Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Note to self: don't blog while sleep-deprived.

You remember it later, read it back and feel bad about yourself. Ugh.

Character? Or rock-hard thighs?

Well, Blog, you're officially unread. And perhaps unreadable. For as long as it's you and me, anyway, I think I'll just riff. Which is so markedly different from what I've been doing until now.

I am super sick right now which I mildly revel in because I've had to take time off work and just bum around the house. It's given me time to think and ponder some stuffz which ultimately feels overdue but nevertheless lovely. My birthday was yesterday and due to being ill and having made no important plans previously it was spent eating junk food, watching TV and hanging out with my sister and a fellow sick friend. So basically how I would likely have spent any other Monday night this year. I joke that turning twenty is essentially the quarter-life mark, like, sixty years to go. The reason I am so openly macabre is simply due to my belief that twenty-firsts are ridiculous milestones for us all to celebrate when legally and socially they mean very little these days and in this country so let's look at something close to that that has at least some significance. Nope, even written down like that I still sound crazy.

My family and friend got me beautiful gifts which was wonderful and the fact that I am turning another year older at all deserves celebration, as ever. But I doubt being a year older will feel like... anything at all, to be honest, until I've left the house for the first time in days and seen people. I think I'm becoming more of a dreamer as I head into adulthood which is strange but I spend most of my time these days idealising things and planning for far-off or unrealistic futures rather than truly living in what I have. I can't bring myself to be sorry for that though so while I am still very much nineteen-years-old and wondering what it'd be like to be twenty and still clueless, I'm happily contemplating all the novels I'm going to write and the beautiful cities I'm going to see.

People have been asking me a lot about post-grad plans and the fact that I have none doesn't seem to stop me talking a really big game. But I don't know what to do since "write" seems way too self-indulgent and insupportable so I say "social justice" and hope no one calls me on how broad and cliched that answer is. What do I do though, really? Where do I take myself, how do I live with myself, what do I 'work on' for the next decade or half-century or whatever of my life? Identify a passion- how do I do that when they're such short bursts and are so varied and I have to pick just one? Knowing that I will always choose paths rather than be forced down one or step straight onto one out of indifference or fear makes me curious to see which children's story will resemble my life. Ruby slippers? Bread crumbs? Red hood? White rabbit? I take heart in the fact that they all end happily and try not to worry about the turmoil to come in the meantime. Besides, if it's anything like last year's adventures and my childhood reading preferences, the chaos in the middle might be my favourite part.

I'm in a fair bit of pain right now, with throats and heads and things, so I don't really know how much sense I'm making. It seems absurd that I'm of a generation that works out their issues publicly- AKA on the internet- before properly dealing with them privately when for so long the assumption was that one should only do it the other way around. I'm just musing on my identity and mental health in the most public forum there is because somehow it feels safer and more anonymous than doing so in my own head, or talking about it with people I love across my own kitchen table. I worry that one day I'll regret that there are so many pieces of me scattered across cyberspace, little crevices of my memory and consciousness that I can't see in the darkness but that unknown others may uncover with flashlights and feather dusters. It seems fairly self-obsessed to assume someone would bother though, so mostly I feel fine about displaying all my neuroses here, not bothering to censor myself. I guess I hope I never have reason to regret having such low self-esteem.