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How do you leave the past behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart? It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out til your torn apart I think maybe I should just leave it at that. Last night, after I wrote that enormous gigantic entry in here, I was wondering (not for the first time) why I keep my journal where anyone who wants to can see it. And why, even more than that, I want people to read it. But I was getting ready to go to sleep, lying on my bed reading The Sun (which is an incredible magazine, I highly recommend it.)and I was reading an interview with David James Duncan (no, I don't really know who he is.) and he said this: Readers are always thanking me for "giving" them my stories, but without readers, a work of fiction is like a musical score: dead black marks on a white page. The author is the composer, but until a reader breathes life into those marks, they are just inert characters on a sheet of processed dead tree. The act of reading, to my mind, is more a gift from the reader to the author than the other way around. I think that about says it. Granted, he's talking about fiction and nobody ever thanks me for writing this journal (there's no reason why they should... I don't do it for them.) but I think that still sums it all up. I have to go soon and give a group presentation in my research methods class. Very scary. My chest is about the size of an apple and it keeps getting smaller. Deep breaths make it worse because they acknowledge that there's something wrong. The funny thing is I have another presentation today in Spanish, right after the research methods one. I'm not at all nervous about that one. I don't know why and I'm not going to try to figure it out... probably, instead of convincing me not to be nervous about the research one, it would just convince me to be nervous about the Spanish one. Yeah, I know that didn't make any sense. |