Novels, and not novel ideas either.

So lately I've been reevaluating my life goals and trying to narrow my options for grad school. With a whole bunch of AmeriCorps education money, a decent IQ, and no student loans to pay off, I figure I just may as well go back for my master's degree. The thing is, I love reading and learning. Every program I look at is just so goddamn FASCINATING, I can't fathom how anyone would just KNOW what they wanted to study. I'm trying to be reasonable, though, and come out of this really knowing where I see myself in the long term.

For the time being, I've settled upon University of Baltimore's Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program because I've always and forever been a writer. If there are two constants in my life, they are my need to write and play music. Music performance doesn't seem like it's in the cards as a career per se, but writing and media management sure could be.

Lately I've been taking out old ideas and old writing, dusting them off, and seeing what I can make out of them. While rummaging through a bunch of old notes passed between myself and my friend Oli in seventh grade (yes, okay, I still have them), I found this. I might see what I can make of it for National Novel Writing Month, which is fast approaching and sure to go much more smoothly if I have a plot to write on from the outset. The bulk of the handwriting is mine, but the big "BOOK!" at the bottom is from Oli. Interesting to see what I was thinking from ages 12-14. Alternate realities, breaking spells, etc.

"What am I doing with my life?"

So, I feel a need to tell a story. I wrote a long-standing (oh whatever, one-plus-year) photography blog called Words + Images at my personal website. My family knew about it (not true of most blogging projects, including this one) and I handed out business cards with the URL. I spoke at a press conference as the writer for that blog and represented the art blogging community of Baltimore.

On top of all that, I followed a whole slew of art blogs, tried to keep up with the goings-on in Baltimore's art scene, and generally made a point of being somewhat of an expert on my subject matter.

A few months ago my life became pretty stressful. My employment situation was weird and/or uncertain, I had way too much on my shoulders at the office (notice how well those two mesh together), and I didn't do a lot of photographic work during that time either. Adding insult to injury, I had failed to create a vibrant commenting community on the blog, which I had defined as a primary goal in working so hard on it in the first place. Combine all that together and you get a whole lot of me not writing in my twice-a-week blog.

The thing is, since my family knew about this blog, I started getting questions. "Are you ever going to update your blog again?" "Well, I enjoyed reading it."

Why is it that family can mean so well, yet make you feel so much like you're not living up to your full potential? The plague of my adult life has been my consistent belief that most of what I hold in my hands is just that: potential.

Part of me wants to accept my broad spectrum of talents (i.e. lack of focus) for what it is and write a new blog about that...which is what I'm doing at the moment. The other part of me, the little voice of self-doubt, tells me I'm accepting failure. I should have persevered and kept doing something that felt like an absolute chore instead of moving on to whatever excited me at the moment. For now, though, I'm going to try embracing the fact that I'm not just a photographer, painter, writer, or musician. I identify as all of those things, and if I write a blog about my life as a creative person it needs to acknowledge who I really am. Even if I learn my destiny is to experience many things and truly excel in none of them at all, that's not something I can deny.

As always, though, I'm caught in the war between these two voices. I honestly don't know whether to accept my natural state of being or to insist upon something different, a singular focus that is both easily comprehended and readily congratulated.

Reading old zines.

I was about to post something else about social interactions and the introvert/extrovert dilemma, but found this from last week and decided to change the subject (for a day or two).

During a feeble effort to sort through the pile of boxes packed away in my basement, I unearthed one labeled "zine stuff." It contained all the original flats, plus a surprising number of paper copies, for the zine I produced from ages 15-19. I find my earliest issues rather embarrassing now, but the last two were both surprising and inspiring. 19 seems forever ago, but the last hair-under-six years represent a lot of personal growth and discovery for me.

For example, I was shocked by some of the views I held about my own sexuality. How "gay" was "just another label I [didn't] believe in" and how straight folks repressing same-sex attraction led to body issues. And how I could never be labeled/self-identified as bisexual.

To which now-me, sitting on the couch and reading this through, said: "WTF!?"

Recently I was with friends late at night, talking and occasionally dozing until the morning hours. Somewhere in there we asked, what if kids were brought up to be comfortable and open with their sexuality, no matter what it was? We represent all points on the Kinsey Scale and agreed our high school experiences were...less than encouraging.

Reading this makes me wish I'd had a venue to express and explore my sexuality at a younger age. That I knew and processed the term "bisexual" at ages 17-19 is actually somewhat surprising given my high school experience. Non-straight -- and non-white, for that matter -- culture/viewpoints were simply not represented. Period. Some of the words I heard about gay people are so hurtful I rarely, rarely repeat them. I think they're made more so by the fact that at the time, they passed like water under the bridge: no reprimands or consequences from those supposedly in charge.

For those of us who could/did experience opposite-sex attraction, adopting the heterosexual label was automatic and completely natural. At least in my case, any potential same-sex attraction was manifested in other ways, most of them negative.

So it doesn't surprise me that even at 19, I was still saying "it's not natural for straight people to only find the opposite sex attractive." No one had really taught me what "natural" was. I just didn't realize it was possible for me to own an identity other than straight.

In the end, I don't want gay children. I don't want straight children. I also don't want children just like me. I just want them to grow up knowing that whoever they are is okay. They can identify (or not) with whatever label they want. But nothing they feel -- beyond the stuff we all feel as teenagers -- should make them feel afraid, angry, or ashamed. It's hard enough already to figure out who you are, right? After all, I have a whole bookshelf full of old journals documenting my struggles with just being a young adult.