Up at my parents' house for a couple of days, here to vote and get my gun license!
I booted up the computer in the living room just now, then looked across the couch to see four pairs of kitten eyes squinting back at me. It's going to be a lot quieter/saner here tomorrow, after they've been sent to their new home.
But as for this night... Wow. Filed through a bunch of old papers in my bedroom tonight. Some of these things I can understand, but why do I keep all of this stuff? What a packrat I am.
I went through one small stash that had some pretty interesting stuff in it, but then opened another box and lost my trail. The box was mostly high school school-related stuff -- band practice schedules and sheet music, graduation information, and tons and tons of research related to the junior project. Is that project a universal undertaking, I wonder, or limited only to various schools? What a nightmare, though. I wonder why I kept all of it. The band stuff I understand keeping. That stuff's cool. And it has all kinds of notes my best friend and I wrote to each other.
But as for the more interesting stash...
There was a little bit of crazy fandom stuff -- a page and a half of zany MMX/RPG crossover madness, some Tactics Ogre character growth statistics. The incomplete character sheet for a lawful evil darkblood rogue who clearly never got as far as the first level of the simplest dungeon. AAAND some lame-ass teenage angst. Naturally. There was a notebook whose first third was nothing but Trigonometry work (with the occasional song title or line of lyric dashed off in the margin) -- but then there were some ten or fifteen or twenty pages of letters intended to be sent to the man for whom I was pining -- and oh! I should be glad they stayed put. What a godawful dreadful bunch of drivel. No wonder he never returned my affections. I'd never wish to reread that which DID make it to him. The last bit of that notebook, whereupon it seemed I'd abandoned the idea of delivering it, was filled fitfully with AP Biology fun and other quasi-academic fancy.. too often interrupted by intermittent pages of the complete lyrics of pathetic songs (thank GOD there were only two that I had written!), and too much prose of my own. Maybe I was typical after all.
it's 1:30 a.m. i lie on my back in a mass of cold blankets and try to harness my rampant, yet ever slow-paced thoughts, but the correct words seem to slip from my grasp each time i can reach them. (....) my inert heater, set below the 40-degree level, clicks idly; miniature gunshots firing futilely at the icy wind that howls on the other side of my window. (...And so on, unbearably, for the rest of the page.)
Ugh. How presumptuous. I should never be allowed to write again.
But the most interesting are those rare pieces of earnest self-exploration. I found a pair of pages, numbered 2 and 3, both dated 9-12-02, clearly a study and yet clearly not at all school related. I wonder how many pages complete the set. I especially wonder what the first page held..
2
Now what? Essay. I try to write, but all that comes out is a skeletal assortment of informal, disjointed thoughts, far from suitable for an essay.
3
I am getting nowhere! Can I tear away this sheep costume? But I am afraid of revealing the ugliness, the monster, concealed within. (However, I do think wolves are beautiful.) That moon is mine, that tawny scimitar-blade crescent illuminating night's felt backdrop, and this howl, this bitter cry of defeat, cannot stay muffled inside much longer. With nothing worthy to say, though, I am afraid to even speak at all. And this is the closest I can come to a cry for help.
What am I doing? This isn't an essay - Am I even trying? Can I? What? Who? Why? Is this my true train of thought? No one else has this difficulty; what is my problem?
Seriously. I need to have my creative license revoked. It makes me sound so BLOODY presumptuous. So much for earnestness. (But that word does make me wish earnesty was a word. It sounds.. somewhat better.) Apart from the abominable style of it, I guess I'm grateful that I left myself something of a pawprint, if I should be so ridiculous as to call it as such.
Heh. And I thought I was going to pass the night playing Pokemon. But I couldn't find Red, and I sure as heck wasn't going to play Blue..
I could go outside for a bit, but I think I hear someone howling out there already.