{"id":7461,"date":"2016-03-21T23:43:52","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T03:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=7461"},"modified":"2016-03-22T00:19:13","modified_gmt":"2016-03-22T04:19:13","slug":"a-brain-crowded-with-ideas-and-absent-of-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2016\/03\/21\/a-brain-crowded-with-ideas-and-absent-of-focus\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brain Crowded with Ideas and Absent of Focus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Today\u2019s blog post is going to be pretty modest because I\u2019m not sure what to write about. I have ideas swirling around in my mind, and tons of things I could write about, yet I\u2019m somehow coming up empty for one main thing I want to delve into. See, I even included a picture of an empty notepad, shamelessly picked from a cursory Google Images search, to represent this post. Oh well. I\u2019m just going to touch on some random things I\u2019ve been up to and thinking about.<\/p>\n

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  1. Recently my high school closed down, so I\u2019m trying to tackle a big piece about what the school meant to me. I started writing it today and I was originally actually planning to use that as my post today. But I realized how hard it was to sum up four years, especially because those years were so huge for me\u2014they were like a whole other life. It\u2019s strange to think about those years as only a fifth of my 20-year life. It seems more like 45%, with college being another 35% and my pre-high school years being the 20% that I don\u2019t remember as well and can\u2019t analyze as deeply.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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    1. God, journaling is great. I\u2019m perpetually behind in journaling because I write such verbose descriptions and it takes so long, but I\u2019ve taken some time lately to catch up a little, and it\u2019s been so rewarding. Seeing those pages full of text is nice to begin with, and having my stories out there in writing feels cathartic, even when they\u2019re relatively mundane stories.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Whenever I\u2019m feeling really bad about something, whatever it is, writing it out helps. It makes my emotions feel clearer and more logical. It helps me make sense of whatever confusing mix of emotions I might be feeling, and I\u2019ve had a lot of that lately. As unhealthy as this sounds, I think I might start focusing more on journaling even if it means spending less time studying. It\u2019s worth it for my mental health.<\/p>\n

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      1. I\u2019ve been thinking about one of the most differences between TV\/film\/novels and reality: reality doesn\u2019t have as much big confrontations. That\u2019s not to say there isn\u2019t conflict in real life, of course, and in the right hands, the smallest of conflicts can become enthralling in writing or onscreen. It\u2019s more to say that in real life, there are little simmering tensions and passive-aggressions, whereas movies use big, dramatic confrontations where all the emotions come out at once. Characters are dramatically brought together with grand romantic gestures and first kisses in the rain. They\u2019re brought apart by cataclysmic shouting matches.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        And sure, maybe I\u2019m only describing the most melodramatic, clich\u00e9 devices, but still, even the best stories have to fabricate big confrontations out of necessity. It\u2019s just how things are; no one wants to see a romance movie where two best friends have feelings for each other but literally never act on them, instead just secretly pining away for each other, being jealous of each other\u2019s partners, and slowly accepting that they\u2019re never going to do anything about it out of fear that it\u2019ll ruin the friendship. (I guess you could point to the general critical success of \u201cDrinking Buddies\u201d to prove me wrong, and good point, although I found the ending of that movie lacking for this precise reason: there\u2019s no catharsis, and it doesn\u2019t act on that building up of sexual tension.)<\/p>\n

        Good stories make a promise to the audience at the beginning\u2014\u201cthis is going to blow up eventually\u201d\u2014and fulfill those promises. Aside from radical stories that purposely set out to subvert expectations, stories don\u2019t tend to be set on \u2018simmer\u2019 the entire time. There has to be change.<\/p>\n

        I was thinking about this because of various times in my life when a confrontation seemed inevitable. To improve a certain friendship, I could\u2019ve called out a friend for something shitty they did. To move past an object of my infatuation, I could\u2019ve told her my feelings and accepted the result, whichever way it went. But so many times in my life, I\u2019ve eschewed those big confrontations. Sometimes it probably would\u2019ve been healthier to have<\/em> those confrontations\u2014but movies paint them as happening so much more often than they actually do. And honestly, sometimes I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t confront somebody about something. Confrontation isn\u2019t inherently the right choice. As unpleasant as it sounds, sometimes burying your feelings and letting them shrivel away can be the right choice. Especially as you get older and it becomes necessary to be a little fake once in a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Today\u2019s blog post is going to be pretty modest because I\u2019m not sure what to write about. I have ideas swirling around in my mind, and tons of things I could write about, yet I\u2019m somehow coming up empty for one main thing I want to delve into. See, I even included a picture of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7461"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7468,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461\/revisions\/7468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}