A good day
Let's hear it for minor, but resonant, victories. Today I had a satisfying day at work, managed to free the stuck seatpost on my bike, rode several miles in the dark and the rain without peril, and confirmed the latest batch of homebrew is indeed living and in the midst of becoming alcohol. And, also, I'm using my blog after a week of writer's block.
So, yeah, my blog. While a good chunk of my raison d'etre is based around rejecting the navel-gazing of my peers and being a normal man as much as possible, here is why I am doing this (not as though you necessarily care, but, hey). I have had aspirations of making Writing as being something equivalent to doing music - not something that I would ever think of being a real vocation, but as something that provides satisfaction and entertainment, and allows me to more deeply process life. My history as a writer, however, has consisted of a handful of interesting ideas that turned into unfinished short stories, along with some utilitarian record reviews and other such stuff. The one victory in the writing department has been the journal I kept when I was 20. It was kind of a magical, horrible time for me; after a couple of years studying and struggling with Japanese in college, I realized that it was more or less now or never, and signed up for a year of study abroad at an undistinguished university in suburban Osaka. Since the school itself quickly proved itself to be a bad joke and my grades only counted as a pass or fail, I found myself with lots of free time. While most of my American and European comrades saw this as the perfect opportunity to put a down payment on that cirrhotic liver they needed to go with their business degrees, I instead spent a lot of time attempting to do Japanese things while not pretending to not be an American. Long story short, that's not the easiest thing to do, and so I spent a good chunk of my time documenting my foibles and various stages of resultant mental decline in a journal that ended up being well over a hundred pages by the time my shattered ego was flown back to the states.
So what made that my golden period for inspiration? Well, I've come to realize how important those nine months were, for supplying me with a decent arsenal of small talk - even though I can barely read or speak Japanese anymore, pretty much every month I find myself talking about it in some form or another. And yes, living in another country is not something which most people have had the opportunity to do, but it's not really the Japan aspect of the journal which makes it interesting, it's the way I thought about things. Now, a decade since I've been there, I still think about things, but often I don't talk about them (and I sure don't bother writing about them). Why is that? Is it the same impulse that makes me shrug shoulders when people ask me what's new? Of course there are things that are new. They might not be as obviously exciting or glamorous as the things that I have deemed worth writing about, but they're still important and still relevant. I think there is an impulse, fed by reading too many LiveJournals, or maybe just by feeling more mature and less like you have something to prove, to not make a big deal over things that are going on in your life. While I will eat this laptop before I post any pictures of myself staring sulkily up into a camera or posting any intimate details, I think there can be a happy medium, and, hopefully having a theoretical audience will motivate me to keep this up.
I'm a hell of a lot happier with myself now than I was when I was twenty, and I'd rather not have the twenty-year-old me be my legacy. Okay?
So, yeah, my blog. While a good chunk of my raison d'etre is based around rejecting the navel-gazing of my peers and being a normal man as much as possible, here is why I am doing this (not as though you necessarily care, but, hey). I have had aspirations of making Writing as being something equivalent to doing music - not something that I would ever think of being a real vocation, but as something that provides satisfaction and entertainment, and allows me to more deeply process life. My history as a writer, however, has consisted of a handful of interesting ideas that turned into unfinished short stories, along with some utilitarian record reviews and other such stuff. The one victory in the writing department has been the journal I kept when I was 20. It was kind of a magical, horrible time for me; after a couple of years studying and struggling with Japanese in college, I realized that it was more or less now or never, and signed up for a year of study abroad at an undistinguished university in suburban Osaka. Since the school itself quickly proved itself to be a bad joke and my grades only counted as a pass or fail, I found myself with lots of free time. While most of my American and European comrades saw this as the perfect opportunity to put a down payment on that cirrhotic liver they needed to go with their business degrees, I instead spent a lot of time attempting to do Japanese things while not pretending to not be an American. Long story short, that's not the easiest thing to do, and so I spent a good chunk of my time documenting my foibles and various stages of resultant mental decline in a journal that ended up being well over a hundred pages by the time my shattered ego was flown back to the states.
So what made that my golden period for inspiration? Well, I've come to realize how important those nine months were, for supplying me with a decent arsenal of small talk - even though I can barely read or speak Japanese anymore, pretty much every month I find myself talking about it in some form or another. And yes, living in another country is not something which most people have had the opportunity to do, but it's not really the Japan aspect of the journal which makes it interesting, it's the way I thought about things. Now, a decade since I've been there, I still think about things, but often I don't talk about them (and I sure don't bother writing about them). Why is that? Is it the same impulse that makes me shrug shoulders when people ask me what's new? Of course there are things that are new. They might not be as obviously exciting or glamorous as the things that I have deemed worth writing about, but they're still important and still relevant. I think there is an impulse, fed by reading too many LiveJournals, or maybe just by feeling more mature and less like you have something to prove, to not make a big deal over things that are going on in your life. While I will eat this laptop before I post any pictures of myself staring sulkily up into a camera or posting any intimate details, I think there can be a happy medium, and, hopefully having a theoretical audience will motivate me to keep this up.
I'm a hell of a lot happier with myself now than I was when I was twenty, and I'd rather not have the twenty-year-old me be my legacy. Okay?
posted by dmg at 8:19 PM
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