Day 33

My parents visited today, which was awesome. At the same time, it was a little hard to concentrate. Hard to make eye contact. Basically, it was hard to actually be there, in that room, in the present, because their presence had me imagining the future when we won't see each other across a table in a sterile room, but we can actually sit down and talk. And at the same time, that reminded me that - in fact - I was still in PPD, in my faded violet shirt and scrubs. We talked about the future, about when I get out, about the Renaissance School next year. It was good, and I'm glad they came, and I was definitely in a good mood when they left. I just... was distracted. Too much going on to stay focused on anything for more than 10 seconds. Maybe I'm just ADD.

Lets see, I also read If Grace is True today, which I'm still thinking about quite a bit. I won't write about it though.

At my request, my parents brought me a notebook. I think I can easily incapsulate my recent struggle over the source of beautiful writing (which I pursued by trying to figure out what made beautiful writing different from practical writing) by describing where I write stuff. For most of my college experience, most anything I have written "creatively" I have started in a spiral-bound notebook and eventually transfered to a computer to be finished and polished. By the way, when I say "creatively", I mean created with a hope for and intentional pursuit of beauty over functionality. Most of my stories and poems were written in the margins around lecture notes and my notebooks are always very messy. A few pages of lecture notes, a few pages of sketches and doodles, an incomplete story, a few pages of personal reflection about something that was bothering me at the time. Studying lecture notes for a test was as much a review of everything that had happened to me and mattered to me in the past semester as it was a review of the important information, because my class information was tough to separate from everything else that I wrote. And every time I studied I found a story idea or poem prompt that I liked.

In the past year or so, as I have become more serious about the intentionality of that creation, I've tried to move away from that messy setup. For one thing, I have always wanted to write a journal so that I can look back on it later and know what an idiot I was then and how much wiser I am now. I also like to write because the act of writing about my day seems to focus my thoughts excellently, but I wanted an actual journal I could save and refer back to, and my messy spiral notebooks were not the austere image I wanted to present to my future self. Not to mention the educational value of only taking notes when I should be taking notes, and only reviewing those notes when I should be reviewing those notes. Also, I wanted a place to write creatively, intentionally, putting aside my school and inner dramas and writing something separate.

So, I've had journals for years, mostly blank, gifts from someone who thought I should be writing, but in the past year, I started writing quite a bit in my spirals, and maybe 4 months ago, I picked up one of my old journals and have gradually tried to get in the habit of writing in that instead of in my spiral notebook. I also bought a little unlined notebook that says "The Poet's Notebook" on the front, which looked cool, so I bought it. Inside the front cover of the "Poet's Notebook" it says, "Carry this around with you everywhere. Never have it out of reach, so that when you have something to write, you can write it immediately. When you can't think of anything to write, go back through your Poet's Notebook and find something you started but couldn't finish at the time and see if it strikes you now."

I got to the point near the end of last semester when I would sit in class during the 10 minutes after I had sat down but before the professor would arrive with three, count them, three, notebooks in front of me. My spiral, my journal, and my poetry book. I would be writing in my journal, then jump over to my poetry book for a while before the professor walked in and I would switch to my spiral. Now besides looking ridiculous, that works pretty good sometimes. But most of the time, I open up my journal with the thought, "Right now, I am going to write journal stuff," but that stuff didn't really interest me at the time. Or, what happens even more, I open up my poetry book with the thought, "Right now, I am going to write something... pretty."

A week ago, I was talking on the phone, and someone was giving me phone numbers, so I clicked my pen to write. Then I looked back and forth between my poetry book and my journal (the only two books I brought with me into PPD) with a little bit of alarm, wondering where I should write down phone numbers! I ended up opening Microsoft Word on the computer and typing them there.

This is what happens inevitably. I quit writing poetry or journal because I'm not sure what fits into each category and end up getting on the computer, ideally to write, but actually to browse the internet, and whatever I might write doesn't actually come from me, flowing through my fingers. (Yes, I'm old-fashioned about pen and paper. More old-fashioned than my parents.)

So now, wonderfully, I have a thick spiral-bound notebook. And do you know what I'm going to do with it? Everything. It's going to be wonderful. When someone gives a number, I'm going to write it there. When I listen to audiobooks, I will doodle on the pages and write down words I hear that sound cool or I don't know. (I hate to admit that most of my college notes consist of words I hear that sound cool or I don't know.) If, while I am doodling, one of those cool-sounding new words lends itself easily to another word that pops into my head and something starts to form itself on the page, I will make space for it and see what happens. And this notebook will be butt-ugly: smeared and torn and ragged and completely unorganized.

I know I'm only 21, but maybe I'm already too old a dog to learn this new trick. I'm coming into my senior year at UT, I guess how I've taken notes - how I have interacted with the world around me - for the past three years is just going to have to work. Like I said earlier, maybe I'm just a little ADD. I have heard more than once that my notebooks look like the work of someone who doesn't concentrate all too well.

So, it's 9:17 now. I have an hour and twelve minutes until snack and then a little over an hour until bedtime. I think I'm going to go listen to an audiobook and doodle in my notebook.