Hakuna Matata

The cat pissed on the couch a few days ago, so I stripped everything down to wash what I could and soak the rest in vinegar. Not to be outdone, kitty went ahead and pissed on the bare cushions, making sure to really soak her precious lemonade through and into the unwashable parts of our furniture.

The roomies and I have been talking about throwing out the ruined cushions and just stuffing the pillowcases with old clothing. None of us are opposed to this, and it makes me realize how happy I am to live with people who are unwilling to get upset over ...well, pretty much anything. We could probably replace the couch if we really wanted to, but it would only be to appear less ghetto for anyone who comes over, since we spend most of our time lounging on comforters and pillows on the floor anyway. We seem comfortable there.

Which brings me to my next point; I like owning replaceable crap. Its not that I don't LIKE having nice things, I just don't like using my precious waking hours to acquire them and I enjoy even less worrying about making sure they're safe and well taken-care of, and making accommodations when I move. Most of the things I own are either hand-me-downs or acquired objects, and I can honestly say I don't feel I'm missing out on anything.
Quite the contrary! When I think about all the time I DON'T spend worrying about my shit, I get downright giddy.

Meta-blogging partie deux

So the whole point in this blogercise was to "find my voice", that is, something like what a conversation with myself would sound like. That in itself is not difficult, any verbose doo-dah can learn to slow down their thoughts fast enough to keep up on a keyboard; what I wanted was to practice organizing my thoughts, and possibly even thinking in a more organized way. My problem isn't slowing down to keep up on a keyboard, its slowing down enough to explain the jumps between points. Like a higher-level algebra problem (to me), the steps leading from one statement to the next makes perfect sense when explained logically, but in my unexplored thought-tundra, the steps never need explaining and are thus rarely addressed.

That second step, coming down from my tower for a closer look at the gritty mechanics of my own thinking, has been a humiliating experience as I keep coming up against impassable moats filled with my own half-articulated refuse. I feel awkward and clumsy and I find it difficult not to express myself in prepopularized sentiments, not to imitate my favorite writers. I'm outraged at my own unoriginality. I got by in college with a bland writing style by just being really precise and functional, but those techniques don't adapt well to expression. I'm really embarrassed at how unrefined my communication skills are, but as I've said before, improvement in this area can only happen through practice.

My high school lit. teacher was wise to forbid us to read anything the first half of the year while we were building our writing fundamentals. I've been compiling a list of liabilities I've become aware of in my writing, and rules I try to follow to lessen the danger of sounding stupid. For example, I have a tendency to actually describe what I'm thinking and feeling rather than saying it. "XYZ make me feel" is a sentence I've deleted about 12 times since starting this post. Since realizing this, I'm simply not allowed to describe things like feelings objectively, I have to work to convey them in an accurate and genuine way. Its going to be hard but satisfying to internalize.

I don't feel unintelligent, just unintelligible. No wonder so many people feel misunderstood and unloved; its not because they are unworthy of attention and affection, they're just fail to realize how grossly they're failing to convey their important emotional innards.