Hollow. Yea, hollow.

Air is supposedly one of the best insulators. Maybe that's why I can't feel anything. I know I'm not suppose to let me myself dwell here.  There are other places my focus might be more productively and healthily spent. I have so many things I want to do and see and accomplish, it is certainly a waste to make these feelings the locus of my attention.

But who knows, maybe suddenly everything will become wonderful. What if this is my last chance to embody my existential angst first hand? I better take it in before its gone forever..

Meh, I'll just go back to re-tooling my mind until the hollowness becomes a primer for my awesomeness.

I don't have anytime to write an actual post tonight because tomorrow I have a chemistry final that I am woefully unprepared for. But I wanted to check in and say hey and let you know that I miss you and I'm thinking about you and I'm still pretty broken and still not really sure what to do about it.

To better tomorrows.

Oh, also, a hot chick messaged me on OKCupid today.  I must have botched my reply because she read it and didn't respond, but still.
#Smallvictories.

Game on

I successfully bagged a girl's phone number today. Strangely, it wasn't an awkward experience.

I guess I should admit that it had little to do with my being smooth and almost everything to do with her being unusually interactive.  I mistook her for one of the baristas because she was the first to greet me upon my entering the coffee shop. She complimented my glasses and then proceeded to explain how she was working on a collage for a friend.  I hadn't even made eye contact.

I was there to work, so I didn't let the conversation linger, but after ordering the guilt-free-internet-access coffee that I couldn't finish, I was setting my stuff down at a perfectly suitable table when she asked me if I wouldn't much prefer the two-person love seat she was occupying?  I actually had a lot of work to get done and wasn't in a flirting mood, but I couldn't say no because, 'ballsy', right? But then she says she's not actually using the spot, but its her favorite and she wanted to me be able to enjoy it. She then proceeds to run around the shop like she works there (which she already assured me she didn't)

I'm working for about an hour and notice she's taken her stuff and is sitting off a ways working on her computer, which made me feel a bit awkward but I didn't have time to dwell on it because god-dammit my to-do list never ends.

 Finally the shop is closing and we both get up and I have a chance to make conversation, which she is adorably eager to have.  We swap background details. I comment on a scar given to her by a barbed wire fence.  I show her my 'crashed into a parked car' and 'ring stuck jumping over tennis court fence' scars.  She trumps me with a 'falling out of tree playing ballerina and catching tent-worms' scar. I don't think I've ever had small talk come so easily. I didn't even have to try to impress her.

Tedious story short, we exchanged numbers and I told her I'd invite her out to the lake tomorrow. To which she replied that tomorrow was one of the few days she didn't work 9-5 at Jiffy-Lube.

I'm not leaving myself enough time at night to put up a decent post.  I need to start doing these near the beginning of my day, while I'm still fresh.  The stuff I write at night isn't even coherent.

Blah blah blah. something vague and predictably self-important.

I really need to figure out what I'm doing with my life.  The options have been slowly dwindling.  Should I teach?  I'm not really much of a teacher.  I don't possess a lot of patience or empathy. But its something I feel I can do and not thoroughly hate. And there's job security, even if the pay is shit.  I'd have more free time. I'd get to work on my people skills.  If I teach English abroad I'd get to travel and learn new languages. Which would give me experience for getting a better paying teaching job in the States.

Should I just go for the money?  I could get my broker's licence.  I could start making a decent living and shoot for early retirement.  I'd get to enjoy a more luxurious existence.

I could go for higher education. I love being in school. I could even get something practical like an MBA and then not have to worry as much about paying for it.

I don't know. Anything would be fine. I just hate the idea of making the wrong choice.  What if I end up hating the career I decide to go into? What if I come to find that I can't stand teaching? or I start despising real estate? Or what if I grow to regret throwing away all that money for a useless degree I'll never use? I don't want to be responsible for those kinds of consequences.

I just want a clear path. Something I can enjoy rather than fret over.

Aging is a rather wearisome process. We start out with such blinding potential, and end up with what? A bleak reality we have no choice but to accept. I guess there is a choice though. There's always a choice, so long as we can bear to make it.

I have some time left.  Some choices to make.

I missed a night. woah is me.

That's right. Woah.

I was rather productive today.  I think I might be getting used to this. Except I almost forgot I have school tomorrow and I neglected to do my homework. shucks.

Tonight I walked into a bar and didn't feel nervous. I drank a beer and felt even better. I think I'm ready for attention again. Look at me! Ima rock yo world, bitch!

Coming for t space. Chop that slider into pieces.

Also, my cat has been gone for nearly 3 days now, and that family of snails still congregate where her food used to be every night.  Talk about slow..

And their guardian:

Interesting

I wonder what it's like to be interesting.  Like being different, but in a way that is attractive.

 You'd have to be lucky as fuck and then have the common sense to run with it. Or maybe there's something more discernible to it.  Either way though, you have to run with it.

 Running can be dangerous. So little control.  What if you end up running with scissors?  Ouch. Right?

But maybe not.  What if you were running with scissors and came upon a misapplied zip tie? All of a sudden you'd be brilliant. A hero even, depending on how badly applied the tie, how available alternatively sharp tools, and how time-sensitive the whole situation.. Imagine running upon beautiful damsel helplessly zip tied to the tracks of a rapidly approaching train.  Suddenly running with scissors is the best thing since sliced bread.

Seriously people, why isn't everyone running around with scissors right now? Do we literally hate distressed captives so much that we'd just let them die than disobey our fretting mothers? Gawd we're so hopeless.

Practice

Practice. this is practice. What am I practicing for? A performance. Which I guess is just a practice that counts. But if you're truly practicing, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I feel good.when I practice. I should practice more often. I so rarely practice. Practice is healthy. I will practice.

I feel like I whine a lot when I write. I don't want to do that. nobody wants to listen to whining. We sure do like whining ourselves though don't we? no? I guess its just me.  No. no I don't like to whine either, I just feel like whining right now. I'm doing everything in my power to refrain from whining, including writing about whining.

Emotions. pesky things. always exhorting us like there's something we can actually do.  I guess their alright when it comes to motivation, when a task is clearly necessary and attainable.  But when the time for action is past, emotions never seem to get the memo.  Yo, Emoto, just leggo already. That emptiness isn't going away anytime soon.  Those smells don't have those meanings anymore. Those vacant drawers, that gaping closet, this amenity-free bathroom, these bare walls; they are home now. Accept it.  What do you want me to do? redecorate? Do I look like someone with any sense of design? Look at my fucking blog for christ-sake! It's fucking default! Because I don't care!  Why do you have to care?  You never cared before! Why, now, must you decide your surroundings are so barren and uninhabitable?  What am I supposed to do about it!?!?

I don't have time for this shit. I have dreams to dream about. Look at me, writing like a champ. 5 days in a row I've manage to vomit incoherent existential angst all over the blogosphere.  I'll be famous any day now. It's only a matter of time before some big-shot publisher stumbles upon this literary masterpiece and offers me a lucrative book deal; effectively beginning my career as Hemingway. I'm just going to make my living being Ernest Hemingway, traveling and drinking and loving beautiful woman and writing about it in such a way as to spurn my entire generation a revolution of romantic malaise.

Except the only beautiful woman I've loved might actually read this. I guess I shouldn't care, right? But how am I supposed to write Hemmingway-esq romances with her sitting there comparing and contrasting the story with the reality?  And what if I decide to hate her rather than love her? What if I want to paint her ugly and vulgar and emphasize the blemishes?  She should have enough awareness to know that's not really her, right? She should be able to discern fact from fiction, to appreciate a sacrifice of accuracy for the sake of art, right?  I wouldn't.  But I'm not the reader, I'm the writer.  I get to make the rules.  I get to call the shots.  If the reader doesn't like it.  The reader can put the book down and walk away.

(Disclaimer: All characters appearing or referred to in this blog, including myself, the author, are completely fictitious. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental)

Out played

I went all in and lost. I Lost it all. 

In hindsight, it was a pretty poor bet. But the game was dragging on, I let my guard down, I got caught up in the moment. I don't know.  I wish I had set up better hedges. I wish a lot of things. I wish going for broke didn't mean ending up broken. I wish the breaking process wasn't so messy and disorienting. 

breath. I can't remember the last time I had to tell myself that. breath. god just breath. in. out. in. out.

Contemplate the universe within you

What happens when we turn science into religion? What happens when we worship what we know instead of worshiping deities that personify the magnitude of our ignorance?

For some, for the ignorant, life becomes cheap and lackadaisical. What's the point if we take the magic out of it all?  Why limit the experience of life to the tiny fraction of the universe that our mind can understand?

For others, the true curious, our passion becomes validated by the poetry of our journey.  I shouldn't judge, but I want my magic to be catalyst for progress rather than an obstacle.

I'm drunk and I'm frustrated and I feel alone and I don't want to settle but I don't know how much longer I can hold out.

It's too late

for hopes and dreams.  It's too late to change anything meaningful.

The die have been cast. Resistance is futile. We can only hold on now and witness the inevitable.

What does it matter how we perceive it? It's going to happen. Tick tick tick. Moment after moment after moment. Never ceasing, never pausing, never waiting for anything. And then and then and then and then and then and then and then and then and then and then and then

We run around possessed by ourselves like canines chasing their own tails. We cycle through the same emotions as regularly as the seasons, and yet somehow every shift of consciousness catches us unaware. Dramas we create to distract ourselves from the terribly consistent rhythm of existence.

All we really want is to be in sync. To feel alive. To resonate with the catastrophic physics we came from, without permanently joining them. Synchronized, but separate.

I don't have a choice anymore.  It's too late to decide. I must simply act and leave life and death to divinity.

I used to think myself a fool, for I could not fool myself to think of how to live.
 But now it's clear that life is queer and death is always the answer.

Day Three

Wow, this is hard. I was crazy busy today. I have so many things to do. I don't want to think about them. I also slept in, which was a bummer. But it was because I was getting laid, which kinda neutralizes the consequences.

I think I take things too seriously. I'm just not sure how else to get what I want. Then again, I don't really know what I want.  I only know what I don't want. I don't want to be dependent on anyone or anything. I don't want to get stuck. I don't want to fail.

I think that failure thing is kind of keeping me from figuring out what I really want.  I'm not really sure how to become ok with failure.  It's really not ok in any situation that matters, but if I can't get over the possibility of failing, I can't get myself into a winning position. God, I suck at this writing shit.

Tomorrow I'm going to work really hard, and then this weekend I'm going to figure  out how to stop working so much.

Day 2

I nearly forgot my new found obligation today. There must be some force out there needing me to comply with my calling because this is the second night in a row that I've returned here from the comforts of my covers. I'm going to call this force 'Frustration'. It is nature's means of reconciling who I am with who I feel I should be. It's a rather depressing evolution. Life is the eventual dying out of frustration. I guess that's not too bad. Tomorrow I'll try to do better.

Daily Post Challenge

I often like to stumble. When so engaged, I often stumble upon articles about writing. I usually read these articles because I like to fancy myself a writer, which is at best premature considering that, not only have I never been published, but I've never brought a single piece of work to fruition. Part of me would like to elaborate upon my impotence, but this is not suppose to be a rant.
What I'm getting at is a recurring piece of writing advice that has always struck me as being key: write everyday, no matter what. I've been meaning to make this a personal vendetta for an embarrassing amount of time now, but tonight I think I'll own it. It's become clear to me that my time as an individual might be very brief, and since I'm damned terrible at 'enjoying' my allotted existence, I might as well spend it like those prehistoric cavemen from the natural history museums: etching my consciousness onto a time-resistant medium.

I like to write. I fantasize about it regularly. But for years I've experienced fierce internal resistance. Some terrible combination of ineptitude and perfectionism has made the act of actually sitting down and giving form to my thoughts an excruciating experience. It's really not until this moment that I've been able to come to terms with the limitations of my talent. There's little I can do about my skill set, other than practice, of course (bleh). The pride however, can be more easily calibrated. What, after all, is more detrimental to a writer's hubris than poor work? And since my intrinsic capacity prevents me from producing any alternative, I'm guaranteed to succeed :)

Liberated by the abolition of standards, I present the following:

It took me an hour to write this much. I'm afraid to spend too much more time on a single post, let alone the first of my 'Daily Post Challenge' because I don't want to set the bar too high, lest I intimidate Future Me and sabotage this whole project. I will try to briefly touch on the source of my midnight restlessness. It's the same inspiration that last drove me to the keyboard a few months ago (that post was never published): emotional turmoil.

I am not comfortable with emotion. It doesn't mesh well with my core values or my sense of self. However, I am by no means impervious. For the last 4 or 5 months I've been navigating a rather drawn-out 'breakup'. As far as these things go, I don't feel this to be a particularly dramatic affair. It is however, my first official 'breakup'; and I'm finding it less-than-invigorating.

Aside from the loneliness, which honestly I don't find all that foreign, I think the most disorienting aspect of the separation process is the ego-blow. I never realized how vain I was until I witnessed someone with whom I had shared a not-insignificant portion of my soul enjoying their life despite my absence. Throughout the course of the relationship I had imagined myself the progressive, self-affirmed independent; calling the shots and breaking hearts. And yet here I am agonizing over unreciprocated texts and creeping on facebook. What happened?

I know it's just a phase, a temporary product of change, and maybe I'm exaggerating slightly for irony's sake; but I don't rightly know how to express the uneasiness I feel. The loss of confidence.

I'm running over two hours. At least I can thank my emotions for this post. And this project. Tomorrow Me, you're up.