Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

I drove away, looking up at the Cheshire Cat moon smiling down at me, wondering if I would see him again.

This is the thought I had, word for word, driving down the road on Sunday night. This writing thing is sort of a gift and a curse, because you often find yourself narrating your real life as it happens in bombastic and high-handed prose. Even the phrase “bombastic and high-handed” is fairly bombastic and high-handed. That whole sentence was like a snake swallowing its own tail.

The point is, I pretty much spend my whole day doing this, relaying this ongoing commentary back to myself, seeing the words appear before me like a close-up shot of a old fashioned type writer in action. I've been doing this my whole life, and while it has tapered back significantly in the past few years, it still happens a lot. Lately all I've been getting are turns of phrase like this one, barely fit for a bargain bin first novel.

However there is nothing of substance to write about lately. I'm working a ton, and I must admit it is a blast. At least once a day I'm typing or uploading or dragging-and-dropping and it just hits me like a freight train: I love what I do. There was a time when I thought I'd mostly be out of the web business by this age, but apparently I'm just getting started, and the extra cool thing is I'm really fucking good at it.

When I'm not working my brain spins overtime parsing this “he–loves–me / he–loves–me–not” drama, which is like something we've all seen on some network comedy somewhere, young career woman in city, focused on work but looking for love, with generous layers of sexual tension between her and the male lead. Except not as funny as that show you saw, and, unbelievably, more pathetic. They don't ultimately get together because he doesn't love her, and without the Ross and Rachael/Carrie and Mr. Big/Buffy and Angel on–again–off–again mess, the whole thing loses steam.

I'm trying to get that show canceled so I can move something else into that time. Maybe something educational. That would be good.

New design: 9.0, “Critical Darling, Commercial Flop”.

I also rewrote some of the About page, although I am throughly convinced that no one reads it but me. I've often said that this site functions as my memory, and in this context I must admit that the About page generally serves to remind me who I am. I find it comforting in a way that makes me feel guilty, because I'm enjoying my own writing too much. I feel it lacks some humility.

“Ultimately all you have are your experiences, and it's hard to write about that because if you do—”

“—everyone will know.”

“Exactly.” He took a long drag on his cigarette.

We sat side by side in silence for a full minute before I got the courage to speak up. “I used to write characters that were just thinly veiled versions of people I wanted to be. They had all the qualities I wished I had.”

“Fight Club syndrome.”

I turned to look at him.

“You know, ‘I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I do what I want to do’.”

I looked at the sidewalk between my feet and smiled. “Yeah, that was pretty much it.
“The problem was they were so perfect that they were never in peril.”

People have asked me many times how I could write about my whole life on the Internet. Anyone could read it! Dire consequences might follow! They want to know how I keep it safe, keep it secret: a website bearing my real name.

My answer is always the same; honestly, I have nothing to hide. I'm an adult, I'm responsible for myself, and I own my mistakes. For many years I've been the type to give direct answers to direct questions, and while there have been times where I might imply that I have more (or less) experience with certain things, on these pages I've been pretty straight with the ethereal out there. There never seemed to be any point in hiding that I'm a drunk, or overweight, or sometimes pretty fucking lonely. Besides, I believe that reading about my life is probably like watching Nascar: no one really wants to see anyone get hurt, but if it happens, no one wants to miss it either. Having to run across a university quad in broad daylight wearing only a bathrobe? Fantastic! Walking home alone, drunk, in the middle of the night? Well, it was a close call, but I got home okay. Finally being painfully rejected by a longtime crush? Learning experience. Hungover and puking on a public intersection at high noon, with cars all around? Comedy gold.

My humanity and ability to err are the things that have made my life interesting. In the past couple of years or so, however, things have gotten much less compelling on paper. Not bad, per se, but not as riveting as things might have been in my younger days. I spend much more time just chilling out, or talking to my friends, or working, and not getting into anything really resembling trouble. On the one hand it can be comforting to have things be so constant, on the other I've almost been waiting for something to happen to me, because while I can go back to many times in my adult life and read about how things were, I feel like I'm going to go back to this time in my life and find an empty hole, resembling in that way my life before high school, of which I remember very little.

And yet.

The past couple of weeks have been different. I've felt like someone else, and that Jenna is totally irresponsible, blows off work, doesn't keep in touch with family, and is at times dishonest. That Jenna does things that draw blood. This person that I am not has felt more alive than I ever feel, but also manic, crazy, and fantastically selfish. On the one hand I want to be more like this woman, and on the other, I wonder how long I might live if I let her truly run wild.

Lately I've done enthralling things, actions and thoughts that make for compelling, if not necessarily happy or comedic, reading. I composed the essays in my head one million times, tossing and turning in my bed, trying to wrap my head around who I might become if I don't keep this all in check. Then it hit me: I finally have some things that I need to hide. I can't, at this time, live my life in public the way I used to, so I can't vent, I can't work it all out for myself in essay form and publish it for the world to see. Let me tell you, for someone who has a years-old habit of living her life out in the open, having secrets is actually pretty fucking stressful.

A lot has happened and nothing has happened while I've been away, Internet. I did Christmas with the family, Charleston with my friends, said goodbye to the single most influential force in my life thus far, and met a dozen or so new and wonderful people.

Then I came back to Athens. And I've felt completely weird ever since. It's a feeling I always get in Charleston, which, being a city I don't particularly care for, has a tendency to throw me way out of my comfort zone on those extended stays. There is no good way to describe it other than I feel “off”. I expected it to release it's hold on me when I came home, but it's hung around in one way or another. This is only a hollow sinking feeling in my gut though. In reality, I own the motherfuckin Classic City. I have friends, regular haunts, a job where everyone digs my work, a swank apartment, and depression-wise, I'm feeling less episode-dy than I have in years. I get up everyday excited to get some shit done (after a shower and a few big gulps of a caffeinated beverage, anyway). It doesn't take every sheer ounce of will I have to make myself walk out and face the world in the morning. This is progress! Read More »

Self portrait by Kyle.

Do you ever go back and read something you wrote and wonder, what the hell was I thinking?

I'm not a failure
I could cry
It's art. Performance art. Ever evolving.

What does that mean?

"I'm tired of looking at myself. Why do I keep doing self portraits?"
- Chuck Close

Current Music: Jimi Hendrix - If 6 was 9

Today I walked around campus completely beat, questioning my will to go to class, cursing the hot sun and just wanting to lie down.

So of course now I'm just wide awake, ready to do lotsa creative things. My head is really just swimming with something, a buzz, a high of sorts, and of course, I have to get offline in a couple of minutes and try to to get some work done for history.

Hopefully the reading will be more entertaining and enlightening than the lecture. How I didn't fall asleep on Tuesday I do not know. Some act of the gods I'm sure.

I'm really looking to succeed this semester.

Someone who has been reading my journal told me I am a good writer today. Something to the effect of my mastery of the English language. It's given my all sorts of renewed confidence about the entertainment value of what I write. I could be a writer I think. Story lines are where I get stuck, is the only thing. I set up a conflict, then I knock it down about four chapters later, and without it, I don't know how to keep my story moving.

However, I feel I am on the brink of something great. I'm just trying to think about Science and Math and History and not my next great piece of (unfinished) fiction.

(I really should pick up some of those things I already did and rewrite them a little. It's just they all seem so.. hokey now.)

Of course, that leads us to the question: am I really meant for fiction at all?

Some things to think on.

Leave comments! They make my day, you have no idea.

Programming all summer has melted my brain.

I sit down to write, and not only can I not sit still for four seconds without parse errors going off in my head, but I have no real content of late. Just smartass comments and useless links and quiz results and nothing really. I could write about adventures in PHP programming but no one who reads this would even get it, and it's not even that exciting, really.

Previously, in such a dry spell, I just wouldn't post anything. If I wasn't feeling really passionate about something, there would just be no new entries. Granted, there were quiz results and smartass comments before but only interspersed with my actual words.

And that's when I realized: installing MT has completely changed the way I post. Interesting article? Link it! Silly graphic? Put it here! MT makes it far too easy. Which was fun for awhile. But I've got to stop. Or at least slow down. There has been one or more entries here everyday since I first installed it. Crazy.

I'm a link whore. I'm the #1 web whore, some say. And the more stuff you have up, the more stuff people have to read, and the more comments you have a chance of getting, the more active your site is, the more attention you get. I fucking love attention.

But then we get into the issue of quality versus quanity. Ben Brown wrote something more than two years ago that I just read today (I'm slowly making my way through his archives) that really made me think. Think about how I'm not really writing like I used to to, how I sorta just coast along on my cult status, by virtue of the fact that my friends like me, and will read my site regardless of there being anything worth reading.

I want to write about myself and my life but I have nothing to write about right now, so I'm going to try (even though I realize I won't be entirely successful) to stop being so trigger-happy with MT and wait for something to come to me, rather than updating every 20 minutes to keep my content fresh.

Case in point: you are still reading this, even though you haven't really read anything yet.

Lesson: Ben Brown can be more than just funny. He can also make you think.