we exceed our headroom
writer's block isn't the inability to write as much as it is the crippling fear that what you will write won't be any good. my favorite poetry professor talked about the illusion of perfection in the head, the trap that keeps writers from writing. i have life block. i've been sitting here for months, inert, trying to imagine the perfect job, the pefect grad program, the perfect future pathwaiting for it, really, and resisting all suggestions of lesser, less satisfying occupations for my time, both short- and long-term; i've been goldilocks. the key is momentum. i know the secret to beating writer's block is to write, to write nonsense or drivel, whatever comes out. i greatly prefer the illusion of perfection in my head.
basically my dad took me out for breakfast this morning, and when he can pin me down for five minutes at a time, this is where all conversations between us tend: what am i going to do with my life? to be fair, he isn't really demanding i come up with a fifty-year plan; he's insisting that i get off my ass and do something while doing his ineffectual but well-intentioned best to help me find my way. so i played the part of goldilocks over eggs at jack's diner on three hours of sleep this morning. at home i napped through the early afternoon, then tried out the 5:30 kickboxing class at the gym. the class was fantastic but i way overdid it and came home spent and shaky. i could have easily put myself to bed by nine p.m., but didn't.
and now to close with a couple of unpopular livejournal opinions: 1) i don't like to link to or click on cut tags. i love the cut tag itself as a thing of beauty and genius (and am extremely grateful for it in these trying, spoiler-fraught times of no cable television and no high-speed internet) and use them all the time myself; but when i go to read an entry that's behind a cut i almost always click on the link to the entry, not the tag itself; and when somebody else links to an entry using the cut-tag extension, i usually delete it from the URL. i need to start at the top of a document; i feel the same way about embedded links in a page. 2) i prefer to click onand be linked tothe read-comments, not the post-a-comment page. and 3) i don't like to read someone else's journal in my own journal style. i don't have my journal preferences set up that way, and, again, if somebody's link includes it, i change the URL. it feels weird to see the contents of another journal in the skin of mine. it's like an out-of-body experience, like coming home and finding a stranger living in my house.
basically my dad took me out for breakfast this morning, and when he can pin me down for five minutes at a time, this is where all conversations between us tend: what am i going to do with my life? to be fair, he isn't really demanding i come up with a fifty-year plan; he's insisting that i get off my ass and do something while doing his ineffectual but well-intentioned best to help me find my way. so i played the part of goldilocks over eggs at jack's diner on three hours of sleep this morning. at home i napped through the early afternoon, then tried out the 5:30 kickboxing class at the gym. the class was fantastic but i way overdid it and came home spent and shaky. i could have easily put myself to bed by nine p.m., but didn't.
and now to close with a couple of unpopular livejournal opinions: 1) i don't like to link to or click on cut tags. i love the cut tag itself as a thing of beauty and genius (and am extremely grateful for it in these trying, spoiler-fraught times of no cable television and no high-speed internet) and use them all the time myself; but when i go to read an entry that's behind a cut i almost always click on the link to the entry, not the tag itself; and when somebody else links to an entry using the cut-tag extension, i usually delete it from the URL. i need to start at the top of a document; i feel the same way about embedded links in a page. 2) i prefer to click onand be linked tothe read-comments, not the post-a-comment page. and 3) i don't like to read someone else's journal in my own journal style. i don't have my journal preferences set up that way, and, again, if somebody's link includes it, i change the URL. it feels weird to see the contents of another journal in the skin of mine. it's like an out-of-body experience, like coming home and finding a stranger living in my house.