Quote of the Day: Departure

Today was my last day of classes as a college freshman. No matter how many times I say that to myself it still doesn't seem real. So much of my week has been taken up by the weight of everything I have to do before I leave (turn in my last few assignments, study for finals, do laundry, pack), that I haven't had time to think about what it means. Leaving for the summer. Moving out of my dorm room. And then I discovered this quote:

"Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. Lost keys, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor. I hate it all. Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes. Even today, when shutting drawers and flinging wide a hotel wardrobe or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived. We have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair pin on a dressing table, not an empty bottle of aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood. This house sheltered us. We spoke, we loved within these walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again." - Dauphne du Maurier, Rebecca

To me, this quote captures everything I've been feeling and then some. You might think it silly to mourn leaving a place that I know I'll be returning to in three months, but live for two semesters in the confines of a dorm room, and it becomes a home. Of course that's not to say I'm not excited about my living arrangements for next year, but I've grown accustomed to the slamming of the front door to my residence hall (my room is the first door when you enter), and the view outside my window, and the random bits of paraphernalia I have pinned to my cork board. So there is a sadness in the fact that a few days from now, among the chaos that is finals week, I will also be slowly disassembling my room: getting rid of papers, cleaning out drawers, rolling up the rug that I so clearly remember picking out at Ikea last August.
There is something mutable, too, about a dorm room. There will always be the knowledge that it has been inhabited by so many college students before you, and so many more to come. Somewhere out there there are people, probably even a few on this campus, who have their own memories of my dorm room. I think that's why I love the idea of a place's ability to capture "a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood." When I leave this room, I will be leaving behind pieces of freshman year. A year of firsts, and friend-making, and movie-watching. And next year, this room will be a clean slate, its walls bare for someone else to pin their memories to.

I'm in College!

Hello, lovelies! There's been a bit of a scenery change since you heard from me last....

My dorm room

If you haven't guessed yet,  I'm in college! In preparation for writing this post I did a lot of thinking about how we as humans hate the idea of change, but when it happens we just sort of naturally adjust to it. I guess it's kind of a survival mechanism, something we picked up from our ancestors. But when you're in the midst of facing momentous change this is pretty cold comfort. A few weeks ago the thought of being a college student both terrified and excited (but let's face it: mostly terrified) me. I was about to be left in a place, 2,000 miles from home, and be expected to make friends and go to classes and become an adult. Yeah... 3 weeks in, and I'm definitely not that far yet. But I have changed. Or rather, I'm learning to live my life in the context of my new surroundings. Before I left for Iowa I couldn't fathom the life of a college student outside of what I've seen on television or heard from friends, but now I'm living it, because I can't not live it, and it is so much more that I expected.

My favorite study spot 

First of all there's the concept of time. In college, time is something you have way more control over than you did in high school. Of course you sill have to go to class, but everything is more broken up, and there isn't any significantly large block of time where you have to be in one place doing one thing. As a creative person, this has been semi-difficult to master. The first time I was faced with a three hour block of free time before dinner, my thoughts swam. There's so much I could do! I could work on a short story, or study for Lit class, or write letters to the people back home, or attempt to make new friends! The list went on. It's easy to become paralyzed by all the things I want to do, and end up getting nothing done. Since that first afternoon I've slowly been getting better at making time for the things that are important to me. Not to mention the fact that I've met so many wonderful people, and am learning something new on a daily basis!

Campus geese!

Okay, so what does all that mean for this blog? Obviously I have no intention of giving up on this blog anytime soon, but things are probably going to be a little sporadic (like that's anything new) until I really get the hang of this whole time management thing. I have several other projects I'm working on as well, including a Tumblr that my best friend and I made in order to keep in touch. So much of our inspiration is shared, and it would have been a shame to loose that connection because we go to school in different parts of the country (me in the midwest, she in the northeast). If you would like to check that out, you can find it under the "Collaborations" tab at the top of this page. I also have some great posts and possibly a blog-specific project planned for the future, so stay tuned for news about that!

City lights 

I guess that's all I wanted to say for now. I've never been very good at the "life update" type of posts because there is way more life than can possibly fit into these 550 words. This will just have to do for now.

Rainbow!

If you have some questions (or advice! o_o) for a newbie college student, feel free to drop them in the comment box. As always, thanks for reading :)

Patchwork

Hello there, reader! I've been trying to write a post for several days now, but for some reason I found myself facing a bad case of blogger's block (that sounds weird, doesn't it). So I went back into my old posts looking for inspiration, and I began reading all of the ones I started but never finished. Of the 106 posts I've started, only a slight majority were actually published. Though it feels like somewhat of a cop-out to my writer brain, I thought I'd share a few excerpts with you today- out of context and only loosely stitched together.

7/23/13
Stories exist to help us make sense of this jumbled mess we call life. Often I've found myself wishing that life was more like a novel. That I could track my progress like a character arc, and that there would be one defining moment in which everything would miraculously become clear, and I would understand the reason for the challenges and suffering that I had to face in order to get there. But in life, there is no "reason" except to live. Every plateau of self-realization is only temporary before we begin the climb to the next climax, facing new hardships along the way. Each life is a collection of hundreds and hundreds of rising and falling action. We are essentially made up of stories.

7/16/13
From my notebook on May 29, 2013- 5:45 pm: We've been in New York for about four hours now, and if this city does not make you aware of your own insignificance I don't know what else will. From the air it almost doesn't look real- like a toy city or a landscape out of a dystopian novel. Or rather, it looks like you have always seen New York, from the air in movies with the narration of some unknown character coming at you from the television. It is always one voice, one out of so many millions, because it is impossible to listen to everyone's voice at once. In the city of a thousand stories, we only hear one at a time. 

If that is New York from the air, then New York from the ground is the opposite. There are no pristine helicopter shots here, no toy buildings with toy cars. New York from the ground is like being dropped into a jungle. Everything is gritty, tangible, unmistakably real. It's as if the chaos is singing to its own tune, and you have to find the melody and hum along.

4/17/13

I want you to think about a person that you trust. I mean the kind of person you would hoist up onto a ledge to get away from zombies, knowing they they would turn around to help you up, too. Trust is a form of respect. It's saying, I respect you enough to know, with every fiber of my being, that you''ll always tell me the truth. I'm asking you to extend that trust to yourself and your creative endeavors. That doesn't mean that suddenly you will think all of your ideas are perfect, or that that twinge of self doubt will go away. It won't. But you'll know when it's grounded in reality and when it's not. We trust people because they tell us the truth, and you should trust yourself enough to know when an idea isn't working. The important part is that you trust yourself enough to try, even when you are unsure about something. A little uncertainty is natural. Doubt to the point of not going through with it is self destructive.

11/20/12

This was inspired by this post on my friend's blog.

You know what I would love to do? I would love to finally write a novel. I would love for college essays to flow seamlessly from my head onto the page. I want to travel to Ireland and I want to meet interesting people. I want to go to a social event where the person I'm with is not constantly checking their phone. I want to live in a city where people don't mind walking places and where trains are cool again. I wish I could be one of those people who writes obsessively in notebooks and isn't afraid to do sketches and water color paintings in the margins. That, and I want to have a drawing style, so that when people look over my shoulder at some random doodle they will say, "Ooh. That's really good. I like your style!" I want to go to a concert. I'll buy a t-shirt there and wear it to school the next day. I want to express my love of Sherlock and Nerfighteria to everyone I meet, but I'm afraid to for reasons I don't completely understand. I want to meet someone who's read the same books I have. I wonder if we all have a book twin. Maybe there's someone out there who's read the same books as us and we don't even know it, like those twins that were separated at birth but both built benches around trees in their front yard. I want to work at an indie book store somewhere. Or, in the next best scenario, be a "regular" at one. 

I want to have a writing retreat that I can go to whenever I feel like it. Maybe a lake house or a table at a local coffee shop or office space in an abandoned artist's studio or a garage apartment. I'd have a big wooden desk and bookshelves lining the walls and an obscene amount of rugs on the floor.  Better yet, make it an attic studio in Paris or a stone castle in Ireland. Maybe I'll end up in an artists commune out in the dessert and we'll all live in Airstreams and type on antique typewriters while the mountains turn purple behind our heads. Someday, I'll get a brilliant idea while riding on a train.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip through my past! Also before I go, a quick update:

1. I didn't hit 50,000 words during Camp Nanowrimo, but I wrote 16,000 words during the first two and a half weeks before life took over. It was a great experience and one I'd definitely like to try again.
2. I leave for college in just a little over a week! I don't know how much time I will have to blog, but I'm going to do my best!
3. You can now sign up to receive e-mail updates when I make a new post! (Considering the erratic nature of my postings, this could come in very handy ;) Just enter your e-mail address into the box in the top left hand corner of this page.

As always, thank you so much for reading! If you have thoughts on any of the scattered postings above, don't hesitate to leave a comment.