Thoughts on a Tuesday Eveing

I haven't written for awhile, not necessarily because I don't have anything to say.  Of course I have things to say.  Don't you know me?  I always have things to say, long involved stories often about nothing.  The problem is right now I have too much to say.  I can't even get a handle on my emotions.

I want to write about my thoughts on serving a mission (29 days.  Twenty. Nine. Days.)  but being aware of the depth and vast range of those emotions, I can't even begin to delve into them.  It's much much easier to recognize that I'm leaving, and stop there.

I'm excited mind you.  I don't want that to be a question for a minute.  I don't doubt my choice.  But humans are hardwired to fear the unknown right?  I think I wrote an essay about it way back in my AP European History Class.  And I'm adventuring into the unknown, a weird kind of structured unknown where I kind of think I know what I'm doing?  The general logistics and overall goal and all that, yeah. But the details?  No clue.  What will my companions be like?  No clue.  What's going to happen to my family, friends, and certain relationships while I'm gone?  No clue.  I mean I have trust and faith and all that, so I'm not really to ulcer level anxiety or anything but if I'm being real then yeah, there's a little bit of fear there.  (Read: TERROR)  And I could go on and on about that.  But I don't want to.  I don't want to concentrate on that.

I want to tell you about visiting my family back east, the sights we've seen, the states we've visited, my lovely and interesting relatives.  And of course the stories of finals, heavily studded with Billy BYU moments.

You know I'm a nostalgic old man right?  Papa Jim style?  Well I'm brimming with nostalgia and sentimentality, and maybe even a few fond tears and I want to talk about that.

Mostly though I want to continue the tradition I started last year, cataloguing some of the people I found in these two semesters of school.  I need to tell you about my roommates, how I'm drastically happier than I've ever been since beginning college.  But two of the most important relationships I've experienced... well I don't think I have the words for those. Here's my conundrum.

1.  These two experiences were crucial to my development and I want to do them justice.
2. I don't want to gloss over them like they didn't exist, though they turned (or may turn) out not so happily in the end.
3.  And I hate people who give mysterious allusions to an event without actually giving details.  Usually I tend to think those people just need validation from others begging to know what happened.
4. I don't want to be like that, because that's not what this is for me.  I write pretty much for me.
5.  BUT this online any joe shmoe can read.
6.  And because it's online and involves other people and is very personal, I can't really say everything I need to anyway.

So I can't NOT write about them, I can't KIND OFF write about them, and I can't COMPLETELY write about them.  I don't know.  I'm pretty sure this can be categorized as a quintessential Catch-22*

All this leads to being a little overwhelmed.  I'm tired already.  Too much to say, too little time.  But I'm going to try.  Beginning tomorrow I'll peg away at the ice block of my brain, hopefully fast enough before it melts into a mess.

Let me put it this way.

"i have come to believe that writer’s block is not so much an absence of ideas as it is a tremendously strong desire to take a nap, all. the. time.

when the desire to sleep is greater than the desire to write–to say something–that’s writer’s block.

perhaps it is that the act of writing or thinking or forming words is the very thing that overwhelms and exhausts. sometimes it’s just harder. sometimes it just costs more.

All this thinking and pondering and remembering crap has worn me right out.  So in light of that, I'm going to bed.  Sweet dreams.  I'll see ya tomorrow.

* I hated that book.  Call me an uncultured unappreciative neanderthal**.  I don't care.  Really, go ahead, do it.

**Irony: needing to look up how to spell "neanderthal"

Words

"Oh, winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the seasons of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover,
Blossom by blossom the spring begins."

Algernon Charles Swinburne

"'I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished.  'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.'  I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.'"

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald, you have my heart.

Weekend Words (Oh, Hello Again)

Let us go then, you and I, 

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

The streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent 

To lead you to an overwhelming question...

Oh do not ask, "what is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

"Prufrock" by T.S. Elliot

Weekend Words (It's Been Awhile)

The light comes gradually, much like the rising of the sun.  

You can discern the increase of light on the horizon but never all at once.  ...  

Sometimes receiving inspiration is like a foggy day.  

There's enough light that you can tell it's not darkness anymore.  

It's not night.  

But it's not brilliantly illuminated.  

You can see just enough to take a few steps ahead into the cloudiness.  ... 

There's enough to take just a few steps.

And then the light continues ... just far enough to press forward.

David A Bednar

Full video here

This inspiration, this light, that comes so gradually isn't only related to spiritual matters in the stereotype of things spiritual.  It's also related to taking a few more steps when I run.  

It's a few more minutes productively studying.  

It's the slow replacement of apathy with passion.  

It's a little more peace with myself - the way I look.  

It's a little bit better lesson plan.  

It's a few more confused minutes as I try to understand questions that seem to have no clear cut answers - but at least I'm looking, at least I'm thinking, at least I'm trying.  

And it's a few more pieces of understanding, of becoming, creating, developing. 

Sometimes it's not getting lost a second time on the way to work.  

And sometimes it's getting lost even worse than two weeks before, only this time having the courage to ask for help sooner.  

All I'm saying is I think there's hope that someday the willpower will come.  Someday I won't even need willpower because it will be second nature.  Someday the confidence will replace the fears and insecurities.  And maybe that someday is today.  Just a little.  Just a degree.  But today.

Weekend Words

"It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls' bodies ease from on e place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc.  I'd noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance." - John Green


And one more John Green Quote.  Seriously, read the whole thing.  I'll even do lots of random line breaks to keep your attention.  (Admit it, you skim when it's longer than six or seven consecutive lines.  CONSECUTIVE!  I mean honestly, who's attention span is that long?)

"Maybe it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open.  Like, each starts out as a watertight vessel.  And these things happen - these people leave us, or don't love us , or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another.  And the vessel starts to crack open in places.  And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable.

But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart.  And it's only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs.

When did we see each other face-to-face?  Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours.  Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside.  BUt one the vessel cracks, the light can get in.  The light can get out."