The sun isn't up yet but I can see the outdoors

I thought it's been a while since I did one of these - if you've known me for a while (and are still bothering to read this) you know what I mean: an almost trademark early morning post that might ramble on forever, brought on by the power of dawn and that state one can reach by pushing past tired and staying up anyway. A lot of people get giggly - I have, sometimes, when I'm with people. Normally, though, I get terribly introspective.

These are normally summer things - I don't screw up my sleeping schedule badly enough to warrant them most other times.

Except I have. Brill, really.

I'm not even sure I have much to say, but it felt like a thing to do. Sorta I just don't want to go back to school. It's not even anything against school: sure, I don't like reading about teaching people to write, and my partners in the comic book class don't know when to stop coming up with ideas and start getting some of them down on paper, but overall I enjoy school. I just enjoy being free to read and write and take walks through real trees without worrying about messing up some guy's lawn manicure job. So I want to extend time. And I do that, at some day when it gets really bad, by getting up at the normal time for a break and then not going to sleep. I mean, it's six thirty in the morning - gozen roku-ji han, in Japanese (I've been trying to relearn what I knew of that language), and I'm still up. I woke up around eleven Wednesday morning.

I should mention that reading romantic comedy comics when you're terribly romantic (in the Keats way, not the Danielle Steele way) and have a bad case of social anxiety - well, that's bad. It doesn't help that a few of the people I work with manage to reinforce that anxiety once in a while. Really I'm sure they don't mean to (well, the sorority girl probably does, actually) but that makes it worse, in a sense - it's just about what they're seeing, then, instead of an attempt to fire into your unprotected core after bypassing the pure invincibility (oh, arcade shooters, I'm so bad at you as a genre). Maybe I should look into that - turning gaming metaphors in fiction. Obviously I shouldn't steal those metaphors from 8-bit theater, but it's a good place to start.

I don't even know how the writing's going right now - don't ask. Actually, I felt pretty good about it until someone asked today. Of course, opening conversational lines by asking me about teaching wasn't the best way to put me at ease, but she was laboring under the impression that I wanted to teach. Just because every other English graduate student wants to pound their heads against brick walls until they're stunned, stop, gaze on their blood speckling the wall, and smile at the change they've wrought, that doesn't mean I want to.

That could be the most emo thing I've written in three years. But it sounds pretty cool, and I hear all the writers use extended metaphors nowadays. Of course, most of them are talking about sex, or drugs, (or if we're honest, both - as sex is really just a physical stimulant to get natural drugs rushing the body).

So, guys, pointing out that I won't have to worry about having children because of my inability to get into a relationship? You know that kind of joke? Not really funny, thanks. (Sorority girl in the WC again, actually, but I thought I'd get it out there).

There actually isn't anything for intellectuals to do in America other than teach, is there? It could be just as true of other countries, but I don't know much about them.

And don't think I'm trying to puff myself up, there - what else am I, but an intellectual? I honestly, without puerile posturing, enjoy discussing Nietzsche, Foucault, and Freud. I ascribe to "schools" of literary theory, because some of the heavy hitters have managed to articulate well what I think haphazardly. This is a particularly American one, mind, but I read, damn it. For fun. Stephen King has claimed he was part of the last generation of writers to read more than watch TV - who knows if I actually get to be called a writer (as some people think you have to have a degree to be a philologist, any opinion's possible: I haven't met an Engish major [or professor, for that matter] who believes that makes any sense, but anyway), but I read more than I watch TV. And that was true when I was but a wee child, as well as now.

Of course, this seems to be a liability - even King is heavily influenced by the monster movies he used to watch when he was a kid. I am infatuated with the English language at a time when both writers and readers want descriptions of, for lack of a better word, camera angles. Writers tend to switch between characters just to keep a reader's interest - if you've been keeping up with my sporadic postings of the last year, you know this particularly modern habit drives me insane.

Well, all right. It's getting brighter and brighter outside - I want to step out for a few moments before collapsing in bed.

O_o The school bus just went up the hill. Son of a bitch.

Anyway. I was going to comment that I hadn't really even gotten into my constant state of un-dating. But we're probably all glad for that - what would I have to say that's new about it? Most aren't interested, and I'm insane. That covers about everything there.

Oh, and not every comic needs a mystical near-east martial artist, by the way. Apparently, the comic I'm working on has one, but you know, whatever. That's cool, or something.