Prologue
A heart wants what it wants and a logical mind has no say in how a person feels about another person. Celeste Green never meant to hurt anyone, least of all herself, but sometimes the person her heart wants is unavailable. Celeste's blue-green eyes hurt but she refused to cry. She was done crying, she told herself.
Once she fell for that guy who would never stick around, she remembered as she glanced in her rear view mirror. Her sister knew, maybe Celeste even knew, Cavan Hale was not the type of man to settle in one place for long.
"Maybe someday he'll be ready to settle down," Celeste said to herself, "Maybe he'll find someone who wants to travel long roads with him, or maybe his happiness doesn't depend on any person other than himself." She figured he was probably one of those people who didn't consider marriage or a relationship a goal. Love was something she sought so she hadn't actually believed people like that really existed. There certainly weren't any of them in the books she liked to read.
Cavan had worked all manner of odd jobs in his life and had stopped briefly in all manner of places. His most prized possession, his only possession as far as Celeste was concerned, was a 1997 Harley-Davidson Sportster. Technically, she knew he also owned a cabin and a small patch of forest near the Appalachian Mountains that his grandfather had left him. It doesn't matter, Celeste told herself, travel is a part of him and he wasn't going to change for anyone but himself. He had chosen not to change. Celeste couldn't fault him for leaving; he'd never promised to stay. Only she'd had this romantic notion that he would take her with him when he left. He hadn't chosen to take her with him, either.
She'd lost love before. She knew the fire that was faith, hope, and love was burning inside her still even if those fires were banked for a time. Celeste refused to continue her depressing trudge down a less-than-romantic memory lane. Instead she turned the radio back on and tried again to find a station playing a song about something other than love or a broken heart.
As she drove toward her new place in New York she felt as if she'd love him and feel the pain of it forever. Her logical mind told her it wasn't true but foolish heart wasn't convinced. She could not control how she felt or the person her heart had chosen. She could control her actions. Celeste would start her life over again.
Chapter One
The first time Celeste flew she had a window seat on a cloudy day. Her then-boyfriend told her she could have the window seat because it wasn't much of a view. He explained to Celeste that all she would see would be clouds. She was twenty-four years old that year.
The plane took off and it was terrifying and brilliant and beautiful. She will always remember feeling as if her mind had expanded infinitely in that moment. She stared at the clouds that rolled like hills and climbed like mountains. She stared at the sky above the clouds, clear and lit by the setting sun. Celeste felt closer to deity at that moment. She thought to herself that it was a miracle of some kind that such marvelous beauty had gone on above the world for centuries before mankind learned to fly without anyone ever seeing it. She felt special somehow for the gift of such a sight when so many would live and die without ever getting on a plane. She could still remember the sun setting and the deep, rich blue of the sky as the last light of the sun faded to black. When the plane landed it was dark, the stars were out, and she was a different person.
Years later she had that feeling again. Seeing him for the first time was like flying for the first time. She was a bit awestruck. She felt, upon seeing him for the first time, that it was a miracle he could have lived his entire life without her knowing he existed. She felt as if she were lucky to know now and to have seen him. She thought he was the most beautiful man she'd ever seen. His eyes barely registered her. They rode the same subway every morning without speaking to each other. She wrote amazing brilliant stories in her head about what he did for a living, his life, and his family. She never spoke to anyone on the subway and even if she had been tempted to say hello to him there was a gold band on his ring finger that would have stopped her from ever starting a conversation. It went on that way for six months before he finally spoke up.
"You and I have been riding the same subway for a while now and we've never said hello," the beautiful man said one day, out of the blue. She'd been speculating whether or not he would have an accent.
"It's been about six months, actually," Celeste replied, so shocked she was barely aware she was responding to his statement until the words were already out of her mouth.
"That's a shame," he said, "I'm Devin O'Ceiran."
"Celeste Green," she responded, wondering if she was still asleep in her bed. If so she hoped it was Saturday or Sunday because she'd hate to oversleep on a workday.
"Celeste is a beautiful name. Are you going in for work or for school?" he asked her. She was reminded of the fact that she would forever look like a young teenager when he referenced school.
She nervously pushed a lock of painfully straight, blonde hair back over her shoulder. She had always called it deer-hide blonde. She had light brown, blonde, white, and red highlights in her hair. Last year she had been stopped on the street in New York by a woman demanding to know where she had her hair colored. The woman had been disbelieving and livid when she'd told her it was natural.
"I haven't been in school for a few years now," Celeste's voice was tinged with amusement.
"How old are you?" he asked, surprised.
"Twenty-five," she responded, not mentioning that she'd been twenty-five for three years running, "And you?"
"I'm thirty-two," he told her, smiling, "What do you do for a living?"
"I work as the receptionist at a law firm in midtown," she responded.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Like Flying
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Quotes/Sayings
Embrace who and what you are. Some people will try to make you ashamed. Don't let them.
You can't shovel other people's shit for them. You won't get very far if they keep piling crap on top of you. People have to start shoveling on their own before you can help them.
Love is too precious to be ashamed of.
There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed/
Sometimes it's not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you and know, absolutely know, that the sound in the dark is a monster, and it really is as bad as you think.
What is love? Sometimes it's just letting yourself be who and what you are, and letting the person you're supposed to love be who and what he is too. Or maybe what and who they are.
love isn't absence of pain, it's a hand to hold while you're going through it
the true way to a man's heart is six inches of metal between his ribs. Sometimes four inches will do the job, but to be really sure, I like to have six. Funny how phallic objects are always more useful the bigger they are. Anyone who tells you size doesn't matter has been seeing too many small knives.
Nothing is more appealing than a handsome man who is also uncertain of himself. It appeals not only to the woman in us all, but the mother. A dangerous combination.
If your life works, and you work in it, then it’s okay, whatever is happening is okay.
No matter how bad you feel about it, life just goes on. Life doesn't give a fuck that you're sorry or upset or deranged or tormented. Life just goes on, and you gotta go on with it, or sit in the middle of the road and feel sorry for yourself ... until someone or something just runs you over.
Love mattered, in the end. A house without love would always fall, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in the end without love nothing could endure.
Gardens
There were once two gardeners. Each had his own plan for his garden and the flowers within it. Both are equally talented and equally hard-working. One morning both gardeners found a rose bush had appeared and grown up in the center of the garden. One perfect, wild bloom flourished in the center of the bush. Each gardener paused to regard the miracle.
The first gardener, certain that such a bloom was not a part of his plan, fought the entire rest of the day to thoroughly remove the rose from his garden. By definition, a weed is any plant that is undesired. The rose was not a part of the gardeners plan and as such he considered it only a weed. The gardener fought and fought the rose and his garden is surely the worse for his efforts.
The second gardener smiled at the rose. He thought about how impossible it was that he had missed such a blatant intruder in his garden, his plan, and he laughed. He thanked deity and he marveled at the miracle and the beauty. It did not matter that it was not his plan or that it was not a cultured rose; it was beauty and it was a miracle. He let the rose be and was better for it.
Which gardener are you?
Story piece
A heart wants what it wants and a logical mind has no say in how a person feels about another person. Sometimes the person her heart wants is unavailable. Maybe someday he'll be ready to settle down, maybe he'll find someone who wants to travel long roads with him, or maybe his happiness doesn't depend on any person other than himself. The reason for leaving had to do only with him, a part of him that he wasn't going to change for anyone but himself. He had chosen not to change.
A heart wants what it wants and a logical mind has no say in how a person feels about another person. Celeste Green never meant to hurt anyone, least of all herself, but sometimes the person her heart wants is unavailable. Celeste's blue-green eyes hurt but she refused to cry. She was done crying, she told herself.
Once she fell for that guy who would never stick around, she remembered as she glanced in her rear view mirror. Her sister knew, maybe Celeste even knew, Cavan Hale was not the type of man to settle in one place for long.
"Maybe someday he'll be ready to settle down," Celeste said to herself, "Maybe he'll find someone who wants to travel long roads with him, or maybe his happiness doesn't depend on any person other than himself." She figured he was probably one of those people who didn't consider marriage or a relationship a goal. Love was something she sought so she hadn't actually believed people like that really existed. There certainly weren't any of them in the books she liked to read.
Cavan had worked all manner of odd jobs in his life and had stopped briefly in all manner of places. His most prized possession, his only possession as far as Celeste was concerned, was a 1997 Harley-Davidson Sportster. Technically, she knew he also owned a cabin and a small patch of forest near the Appalachian Mountains that his grandfather had left him. It doesn't matter, Celeste told herself, travel is a part of him and he wasn't going to change for anyone but himself. He had chosen not to change. Celeste couldn't fault him for leaving; he'd never promised to stay. Only she'd had this romantic notion that he would take her with him when he left. He hadn't chosen to take her with him, either.
Celeste refused to continue her depressing trudge down a less-than romantic memory lane. Instead she turned the radio back on and tried again to find a station playing a song about something other than love or a broken heart.
As she drove toward her new job outside of New York she felt as if she'd love him and feel the pain of it forever. Her logical mind told her it wasn't true but foolish heart wasn't convinced. She could not control how she felt or the person her heart had chosen. She could control her actions. Celeste would start her life over again.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
On Bigotry and Being American
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I am proud to call myself an American.
I believe in American ideals like equality, liberty, freedom of speech, and the right to keep and bear arms. I grant that every American has the right to believe and say what they want. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion. I also believe in radical, progressive ideals like our society taxing the rich their fair share as well as supporting care of the elderly, the poor, and the sick.
Have you read Grapes of Wrath? The story matters and it matters even more today. As a country we are fighting the same men who stole and killed during the Great Depression, when the Grapes of Wrath is set. In chapter 29 there is a quote about men and horses. If a man had a team of horses that plowed and cultivated his land he wouldn’t think of turning those horses out to starve when they weren’t working. But corporations will do that to men. Because banks and corporations live and breathe profits. It is all about the bottom line, the profit margin, and none of it concerns itself with ethical or moral decency.
And why would banks and big business care about ethical and moral dilemmas? Wells Fargo killed a little girl recently. It was in the news. How do you properly put a corporation on the stand and accuse them of murder for profit? You don’t; people have to be accused of committing crimes. People, however, are content to hide behind corporate memos. Things need to change. Things must change.
In Italy and other countries the crimes of banks and corporations have been cause for rioting in the streets. In Iceland bankers were jailed for contributing to the financial crisis.
I’m sorry but I’m from Bakersfield. If you kill someone’s child, or steal someone’s horse then there is a good chance you’ll find yourself on the wrong end of a noose---and rightfully so!
My great-grandmother was Irene Howard. She walked the Trail of Tears when she was three. According to family stories, Irena began the trip with her mother and father. She ended the trip with her father and stepmother. My great-grandfather was a Native American who fought in the Civil War to gain “white status” which would allow him to legally marry my great-grandmother. (That is actually what people called it, as far as I know.) It also allowed him to own land and granted his family other rights that we take for granted. They had a daughter, Ada Plummer, and she had a daughter---my grandmother Rose. Grandma Rose was a seamstress when time allowed. She had a good phone voice, though, so for work she was often employed doing some manner of telephone customer service. My grandfather---he died when I was three---was sort of a farmer’s hand. He was Irish according to my mother, though his last name is English. My mother told me that they moved a lot when she was young because picking strawberries and the like was transient employment. Even in California, with its extended growing season, not all crops are ready for picking at the same time. After my mother was born my grandparents had three boys: my Uncle Jim, Uncle Paul, and Uncle Mike. My grandfather Lloyd would take the three boys when they didn’t have school and they would all go out into the fields to work.
I’m not sure if you needed to know all of that, actually. But I think knowledge can lead to understanding so maybe you did need to know it.
I grew up in a city in California but the city thought it was a small, Southern town. We had the rodeo come through every year. People wore mostly jeans and plaid shirts. You made tea on the roof and lemonade with lemons.
Being an American takes a great deal of courage. Being an American means a deep generosity of spirit that brings to mind the great heroics of legends and idols.
To quote Arjun Sethi: This country's commitment to equality - and to the promise of a nation that is not just characterized by diversity but also defined by it - is what drives immigrants here and what makes the United States the envy of the world; it's what led so many immigrants to cross miles and oceans and leave behind more than most of us can imagine.
Bigotry is deeply un-American.
National Coming Out Day
Okay, so I'm very Belated on this particular holiday. By about a week. But it doesn't matter how much time passes this is still a subject I believe needs to be talked about. I believe a lot of people have already said some amazing things---so I'm gonna quote some people smarter than me in a bit---but I want to add my support to the LGBT community across the United States, heck across the world even.
First, let me clear something up for you: I am not a member of this community, even though I identify with it. The fact that I regard people who have non-standard sexual orientations
as super cool is something that we need more of in the world. If you
want to debunk the standard arguments against gay marriage then do refer
to John Corvino's videos for an excellent study. Or, better yet, buy his book. Part of me feels like the only person at a school for superheroes who doesn't have any super powers when I say that. John Corvino may say that it has never been a reaction to homosexuality for a straight person to want to be gay... He's both right and wrong. Being straight as a ruler was never a choice I made. If anything it was a truth about me that (at least in high school) I wish hadn't been true. I had trouble finding a date and part of my explanation for that was to say that if I were gay or bisexual the choices would be better. (I certainly wasn't going to admit that my dating issues were because I was neurotic and a little bit obsessed with my education.) Not my fault, young me cried.
Imagine for a moment (here is a moment of girl geek for you) that for whatever reason you are in the X-Men universe. You are attending Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters despite the fact that you are not a mutant (pick a reason, prophecy, luck, or whatever). As a non-mutant fighting to defend the rights of the mutants around you, your friends and classmates, what would you say?
People accuse mutants of being dangerous. Well, mutants are dangerous because mutants are people and people are dangerous. Having fantastic abilities does not dictate whether or not any particular mutant will use those special abilities for good or for ill.
The same could be said about heterosexual couples verses homosexual couples: being detrimental to society is something that we are all capable of and it has nothing to do with our sexuality. It has to do with who we are. You can look (and not look very hard) and find married heterosexual couples that are not capable or not willing to have children (just like some homosexual couples) and you can certainly find news reports about married couples abusing their children. That is not good for children or for society. It may actually be harder for a homosexual couple to get away with abusing children because people in our adoption system may be more willing to see problems in a non-standard situation that in the standard one.
What I find particularly heartbreaking is the religious doctrine that Christians have been learning, in regards to the LGBT community. Matthew Vines preaches and excellent sermon on the subject. He is preaching to the LGBT community the message that being gay is not a sin and the Bible doesn't say that it is a sin. Actually, I found his post both informative and moving. I agree with what he has said and if I any of my children decides to become a Christian this is the sort of preacher I would want for my children.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Ethics in the United States
A common enough sentiment of the current era is that as long as something is not illegal then it is acceptable behavior, but this is not the case. Unethical behavior, while not necessarily illegally (yet) is still wrong and can have a detrimental affect on a person professionally as well as personally. For instance, the new healthcare reforms are proposing penalties for those companies that do not provide healthcare benefits to their full-time employees. Some companies are considering paying the penalties rather than insuring their employees, “a document prepared for Verizon by consulting firm Hewitt Resources stated, ‘Even though the proposed assessments [on companies that do not provide health care] are material, they are modest when compared to the average cost of health care,’ and that to avoid costs and regulations, ‘employers may consider exiting the health care market and send employees to the Exchanges.’ (Under the new bill, employees who lose their coverage will purchase health care through state-run exchanges.)” (Tully, 2010). The threat of public backlash against such unethical business practices will hopefully mitigate the number of employers that actually take this route.
Ethics are complex standards of demeanor. Ethics can be personal or very broad. The rules by which an individual wishes to determine his or her carriage are personal ethics. The guidelines to which a group (religion, nation, et cetera) holds itself and each of its members accountable are community or global ethics. In the case of global ethics some consider all ethical principles to have evolved from our instinctive ethics. For example it would go against natural instincts in our species to abandon our children because humans produce so few offspring; raising children increases the chances of the community’s survival.
Another example of instinctive ethics might be found in Sagan and Druyan’s book which discusses a group of macaque monkeys that demonstrated the willingness to sacrifice rather than cause pain or suffering to another macaque monkey. In this experiment “[M]acaques were fed if they were willing to pull a chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. Otherwise, they starved. […] 87% preferred to go hungry,” scientists reported (Sagan & Druyan, 1993). Humans repress these instincts in favor of learned habits or else people flounder when faced with a much more subtle ethical dilemma. The macaque monkeys instinctively valued the well-being of other living creatures above the basic need for food.
Values are more like ideals and they may vary both in what is considered valuable and in the importance and priority of each value. Values are ideals rather than rules and how much they can vary, even among two people who believe they have similar values. This difference may often be caused by the difference between instrumental values and intrinsic values. For one person family may be a value that is an intrinsic value, or valuable on its own, and the value of money may be an instrumental value. In that case money is valuable because it allows that person to afford to have a family and not for the sake of having money.
Understanding the ethical guidelines and the importance and priority of values can make navigate the pitfalls of life a bit easier.
References
Sagan, C., & Druyan, A. (1993). Shadows of forgotten ancestors. New York, NY: The Random House Publishing Group.
