Notice
"There is no 'us', Orlin. I don't see how there ever could be."
"You only say that because we used to live on different planes of existence."
--Sam/Orlin, "Stargate"
1)Do you ever wish you could know what the stupid things would be before you did them?
2)Because they always seem smart beforehand; it's not like we choose to do stupid things, at least not most of the time.
3)Okay, at least not ALL of the time, not some of us anyway.
4)I've done many stupid things, and by and large they amuse me in retrospect and sometimes even when I'm doing them, and I can't think of many I'd change.
5)Actually, I can't think of anything I've done that I'd change, but I think that's probably more because I don't remember things very well than because I wouldn't change any of them.
6)I guess it kind of ends up being the same thing, though, right? Because you wouldn't change what you don't remember.
7)Or if you would it would be hard, since you don't know what you did the first time so how could you make it different the second time?
8)Do you ever read things other people write and just sort of accidentally pick up their writing style for however long?
9)It's like with accents, except I think maybe that it happens faster and the effects are more transitory.
10)I was reading Jessie's latest journal entry at "Perpetual Motion" and I really love doing that because she's funny and she's real and she makes no apology for it.
11)She also has a very stream-of-consciousness style of writing, which of course seems to have kicked in for me now that I've been thoroughly amused by her uncertainty about whether time is moving too quickly or too slowly.
12)One night when I was reading jenn's x-fic I stopped to work on a "First Love" story and Zhane totally turned into jenn's portrayal of Bobby which I knew was bad but was somehow terribly funny at the same time.
13)He just started thinking the way Bobby does but it was only because I had been reading "Bobby" for like an hour and I don't know if that's channeling or what, but I really like the accent analogy because that's what it feels like.
14)Am I rambling? I'm totally rambling. Which is good because I tried to update this page earlier and I seriously sat here and stared at the screen for a good five minutes with almost no thoughts in my head whatsoever.
15)I don't usually know what I'm going to write in advance; random things just get written down but this time they didn't and I think my zen teacher would be really proud of me if I'd done it on purpose.
16)And if I had a zen teacher, which of course I don't.
17)But I'm reading another buddhist book called "Work As A Spiritual Practice" on the recommendation of my sister and it's terrific.
18)It says many clever things, but one of them is an admonition to be more aware of what you're feeling which I totally am not and all of sudden, reading that, I realized that that's one of the reasons I have trouble journaling.
19)You wouldn't know it, right?
20)I've kept journals for years, but I've never been able to journal in the traditional sense of writing down my impressions of events or even things that happen to me and especially not things I feel.
21)My journals are filled with quotes from other people and ticket stubs and scrapbook-y items and doodles and sometimes random poetry and stories.
22)Occasionally, like once a journal, there is evidence that I made an attempt at being normal and saying "Today I felt lousy because I had a headache all morning" or "The funniest thing happened this afternoon, when I fooled the principal into thinking I had just transferred from San Francisco" but those attempts usually trail off within a paragraph or two.
23)I can't tell if it's because writing down how I feel makes it more real, like wow I'm so messed up when I see it on paper, or if writing it down makes it less real, like I can see how trivial those things are and I shouldn't really feel anything about them.
24)That's one of the reasons that it's so easy to write about other people, because I totally empathize with other people's feelings and I'm perfectly willing to accept that a character's feelings are justified when I think my identical feelings are not.
25)So writing fiction is definitely my substitute form of journaling, which, doesn't that sound messed up?
26)See! That's what I always think! If it's not trivial, then it's so significant that I must be crazy, and neither of those two attitudes is very conducive to prolonged journaling.
27)But when this random buddhist guy is like, we need to be more aware of our emotions (he said it more eloquently and with clever anecdotes designed to facilitate understanding) I was like, "I'm so not!"
28)This was a major revelation to me, since I'm mostly a mystery to myself and the three things I know about me have more to do with what foods I like than anything that would help me on the path to spiritual enlightenment.
29)So I realized that most of the time I don't like to put what I'm feeling into words even in my own mind, let alone on paper or out loud--I've recently thought I was making progress with both, but it occurred to me today that if I can't even say in my own mind "I'm nervous" or "I'm angry" then how am I suppose to deal with it?
30)Oh, and by the way, my new thing is pilates.
31)I don't really know what that means, but I know it involves yoga somehow and I did a whole hour of it this morning and it was fun.
Run Away