About Face

"Sorry about the absence of posts" begins so many blogs. Why do we not blog? I don't know. The absence of post does not mean the absence of thought, or of thought formulated into what it will be written on paper. The trouble seems to be in the sitting down and the sending of the fingers across keyboards, and pressing all those spacebars. Etcetera.

For me, writing has always kind of felt like a pause. When I'm running around, doing my own thing, I kind of keep a running monologue in my head of things I'm feeling/seeing/experiencing. This feels active, and the wheels turn quite pleasingly in the brain. When the time comes to sit down and transcribe what all has happened, though, some of it gets lost between the presses of a key, or lost in trying to find the right word. Writing, to me, just doesn't feel like what writing should feel like, and what just plain thinking does feel like. Nevermind trying to sit before the blank page and write something out of thin air. Maybe with a pen or pencil you could drum up some interesting thoughts, but I'm a firm believer (or nonbeliever?) in the impossibility of true creative writing on a computer. Then again, my boss says that too often people get caught up in the trappings of the writing, when in fact the problem is their un-inspiration. I don't think she's right, but I don't think she's wrong either.

I think I get trapped because I want to get trapped. When the thoughts live with me, up in my brain, running back and forth like electricity, they keep me company and provide me with some of the best companionship (and some of the worst, so there is a balance of course) there is to have. When I write, though, I have to stop living life, and just try to remember everything it is I've been living to write it down. That's the first thing, the pause. I don't like to pursue activities which stop me from experiencing "life" actively. It's the same reason I have my hangups about photography--you have to constantly be on the lookout for the right frame, the right angle to show things. Stops us from being "in" the picture, literally and figuratively. (I swear to God the metaphors must stop!) The second thing--yes we're back to that--the second thing is that once thoughts are written down, they have the troubling tendency of losing the lustre of lightning thoughts and becoming just a series of black curves and lines connected together. They're not living beings anymore, these thoughts, but killed, flattened out, and pressed between leaves of a book. The butterfly's colors may be beautiful, but unless it's allowed to flutter in the wind the true essence of the butterfly will be lost.

I swear to God. Metaphors. That's something facebook has made me hate, in others and myself, which is the too-easy tendency to turn even the most mundane experiences into the grandest of fucking metaphors. Metaphors are too easy. Almost cliche. Yet why am I still drawn to them? Not sure I'm comfortable following this question all the way to its conclusion.

Which is why I should introduce the concluding thought which has caused you to sit through this long introduction. 

I'm picking up some physics and math classes at school.

And since this blorg has been a good place for me to deliberate over these kind of life changes, I figured it would be only right that I should document the change. I had a conversation with some Christians the other night that ended up being incredibly productive. One of the subjects was, duh'f course, the meaning of life. For me, I've isolated it down to two possibilities. One, to have meaningful connections with the people around us--friends, family, coworkers, etc. Two, to improve the world through the talents/interests (or are the two equivalent?) that many translate into a career. Maybe the two are completely separate, or not so separate, but these are what I want to pursue. There's another candidate for the answer to the meaning-of-life question, which would be to experience all we an experience, but that gets us into a whole other ballgame so perhaps I'll save that for later. For now, I'll just say that the whole connecting and helping the world thing is by its very nature going to gain us some experiences.

Soooooooooooooooooooo for this reason I think I'm going to give physics another go. I gave up on it too easily. Not for grades or difficulty or anything, but because I saw some research astronomers were doing and said "yeah, fuck that." Fucking clicking on black dots on a white screen all day. Also because I refused to become an engineer like my father. Well, folks, the time has come where I reconsider and perhaps reroute.

And I think this is best. I want to do everything, honestly. I want to write, I want to think, I want to love, I want to do math equations. For my life, who knows? Maybe this will be the most compatible combination.