Too much time on Youtube

I've spent the last hour watching Obama speeches on You tube. I'm embarrassed by what I wrote after his election. I voted for him (I was going to say obviously but maybe that wasn't so obvious) but I'm only now becoming emotionally involved in this election, now that it's over. I'm glad other people did before me so that he got elected.

Sometimes (or all the time) I just can't seem to see in front of my own nose.
I've read things that other people have written about Obama, I mean people my own age (I'll be specific, I read something that Dan Cluchey wrote and I thought it was perfect) and I see in them (especially him!) foresight. I'm so caught up in the present or the past, (or maybe in my day dreams), that the future -- any kind of rational vision of the future, rarely makes it in.

Ok, what else? I'm a little embarrassed that this is my blog. I just read some others, and they were so much less frivolous than mine. People were writing about things they were doing, and they were doing some impressive things. I, on the other hand, don't seem to be doing anything. Nor do I speak about very much other than myself.

Writing is sometimes the only way I can get myself to think, so I have this obsessive need to keep doing it. My whole life I've never thought I was good or smart enough to show what I wrote, I just kept a journal for my own sanity. When I was in highschool it was the thing I went to... I don't know, it was a source of private pride. This was me. This was where I could do whatever I wanted, because no one would ever see it. It wouldn't be held up to the measuring stick of everyone else. I always had a sort of, damn them attitude when I wrote. As if to say, "they" might not think it's any good, but I don't give a fuck, this is for me.
Because I kept the journal private, I could say that, and it was so liberating.

Yet, at the same time, even when I was just seven or eight, I wrote with the question, hope, fantasy in the back of my mind of, "what if someone were to find this and read it? What would they think?" It was a game I always played. Game isn't the right word. I wrote with the hope of having a reader at some point. So recently I was thinking, well, maybe I'll write and make it so that people can actually read it. Hope becoming reality.

What do I gain out of this blog? I don't know. Except that when I wasted half a day writing in my journal, I never had anything to show for it because I never showed my journal to anyone. But now, I do have something that will be shown, or, is shown is more like it. (I guess you could say that I'm showing it, but in my mind it's more passive than that.) And so, at least I feel like I'm doing something rather than wasting hours.

Another reason for this blog is that last year, I started to open two word documents when I began to write papers. One document was supposed to be the paper, the other was what came out of my brain instead. I have pages and pages on my computer saved under titles like, "I'm supposed to be writing my paper right now". They are usually raving and rambling things, and sometimes I sound almost high, but at least they are me expressing thoughts that I wanted to express rather than the documents that I handed which had me writing about things I never felt comfortable writing about, usually because my mind was always on something other than what I needed to learn to write the papers. Plus the papers I handed in were always going to have a critic on the other end and the knowledge of that turned me into the harshest critic, and I spent more time deleting myself than writing.

Anyway, I got so frustrated by the end of school because the thoughts that I respected were the thoughts on the second document, the one no one ever saw. I wrote about Amherst. I wrote what I thought after Jenny Kim died. Once I wrote what I would say if I were to publish an oped in the Student, "four years at amherst". haha. And another time I wrote a tirade I wanted to say to the lacrosse/ psi u boys after three years of reffing their teams at the Educate Dodgeball tournament.

A lot of people know that I.... was a little bitter by the end of college. There are a lot of words I could use there. How to put it succinctly? What I felt in school was not what you imagine when you look at those radiant pictures of students and fall leaves and beautiful brick buildings. Not because of my sister, which is how I often phrased it, but maybe in the same way my sister has not had a normal college experience. However hers is her own story and is much more of a story than mine (out of the two of us she should be the one with the blog because she was always and still is the better writer, and also because she feels things even more powerfully than I) and so I won't go into it too much. But anyway, I had a lot to say that I kept in at Amherst and I probably shouldn't have kept so much in. If I had let it out I might have found that things were not exactly what I thought they were.

This damn computer won't charge so I'm going to stop. And go for a run I think.

Ok, and also, after and in between watching Obama I was watching my new favorite crush on youtube, Matt Doyle. Haha, you should look him up. I really am pathetic. (The videos from Bare, pop opera, are really good, or at least they are if you're already a fan like me.)