my brilliant future

it's like i spend all my time musing on things past, examining my life in retrospect. it makes me sound old. but it is funny how things turn out.
 
i am really disappointed with my performance this past year. everyone's like, you did this amazing thing! you went to sarah lawrence! you did well in your classes, you interned, you didn't drop out (not that that's always bad). what's the old saying, 50% of life or success is just showing up? or was it 90%? maybe 90% is sweat, and 10% is genius, i'm mixing up my proverbs. anyway, yes, i went. but physically existing 2,000 miles away is one thing. feeling like i'm getting the maximum out of my classes, doing all the reading and then some, delving into my conference work because it's interesting and fun, that's something else. and i don't know that i did that. this is an insanely precious period in my life - my time at sarah lawrence is quite limited, and i feel tremendous pressure to act accordingly, to squeeze every drop out of it. i'm already 1/4 done, 1/3 if studying abroad works out (oh please, let it work out). i'm actually really scared i won't get to go abroad, because so much of my life has worked out so well, through luck or by accident, very little of it by the sweat of my brow. i'm due for an ass-kicking.
 
but it's easy to fool people, for the sake of grades or whatever. and that's what sarah lawrence was about, faking. i hate catcher in the rye, but holden was right about "phonies", and now it's my life. anyway, lord knows it was easy to fool 'em in high school. walk into class, toss around some big words, write a neat essay, whatever, you're the star of the class. woohoo. it's getting harder, though. persis, for example, must think i'm dumber than i am. she didn't push me very hard. or, gasp, i am dumb and i was working at my limit and i just think i have these potential and abilities that i don't actually have. ouch.
 
i think i want to have a blog so i can have something tangible to point to: "i write on a regular basis, see?" writing is a thing i like to fight with. it's like a loved one. i can talk and complain about it all day. (i have a feeling my blog posts are going to be epic - just a thought.)
 
i spent the last year spinning my wheels. sometimes it pours out of you, and that's lucky. but usually, it doesn't. usually it's much harder work. i like to think about what kind of writing i want to do - for example, the format of a short story annoys me. there's a reason i avoid it. vignettes, yes, okay. but tamping down a story line to something small, i hate that. either it's a story large enough to be told in at least novella form, or it's crap, or it's small enough to confine to a poem. maybe i'm being too picky, maybe i've read crappy short stories. some of them come off like sketches.
 
i love essays. i think i may be an essay writer down to my bones. give me a topic and i can embellish and elaborate for days, for pages. whether it's fourth/fifth amendment rights, sept. 11, and school searches, a letter apologizing to lydia, or margaret mead e-mails, i can do formal, topic-oriented writing. okay.
 
i can't ever imagine the sort of love writers - you know, the class we commonly think of when we think "writer" - have for their characters. novelists. they have to live with their characters for so long, develop them, talk to them. i'm thinking of people like tony hillerman, who's been sticking with his characters for how long now? yes, often that comes up in genre writing - romance, mysteries, sci-fi - you end up hanging on to your characters. but even one book. the god of small things - she had to live in the oppressive house, with its secrets, just like her characters, and only she could weave the story. it's the weaving, the actual execution, that scares me. i can't imagine that sort of long-term committment to anything right now, even fictional people.
 
i think i'd like to write something like cunt: a big, wandering amalgamation on a central topic, diffused with personal anecdotes and research (though i'm not a big research fan. and i'm doomed to do it forever. whatever, one more way to follow in artie's footsteps.) i want to make connections. the more politically-oriented stuff i read, the more i want to make connections, want to peel back the veil and understand why it is as it is. i'm getting to the point where i understand what it is - how the hell you get from point a to point b, but not the why of the journey.
 
don't even get me started on poetry. suffice it to say i don't often feel like much of a writer, though it's been a primary way for me to identify myself for some time now. and blah blah blah i do love it yada yada. one of my ex-friends once told me i would write in my own blood before i stopped. he may have been right, but only if i had something to say.
 
i can hear it echoing now: "you don't have to have it all figured out by now." no, i respond, but i want to.

what have i done?

i've created a blog. i've finally given in and joined the rest of you. so there.
 
this should cement my status as an attention whore. that's what blogs are, another way for people to feel important and whine and have other whiny, self-important people pay attention to them, and yes i'm fully aware that i'm participating and that this sentence is pretty pretentious and stupid. the sarahlawrence freaks are rubbing off on me. or exploiting what was already there. yikes.
 
my blog title comes from one of my favorite quotes*: "life is not about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself." i fully believe this is true. i am a huge fan of quotations - i can't say it better than they did, so i may as well just quote the source.
 
problems:
i haven't called America Coming Together. thus, i haven't applied for the job. thus, i won't have extra money and a cool, street-cred resume stuffer come fall. damnit.
 
adam "the turnip" is blog-stalking my sister. (seriously, go read her comments!! damn, adam, i know she's wonderful - i've been around her entire life - but at least blogstalk someone you've met. like me.)
 
my blog will never be as cool or widely read as my sister's. oh well, i guess she gets to win some of the time.
 
i'm pretty blustery. that said, i'm going to say things on here that piss a lot of people off. in fact, if you're reading this and haven't just dredged it up off the internet, you'll probably be pissed at me at some point or another. especially emily. and i will never have a picture posted, because i'm techno-lame. and i'm the most tech-savvy in my family, how sad is that?
 
 
*all right, technically "quote" is a verb, and i should be saying "quotation", but i can adapt to the vernacular, see? in case it isn't painfully obvious, i'm a huge geek (one might call me a "lit geek", which, as Brigid and i know, is an anagram for keg tile. yep, just try and outgeek me). sometimes i'm especially geeky about grammar.