Running Dry

I'm starting to freak out, which is stupid, considering I have about two months (A LITTLE LESS, ACTUALLY, OMGGGG) to write my story. Stupid, stupid. And really I shouldn't be worrying about my nonexistent, far off story because I should actually be worrying about my UW app, which I haven't started, despite the fact that it's due the day after tomorrow. Anyways, I always seem to be worrying about dumb things, in a dumb order of importance.

Sometimes, I even manage to worry a little about my inability to set my priorities straight! Brilliant, eh? I know. I'm a brilliant kid, and you're jealous. -.- just kidding.

I'm in a really blah sort of state right now. My whole life is blah, college apps are blah, and my short story has accomplished the amazing feat of being blah without even existing.

But seriously, I have NO IDEA what I'm doing with my story, and I am quite, quite quite quite concernnned that I'm going to be this blank by the time January rrrrrrolls around and my story is DUE. ICK. These stories I've been reading for workshop are BRILLIANT so yeah, I feel especially clueless now. It's amazing how unique people's ideas are, how their stories are fiction, yet so them. How does that happen? How do bits and pieces of ourselves sneak in, slip in and pop up in random parts of our stories?

So anyways....I'm going to start writing random ideas, bits and pieces, NOW. TODAY. TODAY IS THE DAY......for what? I have no idea about that, either. But the brainstorm needs to start brewing ASAP. Right now I admit it's a bit of a noob-tropical storm out in the middle of whatever the lamest ocean is (which do YOU think the lamest ocean is? ha).

So. Don't read this next part, if anyone was reading this in the first place.This is my storm-in-the-making. And hopefully, if my creativity-drought ends, by January I can make it something that can reckon with the likes of Poseidon (I wish).

Some things I want in my story.....mabes:

• weird quirks. People can be so strange.
• Fortune cookies
• Food in general?
• Those faces I always seem to imagine when I see car headlights...
• colors?
• superheroes?
• letters?
• I can't decide if I want a happy ending or a sad one. both of them seem difficult.
• Setting: our everyday world? a high rise? the city? a park? a single room? a door? a not-door (window)? a desk?
  
• a dentist
• A single, yellow canine in an otherwise white and flawless smile
• markers

wtf this is such a random list. what am i doing!?! This isn't helping. And I'm beginning to have trouble ignoring the webassign tab on the left side of my browser and the UW app tab next to it, and the fact that I have a college interview tomorrow.

So far, I've only been able to make decisions on what I don't want to write. I don't want a love story, or a story placed in the country, or one with many characters or dialogue. I'm looking for something simple and maybe slightly strange in my messed-up, upside-down mind. I'm thinking I still need a longgggggggg while before I can sort things out.

....Therefore, WEBASSIGN GO T_T

You don't know me.

Something just occurred to me, and I wanted to get it down.

Do most people feel as if their parents know them? While I've been doing college application essays, and other people have been doing the same, I feel like that issue has been coming up a lot....

At first, I wrote an essay that I thought would turn out well...I sat down and said, I"M WRITING MY COLLEGE ESSAY....STARTING NOW. My mom read it and hated it. She was like, it doesn't sound like you.

I must admit, I ended up agreeing with her, but at first I got super pissed about it and it ended up being a two-week long argument. She said my essay was too negative, dark, and unappealing. I responded by saying, "Well clearly you don't know me then. But I know myself, and I know I'm in this essay, and if you don't like me this way, that's too bad." But she won the argument, and I edited the essay over, and over, and over again to make it "positive" until I realized I'd edited myself out completely, and I was trying to write in the voice of a stranger. The idea I'd had, the idea I'd been enthusiastic about for months, the idea I'd anticipated writing eagerly, became ugly, and later I couldn't stand it.

So I scrapped it, eventually. And I was super upset, so I was writing about how I was upset about that....and then that became my new college essay.....@_@ super circular and ironic. And after that, I wrote two more essays, and as of yet the three essays all feel like me, I think. I hope.

My mom likes these better. But still, there are times when she points at a line and says, THIS ISN"T YOU, and I say HOW WOULD YOU KNOW. This whole back and forth process has been stressing me out. It made me wonder if I was abnormal or unreasonable, if I was the only one having these huge arguments.

But then I heard a lot of people talking about the same things, and it made me think that the college essay really is a sort of pressure cooker. People get pushed by everyone else on all sides--do this, do that, take that out, I don't like this, you should be that. So it's critical to truthful, good writing to be honest to yourself. Follow intuition. If it feels wrong for you, it's because it is wrong for you. It doesn't matter if you don't know exactly, explicitly, precisely who you are. Somehow, if there's something that clicks, even if you don't know what, you should follow through with it. An essay about yourself should be something that you can smile about, not something that you hate. It should be something easy to write, not something that you worry about or something that makes you feel insecure.

People don't, people can't, know all about you. People can't know all about me. The writer needs to take control, because they're the only ones who can easily, naturally, beautifully lay themselves out on the paper.