Want a surefire way to wake up and stay awake?

Discover that there are FUCKING JETS OF FIRE in your closet!!!!

Why, why oh why is there a furnace in my tiny little closet? Why does it make my closet glow both orange and blue when it kicks on? Why are there (sort of) open flames SHOOTING AT RIDICULOUS SPEEDS THAT MAKE BURNY BLUE FIRE NOISES?!

This tops the self-flushing toilet, the whistling fridge, the creaky floor, and the dishwasher that randomly smelled like dead chickens one night.

JETS. OF. FIRE.

Do you think Steve Jobs answers prayers?

I know what it is to fear now. I didn't know before, but in that moment when my computer suddenly and without warning decided that hinges were unnecessary and went flat, I knew what it was to fear.

My life is on my computer. I never thought I would be one of those people - addicted to the internet, communicating almost if not entirely through email, facebook, the like. One of those people who reads blogs instead of newspapers, who blogs instead of doing their homework (oh look at that meta reference right there), who stays up late into the night watching british clip shows instead of reading books.

On the other hand, what else am I supposed to do? Music is digital now, photography too. One doesn't write a thesis on a typewriter, one uses Microsoft word. When one can stay in touch (for free, more or less) with friends across the world through a website, shouldn't one do so? The letter is so much slower than the wall post, than the tweet. And when the world is so exciting and life moves so fast, one needs the constantly evolving web to know what's happening.

At the same time, when I returned home from the Apple store (where they promised me they would repair my baby for only half a month's rent) and I felt uncomfortable because I could not immediately check my email, I felt like I had a bit of a dependency issue. I'm borrowing a friend's old, spare, in-case-her-computer-self-destructs laptop for the time being, which will hopefully help me to ease my addiction - I'd feel guilty using someone else's computer 24/7. If I'm working (or at least mostly working) the use of this computer feels legitimate, even necessary. But I think I shall not watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the seventh time tonight.

Like endless rain into a paper cup

I must confess that sometimes it feels like I've run out of things to say. I've hardly written lately, so consumed am I by the thousand other things I'm supposedly supposed to do. But I need to be writing - oh, how I need to be writing. My thesis haunts me. I have a story due next week. The overly ambitious wanna-be-author in me decided to try to write a novel this month (like the rest of the world) yet hasn't done a thing this week as this month finished a fourth of itself.

Oops.

Well, does it really matter, in the end? Any of it? These things that are pressing for my time?

I'm going to write a thesis. Whether it will be a good one or not - whether I will just be regurgitating theory at a set of historical events, whether I will make up fifty pages and bullshit the rest - is yet to be determined. My classes are fine - this story due will be done soon enough. And really, nobody's watching if I just ignore NaNoWriMo.

Sometimes it is nicer to slow down. To cook a full meal for dinner, to take a walk in the park. To go to a party where I am alone, not bound to anyone, free to flit between friends as I please. Free to wear what I want - a slinky dress, heels if I so choose - and have none criticize me. Free to take the forty minute freezing walk home when I - and I alone - decide I want to slip away early. To watch the moon glow, impossibly full, on a perfect Halloween night. To feel myself walking slower and slower, to take off my heels, to walk barefoot, avoiding leaves and acorns and broken glass. To arrive home at last and drink coffee at midnight. To know that the soul of me - renewed in such small moments - is stronger and more eloquent each time that I walk and I talk and I sing to myself.

And that's what matters. I can think again, I can phrase, I can manipulate nouns into verbs and use too many commas and dashes and too much alliteration and reference my writing in my writing.

Without the soul of me, I cannot be a writer. I cannot be what I am, do what I do. I cannot exist that way.

So I am being the soul of me.

I've been busy

Inspiration strikes at the worst possible hour, leaving me desperate to scribble but needing to argue, coherently, about the relationship between performance art and social activism in Mexico since 1988, since that is what I so cleverly decided to write a thesis about.

Why write the thesis, I wonder? I always assumed I would write one, never questioned it for a second. Yet I find it so hard to motivate myself to work on it. Perhaps I've simply gotten out of the habit of being excited about research, but fiction is calling me lately.

There's a story screaming in my ears, just waiting to be written. It's got a name, already, and everything. I know how it ends, I know how it begins, and I know most of the things that go in the middle. But I resisted writing anything down for a week, because I was supposed to be writing my thesis.

And then I procrastinated. I did other homework, less pressing. I got sick. I slept a lot. I wrote on my thesis, but I spent a good deal of time doing nothing productive. I could have been writing this story, and yet I felt guilty, because the thesis wasn't finished.

I resisted. And I continued resisting.

And today I stopped resisting and started writing, and it was the easiest and most natural thing I have ever done. The words came tripping through my fingertips and keyboard, word after word after word. I saw where the pieces fit together, the places I have yet to fill. It felt good, a relief to get those words, those pages out of my head and onto the screen.

I shouldn't deny myself when I know what I want to be writing, should I?

autumn's here

I find myself looking more and more and sounding more and more like the sort of character I want to write.

I walk down the street with a bag slung over my shoulder, cheap sunglasses held between my teeth, their plastic coating wearing thin. My shoes are battered, their suede dirty, their ribbon not so shiny anymore, but they cost only $10 and they've lasted me two years, so I'll wear them until they fall to pieces. My jeans were cheap, but they fit well and they have a dark wash, so I can wear them multiple days in a row and no one can tell. I've got on a silk and lace shirt which is both stained and fraying, but it's a pretty color and really, the charcoal grey blazer I'm wearing as a jacket raises the whole look from "this was on top of my clothes pile this morning" to "I'm a cool intellectual and it's effortless to look this way".

I wear silver nail polish because it feels a little punky. I've got scars on my hand from where I burned myself as a waitress. I wear a ring on that hand now - the only piece of jewelry I've bought for myself without having an existential crisis (I decided that since it was fair trade, I could excuse parting with the cash for something frivolous. It was like making a donation and getting a gift in return) - a celtic-y silver-y thing that I play with during class, moving from finger to finger. I don't wear much makeup, just a bit of mascara when I remember to put it on in the morning or forget to remove it the night before. My hair is tossed about - the wind moves it everywhere anyways, so it's hardly even worth it to brush it in the morning when I'm just going to brush it back with my fingers compulsively each and every day.

I've gained a reputation as a cook, a handyman, someone entirely capable. I don't always sleep at night. I've given up coffee for the fifth time in 18 months and am drinking Irish Breakfast tea constantly instead. I pay bills. I can open a bottle of champagne without endangering anyone's life (no small feat).

I've just had two of the hardest months of my life, dancing on the edge of falling to pieces but somehow impossibly staying whole, or something close to it. And now, at the end of it, while I put myself back together, I have suddenly discovered that I'm sort of interesting.

This is a new sensation.

self blocking, narcissistically

I've been scribbling a lot lately, little bits and things that pieced together will form a few approachingly coherent ideas. I have a story due soon for class, so you'd think this would be a good thing.

The problem is that these ideas are incredibly personal. I see myself in every narrator, my main characters. Writing autobiographically isn't a literary sin - countless authors do it - but I fear that I can't do anything else. I do me - and I can do me exceptionally well - but can I make a career out of one note?

It gets hard to think of anything but what I've lived, especially since my life this last year has had so many of the standard tropes of stories - travel, love, heartbreak, fear, panic, work, new places to live, coming of age, trying to be a writer. Each time I start a character which I think is not of myself, I discover my face beneath theirs.

I tried to get around this, once upon a time, by trying to actually write me, and just me. I took a creative non-fiction class, memoir 101, more or less, and it was one of the hardest things I have done. It was painful to be honest, to lay myself out on the line, to feel that I could not blend and blur the edges, that I had to include all the facts. I felt myself boring, uninteresting, plodding along without the wry humor and double negatives that I have made part and parcel of my fiction. So it is back to fiction I go - maybe I'll try my hand at truth again one day, but not until someone tells me I am interesting enough to do so.

The other problem is that I feel so much more risk writing these stories for a class than I would in trying to get something semi-me-inspired published. I'm not quite sure why the close judgment seems so much worse; perhaps it's that actually being published and being criticized by people who aren't just my peers would, in itself, give me a certain legitimacy that I crave.

I just wish that I could get out of my head; I feel like such a narcissist, unable to escape from myself.

metathinking

I sit right now with my computer in my lap, headphones in my ears, happy music drowning out the sounds of chatter in my library's adjacent cafe in this space between the hours when people rush to class and the weekend. I am done for the week, save for a meeting and some few tasks I should responsibly finish before I start my Saturday and Sunday tradition of procrastination.

It's so hard to get anything done. It's bright outside. Men with mustaches and cowboy hats keep walking around my campus, which is absurdly strange for the demographics of this particular school.

Working just isn't appealing right now. I might miss something, if I try to accomplish something. Sure, no one has approached me for the last hour - but someone I know might walk up to me in a moment's time and demand I rush off on some sudden adventure with them. And if I get all my silly internet searching out of the way now, I can get things done later. (Untrue).

It's times like these when I miss those little things I hated most about high school. Like the bus ride home. As much of a pain as it was, as humiliating as it was to be the only senior without a car, as much as it reinforced the age division between myself and my classmates, I always had any reading finished by the time I was home. And the dial-up internet, so painfully slow - I wasn't an addict then. And living so far from my friends - desperate for independence, I threw myself headfirst into making plans and getting into college, crafting my own life and escaping.

I think that being happy with this place is making me complacent. I am reticent to face the fact that I will be leaving soon, very soon, and that this luxury of people watching and not doing my homework will likely go away when I do.