Six: A cup of coffee

Sometimes, nothingness can be exhausting.

Reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg joke about how tiring his dreams are, one minute you're lying down to rest, the next you've got to build a go-kart with your land lord. Last night I dreamed about getting punched in the face repeatedly. What does that tell you.

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the nothingness. It just gets a little hard to focus on anything when your mind is permitted to wander so much. I've come up with so many ideas lately I might never get around to.

A long while back I pitched to Martina the idea of collaborating on a webcomic, knowing she's a hell of an artist. Except I didn't have any ideas ready at the time, so occasionally she'd check in by asking "Anything yet?" Then a few weeks ago I was digging through the forgotten files of my mind for stuff I used to think about writing, and I remembered The Knave, which was to be my epic Medieval story, my Mythological Stew of dragons and sorcery and Greek myths and pirates and all sorts of crazy whatever off the top of my head. And since then I've been dreaming up all the various pieces of the puzzle I intend to fit together in the end, although the route I take to get there seems quite jagged still. My attempts to write up an outline so far have been... tricky.

But I'm determined, because Marti has shown a good deal of enthusiasm for the project, and I'm keen on it myself because I get to invoke and play with all those quest tropes that have become so ubiquitous in pop culture lately, with LOTR and all. More, though, that I'll be drawing on old stories that came to me in picture book/illustrated form in my Tales of Magic and Illustrated World Myth books as a kid, which were largely what opened my mind to the richness of storytelling tradition.

So it was an ordinary crazy ass weekend, which began with my Music exam, which I probably didn't do quite as well on as the midterm due to what I perceive as being the more nebulous nature of the material. But that's just me. Maybe it's all really concrete and the problem is me.

The revelation that the problem was me all along would not be terribly shocking, given what we know.

Anyway, the exam was fine and I didn't feel like I was at a loss at any point, although I did occasionally feel like I was stretching my points... which I also felt during the midterm, and I did well on that, so who knows. I'm thinking 76.

This all ends with the soul-crushing yet entirely expected bummer of my paper for that class. I had a feeling, when I opted to do the paper the way I did it, that it was a high risk high reward proposition. It ended up in the high risk territory, as I sacrificed what could probably have been a more solid yet less interesting (to write) straightforward paper for a chance to take advantage of the paper's incredibly broad outline. My own bad. It was not well-received.

Well look. I get it. It's like that paper at the end of the American Lit last year. I know exactly what the problem was, and why this didn't go well. I feel bad about it, but I'm not going to feel sore about it like I did with the first paper here. But after three relatively conventional papers, I was just fuckin' sick of the same old, and if this one allowed for a bit of creativity, I wanted to take it as far as I could, and I did, and I paid the price.

But it was not a good paper. I know that. As I have a habit of doing, I made incredibly broad claims and didn't support them terribly well, as well as all that anecdotal business (encouraged but I was far too casual with it.) I wasn't shocked, and while I do reserve the right to be disappointed with myself, I do not believe an injustice has been served, except perhaps the one I inflicted upon myself.

Life goes on.

In case anyone is interested in the resolution to the little psychodrama I described in my previous entry, the answer is that it's all cleared up, without even a spare word needed to do so. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.

The weekend sort of passed without anything particularly important happening. I'm feeling more unenthused about work, mainly because I'm getting less in the way of hours despite my increased availability. And yet people continue to drop off resumes by the bushel to the point where I feel guilty telling them they've got a shot. We even just lost someone (well, by the end of this week.)

The main interesting thing about the last few days is that I bought a CD by the new Canadian alt-rock Zeus, and I quite frankly can't keep from listening to it. I wouldn't say it's as good as some of the other albums I've bought this year, but it's very good listening material for just chilling on the web.

I want to say so much, but there is nothing left. And none of it's important anyway.

Anyway and anyway.

There is no way to reach out.

Keep on rockin'
-Scott