To be what I want to be. . .

There is so much between me, right here right now, and me, two and a half years from now on my graduation as a Journalist that anything can happen. I am currently procrastinating on two papers I have to write to write here, but I need this little break. With Jack Johnson on my earphones, I am writing really mellow papers anyway.

I love writing. In High School, I used to like writing essays--even though I said I didn't because no one else did. Now I look back and I know that I was lying. John Steinbeck puts it best in East of Eden when he notes that all writers are liars. We like to lie and hope we get something out of it. When I told this to my friend Brianna, she replied that (paraphrased) it wasn't true because things that we write have symbolism, which represent true things. I replied that we are master liars then, because the best type of lies are half-truths.

Apart from my ability to lie on paper, there is some truth to the lie that I disliked writing essays. Halfway through any essay and the play and two books I'm writing I get the feeling that I don't want to write anymore, that it's too much. Somehow I picture myself in fifty years or so filing for retirement with Huck Finn's closing words about writing books (applied to being a journalist): ". . . if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't agoing to no more."

A little homesick...

I was skimming through my high school pics, and I see a really skinny me smiling around with people who I thought I would be friends with forever. But man, I have only kept in touch with a handful of them, and sometimes even Keene seems like it is a town I don't fully remember, it has changed so much.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days when "shut up" was a bad word.
When, after a fight, everything would go back to normal by the next day at the latest.
When popping a weelie ("did you see it?! I went like two feet on one wheel!") was the ultimate test of manliness.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to the times when the hardest decision I had to make was whether to get a cheeseburger or chicken nuggets at McDonald's.