One down, two to go.

I finished rewriting at least one of the memoirs, My First Trip to The Great Escape. This was no great feat, considering that it is the shortest of the three memoirs, having only six parts. I will certainly finish the Hershey Memoir next, for it has seven parts. The most recently written one will take the longest, for it has a whopping eleven parts.

My life has been a little difficult lately, for personal reasons. I've been dealing with a lot of my issues. This won't affect my writing too much, because I don't write a lot to begin with. It is a stroke of luck that I managed to finished editing two entries today, for most days I can't even bother to even start a brand new entry. I've been plagued by anxiety and general malaise, despite the pleasant weather. I do not know when things will start to look up, or if they will at all.

Have I gone too far?

I'm starting to wonder if I've gone too far with my memoir rewrites. At the beginning I vowed I would only fix a couple sentences and mend grammatical errors. But now I find myself rewriting entire paragraphs! Yes, I do have paragraphs. The formatting of this blog doesn't allow the indentations to appear. So I just break up my story into spaced chunks.

So I'm rewriting entire chunks now! Soon it'll get to the point where I'll delete an entire entry and just start from scratch!

I'm just trying to improve my writing. Is that such a bad thing? Am I taking this too seriously? I mean, they do sound better after I'm through with them. They make more sense after I revise them, they truly do. I still don't have an outside opinion though. Damn.

Disgust and Dismay

A few minutes ago, I logged into my blog with the intention of continuing my memoir rewrite. To my surprise, I noticed I had a new follower. A new follower! A strange coincidence, after writing an entry lamenting my lack of followers, right?
My surprise and delight was shattered when I realized that my new follower was none other than my ex-boyfriend, Bryan. This discovery filled me with a mixture of disgust and dismay, as the title suggests. He followed both my blogs, including my inactive blog from a high school health class.
How did he find me you ask? Well, several months ago, I left a mildly snarky comment on a blog entry he'd written regarding health care. Why, I don't know; I'm very impulsive sometimes. He responded with sincerity, clearly missing the snarkiness in my tone. Did he know who I was? Most likely, seeing as the title of my abandoned Health Class Blog has my last name in it. After all, how many people have my surname?

Why would he want to follow the ex-girlfriend who broke his heart and (literally) broke his balls? Is he still obsessed with me, as he was in the months after I dumped him? Does he follow me to keep tabs on me, wondering if my life if better or worse than his?
I check up on my exes via the internet whenever I'm bored. My motive is generally one of curiosity, I want to see they're doing with their lives, if they ever still think about me. Lots of people do the same thing, especially women. Women relish the idea of their exes still thinking about them, it strokes our egos.
For me, it strokes my ego and disgusts me to find an ex still thinking of me. On one hand, I feel a certain pride knowing that I made such an impact on their lives.

My relationship with Bryan lasted one month and three weeks. I was twelve at the time, and he was fourteen. It was for my part, unpleasant, mainly because I was not emotionally ready to have a boyfriend. I panicked, and fled. He reacted by following me around, attempting to win me back. Then, when he realized he wouldn't ever get me back, a rivalry began. Who was the better thespian? Who was the better singer? Who was cooler? With the rivalry came an abundance of bitterness.
We both hated each other, and both tried to constantly outdo the other. The whole thing created plenty of amusement for our peers, and plenty of frustration and humiliation for me. I regretted ever meeting him, and I still feel that way.

When I moved to VT, I thought I had escaped the drama. But thanks to the internet, the drama sought me out and found me, causing more trouble. He's messaged me on Myspace, followed me on my blog. I'll never be able to evade my juvenile mistake of dating him. The internet makes it easy to find anyone you want. All these social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter only make it easier. It's a problem that we are only just beginning to grasp.

This unspoken rivalry, as old as it is, will probably never go away. The urge to one-up a nemesis never does. I can hold a grudge for a damn long time, too. I was a kid when this started, just a kid who made a stupid decision that should have meant nothing at all. But instead it turned into an epic clusterfuck, one I can never escape. Normal people don't hold death grudges with former childhood sweethearts, you know?

So I blocked him from my blog (let's hear it for alliteration!). I only wish that I'd written this blog before hand, so he could see this and answer for himself. I want to know his intentions, and then I want him to go the fuck away.

Memoir rewrites!

I started to write a blog about some of my obsessive compulsive rituals involving food, but had an attack of writer's block. The thought of writing more memoirs kept taunting, teasing and tempting me. I couldn't settle upon another idea for a memoir, nor did I want to make this blog redundant, so I resisted the urge. But the urge grew stronger, and my obsession with self-indulgence and rich details began to consume me. So I decided to re-read my already published memoirs. Doing so left me dissatisfied and frustrated, for nothing about my published works sounded right. The language sounded stilted and awkward, and I found a few grammatical mistakes peppered here and there. My writing didn't make any sense, and didn't sound as intelligent as I had previously thought.

So I decided to fix it. I've started rewriting them, though not completely. Nothing drastic, just a few touch-ups here and there. Rewrite a few sentences, add some semicolons (the semicolon obsession persists!) and fix mistakes. I'll add more information in some places, to flesh out my already florid and corpulent details. I have a few doubts about this clean-up though, a feeling that I'm simplifying my work and making it as dull as Stephenie Meyer's prose. A writer is often her worst critic though, so I need a second opinion to tell me if these changes are for better or worse. Unfortunately, it looks like my followers don't seem very interested. I think perhaps they don't really care about the memoirs (which is why I've decided to avoid them from now on). I must admit that the memoirs are more for me, than the reader, and I use this blog as an outlet for my memories and opinions. I didn't start writing to garner attention (though that is an incentive, sometimes); I started writing for my pleasure, a reason I think a lot of people start writing for. Very few people write for unselfish reasons I think.

I've begun to doubt my talent. I suppose a lot of writers doubt themselves, like Stephen King. He was never going to publish Carrie, but his wife took the manuscript out of the trash and convinced him to go through with it. Sometimes, all a writer needs is a sensible person to slap them in the face and say "you don't suck!". I haven't had anyone do that for this blog though. This little corner of the internet goes widely ignored, no matter how often I pimp it out to friends and loved ones.

But I'm going to keep on trucking. I enjoy writing, whether or not anyone notices that I'm doing it (though it would be nice if someone did). I'm going to obsessively rewrite my self-indulgent, florid memoirs and maybe even write some new ones. At some point, I'll write some regular blogs, when the mood takes me and my mind allows me such a boon. Who knows what I'm going to do next with this blog, or if anyone is going to ever see it? Maybe it won't be such a big deal if I stop thinking about it.