does anyone know how i can email/contact The Script?

they’re performing where i live and my little sister is so heartbroken that she can’t be here that i am actually trying to see if they will send her something autographed.

so if anyone knows an address/email ID you would be making my day AND hers :)

and i have to end with a question mark so that you can answer so here

?

so i have been accused of being sad all the time.

and as you can see from my previous post, my first reaction was defensive: i’m not sad and pathetic, i’m happy and well-adjusted and my life is perfect, und so weiter. (side note: i am allowed to show off and use german words once in a while. especially when they’re such cool-sounding words. this is not pretentious, it is practice.)

anyway. the truth is, maybe i do like writing about things that are sad - not in the sense of tragic things like death and murder, but the things that confuse or intrigue or worry or disturb me. and now i think i know why that is. you know that ridiculously cliché Tolstoy quote about each unhappy family being different? when i was younger, i said the quote wasn’t even valid - that the sentence should read “all families are, in some way, unhappy.” (gosh i was a deep twelve-year-old.) but now i’m beginning to think what the quote is really saying is that sadness is interesting.  

everyone can be happy the same way, you know? we watch an episode of friends and we’re essentially laughing at the same joke. you see something pretty and it makes you go aaaah and you know that other people are probably feeling the same way. i know this is a terrible generalization and there are different kinds of happiness but what i mean is that sadness always feels frighteningly unique, something that’s just yours, in a way that’s different from happiness. songs that make me cry leave you unaffected. the weird building that’s been in the process of being torn down for years just fascinates me, but makes my friend feel awful because she says the house looks like it’s caught in limbo. sadness is strange: you can’t explain it and you can’t fight it.

i don’t always stop myself from feeling sad. so when i’m happy, i’m happy. and let’s be clear: i am happy, most of the time. but when i’m sad, i’m okay with admitting this to myself. because to me, being sad doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. it is a bad thing if you’re all self-indulgent and woe-is-me and the-whole-world-hates-me, but hey, if you’re watching an episode of Grey’s and you want to cry, just cry, you know?  sometimes i like re-reading The Book Thief or watching that heartbreaking episode where Ross and Rachel break up, or that scene with Keira Knightley in Love Actually, or listening to The Riddle (which i’m not sure why it makes me cry so much, but it does).

and i like writing about the things that make me feel sad or confused precisely because i also find them interesting. if i wrote about the things that made me happy those would basically be books, movies, music, people and the world in general. these are interesting too, but i always know when i’m happy why i’m happy - it’s only when i write down the things that make me anxious or unhappy that i realise the reasons behind these feelings.

 when you’re little, you’re taught always to smile, because feeling sad is bad - but when you grow up and learn that life isn’t always ideal, don’t you also realise that some amount of sadness is inevitable? life isn’t perfect, and i’d rather go through life knowing when i’m happy and when i’m not, than trying my best to suppress any unhappy feelings and living in a kind of forced happiness. 

i don’t know what to write today so i am doing this stream-of-consciousness blog post about nothing.

it’s twenty to twelve and i am sitting in my room. i like my hostel room. it’s messy but not in a dirty way - i mean there’s no laundry on the floor and breadcrumbs on the bed, it’s just messy in a lived-in sense. post-it notes everywhere, piles of books. i am literally incapable of inhabiting a space and not filling it with books, i currently have more books than underwear in my room which is either awesome or pathetic, depending on how you look at it.

i like my messy cluttered room, anyway. clinically clean places make me claustrophobic. (ooh, that was accidental alliteration right there.)

ANYway, i am drinking a cup of english breakfast tea, which when i was small i always thought meant an actual english breakfast, like someone drinking a mug of bacon and eggs. english breakfast is a stupid name for tea. so is earl grey, but that is probably because i don’t know the origins of the names and so i’m being unnecessarily judgemental. as a lit student, i really should know better.

(i just googled it. earl grey tea is actually named after an earl called grey. the second earl of grey, to be exact. i wonder if they asked him if he was okay with having a tea named after him? personally, i would hate it if someone said, oh i’m off to have a cup of tara.)

speaking of names, when i was small i absolutely hated being called tara. that is, by the way, only half of my name - but i’m paranoid about privacy so you will never learn the other half (she said mysteriously). anyway, i hated that my name had this other name in it - being called tara made me feel like half a person. but now that i’m in college and everyone calls me tara, it’s starting to feel like a kind of friendly alter ego. tara speaks up relatively confidently in class, makes people laugh and writes amazing essays. people says her name’s exotic and lovely. i kind of like having her around.

tara also reminds me of the artemis fowl books, so i feel like something that’s important to badass Fairy people. which is also kind of cool.

re-reading this post, i seem to have jumped from my room to the second earl of grey to my name to artemis fowl.

it must be fun being my mind.

1. there is nothing wrong with being sad some of the time. we are humans, not that guy from star trek with weird eyebrows and no emotions.

2. i am NOT sad most of the time. in fact i am, in my opinion, quite a happy person. i smile a lot and i only ever cry over episodes of grey’s anatomy and/or glee. 

3. being introspective is not the same as being sad. why do people think it is?

4. being not-optimistic-all-the-time is not the same thing as being pessimistic-all-the-time. i mean i might not see the world as rainbows and butterflies, but i am also not oscar the grouch.

5. worrying is not the same as being sad. why do people think it is?

6. i do not know why i started a numbered list but now i cannot seem to stop.

8. i skipped number seven, because i’m kind of badass that way.

13. numbered lists are fun if you don’t go in order.

14. i do not think that anyone who loves post-its, chick lit and Edward Monkton as much as i do can be accused of being sad and depressed, but we live in a strange world where such things happen.

15. basically in this list i argue that IAMNOTSADANDDEPRESSEDOKAY.

16. to prove it: i do not look like this, do i?

no. no i don’t.

p.s. if people see glasses as half-empty or half-full, and i just see them as, well, glasses, then what does that make me?

i am terrified of forgetting.

when i was small and lying in bed alone in the dark, i didn’t worry about monsters or ghosts. i worried about what would happen if i lived my life and then died and was reborn, and that someday i could be this totally different person who would have no recollection of this, my present life. the thought haunted me - it made me cry sometimes - and i’m still completely unsettled when i think about it today.

i live halfway in the past. i’m obsessed with holding on to tiny details about the things that have happened to me.

i reminisce and i repeat and i recall and i retell.

my mother says i’m too young to be nostalgic. is nineteen too young? is it morbid to cling, at my age, so desperately to my past, to constantly be afraid of forgetting everything that’s made me me?

i don’t know. i do know that, yes, memory can be treacherous. it can change, inception-style. it can fool you, and disturb you, and you can believe something for years and then find out that you imagined it. it can come back to haunt you when you walk into a room that smells like your favourite aunt’s old house and you’re suddenly reduced to tears. living in the past, as Dumbledore says about dreams, “does not do” - especially if, in the process, you “forget to live”.

but memory is also so powerful, and in such startlingly wonderful ways. it can make things that aren’t yours belong solely, uniquely, magically to you - the song your father sang you to sleep with. the book you read sitting under a tree listening to A Fine Frenzy on your iPod. the road you took to school every day, the view from your verandah, the movie that made you cry even though everyone else found it funny, the combination of pancakes and orange juice that you ate on the first day of college and will now forever be associated with the nervousness and anxiety you felt that day.

it can keep things alive which aren’t anymore. you remember your first dog’s eyes, your second dog’s fur. the touch of your great-grandmother’s hand, the blueprint of the house you moved out of, the teachers who don’t teach you anymore and the fact that you believed in the tooth fairy and the time you woke up at the crack of dawn to see what Santa left you, and cried because you didn’t realise that the stocking was empty only because the lightsaber wouldn’t fit into it.

it can make you remember the things that made you who you are today. the teacher who made you cry, the friends who made you whole, the book that made you decide to major in literature, the music that kept you happy. the good and the bad and the right and the wrong, the embarrassing memories that make you visibly cringe and the heartbreaking ones that make you cry. i think they’re all so incredibly, incredibly important - and you can call me nostalgic and sentimental and pathetic, but for as long as i can,

i will reminisce and i will repeat and i will recall and i will retell.

and i will remember.

i don’t understand how people write.

how do you write without getting personal? i can’t. an essay, yes - although my opinion always leaps out of the page. a magazine article, yes - although being objective and clinical is so near-impossible that i end up writing book reviews instead.

so then…if you do get personal…if everything you write is a reflection of your thoughts and feelings and mood at one particular moment, then how on earth is it possible to let people you know read what you’ve written?

i’m used to living behind my mask. the girl who’s only insecure in a slightly neurotic way, but is actually perfectly happy and has it all figured out. the kind of sarcastic, cynical, oh-let’s-just-diffuse-this-conflict-with-a-little-humour kind of person.

writing, for me, strips this mask. i become simultaneously more insecure and more confident; pessimistic yet romantic, a little less happy and a little more confused perhaps.

stripping the mask is terrifying. i’m not very good with being brave. but i can’t live like this forever - not when i have things i want to say and wish i could say - so i’m doing this, a kind of anonymous blog.

i don’t know how this is going to help me. personally, i’m hoping i’ll magically transform into some super-confident young woman and then someone who looks like jude law will fall hopelessly in love with me and i will acquire grace kelly’s accent and wardrobe and become the next j. k. rowling and live happily ever after.

(but if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. really.)