Elephants

It's almost February. I graduate in May. I have no job. I have no money.

Sometimes I feel like I'm bungee jumping with a faulty cord. The fall is this semester, the snap and smash is going to be May. The absolute last thing I want is to live at home. That being said, I probably can't even do that because my parents are struggling to make it right now. They may not have a house in the next few months. So where do I go? Do I try to stay here? Do I move far? I really have no idea. If I think about it for too long I get this really tight feeling in my chest, I feel like hyperventilating.

I'm ready to be done with college. But I'm terrified to be done with it as well. I'm afraid to move to a new place and become a hermit. My natural tendency is to be reclusive. I have to really fight to go be social. Being surrounded by friends, my natural tendencies get pushed aside. I'm just worried that I won't meet anyone. I'll be a loner with a lot of cats and a musty smell.

I'm trying not to think about it, but it seeps in to my mind so often that I'm having trouble pushing it away. It's the big ol' elephant and it seems to be getting larger.

Last semester I was stressed for a completely different reason. Last semester, this one event pushed me in to recluse mode. Granted, this thing completely fucked my world up, so being a hermit was almost inevitable. But this semester I'm dealing with the complete terror of the uncertainty of my future. And I'm dealing with it by going out and getting obliterated more than I have since the first semester of my freshman year. It's almost a complete 360. I'm not sure that this is the right way to deal with it, especially considering my family history, but this is how I'm dealing.

I just have to hope that everything will work out. I have to work for what I want, and I have to work for security.

But...if all else fails I'll marry rich. :-)

Mr. Sandman

There must have been something in the air in our apartment last night because the three of us had really strange dreams.

Katie dreamt (apparently dreamed is also correct, dreamt is British) that she was fishing and a shark turned in to a man and asked her to dance.

Haley dreamt that I was getting my nipple pierced in some dirty place that had me sit on an old mattress (gross).

I had two really strange ones. First, I wanted to dye my hair some really ridiculous color like hot pink or something. The place we went to was really creepy and the people that worked there were all tattooed and very witch-doctorish looking. They had snakes in cages everywhere and I had to hold one in order for them to dye my hair. And then they made me take a shower. It was all very creepy and weird.

And then right before my alarm went off (at 6 AM, barf) I kept dreaming about Nazi concentration camps. Fuck if I know why. Every time I closed my eyes it would be a different scene. In one people's eyes were popping out in gas chambers, in another I saw people being burned alive in the crematoriums. It was disturbing. It actually made me want to get out of bed, because I had enough dream insanity for one night.

I've been sleeping poorly ever since I got back here after Christmas. I wish I knew why. I have really fucked up dreams or I can't get to sleep. Or I toss and turn and wake up a million times. Wish it would stop.

Anxiety much?

I'm taking a class on post-modern American fiction and my prof seriously depressed me today. Now, I get the whole "death of the author " Roland Barthes thing. I've studied it, but I've never really given it much thought. Until today.

With the death of the author comes the death of creativity. Everything that is produced now is a replication, interpretation, or reworking of something that already exists. And if you think about it, it's fucking true! Everything has an influence. Kirk Hammet's guitar solos are often influenced by classical music (they are, we can argue about that if you don't believe me). So many movies are remakes, they form to genres and stereotypes.

If people that are considered artists are no longer creative where does that leave the rest of us? I would love nothing more than to be an author, but to be completely honest with you I kind of suck at creative writing. I am inherently good at music, and yet I can't write my own. So, as ridiculous as I know this will sound, this makes me feel like a double failure. Not only is our society as a whole failing because we are just processing information and splicing it together, but here I am not even being able to process and splice. So where does that leave me? I want to own a coffee shop, how original. I would like to write children's books, but christ how the hell am I going to do that when all the good stories have been used up.

And then, in my Shakespeare class, Prof Charnes told us all about the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings (established by Henry VIII) which claims that when the mortal body of a king dies, the king's second body moves in to his legitimate heir, thus establishing a spiritual right to the throne and ending the desire for civil war. How fucking original is that?! That's so incredible. I mean, it's ridiculous, but it's genious. When things didn't exist people made them up. I just feel like now there is nothing else to make up. Is anyone else depressed by that? Perhaps I'm just overly sensitive.

I'm constantly petrified of becoming uninteresting. In college I tend to feel uninteresting because I don't drink often. In general I tend to feel uninteresting because I'm constantly surrounded by intensely interesting people. And now, thanks to class, I feel uninteresting because I can't come up with anything new or creative. Thanks IU for making me feel like I can't do it.

This entire post is ridiculous, but this has been bumming me out all day. Plus worked pissed me off, so that just sank me deeper into my thoughts. Dangerous place for me to be at times.

Ah Literature

Went to Barnes and Noble today to spend my 40 dollar gift card. For those of you who have never experienced my bookstore psychosis I will describe it for you.

I walk in, usually take a deep breath and comment on how much I love the smell of bookstores, and then begin my perusal. Generally I check out the tables with newly released fiction, then move to bargain books, and then I just wander around the fiction shelves looking for anything that catches my eye. There is almost always a book I want, so I find those first and then I just browse for a good hour. While I'm browsing I find things, and after an hour I generally have a sizable stack to sort through. Now comes the hard part: picking which to put back and which to buy. Sometimes it seriously hurts me to put some books back on the shelf. Which is ridiculous because I have sooo many books on my shelf at home that I have yet to read. But this doesn't seem to matter. So I look at the books, and then slowly talk myself out of all but two. I can rarely only get one book. Today I needed to keep it right around 40 since I have little money of my own. I wound up paying about 7 bucks for the taxes of the books I bought. Not too shabby. The sad thing is that I'm probably not even going to get to these books until I graduate because I'm taking 3 lit courses...but whatever. Sacrifices must be made I guess.

I love reading. I'm truly amazed by it. Reading is one of those things that actually makes me sad when people say that they don't enjoy it. You learn so much from reading. New words, dialects, ideas, points of view. You learn to cry and laugh and think deeply. You make connections across genres and generations. You become good at games like Scattergories and Catchphrase. :) It's really a win win win win win situation.

So go read a book today. I think I'll fall asleep to the lovely Dave Eggers and his Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

New Year, New Blog!

Hello all in blogspot land! Figured I'd move my blog from livejournal to here, for some reason this site seems more professional. I'm fairly new to this site so it may take me awhile to figure things out, but for now this is me.

As I'm a soon to be graduate of Indiana University looking for a job in either the publishing biz for the coffee biz I figured it was time to start a more career, coffee, fiction driven blog. As for now that's pretty much all I've got to say! More to come soon.