Oh right. The blog.

(I'm almost afraid to admit how much I love the new Shins album.)

Sometimes you forget why you do things. Or maybe, I forget why I do things. For a while, I forgot why I kept this thing. I forgot why I needed to write at all. These days I'm completely surrounded by people who are fantastic writers, and it's intimidating. Why bother, you know? I'm so behind. I'm not anywhere close to being a professional writer like I'd planned, so why maintain something that might indicate mediocrity? So I stopped making an effort, and it fell away.

But then other things quickly bubbled up in it's place. Drawing with cool japanese markers. Biking further and further away from my apartment. Flamenco. And it began to seem like a trifle, just another thing I played at.

Until, there was, ug, I hate to admit that this might be the reason, but a new boy came into my life. And he might not even turn into a romatic relationship, but he bumped something (not literally) that I guess had been dormant for a while. It's like when you move that bookshelf in your room to another corner, and suddenly your room looks totally different. Anyway, I've been really good so far with this one, even though it's only been a few days since our first (questionable) date (or not-date). I haven't sent any cute text messages or acted over-eager. I even jumped out of the car super-quick when he dropped me off after our maybe-date. We have another maybe-date to see the movie in the cemetary this weekend.

I was sooooo close to jumping the gun the other day thought, and the whole incident reminded me why this forum is important for me to keep up. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was super stressed out about work, freaking about things I couldn't control but were my responsibility anyway. I was looking for validation, from someone, anyone, and I thought about texting him. He gave me a few of his films to watch (he's doing a project for me for work, which is how we met), and they're actually good. I was going to text him something funny about his films, and see what his response was. But I didn't! I actually had the fortitude to think critically about the situation, and not mess it up. And I remember what I did with a lot of that nervous energy before, when I was actually dating (or something) people with some frequency. I wrote. A lot.

I've always sort of felt like writing, and likely all art, comes from a bubbling over of some emotional experience. When you can't hold something in your skin or your brain or your heart, it comes out. And it doesn't matter whether it's through the pen, the brush, the guitar string, or the flamenco shoe. It just has to come. Or else we go a little crazy, and our whole world gets thrown off. We stop communicating effectively, we begin looking outside ourselves for relief. And that's backwards you see, because it can't ever come from the other person.