(no subject)
So I haven't updated in over six months.
Hi.
I'm going to forego catch-up chatter. Recently, I decided to write a bunch of short memoirs for my thesis. Since I have a piece due to my thesis chair this Wednesday, I jokingly told one of my friends that I'm thinking of just putting together a bunch of my old Live Journal posts from back in the day. Funnily enough, I've had this thing since I graduated high school. The last time I looked at the really old entries was sometime midway through college-- not long enough to overcome the embarassment of realizing that yes, I did in fact use ridiculous nicknames to refer to people that nobody who ever read my journal even knew. Spaz? Valky? Vampy? WTF, wee Kat?
It's always weird, though, to pick up things from that era or slightly before. My sense of humor's the same, as is my sentence structure. I remember picking up a copy of Marya Hornbacher's Wasted a couple years ago and realizing exactly how much that book's style ended up permeating my own writing. I think I read it at least a dozen times in middle school and high school. Can't read it now, though, because I remember it so vividly.
The switch to memoir was kind of out of the blue-- my friends have been telling me to take a nonfiction class all through grad school. And I liked them well enough in college, even though I could never get anything on page right. The structure seemed off, the sequencing of events didn't make sense to me.
So it was surprising to get into class and realize how natural it feels at this point. More natural than fiction for the time being. I've felt stalled with regards to my writing ever since I came to Emerson-- not wanting to send things out, not feeling like I could really get the ideas floating in my head to form legitimate pieces of literature.
Thus, I decided to write my thesis around all the themes that have been floating in my head, mostly things regarding these past few years: life post breaking up with Mike, coming out, etc. Horribly self-indulgent, I realize, but it's writing, and it gets it out of my system. Once I'm done with it, I figure, I'll be ready to go back into writing about other things, made up people and so on. So we'll see.
Anyway, I'm tired. Randomly picked up The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fischer when I was working at Borders. Figured it would be one of those brick-like books that remain on my shelf unread, but I'm on a not-buying-new-books kick, as well as a non-story/non-literature kick, so this collection of food essays seemed like a good fit. And it is. One essay she describes placing tangerine slices on a radiator for a day, then cooling them in the snow, then eating them. Another she talks about Roman vomitoriums. Another she talks about the development of cookbooks. Etc. Interesting and lovely.
Hi.
I'm going to forego catch-up chatter. Recently, I decided to write a bunch of short memoirs for my thesis. Since I have a piece due to my thesis chair this Wednesday, I jokingly told one of my friends that I'm thinking of just putting together a bunch of my old Live Journal posts from back in the day. Funnily enough, I've had this thing since I graduated high school. The last time I looked at the really old entries was sometime midway through college-- not long enough to overcome the embarassment of realizing that yes, I did in fact use ridiculous nicknames to refer to people that nobody who ever read my journal even knew. Spaz? Valky? Vampy? WTF, wee Kat?
It's always weird, though, to pick up things from that era or slightly before. My sense of humor's the same, as is my sentence structure. I remember picking up a copy of Marya Hornbacher's Wasted a couple years ago and realizing exactly how much that book's style ended up permeating my own writing. I think I read it at least a dozen times in middle school and high school. Can't read it now, though, because I remember it so vividly.
The switch to memoir was kind of out of the blue-- my friends have been telling me to take a nonfiction class all through grad school. And I liked them well enough in college, even though I could never get anything on page right. The structure seemed off, the sequencing of events didn't make sense to me.
So it was surprising to get into class and realize how natural it feels at this point. More natural than fiction for the time being. I've felt stalled with regards to my writing ever since I came to Emerson-- not wanting to send things out, not feeling like I could really get the ideas floating in my head to form legitimate pieces of literature.
Thus, I decided to write my thesis around all the themes that have been floating in my head, mostly things regarding these past few years: life post breaking up with Mike, coming out, etc. Horribly self-indulgent, I realize, but it's writing, and it gets it out of my system. Once I'm done with it, I figure, I'll be ready to go back into writing about other things, made up people and so on. So we'll see.
Anyway, I'm tired. Randomly picked up The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fischer when I was working at Borders. Figured it would be one of those brick-like books that remain on my shelf unread, but I'm on a not-buying-new-books kick, as well as a non-story/non-literature kick, so this collection of food essays seemed like a good fit. And it is. One essay she describes placing tangerine slices on a radiator for a day, then cooling them in the snow, then eating them. Another she talks about Roman vomitoriums. Another she talks about the development of cookbooks. Etc. Interesting and lovely.