Freaks on the Bus

--Things have been kind of hectic lately. It's nice. I feel like I'm always getting something done, which offsets the creeping feeling that I have so much to do. But every week this semester I put aside an hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays at around 3:45, when all my classes were done, where I just went to the dining hall by myself, grabbed a sandwich and some coffee and just read Middlemarch with the sun at my back. It's mostly empty at that time between lunch and dinner, and that has really been the only time I've been able to put aside to read by myself. After slushing through a lot of material that I'm totally apathetic about and casting out desperate feelers for some sort of direction after graduation, it's been a quiet little luxury that I've come to relish, and I finished that book today with genuine regret that the last page was upon me. First time I've felt that way in quite a while. It took me a few times to overtake the first third of the book, but it was worth the wait. One of the most profound things I've ever read. That woman was a genius. How can you be write the perspective of one person so well, which such quick, broad, dazzling insight, and then suddenly move to encompass a group, a town, a nation, the whole human race? Genius. God. I'm exhausted from this book. A tip of the hat to you, Mary Ann Evans.

--One of the things that's been keeping me busy is a sudden manic episode of exercise I'm having. I get like that once in a while, but this is far and away the best (or worst, I guess) it's ever been. I've been getting up at 6:30 willingly, even joyfully, pounding out an hour of IM sets at the pool, then turning around and burning upwards of 1,000 calories at the gym in an hour. I've yet to crash and I really feel awesome right now. It's affected my mood hugely, and it keeps the ball rolling in other areas. Hope to keep it up for a few more weeks at least.

--One of the other things is that I started to write for the Arts section of the school paper. Why? I have no idea. I'm in my last semester. Why bother to take this on now? But a friend of mine told me they needed writers around awards season because so many of the small theaters out here were releasing all those films that got nominated that no one has heard of. So I went to the meeting, anticipating I would see something niche and artsy. My first assignment was the Justin Bieber movie. I almost dropped the whole thing in that moment. But... I don't know why, but I didn't. And as trivial as this blog is, I'm genuinely grateful that I've kept it up, off and on, for the past few years, because I got to take that same kind of idiotic tone that I use here in my review, saying whatever the hell ran through my head. I wrote it at 3 AM on a Sunday morning, sent it, immediately began cringing and second-guessing myself. But it was published. And suddenly people I didn't know or didn't speak to very often were emailing me and stopping me, telling me how my review made them laugh, that I was a good writer and they never knew. I saw people I didn't know across classrooms reading my article and chuckling to themselves. My mother found it somehow - I hadn't told her - and she berated me, proud and irritated at once, asking why I had never let her read anything I'd written, why she didn't know I could write. The manager of the independent theater in town called the paper and told them he liked my review, which... I didn't even know what to say. I was just so... so grateful. I'm not saying I'm the best writer in the world. I'm not. Anyone who has read this page knows I'm not. It's just... I don't know. This is something I never would have done a year and a half ago. It's stupid. It's a small section of a college paper. But still. Writing something down and putting my name and contact information on it and having it distributed to thousands of people? I would never have put myself out there like that before. This might sound like I'm blowing this out of proportion, and I am, but I can only speak from the frame of my own experience and tell you that this is, somehow, something I've been pining for, or at least a piece of that something. I set a sort of vague mission for myself at the end of 2009, some sort of nebulous New Year's Resolution that didn't have a set end but was more a need for something different, a different attitude, something that would carry on and on and on, and I knew five months later from the way I was thinking and the way I was carrying myself that I was actually getting there, but this is just more proof that it's happening, that I'm doing it, finally. I wanted things to be different and all it took was to make it happen. I might not seem different or sound different to people who know me, but here, in the space between my ears, the space where I am always with myself, it is different. I'm sorry. I'm exhausted and incoherent right now. But, man. It's just - have you ever realized how unhappy you were before only in the light of how happy you are now?

I had more to say, but I'll just leave it. Cheers to exercise, George Eliot, and Justin Bieber, because things are good right now. The kind of feeling you want to bottle up and save.