Temporary/Lasting Changes

I have temporarily uprooted myself from Long Island to spend three lovely weeks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Though the cats and plants must be fed and looked after, I am temporarily living the life. (More about this later.)

As I've learned many times, a good night's sleep helps bring good ideas the help they need to be smart ideas. When I woke up this morning I had a realization: in my odd introductory post I neglected to get to the point of my being here, typing all of this, on the internet. This time around it isn't (just) a place for me to vent and feel self-important, it's more of a true running log. In the past, my records have betrayed themselves and lapsed into vague suggestions of feelings no longer felt; they have meanings that no longer refer.

Now that a large chunk of youthful uncertainty has passed--I made it through high school and college, found my interests and myself--I'm left to face the open void that is, essentially, adulthood. I need to find a job. I need to move out of my parent's house. I need to, in the crudest and simplest terms, get my shit together...but how? What do I want to be (besides a well-paid something-or-other)? What do I want to do (besides watch reality TV and read celebrity gossip)? Where do I want to go (besides visiting all the cool places in the world)?

The big "H" seems to be on the tip of everyone's tongue, or at least it's somewhere on the palette, and more often than not it seems that the answer remains elusive even once things start working out. I've done internships, but I still want to go to graduate school; I'm done with college and had a wonderful life-changing experience, but I sometimes wish that it could just start again or wish that it had just kept going. My life now calls for constant job searching, and thus constant self-questioning--yet another stint of, even greater, uncertainty than the stages I've already gone through.

I'm currently sitting in the kitchen drinking tea and listening to the cats' infinity water bowl and the constant dry hum of the BQE. Even though I'm out of my house, I still feel the need to get out and be someone, do something and go places.

For starters, I need a personal project, aside from cover-letter-writing and computer-staring and blog writing, so I'm going to (do my best) to start a 365 project: one photo, of anything, per day for one year. I'll throw those here every day, if not only to keep track, and will add to them my woes and (hopefully) triumphs as a post-grad girl just looking to live.

Beginning Anew

Ok, so I'm no stranger to self-description on the internet; I'm 22, I've had my online-intro down since before I was even on MySpace. I started my first LiveJournal when I was 16 (going on 17), and started out with this:

well i finally gave in and hadda get myself a live journal...this will prolly be boring and no one will prolly read it but lately i've needed a place to vent and the wall isnt helping me get thru anything. well i dun have too much to write about right now....and if i do have no words to express it so i guess i'll write something later..

Since then I like to think that I've matured quite a bit--at the least I've moved on from internet-speak to a full use of the English language. I kept this log for over two years, leaving it only for another LiveJournal account which followed me (pretty actively) through my junior year of college, and then less frequently into my senior year. Towards the end I used it solely to complain about my thesis, brag about my cooking skills, and post pictures of pretty things that I wanted. Either way, this one started out quite differently than the first:

bonjour.
i needed to start new with everything including my livejournal.

welcometome
hopeyouenjoytheride

I had clearly moved into the field of correct spelling and grammar, but still refused to completely conform to: punctuation, spacing, and any sort of consistent language use. Through the middle of this account I started keeping an additional log of thoughts that I didn't share with the internet; I kept a simple text document of quickly-typed diary entries, which I wrote in when I was too worked up to write short blurbs in my physical (dare I say analog) sketchbook--which is mostly words, as I cannot draw or paint. (This document currently resides in a "random" file, piled in with "School Work," and hastily named "running log.")

Wait, wait, wait. Let me say first that it is terrifyingly strange to realize that computers really do have a better memory that humans; I checked the timestamps of this file, and another with an identical name, and they don't even remotely match what my brain told me...
Secrets have been kept from me that I forgot I was keeping--here's a brief gem of teenage angst and disappointment:

from August 2005, I was just going into my senior year of high school:

for the first time in forever i'm comfortable with me. but it scares me to death to think that i could lose even that at the drop of a hat.
being back in glen cove and sliding back into the same old routines is making me realize that if i don't hold on tight to these last remaining threads of what i've stitched together this summer theyre going to fall apart and forget they were every held close to one another. i feel like im searching for some universal glue that will gloss over everything and make it last forever. never fading. never wearing. never faltering. never breaking.

and from September 2006, I had just started college and was wrestling with feelings of love for a close friend:

and it's back to normal. as if we never happened. as if it were this time last year where we'd see movies and hang out and nothing would come of it. right when i was comfortable enough to like him (unfortunately love this time around) he's gone.

This later document only follows my emotionally-trying romantic attempts of freshman year, but for some reason I remember it in a different light...It's times like these where I realize, again, that the brain is truly a weird place.

But what does any of this, really any of this, have to do with who I am now? I exist as these words stored in my computer and still posted on the internet, never to be truly erased and never to be revisited, except by me every few months for a false sense of nostalgia for some former imprint of my younger self. Who am I now? Clearly none of these poorly-informed, emotionally-charged, self-important nerds...
Well now that I put it that way, of course I'm still all of these people--except that I'm not.

If I were to summarize, without citing any of my other existences--facebook, twitter, flickr, livejournal, myspace, carbonmade, jpg, last.fm, polyvore, or deviantart--I'm a 22 year old who wishes she had one more real summer left before facing prison guards in the "Legends of the Hidden Temple" of the publishing world. All I want to do is find the pieces of the Silver Monkey, but the first guard took my Pendant of Life; I still have a half left, and hopefully will find the other half along the way.