Pandora's Box

Funny thing- I've been thinking a lot about Pandora's Box. It's lovely in a savage way... an innocent girl, curious as a kitten, is told to never, under any circumstances, open a box (actually, it would have been more of a storage jar, called a pithos. Kind of like an amphora, or a grecian urn. What's a grecian urn, you may ask? Well, it depends on if we're speaking union or non-union. But I digress.)
Anyway, this poor girl is told to never open the box but, like those of us who were told to never peek under the Christmas tree or turn on Cartoon Network late at night... she did. Of course she did. How couldn't she?
What follows is a scene of horror and devastation not just to poor Pandora, but to everyone (and don't the ancients luuuurve to blame the problems of humanity on a woman? Eve ate the fruit, therefore she is responsible for all of the sorrow that follows. Pandora peeked into the box and is, therefore, to blame for the nightmares that come flying out of it. Pandora, like Eve, was made for the gods as companionship and possessed only the skills and traits bestowed on her by them. However, when those women acted upon emotions granted to them by the gods- curiosity, desire- the woman is blamed for the destruction to come. Always the woman at the center of the ancient blame game.) What comes flying out is straight out of a nightmare- hate, anger, sickness, despair, poverty, war... this one woman's "foolish" curiosity has gotten the better of her and now there will be hell to pay.
But this legend has a twist, a seemingly tragic one. Underneath all that evil, there shimmered hope, there, at the bottom, waiting for the evil to fly away but LO! Pandora, realizing her error, slams the lid shut and traps that last thing inside. She, foolish girl, had released evil, but trapped hope. Silly woman. Silly, sad, culpable woman.
I wonder, though. Picking through the variations and translations and speculations, I do wonder. The gods had made that... well, we'll call it a box because I'm too tired for complicated words in italics just now... they had formed that box to hold all the evil that was to be kept from humanity. War, death, sickness... it would have been helpful indeed to keep that mess locked away forever. But it makes me wonder- what was hope doing with such a motley crew of evil tidings? Was it that they designed it to be the one foil to the destruction within? Or did the gods realize that hope can sometimes be the cruelest thing of all and strive to keep it locked away, as a safeguard against its box-mate, despair?
I wonder about this. Maybe it wasn't the solution. Perhaps it was simply another problem. Perhaps man would be better served without hope to skew their perspective and raise them to impossible and unsustainable heights. Perhaps trapping hope doomed a race now swarmed by misfortune, but... maybe they were spared from worse by the absence of an emotion that can alternately raise you up and then let you fall again, just as unexpectedly.
So, Pandora, foolish, foolish plaything of the gods, did you fail mankind by trapping hope, or did you attempt to save us from a worse despair?

Split ends and wobbly bits

So, the summer is over (thank the gods) and honoring the great and terrible cycle of life, I'm back on my parents' couch with my laptop melting the tops of my thighs and endless episodes of Dr. Who on the television. I suppose it's a bit strange for me to have walked so far and still ended up exactly where I started.



This summer was one of great personal awareness and awakening. I daily rode on a rollercoaster that slammed me from the heights of self-worth and pride then plummeted me to the familiar, comfortable dips of self-loathing and regret. I think, if anything, it made me hope the ride would come to a complete stop so I could walk calmly to the nearest exit and find a ride that would leave me a little less queasy.


So, how do you wrap an iconic 10 weeks into a tidy little blog package? I have no idea. But I've left this poor page idle for so long and I have so many things in my head right now. Let's make a list. I love lists:

1. Everyone deserves to be loved. There are so many kinds of love and no two people need the same thing.

2. At the crossroads of life, some people go left, and some people go right, and some people curl up against the large oak and wait for someone who will make the decision for them to come along.

3. I should shower before going out for German food with my parents, but I don't wanna.


4. I have wobbly thighs. So freakin' what? I'm so tired of telling myself that I'm ugly.

5. Epiphanies are rather unsettling. And now, I'm seeing the world through newer, clearer eyes, and I'm both enchanted with and struck by the tragedy of everything I see. How melodramatic.

6. It's funny how I've sung so many songs in my life but never bothered to listen to the words or understand the meaning before. But I think I kinda get it now.

7. I'm dying for the next part of my life to begin. Hickory feels like a concentration camp. It's time to grow up and I'm so content with that but I mostly just want to crawl into a pumpkin and die for a while.

8. Time moves more slowly at home. MUCH more slowly. Like, cryogenically frozen slowly. I know time is just a wibbley, wobbley, timey-wimey ball, but still... I've been napping for a very long time.

9. Friends help you move, but real friends help you move the bodies... no, but seriously, I have some of the most amazing friends ever, and they truly showed their glorious true colors this week. Thanks, guys.

10. It is a truth universally acknowledged that any single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.

11. Without the bad times, the good times would have no meaning and no value. That doesn't, however, mean that being an adult doesn't utterly suck sometimes.

12. After all the hemming and hawing and rules and semantics and power struggles and other ridiculous blather has quieted, the only thing that matters is to believe. Everything else, the unimportant crap, will eventually take care of itself.

13. After Pandora opened the box and all the ugliness released itself upon the world, the only thing she found in the box was hope, shivering in a corner, waiting to be discovered. I kind of think it's been like that with me... so much chaos in my brain, and the one thing I needed the most was waiting, patiently, until the rest cleared out and I could let it glow uninhibited.

Yikes. Not my most brilliant post. There's just too much going on to try to make sense of any of it. More to come later.