When I reflect back on my college career as a current junior, I realize it’s been full of bad habits. It’s been a cycle of unhealthy thoughts, actions, and me trying desperately to escape from this habitual cycle to become “better” again by trying to change everything overnight.
And when I fail to get 100% “better”–which is 90% of the time–I become so unmotivated and disappointed in myself that I start hating myself. Even as I write this, I’m constantly berating myself for being unable to record my thoughts more succinctly and eloquently.
I’m convinced that my recent turmoils stem from my insecurities, ambivertness, and a great need to please and impress others.
Currently as a junior in the Michigan in Washington program, I’ve become more disenchanted by politics and political figures. I hate politics. And this means I also hate a lot of politicians.
The government is more often than not frustrating, inefficient, crooked…
I’ve met many government officials, private attorneys, professors, White House correspondents, executive directors of non-profits–all intellectual, tenacious, and accomplished figures in DC– but they all seem to put on a facade.
I don’t think anyone here is showing me who they are really.
I came here to make myself love politics; it’s not working so far.
I read Joseph Addison’s it-narrative relating the journey of a coin. Addison states that he was in a state of delirium when writing this story, which made many of my classmates dubious to the history the narrative supposedly recounts of 18th century London.
History is supposed to be a factual recounting of past events, so to write about it in a state of delirium endangers truth. But the discussion was mainly focused on the fact that Addison was in a state of delirium, which many of my classmates found unaccountable to hold the political, cultural, and social experiences of the coin as pertinent.
However, I don’t think it’s important that Addison was in a state of delirium when he wrote this piece in regards to recounting history. In confessing his delirium, I believe Addison meant to emphasize his passionate disturbance for the subject that evoked him to write in such a state.
The narrative of an inanimate object is obvious unorthodox as a method of historical writing, and that is the point.
As readers, it’s our responsibility to switch our lens accordingly the plethora of genres, styles, and subjects of literature, and for this it-narrative, our lens should be focused on the satirical criticism Addison employs in the narrative to reveal the truth—or reality—as he viewed it during this era of scorn he possessed for shallow businessmen engaging in what he scorned as mere trifles of life.
Rhetorical writing especially is evoked by passionate opinions about a subject matter. When a writer is strongly inspired to write, the inspiration often entails an epiphanic and dramatic understanding of what is believed to be the unveiling of a truth existent in mankind.
If this kind of inspiration was achieved by delirium for Addison, then so be it. But if this audacious approach makes his critique of the socio-cultural and political aspects of the era invalid, then Addison, along with all writers of such rhetoric and style of mode, should be denounced for fictional writing that challenges the “truth” because of the state in which they produced their work.
The truth is therefore not always important nor significant in literature. Literature can be anything but the truth, but reveal the most truth in this way—or reveal all the lies in this way, too. Either way, literature holds no responsibility to tell the truth, so it’s a waste of time to scrutinize it for validation. It would be much more fruitful for time and intellect’s sake to scrutinize it for the author’s intent of producing the work in such a mode than to denounce their work as irrelevant.
Vogue has a series of short interview series called 73 Questions. The interviews are approximately five minutes of successive, quick questions directed to a celebrity who answers with one word or a short phrase while continuing to go about their business in wherever setting the interview takes place.
It’s interesting how much you can learn about a person in five minutes from 73 questions such as “what do you like on your pizza?”
It’s not so much what the interviewee answers, because these questions are quite shallow and hence limited in evoking a complex enough answer, but it’s more so how they answer.
The mannerism of tone, gesture, expression, and speech hints at different personalities of each celebrity and frames each question and response through a whole different perspective from which the celebrity may or may not meet up to the expectations of my own fandom for them.
Lupita Nyong’o, for example, is more hip than I thought. She’s playful but with a flair of authenticity and poise that’s both charming and avant-garde.
Viewers are undoubtedly inclined to preconceived notions of these world renown superstars who have already established a name and reputation for themselves, but because these questions pertain to every-day, “normal” inquiries we can all afford to question, it’s fresh.
I’m also just naturally curious and always asking questions, so I’m living my dream through this faceless interviewer who gets to ask all 73 seemingly inopportune and irrelevant questions the celebrity is willing to answer immediately upon request (although some wiggle their way out of answering some).
If I were to answer these 73 questions, I’d struggle to frame them to avoid revealing too much while giving them my honest opinion, but I realized they still wouldn’t know the whole truth anyway. Because if I answer, “I wish I hadn’t woken up before my alarm,” to the question “what’s the first thing you thought of this morning?” who’d be able to validate it as false? No one but myself, because it was a personal thought I had as soon as I opened my eyes this morning. And does it matter that it could potentially be a lie? Do people care enough? I guess if I was Lupita Nyong’o, they would. Good thing I’m not.
Conditioning is a long process, and because there’s a routine and repetitive method of training one’s mind and body to act habitually, it can get old and unappealing, but it’s helpful in times where I need discipline to endure a long-term process.
Usually some trickery has to accompany conditioning.
For instance, I trick myself all the time when I’m conditioning for the marathon. My body signals discomfort and pain, but I trick my brain by consistently by telling it that it’s false or doesn’t exist, and it works.
Let’s say I’m on my sixth mile, and my ankles are tightening up. At this moment I shift my focus to anything else but the discomfort. I pretend it’s not there. Other than the physical attempts in which I try swinging my arms differently, straighten my back a little more, hold up my weight by tightening and straightening my core before coming down so that the impact of my feet to the ground is softer, I direct my mind to something else.
It could be the music I’m listening to, or the people I’m passing by, but usually distracting my mind works most optimally when I start paying closer attention to my surroundings. I try to magnify my five senses to nature, people, and objects I’m passing by.
Pain demands to be felt—and it is felt—I just don’t pay attention to it. Practicing this type of conditioning has made numbing the pain and forgetting it altogether come faster than before, so I don’t experience much pain during my runs anymore.
For social affiliations and daily inevitable events, however, I learned that tricking your mind in this method yields different results than when I use it for physical exertion. Because unlike running, it’s not just pain you have to trick yourself from feeling.
So when it comes to anything but physical activity, I try to avoid this conditioned exercise, but I still practice it sometimes because unfortunately, it’s become a sort of innate reflex.
A writer’s block is a condition writers experience when they can’t proceed their writing or cannot start the writing process at all from a lack of inspiration or ideas.
Is it ironic that I experience the writer’s block more for my personal journal than for academic writing?
Throughout the day, I have a plethora of discombobulated but relevant, discursive thoughts going through my mind. When I sit down at the end of the day to recount all these thoughts all—or at least some—and eloquently organize them with words, I’m buffered by a writer’s block that demands correctness and sensibility.
For this journal, I’m working on liberating my writing by practicing a style similar to a stream of consciousness. But my writer’s voice and tone is more formal and rigid from habit (or personal preference and style) than conversational and casual, so although this is a journal, it often doesn’t portray a sentimental and blithe approach a diary commonly demonstrates.
When I read my diaries from grade school scribbled in my juvenile penmanship and unaesthetic “artwork,” I cringe but simultaneously take pride in such records because at least I tried.
Many of these older diary entries are childish reveries that are more amusing and entertaining than creative, and some of them are painfully boring and literally journalistic in style—I’m pretty sure you can find nut grafs in some of them.
I like reveries, and even though fluff in some rhetoric is unnecessary, I like them sometimes. Especially for creative writing and reading for pleasure.
However, I also like direct, less-is-more, journalistic writing—like Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Miller, and Albert Camus.
I can’t fathom establishing my own preferred voice of distinguished style like the canonized authors have accomplished, but perhaps I won’t even realize when I’ve found it.
As I was prepping my food for the week today, out of nowhere I remembered how I used to cut celery the exact same way in sixth grade when my mom taught me.
My mom taught me everything I know today about cooking. My dad also taught me a few things, but he mostly taught me how to hold a knife, how to sharpen the knife, how cut—mostly how to handle the knife and other dangerous kitchenware.
My mom taught me how to cook by showing me. She doesn’t say much when she cooks, but I ask a lot of questions. Why do you put that in first? How come you have to cut it like that? How do you know when it’s ready?
Sometimes she answers these questions elaborately and scientifically, but sometimes, and quite often, she says she “just knows.”
My cooking will never be as good as hers, but I think I’m beginning to understand “just knowing” when cooking. When I was home during break, I watched her cook some more, but this time I asked fewer questions because I “just knew.”
If at age 19 I’m beginning to “just know,” I wonder how much my mom “just knows.” So I still ask her a lot of questions, but perhaps I should ask her more questions than just about cooking.
But as she does when she demonstrates cooking, she doesn’t have to verbalize but just show. And because I believe actions speak louder than words, her demonstration portraying the management of a domesticated lifestyle of motherhood with three demanding children and a restaurant business is good example enough.
The theme of my journal entry titles are one word verbs. I find that too often we write and speak, but to an excessive point where we get caught up in our thoughts and forget to do things. We forget to act. It doesn’t even have to be right or wrong, we forget to act—or worse—we choose not to.
Whether it’s fear, ignorance, or oblivion, hindrance from action is dangerous because it facilitates laziness, hypocrisy, or both. I’m not sure which is worse, because both are terrible.
Starting can be easy, but ending can be difficult.
Ending can be difficult for many reasons, but one of the reasons is being unable to keep up with everything that comes in between the beginning and the end: the middle. The middle can be full of chaos and confusion.
Starting this blog and labeling it The Journal was easy, but keeping up with it is difficult because of everything in between that hinders my mental capacity and sheer willingness to journal every day.
Writing a public journal is no easy task because I find myself constantly rewriting and editing to make sure that my records and thoughts are, if not true, at least valid.
But to every beginning there is an end, so I took the limited time I was given this winter break to end some things I started.
I finished reading Sula, Little Women, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
My favorite characters in these novels are Sula, Jo, and Maya. They’re all curious, rebellious, strong, independent, conflicted, bold, and impactful.
As each novel progresses in plot, each of these characters become jaded by a nexus of societal problems, but their ends are nonetheless met with any less severity than the beginning of their existence.
Whether intentional or unintentional, their ends are impactful because they reveal a sympathetic truth of human condition—a truth that evokes an array of emotions and thoughts difficult to fathom if it hadn’t been for these renegades.
I started this journal because I wanted to record my daily happenings in accordance with my ideas and thoughts. Some of the entries may not reflect this intent, but they vaguely and often ambiguously capture daily experiences, and art, in any and multiple forms, becomes the vessel to these portrayals.
This journal is purely for my amusement and a method of record-keeping (a method to my madness) but like Sula, Jo, and Maya, I’m looking for some kind of impact from my personal human condition.
Yesterday my middle toenail fell off for the first time.
I think today is the first snowfall.
This toenail is the first for the middle toe of my left foot to come off, but I’m already missing the fourth and fifth toenail on the same foot.
I have runner’s feet, or foot, in this case, since it’s my left foot experiencing the most pain at the moment–which is odd, because I’m right footed. Perhaps I relied on my left foot too much because I’m right footed, if that makes sense.
Your toes don’t feel much.
It didn’t hurt when my fourth and fifth toenail fell off, but when I ran yesterday, my middle toe experienced sharp pain and I ignored it.
You should never ignore pain, and I know this as an athlete, but I ignored it and kept on running anyway.
I sprinted the straights and jogged the curves, but I started sprinting at maximum speed on the last mile. Both straights and curves.
I came home and a familiar red spot seeped through my white socks. I’m used to seeing blood on my socks, but this time I was frustrated.
The reasoning for my frustration is illogical and stupid—but it reminded me of my dad’s childhood story.
He asked his mother, who has passed, if she loved him as equally as his siblings, and she bit her fingers and said they all hurt the same.
Why did she have to say hurt? Why couldn’t she have said that not one feels less than the other?
I’m the middle child, and my middle toenail has never come off until yesterday, and it hurt the most out of all the toenails that have fallen off.
I don’t believe in bad omens, but I didn’t like this middle child syndrome conspiracy that seemed connected somehow to my middle toenail falling off.
It felt like a foreboding foreshadowing. It’s pretty stupid—it’s just a toenail and it’s my fault because I ignored the pain my body signaled.
And because things fall, and things fall apart—love, family, friends, and toenails—I know it’s only natural.
Today is the first snowfall, and as I am writing this, the snow continues to fall.
The first snowfall for Michigan is expected to be high, which isn’t surprising for Michigan weather.
A lot of people hate Michigan weather, but I don’t hate it. First of all, I’m adapted to this weather, because this weather is all I know as a lifetime Michigander, but second of all, I try not to hate anything. Hate is too strong of a word—feeling.
But the snow falling right now is not too strong: it’s fragile, delicate, gentle, white, pure, natural, and innocent. Yes, it’s cold, but it melts very quickly when it lands on a warm surface.
And if you look close, you can see its intricate, beautiful pattern, but that’s only if you look close enough as it lands seconds before it melts away. It’s fleeting.
A crew of joggers just passed by the window, and I see the snow melting on their vinyl jackets—even more quickly than it does on the surface of the ground from the heat the runners generate as they pump their warm, red, blood in this cold, white, snow.
…
I often listen to music when I write, and currently I’m listening to Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
This piece makes me miss playing the violin for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and dancing ballet in my hometown’s small dance academy. I also miss running high school track meets. I miss a lot of things from my past and feel regretful for not taking full advantage.
But recently I’ve been talking to a lot of people, and I think I miss so many people and things because I talk to so many people and see so many things.
Holden Caulfield said “Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
I know what he means. You either “miss” them as in you desire to see them again, for they’re not with you physically in time, or you start “missing” them in the sense that they “miss” what you’re telling them. They “mis”understand you—or they just miss you telling them anything at all. The feeling of “missing” is reciprocated—whether good or bad.
In this way, things fall, things fall apart, and we miss.
But like waiting for the first snowfall, we wait, hope, and know that there is a first.
And today–as I watch the first snowfall in fall weather–I wait, hope, and know that the future holds a first.
A Journal 