|
E_Rocket
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Erick
Country: United States
Birthday: 4/2/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: Reading, writing, musical things, hanging out with the folks I love
Expertise: Telling lame jokes that I think are funny
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
5/24/2003
|
|
| Just got it OFFICIALLY confirmed early this afternoon:
Our lease went through--all the way, through each and every hoop.
So say hello to me sometime at my new apartment on Wolcott Ave, ten minutes' walk from the center of Lincoln Square and the Western el stop. That's Chicago, IL.
Not sure if I should be nervous about putting my actual adress on here, but something is stopping me. Ask me if you want it.
Hope to see you.
| | |
| Looking through my spam folder this morning. Here are the most notable and interesting blurbs written in the subject line:
heya quotes
Low mortaggee ratess
Homeowner, you have been prequalified for a decreased percentage
Re:United States Residents
Your money, oil pan
uh oh, pre aproved
:), Non-jew
decathlon snyaptic fusion inward gimmick jiffy remit bastion true riordan presbyterian ala
Your future, never-twinkling
You always compare yourself with perfectly shaped sportsmen? With Hoodia 920+ you can get the same results.
Hi, mythico-historical
Hi, narrow-ended
Your cash, One-two-three
Your health, now-big
Looks like I have a lot of responding to do! | | |
| Post-Grad Log, Day 4:
I am looking forward to the freedom of intentionality.
Hello Minneapolis, old friend and playmate! | | |
| Today--so far--I have only eaten yellow and orange food.
A bowl of Corn Pops for a slightly queasy breakfast.
Both Macaroni and cheese and a banana for lunch.
Actually I had a chocolate-covered, cream-filled donut in class today that was definitely not yellow, courtesy of K. Odelius. If it had been yellow, it probably would not have been a very good donut.
So, revising myself here, all the food I have both eaten and provided for myself today has been yellow or orange.
I am anxious to see if dinner will fall in line with today's color schema.
EDIT:
So, for dinner I had something that could be described as colorless, maybe a pinkish-gray.
I had a brat.
Clearly not yellow.
Clearly the opposite of yellow.
I enjoyed this brat a lot, but I often don't like them. I hate first biting into a brat: it's like they pop--know what I mean? A brat is basically a big plastic tube of fat that melts into a gray goo when you heat it, so when you pierce the tight plastic coating of a hot brat with your teeth the fat bursts out with a ripping pop into your mouth, or maybe onto your shirt or a nearby friend. Gross.
A banana would not do that to anyone, despite its similar tubular nature. None of my yellow meals today gave me such trouble. Yellow seems to be a far kinder color for food, visually and behaviorally.
| | |
| This past weekend I drove (er, rode) up to Grand Rapids with three other great people to spend three days at Calvin College for their bi-annual Festival of Faith and Writing. Calvin College, where I had never before visited, was nice--it reminded me, you Minnesotans, of Bethel University: campus outside the city (though this campus was not too far out), green rolling hills, clean brick architecture. A peaceful place to retreat for a few days, get away from the city, yet maybe a little too peaceful (for me) to stay a four-year term.
Lately I have been thinking much about what it means to commit myself to a life of writing. There are dozens of elements to this puzzle, lots to sort out. I feel as if, facing graduation and a degree in creative writing, I am left with the pending decision not of a career path or a job, but of a lifestyle and, even, of a calling. These are the days when I will be deciding whether or not to try and do what damage I can to the world and myself with my writing, deciding what that damage might look like, and deciding how I'd like to fund that damage.
This all seems huge and dangerous to me. In keep with the damage language, I feel I could end up traveling on with the lukewarm, on-payment adrenaline of a mercenary, or the confident, God-given ferocity of a holy conqueror. Or I'll be the soldier who faked mental illness to get out of his required service. Or whatever.
That was, perhaps, much too dramatic. But I am feeling the drama right now. Writing is difficult sometimes--or often, or nearly always--because, among many other reasons, it pulls you away from people. No matter how introverted you are, at some point you will not want to be alone some Tuesday night with your computer and a bag of dried fruit. But to write I need to be alone. This is the dilemma, in the words of a speaker I saw this weekend: If I do write, I face isolation and loneliness; if I don't write, I face my own self-hatred. Both are heavy loads, but the later is a harder one to shoulder. There is drama involved here. Especially if I decide to juggle these loads for a good long while.
"Writing" seems to always come packaged with an air of ridiculousness because of the degree of seriousness with which those who do it ascribe to it, the holiness they claim for the act. And heck, I believe a lot of that, I think I really do--but, as with religion, you can brainlessly pursue that which is powerful without ever realizing that you have no idea what you're doing, no clue that you are only producing tepid piles of groaning mediocrity. If writing is an art, and it is, then I have no desire to pursue anything less than excellence as I work with it: I will not be satisfied with less than that which is of worth. Yet that does not eliminate the fear that I will be 'that guy' producing weepy schoolboy drivel his whole life without realizing it.
At the conference this weekend I could not help but look, oftentimes, at the crowds of attendees with what was surely a questioning, skeptical leer bordering on arrogance. Me and my three companions were among a small group of college-age conference-goers; most filling the lecture halls were thirty-somethings, forty-somethings, and beyond. There was a lot of fading hair. It is fine, of course, for those older than myself to be interested in writing, but looking at so many middle-aged people who were at Calvin this weekend probably because they each claim to be "a writer" was depressing in the sense that most of the people in that room, I imagine, were not producing work of real depth or interest. If they were, wouldn't they be the ones giving the lectures?
Despite the innaccuracies and hubris in looking at the conference in such a way, the main point remains: I am scared that I will decide to pursue a writing life with the piece of existence I've been given only to wake up some Tuesday morning in my fifties at yet another writing conference, realizing that I haven't done anything worth mentioning.
When I decided that I did not want to spend this coming summer in Alaska, I found myself in what seemed to be a moment of deep clarity: I felt the joy of arriving at the right place, the excitement of new possibilites and adventures. I also felt a healthy rush of enthusiasm to pursue grad school, helped along by a mentor's unsolicited encouragement. This was to be my adventure! Not the ragged mountains of Alaska, but graduate school!
Maybe, but I am less sure than I was then. I feel as if I have had writer's block--or, for my current writing project, poet's block--since about a week after spring break. I feel this stuff in me, I feel the ideas that get me excited...but I cannot figure out how to get them out. Frustrating and beyond. Immobilizing. It feels like I am eternally waiting to sober up.
There are comforts. There is Yo La Tengo peacefully coming at me as I type this. There is the epic Animal Collective song "The Purple Bottle," which is the most breathtaking, excting bit of music I've heard in a long while. It makes me dance in our kitchen. There is, for those who know my study habits, the Nook.
When something I'm writing comes together, really comes together--even if I can only point to a single line of a given project that has really done so--it's a great feeling. It makes me want to go run around the block or go dance some more in the kitchen: that feeling that you've created something of worth, something that is good, that you're doing something right.
The fact that I found the writing of this to be excising and nearly necessary for my mental digestion of recent thoughts should probably tell me something here. | | |
|
