What would you do if you could not write?

Where would it go? Where would all the thought, emotions, observations go? Would they fall by the wayside, forgotten? Would I implode with the bursting pressure of them, like an over-stretched balloon? Would my words die if they lost the immortality of being stained to paper? My writing is pain and passion, love, laughter, family. Would that cease to exist if I could not preserve it? I compare it to a soul. The soul is eternal. My words, my thoughts are eternal. To not write them down is not to say they never were. The air would thicken with the pregnant tendrils of my forbidden words. Unable to be contained in paper, my thoughts would simply drift away, eluding me; they would not die. But like the loss of a soul, it would be an agony to endure the separation.

(written 9/5/08)

Forget

I wish my mind was a tape recorder. I wish it was practical and socially acceptable to carry a notebook with me everywhere I went. To write as I think and document my every thought. To capture observations, put life’s minutiae down to ink and paper. Thoughts like gems, given permanence and physical evidence of their existence. Not retreating into the recesses of memory, forgotten.

The wastefulness of forgetting is a gnawing presence. I want to imprison my impressions of the world. Lock them up, freeze them forever, never forgetting. But I can’t. My thoughts are not gems for safeguarding. They are water, they are sand. They cannot be held in the palms of my hands. I forget, I always forget.

And then it's gone.

(written 9/4/08)

Harry Potter Bookmarks

I made up a couple of these Harry Potter bookmarks to use for my Deathly Hallows book.

The first contains one of my favorite quotes from the entire series. It is Dumbledore's last line in Deathly Hallows and it perfectly captures the conversation that had taken place between himself and Harry at King's Cross. More importantly however, I think that line was JKR's beautiful tribute to magic, reading, readers, and all the Harry Potter novels as a whole. Although the world of Harry Potter and the fictional characters we come to love so dearly are works of the mind and the imagination, it does not make them any less real.

Harry will always be real to me.




The second bookmark is actually a quote I got from an interview with Daniel Radcliffe. These were the words Anton Chekhov used to describe the woman who he eventually came to marry, and I thought it fit perfectly with the way I felt during and after Deathly Hallows was released and the Harry Potter novels came to an end. Though the conclusion of the books didn't literally end my life, they did make up a huge part of my childhood and teen years and when I finished them, it was like ending a chapter in my life... that is, a glorious, magical, and unforgettable chapter of my life!

Change

In light of my recent neglect of Blustery Day, I've decided to do this new layout, sans Winnie the Pooh (I still love you big guy). I felt that just because I was inspired to write the blog based on a Winnie the Pooh song, I didn't have to plaster the poor guy all over it! So here it is, Blustery Day in her brand spankin' new outfit, ready to take on the world (how epic!!). Hope you like it! (And by "you" I mean "me").

Staying Above Water

One of those strangely vivid yet hard to place memories I have from my childhood is watching an older man— I don’t know who— floating in the water while I was swimming next to him and trying to mimic his movements. I remember watching him expand his chest and exhale while keeping his body afloat like it was the most precise and exacting of arts. No matter how accurately I recreated his technique, I found that it made no difference in the way I floated. But there he remained, bobbing in the water, only his face and stomach breaking the surface.

I Am Not What I Am

Right now, I look like one of those girls whose mascara has migrated from the tips of her lashes to the better half of her face. I look like one of those girls who cuts deep V-necks out of sweatshirts. Right now, my hair is straightened and my bangs aren't trapped in a clip away from my face. Right now, I am not what I am.

Oh, Bother

• Why can't people do simple things like wait on the lunch line without having to take an entourage of unsuspecting fools (me) with them to asuage their terrible insecurities about standing alone for ten freakin' minutes? It's just a lunch line, nobody is judging you for standing on it.
• I have a scar on my knee that looks like a weirdly discolored blotch of skin rather than the cool WWII battle scar I had intended it to look like... not cool
• I am allergic to AP Biology... no seriously. Every time I walk into the room I feel like I'm being sucked into a vortex of pollen and irritants that no common antihistamine could cure.
• At the rate this election is going, I wouldn't be entirely miffed if Obama and Hillary just pulled a Hamilton vs. Burr middle-of-the-woods duel. Hillary, feel free to loose that one.
• Andrew Jackson was a badass
• What the hell has NASA been up to all these years? Do they think they can just land on the moon and be done with it?
• Whoever manufactures school desks clearly has never had to simultaneously use a laptop, textbook, and notebook while hiding a cell phone underneath it all. I'm sorry but a 3x2 hunk of lacquered square footage just isn't going to cut it. And what's with the whole lovechild of a wood and plastic orgy look?