in a sea black with ink

i can't write. no, i can. i just don't like it. these blogs are the closest i come to writing (aside from impulsive, wordy text messages...the stuff i write for work doesn't count), and although i think about writing every day, i can't bring myself to do it. it bores the hell out of me, unless there's a point...and/or a deadline. but not like a right-now kind of deadline...one i can see off in the distance and ignore until the last minute.

whenever i do write for myself, it's always on some sort of disposable medium...notepads i discard as soon as i'm finished filling them with half-sentences and lists, pieces of paper i fill with words and then write on top of until they're completely illegible, napkins, random pages in random notebooks...whenever i do come across something i've written in the past (be it half an hour or 22 years ago), i'm always surprised that i'm the one who wrote it. and yet i have a crate of half-filled journals that i've written in over the years and yet know i'll never go back and read.

the thing is, i don't plan on reading those things...they were all exorcistic in nature and i want to throw them away, but there's something that won't let me...and yet keeping them around is almost more of a liability. we all know the trauma that reading someone else's mind would cause, yet when faced with a crate full of someone's innermost thoughts and no one around, it's hard to believe that personX wouldn't sneak a page or two, even if what was read was from X years ago. this very thing being against my nature (principles?), i used to be naive enough to think people wouldn't do that, but i know better now...from experience. and so i can't tell if i'm scared to write, or if it is that it actually bores me. my thoughts are too scattered and often i feel like my hand can't keep up...or write the right way to get it all down, i don't know.

When i was in college...and even afterwards, i would write term papers for money. it was easy for me, and the money was good, but i think i did it mostly because i knew i wanted to write, and now that there were parameters and someone else's grade on the line, i had a goal. i had my focus. as much as i charged, the money was never worth what i put into it...and i could never admit that i committed as much as i did to those papers because although i knew i could get away with a lot less (i know i did with the papers i wrote for myself), i wanted to write something kick-ass. The literary analysis i did for this girl my senior year ended up being one of the greatest papers i ever wrote, and one of the most exhilarating and engrossing things i ever researched...and my biggest regret is that i don't have a copy.

why is it that these seemingly sterile term papers captivate me more than the stack of journals filled with my own thoughts do? why is it that i'd rather spend the evening conversing with a friend than i would sitting and writing the same things i would say, but more? i think it's the give-and-take.

writing irritates me b/c either it's completely internal or you have to hand it to someone and say "read this, please." and for most people, that's kind of heavy...and weird. especially if it's musings like this or personal thoughts. so what can you expect someone to say? right. at least in the course of conversation you can expect someone to dispute or add to something you say. with writing, it's just you. you vs. you. and to me, me vs. me is boring. and 90% of anybody who bothered to read even the beginning of this blog probably got bored a long time ago, further proving whatever point i wasn't even close to making (although i'm sure it doesn't help that i ignore capitalizing letters and believe that ellipses are the most supreme form of punctuation).

See, and here's the part where i have more to say, but i'm tired of writing.