i have been eating everything in sight, my lower back wants me to suffer, and i’m exhausted for like 70% of the day. after my oral presentation on tuesday, i will take a deep breath, and pass out for at least ten hours of peaceful sleep. but not until then.

and then he said…

…”that’s a shame, i was looking for a go-go dancer to go with my austin powers.”

O.O

letting it all hang out

writing really does mean exposing your self completely to the reader, even if the piece is fictional, because every idea that takes shape on paper is a reflection of the writer’s  sensibilities, as well as the experience she’s had to be able to formulate those sensibilities into ideas. i think that’s why it’s crucial for writers – successful writers – to come to terms with themselves as human beings, and to accept their flaws so that they can more easily reflect them and deal with them in their stories. inevitably, those flaws will be broadcast to anyone reading the story, and the writer has to be okay with that. without this comfort level, the writer is just on a silent date with himself, awkwardly pushing his commas and periods around while hoping that someone else will do the talking for him. nobody wants to read the fruits of such labor, not even the writer who wrote it.

i have been working for the last few months on being okay with myself, and licking wounds that have, over the course of several years, given me the kind of writer’s block that writers only have nightmares about. it’s a slow process – much slower than i want it to be – but the haze in my head is lifting. today i got excited at the prospect of transposing my own ideas onto a character i’ve been slowly developing. i realized this character has great potential to be multi-dimensional (as long as i’m honest with myself), and that writing her won’t be as difficult as i imagined because i think a lot of her experiences are going to reflect my own in one way or another, whether i want them to or not (just in a really wacky setting, as per usual). this has given me relief, because it means that i can  kick my mind into its natural gear and let intuition start the initial draft – that’s my favorite way to write.

a list of demons

at some point over the last few years i became averse to complaining out loud – to venting, if you will. i attribute this aversion to listening to certain people complain nonstop about trivial things for the better part of those few years, and developing such a disdain for their petty griefs that i became unable to voice my own frustrations out loud for fear of becoming like them. every time i complained – or even when i complain now – out loud, to others, i’d feel a sense of shame about myself that i found very unbecoming and very uncomfortable. i told myself i should not complain, as i had nothing to complain about.

but i AM stressed out – and justifiably so!  i DO have complaints, and i HAVE been complaining – just in a really ineffective way.  i have been allowing only a few grievances to seep out here and there, to one friend or another, on a daily basis, feeling guilty each time i do, and it’s not bringing me any kind of relief. there’s a reason you’re not supposed to bottle up your emotions.

so in an effort to “cleanse” my emotional palate and regain some semblance of lucidity, here is my list of grievances:

i have managed to acquire over the course of this year almost every single common running injury. this is a source of daily irritation, because what do runners like to do best? run. but what CAN’T runners do if their legs have tendinitis or IBS? RUN. and the injuries have not hit all at once. i had a bad bout of tendinitis in first my right calf area, and then my left calf area, so i waited two months for it to heal, and did no running in the meanwhile. the elliptical machine allowed me to maintain SOME stamina during those two months, but after the freedom and exhilaration that running provided me, that elliptical machine was  just a bad joke. when the tendinitis went away, and i built up my mileage to just short of a steady six miles, i got IBS, which is an inflammation of the tendon that runs along  the outer part of your thigh and knee. the tendinitis hurt like hell, but this injury is even more annoying, because while it doesn’t “hurt”, it makes my leg feel like it’s dragging behind the other everytime i run. it is taking forever to go away, and my mileage has dropped to barely over a mile and a half so i feel like i have to start from the beginning when it does go away.

two nights ago, something happened to the electricity in my apartment. the lights in my bedroom and bathroom flicker, and my refrigerator does not want to stay on. i could deal with the lights flickering, but all the food i had in my fridge is now a pile of wilted garbage, and i can’t go out to buy more because instead of fixing the fridge the first time, the maintenance man “reset” it and went on his merry way. i had to resubmit a work order and now must miss class to be here when he comes to fix it a second time so that i can make sure he doesn’t just “reset” the fridge again. clearly there is a greater electricity problem afoot.

i’m also REALLY tired of the daily routine right now. usually i go for a mini outing every couple of weeks to tahoe or san francisco or SOMEWHERE, but because the last two months have been insanely eventful in a busy sort of way, i have not had the opportunity to venture outside of sacramento. as a result, i am going stir crazy, and craving the natural outdoors in the same maniacal way i’m craving a good 5k. I NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE.

additionally, 2L classes this semester border on useless, and going to all but two of them is a big waste of my time. i’d be better off reading supplements and E&A’s during the time i spend in class, but instead i have to sit through two hours of bullshit and then spend hours trying to untangle the mess of doctrines that i was supposed to have learned about in class. i am going to hope that next semester is better, but i don’t want to count on it.

~fin.

thankful for the wash away

first rain of the season, and my apartment is cozy. the trees outside my window and patio are ripe with burgundy and lush with green because the rain has rinsed all the dust off. i find myself relieved by the weather, because it’s pounding away the last few months. (also, it’s sweater season, and sweaters are my favorite.)

i am absolutely craving nature and extreme weather. i have an urge to visit lake tahoe because it’s supposed to be snowing there this time of year, and also because it has trees and a large lake, and i want to sit at its bank and stare off into blue. my hairdresser told me to drive down freeport until i hit country, which apparently isn’t far from here. i think since that’s a closer alternative, i’ll give it a try this weekend, and take my camera with me for companionship. it’s been raining, so any natural color should be brilliant, and that’s my favorite kind of color to shoot.

A short

this is a good marker of where i’m at:

you can read that picture as you will. it is mine, i took it and edited it myself.

____________

i read an old memory in my journal last night that i subconsciously erased. it took me 20 minutes of hard thinking to recover that memory as my own, as I was convinced it never happened to me.

it was real though.

after prying insistently into my bank of memories, i was able to extract the whens and the wheres of the occasion. when i finally remembered the scene, it made me cry. it was a sweet and tender memory that i should have cherished instead of erasing. it was about first love.

i imagine it was my pride that locked the memory away, because it despises my sentimentality about these kinds of moments.

but my pride has no relevance anymore, and i should stop rejecting my past. i tend to see my younger self as naive, and i consider naivete as fairly loathsome.

but pride can be helpful, i think, if i refocus it. it can make me appreciate all the memories i’ve collected, good and bad, i just have to make it stop hacking me up into only the pieces i can bear to acknowledge.

Breathing room

All I want to do recently is laugh. It’s a manic desire – like a complete necessity – and once I start, I don’t want to stop. I’ll laugh at the way you scratch your head or the way you shift in your seat. Don’t take it personally, it doesn’t have much to do with you. It’s just so much better than crying.

I am thoroughly enjoying having my own apartment, and knowing that nothing will move unless I move it, and that no light will go on unless I flip the switch. I can do anything I want in this space. I can walk around naked if I wanted to (but it’s kinda chilly for that now…).

For the first time in a really long time, I feel like I can breathe. Like every pore on my body has air. And like I can take my time with life – with everyday tasks – with lounging about and falling asleep anywhere I please. I enjoy filling my sink up with pans and pots and dishes and glasses, and then washing them all and letting them sit to dry on my dish rack. I like brewing a cup of coffee in the morning, or making tea if I please, or just grabbing yogurt out of the refrigerator on my rush out the door. I like that I can do all these things, and not a soul is watching. I like that I can hang my art in any corner I choose, without compromise or second-guesses.  I like the way my furniture sits, because I put it that way. I decorated, and I live here.

A new favorite line

I have discovered what is becoming my most favorite line of text in all that I’ve read in my 23 years:

“It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.”
The Sex Lives of Cannibals by Troost.

It’s expressive, brief, supremely telling, and syntactically pleasing.

That’s only a snippet of funny from that book. The writing style is so often whimsical and lighthearted that I have a hard time believing Troost is describing a real place. This book could have gone in such a different direction – it could have been tragic and sorry, and along the lines of the kind of “groundbreaking” journalism that paints the world into a grimy, sorrowful place. It’d be WAY less enjoyable that way, and probably far less informational.

writer’s diary

I sometimes wonder if I was meant to be a tumbleweed. Because my fancies are scattered over a wild and haphazard geography, and it seems too tedious to use jets, planes, or automobiles to get to where I should already exist. I want to just roll on through and out, on to wherever the wind blows me.

This is a different inclination than “to travel,” because traveling implies some organization. No, I want to be in India one day, and the Netherlands the next. The deep mountains, an ocean shore. It’s so easy in my dreams – I can hop a millennium in less than two seconds, and have been in every continent, on any plateau or atoll.

I suppose that’s what books are for: to transport, if only momentarily. I did read a lot as a child, and still do. And I could easily go wherever the author took me, as though I was dreaming it. Those were the places I preferred to be – lands I knew nothing about, situations I could not predict. Then I’d learn as I read, and a story would unfold, and I could be as engaged in that reality as I should have been in my own. I preferred to dream and make up stories, and still do.

I should be able to dream onto paper, but it’s tough to find words that match the sequence of events, and the rate at which they unfold, in my head. Everything up there is soft and mobile, but words aren’t. They’re real and permanent, not at all like tumbleweeds. They never move the way I want them to, and maybe that’s the task at hand.

I’m torn between malleable daydreams and the reality of human interactions. It is not fantasy, what I see in my thoughts, but it isn’t anywhere near reality either. I am inclined always to fuse the two, but it occurs to me that maybe I can’t – or shouldn’t. I’ve never liked expressing the psychology of humans, so why have I continued to try? Some authors have something to say about daily interactions between people, but I don’t think I do. I think I have another place to take you altogether. Sort of like magical realism, but less magic and less real.

A few reflections on the last month

I hadn’t really thought about it until I started going through pictures, but I’m finding that I actually really miss Salzburg. And the giant square with the weird golden ball with the man on top. And the gelato and kabob on the street. And the clap of horseshoes on cobblestones.

My world both shrunk and expanded while I was abroad. Expanded, obviously, because I saw sights I hadn’t seen before. But it shrunk in a really helpful way, mentally. I was sans internet, phone and everyday worries for a month, and it really allowed me to filter out all the nonsense that had been crowding my head before. It was like a month-long meditation, really. I came back feeling a lot more lucid and calm about my priorities, and I feel in a way as though my head got a badly needed reboot. I’m finding it a lot easier to live in the present day without worrying about abstract ideas such as “my future” and “being an artist” and “not being a law ‘person’” and “not doing with my life what I want.” At some point during the trip, I subconsciously realized all those ideas were pretty useless, and that instead of thinking about “my future” I should just take steps to have one. And that instead of “being an artist” I should just learn the technical aspects of the crafts I enjoy and produce actual work. I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to internalize ISO, f-stops and shutter speeds (all of which I had no patience for a month ago) – and I liked it.

I’ve had this tendency ever since I was a child: to disregard details, to think I know enough if not more about whatever I’m doing. I feel a lot humbler these days, and I think that’s actually getting me much closer to where I envision myself going in terms of career and dignity.

So I do miss Salzburg, and Europe in general. I can’t wait to go back, to see new countries, to travel. But for now, I’m going to try to maintain this lucid state the best I can.