The footsteps of clouds

of academia and senses
OR
why I love to write but have learned to hate it...

I think I'll have some free time this weekend to pay attention to myself and to the people I've been neglecting in my life. Unfortunately, that's pretty much everyone and I don't have THAT much time in my schedule. I'm jealous of my friends, that they can still remain friends during the term. That they have time to support each other and be something meaningful. I'm envious of people with personal bonds. All I have time to do is contemplate and be fearful that when I find myself free, I will be alone.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life I had the irrational fear that my boyfriend will leave me. That I will be too cold or too clingy or too allof and he will get sick of me and leave. I've never felt this before. I've always been in control, independent, strong. I've been the leaver, never the leavee. Of course he loves me and he isn't going to leave me. I don't know why I thought this awful, painful thing and dwelled on it but I did, I went home and clung to him before I buried myself, again, in my work.

Sighs. Despite my approaching "free time," I have to write a pleasant, seven-page paper for Philosophy. PLEASANT?? And seven pages??

Good god, what could she be talking about??

My friends, meet Cheney Ryan, my Philosophy professor. It's a discussion class and so we discuss. We also have three papers, two of this length with an open-ended question provided and a longer, final paper. This is the paper of my dreams right now. Why? Because I get to talk about the philosophy of others on social morality and individual identity while relating it to what kind of person I believe I should become. According to Cheney, more than half the paper is personal opinion and evaluation. Hell, I was going to write a blog entry that IS this paper. It's already written itself! Oh, except I was going to use quotations and page references (because that's what academia has conditioned us to do) but Cheney HATES Quotations. I shall quote him, using irony as a literary device as my high school literature teacher taught me.

"I don't like all this scholarly apparatus," he says, "I think it takes away from thinking about the ideas for yourself." RIGHT ON!!! Let's dedicate some time to just free-writing our interpretation, our opinions and being INTROSPECTIVE for god's sake. Isn't that what learning's about??? When the hell did college turn from accumulation of knowledge and a passion for discovery into this VOCATIONAL TRAINING BEUROCRACY that it is now?? Let's be REAL here! I WANT some time to ACTUALLY learn!

I want to write, openly, like I do here... even in my classes. I want to have time to write fully and well and still have a life. The problem with writing is that it takes so much TIME (she says as she sits blogging instead of completing her homework). Unlike calculus homework, writing can always be revised, improved, changed, molded... forever. It is the supreme amalgamation of endless possibilities. (I must like the word amalgamation, I've used it twice in the last few days) Writing like here in the blog is just SO open and SO free... so much writing-by-association that it can just go on forever. Professional writing is beset by its own dilemmas. First, one must choose a topic. Then, one must refine the topic and decide what angle to have, what voice to use. There are indefinite choices. And one started, the question is... have I made the right choice? The simple addition or replacement of a word, phrase, paragraph and change (improve, devalue) the entire nature of a work. Writing is NEVER FINISHED. And so when I sit for hours in front of the computer looking at my articles and feeling sorry for myself, I am not at fault. I am not a slacker. I am stuck in the hallway of possibility... inspired but afraid to take the wrong direction. I hate it, spending all evening on one thing, trying to make it perfect and never coming close... finally giving up in frustration and stomping to bed. I hate it and I love it. Keep your calculus homework. The word is for me.

It pains me that I love to write and school is teaching me to hate it.

For the last few weeks I've been stifled by this very academia into being spiritually deaf and mute. It came on me suddenly and unexpectedly and I still don't know how. My senses have been broadcasting at the lowest frequency for survival but not recieving. Part of this stems from my perpetual illness, a horrible stress-induced cold I've been carrying around since the first Friday of the term. I'm almost recovered now and the alertness is contributing greatly to my spiritual regeneration.

The other day, I realized I'd lost my sense of smell only when I regained it. Yesterday, with a sudden upsurge of libido, I realized I'd found my sense of touch, too. And today, coming out of the woods by the Willamette and onto the foot bridge, I regained my hearing.

It was quiet but not a hollow, stifled silence-- A quiet that was crisp and clean. Natural. I was hearing the forest. The trees breathed, the earth shifted. Then I heard the soft, whirring rotation of my bicycle tires, spoke after spoke, rubber treads on pavement. Another biker flashed by, the whoosh of air, the exhale of breath. Cresting out of the woods, I heard the river. Not the soft rush of water I usually ignore but the trickles and gurgles and whorls and eddys all running together into one gigantic outpouring. In the distance, a train. Further out and up, the movement of air in the atmosphere, the footsteps of clouds. Above it all, my breath, the whispered inhale-exhale of life!!

And tomorrow, when my sight returns, I shall speak only in adjectives.
GREEN, GREEN, GREEN!!!

(NOTE: see scuba entry below for complete dive stories... oooooohhhh fun fun fun)