Friday, October 27, 2006

To rock around

My computer crashed. Well, more accurately, I crashed my computer. It's a pisser. Not because I can't get it working now (I'm using it right now, yea!), but rather because I lost a year and a half worth of journals that I kept for myself, and because I lost all the fragments of stories I was (at one point or another) working on. I have all the full stories saved on the internet in case of incident, but not the fragments. It's really not that bad, though. It's like starting a new character in an RPG. You don't have all the high level stats or all the cool weapons, but you know where to get them. It's a fresh start. And maybe it really is a good time to start over. That is my optimism, at least. I guess that is really how I deal with loss. I just shrug and say "better get going on going forward, than." I don't know. I'm done to one Grandparent in my family now and I've barely shed a tear for any of them. I've often wondered if there was something wrong with me because I wasn't that sad at their death, but then I realized that that is just how I deal with it. Time to move on, forget about the past. Maybe that means that there really is something wrong with me, but at the same time I think that it is better than most people deal with death. When I die, and hopefully that won't be for a very, very long time, but when I do die I don't want everyone all sad and unable to move on. Life moves quick, even if your someone like me that spends most of their time by themselves reading and pondering the nature of the world, and its better to get going forward than to lament the people that have come before you and live in that sad state of knowing that they are gone forever. They are gone, they aren't coming back. It's sad, and it can be lonely, but you have to press forward, you have to make due with what is left because that is really, really all there is.

So me loosing some documents on my computer doesn't really compare to the loss of life. I know that. But I think the comparison is there. People who can't stand loss can't stand loss. It doesn't really matter what it is, all that matters is how they deal with the loss. I don't know, its a strange cycle, the circle of life, as it were. Its something we all have to deal with more than we would probably like in our lives. I'm just trying to put mine in perspective.

I did almost nothing today. I didn't read, I didn't write. I played some video games, I watched some DVD's, I slept. It was such an unproductive day that I felt that I had to have worked at it to make it so unproductive. Laziness is an art form.

I need to write a story for my class my Monday. I have the weekend to work on it, but I have some other homework to work on as well. More so now that I've lost my documents. I think I will write a spooky Halloween story. We were talking in my creative writing class about what the point of being a writer was. The prof was saying that if you didn't love it, you just couldn't do it. But he also said that if he hadn't gotten a book published when he did he probably would have given up too. So its a lot of luck, there is skill, there is talent. But a lot of luck. Before I was always trying to write things that proved I had the talent, that with a little honing in on my skills and a little bit of luck I was going to be a great. But thinking about what he was saying, and thinking about my own desire to write, and thinking about everything that makes me want to think of myself as a writer I realized that I am just going to write things that I enjoy writing. I hate going back, I hate revision. I think that is why I won't ever be able to be a great writer. I love just going with whatever I said the first time and whatever poor word choice and gramatical error that entails. Really, my brain works fast, and I can't ever hope to write fast enough to keep up with it. A great story idea will become old news after a day or two. Even if I wrote non-stop I would never keep up with everything that is going on in my head. So I think that is why I really hate revision, and that is why I just want to have fun with my writing, which is why I want to write a Halloween story. I came up with the idea this afternoon and didn't get around to writing it but I think that I will write it tomorrow and then just be done with it, although I would have to revise it for the sake of a grade in that class, I think I could have some fun revising something that didn't really mean a whole lot more to me than a few hours of typing. I don't know if any of this is really making sense to anyone else, I just realized. I should probably move onto the next topic.

I think a lot about our world and how it would be if I was someone (or I met someone) that grew up in the 18th century in the pre-U.S. and how anyone from them would relate to our world. Microwaves, TVs, Refrigerators, Computers, the internet? Those things would seem completely alien. But then I think, well, they are simple enough in concept and conceptualization, they are things that are made to interface well with users. You give someone a few months to get used to the "dialect" that we use now a days and give them a few crash courses and they would get used to our technology with no problem. That is a comforting thought to me, I don't know why. I think it is because I sometimes worry that humans are moving further and further away from their roots and that we are living in a society that no one in any other time could ever dream of living in and then I think, well, yeah, they may not be able to dream of living in it because they don't have the reference points, but once they were giving those reference points they could assimilate pretty easily. It just makes me feel more connected to the past maybe, I don't know. Anyway, I like the idea.

Enough rambling for one night, I will try to be more on the ball and update this once/twice a week as I was trying to do earlier. But don't hold me to that.