discovery

in lyric essay, i have opened a, forgive the cliches, pandora's box, a can of worms, a box of sand that i'll gladly climb into. what is this fascinating form, it's such a mind-fuck but yet a mountain i can't but want to climb. no doubt i will hate it at times, but i won't give up on it.

little darling

the rain has provided me with a sort of solace. this essay i am working on i write in spurts, and in between i jump up from my chair to play on the jungle gym outside. you make no sense to me, but last weekend you kept me from being lonely.

remedy

somehow, every other saturday i get depressed. i fear that soon, it will be every saturday. i hope not.

word of the day: tempestuous

adjective
1.
characterized by or subject to tempests: the tempestuous ocean.
2.
of the nature of or resembling a tempest: a tempestuous wind.
3.
tumultuous; turbulent: a tempestuous period in history.

Of course

Life becomes a hell of a lot less stressful when I accept mediocrity.

What a waste of time, energy, potential happiness, to strive for anything more!

Aftermath.

The first lecture panel...it went OK. Of course there were typos--The Karamazov Brothers instead of The Brothers Karamazov, for example, which killed me. The first lecture was boring, the second emotional, the third just a tad too long, the fourth riddled with bad words, which no one told me were not OK. So still good that I dressed well for the all-eyes-on-me moments. I'm glad, though, that it's over, and nervous about the next one, as the expectations are now higher.

Silly me. I thought I was here to write!

First.

Today is the first of the Iowa City Public Library Lecture Series, which I'm in charge of orchestrating. Today's topic is Translating and Writing Across Languages. My boss told me that if anything goes wrong, all eyes will turn to me. Pressure, anyone?

It's stressful to have this job while I'm doing my MFA--babysitting and meeting with and editing the ramblings of 38 writers from all over the world--but a nice excuse not to write and a little respite from solitude. So for now I try and make the best of it, and hope that nothing goes wrong. And if it does, and all eyes turn to me, I'll at least be dressed for the occasion.

Passage.

I can't believe how much time I wasted--working office jobs, doing things I didn't want to do, being a masochist more generally--when I could have been ostensibly writing. Why all that suffering, really? To what end, for what purpose? Surely not money, as I made just enough to get by and keep doing the shit I was doing. I feel so behind, so at a loss, so threatened by the passage of time because I've wasted so much of it. I see these 22 and 23 year olds, straight out of college, doing MFAs alongside of me, and I think, fuck, they are so much smarter than I am. They went straight for what they wanted, while I went for character-building experiences in which I consistently placed myself in challenging and uncomfortable situations. I could've been sitting in a cozy, familiar room, writing. Why oh why oh why do I always take the more difficult road? What does character-building mean, anyway? It means I've suffered, seen the world, seen parts of myself that I frankly wish I'd never seen.

And yet I wouldn't take back a single experience. Not one, really. OK, maybe the last office job I had. Though it took that one to bring me here. It took severe disgust and fear of "this is it, forever and ever?" to make me apply to go back to school less than 6 months after graduating. So who the hell knows whether it's ever a waste or exactly as much time as it takes.

1.

I wonder, sometimes, about loneliness. Why it seems to sneak up. Why you can be having a wonderful time with yourself, and then suddenly feel very alone. I am glad to experience it, as I reminder that I need.