#7: Travel to 5 states I haven't been to before - Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana

It was three days after graduation, and I was getting restless. The U-Haul had finally been attached to our green Toyota Highlander, and the cab of the car was filled to the front seats with pillows, suitcases, snack boxes, and a cooler filled with Diet Pepsi, of all things. We dragged our first cheap mattress through the back door and laid it up on the dirty fence, grabbed sheets and pillows, and closed the door. This change didn't upset me as much as I thought it would, or should. I ran away to Virginia to figure out life and college, and now I was leaving it half a decade later: very content, very accomplished, and very much married. I'd gotten what Virginia had to offer me, taken what I needed from it, and looked towards the next place to explore.

Now, I don't know if anyone else has done this, but the drive from the East Coast to the Gulf is quite a trip. I was happy to cross three more states off of my list, which added more excitement to road trip ennui. (Spoken like a true Oscar Wilde scholar.) I had already visited Tennessee, so I could not cross it off my list; however, this drive through revealed the damage caused by the recent storms and tornadoes across the South. We drove past splintered buildings and hunching metal poles. I said a little prayer for the South, both the people and the land - something I never thought I'd do in my life.

#1: Read one book for each month of the project OUTSIDE of school books (MAKE UP BOOK!)

I have SO much make-up reading to do... but now that I'm graduated and currently unemployed, I've got some time to do it in.

I saw the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray on a bookshelf by my sister-in-law's bedroom, and I asked her if she had to read it for class (she's a senior in high school). She said that she did, but that her teacher had ruined the ending for them in class and she lost interest in it; it was dry reading, anyways. I kind of knew that about Oscar Wilde after watching The Importance of Being Earnest (the Colin Firth version of course),  but it was a short 230 page read so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm glad I did, because I learned a lot about Wilde and his importance in the literary world. Check it out:

The Picture of Dorian Gray was Wilde's first and only novel, and was actually used against him in court at the turn of the century in "gross indecency" trials...which was England's way of saying that it's not okay to be homosexual...or at least come out of the closet. Which is messed up. Dorian Gray came before his more famous plays, like Being Earnest and Salomé, and had to be revised twice in order to remove certain nuances - the preface to Dorian Gray contains a sort of defense to critics of "art for art's sake", and that viewing art as a source for society's moral code is pointless and deceiving. Oscar Wilde died just 10 years later (at the age of 46) in exile in France, after serving a sentence in Reading Gaol, a French prison.
 
I didn't necessarily love the book as a novel, nor do I really reason with aestheticism (then again, I'm from the 21st century), however I think that this novel is quite unique because of the relationship between Dorian Gray's plight and that of the Victorian society Wilde addresses. Lord Henry, one of the characters who influences Dorian to reject morality for vanity, plays the jester to Wilde's courtly readers, mocking their snuff-nosed views with paradox. That's what Oscar Wilde does best, and I couldn't really call myself an English major without reading him.

Seriously, though - without writers like Wilde who made a case for free expression and the widening of society's aesthetic sensibilities, what kind of novels would we be reading today? Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Lolita, Catcher in the Rye...even the mild sexuality in Twilight would've been questioned and protested. Which I think is hypocrisy - there is a long history of homosexuality and promiscuity in the English monarchy alone - ANCIENT GREECE, hello! How much does history owe to hedonism? I don't agree with "explicitness for explicitness' sake", but it is a fact that all authors enjoy freedoms of expression because of forefathers (and foremothers) who had the courage to create their art. And that's my own case for The Picture of Dorian Gray. Besides, Oscar Wilde looks a heck of a lot like Cameron Crowe.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

#3 - Graduate from Southern Virginia University.

It is finished!

four years, four rooms, fifty classes, fifty term papers

two majors, one minor, one senior show, four seasons,

one guitar, one internship,  one roommate, one husband. 

I can't believe it's over! Southern Virginia, you've been good to me.