40 days of lent

the past several years, i've decided to observe lent, though i am not catholic. i am, though, a rather introspective and goal-oriented person, and the idea of sacrificing something for a period of time with an eye toward self-improvement is always appealing to me. so, i do lent. this year i decided i was going to give up soda, since, while i don't think i'm really "addicted" to dr. pepper, per se, i was craving it way too often.

but that didn't really feel like enough, since it wasn't like i was drinking 50oz. of pop a day. someone--it might have been meredith--suggested that i start doing something during lent that i don't normally do. i really like this idea, of adding something to my life, replacing a negative behavior with a more positive one. so, since i love writing notes to people, i set a goal to write 40 notes/letters during the 40 days of lent.

i started out really well, on pace to reach this goal. as the weeks went on though, i decided that a more realistic target was 25 notes in 40 days. it wasn't that i wasn't thinking about the goal and just let it slip away from me--i was thinking about who i could write to pretty constantly. but, you know, postage is expensive.

but it was still pretty great. i sent 13 notes through the mail, 6 were hand-delivered, 4 were substantial and meaningful facebook messages, and 2 were emails. i became obsessed with stationery during these five weeks and bought way too much of it as a result (but that just means i need to write more notes!! it's a beautiful circle!). with some of these little notes i sent out into the world, i never heard anything from the recipient, so hopefully they all got to the right place. why is it so hard to get people's addresses? mail used to be it, the only way to get information--now it's like a person's residence is a closely-guarded secret or something (obviously, good idea if you want protection from killers and stuff, but bad idea if you want to receive thoughtful mail from a friend.)

anyway, i'm excited to keep going. i love writing notes, as i've expressed before, because it's sooooooooooo much easier to say what i want to say with the written word. and it's something you can keep forever. so if you want a note from me, let me know :) i have plenty of cute things to send you!

oh hey

every day when i get to work, i open a browser and go to my blog. i open a post i've been working on, or i start a new one, intending to fill the blogosphere with my latest profound thoughts. but lately, everything i start to write seems stale, leading to a bunch of half-written, half-formed posts that i feel no enthusiasm for. does anyone really care about the music i've been listening to lately? am i bringing anything original to the table, and if not, why don't i just save all these musings for my journal (which is pretty much what ended up happening this month)? how do the bloggers do it, come up with interesting original content each day?

but i guess the answer is that i don't care too much about all that. i'm never going to be one of those huge lifestyle bloggers with my humble little blog. and if i don't feel like writing something here, i just won't. and if i do, i just will. and maybe i was in a slump, because people, it wasn't like i wasn't trying to post stuff for the past few weeks of my life.

but i also sometimes feel like maybe i'm trying to record things in too many places. does that make sense? i have my journal, which i write in pretty faithfully, and i have my blog, and i have my other notebooks, and i have my phone, and i want to take this art journaling class, which would just make one more place to record my life and my thoughts. and is it just too much?

i don't really know. i don't feel like thinking too deeply about it right now (bowling took up a lot of my concentration cells today). but, best case scenario, i'm prepping to be an awesome over-sharing mom, am i right??

resolution for the new year {2014}: build my portfolio

i've had this writer dream forever. i've tweaked it over the years, and i've dabbled here and there, but i can't get it out of my head. but the problem is that i don't really have writing samples, per se. i have blog posts and journal entries, but nothing really concrete, aside from a couple personal essays i wrote in pat madden's essay class a few years back. i have these aspirations of writing something more serious, and then it never happens.

so, this year i want to dedicate time (hopefully each day, if only for a few minutes), to writing for real. i think blogging kind of counts, especially if the posts are of the more essayistic variety (and let's face it, i should be doing more of those anyway). but i want to start to put together a portfolio, since many of my dream jobs require something like that.

por ejemplo, a couple weeks ago, joanna goddard of cup of jo posted a job opportunity working as a writer and editor for her blog, which has a pretty huge national readership. in my opinion, i could totally do something like that--write interesting and meaningful posts and build a brand. but i don't have the experience i would need to even feel comfortable applying.

that's what i want to change this year--write more, on a more consistent basis, with the intent that i will actually do something with that writing. i even bought this book to help me :)

love letters

i like to call myself a writer sometimes. mostly this is because i have been an english major for so long and have written a lot, academically, but it's also because i just...like to write. i like to write in my journal, i like to write on my blog, i like to write the family christmas letter. i like to write people notes because i feel like i can say it better on paper than i could in person.

i've noticed that i also like to write letters to the guys i like at any given time of life, the really big crushes that took over my life. i've been reading through some of my old journals, and there are several instances where i wrote letters to my crushes instead of actually saying anything. for the most part, i didn't say anything to them because i was pretty sure they didn't like me back and, therefore, it would have been incredibly embarrassing for me to confess my undying love in any fashion. sometimes i wrote the letter just as an outlet for me, to clear up my own feelings and figure out what exactly i was thinking.

But I'm starting to come to a realization: you haven't forgotten about me, and I don't think you will anytime soon, not that I'll let you, though I did try that...and it didn't feel right. But I'm pretty sure you talk to me more than you talk to almost anyone else...

i guess i need to write it all out because my feelings/relationships/prospective relationships are almost always confusing. is that me, or is it just life? i don't know.

If you had any inkling that I was feeling like this, you'd probably run in the other direction. Believe me, I wish I wasn't.

i remember, in elementary school, all through my days at cesar chavez, i loved david apana. i knew his address, i knew his phone number (549-6785), i convinced my friends to three-way call him--i loved him. one day, i wrote him a letter expressing all of my most intense grade-school emotions, and before i could talk myself out of it, i put it in the mail (because i had his address memorized, of course.). almost immediately after the postman picked up our mail, i wished i had that revealing letter back. i mean, obviously it was an awesome letter with different colored pens and probably stickers and maybe some of my mom's perfume spritzed on. but, even though we are talking about snail mail here, i was putting myself in a vulnerable position.

i needn't have worried--nothing was ever said about the letter, so i have no idea if he ever even received it. of course, nothing ever happened between me and david, either, but that was probably for the best. since then, though, i've been more careful about wo i share my love letters with.

i like the written word. it's a way to be both personal and distanced at the same time. and that comes in handy when you are a girl with a lot of feelings and not a lot of guts.

journal dilemma

i'm in the market for a new journal. about a year and a half ago, the bookstore was selling a ton of piccadilly notebooks for super cheap. i bought a ton of those in every shape and size: small, medium, and large, blank, ruled, and graph. i was pretty much in heaven when i brought all those beautiful books home. i still have two large notebooks and one small one left, but i'm down to the last ten or so pages in my last medium one, which i use for my journal. anyone who knows me knows i can't be too long without a journal--i bring it with me basically everywhere.

so, i'm shopping around. i could go with piccadilly again:

pros to piccadilly: they are like moleskine, only cheaper; i know i like them; they match my other journals. cons: they aren't the easiest to find, especially just the way i like them.
or, i've had my eye for months on these beauties from kate's paperie.

pros: RAINBOW!!; something new to try; and, let's face it, i'm a sucker for anything rainbow. that's a pretty big pro in my book. cons: a little bit pricey; something different that i'm not sure i will like.

these are the main contenders. i just looked at amazon to see their profferings, and moleskine could come in to play. but we'll see. the rainbow might win out over familiarity. i like to switch things up.

writer's block

there are days when i feel an urgency to write--to post something on my blog or fill a page in my journal. there are days when i have so many things to say and document that it seems like there isn't enough time to get it all down.

but sometimes, even when i want to write, i can't. i can't think of anything to say.

that happened to me yesterday. it was almost like i wasn't even thinking anything, or at least not anything that i felt like recording.

then, like magic, all of a sudden i had a hundred ideas. nothing groundbreaking, probably, but something--something to put out there, something to express. something to show what i'm thinking, or that i'm even thinking at all.

writer's block is the worst.

need and want

“to crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. for when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? and here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. for to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. so whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”

marilynne robinson, housekeeping

 i don't consider myself a super needy person. i've always been fine with eating lunch alone or going to the movies by myself or just hanging out at home on a friday night. maybe this is partly a result of circumstance, but it's never bothered me all that much. i'm mostly okay on my own. but sometimes, i just want to be needed, you know?
 

“having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need. ”

margaret mead

this isn't meant to invite pity; i've just been thinking about the ideas of need and want lately. i feel like showing someone you need and/or want them in your life is part of being a good friend or potentially more than a friend. if that need is eventually fulfilled, does that mean that the relationship is over? it seems to me that if you don't need or want (i think of these two terms as kind of interchangeable, but i'm still trying to decide if they are significantly different.) a person anymore, something either needs to change or to end. 

i struggle with this, because it usually seems to me that time and experience and subsequent investment in a friendship (or whatever) would just create need/want that has some kind of enduring power. but i guess that's not the case? and i'm all about moving with the cheese, so it's something i need to just deal with. but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt when you realize you are not needed or wanted anymore.

eponine deals with this same feeling: "without me, his world will go on turning."

i feel you, eponine.

a quick word

the first key to writing is to WRITE, 

not to THINK.

finding forrester

what is my problem.

this morning, i had to wake up a little early to complete a short writing assignment for my new testament class. i needed to write at least 150 words on a question about the reading we did for today. i didn't think it would take me all that long to complete, and i was right.

i wrote almost 200 words in less than ten minutes.

why is this thesis thing so stupid then?

i know that writing an opinion-based response is much different than writing a long research paper (or research-based argument, as we might say in writing 150.) but still, i can write. i can do this thing. i can write 200 words in under ten minutes, for goodness sake!