Raw Materials

Getting adequate sleep has become somewhat of a luxury these days. I find myself collapsing in the unlikeliest of places, falling asleep almost everywhere and embarrassing myself when I end up sleeping in the middle of doing something important. Even right now, I am extremely sleepy and I have readings to do. It is quite annoying because it feels like work never ends and the last week, I ended up leaving quite a bit of slack. So this weekend, I really need to work hard to get back on track. The thing with a course like Literary Theory is that all these texts mingle and talk and converse with each other. If you haven’t read any text, chances are you might get extremely lost in class.

I don’t like feeling lost in class because it makes me feel more dumber than I do on a daily basis. I then need to constantly tell myself, in quite an unconvincing way might I add, that I am not dumb. It just loses its meaning after a while, it just starts sounding extremely insincere and stupid. Anyway, it is not a big task to sound stupid, at least from my limited experience. I can sound extremely stupid without even trying, case in point, some of my own blog posts from the past and well, I still don’t know how this one is going to turn out so this one might add itself to that list. Regardless, I am quite stupid many times and today might just as well be one of those days.

What gives me some modicum of joy is the fact that I am quite wonderfully writing a story (around 500 words) every week. I have ended up writing quite a bit and that feels good, to have something to look at and say that I wrote them. Now, whether those are good pieces or not are yet to be seen. But regardless of the worth/value I assign them, they are still written pieces that can be worked on. They are extremely useful raw material and in the world of writing, raw material is great, it means there is something to work with. It takes a lot of pressure off the writer. You don’t feel as sad when you are not churning out something from time to time, you can work on stuff you started in a moment of inspiration (or compulsion, which is also a good inspiration sometimes, I feel) and never brought to fruition.

One of the primary problems with this blog itself is the fact that every day I write without much raw material to work with. The only raw material I have is the memories of the day and sometimes even that is extremely sketchy. With such a precarious position, it is quite no wonder that most of the time I have to force myself to type words. this compromises on stuff that I could be saying. It is really not about how frequently you’re producing, but rather, what you’re producing and how you’re producing. But anyway, this blog has been going on every day so far and hopefully shall continue to do that until the end of this year. Maybe next year, I can limit myself to weekly stuff. have a theme every week and write one post each time. It is all quite far off into the future and now is not the time to ponder over them. But nonetheless, sometimes the future and the raw material it promises, sound exciting and worth dreaming about, doesn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Hard Amends

I am much too sleepy to type and write this blog post right now. I had been holding out on this marvellous sleeping for a while now and the last few days seem to have been a real problem for me. I had been horrible to myself last semester and this semester, I have already been inexcusably bad to myself that I know for a fact that I have really affected my mind and body. But I have promised myself that I shall work on amends, that I shall make them as effective as possible. But of course, the first step is to realise that you messed up big time and being willing to move on.

After yesterday’s breakdown, I feel a lot better in general about myself and the situations I have managed to find myself tangled up in. One of the major things that had been on my mind was my own foolish fancies about this guy I like, and I was allowing myself to be carried away by things like messages and whatnot. Now, I would think of my behaviour as extremely stupid, expectable but stupid. So one of my primary objectives right now is to work through these seemingly stupid decisions, slowly by parts, to try and understand myself and essentially set up a system where I would be less prone to this kind of behaviour. But of course, that is not to say that I do not feel any pain at all about whatever has happened, because I do and the pain is numbing. I only hope that I shall be able to find the mental strength to pull through this pain.

It is just the second week of the semester and I already feel reminded of some of the worst days from last semester. Maybe it goes to say that there are more hard things in store for me, that there are much tougher challenges that I would have to tackle in the course of this semester. And I won’t lie, that is not something I am excited about. But I think what I would tell myself is that I can prove to myself that I have an inner strength that I can depend on, that I am someone who can hold her own fortress. While right now it doesn’t really seem like much of a founded belief, what I am hoping is that I can prove me wrong. Right now, I feel like one of the theorists I am studying in my Introduction to Literary Theory class, what with my saying the same thing over and over again, with different words.

I think that is one thing about the workload at university and the amount I need to study. I feel like, as a student, I have made some incredible progress, that my brain has grown indescribably, to be able to allow me to accommodate the different things that are happening in class. I am most definitely becoming smarter (while also simultaneously becoming dumber in places of common sense, but that is a situation I aim to rectify in the near future) and I can feel it and that is a great feeling. I think I do like education, at least right now, at this point in time. Maybe during finals week or mid-term week, I shall be singing a different tune. But right now, I think I should take it in stride, stop being stupid in the many places where being stupid affects my physical being and prove to myself that I am not a force to be trifled with, not even by myself. I think that’s always the hardest part to execute, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.