(Slightly related elaborations from this post.)
Something else God pointed out to me:
I was upset because I had nightmares lat night. I’ve been upset on many, many nights because insomnia was robbing me of much-needed sleep.
But you know what?
God made night and day. And He called them both good.
I hear that from time to time: people talking about how God made everything and called it good. But I usually hear it referring to people‚ or to nature—living things. All true and excellent, of course. Yet, God said everything was good. He took the time to call out every individual thing He created and tell it how good it was.
So I have “good” nights and “bad” nights. There’s grace in that, too. There is grace because God always shows up.
So I bless the night. I bless it even when I don’t meet the new morning feeling phenomenal. I bless it even when it made me miserable. I bless it, because God did it first.
Showing posts with label Insomnia Returns With a Vengeance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Insomnia Returns With a Vengeance. Show all posts
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
The Way Things Go
11:50 p.m.
Often, I get excited about things. The excitement is blinding in its quickness and its intensity. It fades, sooner than I expect it to, every time.
There are others things which I am rarely expressively excited about, but I keep coming back to them over and over because I really do love them. They stick.
In my excited micro-explosions, I feel as though I know so much; in my quiet, insistent, tenacious love affairs, I tend to feel about as knowledgeable and capable as an infant camel. Maybe that's okay. Maybe that's what learning is.
———
12:03 a.m.
Sometimes ignorance and knowledge both feel like sickness. Sometimes, I'm afraid that people will stop learning about things that are important, and even people who do want to refine themselves with learning and truth and real knowledge will be culturally corralled into having useless fluff stuffed into their brains 90% of the time instead. Sometimes I'm afraid that people will know too much and the whole world will turn into a Gambit Pileup of everyone trying to pull others' strings, and we'll never know who's going what way. Sometimes I want to hole up and have no contact with anyone because I'm afraid someone will bleed on me at the wrong angle and it will be the break point that kills the infinitely fragile person lurking inside this thing called myself.
———
12:20 a.m.
Every once in a while, I wonder if I am a good person at all. Jesus said no one is good except the Father. But then, I think that Paul said later on (post-Crucifixion/Resurrection/Holy Spirit outpouring, amazing etc.) that the Father sees Jesus when He looks at us, and Jesus was the image of the Father. But sometimes I wonder if there really is too much darkness in me. And really—if I can't get rid of it once and for all, why can I not at least channel it? I could do great things with darkness. Instead I'm squashed up in some inexistent corner, horribly terrified and horrifically angry and wrenchingly sad and much too apathetic to do anything about anything. This is dark, and I know it, and for now I will refuse to care, even peripherally understanding that later I will know this isn't me, or not me in my entirety.
———
12:40 a.m.
Tell me, where do existentialism and faith diverge?
———
12:42 a.m.
Be still, and know that I am God.
~
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.
———
12:55 a.m.
Sometimes it takes some good, hard thinking to ready one's mind to listen. Sometimes, thoughts can be exhausted to emptiness. Noise might be a gateway to silence, and silence a slippery road to clarity, or to peace, or to something else that we need. Sometimes, it is desperation and not satisfaction that draws us upwards.
Often, I get excited about things. The excitement is blinding in its quickness and its intensity. It fades, sooner than I expect it to, every time.
There are others things which I am rarely expressively excited about, but I keep coming back to them over and over because I really do love them. They stick.
In my excited micro-explosions, I feel as though I know so much; in my quiet, insistent, tenacious love affairs, I tend to feel about as knowledgeable and capable as an infant camel. Maybe that's okay. Maybe that's what learning is.
———
12:03 a.m.
Sometimes ignorance and knowledge both feel like sickness. Sometimes, I'm afraid that people will stop learning about things that are important, and even people who do want to refine themselves with learning and truth and real knowledge will be culturally corralled into having useless fluff stuffed into their brains 90% of the time instead. Sometimes I'm afraid that people will know too much and the whole world will turn into a Gambit Pileup of everyone trying to pull others' strings, and we'll never know who's going what way. Sometimes I want to hole up and have no contact with anyone because I'm afraid someone will bleed on me at the wrong angle and it will be the break point that kills the infinitely fragile person lurking inside this thing called myself.
———
12:20 a.m.
Every once in a while, I wonder if I am a good person at all. Jesus said no one is good except the Father. But then, I think that Paul said later on (post-Crucifixion/Resurrection/Holy Spirit outpouring, amazing etc.) that the Father sees Jesus when He looks at us, and Jesus was the image of the Father. But sometimes I wonder if there really is too much darkness in me. And really—if I can't get rid of it once and for all, why can I not at least channel it? I could do great things with darkness. Instead I'm squashed up in some inexistent corner, horribly terrified and horrifically angry and wrenchingly sad and much too apathetic to do anything about anything. This is dark, and I know it, and for now I will refuse to care, even peripherally understanding that later I will know this isn't me, or not me in my entirety.
———
12:40 a.m.
Tell me, where do existentialism and faith diverge?
———
12:42 a.m.
Be still, and know that I am God.
~
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.
———
12:55 a.m.
Sometimes it takes some good, hard thinking to ready one's mind to listen. Sometimes, thoughts can be exhausted to emptiness. Noise might be a gateway to silence, and silence a slippery road to clarity, or to peace, or to something else that we need. Sometimes, it is desperation and not satisfaction that draws us upwards.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
[Untitled] I'm not entirely sure what this is.
(Other than three hours of lonely-like ponderous imaginings and Death Cab For Cutie.)
~
She was standing before the window, shuttered though it was, when his knock came on her door.
There were stars in the sky, turning their faraway faces towards them as she opened her house to the road. His silhouette was dark as his hair, and as sleek. He crossed her floor on heavy but light feet—soon she would call it a widow's walk, and some unspecified time after that it would be forgotten.
Together they smelled of sand—of shifting foundations made for dancing and stumbling feet, of fragile castles soon worn away, of fanciful dreams soon washed out by high tide. Heat still flushed visibly across them, in sunkissed streaks of ochre and thickly forested freckles. Eyes were damp, with perspiration too warm to dissolve into the air, and perhaps with the visceral knowledge of all they must forego.
They faced each other; they slowly grasped one another close for a long, last moment: imbibing the scent, the feel; patterning their memories with the texture of their summer. Breath was their song now—long and heavy, as if they lay on the verge of sleep. It was a final closeness, and they reveled and sorrowed in it as one.
Carefully, then, they began their work. They sat in the near-darkness, set their hands on shoulders first. Sometimes their own, sometime one another, perforating and folding, loosening and disencumbering. If they exchanged words, they were so quiet as to be nearly indiscernible; they may have meant everything, or nothing at all, in this static hour of reality warped by transition.
They stripped all memories of one another from their corporeal selves, the laughter and joyful energy slipping off of them as rain from a waterfowl's wings. Their limbs slowed and steadied, the hot aroma of sunlight settling on them in new earthy tones, pinioning them into regularity and necessity. It flaked off them, it peeled off them; every once in a while it would bubble and crack, and the wisps of heat would escape, unwanted, into the night.
What else escaped with it? They did not dare to ask, lest some unnameable beast pounce on their doubts from within. Everything they was "they" was shivered off with fingers sometimes tearing, sometimes stroking.
Time had followed close on their heels, as it followed in every Season.
After an hour, they stood, dressed in burnished, tender pink, looking pale and rosy against the sloughed-off image of their yellow-red-brown summer skin. The dim firelight cast reflections of their new incarnations, the selves they now belonged within. Their feet set comfortably against the floor, flat-footed instead of tip-toed.
They were always told not the anticipate the emptiness of the Autumn. They were always cautioned not to look into the eyes of the encroaching twilight until they were on its verge—always warned that to cast a shadow over the Summer, over the noon, was agony and sacrilege.
Why was it sacrilege to ache? She wondered it aloud.
He had no answer, and their new skin was too tender for him to reach for her hand. She knew by the bent of his head that he shared her mind in part, that he might yet share it beyond this night, even if she knew nothing of it, even if he understood it not himself, even after no trace remained of "they" even in dreams.
How long would it take until they forgot? —It was a cycle that did not end. Better for them to enjoy the moment while they were within its brilliant, dazzling, exhilarating embrace, and take the grief when it fell like they were human anvils. it would be over soon enough.— She could not even recall if there had been anyone before, if summer existed more than once in a lifetime.
But why was it sacrilege to ache?
—Had she ever asked this question before?—
The light that burns at the heart of summer—it is to know, and to risk one's heart anyway. Never mind that it chafed, never mind that the glasspaper would sear it from her eventually. Let the smell of sand linger, even mingled with the smell of salt for a time.
Let her feel the end coming, and love despite it. Let her strength be for something even just for a blink of an eye: a splash of dark, cool color burning across the ever-gold sky.
No. The thought to reject it, for a moment, passed through her, but it was swiftly gone, ephemeral in the hard-nosed wave of tradition and habit and the entropy of the world that already overtook them in the face of the change.
Long minutes he and she sat in the dark, staring into eyes that had sooner been portals for the world, for the microcosm of a soul, and now were slowly draining of their intimate double edge.
If the love lodged somewhere within them, they would not know it until the end of all things.
At last he and she slept, and when morning came, her winter skin was firm enough that she could go about her day, and there were only tiny shavings of freckles and snippets of gold on the floor, already falling through the minute cracks in the wood grain, to show that he had ever been.
~
17 March 2012
~
She was standing before the window, shuttered though it was, when his knock came on her door.
There were stars in the sky, turning their faraway faces towards them as she opened her house to the road. His silhouette was dark as his hair, and as sleek. He crossed her floor on heavy but light feet—soon she would call it a widow's walk, and some unspecified time after that it would be forgotten.
Together they smelled of sand—of shifting foundations made for dancing and stumbling feet, of fragile castles soon worn away, of fanciful dreams soon washed out by high tide. Heat still flushed visibly across them, in sunkissed streaks of ochre and thickly forested freckles. Eyes were damp, with perspiration too warm to dissolve into the air, and perhaps with the visceral knowledge of all they must forego.
They faced each other; they slowly grasped one another close for a long, last moment: imbibing the scent, the feel; patterning their memories with the texture of their summer. Breath was their song now—long and heavy, as if they lay on the verge of sleep. It was a final closeness, and they reveled and sorrowed in it as one.
Carefully, then, they began their work. They sat in the near-darkness, set their hands on shoulders first. Sometimes their own, sometime one another, perforating and folding, loosening and disencumbering. If they exchanged words, they were so quiet as to be nearly indiscernible; they may have meant everything, or nothing at all, in this static hour of reality warped by transition.
They stripped all memories of one another from their corporeal selves, the laughter and joyful energy slipping off of them as rain from a waterfowl's wings. Their limbs slowed and steadied, the hot aroma of sunlight settling on them in new earthy tones, pinioning them into regularity and necessity. It flaked off them, it peeled off them; every once in a while it would bubble and crack, and the wisps of heat would escape, unwanted, into the night.
What else escaped with it? They did not dare to ask, lest some unnameable beast pounce on their doubts from within. Everything they was "they" was shivered off with fingers sometimes tearing, sometimes stroking.
Time had followed close on their heels, as it followed in every Season.
After an hour, they stood, dressed in burnished, tender pink, looking pale and rosy against the sloughed-off image of their yellow-red-brown summer skin. The dim firelight cast reflections of their new incarnations, the selves they now belonged within. Their feet set comfortably against the floor, flat-footed instead of tip-toed.
They were always told not the anticipate the emptiness of the Autumn. They were always cautioned not to look into the eyes of the encroaching twilight until they were on its verge—always warned that to cast a shadow over the Summer, over the noon, was agony and sacrilege.
Why was it sacrilege to ache? She wondered it aloud.
He had no answer, and their new skin was too tender for him to reach for her hand. She knew by the bent of his head that he shared her mind in part, that he might yet share it beyond this night, even if she knew nothing of it, even if he understood it not himself, even after no trace remained of "they" even in dreams.
How long would it take until they forgot? —It was a cycle that did not end. Better for them to enjoy the moment while they were within its brilliant, dazzling, exhilarating embrace, and take the grief when it fell like they were human anvils. it would be over soon enough.— She could not even recall if there had been anyone before, if summer existed more than once in a lifetime.
But why was it sacrilege to ache?
—Had she ever asked this question before?—
The light that burns at the heart of summer—it is to know, and to risk one's heart anyway. Never mind that it chafed, never mind that the glasspaper would sear it from her eventually. Let the smell of sand linger, even mingled with the smell of salt for a time.
Let her feel the end coming, and love despite it. Let her strength be for something even just for a blink of an eye: a splash of dark, cool color burning across the ever-gold sky.
No. The thought to reject it, for a moment, passed through her, but it was swiftly gone, ephemeral in the hard-nosed wave of tradition and habit and the entropy of the world that already overtook them in the face of the change.
Long minutes he and she sat in the dark, staring into eyes that had sooner been portals for the world, for the microcosm of a soul, and now were slowly draining of their intimate double edge.
If the love lodged somewhere within them, they would not know it until the end of all things.
At last he and she slept, and when morning came, her winter skin was firm enough that she could go about her day, and there were only tiny shavings of freckles and snippets of gold on the floor, already falling through the minute cracks in the wood grain, to show that he had ever been.
~
17 March 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Colored stars, spotting me for the fall.
I finally have the chance to get a full night's sleep, yet all I can do is trot along, leaving semi-artistic footprints on the ever-whirring treadmill of my cerebellum.
Manuscript
Sometimes, I don't understand how I can work up enough emotion over vicariously experiencing something I've never experienced in reality that I actually need catharsis. I wonder what the natural endpoints of emotions are, and how many of the actions we think will be solutions truly would be solutions if we were able to try them all out. I wonder what really constitutes love. I wonder why the word hasn't gone out of fashion. I wonder what plucks the chords in our hearts that make us not want to leave the moment we're in. I wonder why sometimes our need to understand is completely subsumed by our need to wring our hearts into intellectual uselessness, into ornate literacy, into philosophical mazes (into the instinctive and mechanical scrawling of oxymorons?). Who follows us down the paths we take in the night? Who defines waking dreams? When your heart is full, does the fact that you understand nothing matter? Does stream-of-consciousness writing really exemplify as much serious thought as it weirdly, ironically seems to imply?
———
EDIT / 2:58 a.m. / And what happens when the yearning for understanding returns? Are we more or less lost?
———
EDIT / 2:58 a.m. / And what happens when the yearning for understanding returns? Are we more or less lost?
Friday, November 4, 2011
limbo word count and some obsessiveness with new music
NaNoWriMo day four, except that it's the middle of the night, so it's sort of a limbo between days 3 and 4. I'm currently about 230 words ahead of my day 4 quota, and dawn hasn't even risen on day 4 yet. I am going to be a little computer monster on Friday, hunched over my laptop, dividing my brain ignobly between the passionate fit of novel-writing mania and all the mound of ever-present schoolwork that is my bulwark against social anxiety. (Pardon me if some of my sentences don't make sense; I would offer to translate them, but I may not be any more able to than you once I've gone to bed and come back.) Also, I listened to the indie singer-songwriter genre station on Pandora for an hour or so and discovered this and this — I wish I could remember our iTunes password.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Frustrations of a Night Owl
You know, I actually have a surprising capacity to be productive (tangibly as well as mentally) at 1:30 a.m. The problem is, I live in a culture where I'm more or less expected to (once in possession of a career, anyway) start being productive at around 9 a.m. (pre-afternoon, my productiveness capacity is at maybe 8%, possibly as high as 30% if augmented by Extremely Imminent Deadlines), and being tangibly productive in the middle of the night would be labeled workaholism. (My current status as a college student, I am sure, exempts me from that latter point for the interim.) This is land of the coffee gods and the home of the morning people. (See, the reasons I should move to Europe someday just keep compounding.)
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Four a.m. again—oy vey.
Three nights in a row now, there is too much stuff stewing in my brain to let me sleep. All my thoughts are engaged in a redundant, unending steeplechase, and the end result is the worst insomnia I have had in ages. It is amazing how long a night can be when your mind can't wander. Give me something simple to think about, please.
Monday, March 28, 2011
immolation to imagination, ex nihilo
Isn't it astonishing how you can make tiny choices that turn out to be incredibly, irretrievably stupid? You can make the same choice half a dozen times a day and choose the same answer every time, and it's normal, innocuous choice; and then you face it at just the wrong moment and it ruins you for a night. You suddenly go spiraling into a event horizon of collapsing sanity, a helix of half-dreamt psychosis, and you wonder what you could conceivably have been thinking, and how you're going to fix this the following morning, all the while knowing that you likely won't. One moment the workings of your mind are mundane and innocuous, and the next you find yourself on a train in tangent, and it pins you down and smothers you until you stave it off with a journal entry, wrathfully vague blog post, and some subpar poetry. Sometimes, I do not like choices. Sometimes, I do not like imagination. Sometimes, the word "wistful" and all it entails is the bane of my existence. I want to set something on fire and jump into it. Burn me away, just for a moment. Just for one hour. Let me sleep away time itself, and lose all I feel like I'm losing, even though I know I am losing nothing but time.
{This is keeping me sane, which vaguely astonishes me, considering my natural daylight propensities towards the banjo.}
{This is keeping me sane, which vaguely astonishes me, considering my natural daylight propensities towards the banjo.}
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Welcome to Kiersten's Mind, circa 2:47 am, Wednesday, 26 January, year of our Lord 2011.
HELLO.
{author's note, circa 36 minutes in the future: this post is very long, and potentially tedious and absurd, and I'm sorry, and I ask that you not feel obligated to read it all if it turns out to be nonsense or just plain boring, or for any other reason which seems conscionable to you the reader.}
{author's note postscript: Apparently "conscionable" is not a word, and I just invented it retroactively(?) from "unconscionable".}
SLEEP ELUDES ME.
Sleep is [insert witty, poetic, and eternally quotable metaphor here].
And what did I do?
I fell asleep in the middle of writing an essay around 5:00 this afternoon.
I accidentally drank three and a half cups of caffeinated tea at 9:30 p.m. (Because the mint tea was decaffeinated! But it was also nowhere to be found in the labyrinth of our untidy kitchen. Thus, I drank vanilla caramel instead. That turned out to be a mistake.)
And now—I sit. Awake. Alert. My frenetically typing fingers the only endless sound in the oddly soundless night. (Why isn't the furnace running…?)
And now my imagination wanders bravely through a dark and stormy night, a night rife with simmering resentments; events forgotten that may have changed the world, had we only the maturity to recognize them for what they were; plots that you thought were hidden from the world; musings about spiritual wealth versus materialism; theories about the potential of dreams of inventive metaphors for our deepest fears; vicious truths about sibling rivalry and debt and the nature of guilt and forgiveness; ambiguous endings; and the ultimate dilemma between true forgiveness and spilled orange soda as a metaphor for childhood fratricide.
Don't'cha just love writing abstract essays about 20th-century college literature?
Me too, folks.
Me too.
(But not at this time of the night.)
BUT I DO HAVE a working printer!
You know, the free one that they gave me with my expensive computer way, way, way back in July! I finally set it up seven months later so I can print documents without having to convert the file, save it to a flash drive, drive 40 miles, and wait in line for a working computer.
So i can print out all my rambles (not these, the other abstract ones, roughly in essay form, about the college literature) and give them to my peers to review in class tomorrow, and they will tell me how brilliant the writing is but that its patent subjectivity places it completely outside the parameters of the assignment. And they will write in purple pen, because honors students have been properly warned about the possible psychological danger (to the recipient) of using a red pen to give criticism on a school paper.
I actually know none of this for certain (save the part about the working printer, though who knows how long that will last?). I rarely jump to the same conclusions about my 3-a.m. essays as other people do. Last year I wrote a five-page essay on the pros and cons of living life as a short person. I prefaced this essay with three-quarters of a page about stratus clouds, including one very bad pun that made for a horrifically fabricated segue with possibly abused italics. My entire class thought it was a brilliant opener. Four hours later, I thought it was nonsense, even if the rest of the essay was pretty decent.
I have Parmesan cheese stuck between my teeth, because I just ate about four ounces of it. I hope all the expensive protein is worth it.
I keep writing these things ("things" meaning all the rambles of my mind in the middle of the night) down, because I hope that insomnia creates something worthwhile. I think that insomnia makes me a lot of who I am. i used to dream about archaeologists someday discovering the lost civilization of Kalamazoo, and my journals would become the definitive source of history for the early 21st century. Now…um, I don't think much of that idea (to summarize a lengthy paragraph, which involved my writing a will and someone committing arson, which I decided wasn't worth the effort to translate for the non-Kiersten reader who has staunchly trekked through this post to this point).
If you read this post in its entirety, you win major points. I don't know what sort of points. Not "awesome" points, because that sounds somewhat presumptuous because this post probably isn't that awesome, because my brain is functioning on sleep deprivation and caffeine and English literature (that prosaic fiend that consumes the mind in molehill-to-mountain analysis). (George Orwell would be doing the polka in his grave if he could see me breaking every rule of his seven-page paper on concise writing.) But you are awesome, so perhaps they are just rain check points. Rest assured, you may at some future date be able to cash them in for something awesome.
Baaah. I cannot compose poetic gems of wisdom right now, as much I wish I could. But that's already redundant, because I essentially have two concluding paragraphs, whereas Tobias Wolff has none. Is it too subjective to discuss the inferred fratricide/reconciliation results of the ambiguous ending in a plot abstract resolution?
That might be the one sentence I've written all night that I know meant something, even if was something boring.
G'night.
{author's note, circa 36 minutes in the future: this post is very long, and potentially tedious and absurd, and I'm sorry, and I ask that you not feel obligated to read it all if it turns out to be nonsense or just plain boring, or for any other reason which seems conscionable to you the reader.}
{author's note postscript: Apparently "conscionable" is not a word, and I just invented it retroactively(?) from "unconscionable".}
SLEEP ELUDES ME.
Sleep is [insert witty, poetic, and eternally quotable metaphor here].
And what did I do?
I fell asleep in the middle of writing an essay around 5:00 this afternoon.
I accidentally drank three and a half cups of caffeinated tea at 9:30 p.m. (Because the mint tea was decaffeinated! But it was also nowhere to be found in the labyrinth of our untidy kitchen. Thus, I drank vanilla caramel instead. That turned out to be a mistake.)
And now—I sit. Awake. Alert. My frenetically typing fingers the only endless sound in the oddly soundless night. (Why isn't the furnace running…?)
And now my imagination wanders bravely through a dark and stormy night, a night rife with simmering resentments; events forgotten that may have changed the world, had we only the maturity to recognize them for what they were; plots that you thought were hidden from the world; musings about spiritual wealth versus materialism; theories about the potential of dreams of inventive metaphors for our deepest fears; vicious truths about sibling rivalry and debt and the nature of guilt and forgiveness; ambiguous endings; and the ultimate dilemma between true forgiveness and spilled orange soda as a metaphor for childhood fratricide.
Don't'cha just love writing abstract essays about 20th-century college literature?
Me too, folks.
Me too.
(But not at this time of the night.)
BUT I DO HAVE a working printer!
You know, the free one that they gave me with my expensive computer way, way, way back in July! I finally set it up seven months later so I can print documents without having to convert the file, save it to a flash drive, drive 40 miles, and wait in line for a working computer.
So i can print out all my rambles (not these, the other abstract ones, roughly in essay form, about the college literature) and give them to my peers to review in class tomorrow, and they will tell me how brilliant the writing is but that its patent subjectivity places it completely outside the parameters of the assignment. And they will write in purple pen, because honors students have been properly warned about the possible psychological danger (to the recipient) of using a red pen to give criticism on a school paper.
I actually know none of this for certain (save the part about the working printer, though who knows how long that will last?). I rarely jump to the same conclusions about my 3-a.m. essays as other people do. Last year I wrote a five-page essay on the pros and cons of living life as a short person. I prefaced this essay with three-quarters of a page about stratus clouds, including one very bad pun that made for a horrifically fabricated segue with possibly abused italics. My entire class thought it was a brilliant opener. Four hours later, I thought it was nonsense, even if the rest of the essay was pretty decent.
I have Parmesan cheese stuck between my teeth, because I just ate about four ounces of it. I hope all the expensive protein is worth it.
I keep writing these things ("things" meaning all the rambles of my mind in the middle of the night) down, because I hope that insomnia creates something worthwhile. I think that insomnia makes me a lot of who I am. i used to dream about archaeologists someday discovering the lost civilization of Kalamazoo, and my journals would become the definitive source of history for the early 21st century. Now…um, I don't think much of that idea (to summarize a lengthy paragraph, which involved my writing a will and someone committing arson, which I decided wasn't worth the effort to translate for the non-Kiersten reader who has staunchly trekked through this post to this point).
If you read this post in its entirety, you win major points. I don't know what sort of points. Not "awesome" points, because that sounds somewhat presumptuous because this post probably isn't that awesome, because my brain is functioning on sleep deprivation and caffeine and English literature (that prosaic fiend that consumes the mind in molehill-to-mountain analysis). (George Orwell would be doing the polka in his grave if he could see me breaking every rule of his seven-page paper on concise writing.) But you are awesome, so perhaps they are just rain check points. Rest assured, you may at some future date be able to cash them in for something awesome.
Baaah. I cannot compose poetic gems of wisdom right now, as much I wish I could. But that's already redundant, because I essentially have two concluding paragraphs, whereas Tobias Wolff has none. Is it too subjective to discuss the inferred fratricide/reconciliation results of the ambiguous ending in a plot abstract resolution?
That might be the one sentence I've written all night that I know meant something, even if was something boring.
G'night.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Okay, I know I'm not the only one who's frightened of the future. I know I'm not the only college student wandering around wondering what the heck I'm supposed to be doing, or what I'm doing right now for that matter. But it definitely looks to me like everyone around me either 1) has everything neatly, confidently planned out, or 2) doesn't give two beans about their college career, so long as they graduate and have a halfway decent chance of making six figures.
But, oh God, I'm scared to death. I feel like everything rests on me, you know? I have to keep up my grades and plan out all this community service and make sure I'm not wasting time and money on classes I don't need to take (basically, I don't get to take any electives, because my stupid honors courses ate up all my electives. Sucks. — That's another thing. I feel like like a crappy honors student. I can do the coursework, for sure, but I'm not exactly the most confident or responsible 18-year-old out there. All I do is write good essays!) I can make so many wrong choices. I could do so many things wrong. There are so many ways to just mess up. I feel so pressured to make the most of my time (I feel like I wasted a lot of it already.); to do something with myself.
And I'm so scared, because I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And I don't have the self-motivation to take time to listen to God. [expletive deleted] self-motivation that I don't have. Being a spontaneous person instead of a goal-oriented one sucks so much right now. I know I need to change, because, face it, I tend to be a rather irresponsible person and I can't afford to stay that way. But I don't feel an urgent, desperate need to change, except in crunch time, and by then it's too late; and then I get through it, and on the other side it never looks so bad. So I just keep doing the same stupid things over and over and never change.
And then there are things I'm terrified of—like taking a required physical education class. I would, in all seriousness, do almost anything to get out of taking one. Just thinking about it, just looking at the gym, makes me want to run, literally. And I have no idea why I dread it in any form so much. Even classes that seem like they'd be lots of fun, like karate or yoga or scuba diving, still scare the daylights out of me. But I have to pick one eventually [eventually meaning "SOON!"].
Still, I'm scared to death. I can't graduate in two years without either taking seventeen credits both semesters next year (impossible, unless I undergo some really drastic personality changes), or taking at least ten credits over the summer (am I capable of going to school full-time for twenty-one straight months without going insane? I doubt it.) I'm so frightened that my GPA will drift just a bit too low, or I'll procrastinate one day too far or on one project too many, or I'll get one night too little of sleep, or I'll fall in love with somebody and screw up my whole life, or I'll just plain lose my mind and go crazy. Literally. And I can't even listen to God, who I've been desperately asking for help. I can't even bring myself to do that much. I feel so desperately out of touch, out of time, out of anything but emotion.
But, oh God, I'm scared to death. I feel like everything rests on me, you know? I have to keep up my grades and plan out all this community service and make sure I'm not wasting time and money on classes I don't need to take (basically, I don't get to take any electives, because my stupid honors courses ate up all my electives. Sucks. — That's another thing. I feel like like a crappy honors student. I can do the coursework, for sure, but I'm not exactly the most confident or responsible 18-year-old out there. All I do is write good essays!) I can make so many wrong choices. I could do so many things wrong. There are so many ways to just mess up. I feel so pressured to make the most of my time (I feel like I wasted a lot of it already.); to do something with myself.
And I'm so scared, because I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And I don't have the self-motivation to take time to listen to God. [expletive deleted] self-motivation that I don't have. Being a spontaneous person instead of a goal-oriented one sucks so much right now. I know I need to change, because, face it, I tend to be a rather irresponsible person and I can't afford to stay that way. But I don't feel an urgent, desperate need to change, except in crunch time, and by then it's too late; and then I get through it, and on the other side it never looks so bad. So I just keep doing the same stupid things over and over and never change.
And then there are things I'm terrified of—like taking a required physical education class. I would, in all seriousness, do almost anything to get out of taking one. Just thinking about it, just looking at the gym, makes me want to run, literally. And I have no idea why I dread it in any form so much. Even classes that seem like they'd be lots of fun, like karate or yoga or scuba diving, still scare the daylights out of me. But I have to pick one eventually [eventually meaning "SOON!"].
Still, I'm scared to death. I can't graduate in two years without either taking seventeen credits both semesters next year (impossible, unless I undergo some really drastic personality changes), or taking at least ten credits over the summer (am I capable of going to school full-time for twenty-one straight months without going insane? I doubt it.) I'm so frightened that my GPA will drift just a bit too low, or I'll procrastinate one day too far or on one project too many, or I'll get one night too little of sleep, or I'll fall in love with somebody and screw up my whole life, or I'll just plain lose my mind and go crazy. Literally. And I can't even listen to God, who I've been desperately asking for help. I can't even bring myself to do that much. I feel so desperately out of touch, out of time, out of anything but emotion.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Memorandum To An Overactive Imagination:
Herself, Inc.
from the desk of
Kiersten M. Lawrence
Senior Manager
My dear Overactive Imagination,
Greetings and salutations.
I see this letter finds you in good health. On most given days, I would rejoice with you in that, but it also seems you are feeling a bit overzealous at the moment, and in such a state you are being a small — how shall I put this? — distraction to the 95% of the rest of me that would dearly love to get a night's sound sleep.
It has been brought to my attention that my visual cortex exposed you to five minutes of a slasher movie today in humanities class. I shall have to have a talk with her about that. She should know by now that suspenseful, frightening murder scenes make you feverish. It would seem this was a conspiracy in which my judgment center was also a participant. Sometimes I think my decision-making center has not quite grasped the fact that there a direct link between your rovings in the world of the creepy and horrible, and the supply lines to the Irrational Fears and Nightmares faction that took up residence in my brain when I was just a little tot, and whom I have not yet been successful in starving out. A slow learner, my Discerning Judgment-Making Center is. In future, I advise you not to believe every ridiculous little thing you receive from those greedy sensory stimuli. Perhaps you should double-check the keywords on your spam filters. I really don't want to have to start forwarding your mail through the You're-Being-A-Wretched-Idiot fulcrum. He can be positively merciless.
When I notice a lack of educated judgment among our members, I view it as my solemn and Rhapsodizian duty to correct it. To mollify your low attention span, I will try to put this as succinctly as possible:
Shut up, darling.
I just don't think you realize how utterly valueless your rambles through the land of nihilistic speculation are. You need to understand that while there are many excellent times and places to romp through the universes of the wonderfully preposterous, there are certain times (e.g., the present moment) when it would be beneficial to all members of this body if you would please quiet down and anchor yourself in land of the realistic. And there are places—the places that seeing images from things like slasher movies make you think you should go—that you should never, never wander into, especially at night. They provide not only annoyance to me, but actually are capable of causing irrefutable harm. Please refrain from even dipping your metaphorical toes into vivid speculations of visitations from serial killers or cannibals or psychotic supervillains or showers. They are decidedly unappreciated.
I apologize for the relative harshness of my discourse in this letter, but previous "gentle nudges" have not served to get my point across. I sincerely hope you take my warnings to heart and adjust your behavior accordingly. It would cause me great grief to be forced to implement more drastic measures.
Again, I send my fondest felicitations and prayers your way.
Included in this envelope is a week's supply of Valium. Yes, that is a hint which I intend you to take.
I remain,
Your loyal friend, willing servant, and tortured owner, etc.,
Kiersten M. Lawrence
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