Make it Artsy – A Review
The process of writing a blog when you’re exhausted and tapped out of all creative energy is as follows:
Type out a response to a title you texted yourself last week.
Make sure the words are incoherent, and formless.
Erase it all.
Undo the erasing with Ctrl-Z, open a new word document
Start typing something nonsensical or something from your mind’s overworking.
Repeat steps 2 and 3.
In your new document, write the same title as before, but this time write about something that happened to you today that probably requires more information.
Repeat steps 2 and 3.
Title this new document literally whatever was on your mind at the time.
Write out your frustrations.
Start a numbered list.
Fill that list with all the silly things you’ve tried.
Write whatever comes next I guess.
Hello.
I’ve been in living in New York for sixteen days. I am, mostly, adjusted. Once work starts for real on Monday, I’ll be able to settle in and get all nice and cozy. It’ll be good to have regularity back in my life, no matter how stressful or involved it might be.
Today. Today marks the final irregular day. Tomorrow will be my first REAL weekend in over a year. Prior to this new job, I was kind of on a semi-permanent sort of every day of work might be Friday schedule. Meaning work was unsure. So, once I finished my project, it might be the weekend, it might not be.
That’s how freelance editing worked, for me at least, probably because I wasn’t the best at finding new work. Or maybe I was too good, and I gobbled up all the jobs too early.
When I started the writing the blog (regularly), I sort of developed the idea of a weekly cycle. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday became my blog/research days, and Tuesday and Thursday became my “personal” writing days. This simulated a workweek for me, to a point, but I’d often find myself itching to write on Saturdays and Sundays. All of which was generally just in a large word document entitled “Dump File.”
There I save all my old work. It is to be opened when I die. Hold someone accountable to that.
When I tell people about my dump file, they generally want to read it. But it’s like… 80 pages, I should trim that when I get the time. It’s also a lot of personal stuff. Writing that was just… necessary. Stuff I had to say to vent, stuff I didn’t even believe when I was writing it. A lot of it wouldn’t be decipherable, especially the section titled “Barely Even a Sentence,” which contains the beginnings of stories that are… Barely Even a Sentence.
I think only one person has ever seen the dump file, and that was in its infancy. I showed him two poems that I wrote.
I have trouble keeping the boundaries I set for myself.
It’s not that I don’t mind letting people see what I’ve written in there, it’s just like, what’s the point in having this super-secret hidden packet of goodies if you’re just going to go and show someone it.
Oh well. I was proud of the poems.
I’m getting to this strange point where I like showing people my work. I don’t understand it. If my creative fiction teacher from college reads this, he’ll probably have something clever to say in the Facebook comments (go ahead, if you really want to). But really… I like doing this. It’s just a shame when I’m tired, because I don’t feel like I owe YOU a blog, I OWE me a blog so you can read it.
It should be no surprise that it’s the blog that got me there. I mean. Several of these blogs go into specifics about my mental health and what terrifies me and what’s bothering me and what my anxieties are.
If I’m comfortable sharing that, then I should probably also be comfortable sharing my epic space western about a hillbilly named Cletus, or my first finished real story from senior year of high school, or this one sentence that just says “Do you remember the first time you saw a Rubik’s Cube?”
Wait. That’s actually a good question.
I wonder how I reacted to the first Rubik’s Cube I saw. Was it shuffled up? Or was it solved? Would I have known that you had to match the colors, or would I have thought it was a toy.
Has anyone’s first Rubik’s Cube sighting come with directions? Or was it just another mystery?
Follow-up question: have you ever met someone who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube?
Are Rubik’s Cubes something that have become socially innate. Something that is known but never learned?
Like blowing the dust out of N64 cartridges, remembering to blink, or to breathe?
Please do your own safe and swift research on this subject and have the report to me by tomorrow. Thank.
I’m just going to go to sleep now. Yeah. Happy Friday friends! And… Why am I still writing? Just sign off. I must be really tired. This isn’t even that well developed of a joke. I’m just typing. Like. It’d be funnier if you were in the room with me right now, but I just need to st-.
OKAY GOOD NIGHT!
Have a great day! I’ll try and do the same.
