Tag Archives: musings

A Letter to Everyone I Don’t Keep Up With

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Hi. How are you? You’ll probably say “fine.” That’s what we all say, all the time, because it’s what we’re supposed to say. The basic response that shares absolutely nothing about how you are. If you ask me that question. I’ll say “Fine.” But that would miss all of the details, so let’s just skip the question.

Mostly, time passes, life plods along, and before I know it another month has gone by without note. Watching content has taken a huge chunk of my time. I’ve watched a lot of Netflix, lots of YouTube. I have some DVDs I’ve wanted to watch but no way to play them. I’m trying to read more books, but not really succeeding. I want to take in stories that will spark my creativity, and remember what it’s like to feel inspired. I’ve also taken about 2.5 million pictures of the dog. Most of them are very similar, but I can’t help taking more.

I wrote some song lyrics. I had the beginnings of a melody at the time, but I’ve forgotten the little snippet I had then. Pretty good structure though. I think the lyrics are basically done–I won’t even need to edit much. I still feel like I need to actually learn an instrument if I am ever going to be able to write songs. Do you know I used to want to be a singer, as a career? Then I kept hearing how impossible it was to make a living that way and I was already so tired from thinking about it…

Miscellaneous things: weight gain, need to get outside more, trying to start working out again, decluttering, realizing I am barely in touch with anyone and how many friends are you supposed to have in your 30s again? That you actually see and talk to, I mean? It’s definitely more than I have.

I’ve started unsubscribing from most brand emails and newsletters. I can’t keep up with my inbox anymore. There are still a few glimmers of enjoyment and value in there, so I’m weeding out all the noise right now. I always used to think, what if I miss something? But think about it… how often do you read an email (that isn’t actually from someone you know) and feel like you really got anything out of it? Am I really supposed to keep all these things coming into my inbox just in case they have a few useful tidbits, five minutes of real value in a month, a year, of email messages? No, no. I can’t keep wasting my time like that. I’m still getting way too many emails, but I’m working on it, and I highly recommend unsubscribing from as many things as possible.

I finally paid off my student loans, and it feels oddly anticlimactic.

I’m stuck in an unfortunate in-between place right now. Some things have started to get better, but they aren’t good yet. I don’t care if my life looks like what other people might expect, or even how I thought it would. I care about waking up and wanting to participate in the various parts of my life, and going to sleep with a sense of contentment. Maybe nothing we do really matters, in the grand scheme (is that phrase cliché yet?), so I want to do things that at least matter to me.

I wish I lived by the ocean. Any time I need to let out some feelings I could scream into the waves like seagulls do.

I wonder often what my life would be now if I had done a few things differently. I felt like I had to do certain things in certain ways because that’s what’s expected, and I didn’t think I could take the eternal struggle of scything my own path through the tangled woods of modern existence. Realizing how difficult everything has been anyway, doing more or less what people are supposed to do (a little less, but not in ways that did anything positive for me), I feel cheated by my younger self. Or by whatever it was that turned me into someone who couldn’t bear to take risks.

Now I feel different. Everything is a risk, and risk is necessary for growth. Doing what’s “safe” will not give me the life I want. Doing things that drive me and satisfy me can. But I’ve been naively trying to avoid risks for so long, I feel like I’m trying to break out of a solid shell that is peeling off bit by bit. I want this part to be like a movie montage–just enough screen time to show the studying and the building and the progress without having to sit through all of it, with fun outfit changes, random dancing, and an epic background song.

Now I’m sitting in bed, sipping my morning coffee. The dog is curled up near my feet. It’s colder out than it has been, and I really can’t believe it’s almost June. I can’t believe it’s 2021. I can’t believe I’ve let so much time pass without being fully myself. I’m getting too old for this.

Here Goes Nothing (literally)

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Guess it’s been a while.

When you’re not a writer by trade, it’s easy to let the other aspects of life take you away from the act of writing. This blog, while being something I was always planning to connect to a writing career, has just been a hobby in the past.

I know what no one’s asking as they read this: “Have you been writing otherwise, privately, things you don’t post on the internet?”

Not really… not creatively, anyway. I’ve done a little (and I do mean LITTLE) journalling, a little bit of bullet journal practice that has decidedly not become a regular habit yet… and that’s really it.

I started writing a song the other day, I had what would probably be the chorus just come to me and sit in my head while I sang it a couple times. I never ended up writing it down, and now I can’t remember. So that’s probably gone and I don’t think I should count it.

I have been thinking about writing, though. Lots of thinking. So much thinking that I have absolutely no idea where to begin when it comes to returning to the land of the blogs … where some people are happy to dump their thoughts in raw form, and others spend much time and effort creating a very formal, well-presented, brand-appropriate collection of posts that would never dream of revealing just how difficult things really are.

I thought about deleting my old blogs and starting new ones from the beginning. Then I thought, I don’t mind if people see the starts and stops of my old posts, old self, to several years later. This particular blog will probably never be a professional one, and I could spend the time crafting a “brand” for myself here anyway, but chances are that by the time I’d established one I would want to change it.

I can’t promise regular posts, or give a reliable account of what I’ll be writing about, because I don’t have a plan right now and I don’t know what I’ll want to write about. But I know I’d like to be writing again. I might as well try (before we enter a full-on climate/societal dystopia).

The (Un)Importance of Leap Day

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The hourglass is a fitting timepiece because time slips from our grasp like fine sand.

Today was February 29, the disproportionately talked about “leap day.” Some people like to make a big deal about it, but really it’s just a day. You hear all kinds of things about leap day that don’t make sense. A whole extra day! I’m going to [get more work done, go on a trip, clean the house, spend time with friends, finish my novel]. It’s leap day, nothing that happens really counts (yes, this is a 30 Rock reference).

Aside from being a date that only occurs every four years, there is no difference from any other day of the year. You wake up, go through your routine, and try to survive life. It passes before you know it and you wonder what happened to that extra day you were so excited for.

An extra day will only give you more time if you make a plan to use it. Realistically, a day is not a lot of time. Sometimes they drag on, but afterward every single day that you have experienced is no more than the blink of an eye. It’s almost as though none of it ever happened at all.

Blogging Back to Life

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What do you do when you stop blogging for a significant length of time and no one seemed to notice, when you’ve had a blog for years but have no more than a few hundred followers (literally what would be called a “drop in the bucket” on the internet, even if it seems like a lot to me personally) and no more than a handful of likes per post, and you know this blog will never have a niche, which seems so important in the blogging world?

It’s tempting to let this gasping site die and start up another one, but I renewed the domain name in August or September, so I have a few months left to go in order not to totally waste my money.

I bought this domain name specifically because I wanted this to be my personal author website. It’s definitely not what most people would call an author website, not least because I haven’t actually been published. One could argue that this is mostly my fault. I never really put myself out there, except for a few timid attempts here and there. It’s no wonder I never get anywhere…

The reason I want to let this blog go and start a whole new one is because I would be able to form and shape it with intention from the beginning. But I don’t want this one to disappear. A lot of work has gone into it in the past, even if not recently. A lot me is captured here. Call me clingy, hopeless, or whatever you like, there are ideas and thoughts expressed here that I believe were worth sharing. Instead of cutting this path short and starting an entirely new one, I’m just going to keep building on this one.

Yes, I’m going to start blogging again! And I know that of most of the people who see this post, only a small number will care. That’s not important right now. The important thing is relearning how to express my thoughts. At the beginning of the year, as I try to get myself used to writing again, I will probably do a lot of personal journaling that will be seen by me alone. In other words, don’t get too excited, because I don’t have all that much to say here yet (that’s sort of a lie. I have a lot to say, always, but I need some time to figure out how to say it), and there won’t be any new fiction for some time unless serious inspiration hits, but soon enough this will be a platform for my weird brand of creativity to come out once again.

 

Don’t touch that dial. We’ll be right back.

Blogvolution

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If I happen to glance back at my old posts, particularly those of a few years back, I find that quite a lot of them are the sort of stream of consciousness writing that to me was the point and definition of a “blog.” Articles and points were for professional websites. Blogs were for rambling.

Over time, “blogging” has become an actual business venture, although not for me, and this makes me steer away from that sort of rambly, babbly, slice-of-mind type posts and toward ones that are at least a little bit topical. By that I mean having a topic, and not especially relevant to the time, although almost everything you will ever write is informed by the context of the time you live in, so I guess that applies too.

This blog is a personal site, not a professional one, so there’s no especially good reason not to ramble on, except that I want to put something a little more thoughtful out there. I want to feel a little bit more like my thoughts have a point. It would be nice to look back on previous posts and think “Yes, I see what I was saying here, and I think it was worth saying.”

One could argue that I should go back and delete some of my older posts, at least the silliest and/or most pointless ones. I don’t think I’m going to do that, though. I want to keep this site personal. I don’t want to clean up my image too much, to seem like someone whose thoughts just flow naturally into perfect forms of stories or essays or what have you. It doesn’t get me views or make me money, but I still feel attached to it. I’ve poured quite a bit of myself into this blog and I don’t just want to delete parts of me, even if they are smaller or more distant now than they were at the time of writing. Perhaps I am too attached to the past. Maybe it’s the influence of writer’s journals, like Virginia Woolf’s, and the idea that someday, people will be interested in my raw thoughts because I will have gained some fans through my creative efforts.

I mean, probably not. But at least I can look back on it myself.

Learning Process

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There are certain pieces of advice that you hear over and over. On the internet, from your parents, from teachers, made into motivational poster memes. I know there are many that I have repeatedly come across (and for some reason I can’t think of any now, wouldn’t you know it…) and I knew, but could not fully grasp them until more recently.

I wish certain things about life had not taken me so long to learn. Things like failure being a natural part of life, and if you never fail at anything it probably means you haven’t tried anything–and also that it doesn’t mean you should give up. I never really learned to bounce back after failing, I would just move on to something else. I generally did well in school, rarely failing anything and never trying to master that material after the fact, the few times I got a failing grade.

The past few years, I’ve been failing at a lot of things. Often I feel like I’m not capable of dealing with life and I should not have been allowed to be an adult. In this case, dealing with the stuff that’s causing me stress is the only option, short of giving up and staying in bed for the rest of my life. To be clear, that’s really not something I want to do. And after what feels like a million years of hearing from everyone that you just have to keep trying and keep going, I’m able to face things that have gone wrong and try to improve or fix them.

I wish that someone who struggles the way I have would read this and take it to heart and feel better about what’s wrong in their lives, and understand that it doesn’t mean they themselves are a failure or that they can’t do something to make it better. But that probably won’t happen. Here’s why:

For most people, you simply can’t learn those really important things about life until you’re ready. You might know intellectually that the wise advice you hear is true, but it doesn’t reach your heart because you don’t really believe it. Something has to happen to make it sink in. A certain experience, or a person in your life, or just time in which you can think about life and start to grasp what it actually means, what is important, and what isn’t.

The one I’m working on right now is that it might be okay if I never really make anything of my life. I’ll still be a good, worthy human being. This might be the most difficult one, the one that I can never fully accept…

Slainte

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What are stories of rainbows and pots of gold really about? Are they stories of good luck and hope, or of foolish wishes for magical solutions that don’t exist? There are tales both of people tricking fairies and fairies tricking people. So, is it a trait of the person that makes the difference? That is, if you’re clever enough, you’ll snatch the prize from its keeper, but if you’re the simple, gullible type the supposed treasure will turn out to be fake.

Of course, rainbows aren’t magical, pretty as they may be. They don’t actually lead all the way to the ground, so if there were a pot of gold at the end, it would be floating in the sky somewhere, not reachable by people. In fact, I don’t think rainbows generally have concrete “ends.”

But who knows. If you meet a leprechaun, see if he’s feeling generous.

An Unnecessary Post

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Just now, my life is feeling very bland. I’m not devoid of creative inspiration for writing, but I don’t feel a particular urge to create. I want to spend time with my friends, do something fun, exciting–but I also want to just have time alone, possibly lying in bed staring at the ceiling while listening to music.* I want to get lost in reading.

I have two thoughts on this. One is that my creative energy needs time to build up. None of our creative wells are quite bottomless, and if it hasn’t rained enough lately, they’re bound to be very low.

My other thought is that I’ve become engulfed in necessity (chores, bills, etc.), and the energy that requires just puts me in a mindset that is not conducive to writing.

From my past experience, I have to advise myself that the best way to fix this is to just start writing something.

But I need to complete this editing work first. And many other more “necessary” things.

But what could be more necessary to a writer than writing?

I am awash in dilemmas of adulthood.

 

———–

*Current music selection would probably be Deftones, Oh Land, or something very new age/experimental with no vocals.

Five Things Friday: July 19, 2013

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Last Friday, there was still plenty of time left in July. Now, there is barely any (and also barely any money).

It’s been really hot, in the 90s every single day, and, as it’s New England, very humid. Like today. “Feels like 104.” I think the heat this week has really been getting to me. Here is why:

 

1. I have been near unable to get up in the morning. I just feel so sleepy and so unwilling to be awake and step out my door. Not for the reasons Bilbo Baggins cites, but more for the fact that it’s almost impossible to choose clothes when it’s so hot that I really don’t want to wear anything. Why can’t I be one of those girls who doesn’t need a bra?

2. I had such a bad, stupid dream last night. It was basically a terrible soap opera, but it also drew on some aspects of my personal life that make me especially frustrated or worried. Why am I blaming the heat for that? I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s involved somehow. See #1.

3. The second I step outside, it isn’t really so bad, but I’ve barely been outside a minute before my skin is all clammy and I’m sweating from several different places. I don’t like getting sweaty unless I’m working out (and therefore it’s justified) and/or I will be able to change into other clothes very soon. Working up a sweat just from walking and then having to sit in it all day is just not something I want to do.

4. As per #3, walking is not enjoyable. Therefore, what is usually the best part of my workday (yes, I know that’s sad) is made into yet another chore. As a result, this important part of improving my mood does the opposite.

5. Many cold beverages are purchased, and as a result my bank account dwindles. Thus, every time I look at the balance I feel a little more like crying.

 

Is it fall yet?

Five Things Friday: July 5, 2013

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This is a bit later than I planned, because Friday night happened, as it sometimes does, and I did not end up having time. Then I just totally blanked for a while on anything I could write about. So now I’m just going to wind back some metaphorical clock or other and pretend it’s Friday while I write this.

July 4th edition

One

The first thing was waking up around 9. After waking up much earlier, thinking, “That’s too early,” and going back to sleep.

Two

Sometimes people make you waffles. Waffles are tasty with maple syrup and a giant pile of cut-up fruit on top. And coffee. But most things are tasty with coffee, so why even bother mentioning it?

Three

The movies are an excellent place to go when it’s Hellishly hot outside. They always have air conditioning. I saw Man of Steel. It was entertaining. Since then I have developed an impression of drunk Superman that is very entertaining.

Four

DON’T go to The Gourmet Dumpling in Chinatown on a holiday. Just don’t. But, DO go. They have really tasty food and considering the portions, it’s going to be well worth your money. Unless you hate Chinese food, in which case, I’m sorry about your taste buds.

Five

I should have known that Friday, being the day after a holiday, would not be a productive work day. I should have known. I thought that I could be all focused and just knock out all this work in no time. …Nope. I blame the heat and my need for tons and tons of sleep right now. You know that feeling you get sometimes, when you just want to spend an entire day in bed, napping, maybe reading or watching a movie if you feel too awake, but otherwise not being conscious, and maybe wake up the next day super-rested? That’s what I would have liked to do on Friday.

 

And also, Happy 4th of July. I prefer to express that sentiment AFTER the 4th, when most people are over it. 😉