On the Things that Never Change: Part II

Posted by GPC, Oct 10 2008, 09:34 PM in Miscellany

I'm really fucking sick of this love-hate relationship I have with writing. If I'm not in love with every word it doesn't work: I can't let a half-decent sentence stay on the page; and this perfection gets me nowhere. I just spent the last hour "writing" and came up with a paragraph--a very small paragraph--and I hate it.

I just want to wash my hands and be done with the entire institution. I don't want to write anymore because it only makes me miserable. I don't want to read because it gives me ideas and makes me want to write. I don't want any of it. There's nothing here except personal torture and constant torment and I really hate it. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of coming up with ideas all the time and getting excited about them, only to try to execute them and become horribly disillusioned. I wish I could do this with any sense of finality, but I know I can't. It won't be long before I'm back to jotting down ideas and desperately wanting to write something, and then it will start all over. I really don't fucking want it anymore. It's all I've wanted for years and I still don't want anything else, but I don't have the courage to take it. I'm too weak for it. I'm beaten. I can't stand it. I hate it I hate it I fucking hate it.

On those Surprisingly Moving Items

Posted by GPC, Oct 7 2008, 04:44 PM in Miscellany

Does anyone else fall in love with these? Sometimes they're perfect.

From Sam Brown's explodingdog.com

On that Familiar Emptiness

Posted by GPC, Aug 26 2008, 11:00 AM in My Attempts at Insight

My life is not being lived.

It is a series of passionless, fruitless days, weeks, and years. Nothing gets done and there is only time enough to worry and reflect on all the ways in which I have failed. I am disconnected from any hopes and dreams that I may have, and I anticipate every endeavor as lost. I honestly don't know what the point is anymore. I have a strong desire to live comfortably and travel and provide for those that I love--to give something back to them after taking so much--but I have pretty much accepted that end as impossible and will simply wait until that fantasy withers as the rest have. I only make myself more miserable looking at pictures of nice things that I will never have and wonderful places that I will never see.

I have attended college for five years and fall eight credits short of graduation, but now that I owe a ridiculous amount of money to a university that will not let me return until it is paid off, and because they are only obligated to let me in until another year or so has passed, I am pretty sure that I will not be able to return to graduate from that somewhat decent establishment. If I ever do graduate, it will be from a place that impresses no one, and my degree will just be a piece of paper.

And what will I do with said degree? At one time I wanted to teach, but such a ridiculous thing is impossible. I could spend my days working for magazines--something I've never had any interest in. I have no interests at all. I only ever wanted to write, and now I'm feeling strangely alienated from that. I feel like giving it up. Why should I torture myself to create things that nobody will see? Why nurture a facet of myself that only makes me suffer? That would stop the last heart that is still beating, and then I would be nothing, and it would be easier to give up entirely.

This sudden despair most likely stems from the lack of antidepressants in my bloodstream. I don't know how to feel about it. I feel that my eyes have been opened and I am seeing for the first time in so long that I am wasting my life. But I don't know what else to do with it. I don't belong here. I can't function in a world like this. Everything around me--everything that I see as I go about my day--just crushes whatever spirit I have left. I really don't want to be a part of it, and I have nothing to contribute to it. There are beautiful things in the world but they seem so far away, and it only...
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On the Things that Never Change

Posted by GPC, Aug 14 2008, 03:23 PM in Miscellany

I'm not exactly sure what does change. Perhaps there are subtle changes that I don't notice or that I take for granted. Perhaps the fact that I stopped taking my antidepressant could be considered a change, however the only marked difference I have experienced since then is a strange feeling of "woom woom" in my face.

I've started two new short stories since finishing the ridiculously long one a while ago. One I haven't touched in twenty-one days according to Dropbox, and then other I actually started working on today but have been thinking about for a while. I wrote around 400 words of each and then stopped. It frustrates me that I don't often have the will to finish things. ("Just write the fucking thing") I don't have a lot of faith in my old work and need to start rebuilding my arsenal, because right now I'm fairly defenseless. I wish I was more productive and more disciplined in writing. Very frequently I will go an entire week without writing a word, and that doesn't seem acceptable. At this point I really don't know what to do and am fairly open to suggestions. Perhaps there are too many other stressers in my life right now, but then that would just be an excuse, wouldn't it? One option that may work for me, despite it being somewhat expensive, is renting a writing space at The Loft. If I was obligated by my wallet to go there and spend two hours writing three times a week, I might actually get something done. I don't know. It might just end up like college: I'll pay for it and never go. So here it is: another entry in this dreadfully boring collection of entries full of expressed frustration with a supposed passion. Sometimes I wonder if this is what I should do, but then I realize that there's nothing else I would rather do with my life. Even so, it seems impossible. ("Just write!") It feels awful to be so dead.

Sometimes it's all too mundane. I'm living my life but sometimes I wonder why or for what purpose. I really don't want to write myself into an existentialist crisis but honestly it's often so difficult to find a reason to live, despite being occasionally happy. Sometimes it's hard to take happiness for happiness. My therapist told me a few weeks ago that it's nice that I'm dealing with normal life issues these days. It is nice to no longer be at the mercy of my own self-hatred (all the time, at...
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On the Weekend of June 27, 2008

Posted by GPC, Jun 29 2008, 06:27 PM in Miscellany

I'm not really sure if one titles the weekend after its Friday date or the Saturday date, but I'll go with Friday for right now, consider some events took place on Friday.

This weekend was the Twin Cities pride festival, which I didn't exactly indulge in to the same extent as last year. I went to the block party on Friday, then the Saloon after (but didn't end up doing anything because Michael got a headache and we left at about one o'clock). And now on Sunday we spent the day at Loring Park. I got hit on once or twice, which met my demands. That's really the only reason I go: to be objectified. That's why I consistently remove my shirt when I go to bars (or in this case Loring Park).

Yesterday was interesting. Michael went out of town to a friend's wedding reception and I spent the entire day at home. I spent my time online, reading, sleeping, and writing. I wish I would have spent more time writing, because I ended up at 4,273 words yesterday, which is only about the halfway point, estimating it to be the longest short story I've ever written. As usual, I hope it outshine everything I've done up to this point. It's strange. I lost faith in the project completely yesterday morning, but started writing anyway and suddenly regained it. That's never happened before (I usually just lose faith entirely and never finish it), so who knows--it might not be as catastrophic as my usual failures.

Anywho. That's all there is to say. I might get more writing done this evening, but I can't promise anything, especially not to myself.

On the Allure of the Impossible: Part III

Posted by GPC, May 30 2008, 10:07 AM in Miscellany

It is true that I have decided to attempt to write a novel over the summer, or at least make decent progress on one. I dragged Michael to a coffee shop last night and spent about forty-five minutes struggling to find a way to transition one paragraph to the next, but I finally did it and the rest of it flowed somewhat nicely, although quite slowly. I continued working on it at work this morning and am currently at a mere 750 words.

According to the dictionary, "sorcerous" is a word, but MS Word (which supplies the dictionary) underlines it in red. I used it anyway.

If I can complete this project, it will signify a huge leap forward in my writing. I start to go crazy when trying to complete 5,000 words, and to attempt 70,000 or 80,000 seems very outrageous, but I think it's necessary for me to do. The farthest I ever made it into a project was 55,000 words, and the project was rather dreadful--written very carelessly. Agonizing over every sentence, which is how I write, could very well destroy whatever sanity I possess. So, if I do manage to finish or even come close to finishing, I will be very impressed with myself.

I'm not completely sure why I suddenly decided I should write this. I guess I feel it's a necessary step. My short fiction seems perpetually stale, so perhaps it's time to try something relatively new.

Please let whatever god you pray to know that I need all the help I can get.

On the Need for Structure in Light of Aspirations

Posted by GPC, May 16 2008, 09:00 AM in Miscellany

I was covering the front desk at work a couple days ago and decided that I would make a list of things that I wanted to accomplish in the next couple years. It contains everything from graduating to writing a novel to taking a martial arts class, and is, in all honesty, a lot of things to get done. Still, years are long. I may find the time.

If my school loan is approved to cover last fall, I can return to school this fall and take one class, then take another in the spring. Then I'll be done, if everything goes according to plan. It would be nice to get this over with, as I've been teetering on the edge for quite some time. Even though I'm philosophically against it and I think that college is a psychological burden on the minds of many aspiring youths, I've already come so far, and it would be rather pointless for me to have acquired forty thousand dollars worth of debt just to walk away with only eight credits left.

Another major thing I would like to do is pay off my two remaining credit cards. Granted one is only $500, the other is $7,500, making it a considerable amount of debt, especially when I'm just ignoring it. I spent twenty minutes on the phone the other day with the latter bank, and they said that I could settle the balance for $5,200 if I could pay them now. So I'm going to look into getting a loan. Actually, I've already looked into it, I just need to fill out some forms online, which I may do today or this weekend. It wouldn't exactly lower my payments, but it would definitely lower the interest, and I'd have it paid off in four years.

Writing a novel is going to be a task, I'm sure. It would make a nice--yet torturous--summer project, after I graduate. For the moment, I know which one I am going to write, as it's the one that I can see most clearly--the one about the two gay lovers and their missing child that I tried to make into a short story and failed miserably. I know, vaguely, how I want it to go, but a lot of work remains in the area of outlining and filling those seven long chapters. I do think it has potential, though, and it seems a lot less pretentious than any previous ideas for novels that I have conjured, so I do hope that I'll find time for it.

I would also like to lose weight, start learning something like Kung Fu (don't laugh), and take a few classes on Japanese swordplay. I collect katanas, so I might as well learn to use them.
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On the Evolution of Craft (Equally Theoretical)

Posted by GPC, May 11 2008, 10:23 PM in My Attempts at Insight

I feel like it's time for me to make another jump forward. I've been suspended in motion for a long time and my writing has suffered because of it. I think that finishing "Hymn" was a good start, headed in the right direction. My work has always been one step behind me. When I was in my teens, it was enjoying its childhood; when I was in my late teens and very early twenties, it was suffering adolescence; and now that I'm slightly older, edging toward my middle twenties, it may be nearing the end of its post-adolescent pretentiousness--those insufferable college years. I'm aware that it will always be changing, much as myself, however I am happy to be approaching what might be a new stage. It's almost as if I experience a part of life, leave it, look back on it, and write about it. It excites me to think about what I might be doing in fifty years.

It's when you write something new that shatters what you've done previously--that's when you feel both hopeful and a touch forlorn.

I would very much like to work on this new story. I am anxious to see what will happen.

On the Surprising Nature of Productivity

Posted by GPC, May 7 2008, 11:28 AM in Miscellany

I called in sick this morning. I felt that my time was better allocated toward bettering myself than the vampiric company that is my employer. In the three hours that I have been up, I have filled out a loan application for the tuition that I owe and applied for about five jobs. I hope to stay this busy throughout the day. Perhaps I will even get a chance to relax a little bit and work on writing that new story, which I am indeed excited about. I also might have time to finish my third reading of Autobiography of Red for this month's book selection and then finish writing up the discussion questions.

I went to an unexpected audition last night at the modeling and talent agency with which I used to be signed. The talent scout said she was very impressed, but who knows what will happen. There are things that I cursed myself for on the way home which may cost me the opportunity. I did, however, manage to memorize the script before I went on camera, which she said she'd give us extra points for. Either way I think the pretend commercial was a little strange considering I'm more interested in modeling than acting this time around, but hopefully it all works out in the end. I'm supposed to hear back before noon today (and it's already 11:22...).

If I fail at this stage in the modeling thing, I'll probably become extremely depressed and eat everything in the fridge. I know that I had ten times the personality that the other two wenches did last night. Plus, one was all bony and funny-looking. I'm more attractive than her, even if I am a little meaty.

After we go running tonight, Michael and I are going to try to dedicate some time to projects. I hope we get the chance to design my first chapbook. That would excite me.

Anyway, that is all I have to say at the moment.

On the Dreams One Can Conjure

Posted by GPC, May 4 2008, 10:18 PM in Miscellany

The last few weeks have been ripe with thoughts.

• Suddenly, despite all my venom, I find myself vaguely interested in finishing school. Apparently, I only have two classes to go. The problem, however, lies in paying my tuition for last semester, which will not be covered by federal aid. Kind of a bitch, that. I will probably have to look into private loans and have my father co-sign, just because I have atrocious credit.
• I am sick of the various mistreatment I receive at work. I am looking forward to getting my resume together and putting it out there. I don't make enough money to be treated the way I'm being treated, and then there's the issue of sexual harrassment, which, if I can get enough documentation together, I will be suing for. I've started carrying a little red memo pad wherein I write down every instance of inappropriate conversation with my upstairs boss. I hold no respect for any of my superiors, including the VCEO, whom I once held a great deal of respect for. I have since realized she is just insane.
• The thought occurred to me that I don't look altogether hideous. I used to be a model, and I gave the acting thing a shot (which was admittedly a bad idea), but there's something about it that has been holding an interest in my mind lately. I figure if I can get my body back into the shape it was in a couple years ago, I might have a chance at being modestly paid eye candy. The money is probably my primary motivation, but it would also give me a good incentive to actually take care of myself. If I don't have a good reason to keep my body looking good, I will just let it go, even though I can't imagine being overweight. Shallow of me to say, but it's terrifying. Even though I technically am overweight right now. I have this book that says, because I'm 5'8", I should weigh between 137 and 151. I won't tell you how much I weigh, but it is considerably more than that. It's a sad thing to think about.
• I was lying in bed this morning and had a (possibly, hopefully) wonderful idea, which I cannot disclose at this time. It involves the story I have been brewing for the last week or so--whenever I mentioned the idea in that thread in the lab. The one about the suicides. I thought of an interesting way to tell the story today, and hopefully it will work out. I also have a first sentence, which is important.
• I sat down with Michael yesterday while we were at the...

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