What's coming up for Musings and Ponderings

I've been trying to avoid writing more memoirs. So far it's been easy, because I haven't had any ideas for new ones. Nor was I in the mood to write any non-memoir entries, simply because of my ever-present writer's block.
But this morning, I had idea for a new memoir. Yes, I know, I write too many of these, and they're usually about Amusement Parks, most notably The Great Escape and Splashwater Kingdom. I swear, I blog about them so much they should pay me!
This coming weekend, I will be attending my Aunt Jenny's vow renewal ceremony, in upstate New York. The main event is taking place on Sunday, but my mother, sister and I will be leaving this Friday. On Saturday, my Uncle Russel will be taking me to The Great Escape, since the Vow Renewal Ceremony will be nearby. The entire weekend I think, will be perfect fodder for my blog. I will be writing this in three or four volumes. The first volume will cover the events of Friday, when we will drive from Bellows Falls, VT to Mechanicsville, NY. This will be a fairly short volume, with few chapters. The second volume will involve my trip to The Great Escape with my uncle. This might be my longest volume, for you all know that I can describe an amusement park trip in great detail. The third volume will be an account of the Ceremony and following reception. I do not know how many chapters this one will contain. The final volume will describe the trip home. This will possibly be the most boring memoir I have ever written.
This is clearly the most ambitious and self-indulgent blog project I have ever undertaken. It might be a bad idea. It certainly won't earn me any more followers.
Why don't I lump the entire weekend into one single memoir, instead of writing four separate ones? I did that with Hershey after all; I certainly didn't divide that entire adventure into parts. So why am I doing it for this adventure, before it has even started? Have I finally lost it? Writers are horrible people. We take every aspect of our lives and use it for our art. I feel like I'm exploiting this weekend. I feel perhaps, with this epic four volume memoir series, I'm going too far. Who knows if I am or not? I may not even write about everything, just Saturday's events. I'm afraid that intending to write about this event may raise my expectations, or somehow make my feelings about the weekend less genuine. Tell you what, I'll stop thinking about it, and put these plans on the back burner. I'll enjoy this weekend for what it is, spending time with family, witnessing two people renew their vows and seeing my grandma for the first time in ten years.

Finished at Last!

I have finally finished my massive memoir rewrite! I just finished editing Fox and Squirrel Go On An Adventure, not a few minutes ago. Even though I'm supposed to be done, I still feel the urge to continue editing. I'll probably do another rewrite in a few months. Especially since I've noticed that I keep using the word linear when I should be saying chronological in some of my entries.

So now I ask myself for the millionth time, what do I write next? Should I dredge up another memoir? Or should I write something with some actual meaning? I've got some new blog ideas floating around, but I'm not sure which ones to use. What I do know is that I'd like a bowl of soup. BRB, Soup.

Two Down One To Go

So now I've finished rewriting the Hershey Memoir, meaning that I've only go one more to finish. I don't know if I like how I finished it, though. I never used to doubt my writing skills, before. I've never had anyone tell me I'm a bad writer, though. I usually have people say "You're really good!" Well, what makes me a good writer? Are you only saying it to be nice? If I'm such a good writer, why do I only have four blog followers?
Lately, I've been getting ideas for my blog, great ones, only to lose them before I can get to a computer. They usually involve food or culture and I usually get them when I'm half asleep. Other times I'll get an idea, and then realize it's too personally motivated to put on my blog. Or that if I write it, I'll piss someone off.
I do not like getting involved in drama, even though I am oft times embroiled in it. I try to avoid it, but I can't help it a lot of the time. I regret to say that I am ruled by my emotions. My emotions , my compulsions get me in a lot of trouble. I have to learn how to keep my thoughts to myself, and not dig my own grave with my verbal diarrhea. I would post some of my thoughts in my blog if I could, but the tricky thing about the internet is that anyone can see what you post anytime. Once it's there, it's like a tattoo.
So I keep the private, explosive thoughts in a diary. As for the blog ideas which are viable, I'll have to write those down to, so I can remember them. I'll have to remind myself to do that. Forgetfulness is a vicious cycle.
So I'm almost done rewriting my little memoirs. With any luck, I'll be finished in about six months.

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.