be strong. i wonder if she's more made up of the core that is purely her, or the people around her. i wonder if it really matters.

-k

The Moon Was Red

I've been trying to expand my writing skills, and a lot of times I'll think of certain scenes that would work great in a book, but when I sit down to actually sit down to write the book that is kind of in my head, I'm not able to connect the scenes into a seamless story. Also, sometimes situations happen to me that I think are too weird or incredible not to write down, but they wouldn't really be able to take up a whole blog post. Anyways, this is just an experimentation with writing a story in third person, so if I think of more disjointed scenes, I'll throw them here, but I'll still write the old style as well. Obviously you'll be able to tell from what point of view I'm writing it from. 

She wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders to fend off the night’s chill and the dampness of the grass. The moon was turning a deep blood red, which was oddly beautiful, yet creepy at the same time. He was standing next to her with a pair of ridiculous binoculars, trying to see the phenomenon more closely. She looked up at him, trying to be discrete, but he caught her staring and smiled at her, offering the binoculars so she could see as well. She attempted to find the moon in the sky, which shouldn’t have been hard as it was large and red, but apparently that was too difficult a task for her, and she started laughing. “I can’t find it,” she giggled, “My glasses are too thick, I can’t see anything through this contraption.” He came up behind her, putting his large hands over her cold, small ones and tried to show her how to make the very simple binoculars function correctly. She stopped breathing. She could feel the warmth of him so close to her she could practically hear his heart beating. As she let out a shaky breath, she started laughing to hide any chance that he could see the effect he had on her. Laughing and looking through binoculars don't mix very well, so she shoved them back at her before he could do something else to make her heart beat faster, and ducked her head. She was so thankful that it was cold outside and it was mostly dark, so that her flushing cheeks would be hidden from his incredibly blue eyes. She stepped back from him and adjusted her blanket to mask her nervousness, and he shot her a grin as he sat back down next to his girlfriend. 

-k

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