nonassignment blurb

It seems behind each word we say, speak, and write is a complex, non-linear superstorm of detonated synapses sparking off into forever.  They collide with others and among themselves and conflict,  connect and mold new meaning, or die off, and it doesn't seem to stop, ever, because we're always saying or thinking something, whether amongst company or by oneself with all of the different faces of the psyche, in the dark room behind our eyes where the sparks flash brightest.

Writing snapshots

I

At any time between 7:11am and 2:21pm, my middle-to high school day.  The small desk with the hollow bottom and the varnish with the strength of stone far too close to me, carved into by past scribblers.  It's exceedingly quiet, enough to hear the air conditioning humming through the ceiling.  It's SSR (silent selected reading), but my forehead's on the edge of the desk and my body's bent to hide the marble composition notebook laid out on my lap.  My open book is settled in the hull of the desk just in case the teacher comes by.  I smell paper and the acrid clean smell of blue Pilot rolling ball ink.  The words on the page are all tall and awkward, yet small, and once there's more of them they are uniform.  I'm writing a dialogue between the castle stable boy and an elite fire mage about to set out on a quest.  The margins of the page are filled with little symbols of elements, like flames and leaves and thunderbolts, teardrops.  Manga-style eyeballs and a random Pikachu face.  As I come to the end of the page my handwriting gets awkward, and I triumphantly mark the page number in the top right corner and turn it.

II

Uncomfortably warm, and my arm is going numb from leaning on my side, dominating the keyboard with my right hand while my left thumb spaces.  Quantum Leap is whining low from my little TV, but the glare from the window makes the picture invisible.  My old white box computer sits on an old coffee table next to my closet, cuddled up to the bed.  The word processor's background is screen-of-death blue, and the letters are blocky and yellow.  Everything takes a while to do on this machine but the writing goes fast, but a freeware RPG is open in another tab, waiting to be summoned if someone walks through to go to the den.  My hamster died months ago, but I haven't removed the empty tank from my room yet, and the smell makes me think of hay.  Four sisters escape a pseudo-Spain for the safety of the youngest, putting their trust in a sailor who doesn't trust them.

III

I open my history textbook and marvel at the large complication of it.  It's made bulkier by the paper bag I have taped around it to keep the cover safe.  When Mr. Crosby isn't looking I put my marble composition book open on top of the current page and tilt the textbook towards me, and continue on about the siege of the temple Firadra, a long forgotten dungeon beneath the quiet town of Bracos.  As my protagonist teeters along narrow walkways cradled by lava toward the altar, my attention drifts in and out to the lecture, nodding and looking profound at the appropriate times, gathering just enough to know what's happening should he catch me unaware, and then I proceed.  The boy next to me is dipping his head into his arms.  It's only 11:43, and the flourescent bulbs along with the natural sunlight streaming in make everything overbright and skewed.  If Crosby catches him, he'll come over and slam the paddle on his desk, so I carve each word zealously, ever-ready to flip the page and start bogus notes on Henry Ford and the assembly line.  It's much more effort than it's worth, but I do it anyway.

Thoughts on my research project

At this point, I have fallen a fair bit behind on my blog posts and I'm trying my best to catch back up.  This blog is supposed to be about what I might be interested in doing for my research project for 5030.
Even with this delayed post, I'm still not quite certain, and yet I have a multitude of ideas.  After my conference with Dr. Chandler and listening back on our interview tape, I think I might like to explore emotional engagement to writing.  This morning I read an article on the emotional engagement to reading, and how it helps readers become more empathetic in their daily lives.  I understand this wholeheartedly--throughout my life, I feel that my internal code of conduct has been pieced together not just through my personal life experience, but also through the things I've read--the things I was emotionally attached to as a reader and heroes/heroines I wanted to aspire to in reality, etc.  Stories like Lang's fairy books, the poems of the Tao te Ching, Tamora Pierce's fiction, Calvin and Hobbes--all and more shaped how I look at the world and how I want to be a part in it.

Osmosis through reading, we've agreed in class, is one of the primary ways we learn writing that does not necessarily connect to academia.  So, I would like to approach this thought from another direction--how do we become emotionally invested in writing?  Is this too created by reading, or other factors?

As an avid writer of fiction stories, I often (admittedly) hurry through my daily routines just to get back to the page, just to tell my story, much like the way I would hurry to Crunchyroll to catch up on my favorite anime or sneak a few pages of the book I'm currently reading between train stops.  It doesn't matter to me if what I'm writing will prove unusable later; what matters is that I need to write it and I get somewhat cranky if I can't manage to get back to it reasonably soon.  It's play that I can call work with a somewhat straight face.  It's familiar and it's sensual and it's stimulating and calming at once.

But what gets me this way?  I found that I've relied on writing since I was little to sustain me when everything else was unsustainable. Currently I'm working on a scene where my protagonist meets his future foster aunt on a lonely rainy road, but she's trapped beneath a fallen limb.  It's challenging, but exciting to find just the right words to make this scene click when it begins and ends so differently.  His nostalgia for the life he's running away from might come from my constant moving around in life, the familiar being taken away, but then the hope of change and the freedom that new surroundings bring.  I'm emotionally invested.

 Is the love of writing born out of some level of suffering, only meant for healing?  I'm not sure I would agree with that.  There's something about the mere act of writing that brings me back--the fresh page or the waiting half-finished sentence, the odd acrid smell of the blue ink, and the cosmetic uniform my otherwise shoddy handwriting takes on once there are a bunch of paragraphs.  There is something material about it as well as emotional, too.

I'll think more on it.