I have not done anything creatively stunning lately to share with you all. Though I have been writing letters. Many years ago (or like.... four years ago) my good friend and I started writing letters. We had no lives, so we wrote every single week. Often the letters would be absurdly long - the longest I think was 46 pages. I had never really written anything up until that point. I tried my hand at creative writing many-a-time but was never that interested in it. For fiction to be interesting to me, it must walk a very, very fine line between relatable and poetic. It cannot be bland, and it cannot be fantastic. I didn't posses the knack that walked that line, so my own fiction never interested me.
What interests me has always been people. I have thought that I might like to be a biographer, since that is mostly what I like to read. A few years ago I started compiling interviews in article form. Perhaps I will work more on that project and post some of them here?
Whoa. I got way off topic. I meant to be writing about letters, not biographies.
So this friend and I always thought it would be the coolest thing to find writings from our grandparents and great grandparents, or people who had lived in our houses before, but we never had any such luck. Her old family home has been searched through and through and my own family tree is spread out and discombobulated. So THEN we thought it would be cool if we left an account of our lives for people who came after us and would have the same desire to look into that past that we had.
But really, we were both too lazy to keep a diary or journal.DIV> <DIV>Really. It's too much work.
So we started writing letters. Far more exciting. Someday someone will find one half of the letters and just have to put them together, and by so doing will have a complete history and picture of both of our lives.
We write less now, as we sort of have lives now. I hadn't really written much to her at all in a while until a few weeks ago. My letter writing had gotten sloppy and lazy. It would be two pages of "blah, blah, blah, I'm bored of explaining this now. "
I have fallen quite back into it. I almost never stop writing now. And I write slowly. It is beautiful. To sit and just breathe in and out and explain things entirely. When I stop and slow down a bit, it not longer is a chore to fit in every detail. It becomes a fun challenge, an art form, a game with new ways to use adjectives and metaphors. How many ways can I explain the same feeling? What word would make her understand the taste of that food? How do I describe this person?
I am much better at writing letters than I am at blogging. Especially at two in the morning.
Maybe I will write when I have something conclusive to say.
Oh! Wait!
The other week I was walking along the street, and there was a group of guys standing on the sidewalk. We were nearish to the ocean and they all looked like stereotypical surfer men. Bleached hair, silly muscles, cool sunglasses. They were there being all beefy and manly, when I happen to hear what they are talking about. One of them was trying to explain what his hair used to look like.... "No, no, dude. Seriously, my hair was like.... You know in the Sorcerers Stone? The guy with the black - Snape. My hair was like that."
I love hearing pieces of conversations on the street. You can't make that stuff up.
Latte time.
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