new dawn

Christmas break just started, I'm in bed awake late at night as usual and I thought I'd write a bit.

I'm rereading some of my thoughts from earlier-- sometimes I know how to articulate what I think. That's encouraging. My English professor commented to me that some of the best writing can come late at night because we might be closer to the unconscious... I think he might be right.

Anyway- I'm full of that rejuvenated feeling you get when you scrape through a semester of hard work and emerge on the other side, relatively unharmed. I'd like to get a fresh start this next semester and see if I can't finally learn from my mistakes and excesses.

I want to meet people.
I want to create a new me- no, I want to perfect the old me.
I want to write more.
I want to start exercising, build some muscle.

It dawned on me recently that I am not my body, my representation. I am Ryan, and I exist within that form. The form is mine to change as I will. Putting everything in perspective has filled me with a new optimism.

I feel capable, but also restless again. If I can get some things done over break that I've been meaning to do I think the restlessness will go away. When you're on the road to self-fulfillment, you don't get the restless feeling as much.

My mind is surprisingly empty right now, close to a sleepy nirvana state. This is good for meditation but not writing. I'll say a few more things and get some much needed rest.

The advanced fiction writing class I'll be taking this semester has me excited because I can feel myself taking the steps I need to fashion myself into something great, to harness my talents. I will write, even when it's difficult and when I don't enjoy it because I know that's what I can do, what I'm able to do. I want to load syllables into the cannon and fire them out, build worlds with words, brick by brick. Although I haven't read much of his work, I stand in awe of writers like Cormac McCarthy.

That is a man who looks at the english lexicon, and truly selects words to place on a page. He isn't writing as much as he is building something. His style is uniquely his own, his vocabulary has a spirit and an ethos, it evokes an entire internal universe unparalleled by other writers I've come across. The feeling as a reader that you get when you know the writer is twisting the material within his hands is a good one to have. I want to be the giver of that feeling rather than the receiver. The same feeling came across me when I downloaded Raekwon's new album, and compared the written lyrics to his delivery.

No words were off limits. The writing actually came alive in the delivery- images flashed before my eyes and created something that was much more than what he had started with. I look forward to doing this in the future.