I can't believe what I just said online

It's about one in the morning, and I've been working for around three hours on a Tumblr post, my 4,500th one.
If you want to read that monstrosity, here's the link: http://the-once-and-future-novelist.tumblr.com/post/57400341012/the-girl-in-fandom-world-skyvoice

But it's a little bit amazing to me. Even a few months ago, saying something like that would have been unthinkable. I'm worn out, but not shaky or nervous about who may see it or anything. Is this what they call courage? Or is it confidence? It feels a little more like peace. Even if nobody reads it, this certainly helped me because I had the chance to face some tough questions and put some of Dad's sermons into real life.

I feel...awesome.

Musings at 10,000 feet

Written on my iPod.


Airplanes are amazing.
When I'm flying in one, I always try for a window seat so I can watch the plane leave the ground. Even when I'm not by the window, often I feel carefully to determine exactly when the roaring engines overcome gravity and the wheels lift from the pavement. And as the smudged window reveals more and more of the town below, whether small or large, smoggy and sprawling or shrouded in the shadow of the mountains behind it. As suspended billows of water take place of ant-like cars and minuscule steeples of churches, I am struck by the fervency of the human race. We are constantly seeking something in everything we do. Tenacity is an inherited trait of God's, I suppose. There is an intensity to everything, in the bigness of small things and the smallness of big things. And we are never totally satisfied with it all, craving something more substantial. It's like a part of us knows that we are mere ghosts.
It 's black outside and I know not where we are or if we're landing soon. But I know that I am doing something previously impossible not too long ago, and that I am still able to forget that I am ten thousand feet above the ground. Yet the plane lurches on the wind, and I am gripped by a primal terror that itches for solid earth and not the lurching carpet below my heels.
Hold on, there's a brilliant sunset out there. All that darkness was worth it!
My camera isn't very good. Psh. Oh well. I can see the city lights below. Thousands of people are out in the neon cacophony, having reckless fun and trying to get home and sleeping alone when they ought not be. They are seeking something and some of them will never find it. I may never find it. But I will get glimpses of it, reminders of what I was created to be. What we all were created to be. And I will hold onto those moments that awe me. The sunsets above the horizon, the faces of strangers meeting my eyes with that terrifying curiosity, an excellent story that moves me to tears and clutches my throat from within. I am both hugely tiny and minutely massive because of the goodness in me, but I am nothing more than a girl with a spotty face and wind blown hair because of the bad. I am between world much of the time, but I am going home to people who love me and show me parts of themselves that not everyone can see. And I am thankful.

TED Talks should come in threes

It's a long one, and there's many jokes inserted, and there's a long ramble or two, but he's very interesting and intelligent. I want to read one of these books.

I would like to meet this lady

So she's a little unusual. That's ok. She is highly insightful in the creative industry which I may want to enter if the Fates allow. Take her, and her idea, with a grain of salt.

Revenge of the TED Talks

This is delightful. He's very appealing, crisp speech and funny little coughing laugh. And he arouses a pertinent point. We are being educated like machines, but the gears are rusting. When I go to college for real and not for a short week, I will need to spend more time there than ever before to get a well-paying, parent-approved job. It's entirely likely that I will have to come back home, or that some of my older friends will come back home for a while because we simply can't enter this industrial-styled workforce as fast as we used to. Living as an artist should be easier than ever before, especially if we follow the philosophy of one musician whose Talk I will post in a moment. So why not encourage artistry? With all of the time we theoretically have thanks to our time consuming time saving technology, it should be plausible to live as a person built to create and evoke something inexplicable in others. There is a whole 90% of the human brain nobody can understand or map out. So let's allow ourselves to enter that realm and find soething so much greater than ourselves!
Creative living for the win!!

"We will all be stories someday"

I spend a lot of my time in stories. Thinking about created stories, dreaming up stories of my own, writing continuations or filling in gaps of stories I love. Tales take up much of my time.

Humans live and breathe stories because we love them. We want a good story. When we meet people we haven't seen for a while, we tell them stories. For example, my family would tell the same stories four or five times the past few weeks because we were catching up with relatives, and we'd listen to their stories as well. It's simply how we communicate. Sometimes we tell our own stories, sometimes we tell another person's stories, and sometimes we embellish a little bit to make the story sound better.

Stories also follow a similar pattern each time because of other reasons as well, reasons that go beyond this physical world and into our very makeup--and the ones who did the making. Ever notice that? When stories don't have an ending it enrages people because we crave closure. When there isn't one big final battle, one scene where good triumphs over evil, we start flipping tables because that's not what was supposed to happen! We don't want that to be how it all ends for us.

(Read Epic; it explains all of this in more detail.)

And what we forget is that we are living in our own stories composed of smaller scenes that are in themselves stories that all come together in a big smooshy story casserole to form the story we know as History. And even History isn't the biggest story of them all!

And we serve as minor characters in other people's lives, as they serve in ours. They may only be there for a moment, but still they exist, and have their own massively complicated story that we may never know in its entirety.

(You should hear how fast I'm typing! I get so excited talking about this!!)

Maybe I'm thinking about this because of my upcoming Worldview class on Epic. Or maybe it's because I'm seeing all the stories that created my family. Maybe I'm thinking about this because I'm wondering if I'll remember these parts of my story very clearly later on. Or maybe I'm just excited for the stories I'm staring to create on my own and hoping they'll turn out the way they are meant to be. I don't really know.

Stories!!

That quote up there, the title? That's a quote from the movie version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I cried. Oh, how I cried. Because Charlie's story was so very sad, and it could have ended horribly. But it didn't. And he looks at the happy old photographs and the people on the street and his best friends and himself and he knows that they are all living stories. And they cannot determine everything in how the story goes, but they can decide whether or not to take the situation handed them and work with it or let it end badly. And he chose to learn from his experiences, good and bad, and grab onto those moments where everything is understandable. Those infinite moments where there is no past or future to weigh anything down are what he will live for. Those moments where he can do anything.

Ahem.

Sorry about that. You know me, I'll go off sometimes on a long ramble...I'm a ramblebug. My wings are powered by thoughts. Bzzzzz.

Let's see how far I've come--2011 to 2013

Here's what my good art used to look like.

I shudder to see it now. But I do like the flowy hair on the bespectacled young male whose name I have forgotten. Kinda want to play with it...
Hey, I draw what I enjoy.

Here is what a quick sketch looks like now.

It took me 15-20 minutes. I still want some professional training, i.e., an art class for portraits or the like, but nonetheless I do see an improvement. I just recently obtained a set of watercolor pencils. Here is my experimentation with 100% dry:

Oh no, it's hung sideways...is that better or worse than upside-down?

Here we go, a quaint farmhouse sunset. The weather will be lovely tomorrow in this domestic scene.
(I promise, it looks better in person. All the more reason to come see my future galleries, because the scanned versions just...aren't the same.)

My humans have taken on a more humanish quality, but big noses and pronounced features keep them cartoonish enough to count as semi-realistic. Oh, how I long for anatomy skills like Miss Burge's, or a fun originality like Miss Meago's, but alas! I am more often than not clearly a novice and self-taught. Still, progress heartens me, and though paging through my old sketchbooks is at times painful, I am encouraged by how far I have come, and hopeful as for where I am to go next.

*~*~*~*

Shout-out to all of my friends: I am sorry that I am not always in cell phone range, and/or that I am terrible at staying in contact. But vacations are restorative times for me, where the pressure to always keep in touch in a twenty-first century timely fashion is lifted. If left to my own devices, I would do nothing but write letters to you personally and make posts on this blog and my Tumblog to show that I am indeed alive and kicking. Not many of you read this. In fact, I only know of one...but nonetheless I am communicating with you all here. Huh. I make very little sense sometimes. But with many companions on all corners of the internet and many ways to commune, I cannot possibly make sense. My head is spinning. I belong in another century. Adequacy in technology does not mean love for it. What I love about the internet is not its speed nor its silent pressure on my subconscious, it is the ability to access things and return to them later if I wish to do so. When romanticized in my head, it's like a massive library with new books always coming in. One can get lost so easily. I have buried myself in it and never wish to resurface.

I am sorry. The cost of my companionship is alternating silences and aching monologues. Signing out for the night.
Day. It's late evening but the sun is out.
Gah.