The Art of Forgetting: Making an Origami Lotus

Step one: lay your cheap sheet of solid-colored origami paper flat, white side facing up. You  just got home from winter break—no, it’s not a vacation, it’s the rest of your life now, and you’re unemployed and can’t afford the fancy paper right now, with the breathtaking designs that would make you feel like a real artist.

Step two: fold one corner of the sheet over to meet the corner diagonally across from it, and make a crease. You should have a colored triangle. Now, unfold it and do the same thing with the two opposite corners. You’ll have a big X from the creases in the middle of your sheet. Simple enough. Focus on making the creases as precise as possible to reel your brain back from the edge of your panic attack. If that’s not enough, minimize your Internet browser on the laptop in front of you with the search results of your query for “write + edit jobs”—bathroom cleaner, meat technician, phlebotomist, administrative assistant, administrative assistant, administrative assistant.

Step three: fold a corner of your paper in toward the center of the X-shaped creases you made. Do this with the remaining three corners. You’ll end up with a smaller square with four triangular flaps facing up toward you. This is easy. You’re good at following directions. You’re a quick learner. Consider enclosing one of your lotuses with each resume you mail out as an illustration of your marketable skills.

Step four: with your first set of flaps facing up, fold a corner of your paper in toward the center of the sheet. Do this with the remaining three corners. You’ll end up with a double layer of flaps. As you examine your handiwork, you’ll note the shape of your square looking less than perfect. You’ll itch to fix it, but you’ve already made your creases, and any corrections you try to make will only make things worse—just like considering going back for a bachelor’s in a foreign language because you realized what you really wanted to study was comparative literature, not the old dead white guy bullshit Western English-only canon. Think about telling Harold Bloom and the Educational Testing Service to kiss your ass while you turn your square of paper over so that the flat side faces up.

Step five: fold your corners in toward the center again, like you did in the last two steps. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, as with every other part of every day—wake up, eat breakfast, look for jobs, go to the gym, take a shower, dick around on the Internet, stare at a blank page of your notebook, eat dinner, dick around on the internet, go to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. Wake up, do it all again.

Step six: the hard part. With your single layer of flaps facing up, fold over a tiny bit of each of the four corners. Push down on one of these bent corners while bending the flap on the back side of it over backwards and gently pulling the corner inside out, so that the flap stands up straight in the air, like a petal. Do it gently—pulling too hard or with the flap too far away from the rest of the corner will tear it. If you’re lucky, you might be able to tape it, but it’ll likely end up just like all your job applications—one little thing works against you to ruin any hope of your having a shot at an interview: you’re too young, you just graduated from college with a degree in English and Creative Writing, you don’t have enough relevant soul-sucking work experience, your cover letter doesn’t balance groveling and self-promotion well enough, you haven’t pretended to know enough about the company or faked enough excitement for waiting months to get a rejection letter. Do this with all four corners. Gently.

Step seven: fold your remaining set of flaps out as far as you can to create a “pad” for your lotus to sit on top of. Study your delicate, tiny success for a moment, turning it over in your hands. Set it beside the seven others you made yesterday morning between looking through job listings and going to the gym. Take a deep breath and close your eyes, trying not to picture yourself, your life, your aspirations falling apart. Open your eyes and reach for another sheet of paper. Focus on the paper. Focus on your hands, the only part of you that seems able to achieve any success at the moment. During those brief instants, forget everything else.

Illinois history demands protection

Originally published September 11, 2008.

Kickapoo State Park will close November 1.

Hopefully that grabbed your attention. Many students have already heard about it, and the topic was the primary focus of the Buzz’s cover story last week. But there’s more to this than Kickapoo.

By Nov. 1, 24 state sites will close. In four state agencies, 450 employees are slated for layoff.

Now do I have your attention?

Students’ beloved Kickapoo is just one of 11 state parks set to close Nov. 1 because of the loss of 39 employees at the Department of Natural Resources.

In addition, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency will cut 80 employees and close 13 state historic sites, an oft-unmentioned addition to the park closures. The layoffs will only result in roughly $180,000 of the $2.8 million that the new budget demands IHPA cut. These 13 sites, including tourist favorites, such as Springfield’s Dana-Thomas House, are scheduled to close on Oct. 1.

After reading extensively about the closures, I’ve watched in dismay as less of the information trickles to the ears of the campus population. Kickapoo seems to be our only concern. Even in the papers, the state parks have taken precedence. The Buzz’s article offered one sentence about historic sites. Why aren’t we concerned about them?

The question deserves more consideration, especially when five of these 13 locations are expressly advertised as regional “high points” on the official Illinois tourism Web site. And they aren’t the only ones impacted by the budget cuts; numerous other sites have restricted their hours, even heavyweights like the Old State Capitol and Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield.

Some Lincoln-related sites (including the two previously mentioned, as well as Lincoln’s New Salem, the Ulysses S. Grant home and the Lincoln-Herndon law offices) will receive additional funds for 2009 from the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission to remain open 7 days a week. After the Bicentennial, however, everything is up in the air.

From the state park end, complaints have been voiced regarding the difficulty of reopening. People speculate as to whether the number of visitors who return will be as great as the attendance rates prior to closure. At least for Kickapoo, I doubt this will present much of a problem. Being so close to Champaign-Urbana will bring the crowds back in droves, between outdoorsy college students and organizational excursions. I would venture to guess that more than one UI attendee would advertise a countdown to reopening, were it assured.

We also have to remember that we live in Illinois, and many of these parks offer opportunities for hunting and fishing. The state will have more than just angry college nature-enthusiasts on its hands if it opts to maintain the 11 closures over an extended period of time.

The historical sites are another matter. The time and money necessary for upkeep at the sites may not be considered worth it by the state (or rather, the governor) for locations that only attract a few thousand visitors.

It becomes easy to reconcile any semipermanent closure with the public by saying that the money invested in historic sites is a loss and the cost will not be justified by attendance numbers. Tourists begin to lose interest quickly, and sites forgotten. Who cares about a house where some dead poet lived anyway?

We are as misguided as the governor if we allow ourselves to measure the benefit of a preserved historical location by the number of visitors it receives. The point of historic preservation lies in education and providing that education to any and every person willing to seek it. Do people view the Carl Sandburg home (with 8,598 visitors in 2007) and Lincoln’s New Salem (with 432,176 visitors in 2007) as equally interesting? Probably not. Are their continued existences equally important? Absolutely. We cannot assess the significance of personally experiencing these places by staring at numbers on the page of a report.

History itself is a refusal to forget. If we didn’t recognize its importance, we wouldn’t have protected any of these places to begin with. So who is Rod Blagojevich to arbitrate which locations we remember of the vast number of histories embodied in the sites of Illinois (particularly when the blame for the budget imbalance rests mostly on his shoulders)?

If we can refuse to forget what’s in our elementary school history textbooks, then certainly we can refuse to forget what’s right in front of our eyes. Certainly we can fight for the future of the past.

Chelsea is a senior in English and music and will consider believing in God if he spares her from one more parking ticket.