Meep, and wibble

My math skills are not what they once were. January 18th to April 18th is three months, not four.

(I won't be graduating till May, but classes will be over by mid-April, and my master's paper is due the 12th...)

I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Mostly it's "No, don't throw me out into the real world yet!"

But tell it slant

How do you leave the past behind
When it keeps finding ways to get to your heart
...
Use your camera to spar
Use your guitar

(Sorry, gratuitous song lyrics).

I have never had any ability for writing-as-therapy, writing as direct analogy to real-life angst. Nearly every time I tried it, the story died in my hands, almost immediately. What usually happens is that I end up writing something about angsty gay wizards, and half a year later, it hits me in the back of the neck what the story's really about. Because it wasn't something I was able, at the time, to face head-on.

I suspect this is partly related to my paranoia about my writing; even at eight or ten, I did not let other people read my writing, because I believed without the slightest bit of evidence that if people read my writing they would find out that I was a horrible person. To this day I would rather let complete strangers read my writing than my friends and family, because what do I care if a complete stranger thinks that I'm a horrible person? I know that I read Freud too young, which can't have helped, but my paranoia comes from before then--and I think it's probably not all that unusual.

And then there's my gender studies class--now I'm a feminist, and I've got respect for gender studies as an academic discipline, but studied shallowly enough it tends to give the impression that all art subtly reinforces the dominant patriarchy unless it was made for five dollars on a commune, and is also boring. So I end up worrying about the ideological implications of everything I write, and that's guaranteed to drive one crazy. (I have, at length, come to the conclusion that worrying too much about writing ideologically acceptable stuff is a step away from writing propaganda, and one can't really help the culture one was brought up in). Of course, manga are wonderful for reassuring oneself that on the great spectrum of humanity, I'm really not very weird at all.

So I had this story and I was worrying at the ending, not knowing how it should end and generally discouraged about my abilities as a writer... and then, I found out what I was actually writing about, and suddenly it made all kinds of sense why I was avoiding thinking too much about the ending. It's moderately uncomfortable; of course, I'm going to have to do all kinds of mean things to a character I like quite a lot. And the surface reading, all the stuff I put on top in order to trick myself into writing this story at all, is going to be a little objectionable.

I wonder if it's a good thing when I'm writing about something coompletely different from what I seem to be writing about; it is a kind of self-censorship, isn't it, even if it's subconscious? But I must say, it's good to have a story with a heart beating under it, and it's good to have something cathartic even at a level of remove.