A little boat in a storm.

Real life seems to be overwhelming me at the moment. I’m like a wee boat in a storm out on the ocean. The waves surge around me, wild and menacing, and there is no land in sight. As soon as I sail over one wave, another one comes at me. I just have to hold on and hope that I don’t sink. I am feeling a bit frayed. Perhaps there is a leak somewhere. All I want to do is rest in the safe harbour of my imagination and write about other people’s dramas, not that there are any dramas in my life. It just alternates between fiction and reality, which mostly revolves around studying, and studying is so boring.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but right now, I actually enjoy my early mornings when I get up before dawn just to type about a thousand words of fiction. Sure, bed is nice, but I feel bad if I don’t get my writing done. It’s an obsession. I just have to do it. Essay writing doesn’t count. I wouldn’t read an essay for enjoyment and so I can’t write one. Most of the good essays that I write are based on luck.

Good intentions amount to nothing.

You know, I had every intention of reading my history textbooks and going over my notes today. Knowing me, it didn’t happen. I was too busy reading and replying to my reviews (that was during late morning and early afternoon), and then once again, I’m stuck to the computer screen. It’s just that the internet is so interesting, and I have so many things I can do online, compared with the fairly limited amount of activities I can do offline. But I will do what I’m meant to do tomorrow (who are you kidding, Tel?).

I launched my new story yesterday. These days, my life seems to revolve around my fanfiction and my online social life. My parents keep on telling me that I need to go out more, but real people seem so mundane. I hardly ever find anyone who can talk about the weird things which I’m interested in. My best friend is all the way over in the North Island, so I can’t really talk to her, except through instant messaging. Honestly, the phone bills cost more than if I want to call somewhere far away like Alaska.

There’s this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I should concentrate on my studies, but where is the fun in that? All right, studying gets you money –my scholarships tell me that much– but it’s so boring. All you do is sit there and stare at the page and hope that your sponge-like brain can absorb something and retain it. Let’s face it, most water goes out of the sponge after you take it out of the water. At least my exam marks from last semester weren’t too bad. I didn’t fail anything, so I’m slightly relieved.

All right, I’m just rambling and being boring here, and I haven’t even written in my journal. I’ll go off and do that now. Oh, and I’m feeling a bit hungry. Maybe it’s time to rob the pantry.

A Random Post

Well, it’s the last day of lectures and I have a test this afternoon. I truly don’t have anything inspiring to write; I just want to type something, and see words appearing on a screen. Weird, huh? Maybe that’s part of being a writer. I just love the look of words as they appear on the screen. It gives me a sense of achievement, and typing has a music and rhythm all of its own. Mind you, handwriting is cool as well because I feel like I’m connecting with some higher being, even if it’s just my brain. (Not that my brain is a higher being or anything. It hardly ever functions on a continual basis.) And handwriting is so old-fashioned. I just love it. People have been doing it for years.

It’s just like when I go to mass, I don’t think about the prayers or the liturgy or that sort of thing. I think about the fact that this ritual has occurred Sunday after Sunday for about two thousand years, and I’m doing more or less the same thing as what my favourite historical figure, Balian of Ibelin, did back in 1187 when he took time off his mission to take part in mass because it was the feast day of a saint or something. It’s probably partly his fault that the Battle of Hattin happened, because if he hadn’t been late, he might have been able to stop Gerard de Ridefort’s suicidal attack on the much larger Muslim delegation, but it’s still exciting to feel this link to one of the people which I admire very much. Anyway, it really seems like it’s God’s will that Balian survived but the Kingdom of Jerusalem didn’t.

I go from having nothing to write to writing about writing and then writing about religion, and then history. The mind is a wondrous thing (now I shall change topics suddenly again and talk about psychology. Am I even able to stay on topic?). It moves so quickly, and you don’t really notice the changes until you actually look back and then think ‘where did that come from?’. I guess it really contributes to the randomness of humans. We think about such a lot, and we don’t do half of what we think, mostly. Personally, I’m just not motivated. I mean, I promise myself I will be a good student and study, and then I end up getting addicted to the computer and totally neglecting the academic life until a week or two before exams. That’s fate, or just an odd coincidence.

So to close off today’s totally random post, I’ll just quote Ned Kelly, my favourite outlaw. “Such is life.” (Not sure where that came from or why it’s relevant but there you go. It’s a random post.)

All under control…or so I thought

You know those days when you wake up, and you think you know exactly what you’re going to do with your day, and everything that’s going to happen, and it doesn’t end up that way? Well, that was my day. I’d planned to study those subjects for which I’d missed classes, and maybe read a bit. At first it was all right. I checked my email, I studied linguistics for one hour and absorbed the needed information. I then spent the rest of the afternoon reading P.S. I Love You, which is a very sad but sweet book by the way. So far, so good. However, what I did not count on was Indiana Jones being on at seven-thirty, and I watched that until ten. My mood for studying was broken, so I looked over my notes for speech anatomy for about ten minutes, and then went online, because I was so very bored. And thus, I’m here now, typing about my not-so-spectacular day.

It really goes to show that no matter how well you plan, there’s always something there to thwart your plans. And it’s the same with writing. I can plan my stories all I want, but when it comes to writing it down, the characters decide that they don’t like what I’ve planned, and at their whim, I’m off on a tangent. So far, I’ve found that it’s best just to go along with the characters, and see what they come up with. Some days, they want a break, and that’s those are the hardest days, because I have to be the one who pushes the plot along, and it sounds a bit forced, even tedious. The main thing is to keep writing though. After a while my muses and characters take pity on me, and they take over the story again.