Bothered.

When I was a senior in high school, I wrote for my school newspaper. I can't really remember why I signed up for the class in the first place. I had no aspirations of becoming a journalist and to be honest, I never really read our newspaper during my previous three years at the school. I probably just wanted an "easy" class. Or maybe some of my good friends decided to sign up for that class. Yeah, that was probably it.

Anywho, writing for the newspaper was foreign to me. I knew how to write essays for school. They had formulas. Introduction. Body. Conclusion. BAM. I was good to go for my AP English Language and Composition exam (not really, I scored terribly). Writing for the newspaper was somewhat different. I mean, yeah, you had to include certain things if you were writing in the news section - who, what, where, when, how, blah, blah, blah. But I got to choose what I would write about, what I thought was important enough that the rest of the student body should hear about it.

I found my home in the editorial section. This is funny because when I was in high school, I was deathly afraid to share my opinions. At one point, I was even convinced that I didn't have an opinion about anything. I avoided participating in any class discussions because I was afraid of offending someone or I was busy shading all the coffee mugs I had sketched in my planner. I feel that I'm a lot better at writing than I am at speaking (if you know me, it's awkward turtle all the way with me, man) when sharing my opinions. So, writing editorials it was.

I bring all of this up because this morning, I came across several issues of "The Talon," as it was called (our mascot was a screaming eagle) that I had written articles for. I don't know if you've ever had that experience of watching yourself in embarrassing home videos or listening to how you sound in your cellphone's outgoing voicemail message and you exclaim, "I looked like that?!" or "I sound like that?!" When I read my past articles, I had that same feeling. But it wasn't of embarrassment; it was a feeling of wonder... What happened to my heart?

In one issue, I wrote an article titled "Trash Talk" in which I discussed how my classmates and I complained about the cleanliness of our school when we were the ones leaving our trash everywhere. At the end of it, I challenged our students to throw their trash away and any other trash that was lying around, even if it wasn't theirs. In another issue, I wrote an article about our society's definition of beauty and how it was up to our generation to redefine it. I remember interviewing girls about their ideas of beauty and one girl answered this:

A beautiful person isn't necessarily someone who looks perfect and acts perfectly all the time. It's someone who is comfortable with herself. She knows she has flaws, and yet she still finds confidence beyond those flaws.

The one news article I did write was about my friends and I and our trip to Africa. The whole time I was reading these articles from my past, I felt like I was reading the work of a stranger. Taking action about the problems in our world, telling girls that they were beautiful despite what society was telling them, getting together with my friends and serving others... these desires, these actions, seem so far from where my heart is now.

When I was in Tanzania, I remember one of our friends saying, "Things change when we are bothered by something." Isn't that the truth? People lose weight when they are bothered by their lack of energy or because they are bothered by how they look in their clothes. Someone might change their seat at the lunch table because they are bothered by the smell of their friend's tuna fish sandwich (SIKE, I LOVE TUNA). So the question I'm asking myself is: What bothers me? And a question for you (you = Larson and you = our readers): What bothers you? And a question for all of us: What are we going to do to change what is unjust in our world? If we won't do it, who will?

Enough of my rambling. Your last entry was beautiful. A sort of peephole into the mystery that is Larson. Thanks for sharing :]

Love,
G Love