The Lazy Procrastinator

To start off the first post of my (hopefully) up-to-date photography section, there couldn’t be any better subject than my mother.  On a overcast day in Florida, my mother and her boyfriend Rick drove roughly seven hours to Orlando from Ft. Walton Beach to shop at the “greatest store on earth” aka IKEA.  Why would she do a crazy thing like that, you ask?  Well, it saved her some money on buying lamps.  Twenty-two lamps to be exact, for a secret project that will soon be revealed to the public.  Unfortunately, when they arrived at IKEA they found out that they had been lied to, and the lamps that they wanted were not in stock.  So they had to settle for the second best: a bell-shaped hanging lamp.  After the lamps, we spent another hour in that store, among the throngs of contemporary furniture buyers.

With 22 lamps, a framed photograph of lighthouses, and somethings else I can’t remember tucked away in the back of Rick’s truck, I took the opportunity to snap this picture of my mother.  The unfortunate thing is that you are not able to see the UCF shirt she is wearing or the permanent marker addition of “‘Mom” she wrote on the shirt.

See you on Christmas, Mom!

My mother at IKEA after driving seven hours to buy 22 lamps.

NOTE: Inline photo isn’t working

I’ve never liked the way my handwriting looked, except on a few occasions when I would find a perfectly sharpened pencil, but never with a pen.  Often my penmanship would look large and bulky and I’ve even tried different lettering such as block lettering that my father does.  But unfortunately, nothing seemed to fit me.  Today I discovered a new way to write and so far I’m liking it, but it will take some getting use to, to kill old habits.  So far this only works with a gel pen since it requires me to write lightly and not bully the pen to the paper.  Before I use to hold the pen tightly near the business end with my middle finger close to the tip, but now I have decided to write with a light grip around the top portion of the pen with my index and middle finger rested casually in the middle.  This small change has changed my handwriting from large and bulky to small and Book Antiqua-like.

Also, I’ve decided to stop typing my short stories.  Instead, I will write them by hand and then transcribe them onto a computer whenever they are finished. Typing has become too efficient and worst of all, convenient.  Efficiency often focuses on quantity and not quality, while convenience often leads to complacency.  Mix these two together and you quickly welcome yourself  to ruining anything that could be beautiful.   I want to take the time to perfect the art in order to create something unique and timeless and not be tempted by the likes of the modern assembly line.

It amazes me how some writers seem to have their whole world in their minds. They can see every detail as if they were there, they know what their characters are feeling and why. I have not been able to achieve this, I have no clue what any of my characters are thinking or why they are doing what they are doing. I’m not even sure they know what they’re doing.

I’ve started reading “A Wild Sheep Chase” by Haruki Murakami and I must say that he will probably become one of my favorite writers. I was introduced to him by him in an article he wrote for the New Yorker about how he use to spend just a few hours a night writing at 3 a.m., just after closing his jazz club that he owned at such a young age. I try to imagine this young Japanese man, crouched over a small linoleum kitchen table in the middle of the night, writing this novel for no other reason than trying to write a novel.

I often try to compare myself to other writers. Can I do what they have done or is it too late? I look at their backgrounds and compare them to mine. Do I have what it takes to be a writer? I try to grab hints that they throw out so innocuously here and there about how they write or when they write. Is there a formula, am I doing it right? I search for their answers to the perfect place to write. Where should I write? Do I need to write in a bookstore or a café?

I do not write after a tiresome day. I do not write on a schedule or have any order at all. I don’t sit crouched over a flimsy kitchen table every night and jot down my prose. Will I ever make it if I don’t?

All I do know is that every day I doubt myself and every day at some time or another, I write.

I’m doing you all a favor, 10 years from now when you hear that I have won the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism you’re going to be glad I gave you this link to print out and frame:

First Ever Brand New Feature Story ever written by me!

That was published of course.  There are tons of other stories I’ve written that won’t see light out of the Targét bags I put them in.

This story was actually pretty easy to research and write, but maybe that’s apparent when you read it.  But I had fun doing it.  I got to interview an interesting young person who has so many doors opened for her that it kind of makes you sick!  Not to mention she gets to travel to another country for no other reason than her own research.  But she was very kind to sit down for 20 minutes and answer a few questions.  I also got to find out that my cellphone can sometimes double perfectly as a speakerphone, which some people on the other line don’t find too comforting.

Even though my story is being printed as we speak and will soon be out around campus for bored college students who pick up the newspaper every Monday and Thursday to re-fill their illegal hedgehog cage, I’m not really feeling as ecstatic as I should be and there are reasons for that, but for now I’ll keep that to myself.

I’ve made it a goal of mine to be reading something everyday for the rest of my life. This doesn’t mean I have to be physically reading a book everyday but there has to be, at the very least, a book sitting on my bedside table waiting to be picked up again. So whenever I finish a book, I’m in the bookstore hours later picking up a new one. But now I’ve come to that line where I have read every book that I’ve had my eyes on. Which has given my weakening little bookshelf a wide variety of flavor of classics, contemporary, scientific, and spiritual writings. Over the horizon is nothing but the heavy classics: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Dickens, Bronte, and of course, the Greeks and Romans.

These books have always interested me and I will get to experience their memorable prose and life lessons in due time, but at this point, I just don’t know if I can provide the motivation to get through War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, or Great Expectations. I’m not at a total loss though. I still have Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Kerouac to keep me company before I choose to tackle the above-mentioned.

But I have to have something. So which book did I choose after finishing my latest? Another classic, The Great Gatsby. Supposedly, everybody has read this book sometime before they graduated high school. Well, almost everybody.