Chosen and Imbued

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this. I had the idea to do a weekly blog over the summer back at the beginning of April and I’ve had a few ideas about entries in the time since, but my plan was always to have this be less of a coherent and consistent presentation of ideas and more of a messy amalgamation of everything going on in my life. The idea for this was to both have a longform opportunity to share myself with my friends and to keep my writing skills sharp in the time away from school. I also think that if I don’t do something structured and regular like this I might lose track of time. I don’t expect this to be particularly focused, while some weeks I may essentially write analytical essays most of the time I’ll just be collecting various thoughts I have over the week. I have a number of ideas for blogs already, and I simply hope I can make them presentable. This first entry is a loose collection of thoughts I’ve had about this first week of my summer.

I haven’t even been home a week and yet I keep expecting things to fall perfectly into place. Nearly every day since I got home last Tuesday I have stressed about the instability and lack of routine that I have at home. Part of this is because my boss hasn’t given me a regular assignment, but most of it is self-imposed. To be fair to myself, there are enough things going on around me that even if I were to force myself into a regular sleep schedule and routine I think I’d still feel a little lost. I keep telling myself there’s something just around the corner which will amend this feeling, something which I think is probably true! Even if I adjust to a new routine of a completely haphazard schedule, I’ll still adjust. All of these stressors and worries this week have done little more than reinforce many of the lessons I learned about life and myself over my first year of college. It feels strange to type that out because it still doesn’t feel over. I don’t think it really should feel “over” though. The lessons, the friends, and the memories don’t end so why should it feel like it has? The answer to that is probably the classes, but no matter how I feel about those I am done with them.

While it is certainly possible to be complacent on campus, it’s much easier to do it at home. I could spend all summer inside watching TV, playing video games, and watching movies. It will take courage and a willingness to be stressed to find times for meals, for nightime drives, for day trips, for weekend getaways, for movie nights, and for anything else I and my friends can come up with. This courage is what makes life worth living. That willingness to put yourself out there is exactly what I love to see in other people, and it is something I try to nurture in myself. It could be so easy to stop caring, to sit around and wait for life to happen to me, but that’s playing the game to not lose. Life isn’t something where you can achieve victory, but the mindset of playing to win is still somehow applicable (might come back to this later in the summer hope this doesn’t sound insane).

In the same way that my camera bends reality to my vision, reaching out to friends and making plans can bend my life to the ways I wish it to be. As I wrote in my first review of the phenomenal Resident Evil: Retribution (2012); “meaning and connection are chosen and imbued, not imposed; creation is violence and all we can do is harness it”. Every work of art (under a definition of art as any act of love) is an attempt to change reality. Writing, photography, film, painting, and any other medium all create specific visions of the world which change how their audience sees the world, and I hope that this blog conveys some of my own unique perspectives and shapes the way you all see the world. While most of my posts won’t be grandly profound, I think a few should be suitably ambitious and provoke something in y’all!

Last note: feel free to DM me advice column style questions or things you want my thoughts on!