wish fulfillment, woes

What do you do when you don't want to do anything? Is it every teenager's natural inclination to sit on their ass and waste away? That's what it's all about lately, all I'm good for is for writing good enough for assignment and dreaming big, but my dreams are like the rainbows you see when light hits an oil spill.

I'm frustrated. I started trying to write a screenplay the other day to start to develop a knack for it, but these first few steps have been pretty shaky. The thing I'm most passionate about is movies, nothing else in my life can hold a candle to that. I have encyclopedic knowledge of them so maybe that's a good sign of what I should do with my future.

I like writing too, but I've never been a "writer." How can I compare to even the artistic kids from my high school who've been stitching chapbooks together since they were in diapers? I sometimes wish my parents beat me as a child, or held a gun to my head and classically conditioned me to be talented at things.

There's nothing more terrifying than a completely blank canvas and no creative restrictions. It's worse when you don't put anything on the canvas and then someone starts taking brushes and colors away.

I'm 18 and I have my whole life ahead of me, but I feel like I'm 35 and still living with my parents or something. There are no women in my life nor any strong possibilities on the horizon. I have no desire to pursue or hone my abilities to pick up women, or to do much else with my life.

It's important to note that I'm not depressed- this is me revving my wheels in the mud and not getting anywhere, sinking deeper. It's like walking slowly into a brick wall over and over everyday- there's no pain there, I just can't get around this wall.

The first scene of this screenplay I was trying to write wrote itself, but it's ripped completely from my memory. Plus I reread it, and it sucks. It doesn't sound like a movie, it sounds like real life which I discovered today isn't even that interesting. Life becomes interesting when it's filtered through a lens- that's why storytelling works, its through a mental lens.

I can't caricature my life, but I need to. And I'm bad at writing about things that I don't know, and all I know is what I've lived, so I'm at an impasse here.

I'm looking at my classes and trying to peek into my future. I'm trying to stare down my fucked-up family life and poor social skills. I'm staring into the abyss, as Nietzsche once said. My circumstances have changed, and I'm currently experiencing an upturn of expectation. In literature this is called irony, but I can't see the humor.

Not all kids my age feel aimless and ambitionless, so why do I? Does everybody go through this aimless, Dustin-Hoffman-in-the-Graduate philosophical wandering or is it just me? Am I a pessimist, a cynic? Do I need therapy or just a kick in the ass? I have no idea.