The Line

I am straddling a line.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about maturity - about what it is and about how we get it. Do we get our maturity from our experience or from our years? I am 19, but I still live like a 17 year old. Am I somehow less mature, because I have been denied those experiences? What am I wiser about, thanks to my own experiences?

I live very much in my own head. I think about how I'm feeling, what I am doing next, what is important to me. Yet, I have moments where I have to make decisions - tiny ones - where I act a little less from inside my head. It doesn't happen often enough, but I am aware of it when it does.

So, I realized tonight, that I am straddling a line. I am a nineteen year old girl. I can choose to see myself as a flaky teenager susceptible to emotion and not responsible to anyone else but herself. Or, I can choose to see myself as an older girl, hardly a teenager anymore, capable of a great many more things than she has had the opportunity to do lately.

The line between the two is so thin. It is, I suppose, the line between choosing to do my own laundry or just leaving it for Mum. It is the line between learning how to cook real rice or just getting the quick stuff. It is the line between choosing to teach myself Spanish, and just leaving it all until I get to school. None of these good things I have chosen, though I am quite capable of them, and have the best of intentions to do.

My conclusion is that I am at a point - personally, I doubt it applies to everyone my age - where the state of my maturity depends on me. I get to choose how much of a grown-up I want to be. I have been denied certain experiences that would force me to learn things and adjust to things - so I must make the choices that would develop these new understandings in me.

I am not less of a responsible being because I have not had my first kiss or lived away from home or had to pay my own transportation. I am less of a responsible being because I haven't been making the most of the opportunities I have to learn more about these things - to do my own laundry and to set a budget for myself.

A month ago, I wanted to be doing so much more. I was going to be studying Spanish again. I was going to take up the clarinet again. I was going to have finished more than two books. I was going to write everyday, I was going to go to the gym at least once a week. So, now I need to move past Intend and toward Do.

I won't catch up to my peers this way, but I'll be only 8 steps behind instead of 12. I choose to be the older girl - barely a teenager anymore - capable of doing all of these things and actually doing them.

Prose Styling

I got an interesting comment from my writing teacher today. She noted that, when I was turning in assignments where I was told to jot down ideas, and keep it to just a sentence or two, that my voice was "sharp, secure and economical." In contrast, my prose for a lengthier assignment didn't achieve this. I need to use as few words as possible to convey my ideas; it makes for stronger prose.

I've never thought of it that way. But now, it seems pretty obvious. The more words you use, the more complicated and awkward things get; your ideas are no longer solid. So, I went back through the actual super-short fiction assignment and rewrote it, no extraneous words. I do like it much better now; it gets the emotion of the characters across clearly and specifically.

I thought for so long that my writing wasn't long enough. My stories weren't fully fleshed out and my work was too short to possibly be good. I tried to make my writing longer - but making it frillier was no improvement. If I want to flesh out a story, I'm going to have to look at character and subplot, emotion and action. I'm going to have to spend a longer time searching for that perfect word, because that one perfect word will say more than a thousand imperfect words.

I have a piece I've been working on for a while - a short story I'm submitting for my first "booth" assignment, where the class reads and critiques their peer's work. I went through and cut out the foofy and the frilly, while trying to make the story stand. It's under 3000 words long; any volunteers to read through it before I submit it? I know that this is an area I need to work on; I want to know if I have achieved this, so I can recieve feedback from my classmates on issues I may not be aware of.

Exciting things.

I love the writing course I'm taking. It's only been three weeks, but I really do love it.

I'm one of those people who has to convince myself not to waste time (I do a lot of that, by the way), and sit down and write. Some days, it's all I can do not to sit at my computer for days and write. But in the years since I discovered the difference between quality and quantity, I've been more reluctant to sit down and write. I don't want to write low quality stuff. I know you're supposed to just get it all out and fix it later, but I can never manage to turn that first draft into the beautiful thing I have in my head. So, I avoid writing.

Once I've started, I can hardly stop. For the most part, I fall into the story, into the editing, into the characters and the plot and the prose. I even come up with a few real gems of story-making. But most of the time, I don't really like the product.

Which is why I like this course. Not so much that I'm learning things I've never heard before, but that I'm being forced to write. And forced to use the things I'm being taught.

I can't become a better writer unless I practice. And I can't become a better writer unless I use the things I learn in the process.

So, excited, me?

Yup.

Doubletakes

I got my own desk today at work. I have a computer to use, and desk space to work on, and a cabinet to put my purse in. I have an inbox, where I can find stack of work, covered in post-it notes with instructions, so I don't have to continually interrupt people, asking for something to do.

And you know what was crazy? Instead of being thankful, instead of being overjoyed, my first reaction was to second guess their motives. Yes, they're always nice to me, but is this because I'm always in the way, because I mess up other people's desks (I didn't - or I thought I didn't), because my constant asking for instructions was just so annoying? I make so many mistakes - most of the time little ones I don't even have to think about to correct - but occasionally I make some big ones. Am I really just a hair away from getting fired?

It took me the whole three hours to convince myself that, if I was doing things so horribly wrong, I would have been told. It would be counter-productive to let me keep going on in such a messy fashion. It took me the whole three hours to appreciate this new space (and space! real space! Half the time I need to take to the floor to get all the papers I'm working with laid out), and to appreciate not having to continually ask for work.

Why couldn't I just be as thankful as I am now, the first time around? Why do I keep second-guessing people's motives. Because it's not just the people at the office. It's my family, and my friends. I'm constantly wondering if I'm a burden, if I've been invited along just out of politeness. And I know it's not true. If my friends didn't want me there, they wouldn't invite me along. My family love me, and they supported me through what was unquestionably the worst time of my life.

I so often feel like I'm so immature and so silly; I can't cook or do my own laundry, and half the time I'm still asking for rides places. I don't have all this cool college experience and I just haven't really had a chance to grow up.

But I'm never going to grow up if I don't get over myself.

This is me quitting being such a worrywart.

Woe Is Me

I slept eleven hours last night. After seven thirty this morning, I kept waking up and looking at the clock, and then - what seemed like five minutes later - looking again and realizing it had been an hour. And even after that, I spent the morning in bed.

It was wonderful.

I was getting better, and recovering faster, and I began to forget my limits. The thing with going out and spending time with my friends, or working, or going to church is that I still have to give myself time to recover. And I stopped doing that.

I had a great weekend with Jessica - but on more than one occasion I pushed myself just a little too far. I didn't drive myself to work at all last week. It was just easier to have those fifteen extra minutes of rest.

Yesterday, I had a little pity party over these facts. After all this time, you would think I'd have gotten over it. I know my limits, know what I can and can't do, am plenty aloud to get frustrated...

I thought I had moved beyond disappointment. Guess not. I got so excited to be able to do so much; so eager to be able to do more later, that I pushed myself so I would be ready to go to college, ready to make new friends. Ironically, what I really needed to do was rest until my body was ready to do the extra.

I'm back to the "no stress" route. No requirements for my day. If I have to go to work, then that's all I'm going to ask of myself that day. If I'm well enough to read, so be it. If I'm well enough to write, good. If all I can do is work and then nothing for the rest of the day? I'm going to let myself be alright with that.

Next door's pool pump makes this awful low hum that is driving me bonkers, and my head is beginning to scramble like eggs, so I'll find something happy to talk about later.

Much love,

Judith

Max and the cookie jar

So, Max has been stealing food a lot lately. He acts like a five year old with his hand caught in the cookie jar. He's been running around with more energy and bark than we're used to.

On one hand, it's nice that he wants to go for a walk. Dragging a fifty pound mutt out the door isn't as easy as it sounds.

On the other hand... the dog is hungry. Dad switched his food and our little doggie began changing. He went after uncooked spaghetti this evening. Right now, he's lying under the table, hoping I'll drop some of my apricot-blueberry muffin (delish, by the way. Starbucks).

Jessica visited over the weekend. Yay Jess! I haven't seen her in a year... and what a difference a year makes. How much she's changed since I saw her every day in junior high - it's staggering. And not in a bad way; it's just, when you and your friends are growing up together it's one thing - but a complete other when you grow up apart from each other.

We had some massive cookie fail Sunday night. Turns out that the measure in the all-purpose flour is not one cup, as I believed, but a half cup. So, half the flour made for very flat cookies. Delicious, but a crumbly mess.

I started my writing course today. The first lecture was good - creating a character - not something I haven't heard before, but the questions and the assignment are making me think about this in different ways. What I'm really looking forward to is seeing what happens in the long run.

I finish this post with some wit for y'all: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekinreview/04gough.html?_r=2&ref=weekinreview

Happy reading!

Happy New Year!

Last Year I:

- Read 105 books; 30956 pages (here, I will readily admit to you, that I was a slacker, and could have easily reached 200 if it were not for stupid fanfiction and silly TV)
- Got a job
- Started driving again
- Got well enough to clean my room
- Went to the UK for two weeks, and recovered really quickly
- Began walking for exercise
- Took a yoga class
- Completed 2 independent study courses
- Wrote a novel
- Had a short story published
- Spent up to six hours with friends without going bananas
- Only had to call for my parents to "rescue" me once

This year I will:
- Read at least 100 books.
- Edit my novel
- Write another novel
- Take a fiction writing course from the Gotham Writer's Workshop
- Attend school again

And those are just the tangible, measurable things...