Self

March 24, 2015

The Shire is Only Appealing as a Second-Semester Senior

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– Or The Branching Future and the Fear No One Warns You About –

Build me up (don’t look back)/Tear me down (don’t look back)

– Give Up On Ghosts – Computer vs. Banjo

Hello blog. I missed you.

There comes a point, I think, in everyone’s life where living in The Shire becomes something that looks attractive, rather than mind-numbingly boring. That’s how I feel now – like I would like to just sit in the sun, read, garden, eat food and drink tea with friends, and sleep. Nothing much changes, homes are cozy, and you can live, more or less, without responsibility.

It’s not that this is always the ideal place to live – if we’re sticking with Lord of the Rings settings, Gondor or Rohan would be much more exciting, and Mirkwood would have the party-elves, if that’s what you’re into.

(This is getting a bit off track)

My point is that things that feel familiar, feel like home, things that lack responsibility – those things are attractive when you’re standing at the edge of the graduation precipice.

Picture life like a timeline.

When you turn around and look at your past, you can see a few paths you could have taken and wonder, wistfully, at the might-have-beens.  Each nexus, where your life could’ve changed, has two or three branches, and you can imagine, with relative ease, what would have changed. You wouldn’t have met M if you’d never joined swim team; you would have never gone to Tech if you hadn’t decided to visit a second time.

Easy.

Now, you’re less than two months from Graduation. The end of schooling (for now). You’ve met a ton of new people recently, and you’re going to have to leave them soon. You’re going to have to leave all of your friends soon. Leave Blacksburg, maybe. You’ll need to find a job, but which job? what field? Will you go to grad school in one year or two? Maybe never.

You are standing at the edge of your timeline, and a hundred thousand branches stick out before you.

What if you fail this? What if you move home? What if you date him? What if they leave you? What happens if you stop texting? What happens when they stop calling? Can you do this job or that one, or will you fail out of hand?

Each branch has it’s own branch, and each one has enough what if’s to drown you if you let them.

You will break down. You will cry.

The good news is the you have support right now and you don’t need to retreat to The Shire. You can make it to Mordor, Frodo (oh god this metaphor has gone of track).

What I’m trying to say, audience that is really me, is that you weren’t told about this because the people who have gotten through it don’t remember how it is. Because they’ve survived it, gotten through to the other end, and looked back thinking ‘that wasn’t so bad.’ The mistake they make is that then, they want to tell you that it isn’t so bad. But you haven’t survived it yet.

You will, But right now, it’s not the tiniest bit of fun, imaging all of the nice what-if’s and telling yourself that they will never happen, and looking at the bad what-if’s and praying with every ounce of your shady spiritually that those never befall you. You won’t be able to think of neutral paths, paths that will be okay and will make you happy. There will be no in-betweens.

But you will make it.

You will graduate.

And things will work out…eventually.

August 7, 2014

The Summer of a Thousand Moves

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– Or I have been living out of a suitcase since May –

The last time I updated this blog it was June, and I was sitting in a hostel in Scotland while it rained, trying not to think about the rent email I’d received a couple hours earlier. My friends were planning out the weekend – we’d hammered out going to Edinburgh Castle in the morning – and I was excitedly writing about our 9 hour trip through England and Scotland.

Now, I’m sitting in my kitchen on my lunch break during work. I would be down in Blacksburg, except that the lease for my sublet ran up on July 23rd, which meant that I spent 23 days in an apartment with very little furniture.

What an adventure this summer has been so far.

I’m staring down the barrel of Senior year (again) and, unlike in high school, I am mostly terrified. I have to figure out when I’m taking the GRE, and whether or not I need to email a bunch of professors in Master’s programs. I need to figure out who will let me defer entry for a year, so I can take a break from school. Then there is applications and classes and a social life hiding somewhere in there. Oh man.

Because I have been living out of a suitcase since May, I am mostly concerned with donating the large store of clothing I have sitting around in my dresser. That led to me thinking about the books I probably wouldn’t read in the next two years, and suddenly I found myself planning to clean out my room to make things easier for when I graduate.

I really don’t like living a year in the future. I was doing so well at living less than a week ahead a month ago; even better living in the present when I was London. I feel like I’m clawing at memories of London and trying desperately to go back to June, while being hurtled towards August 20th. Work has been less than inspiring.

I always seem to end Summer on this note – ready to leave, and scared of the future. And restarting a blog that has been on life support for months.

It’s a new semester, so I suppose it’s time to start this up again. To try where I have failed before. I’m in a much better mood, a better emotional place than I have been in in a while. It’s time to tell stories again.

May 29, 2014

So Close You Can Touch It

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– Or Please Don’t Actually Touch That. It’s Historically Relevant –

This is the announcement that I am studying abroad in England. You’re welcome for the update.

I went into the British Museum today with one goal: Find the Native American Buckskin Map they have on display and…view it, I guess. I was with A and his girlfriend, L. They were looking for the Elgin Marbles and something in the African exhibit, respectively.

So, I was going to go in, not be distracted by the other displays, and….oh, is that a mummy?

The British Museum is unlike any history museum I have ever set foot in. We walked into the exhibit on ancient Greece and Rome and were staring down statues of Hadrian, the Roman emperor. Right there. No glass case or anything. I could have touched Hadrian’s face.

(I didn’t, obviously. Incidentally, Hadrian was naked in his bust, which was done in the Greek style, to portray himself as an Epic Hero – god-like.)

There is no feeling in the world quite like standing next to a marble bust of a Roman emperor…except Being In Rome, of course, and experiencing Rome’s history in it’s own country.

(I have nothing against the British Museum, but I do like to acknowledge that they took a lot of things that aren’t theirs and refuse to give them back.)

That aside leads me to my next point – the Elgin Marbles. The hall where the Elgin Marbles are held is called ‘The Parthenon,’ so named because all of the marble carvings in that hall are from the Parthenon. But before that, is the Lykia Neriod tomb. And before that is a hall of Persian stone carvings and Egyptian statues, along with the Rosetta Stone.

Let me repeat that: The Rosetta Stone. I nearly cried. I definitely stood with my mouth agape for several minutes trying to comprehend the amount of history in that one set of hallways (spoiler: I could not comprehend it).

We saw the statues from the top of the Parthenon in person. I saw those things in slideshows and now I’ve seen them in person. And I plan to see them again.

We eventually found our way to the section dedicated to North American indigenous peoples (which was a lovely exhibit), but the galleries began to close soon after. I never did see the Buckskin map.

November 5, 2013

Find My Way

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-Or … –

Note: This entry is long and makes little sense. If you read even a little, thanks. You are a champion.
Signed: E
 

You were never meant to see
All those things inside of me
Now that you’ve gone away
I’m just tryin’ to find my way…

~ Find My Way; Nine Inch Nails

I couldn’t find you a blanket or a miner’s hat, but I brought you hot chocolate.

~ El

The roar of the crowd was unreal, and for a moment there I felt like a part of it.

The reason I say for a moment” is because that moment was shattered about one song later when I realized that I really should have spent the last 17 days of October listening through my entire backlog of Nine Inch Nails that had been given to me a year prior. Granted, I didn’t have everything – not even El or D could claim that – but I was lost enough that it gave me some time to think.

Amidst the lights and the noise and the beer, I was possibly having an existential crisis. At a concert. Oh what fun.

But let’s back track, because this is a Creative Non-Fiction piece, and I do have to provide you some anchoring details so that you don’t get lost.

I suppose the relevant background information includes the following; I have anxiety and what I would call mid-range panic. Mid-range panic is a term El coined to mean “a sustained state of panic that lasts for more than a few hours.” This is an issue that, if I am honest with myself, probably started in middle school or early high school, and I am only just now getting help with.

Around October 18th, the day I went to this concert with El and D, I was undergoing a two week long self-diagnostic, because a friend of mine had pointed out that “[I] seemed sad lately,” and, though I thought I was fine, I decided it would be best if I took a look at my ‘standard fear.’ (Standard Fear is the buzzing of anxiety that always exists in the background of my life.) On the whole, I hadn’t found anything new – I had anxiety and it was being it’s standard, anxious self. In fact, for the most part, I felt comfortable in my own skin, which is not a feeling I experience very often.

For example, while driving up to Northern Virginia, I didn’t feel the usual clawing feeling in my chest, most probably because, on the tree-lined promenade that is interstate 81, I felt excitement. I was going to a concert with two of my closest friends, and we were singing duets to old, pseudo-metal songs and ghost story ballads, watching the fall-clothed mountains give way to overdeveloped XBurbia.

But, as the day wore on, I felt this strange disconnect with everything that was happening. As we walked through the new mammal exhibits at the Natural History Museum to kill time, I felt like I was walking in isolation, watching a pair of people I knew once make conversation. I felt like I had run out of things to say and, simultaneously, like what I had to say didn’t matter.

This feeling eased as we sat down for dinner at Teaism on 8th street in the Penn Quarter. The cozy basement dining room was filled to the brim with people. D, El, and I began chatting idly about our excitement and the food we had ordered. D had accidentally ordered something other than what he had intended to, so there was much trading of food between the three of us (though I didn’t share as much of mine because I had ordered a soup). We left after about half an hour (after lamenting the loss of the table next to us, who had been talking about D&D) and emerged into the distinctly warm DC air.

At this point, I had staved off full panic (regarding my disconnect) by reminding myself that I would not have been invited on this trip, yea those many months ago, if I had not been wanted on this trip.

Full disclosure: before college, I never had friends who were straight with me. I was never really reassured of friendships and such, and I would frequently get invited along on trips and to parties where I, for the most part, was not welcome. I felt this, and this has lead to an immense self-doubt and feeling that I am never going to be good enough for other people.

During the wait for the opening band (God Speed You Black Emperor, or ‘trance-industrial-lullabye’) the feeling of disconnect came back. D and El, for excellent and understandable reasons, had become much closer over the course of the semester, and spent most of the wait wrapped in their own conversation, with their own inside jokes, and I…sat in silence. I recognize now that this was not the correct way to handle things, but I felt that, if I interrupted, it would be akin to a child whining “Pay attention to me, you are supposed to be paying attention to me!!!” I made a few jokes, which fell flat as my jokes usually do, and so I resigned myself to the ‘Auxiliary Friend’ role.

It would be prudent to point out here that I did, in fact, talk to D and El, it’s just that, in my memory, everything I said was stupid and not worth remembering.

This feeling (of being-left-out-but-understanding-why, which is a tad rough) continued through what I would describe as a 45-minute outro, or the soundtrack to the end of your sad, institutionalized life. The excitement of seeing Nine Inch Nails, however, slowly crept back into us, and I pushed my discomfort to the deep, dark hole where I push most of my problems.

The lights went down again and the first few notes of Copy of A hit our ears. The roar of the crowd was unreal, and for a moment there I felt like a part of it. I sang along, begrudgingly sitting because we were in a section of we-shall-not-stand fans, and got pumped.

And then, they played 1,000,000 – a fact that, at the time, was yelled at me by D – and I lost everything. I lost the feeling of belonging in the crowd, I lost the connection with El and D, I lost hold of the one thing that was keeping me from falling to that previously mentioned deep, dark hole. Amidst the lights and the noise and the beer, I was most definitely having an existential crisis.

I eventually figured out the chorus, and sang along, which calmed me down quite a bit. I had moments of connection, like when El and I shouted the All Time Low lyrics at each other, or when we jumped up for Hand That Feeds. I felt adrenaline and excitement and joy, but I didn’t feel that usual sense of ‘yes, this is where I should be’ that I get at concerts.

The concert ended, I sat awkwardly next to a lady on the train who had clearly been hoping I would sit somewhere else, and for the rest of the weekend I felt wrong. Out of place. We drove home and it felt wrong. A Creeping Fear had seized me, and I stared it in the face.

“You are useless,” it said. “You are useless and unwanted.”

I lived with this fear for a week and a half, though I was loathed to outwardly express it. I just sat back, put a Nine Inch Nails playlist on repeat, and tried to find my lost-connection with my friends. There were lovely moments in the mix, too, like laughing into the night with El over our ‘hello-there-freaky’ attitude towards the NIN tag on Tumblr. But, towards the end of Tuesday the following week, I hit an emotional wall, and I was confused.

I hit an emotional wall because of that moment at the concert. Lights were flashing, the music was loud, NIN was amazing, and I watched my friendships (or, at least, my hold on those friendships) slip from my grasp. I was floating in a massive crowd of noise and light and I was losing my friends and I could not understand why I felt that way. I felt myself retreat into myself (frightening how easy that is for me). 

So I did something I do not usually do; I reached out, caught someone (El) by the arm and asked if I could talk to them. They told me that I mattered, and that they cared for me and I didn’t know what to do with that.

An Important Quote: ” I’ve always said that what Trent really needs is a blanky and a hot chocolate with marshmallows. He doesn’t need another hole to crawl into. I think somebody should give him one of those little hard hats with a miner’s light on it, so when he gets lost in a dark hole, he can find his way out.”

-Tori Amos on Trent Reznor

The thing is that I knew El meant what she said, I just could not process it. The knowledge that she cared, however, made me feel a bit more secure. I have the words she gave me (because that is how I think of compliments) written down in one of my notebooks, there for when I need it. I am writing this story down, too, so it is there when I need it.

This long, ridiculous blog post, is an attempt to get at the heart of that initial conversation, because I think better when I write and, honestly, I am intimidated by the idea of telling people this. Sometimes I can work through this on my own, but most of the time I can’t, and I think being open and honest about it, even if it’s just in writing, is a step towards helping me get better.

And there is no witty one-liner I can end this on, really, no silver lining except that I am getting help. I’m starting to pick up the pieces and start over.

October 7, 2013

About The Process

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-Or Visualizing the Writing Process–

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While reading through Toward A Composition Made Whole this week (it will never be finished. I will be blogging about this book until my dying day), I became enamored with the idea of visualizing my writing process. Perhaps it was because Shipka provides such an excellent example of a process map – done by a non English-y person, no less – or because it illustrated the idea that multiple things could impact your writing process, and that those things should be acknowledged, that I latched on to the idea.

So, here it is. Above is a scanned image of a hand drawn process map of my very own, tracking the vague writing process of a project I had in my Fiction class last semester. Now, to the explanations.

The project described here, a short story entitled ‘She Was,’ was one of the more difficult writing experiences I have ever put myself through. The drawing of my desk at home as the ‘production space’ was included because the idea was created there. I had been playing quite a bit of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and listening to the band Murder By Death at the time, so ghost stories and human augmentation were on the brain. I drafted a quick character study and left it up on my blog (warning: this post is an early draft and actually quite bad). Then, I forgot about it.

A month or so later, I started rearranging the character study and adding to it so that I could talk to my creative writing professor about it. He….was not impressed with my second draft. So I went back and, using his mark up, rewrote almost the entire piece in a night. Music was ever present, and tea was plentiful. The draft was finished at 4 a.m. on the due date.

The draft was read by my classmates. They critiqued it; later, I sat dow with a story that was too complicated and needed an extra 2000 words for my final portfolio, with critiques that were going to be of no help very rapidly. I put on a rap album on repeat and plowed through a fourth, and soon, a fifth draft. I rewrote that story from scratch about four different times over the course of the semester. I sat in plastic chairs and arm chairs, at desks and on the floor, and listened to rock, rap, and soundtracks over the course of 14 weeks, trying, desperately to get that story written. It makes me proud to see, visually, the conditions and places and things that helped me get through that particular project. It reminds me of how much work I put into that piece, and how much of myself is in it. It reminds me to be proud of it, even though (as I discovered today) it is riddled with typos.

Seeing a process is different than remembering it. I think it’s important to remind yourself of everything that goes into writing, and how not all of it is writing.

September 28, 2013

Why I Will Never Be a Vlogger

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– Or I Am Terrible at Video Projects –

I am a very visual writer. Description is my forte. It is easy for me to site down and visualize a scene – however, it is difficult for me to think in feasible camera shoots and scenes. 

This is incredibly frustrating, because when I am tasked with creating a video for a class, or simply for fun, I begin to picture a really awesome idea. For example, for the video I was producing in Scripting Woes, I had pictured a video in which the narrative synced up with an interesting walk around campus. But when I sat down to think about what I could feasibly shoot, I realized that I was going to have to go much simpler.

I don’t have the editing capacity, or the camera skills, or a mind for cutting a film together.

 

When I have to downsize an idea, usually the first iteration or so of that project is not…great. At least in my eyes. But there is a difference in movie making – you don’t really get drafts. Sure, we had to turn in a rough cut a week before the final was due, but, at that point, you basically have the idea down and people simply suggest what shots you need to film or music you need to get. We didn’t have time to redo the entire thing.

I get overambitious and end up with something that I feel is subpar compared to the ideas floating around in my head, because I don’t get my safety net of ‘first drafts can suck,’ and I lack the skills to a) write a decent script and b) film anything more complex than simple establishing shots/action shots. And I have to spread this video around – this subpar, simplistic, not all that great video. I know my inner critic is worse than reality, but I have to side with it in this case. I am terrified of other people seeing this – not because of the subject matter, which is pretty personal, but because I am worried about the quality as compared to everyone else’s video projects.

Clearly, a job as a story editor is not in my future.

September 16, 2013

Scripting Woes

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– Or Why I Have Never Taken To Script Writing –

Filming something is incredibly hard. Coming up with an idea and writing it out, complete with a visual component is possibly even worse.

I am a ‘visual’ writer by default – I thrive on description, which has a tendency to affect other aspects of my writing. My character development takes several drafts to get past the ‘shoddy’ phase, and my dialogue is…well, it’s getting better. So, one would think I would be an excellent script writer. I’m great with scenes! All the scenes, give ’em here.

Except not. My scenes – at least the way I envision them – are a bit….grandiose and hard to film on a handheld sort of budget. So, when preparing to shoot a short, 2 to 4 minutes film, I ran into some trouble.

Okay, a lot of trouble. I still don’t know how to shoot some of the shots I need, and I think I am probably going to need to come up with alternatives pretty quickly so that I don’t burn out/lose film quality. My storyboards were super ambitious, so I may need to face the music and re-storyboard.  I have at least four more ‘scenes’ to film on my own and then I will just have to see what I have and if it fits the mood of my script.

I am a bit overambitious, I have found, with large creative projects. Perhaps this is why I am almost never happy with my output. I simply need to ‘keep it simple’ {stupid} and relax on the ‘do all the things’ drive. But it’s so hard. I want this to be good. Really good. I’m afraid I’m going to flounder and screw something up.

Perhaps it’s time to start re-storyboarding, because the due date approches.

September 11, 2013

Writing Priorities

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– Or Yet Another Excuse for Procrastination –

I have been thinking recently about how ‘new technologies’ – computers, tablets, cell phones, etc. – have affected my writing. The conclusion I have come to is this; computers and the like have made it so much easier and so much harder to sit down and write, and the difficulty of the task is directly tied to how interested I am in what I am writing.

As an example, over the summer, I wrote a 2000+ word essay on a pair of episodes in the podcast Welcome to Night Vale (if you venture off to read that, be warned; it is long and also has Spoilers). I was not required to write this essay – I just felt like it. ‘Incoherent Babbling’ was composed in about 2 hours, possibly 3 due to locating quotes.

By contrast, in freshman year I had to write a 500 – 750 word essay on the Scientific Revolution. That particular essay took me 4 hours to write.

I’m not proud of that, but it’s a good example of how inspiration or drive affects my ability to procrastinate. In the first example, I utilized the internet in order to locate quotes and discuss the topic with a few friends of mine. By contrast, in the latter example, I spent much of those 4 hours on Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube, doing anything I could to avoid writing an essay that, frankly, bored me.

The problem lies when I am uninspired, but still need to write, like when I am working on a novel or a short story, and get distracted by videos of cats for three hours. New technologies have made it so much easier to do research for more creative pursuits, but they have also created the perfect procrastination tool. “One more Reddit post” or “Just one more video” are phrases I frequently tell myself when procrastinating, until I run out of time and have to do a rush job on whatever I am working on.

It’s a habit, and a bad one. But I am working on it.

September 4, 2013

Technology

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– Or Thinking About What Multimodal Writing Means –

We need to consider what is at stake – who and what it is we empower and discount – when we use the term [technology] to mean primarily, or worse yet, only the newest computer technologies and not light switches, typewriters, eyeglasses, handwriting, or floor tiles as well.

– Jody Shipka, Toward a Composition Made Whole

It’s hard, I think, to think about technologies in a manner more complex than the computers we’re accustomed to using. Growing up, I remember being taught about ‘new technologies,’ but somewhere along the way, that term was shortened to ‘technology.’ I distinctly remember and instance in high school when a teacher made the radical statement that a desk was technology.

“No, it’s not,” said some, “it’s just a desk.”

Our teacher said that, at one point, people didn’t have desks to write on, and that a desk would have been just as revolutionary as a computer is to us. (Thinking about it now, I would say that the very act of writing was at one point new and is, by this loose definition, a technology as well.)

I try to think about multimodal writing more complexly than just ‘digital’ or ‘audio-visual’ writing projects, but after reading the introduction to Jody Shipka’s book Toward a Composition Made Whole (and talking to Dr. Warnick, my Writing and Digital Media professor), I realized that I wasn’t. Not really. I’ve talked in the past about how writing in other genres (for I will contend that video games and movies are, in fact, genres) requires thinking more complexly about what it means to write, I have never really considered how technologies (pen and paper, computers, apps, mobile devices, desks) and environments (classrooms, the out doors, and the sights and smells and noises involved in each) affect my writing. Is it easier for me to blog on a computer, and write novels by hand? How does writing on a computer affect my sense of ‘writer’s block’? What about where I work?

These are questions I hadn’t considered before, but I believe they are essential to thinking about how you prefer to write, and what we consider multimodal. Because, as Shipka states in her exploration of the topic, multimodal writing is so much more than simply digitizing our words.

September 3, 2013

An Explanation

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– Or Why Am I Here? –

Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I had a blog called “What do I do With a BA in English,” and it was glorious. Granted, I was required to blog for the Honors program, but I legitimately enjoyed it. More recently, however, that blog is being required to be something it wasn’t supposed to be — a glorified inbox for seminar assignments. I firmly believe that blogging as an assignment sort of defeats the overall purpose of running a blog, so, here I am.

New title.

New layout.

Old tricks.

I will be using this blog to talk about writing, composition, video games, movies, and everything and anything else that catches my eye, because that is what I enjoy talking about. It is likely that I will also be relating most of it to one of my college courses this semester (Writing and Digital Media), in part because I must, but mostly because that class is exciting and new and freaking awesome.

So, welcome. I have been at this blogging thing for a while now. If you want to see a sampling, I’ve relocated my favorite posts from the old blog here. Have fun, and I’ll see you on the flip side.

 

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