17th
I recently resolved to start writing again. I used to love writing, before college forced me to downgrade myself to a soullessly efficient book report mill. Writing has been at the heart of some of my deepest relationships. I can hold my own in a conversation, but the only time I feel that I’m saying all that I need to say is when I am writing, poring over my words and carefully tweaking every little nuance of meaning. So when I decided that the only way to rescue my mind-numbingly dull summer was to strive to do something “creative” almost every day, I chose to devote at least part of that effort to writing for pleasure.
I used to blog more. I have never been one to blog about my daily doings, and my bloggings have generally consisted of short comments. Occasionally I would come up with some stream-of-consciousness humor piece, if I was in the right mood. I suppose I stopped blogging altogether because my life problems took on more and more of a private nature. As a wide-eyed, idealistic adolescent, I never suspected that I would have “secrets,” but apparently I was just fooling myself. I would be more within my comfort zone to keep those secrets safe, but I also truly believe that painful things happen so that you can be equipped to help others going through similar situations. Thus I will try to process some things in the light, and hopefully somebody will benefit.
I also hope to become more well-versed in certain philosophical and social issues by forcing myself to talk about them. It is my tendency to rely on vague impressions of the issues instead of truly exploring what I believe, so hopefully the effort of writing about them will help me to explore deeper. I may never be a Mike Janke, but it is disturbing that most of my knowledge of current events comes from the four headlines on the Yahoo! front page. I can do better.
I guess this blog is part of my effort to stop living on cruise control. This is a mindset that I can’t seem to shed, carrying over from high school. I spent my free time dreaming of the glorious future and killing time until it would arrive. Most of that glorious future consisted of the sure-to-be-glamorous college life which I have supposedly now attained, so I need to learn to savor the present. Kicking back and waiting for the stage of life to arrive that will cure all my ills is a hard habit to break. To top it off, I keep having increasingly busy semesters that leave little time to pursue anything other than getting all my work turned in on time, but those are over at the moment. But so far my summer has been a wretched void of stimulus. Almost as soon as I got home I spent my days job hunting at progressively less lucrative establishments, finally degenerating into days of late sleeping and mindless video gaming as I waited by the phone for interview offers that never came. I finally got hired last week, so thankfully those days are over, but I still need to get into the habit of pursuing enriching activities off the clock.
Four years is an incredibly short time, and it’s already half over. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, I’ve been waiting to be this age my entire life, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to stay here. That is an exaggeration, but it does describe my vaguely growing sense of panic at times. But I digress.
So, enriching activities. In addition to crapping words into the latrine of the internet, I plan to spend the rest of the summer reading, painting, and wokring on my music. I vowed the entire schoolyear that I would read the Twilight series over the summer, but the abysmal local library system has failed me. I even attempted to get it from the Columbia downtown library when I was up there visiting, but there were 15 requests ahead of me. In lieu of this, I may tackle LOTR or read the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time since I was about 8 years old. Anything to shake this irrational anti-fiction mood I have been in for the past few years.
I have started painting again. I used to paint when I was a kid, but I was a perfectionist back then and hated everything I produced. (That is worth a future essay in itself.) 8x11 paper is not the best medium for painting anyway. I am not sure when the change occurred, but sometime last year I picked up the brush again and discovered the joys of slathering. Now that I have progressed to canvas and sizable pieces of cardboard, I find immense pleasure in liberally, frantically coating huge sections. One of my favorite techniques is to wad up pieces of paper and blot on splotchy, multicolored backgrounds. I think I enjoy making the backgrounds almost more than the foreground details. It is pure motel art, but it is terribly satisfying.
I am getting my songwriting muse back as well. Songwriting suffers from much the same risk as blogging about personal issues, so that plus an accute awareness of my lack of actual instrumental ability kept me stymied for awhile. However, three semesters of basic lessons later, I have the guitar knowledge to write more complex melodies, and I am more accepting of the voice I was born with. I have some recording equipment and actually recorded a few (bad) songs when I was 14, so I hope to attempt this again now that I have actual musical knowledge and better material and tastes. A good friend told me back then that he would be surprised if I had more than 7 passable songs recorded before college. He was right.
I’ve been admitting lately that a lot of people were right about things that I was wrong about. There was a time that I would have spent considerable energy trying to make myself look as good as possible upon realization of my wrongness, but that concerns me less now. No, I can’t hold down a job and pay for school and pay for the responsibilities of marriage at the same time. No, I don’t need or even care about a four year degree to teach Sunday school, and no, I don’t like teaching as much as I thought I would. But that’s all okay. I haven’t wasted time. I haven’t screwed up my shot at a perfect life. I’ve learned things that I couldn’t have learned without those experiences, and that’s okay. I hope this realization is a sign of growing up, because somewhere under the goth clothes and living off my dad and trying desperately to be a social butterfly, there lies a 21 year old woman.
