If a sheep eats bushes, does it eat flowers, too?

“A sheep eats whatever it finds.”
“Even flowers that have thorns?”
“Yes. Even flowers that have thorns.”
“Then what good are thorns?” – The Little Prince

What a difference a year makes. Time, ever constant, relentlessly moving forward, makes the best of us all… “Time is what changes kittens to cats” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and so it is that even a small increment of time as a year (well, on the larger scale of things) will result in a drastic change in virtually all aspects of life. Granted, not all years have the same impact on the quality of life or even the maturity that you gain, which is why I think it’s kind of hard to use age, or even age-squared as the continuous variable that it is while running regressions—what’s to say that the year that gets added to your life at age 21 has the same effect as the year that you add on at age 46? Anyway, that’s not the point here; I just wrote a very simple econometric paper for my economics of the labor market class and have regressions on the brain… Hmm, how should I best phrase the sentiments that I wish to portray? I guess before I can talk about the first quote I should insert one of my favourites by A. E. Housman:

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
‘The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ‘tis true, ‘tis true.

Last year, well, it kind of sucked. Whatever. I guess the only really neat outcome of all the disgruntled mess is that I can really relate to that poem, because as a 22 yr old, that really describes how my views towards dating changed in the same time period. Not to say that I didn’t grow and improve in some aspects of my life; it wasn’t a ‘complete waste’, but it the prettiest part about 2008 was perhaps the fact that I got to write ‘2008’ at the top of each journal entry. 8 is just prettier than 7 or 9. & I’m rambling again. Okay, so there was a guy that I dated last February that really messed me up a bit; he was quite a jerk, which in turn has made me just that much more reserved towards men than usual. Plus, I realized over the summer that I had a strong emotional attachment to one of my guy friends, so that whole ‘endless rue’ aspect hit home like a burglar with a nine-iron…

To go back to the Little Prince quote, I became a flower, too afraid to be out in the open night air. I became just that much more aware of all the dangers that exist in a flower’s world, such as sheep, who will only try to devour the flower without a thought to the people who care for said flower. So, I did what any self-aware flower would do—I grew thorns. These thorns had the purpose of protecting me from the sheep and the tigers. I withdrew from the company of friends and family, hiding in my own world. Men scared me, like, I was absolutely terrified for a while to even be with one in a room without an obvious escape route mapped out and ready to implement at a moment’s notice. Flirting was completely out of the equation, and if I thought that a social situation might even hint towards more date-like than not, I’d be the first with an excuse to stay out of it. Thorns. Many of them. That was me.

What good are thorns? The sheep will eat the flower whether it has them or not, so why should I even bother as a flower to have them. Answer: I shouldn’t. They are pointless, and will only take effort away from my petals, ie, good qualities/quirks/charms. Coming back to BY U has caused me to realize that there’s no way that a girl such as myself can possibly avoid every single jerk out there, as some of these guys are quite well camouflaged, but that hiding from all men doesn’t seem like the best course of action… I’m going to try to shed my thorns, see where that gets me. Maybe nowhere, but at least it’ll be farther from where I stand right now. Notice to world: Amanda is coming back. Watch out!