Even though I finished college, my life as I know it is not, in fact, over. I’m enjoying not being stressed about assignments and due dates. I’m sure once I start working a job that I’m really interested in, these things will return, but for now, I’m enjoying the simplicity of my data entry job.

I ended up completing two creative projects for my final two English classes. I have a history of being underwhelmed while writing academic papers. I’m not quite sure how people can get excited about them. The week of finals, I was up till 2am at least three nights writing and revising my two projects. I had direction and purpose. I started one project fully intending to write about my experience as a first generation college student by comparing my interactions with my mother with those of Bill and his father as I saw on a roadtrip to Oklahoma. I had it planned out masterfully. I would use the conversations about cicadas to illustrate the two relationships. As I wrote it though, it turned into something completely different. It turned out to be a fairly revealing piece about my wanting to prove my intelligence to his parents. I was amazed to see it take form. As I wrote it, I needed to do some research and actually ended up needing to meet with Wyatt, Bill’s father, to solidify dialogue and learn more about him as a person and, in turn, develop him as a character. I had never taken a project so seriously.

I learned something about myself while writing it; I feel silly for not knowing things and then fail to educate myself about them. By doing that, I set constantly set myself up for feeling foolish. I realized that I am curious about things, but that I rarely satisfy that curiosity. I haven’t figured out if I’m just lazy or if I enjoy living a life of mystery. I’m sure I’m just lazy. Living a life of mystery is just another way of saying I’m allowing myself to remain uninformed. Regardless, it’s not how I want to live my life.

For the better part of the first year we dated, whenever Bill would bring anything remotely scientific, I would listen while staring blankly. Then I would tell him, “I don’t care about science. It just doesn’t interest me.” I’m not sure when, but at some point, I started becoming fascinated by his explanations of things. I envied the way he could articulate a point or reason for something. Initially, I might not be interested in biology on the cellular level, but I am fascinated by the products of the cells’ activities – the possibilities of new species and traits, or the prevalence of certain behaviors and tendencies. I’ve realized that it’s reassuring to have explanations for these things. I think there’s a recognizable comfort in not knowing things. It’s a blissful ignorance, but it pales in comparison to the excitement of discovering ways new information fits into and alters your previously conceived notions.

On a completely different note, here’s an adorable dog.

I’m going down to Oklahoma again next month to visit Bill. I’m half expecting him to buy me a puppy similar to this one for Valentine’s Day. (no I’m not) It was wonderful to have him here for Christmas. It’s impossible to express the contentment I felt having him near in a blog post. It fully deserves its own essay.

On another note, I’ve been reading A Moveable Feast by Hemingway. I wish I had read it years ago. He had such an disciplined and systematic approach to his writing. I too often allow myself to get distracted and break concentration. I think I just illustrated this by sharing a puppy picture and including a completely unrelated paragraph about Bill. Instead of ending a writing session when inspiration left him or when the piece was completed, he stopped in the middle of it – where he knew what would come next, that way he could easily return to his work the next day. It’s such an obvious solution to writer’s block, I don’t know why I had never thought of it before. Anyway, I don’t desire to be a womanizing megalomaniac like Hemingway, but I do want to be as disciplined and brilliantly succinct as he.

I obviously have a long way to go.

Yes. It’s been a while. There is plenty to discuss, I’m sure. However, I can’t really think of anything significant to write about. Well. That’s not entirely true, I can think of plenty to write about, but very little to blog about. As soon as the idea of blogging comes around, I feel obligated to write about things other people care about. And that makes sense – because nobody reads blogs that aren’t about anything. If I had to decide right here and now what my blog was about, my first answer is that it’s about me. So why should you care about me? Not really sure. If you look at my tags, I whine a lot about college, writing, and long distance relationships. Those are primarily what my life is about right now. I guess you could say my blog is about a college girl who writes about a long distance relationship?

God, that sounds like a boring blog.

Since I don’t feel like talking about college, let’s talk about writing.

For my senior seminar project (whoops. I guess I’m talking about college), I’m doing a creative project. It will be a creative nonfiction piece, which is a fancy way for saying I’m going to write a fancy journal entry and edit it over and over until it’s no longer recognizable as word barf. That’s basically what I do. Call it egotistical or self-indulgent and I’ll probably agree with you. When prompted for a legitimate explanation of what I do, I’ll say that I really love the idea of turning my life into art.

That’s true, I suppose. What I’d love to do is to be brutally honest with myself. Life is messy, and it’s something I’ve always sort of struggled with. When i was young, I didn’t like a guy unless I wrote it down. Even though I journaled constantly, there were certain things I wasn’t willing to admit even in my journal. That might have been because my mother had a habit of reading my journal, then confronting me about all the bad parts. Then a whole shame spiral started and it was just a mess. But I think that’s why I’ve always felt a distinct amount of distance in my writing – I’m aware that there’s somebody looking over my shoulder.

That’s an odd thing to be afraid of when you’re driven to write personal essays.