We’ve made it to the second day!

I am exhausted. Not because of this project, but because I did not sleep until the birds of the dawn (larks?) were singing their morning-song. Oh happy little birds, nothing gives me a sinking feeling more than when I realize I have squandered nighttime in a waking state. Though many fun and interesting conversations often occur in the darkness. I once read something, an article or in a book, how the intimacy of a shared nightspace makes people more prone to telling secrets.

And I had another nice little paragraph about my own personal experience to illustrate this tendency to share under cover of darkness, but it was lost due to negligence and I faulty internet connection. Suffice it to say that I was recalling an era of my youth of which I have many fond remembrances. It was the summer before I entered into that most horrible prison of adolescence, junior high (technically I went to a middle school, but I prefer “junior high” because it sounds less sweaty and gross). I spent my time with my sister and her nearly-of-age cohort, the disparity in years making them infinitely more interesting than anyone within my underage demographic. They happened to enjoy my company, too, and I probably considered them my closest friends. We would stay awake until the dawn, playing, of all things, The Game of Life, baking Funfetti™ cakes, and talking about everything. It was all very silly and goofy and wonderfully personal, though it might’ve ruined me a little for the middle school social scene, which was terribly banal.

But that’s a topic for another day.

Hello. I am writing every day now.

Is what I intend to do, anyway. If I write it, it becomes real, correct? Envision your goal and you can achieve it. Books, people write lots and lots of those. Some get lost and some make it to the top of the Oprah book club list.

I’ve had the idea that I want to write a book for several years now. I’ve brainstormed on different topics, but the one I keep coming back to, the experience that could be extrapolated into an extended short story or novella, maybe a really meandering novel, is the experience I had road-tripping a few summers back. I guess it’s not necessarily original, but it’s true. That’s what people look for, right? Truth. Especially when we are young, the search for what is true and real and worth our time is cripplingly important. Truth has meaning, after all. But wait, something can be meaningful without it being true; the Legend of Zelda series carries a lot of meaning for me on a personal level, but sadly it is a fantasy.

Anyway, I think my first goal is to be less careful in my writing. I hated going back and editing my work for undergrad. It was akin to plucking eyebrows out with your fingers—I did that the other day and cried—so I avoided it by sitting for thirty minute chunks at a time mulling over one or two or three sentences in my head, making sure everything was just so before committing it to paper. In short, it was a very demanding and inefficient process. Sure, I guess I only had to make one go of the thing, start to finish, but it always felt like a little piece of me had died by the time I was clattering out the last sentence. I wanted to sound smart and clever and have SUCH GRAND AND ORIGINAL IDEAS that would blow away my professor, who then, being so overwhelmed with my genius, would invite me over for dinner where s/he would pontificate on the finer points of whatever topic and I would pander. The undergraduate dream.

I know, of course, I never wrote (or will, perhaps) anything that amazing or thoughtful. My biggest strength was my inability to focus, which I think professors saw as endearing. Here was this eager soul, chomping at the bit for knowledge, needing guidance to refine all the thoughts swirling through my brain. And my professors, bless them with their generosity of heart, would try their best to lead me; and I, like the proverbially horse, would still do all the dumb things I ever did in my writing: attempt drawing improbable connections between disparate topics, get bogged down in the form, use prolix writing patterns to dress up simple ideas. To make another animal comparison, I was peacock-in’. Yeah, peacocks have fantastic plumage, but they don’t make great writers (never mind the fact they don’t have opposable thumbs).

Nah, I wanna be a bandersnatch. Also, people do really cool drawings of bandersnatches:

Bandersnatch by DaveAllsop on DeviantArt

Well, it’s August November.  That means, among other things, I’ve been gainfully employed for nearly six months.  I’ve found I need to keep reminding myself that what I do now is ‘have a job,’ otherwise it all seems like something I’m pretending to do.  I assume this feeling comes from being a (fairly) recent college graduate who received a bachelor of arts in a relatively obscure foreign language.  Also, I am working on a college campus so there hasn’t been a real disconnect from my student life to my employed adult life, albeit the campus is 3000 miles away from my alma mater.  There are certain qualities that exist across all liberal arts college campuses, so that they all begin to feel very similar.  Even the architecture starts to run together, all brick and mortar, symbolic of…

Well, not to sound like a broken record, but I’ve done it again: made it through an entire 12 months and documented perhaps a sixteenth (if I’m being generous) of how I spent them. I think the problem is one of focus. As in, I am deficient of the ability to concentrate on a single thought or idea for more than a few minutes.

I’ve decided it’s easier to blockquote myself than it is to actually go back and complete those thoughts I had, which serves to prove my point that I have a lack of focus. Though, perhaps it’s really an incredible sign of self discipline that I went back and pulled these from the dusty annals of half-written musings.

At any rate, I’m writing at my work desk, because where better to put aside superfluous matters than while on the job? I sometimes chide myself for not spending more hours of my workday to exercises in writing, instead surreptitiously fitting in a game or two of Candy Crush. If I were to write a more accurate and honest description of my job, it would probably resemble something more along the lines of:

“Plays Candy Crush two to three times daily; checks and responds to emails intermittently; makes afternoon coffee.”

I would argue that learning how to make an excellent pot of coffee in the workplace is a vital skill for any number of reasons, not the least of which being the blatant favoritism shown to the one who brews. But I should clarify: I’m the only one who works in my office, so it’s really just a daily competition with myself to see if I can improve my boss’s opinion of me. It’s both incredibly demanding and preposterously easy; in other words, the most stressful zero-stress job. Far and away the biggest source of heartache is deciding how to space out the three or four things I need to get done any given week. If I do it all at once, where does that leave the other 4 days? Sure, there’s the internet, to which I’m conveniently connected all the flippin’ time, but even that loses its appeal after a time. Well, the solution lately has been to make lists. So many lists. I’ll leave off with one featuring a couple of wonderfully clever and useful Japanese words:

日帰り (higaeri) — day trip

朝帰り (asagaeri) — coming back in the early morning (after staying out all night [drinking])