08/07/00 -- Self Indulgent Angst Bullshit

I'd stop reading now, if I was you.

So I've been really bad about remembering to upload these things as I write them.  Deal with it.  I'm writing them on my laptop while I'm in the office after work waiting for traffic to die down so it only takes me an hour to get home and not twelve.  The machine that has the frame pages is on my desk at home.  It takes effort to remember to dump things to a floppy and shift them around when I get home.

And I haven't had a lot of energy the past couple of weeks.   At least not for mundane things like work.  And uploading journal pages.

 

<self-indulgent angst bullshit>

I want to be happy.  I really do.  But sometimes, happiness just eludes me.  Like now.

I'm pretty discontent with my life.

There.  I've said it.  Feh.  A new pixie haircut isn't going to out-glamour the banality of my wretched existence.  (Minus ten points for received language.  Another negative five for clichés.)

I spent the weekend revamping most of my website (obviously, at the moment of writing this journal entry, I haven't touched the journal pages) and scanning pictures that I took at Clarion.

I did everything but write.  And I'm pissed at myself over it.  I've let people talk me into movies.  Into going out to dinner.  Into things I probably didn't want to do but did anyway.  I'm avoiding writing.

I'm scared.

I should just shut myself away in the loft and live on Ramen noodles or on mac 'n' cheese.  I want to hide from my life and write, except I keep letting my life creep in and take me away.

I want to go back to Clarion.  I want to do weeks five and six of Clarion over and over and over because I felt good, then.  I felt like I knew what I was doing.  I felt like I might actually be getting somewhere.  I felt confident (for the most part).  And I was writing.   I was content.  Hell, I was happy with where I was and what I was doing and who I was with.

And right now?  Now I'm dealing with dog hair on my pillows because Shilo gets up on the bed when no one is home so he can be comfortable while he's looking out the bedroom window and waiting for someone to be home.  Now I'm wishing for my Owen Hall sarcophagus back where I didn't have TV, where I could turn music off and not offend someone else, where I could pace and write and mope and be without any distractions.

I feel sick, and I know it's all in my head because I was fine this morning. I was fine at lunch. I was fine until I walked back into the office. 

And I'm not fine right now.

And I want something different.  Something new.  And it doesn't make sense for me to try and think things through when I'm still under the influence of Clarion, when I still get sudden painful urges to be back there.  And it doesn't make sense for me to try and change my life when I can't be certain that it really needs to be changed, when I'm not positive that the problem isn't just my attitude and my current outlook.

</self-indulgent angst bullshit>

 

And on a totally unrelated note... Karina was wondering about the rules of freewriting.  There really aren't any rules except no editing and no stopping and no saying that it's crap.  You just write whatever comes into your head.   Share it with whoever you want.

When Jen and I  freewrote together at Clarion, we'd read our free writes out loud when we finished.  It was fun hearing what she wrote.  And it was interesting to see that two vastly different (or sometimes frighteningly similar!) things could come from the same word or phrase or song lyric.

And sometimes a freewrite would turn into a story idea.   Sometimes it wouldn't.  Some of my freewrites are still nagging a little somewhere in the back of my head.  They may show up in some incarnation in a story some day.  Or they may not.  I'm not going to push them too hard.