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Long weekends aren't long enough, I'm tired, my room's a mess despite my attempts to clean this evening. I miss Chris, I want him back here with me, and Christmas is too far away.
Trip Highlights: bought a new camera, did a photoshoot with Nicole Dee (I'll post the pictures once she's finished editing the set), watched Where the Wild Things are, rented a car for dirt cheap, spent a day holed up in a disproportionately swank hotel room, snuggled cuddled and kissed.
Also, check out how adorable my hair looks when it's chopped short. Also also, check out how adorable we are when we're together.
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It's strange how easily emotion translates to physicality; enough heartbreak and your breath just stops. The silence you've always craved turns corrosive; you find yourself longing for the echoes of senseless noise. Whatever will stop the doubt and the fear circling through your system.
Your brain blacks out. There's thought there, but the focus eludes you - it's hard enough to remember to turn the oven off, how can you be expected to identify and catalogue the crippled emotions wreaking havoc on your insides? Your rib cage has shrunk, you're sure of it; it's the only explanation for those tiny gasping breaths, the only oxygen you seem able to pull into your lungs. Your heartbeat alternates between racing ominously and threatening to stop completely; there's a raven pecking its way out of your stomach, as if opening you up from the inside out is the only way to let in enough sunlight and warmth to banish the chills wracking your body.
And through all of it, the expectation. Hope for the future replaced not by fear but instead, by the absolute conviction that one day, the words will kill you.
"I love you, I swear I do. Or at least, I used to."
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| I know you don't actually care, because your crazed teenage hormones have blinded you to all reason and logic, but the Vampire Diaries were actually originally written and published about fourteen years ago - while you were little more than a twinkle in your mother's eye, let's say. So before you go on your annoying tirades about how everyone and everything vampiric is a copy of Stephanie Meyer's atrocious attempts at writing good literature, it'd do you well to get your facts straight. Twilight was written well after the Vampire Diaries. And after Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And after Interview with a Vampire. And after even the Sookie Stackhouse novels - the books, of course, that True Blood is based on. And all of these were written well after Dracula. Your fascination with the undead is nothing new, nor is it unique. And if anyone's the failed copycat, it's your literary idol, Stephanie Meyer, who comes at the very end of long line of vampire literary tradition. | | |
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When I used to use this account as an outlet for my many artistic whims, my emo pangs of self-loathing and narcissism, it would infuriate me to realize that many had me pegged as a directionless alcoholic - the wasted talent of the bunch, prone to excess and irresponsibility. It didn't matter that I managed to sow my wild oats while obtaining an honours bachelors degree from one of the best universities in the world, or that in spite of everything, I'd only ever had sex with one boy in my life. Nope, I talked about sex and booze and the metaphorical end of the world, so I was going to die in a blind, drunken haze without anyone to truly miss me and without ever having properly known love. I posted scandalous pictures of myself, and that made me an attention whore more desperate for validation than love; it meant I wasn't a true writer, but instead a waste of talent and intelligence.
A few years later, and I can't say I blame people for their assumptions. Around here, you are who you blog. People don't have the benefit of obtaining a three-dimensional picture of you; they don't get to observe you with your friends, or at school, flitting from day-to-day like a restless hummingbird. They don't get the flesh and blood, the rounded-out rise and fall that makes a comprehensive story. They only get the anticlimax of your day-after musings; what they see, is what you blog.
And only what you blog.
Say, you're a young, attractive woman, writing about sex and posting pictures of yourself, reveling in the attention it gets you. There's nothing wrong with that, per se. Sex, as far as I'm concerned, is nothing to be ashamed of; I'm quite upfront and frank about my sexual preferences, and I've no qualms with people making those details of their lives into a public affair. But don't act the wounded innocent when someone points the accusing finger, screaming "whore!" and begging you to change your ways.
This is the image you voluntarily portrayed. This is the woman you showed yourself to be.
The facts don't matter, not when you've traded in reality for the reputation you cultivated. The fact that you willingly paraded yourself for all the Internets to see means you take the bad along with all the good it got you - they have every 'right' to judge you, because this is the only picture of yourself you gave them. This is all you wanted them to see.
And sure it's not fair, and you're probably not the vacuous whore they've made you out to be. Or you're not really the miserly bastard worthy of nothing but disdain. Or you're not the boring religious zealot bent on sucking the happiness out of every moment in life.
But what does the reality matter, when nobody will ever know that?
Quite frequently, people champion for the idea that we're all real people behind the computer screen - that we should treat one another as we would a flesh-and-blood person, standing before us instead of separated by miles and miles of cords and wires. And sure, we are. Real people, worthy of being treated as such. I'd love for my audience to think of me as more than just a series of profile pictures and pulses.
But that's a lot to ask when the very medium we chose limits us to nothing more than two-dimensional pictures. Even a video blog only gives as much as I let it; there comes a point when you can't blame your audience for not knowing you, but instead must come to terms with the fact that they do.
They know you as your blog; whatever notion they have of you is the direct result of those words and images you chose to represent you.
And maybe that's not their fault.
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