all's divine in desire

I'm not pleased with the fact that I haven't written an entry in an entire week, but to be fair, I've been incredibly busy (and out of town for the past five days).  I think instead of talking about my weekend and college experiences today I will talk about those later and instead write about something else that I've been thinking about.

I suppose the key to writing a blog is to simply pretend that people care about what you have to say, so that you may articulate your thoughts without being afraid that they are useless or meaningless.  Which is what, I figure, I have been doing for the first two weeks of having my blog.

It's so easy to think that your thoughts and everyday words can only resonate at a personal level, because they were written with some experience in mind that happened to only you.  I have been assuming for all this time that I would write entries only to get down my own thoughts so that I could either look back on them and laugh, or simply exercise my writing muscle every day (note to self: isearch topic?); that I would receive a few comments here and there from my friends who have blogs but nothing much more than that, which is why it is totally weird for me to have people tell me that they have bookmarked my blog for future reading.

I am not trying to toot my own horn, or self-promote, or brag.  It is so bizarre for me to have somebody tell me that what I have articulated means something to them.  I wrote my common application essay -- the one I'm sending to my top three schools! -- on what this concept has meant to me since seventh grade, when I hungrily started to try to make my writing to move someone, whether to laughter or to tears.  I tried and tried to write about things that I thought would resonate in people, like death and divorce; cancer and car crashes, but what I failed to do was to check first to see that these things resonated inside of me.  What resulted was writing that was flat and unrealistic (and the farthest thing away from resonation that I could get).  It was not until I began to do unconventional things that my writing started to flourish.  Instead of writing about tragedy, I assigned thoughts and emotions to inanimate objects and strange protagonists.  By putting my own thoughts into these unconventional narrators, I was able to speak so much louder than any story I wrote about death ever could.  (and with that, I present to you the Sparknotes version of my college essay...)

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that since seventh grade, I have been infatuated with the idea that my writing could resonate inside somebody as meaningful.  And I have been so shocked to find that people care about what I have said on here.  My last entry has been complimented by three people, and I think it means three different things to all of them.  I think my English teacher, who stumbled upon my blog through a series of links on facebook, is impressed by the fact that I am doing this project at all, and putting in as much thought into my entries that I am.  My friend Grace (who is pictured below!) appreciated my thoughts on floatbuilding, because both of us were incredibly involved in that process.  And for my friend Rob, who graduated last year and is currently in college, I think what meant the most to him was simply the remembering of it all.

My writing is not just what I intend for it to mean -- it is just as much what the reader brings to the table.  And the thought that what I have wrote can mean something to many different people for many different reasons is truly fascinating and, honestly, a seventh grade dream fulfilled.