#17 is true. A girl kissed me aproximately 3 years, 2 months, and 2 hours after when i originally asked a girl if she’d kiss me.
Of course, i always remember wanting to kiss girls, from when i was very little. When i was five we went to Disney World, and there was one rather boring ride on a boat and i just remember that the most adorable girl was sitting across from me but i was afraid to look right at her because i felt like she would immediately know i was staring at her and i’d look like some dorky little five year old just smiling dumbly at the cutest six year old ever. So, yeah, i was setting up for romantic disaster very early on in life.
Anyhow, the girl who never kissed me was Juliana, and while i didn’t ask her to kiss me outright i would like to point out that our faces were very near to each other and it had never crossed my mind to kiss anyone ever before then in such an immediate fashion. So, while the actual question posed was whether or not she’d ever consider going on a date with me, it was only asked because the question we’re focusing on had been asked and answered in that are faces were still just near to each other. But, anyhow, we just wound up sharing lip gloss, and the rest is history.
As for my first kiss, it’s a topic i dance around constantly on this log without ever actually talking about it, because i talked about it entirely too much when it first happened. As you can easily see, i have no concept of secrets when it comes to myself so i didn’t think to keep my mouth shut about kissing someone – never thinking about if the someone would prefer me to keep my mouth just slightly less ajar than it was. I suppose it would have been better if i just continued to watch the replay of it in my head and not replay it for everyone else, but decisions are decisions and no one was hurt by any of it and life goes on (without us ever ever kissing again). So… no links to point you towards for this one, but if you’re a regular reader i’ll tie it all together for you; these three events coincide: first kiss, new years 2000, & “under my skin.”
Happy now?
Year 01
For a while there was a flicker of light reflected on my change jar that seemed just the right red and gold to be the reflection of a fire, but after a thorough examination of the room to ascertain that there was an absence of flame i realized it was sunlight flitting through the trees outside my bedroom window. Today i feel like a flicker of something; hoping that i’m not outrightly extinguished yet sometimes blooming full and hot. I was too distracted to sing during my lesson today, but then i focused for half a minute to produce two notes that Becky thinks were my best ever. Inconsistent. I don’t think i did much at work today, but no one seems to mind. Tonight the sky is turning from blue to blue with the tiniest band of green on the horizon, and my neighbors yellowed kitchen light is peering around my crimsony sheet draped across the window. Everything is colors, but the fire in this room has gone away and left it black and white and gray.
Of all the beloved sites i’ve ever seen shut down, it’s always been the decision of the site administrator(s). Regular readers can leave and staff members can be bitchy and unhappy, but ultimately the admin makes the decision to pull the plug on the main page leaving everyone scrambling to talk to each other on the message boards before those too fade away or become completely irrelevant.
What is it about being the admin of a site that makes it so easy to shut everything down rather than just make a change? Is it that you’re tied to what the site was and not what it will be? Or, is it that you just get tired of making little fixes to what seems to you a large overall problem. Pulling the plug on a site, whether it be a treasured monument to e/n or the best Ani DiFranco site on the internet, seems like a hopelessly selfish choice. However, i suppose if you take on all the weight of maintaining a page yourself then you’re entitled to be selfish about it’s dissolution.
Bearing that in mind, is the solution to distribute both the joys of being a successful administrator as well as the sorrows? Does having a solid support staff make the difference between giving up on a page or just taking a much needed breather? Of course, having support staff presents nearly the same problem, as their collective vision sometimes strays from yours, leaving you either useless or annoyed. So, what’s the best formula for keeping a site going long enough that it becomes a mainstay in a community and not just a blip?
It seems to me that the easy answer is staying involved in the flow of your site, which is why so many solo blog-projects have become so consistent and venerable. It’s also why so many of them burn out and fail. If you don’t stay involved emotionally or scientifically or anything with your own writing, eventually what you’re creating means nothing and your page is just like the impression your head leaves on a pillow rather than a pillow with a real head on it. The same holds true for a group site … if you let yourself stray slowly from being an active poster to being a distanced administrator, your idea of fun is only based on reading the page as opposed to the real fun of writing it. This is not to say every administrator should be the center of attention – primadonna in their own specially constructed showcase. Instead, the point is that you have to occupy all of the positions at once: admin, staff, writer, and most importantly, fan.
Remind me about this post if i ever start bitching about any of this, if you would be so kind..
I have this mass creative urge and i don’t know where to focus it.
I used to have these days all the time when i was younger… i’d feel like i needed to output my thoughts somehow or else i would just endlessly spin in place for a whole day getting absolutely nothing done. My relief for this emotion in the olden days was either writing or playing with my G.I.Joes. Writing then was fiction rather than songs and blogs, so both forms of expression allowed me to create personas other than my own and then intermingle them all together in a storm of creativity that i could reflect upon later. If i was really stuck for resources i’d funnel all that creativity back into a pre-made creation like a novel, but that wasn’t ever wise because i could devour those books in a matter of hours and they would only leave me more hungry to create a piece of my own.
Songwriting was the perfect cure for the whole mess in two ways. The first was that even my longest song clocks in well under six minutes, so now i have a library of hundreds of facets of my own personality that i can trot out one after another, delve into deeply, and then end with a simple resolving chord (or lack thereof). The second was cover songs: the perfect way to focus my energy into someone else’s creative work but to still come out with my own product. Cover songs are much more productive in the long run than my old alternative of writing fanfics, which are inevitably not only totally invalid when held on their own but also totally the property of the originator of the universe the writing occurs in. Cover songs are not my own, but my interpretation of them is, and i’m always allowed to climb into the feelings a song portrays for a single performance, during which it’s as valid as any of my own songs.
However, my guitar occasionally fails me and i likewise have been known to fail it, whether it be due to a broken string or a lack of physical motivation to play. In some of these instances i’ve been left listessly strumming a G chord (or the remainders thereof) trying to get up enough rhythm and momentum to have a go at a song, but otherwise all of my energy would be wasted. That’s where this log came in last summer … a way to make sure that none of my creative energy would have to go to waste, and also a way to integrate my other creativity into one tangled web of personal thoughts and experience. However, as i become more and more comfortable with my guitar and my own voice (as a lyricist, as a blogger, and as a vocalist) i’m again branching out into other artistic and creative endeavors, which in turn can seem quite fruitless because i never created a mechanism to tie them back into this log. Shortly before this log came about i wrote half of a novella that ran over 100 pages, but it was hosted elsewhere on the internet and was based on years of other writing, so i left it to itself rather than ever mentioning it. During the run of the log i’ve continued to chip away at the novel i began six years ago in my endless churning loop of revision after revision to the same essential chapters, but it never manages to see the light of day. More recently i’ve been reviewing music somewhat consistently, and that i have managed to integrate into this domain at both jla and cor (though their participation with this page is usually limited).
It’s easy to see that i’m presented with several problems tied into this new creative urge of mine. The main issue is that i feel like any content that isn’t integrated into this log is essentially being forgotten before it’s ever found, and also that it’s liable to simply fade away from beneath my fingertips if i don’t sew it into my daily fabrication. I’ve been known to be hesistant about posting to the Ani Discussion Board, Shafted, or even the BlogVoices at Wockerjabby because i’m afraid that one precious paragraph of mine will fade into the ether of someone else’s site to never be retrieved again (a fate that blogger often forces onto posts of this epic length and breadth, which leaves me rather paranoid at the moment).
So, i have an obsession to track everything i do, and to tie it back into this very page. Is there any doubt about why i want a webcam? But, anyhow, i often lack in the motivation, organization, and programming skill it would take to seamlessly integrate all of my creativity into Crushing Krisis. However, where i fail in those latter two aspects i’ve been excelling in the first, and so things just like cor have been cropping up everywhere offering me and alternative for dispersing my creative output. Sadly and somewhat ironically all of these venus seem to be detracting from their intended nucleus: this very log.
And, so, i am left here with this mass creative urge but with nothing to blog and a currently irreplacable broken guitar string. And, i’m wondering what’s going to come out, and how i’m going to record it for posterity if it’s something worthwhile.
{some of the links in this entry have additional blog-length exposition that will show up in most browsers when you hover over them. enjoy.}