Of tightropes, blockage, and the satisfaction I alone seem to find in the grey area.

Write anything, write something, just write.

Anne Lamott has explained many things to me in my life. She has also comforted me when K-fcked radio is blasting at full volume. She has also been on team "Grey Area" when I decide that it's okay that life doesn't always make sense and perhaps that it why life is worth living. But right now, struggling to make what I understand about "The Remains of the Day" (an utterly breathtaking novel) come out clearly in a 15 page paper which has only my infantile understanding of the 20th century's hilarious, oddly accurate Lacan's psychoanalysis as it's weapon... well, "Things fall apart" is just the beginning...

I understand the concept of writers block... it is not an outside force, it is an internal one. The pieces are all there, I am quite capable, and I have the time... but something is stopping me. And that something is me! Perhaps that is why Lamott says just write, piece by piece (bird by bird) and you will chip away at the barrier, the great wall, until you find yourself on the other side. Usually, this works for me. The other side of the wall rarely holds what I thought it would, but I can usually be proud of what I find there. Right now, I feel like everything I do is actually creating another layer of bricks on the wall rather than chipping away at it...

Things are not happy- I feel a lot of anger and frustration toward me from many people in my life and indeed from me to me... but that's not actually abnormal. Usually, if things are going well in college then my home life hates me, and visa versa. It is a tightrope act I've been walking since I was sixteen. But for some reason now I don't feel like walking. I feel like swinging from my knees and telling both ends to cut themselves loose. Expectations cutting me loose may lead to my death, but at least I could go down laughing, upside down and alone instead of rightside up and crowded.

Yes, the wall is still there but there's not just one wall. Writers block has now been built into a house!

Write, just write. Lacan and I have a date with Kazuo Ishiguro. I'm going down swinging.

Katie is coming to AU!!!!

I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol! Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun! -Emily Dickinson

Ouch.

My heart hurts today.

My brain is exhausted.

My body is jumpy.

Hello Monday.... you dirty bitch.

RomCom

"Your words are misplaced.

'Don't worry, you'll find your Blair'

I want to throw up"

A haiku my friend wrote after receiving romantic advice from a lovesick girl.

Perfect.

A Room of Ones Own

is the thing to read when you need to remember why you began your journey....

Particularly applicable to my life (in literature and Theatre), but true to any creative soul.

Enough to live, and a space to call all my own, and I will give you genius.

Why do I settle for less and call it more?

Thanks Virginia, you odd little duckling you.

Thought from Snowmaggedon

"I don't have anything clever to say, and I don't have a funny story to tell. I will say that it wasn't easy for Mitch to leave the military and start over again in California." old man from Elizabethtown.

Now, I have watch E-Town twice in one week and am contemplating watching it again. Don't judge me. It's a fantastic film and when there is 4 feet of snow blocking your way watching a favorite just makes more sense.

Also, good to know no matter where I go to school it will be architecturally unsound. Evidentally the pavilion between these two buildings couldn't handle the snow.

I've also fallen in love with the music of Kate Micucci. She guest starred on Scrubs as Ted's girlfriend in season 8 and played a ukulele and it was fabulous. I finally found her EP and have

been listening to it all week. "no no no I never liked you liked you liked you. please remember I'm a kid, I don't wanna be married. yet."

And finally I have been rereading my journals. I do this every four years- it's usually very funny. I am struck by Sophomore year Hannah. A very forward thinking person with lots of ideas, horrible spelling (that's still the case) and a very dramatic sense of impending... everything. I thought in four years I'd get married, have two degrees, be moving oversees or across the country and, of course, have two new dogs. Rather, my dog died, I am still terrified of marriage, I only have one degree and am working on my second, barely, and I haven't moved very far at all. Have I changed? Have I learned that life doesn't stay in a neat deck? It's not one thing after another, you don't draw from the top. Rather, it's like the pond in go fish. All the cards are there, but what order you pull from the strewn collection is entirely random. You just work with what you've got and keep going. Eventually, they'll run out.

Refocus

"When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flock, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among others, to make music in the heart."
— Howard Thurman, Baptist minister, author, theologian, educator, civil rights leader.