Powerful motivator

Fascinating, interesting, neat, cool. Intriguing, even.

Words we use to bring up something random that we want to talk about, something that struck us as new or different or meaningful. As in, "Isn't it interesting to think about . . . " or "I'm so fascinated by . . . "

When what we really mean is, "This topic inspired a feeling in me" and "This is something I think is important, but I'm afraid to give you that power over me."

Isn't it interesting to think about the way fear can close us off? I'm fascinated by the cages we build for ourselves from the anticipated judgement of others.

older and wiser i am apparently not

I'm all jittery and my hands feel like spider webs and my sternum is all spindly like I'm about to fly apart or collapse and I'm in this circular situation of waiting-hoping-squashing all because once again I wanted to believe in a friend and it was a mistake it is a mistake it will always be a mistake

What's another word for older?

Obligatory birthday post:

I went out and bought things and ate food. I derived a sense of pleasure from these activities. Huzzah.

And so far, no crying! That is a plus. The night is relatively young, so I'll hang on to the tissues.

26, yo.

Wasting time

It's definitely one of those days where writing is forcing it. Which is not good. I hate these days on the best of days, but today is not the best of days. Today is a day where I have to get 5 pages out on a topic that I thought was okay, but is. Okay. Only okay. This is what happens when I try to write stuff ahead of time. I get bored of it way before my deadline and end up hating it, but right now I'm stuck with it.

Here's to passing this class.

*snore*

So today I woke up at nearly three in the afternoon. I had rolled over for an alarm at 10:30 and decided. . . nah. I'll get up when I wake up. Which was 3 pm. I was rested and a little bit discombobulated because the dreams, man. When you actually get a lot of sleep, there's time for dreams.

I was catching up from a busy couple of days writing a paper and prepping a presentation and generally not sleeping much at all. This snoozefest is pretty justifiable, if you look at it in the grand scheme.

But I felt and still feel very, very guilty. I feel like I have done a terrible thing. I slept away daylight hours, and time, as we all know, is precious. How could I waste so much of it in bed? Isn't sloth a deadly sin?

And then I have to stop and think again, because. What?

When did sleep become a waste of time? We need sleep. We can't function without it. It's genuinely a health issue. Why am I so screwed up over time spent just. Sleeping? I mean, I know I have things to do, but. Still.

I know it's not particularly realistic to want this, but I kinda wish stuff wasn't so busy that sleeping, just sleeping, is a waste of my time.

maybe Karl had a point

Gotta write gotta write gotta write

Feels like I will always have a response to write for class and no time to write it in. Because really, I haven't got a whole lot to say in response to Lukacs except, maybe, what. Adorno gets a chortle, because, really, my dude, you gotta stop drinking the bitter stuff and lighten up a bit. Jameson sounds like a hippie. A Marxist hippie. It's all relative, man. We're reacting to the man, but movies are cool, ya know...

You can really only say two things, it turns out. Or one. The world used to be unified, and now it's not. That's either good or bad, depending on how you see it. Or you can say we've slipped back into the sheeple masses and individualism is over again. Or maybe it never existed. Okay so you can say more than one thing, but. It's really all the same.

Which means I'm a Marxist, I guess.

My dude Wordsworth

I suddenly had a weird epiphany. Right now, right here, sitting at this computer, I realized something. The Romantics were right. Are right. About poetry. 

(If they were going to be right about anything, it would have to be poetry, I think.)

I can never remember who said what. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." That's a good one. Coleridge? Shelley? The other Shelley?

The one in particular that they were correct about was this: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." And I realized the full truth of this just now, years after I first read it. When I first read this line, I was definitely ready to fire back with examples in myself where the best words I thought I could give came up at the time the emotions were being experienced. When I was sad, I wrote about being sad, and I called that poetry. I wrote out my anger and expelled it, and that was what I called poetry. I even tried to capture trembling joy, to bottle it up as it came to me and save it for later. That, I thought, was how one does poetry. 

I don't think I was completely wrong. There is something to be said for the first flush of fountaining phrases. You can save them for later, at least. 

But to craft something from a position of some distance lends a new perspective. It gives you the chance to try to recreate those feelings in yourself from a cold start. It lets you react as a stranger would. It makes you try to figure out what sent you to that place of overwhelming feeling in the first place. It forces you to confront the why and what of a feeling, not just its magnitude.

Recollecting emotions in tranquility isn't easy, but I think, maybe, I'd like to try.