Informative, yet tired
09 Dec 2010 1 Comment
in Blog maintenance, Personal Tags: late at night, seasons, sleep deprivation
Riiiight, so instead of going to bed like I promised, I finally made an “about” page and updated the description on my … Gravatar, or whatever it’s called. I should probably really look into this whole using WordPress system, because I feel like such a beginner — making only posts and pages and having a minimal amount of side bars and stuff like that. If only I was somehow graphically talented or… inclined, really, I would design some awesome layout for my blog… … Wait, I have a special someone who is SOMEWHAT graphically inclined, and a sister who doesn’t know anything about layouts (nor do I really know if my significant other does, but hey, I just assume that he knows everything and can do everything, because that makes him happy [I assume]), and maybe I can get them to do something with this bloggeroo that would make it a bit more like me!
… Though I don’t really know what that is, yet. It might have socks and quirky things. I remember having a blog called “The Sock Drawer” that was all about my family moving from Finland to Australia. That was such an awesome blog! The only problem it had was that it was in Finnish, and my Finnish skills started to deteriorate really quickly, when speaking pretty much seclusively in English with the people down here. I speak English even with my sister…
But I kinda went off in a tangent there. What I was initially going to say was that it’s probably not a good idea to have updated all of these things when it’s late and the house is quiet and I’m just tired enough to be relatively coherent, but still have this whole “I’m hilarious” and “I don’t give a shit if other people don’t think I’m hilarious, but it’s ok, because they totally must — random shenanigans are so me, right, right, right?” thing going on. Am I making sense? I might not be making sense.
Oh, by the way, you must’ve noticed that I haven’t been complaining about the weather for a while: it’s because SUMMER is FINALLY HERE! I didn’t have time to post about it while it was slowly creeping upon us, and about the exhilaration that I felt to be able to be outside and not freeze to death, but instead feel the rays of the sun (thanks to our wonderful hole in the ozone layer) warming me~ Now, it’s like fully summer here. I swear, I sometimes wonder why Australians don’t go fully naked — modesty is such a silly thing, when you live in a climate where every little garment is just that much more discomfort. I guess that some of it is essential for protection from the sun that causes your skin to burn and eventually cancer (everything causes cancer, though, but I’m not going to paint skin cancer any less serious than it is; Australia does have a lot of skin cancer going on), so fair enough. Still, I bet it would be a lot more comfortable, at least physically, just to be able to strut around naked.
Heh, well, that’s a vision that won’t go realised soon~
Anyway, I should really be a good girl now and go gallop to bed, because otherwise no-one will like me after tomorrow’s whining about how tired I am. It will totally be my own fault, and I will hate myself for it.
Coffee and love, everyone
p.s. What with me not being very good at this blogging business and all, could someone possibly tell me what’s the purpose of having BOTH categories AND tags?
Interpretative dance as a metaphor
09 Dec 2010 5 Comments
in Personal Tags: brain activity, frustrations, late at night, sleep deprivation
I wish I was funnier. And more concise. Definitely more concise. In that way, maybe I would be more tolerable and more relatable to more people and more people would hence like me! And read my posts. But the only thing I’m really good at is writing loooong pieces of incoherent babble (and even that is mostly about me… I can’t be that interesting, except to my crazy stalker significant other, can I?), and I don’t know how many people appreciate that. I don’t even take really good photos! They’re only there to distract you from how long a post I’ve written/you’ve read! Besides, a disturbing amount of them involve my feet.
What’s with that?
I love socks, though. I want more quirky socks. Quirky t-shirts and quirky socks I can wear with them. I’d be so quirky that the world would implode.
I’ve been all over this before (except maybe the wondering about the feet and then fangasming over quirkiness bit), so I’m just going to go ahead and have an internal dialogue between some of the alter-egos floating around in my, um, personality (well, that’s an expression that I haven’t seen before) and transcribe it down for your convenience! Let us call the characters, incredibly unimaginatively, Anna 1 and Anna 2.
You know what, screw that, we’ll just call them Dancing Elephant and Hopping Grapefruit.
Hopping Grapefruit: Hey Elephant, why’s your dancing so sad today? Dancing Elephant: Oh, it’s just because my only skill is interpretative dancing and I can’t really seem to get an audience, though I haven’t really been trying at all, because I wouldn’t know where to start anyway! I suppose I should look for other interpretative dancers and then be incredibly invasive and totally advertise my own dancing abilities, but I’m just scared of being rude to other dancers, you know! Plus, it seems like a lot of effort to find interpretative dancers that I’d like; I’m a very specific sort of dancer, though I couldn’t for my life tell you what my dancing is like (or what it’s interpreting, really), but I always know that they’re never right! Hopping Grapefruit: Phew, you sound like you’ve got bit of a self-pity spiral going on there. And I don’t mean a pirouette, har har har har! Dancing Elephant: No-one gets your humour, Hopper. You’re all lonely and sad and you think everyone loves you and your quirkiness and at the same time you act like you don’t care, and you try to convince yourself that it’s just better to be yourself and ramble aimlessly about some sort of a spiral or pirouette or whatever, than to try to pretend to be something you’re not! Guess what, Hopper — it’s not working! Hopping Grapefruit: Geez, slow down, big guy, no need to get so butthurt over one joke. You said it yourself, Elephant, you’re not putting in the effort that you should be putting in. No wonder there’s no results. I’ve seen your routine, and that’s incomplete as well! How could people possibly come and appreciate your interpretative dance, if you don’t even advertise it to anyone? Or if you don’t finish it off? Or if you don’t seek the company of other interpretative dancers? How can people like you if they don’t know you? Dancing Elephant: But I’ve been going to this club where I do really short bits of dances and I’ve got a lot of interested friends there… I think. It’s usually kind of hard to get any response from them in any sort of a way… Hopping Grapefruit: Eh, you’re fine. You’ll just have to waggle that behind of yours a bit more vigorously — no more complaining until the work is done; then you can complain! Besides, how important is interpretative dancing to you anyway? And shouldn’t you be dancing about something that is actually meaningful to you — maybe you should start doing something with your life that would give you more joy and pain to interpret, and your dancing would become more rich, instead of just being an extension of your everyday life! Dancing Elephant: So if I were to make a dance out of this conversation… Hopping Grapefruit: To be honest, it seems to me that this conversation is a bit flat, satirical and straight-forward in the sort of way that it doesn’t seem to flow at all; nor does it seem to need to. I don’t even know if that sentence I just uttered was grammatically correct, so that just tells me that… I completely lost my track of thought. Dancing Elephant: What I think you’re saying is that this conversation is under-interpreted? Hopping Grapefruit: Er… That’s not… Ah, never mind, sure, why not; that’s exactly what I’m saying. *both Dancing Elephant and Hopping Grapefruit turn to Little Anna, the mayor of Brainville* Hopping Grapefruit: So how was that? *Little Anna nods vigorously, seeming relieved* *Curtain*Roight. Have fun trying to make some sense of that! I bet that when I wake tomorrow morning, I won’t make any sense of it either, so don’t worry. Bottom line is, if you know any awesome bloggers that you follow, please to share them with me~
I’ll be back with richer tales later, I promise!
Now to go do what I was SUPPOSED to be doing — that is, catching some z’s. *grabs net, puts on safety gloves and charges off*
Have a picture of a dancing elephant, though:
Rationalising about irrationality
05 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: late at night, ponderings, seasons, slight angst, suspense, videogames
UPD 13-Sep-2010: While trying to sort out all the prompts for the next post, I realised that this one pretty much fills the one for
Day 21: Something illogical you think or do.
I actually had a pretty good day today, for once. Good on the scale that it’s raining now, and probably rather cold outside, but I don’t even care — yeah, me, the sun-loving, cold-hating little kitty-cat doesn’t care that it’s wet and cold outside (and why should I, I’m inside; but a lot of the time I do, so take that). Or, well, at least I had a good end of the day — it kind of began pretty shittily, with a headache and nausea that caused me to want to eat only frozen raspberries for breakfast and got my mother to nag about how I’m feeling sick just because I haven’t eaten properly, but I, personally, attribute it rather to my incredibly stupid hormonal cycle (though I wouldn’t tell that to her, since you can’t argue with The Ex-Nurse), which causes, along headaches and nausea and various cramps, this incredibly annoying irritability, hyper-sensitivity (because I’m always sensitive) and irrationality.
I’m a very rational human being — I like science, and I like logic. I’ve always been thanked in English for being able to construct a coherent, logical argument. I do like creative writing, too — but even in that, I like my thoughts to be organised, my intentions to be clear, and each and every thing that happens in a short story or in a novel to be rational, and to clearly and logically follow some other action. This applies even to human beings in my stories — except on a more emotional level. My stories are usually character-driven, and before I create anything else, I will create a character; and how I envision that character to feel and to think, that is where the logic of the story is. Everything has a place and a reason — even seemingly random and useless occurrences are usually there because I felt they would suit that spot there, and because later, they will develop into a character trait or a plot twist or something less significant than that.
I know you’re probably confused about where I’m going with all this, but be patient with me — this blog is one of those things that isn’t exactly very organised, logical and coherent, and there’s multiple reasons for that, too; ones that should be clear in the way I write and what I write about. Anyway. If you go into as superficial definitions as stereotypes, you could say that I’m pretty male in a lot of ways; in how I value rational logic (oh, except that I don’t fit those stereotypes at all, because as logical as I like to think that I am, I’m also pretty driven by emotion; but I think that even emotions are logical in some sort of a manner, and all you need to do is understand the origin of the emotion for it to be clear and rational as day — I don’t like the misconception that logic and emotions can’t go hand in hand) and how I’m incredibly unable to multitask. This is completely unrelated, but this should be mentioned, mostly for shits and giggles — especially since my significant other is always so eager to remind me that I can’t do basic things such as drinking and walking at the same time. The explanation for this is a lot more physical than the one for my usual inability to multitask — simple concentration on one thing at a time, I do something with 110% efficiency or not at all.
But I’m obviously not male, and I’ve got a stupidly retarded hormonal cycle to remind me of that. Even forgetting the physical unpleasantries, I would still hate it with a passion, because of what it does to my mind. Once every bleeding month, I become incredibly depressed over nothing in particular, and the smallest, usually perceived shortcomings of myself or the people around me will make me burst into tears. If there is no such outlet, I will be gloomy and depressed and lethargic for a few days. Then, I become irritable and impatient for the next, often going back to being the sarcastic, almost mean-spirited, too-good-for-you human being I was a few years ago. After this, the hormones usually decide to leave me alone and let me be considerably happy for the next few weeks — until it comes back.
The most annoying thing about this stupid cycle (you can probably tell how much I hate it from counting how many times I’ve referred to it as “stupid” — I was never very good with insults, *smiles sheepishly*) is that the extravagant, ridiculous extremes that my emotions fly to are so very real to me. I get incredibly depressed over someone dropping a cookie on the floor (an actual reference I use when I’m bawling over nothing in particular to note the world around me of how no-one died and that I’m actually rather alright), and at that moment, it is the end of the world, for me. Where it gets infuriating and bizarre is the notion that even when I’m feeling so depressed over the death of this cookie, I will still acknowledge how ridiculous I’m being. I could almost bet that 75% of the aforementioned irritability is my internal fury for not being able to contain my stupid, chemical-ridden brain. Those weeks are probably the only ones in which I will feel strongly about nothing in particular, and be just as irrational as women are, according to the stereotype, supposed to be, most of the time. It annoys me SO; and even more so, because there is actually nothing I can do about it. Just bitch and whine like the teenage girl I am, ugh.
So, that’s passing over another time, again — no-one’s dead yet, so I suppose that’s a good sign — and I’ve been having a fairly alright day. In this day, I witnessed once more how it is impossible for me to stay within word limits (writing a report for Chemistry on the industrial production of ethene — there are seven or so points we need to cover, and I’m in the middle of covering point 2, already having used half of the word limit), dabbled with The Sims 3 a bit again (just a bit, though, because I didn’t really have time to REALLY get into it) and talked on the phone with my significant other, the drummer deity, for some 45 minutes or so. God, that was one of the best conversations on phone that I’ve had for ages. Still, I wish he was home already. I wish next week wouldn’t be so busy. I wish it were holidays already. I wish it to be next weekend, when I’m supposed to get my copy of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep! Most importantly, I wish it were tomorrow, because I’m supposed to get French toast tomorrow, heeee.
Carpe diem, they say, and I endorse that idea — but sometimes it’s just so HARD. It’s hard to not wait for all of this awesome stuff; it’s hard to make yourself concentrate on probability (that I still don’t get; damn you, Markov chains) and on all this school stuff going on, because SPRING IS COMING and summer is almost here and IT’S ALMOST OVER.
Peace and French toast to everybody.
In the dark she pleads
04 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: flow of consciousness, human beans, late at night, ponderings, pseudo-philosophising, religion
I’ll begin by apologising about how little I’ve been posting this week. This week, like the others preceding this one, has been a pretty hard one for me again — and I can see that next week, with its three SACs and one practice exam (which is, incidentally, worth half of the SAC marks for unit 4 for English), will be even worse. But since it’s almost one at my corner of the world, maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about that right now.
What should I be worrying about, then? I’m not entirely certain. I had to take my cute, fluffy dog out for a walk today, and I found it, as I always do, when I can actually move from the horizontal position I automatically take after a day of school these days, rather pleasant. It wasn’t entirely too cold out there — I think the thermometer said something around 15 degrees celsius by the time it was completely dark, so that’s not bad at all. It still smells and feels like spring, with all the birds singing; it might be a universal feeling, but at least in me, the arrival of spring always creates this wild hope, as a sort of light at the end of the tunnel, but at the same time, it makes me dreamy and impatient, which could be very bad for the intense revision that I need to start doing relatively soon. … Ugh, I just said that I wouldn’t worry about it, but school seriously occupies at least 98% of my brain at all times, and that’s one of the tragedies of this school year. It’s been an incredible year, no doubt of that — one of the best years of my life, I’m sure — but I’m getting pretty sick of this academic bullshit hijacking my brain constantly.
And then again, I’m afraid I’ll be completely devoid of thought when I don’t have any school things to think about. It might take surprisingly long for me to adjust to holidays, once they finally arrive… But, again, I’m worrying, even with listening to these stupid “relax” sounds from a relaxation app I downloaded in view of helping me get sleep more easily. But as expected, it hasn’t helped, as of yet — I find that music, even if it’s soft, or ambient sounds like running water, they don’t necessarily make me relax, but instead provide a singular point of concentration and keep me awake. So now I’m trying to get it to help me concentrate, but as you can see with me going off on tangents to every possible direction, it’s either not doing its job very well, or it’s doing it too well with trying to open my subconscious and make all this flowy stuff that makes no sense at all fall out for you to read as one form of verbal diarrhea. Um.
What I was going to say to begin with was that I enjoyed that walk with my dog, listening to semi-melancholy, simplistic songs that I have in my music library — in fact, I enjoyed it so much that when I arrived home, when it was still relatively light but the sun had already begun to set, I just dumped the dog inside and then fled outside again. I didn’t go on a walk or anything, because I didn’t really think of anywhere to go, and it would’ve felt a bit silly for me to go around where I had already been — so instead, I simply sat on one of those pillar-like things in front of my house (it sounds a bit silly, but unfortunately that’s the best description I can give; anyone who has seen my house will know what I’m talking about), cross-legged, and simply watched a decidedly urban sunset.
I don’t know how long I sat there, nor what I thought during that time — I just know that there I sat, watching the world get darker around me, and some cars drive by (I remember feeling amused about them speeding by so fast, no-one noticing the strange girl perched there in front of her house). It sounds kind of forced, now; a sort of deliberately eccentric or artsy type of thing people could do to show off with how beautifully different they are from “normal” people, but to me, it was no different to just sitting out on your porch and enjoying the world around you. It was the same feeling I get with public transport — you’re isolated, left alone, but simultaneously you’re this part of a whole, a part of the life around you. It makes me feel really good, and it always reminds me of my God, because to me, God is unity — God is in peace, and God is in wholes and understanding and all that hippie bullshit that doesn’t mean anything to you, if you haven’t experienced it, at least on some smaller scale.
I do remember thinking about God, and thinking about atheists and going back to the half-formed argument I laid in my previous post. This is mainly because yesterday, there was a huge “discussion” on my significant other’s wall about — well, a score of things, as the opposing side had trouble keeping their arguments straight and comprehensible. It began about how “unnatural” it is for a man to have given birth — you know, that guy who used to be a girl and who then became pregnant, as he left his reproductive organs unmodified in any way, and who appeared on Oprah (I believe) some time ago… If you don’t know the case, don’t make any assumptions, but research it first, please. I wouldn’t like anyone making judgement on anything like that before knowing good, solid facts about it, and even then I would ask you to consider how much it is not our problem that this man, who was born female, has given birth.
Anyway, this conversation can be summed up as a great debate against intolerance on my part and a great intolerance on his (yes, the debate was between me and this unknown person who had posted a link to a group against this “male pregnancy” on my significant other’s wall, and since I never know when to shut up…). It is so remarkable to me why it is so difficult to accept for people that different people have different points of view, and everyone is essentially just as correct as everyone else. I seriously don’t understand such blindness — nor do I understand the apparently human need to butt into everybody else’s business because of “free speech” (I oppose the hounding of celebrities, by the way, as a general indication of how I feel about this) or whatever right people seem to have to force their own values as norms on everyone else.
Why is it so frightening to accept that another person may think that they are right? It’s not like you have to modify your entire world view — all you’re saying is: “Oh, that person is silly, but I suppose that they think that they are right, so I shouldn’t press the matter further, because they’ll not think that I’m right, either.” I was thinking this, because I was thinking about God, and I was thinking about how atheists are so adamant about arguing that there is no God and that the Bible is just a book of stories. I agree with the latter part of it, partially, since some aspects of the Bible are historically accurate, but what I think of the first part isn’t really even relevant. Even if God doesn’t exist, even if God created nothing in the world and if God has no influence over human beings in anything (not even their creation), if there is no afterlife, no nothing — why is it so bad to let someone believe in a presumably fictional being, if it makes them feel good about themselves, their life, and the people around them?
Why do we, as a race, oppose each others’ happiness so very hard, just to prove a silly, stupid point of ours? It breaks my heart.
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Love, and be loved; live and let live.
Turning software into hardware is impossible, thank you very much
18 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: 35 days, late at night, shiny
(psst, the title is a reference to the geek joke/pick-up line “you turn my software into hardware, baby” — I just thought it went well with the general feeling of the post)
Good evening, you generic kiddies whom I always seem to write to — it’s been a rather busy day for me, and if it wasn’t for my oh-so-great significant other, who took it as his job to remind me that I DO have a blog to write and that the 35 day prompt challenge thingomajig is a 35 day prompt challenge, and not a challenge that I’m allowed to stretch out when it’s convenient for me. I found this preposterous! … and yet, here I am, so what can I say. In Finland, we’d say, literally translated, that I’m “beneath his slipper” — to which I believe the English equivalent has something to do with toes and wasn’t significant enough for me to remember it.
Anyway, why the big day, you ask, since today was one of those days in which I only had four periods of school and was RATHER free to ignore all necessary homework (despite there being a literature SAC tomorrow — but I’m fairly sure I’ve expressed my sentiments on that before) and do whatever I wished, which mostly consists of me lying in my bed in a comatose state and surfing the vastness of bullshit that is the internets. I assure you, even that vastness of bullshit can be quite entertaining when you know where to look.
Regaaaardless, my day was significantly brightened by the announcement made by my father that the iPhone 4G that I had acquired in principle, but not in practice, as a present for my birthday a few weeks prior had finally arrived in store. It was simultaneously dulled by how my old phone decided to pick this very day to screw itself up completely, so that I couldn’t actually transfer any contact details from a phone to another. But how shiny is this thing! *gazes at phone in awe* It’s all black and sleek and black and sleek and… sleek. Quite classy, I must say, while managing to be shiny and awesome at the same time. As you might have noticed by now, I’m not exactly the most technological person around, since I’m not gushing over… whatever it is that tech-oriented people gush over when they get to hold something technologically awesome (and when everybody else decides that the least awkward approach would be to just ignore that stain at the front of their pants). Not that I’m saying that this phone here is technologically awesome — and yet, not that I’m not. All I’m saying is “I’ll be fucked if I know” and go play Bejeweled. Oh, and Robot Unicorn Attack.
As you ALSO might notice, you Apple-haters out there, these are not exactly qualities that are solely associated to Apple products, so don’t get all butthurt over me getting a brand of smartphone instead of another. I could go on and on about why it’s unnecessary for people to be so hostile over such a small, and somewhat ridiculous thing as operating systems and hardware, but I suppose that first world people have to have their problems, too. *snortgiggle*
Another thing is that I’m not as acutely stressed as I was before — might be because I decided to go “fuck it”, might be because I don’t have to worry about my old phone giving in on me (I was kind of getting annoyed at it recently), might be because mother dragged me to the gym she and father are going to and made me exercise (gasphorror — not really what I imagined of an afternoon of lying in bed in a comatose state and surfing da interwebs) for a solid 45 minutes. Or it might be that I’ve only got English and lit tomorrow, three periods of school in total, and I only need to start worrying big time on thursday. I mean, tomorrow, for thursday.
I’m not sure it’s entirely possible for me to ever write a post that doesn’t somehow relate to stress or schoolwork. Hey, I’m just ecstatic that there’s so little of it to go, relatively (and yet, every moment now feels like it’s deliberately dragging itself out into one painful torture of .. something, I suck at analogies), and very bad with dealing with stress. So deal with it. Ha! I told you!
Um, right, and now the primary reason I’m here, you sneaky little thing:
Day 07: Something that turns you on
I could really answer this in one word and then go toddling off, but I suppose that that’s not really the point of it, so I’ll start by a rambling preface: I’m the sort of a human being who doesn’t notice the most blaringly obvious things that manifest around her. I know I’m female and everything, but I hardly ever notice if someone has recently had a haircut (unless it’s, like, fire-engine red), is wearing new shoes or something. Hence, appearance really doesn’t matter that much to me — it’s more how you use it, how you carry yourself and project yourself to everyone else.
In other words, I’m extremely attracted to confidence. Any sort of a confidence, really. Not the sort of cocky “oh-look-at-me-look-at-how-well-I-can-drive-this-bike-into-that-wall-and-then-set-it-on-fire” sort of attention-seeking, but a quiet confidence of knowing one’s own strengths and one’s own limits and having no doubt about either. This is very likely born of my own, occasional unsureness and almost constant need for reassurance — –
I just realised that this explanation is becoming kind of moody and dark and more of a what-I-need-in-a-relationship-and-why sort of a self-examination instead of a lightly humorous recounting of what turns me aaawwwnn. Might be the time, might be that I really can’t think of a simple answer to that. A lot of things turn me on, if they’re done right — but mainly it’s the answer I gave before. Confidence is fucking sexy, just ask anyone. Confidence, but also a certain humility, impulsiveness and creativity.
Ultimately? Ask my boyfriend.
Day 08: Your favourite fruit
Day 09: Something that you’re really waiting for
Ok, that’s my disjointed obligation of today under my belt, I’m going back to bed to play Bejeweled. I mean, to sleep. Of course. To sleep. … Ha.
Peaceful mushrooms for y’all~
I’d sacrifice sleep for a bit of self-discovery any day (except tomorrow)
10 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: decisions, late at night, ponderings, revelations
Again, it’s so late that now would be classified as a tuesday, even though I still consider it a monday night (the date doesn’t change until I tell it to, damnit!). Yes, I still have to get up at roughly 7.30 in the morning “tomorrow”, in order to haul my ass back into high school for a French test thingomajig that I’m not sure of how to do, because my teacher sucks. However, I found this pressing need to just type something in my blog in the middle of the fucking night, so here I am, typing something in my blog in the middle of the night.
What is this incredible discovery that I’ve made that couldn’t wait ’till the end of school tomorrow, when I would’ve had even less time than I have now (because of various assignments I was either too lazy or too tired to start on the extended weekend, and that have now piled to this sort of let-us-kill-her pace of work)? Well, to be perfectly honest, it’s not as much a discovery as it is a sort of wake-up call and a vivid memory of the fact that I really don’t give a damn about what people think about what I think and stuff. So I don’t have a structured blog with a structured categorising system (well, to be perfectly honest, this one I kind of try to enforce on my own, seeing as I’m a biiiit of an OCD character when it comes to categorising [seriously, I colour-code my planner]; but even I’ve confessed to myself long ago that whatever goes on inside my head simply cannot be placed into boxes, or seldom can); so I don’t have a clear statement of intention or some sort of a theme. So I don’t travel the world; so I don’t currently even work on any of my writing projects, ’cause I’m too busy dealing with schoolwork, or too lazy and dealing with something far more entertaining in the means of leisure.
That doesn’t mean that whatever goes through my head and whatever goes on in my life isn’t interesting, right?
These are the sorts of things that I sometimes wonder… when did I forget them? I used to know that it didn’t really matter what people thought about you, if you didn’t go out of your way to annoy them or didn’t refuse to accept the fact that you might sometimes be wrong. At some point — and I’m not quite sure where — it transformed into an insecurity of myself. If someone else has a point of view that is different to mine, but carries any validity whatsoever, that must hence be the correct point of view, and I am not allowed to state mine. Similarly, if I think that there may be some person out in that wide world who has a better grasp of, well, “reality” than I do, then I should do better to not humiliate myself and just be quiet instead. That’s the unspoken (well, hinted-at, I’d say) principle that has been dominating this very blog for some time already, and which is the main hindrance and censor to anything I really want to blog about.
But, hey, that’s a load of bullshit, isn’t it? Simply the fact that there may be someone else out there who knows more than I do about something, or simply the fact that they have a more elegant way of expressing their opinion doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to an opinion. Ignorance, or being young, and being vulnerable, and being optimistic — they’re not really crimes, are they? I don’t think that I should be expected to account for every point of view when going through an opinion, and hence I shouldn’t think that anyone else expects that of me, either. And if they do, well, that’s not really my problem, is it? Is it?
And that’s the other thing: expectations. Along with my schoolwork (which I do have in abundance) and the general, you know, living my life, and all of the other little obligations that belong in the life of a moderately busy teenager, I expect myself to somehow tailor a blog to some sort of undefined reader group that will be very interested in what ever I’m writing about. I expect that certain people expect things from me, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m a sucker for expectations. I hate letting people down. I hate feeling like I could’ve done something better, like I’ve disappointed someone. As a writer, I’ve always had the nagging doubt that I won’t be able to take criticism very well, which is a serious worry, because I do desire to progress with my… craft. It’s just the feeling that, clichéd as it is, eats you from the inside, and consumes you to a point where you can’t get rid of it until you’ve talked to someone (in my case, a very special someone who should, by now, be used to listening to the, well, sometimes odd and seldom wonderful things that pour out of my sometimes-bruised heart) about it, and proved why you were right instead of the critic (regardless of the subject of criticism — could be something as simple as clothing, I swear); or then tried to “set things right.”
At this point in time, I’m sick and tired of my own expectations and the paranoia that I have to try extra hard to make people like me, or that I’m not good enough, or that my things aren’t going bad enough to justify for all the complaining I do. I’m an individual, damn it, and even though thousands, or millions, of people will have dealt with similar sorts of things before, that doesn’t mean that I don’t need to. I’m unique, but I’m not, at the same time — and knowing both of these is a sort of tragedy of opposites and paradoxes that makes formulating or presenting an opinion so damned difficult.
But, like I said, I’m not going to do this shit no more — things used to be differently, and I used to be able to accept that I’m an individual and there are some things that I just have to do, stupid or no, however subconscious this acceptance was. I want to go back to that. I’ve been helped along with this process a hell of a lot by my wonderful significant other, in more ways than I can count — and one of those ways, I remember, was to remark at some point about how my blog had turned… self-conscious about potential readers. This was a very recent hint, but there was another one before that, and another one before that, and another before that — pleads to write things in my blog, and when I’d refuse with an “I don’t even know what to write about,” exasperated comments about how I used to be able to write about ANYTHING, from NaNoWriMo to Devil May Cry to jogging.
I am going to try to go back to that.
And as this process goes along, I will most likely take the time to delete all the categories I have these posts in, and instead implement some sort of haphazard, improvised tags with every post. I’m also going to either delete or hide many of the older posts on this page — most of them are useless crap about why I’m not writing, anyway; fulfilling an obligation instead of writing from the desire to write. I’m going to update the information page, and I’m going to see if I can fiddle with its location a little. What I think I’m also going to do is change the layout and colour scheme of this blog — I don’t like the false dreaminess and mysteriousness this shady blue gives. If you know anything about me, you know that if something describes me, it’s bright colours and psychedelic patterns — because that’s what my mind essentially is, this constant burst of fireworks.
One thing’s not going to change, though: if you’ve been watching this blog at all, or if you have the interest of beginning to do so, always expect long posts with lots of reasoning and detail and explanation. I like my own “voice;” and I do write from the desire to write — I don’t necessarily write for you. If you’re ok with that, stick along for a while, while remodel and shift things for a while — have some tea, or cookies, or something.
The guarantee I can give is that you’re not going to be bored. :3
