I knew that this day was coming, but that doesn't make it any easier now that it's here

Ze Frank finished The Show today.

It is very difficult to explain how this feels to someone who didn't watch it.

One person on the forums said it was like all of us had been dating him. For 3 - 5 minutes a day we would listen and he would talk. He'd tell us his thoughts, his hopes, his fears. Things that inspired him and things that annoyed him. How he felt about people in Starbucks knowing it was his birthday. How he felt when random crap got him down.

The other amazing part of it was the community. Being a sports racer, being a fabuloso. Knowing that there are people out there who have been touched the same way you have. Knowing that the community would do things for its members, like when a guy went across continental USA using only sports racers for transport. Playing collaborative chess with all sorts of people and learning more about chess than I could digest. Playing in the ORG, 'you are not alone'. Avoiding being a hard charger. Remembering the initial drive to show Ze to as many people as possible.

Wanting to find other sports racers in the future, just to share that feeling again.

Not wanting to let it go.

Thankyou, Ze.

No Effort

There always seems to be such a very big gap between the things that I daydream about and my everyday life. I do not have any real fear of the future, or of change, or of dying without achieving anything by which society will supposedly measure what sort of a person I was. My fears swirl around living a life in which my dreams are more pleasant than my reality. Where the what-ifs and the might-have-beens take up more space in my memory than the things I did. So I am afraid of dreaming about things that might never happen. Things like being an author, since it is so easy to imagine never ending up as an author. In some ways the issue is that all I'd have to do is do nothing and my life would end up living itself and being empty and meaningless.

I also wish I could fly.

Lifeshapes

Are you happysad? We have this brief moment, pointpoint, timetime, nothing else.
Is that enough?
Are we chasing the horizon or is there a goal? Define a culture by consumption by excess by decadence by ondemand whenyouwantit asmuchasyoucanafford. No wonder it gets heady when it ends. Hard to tell. The finality of choices make it fragile. Long moments endure. Hold them. Choose them.

Retcons You Won't Notice

Alright, alright.

It was silly of me to delete my blog while in an excessively morbid mood.
Instead of self-harm I moved onto hurting things I can't get back.

Of course I forget that RSS readers hold onto things and so thankyou Blessi for making me realise I wanted it back and Jess for showing me it still existed. There, I've just thanked 100% of my readership so this should be a new period of popularity and harmony, right?

I made changes. I couldn't not make changes. In some places a title is shorter, in some places I dropped off paragraphs that were good to write but not so good to read. Notably absent; the Adventures of Norman. I haven't decided how to move forward with that so I'll hold off on re-posting until I've decided. They still exist, anyway.

It's something of a coincidence that I restored my blog today. I realised as I was forging the dates of the original posts that it's been almost a year since I started up here. It doesn't feel like a year at all, but I don't know if it feels like more or less. I had my last undergraduate lecture on Tuesday. Hilariously, I skipped it. It wasn't actually that hilarious. I often let style re-arrange what I want to say so that it sounds better. I'm a writer, I'm allowed.

I have an essay due on Monday and one due in two weeks, and I have an exam next week and another a few weeks later. After that I can justifiably add B.BSc (Psych) to the end of my name, well, assuming that I pass. I will do honours eventually. I'm partly writing that so that if I look back in the future, having not done honours, I'll get this little pang of regret, like so, 'pang!'

It's odd, I miss uni already. I guess it's because I remember school and I realise how fun and silly it all was, and I didn't realise until afterwards, this time I am anticipating feeling that way already.

I'm reading James Joyce at the moment. I read Dubliners a few years ago, and then recently I bought Ulysses and A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. I was a bit bummed out when I did because I found out that what I was attempting with Norman not only has already been thought of, but was thought of basically a century ago, and resulted in a novel much, much better than anything I can write at the moment. That's partly why I'm disenchanted with Norman for now, I feel as though he was just made into a photocopy even though I didn't know the details of Ulysses until recently. It doesn't mean abandoning it, it just means I need to re-think it and put more of myself in it. Joyce is incredible for infusing his writing with both a great sense of the zeitgeist of Ireland of his era and an amazing ability to get across such nuances of character with such trivial phrases. Stepping back from the writing itself, the structure is amazing. I don't know if he wrote it to a plan or put it together as it went along, but it's really something, it feels like the literature equivalent of singing in harmony.

Enough! Suffice to say that secrets remain claustrophobic.


Peace.

Changes

It's amazing how easy it was, actually. I just removed the bits that were terrible.