Merry May
This is the month. I can feel it. Things haven’t been bad, but they’ve been stagnant. A change is gonna come, oh, yes it is.
I’m feeling renewed without the extra weight I’ve been carrying, and can’t wait to feel the beach air in my hair. I’m going to work harder, celebrate harder, and look back at the May of it all and say “Damn, THAT was when it all happened.”
You Mean I’m Not on TV?
I feel like making a fort tent and not emerging for quite some time. I want to roll around in it and laugh hysterically (like this - maybe even Elmo can be there). I want to revert to my childhood while still being an adult.
It’s not that I’ve had some kind of mental break (completely) or that I didn’t do what I said I was gonna do yesterday (I did), but this whole job search fiasco has just gotten to the point where I feel like employers are purposefully not responding to test my sanity. “Yes, you’ve got the job, but only if you can withstand MONTHS of non-communication first!”
It helps when our parents network for us, when our friends tell us to just keep looking, when that too-good-to-be-true job pops up on Monster.com, but it doesn’t solve the problem. We, all of us, still want what we were bred to believe we would have.
Here’s the thing: we were told that we could do whatever we want.
A Modern Day Fairytale
Once upon a time, there was a man who made a girl feel like she wasn’t worthy of his standards. Sometimes she would do something to anger him, sometimes she would do nothing and that would anger him, too. Sometimes she would do things her own way instead of his. This too would infuriate him. Sometimes she would try, sometimes she wouldn’t. They would both upset him to no end. Even though she had long ago accepted who he was, he had never accepted her. She could see that just because he wasn’t loyal didn’t mean he was a bad person. He couldn’t see that just because she didn’t take his anger in stride didn’t mean she was an enemy. She just thought that she should stand up for herself and for her, and for her, and for her, too.
On another day of anger for the man, the girl decided that she was done. She couldn’t be a friend to someone who so rejected all the ideas of friendship. She couldn’t be anyone other than herself. She escaped through a window she had created with her own two hands.
The girl and her character rode off into the sunset, sad to say goodbye to the angry man they longed to befriend, to help. They rode off into independence, freedom, and happiness. They think of that man from time to time in his castle of darkness, surrounded by those the girl had tried to give a voice to, but she and her self will never go back there again.
The process of writing cannot be juggled with another occupation. The job of creating cannot be compartmentalized with certain hours devoted to one kind of creation and other hours set aside for still another. Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it. I succumbed to it.
—
Rod Serling
Amen, dude. I guess I have many more years of this to look forward to.
