Words are good and fun and stuff

Oh wow! It's been a whole month since I've written a blog post, and that's not because I suddenly got a life. No, I've just been busy writing my fictional story about a real live 15 year old me, set at the end of 1995. I'm 91 pages in... and nowhere near an ending. It would be all that and a bag of chips, if I were to get it published one day in book form. That would be like the greatest thing since sliced bread. I have so many thoughts running through my head right now, this will probably be a very random blog, but that's not saying much, because many of mine are. I try to get a theme going, though, in most. So, no segway here but, it's obvious if you know me at all, that I LOVE TV. Like love it love it. Almost 100% of my conversations with my Dad are about the shows we watch, and we watch a lot of the same shows, he watches almost everything I do. I got my love of TV from him, and if he were a deadbeat Dad who never got a job and never provided for us, and I in turn were not a college grad with an actual job providing for myself completely and utterly 100% on my own, well... then I would say "lay off the TV and get a life already." But he is not those things, and I am a productive member of society, so I think we're fine. The Walking Dead is our favorite show. He is totally going with me to the "Walker-Stalker con" in March (yes that is really what it's called). To prove how much I used to be scared of zombies and refused to watch it for years (I just watched all the seasons last summer) I had nightmares just from watching Zombieland. Yeah that's right, it's a comedy and meant to poke fun at it. Well, needless to say, I gave in and am now the biggest Walking Dead fan ever. I am even making a T-shirt to wear at the event that says "Beth is not dead." Just in the hopes that Emily Kinney will give me a thumbs-up, as I pass by her. I'm such a dork, I know, it's been established. It is the best written show there has ever been or will ever be. It is perfection, even if they kill off characters I like. But enough about The Walking Dead. So there's this other show called Hindsight and it basically is about a woman who wakes up back in 1995 the day of her first wedding and is able to make different choices in her life and yada-yada. What's cool about it, besides being a pretty well-written show and the only scripted show to hit VH1, thus being the only show I've watched on VH1, with the exception of that "I love the 80s" show I watched years and years ago, that talked about the great fun things from my childhood and other things I had only vaguely heard about, because I was too young to really know about them. So what's cool about Hindsight, is that I'm able to get some more ideas of awesome 90s stuff for my story. Like for instance clothes and music. What was fun to see in the first 3 episodes thus far, is that I have already claimed several songs they've thrown in, as my own in my story. It's kinda neat that I start my 1995 story just before this one came out. It's like I'm "trendy" or "popular" for the first time ever. Ok, and the 3rd and final TV reference I'll make in this blog is to the HBO show Girls. I've watched all the seasons, but so far I like this one the best because they seem a bit less whiny and trying to "grow up" and join the real world more. I was too young to relate to Sex and the City when it came out and too old for Girls, but at least I had Felicity, which was on when I was in college as well, although I didn't start watching it till it's last season and then went back and started from the beginning. REALLY great show, by the way. But I can't go into that now, I said I was on my last show reference... and I lied. So in Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham, writer, creator ect), is also a writer in the show. She's at this college for a writing program, kinda like a Masters I'm guessing. Everyone has so much to say about her writing (not good stuff), and it definitely makes me never want to take a writers workshop, unless I can just give my writing to a teacher-like older person and they can email me their critiques. I don't think I could ever read my writings out loud to a group of fellow writers and have them tell me how flawed, or weak or immature or whatever they want to say it is. My writing is deeply personal (despite being out there on the internet for anyone to read). I don't welcome comments, unless to say you love it, and that's the way I like it. So will I ever get my "1995" story of a 15 year old girl discovering her true self when she meets a girl that opens new doors for her and changes her life forever, published? Probably not. But that's ok. I share it with those I trust and who I don't think would be weirded out by young love of a lesbian nature. These friends are few and far between, but maybe one day I'll share it with more.... lesbians probably, but maybe the world. Who knows. Everyone always says "Do what you love," and I believe it. They didn't say "you'll get paid to do what you love," and that's got to be ok with you. What I love is writing. As awesome as it would be to make a ton of money on one book so that I could quit my job and really focus all my time and energy on writing more, that's probably not going to happen. I'm not Lena Dunham. That's alright. In my 1995 story, the character Christie is me, totally me at 15. I have a different family and live in a different state, to make it more interesting and a change from how I grew up, but I love that my personality and what I loved and wore and listened to and watched, is all me. I remember my senior year of high school I chose to take a girls ensemble class, despite already being in Choir, over taking a writing class. I didn't have the ability to take more "extracurricular" classes than those. I had already dropped band, after playing the clarinet since the 6th grade, I suddenly stopped senior year. Didn't even want to finish that last year. I was done. I always regretted not taking that Creative Writing class, though. Where could I be now if I had taken it? Maybe nowhere. Maybe I'd still be the same exact person I am. I knew I was going to Baylor. I knew my strength was working with children. I had done it since I was 12 years old, practically still a child. So, that class might not have made a bit of difference other than being fun for me. But maybe, as it will in my 1995 story, it spurred me on to apply for a writing program with a college, which leads to an internship at a publishing company. Maybe I become a junior copywriter, and then who knows what. I don't really know the whole process anyway, I'm not completely sure what a copywriter does in the first place, I've just heard that word in movies. But my point is, in a story you can be anything. You can HAVE anything. If you think it up, it's yours. I love writing like that. I hope I can keep writing till I'm old and gray. I hope they develop technology that can take my thoughts as an old lady and put them in print form on a computer, so I don't even have to talk or type. One of the best things about writing is being able to go back and read what you were thinking at one point in time. I have a journal (one of many), from 1995, from a trip to Centrifuge (a Christian camp my church youth group went to in North Carolina). The whole trip was 10 days long, and I wrote everyday in it. I'm so glad I did that. To be able to go back and read about every little thing I did there, how I was feeling, what cool popular older kid talked to me that week instead of being the invisible girl I was most of the time; all that is priceless. I could never remember all that, but I don't' have to, it's in the pink journal with the cat on the cover that looked like my cat Oreo, that my Mom got me right before we left. I first started journaling the previous summer, in 1994. That June I broke my leg on my 13th birthday. It was the worst thing to happen to me in my entire life up to that point and was quickly followed by the 2nd worst thing- my best friend moved out of state like a week after I broke it. She was the same friend that was there when I broke it and I distinctly remember her trying to climb into the ambulance to go with me, but of course they weren't going to let a 13 year old girl ride in an ambulance. It was all so surreal. I felt like I had left my body and was watching it happen to someone else. My leg was dangling in my hand when I lifted it after I fell on it. I knew it was broken, I heard it snap. It didn't hurt right then, because I was in shock, but later at the hospital I pushed the morphine drip till it wouldn't give me any more. I had broken my left femur in half. Like half half. Seriously, I wish I had the X-ray, the bone was side by side. I still have the steel rod though, that they put in and left in for about a year. And I still have that 6 inch scar on my left hip where they went in to put it in and take it back out after my leg had fused itself back together again. After that happened and my best friend moving, the 3rd worst thing happened, I couldn't go to my first youth camp, having just finished the 7th grade, which triggered events that led to my other 2 best friends from my grade at church, to bond further to each other and forget I existed for the better part of our teens. It's alright though, I made new friends eventually. I even reconnected with one of them towards the end of High School. But the best thing, the only good thing to come out of it was that, that was the summer I started journaling. Sure I'd written many stories I made up or even a "Dear diary, I had pizza today at school" type of writing in the previous years, but it wasn't until this huge life change and set-back (at least for a 13 year old girl who church was her entire life and to miss out on the first youth camp! That was just unacceptable); that I began to really write down my deepest feelings and emotions. I haven't re-read them in years, I can't remember much now, but I still have it, and it most likely had to do with losing friends. To a 13 year old girl, friends are everything, there really isn't anything else. Especially this girl who didn't have crushes on boys or think they were cute at all. So in the end it all worked out. Maybe I wouldn't had started writing, in a deep way, if it hadn't been for that leg break. Or maybe it wouldn't have come till much later. Writing is so powerful. It's why I'm pulled to really well-written TV shows, and how I despise reality shows, to the point that I weep for humanity as their brains are turned to mush from this horribly stupid and pointless nonsense of people competing for "true love" and slapping each other and getting drunk just so they can yell some more at each other, because people who are sober don't yell as much. And don't even get me started on SpongeBob. This is destroying the brains of our children... and the adults that they grow into and continue to watch it, as it seems to have been on since the beginning of time. But anywho, I digress. I love to share my writing. My blog is for everyone and my other stories are for the few, but really just one person who consistently asks to read more and always tells me how much she loves my writing, because I write in such detail that she can actually see everything that is happening. Even just sharing it with one person, makes me feel good. There's a difference between writing for yourself (your emotions and struggles and pain and hopes and dreams), and writing so someone else can read it. It makes it more real. If just one person reads it, it makes you feel not invisible in this world of too much information. There's far too many books, blogs, articles to read. It would be impossible to read them all, even if you wanted to. But I don't know, there's just something about knowing that you're known by someone else, in this way, through the words you've written. It's special. It makes me feel alive and I'm grateful for this person and she knows who she is. She's read every blog and several things I've written. She'll be reading this very blog as well, probably in the next day or two. As my eyes are starting to droop, the time has come to end. Sometimes it's difficult to end. Sometimes my body fails my mind. There's always more to say. Again, it would be awesome if I could think my thoughts and have them typed out for me on my computer. That would be the coolest thing ever and needs to be invented now. Before I start to unravel and make much less sense than I probably already am now, I will end this blog post. I will stop writing. Tonight. Not forever. Never forever. Long live writing.