I saw Beauty and the Beast last night, and it moved me more than I expected. It wasn’t the cinematography, the beautifully decorated sets, Emma Watson, or the hopeful story of love that did it for me. If I’d seen the same movie six months ago, I’d still have felt something, but nothing quite as beautiful as what I felt for an entire hour after seeing this movie. I was so inspired that I came home and immediately wrote the outline to this blog post. I felt this warm, beautiful glow in my chest. A peaceful feeling, like the one you feel right before you easily fall asleep after a particularly rewarding and exhausting day’s work. I’ve changed, somehow. The past several months have probably been the most emotionally engaged of my life. Both my brother and sister have noticed it in their own ways and told me as much. But how did it happen?
Emotional writing is different from intellectual writing. As I’ve moved forward in life, I’ve come to acknowledge a fundamental flaw in my writing ability. It’s been there, masked in the imperceptible shadow of my psyche, for at least a decade. This hidden part of myself reared its head as if born from a button I felt compelled to press as the critical clock of my life spun toward midnight. The only regret I have is that I wish I could have done it sooner. I continue to feel tortured by the unbidden consequences of this action, but I would do it over and over again if it could mean that I would feel complete someday. What it has given me is the realization that emotional writing is only effective if the reader emphasizes with a character’s feelings or situation.
I have managed to avoid being high my entire life. I’ve never even been buzzed. Why would I subject myself to this? I’m obviously insane. When I was younger, I typically did what my parents told me to do if I found it rational. “You shouldn’t drink or smoke,” they said. “Okay!” I said back. And that was that for decades. Little did they expect (and much to their dismay), I kept that habit through college and into my professional life. When people asked me why, I typically said it was for health reasons. At my age and with that excuse, I start to wonder if people think I used to be an alcoholic. “Cranberry juice, please!” When I got my wisdom teeth out, they put me on Vicodin. I called my father and asked when I would start to feel high. His response? “Do you feel any pain?” And of course I responded, “No.” He cheekily replied: “Then you’re high!” Nowadays, I like to tell people that I want to experience the world in its entirety, pain and all. Those discomforting signals, I tell them, let you know that you’re dissatisfied with the world and that you need to make a change. Drinking, in my view, was a self-applied control mechanism to make you docile.
I’ve always struggled with the question of which I’d rather do in my career: would I like to always write new code, or am I happy fixing and extending older code (aka maintenance)? Some people may say it’s never that black and white, “Projects usually have sprinklings of both!”. In my career, though, it has typically followed that trend. So what makes the dichotomy between “writing new code” and “maintaining old” so important in my life as a software engineer, and why am I writing about this?
What makes me so passionate about the words I write? Perhaps it’s a little of the perfectionist in me shining through. I want to create the perfect sentence–one that conveys exactly as much as needed to evoke a thought or emotion, but nothing more. Much in the way that Kurt Vonnegut crafts his sentences, I wish to craft my own. But most of all, I see it as an art form. It’s a creative release for me. Like all things, however, it takes more than a single sentence to create a story. Putting them all together in such a way to make us feel something when we read it is where the real artistry comes in.
When people ask you what you believe in, do you immediately go towards political or religious beliefs? For instance, you could say you are pro-life or pro-choice. You could say you believe in high taxes or low taxes. You could also say you believe in God. According to Google, belief is defined thusly:
**belief - “an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists”
After some recent experiences that I’ve had, I find this definition to be somewhat weak. I feel as though the definition needs to be expanded to encompass something that I can only call “true belief”. I would define it as follows:
When I was thirteen, I had your stereotypical “thirteen year-old” experience. Nowadays, they call that the “hasn’t quite finished puberty” but is “owning you and swearing badly on COD4” phase. Back in the 90s, there were these online forums called bulletin-board systems (or BBS). You wouldn’t connect to them through the Internet, but through a modem and a text-based terminal software. On one such BBS was a game called Legend of the Red Dragon. Now, if you’ve never heard of it (which I assume you haven’t), it was a text based multiplayer RPG. The goal was to get strong enough to fight a dragon. Once someone defeated the dragon ten total times, they won the game and everything reset.
How do you know whether to take a certain action? If you’re anything like me, then you consider all the evidence and alternatives and then try to decide objectively. If you’re not like me, then you probably think about how you feel at the time and then choose the best feeling option. Unfortunately, neither of these methods are guaranteed to lead to the best decision, even in ideal circumstances. Human beings, it turns out, are a complex grouping of experiences and emotions.
My name is Jacob, and I am a procrastinator.
This sounds like an introduction to an AA meeting doesn’t it? To be frank, I feel as though there should be a support group for people like me. The feeling of denial was overwhelming. You find that you’re very productive at work or on other things in your life and all of a sudden, you’re not a procrastinator. You’ve shown yourself that since you can operate normally in one facet of your life, that’s proof that you don’t have a problem.
