A lot has happened since I last blogged.
I read my words below and they speak to me from a time of despair. A time where I really could have been consoled by a pill (something I am rather vocal about, especially after a glass of wine, is how overly medicated our society is, and my desire to "be the change" so to speak), an anti-inflammatory medication for the physical and emotional ailments alike. I got over physical chemistry...I hear most people do...
Why do we need an excuse to "have a creative outlet". (This is stream of consciousness now as I'm listening to a particularly moving song by my gal Florence and her godsend of a Machine.) I only ask because as I browse other blogs I have begun to notice a major trend in their purpose. I begun this blog too as a "creative outlet". Because I felt science was stifling my inner desire to maybe...let's say...paint watercolor creations a la Eric Carle. What I'm trying to say is: I just got out of my sociology class where I spent an hour silently pondering (and admittedly not really listening) why we can't just be creative all the time, then getting really quite agitated with whoever was responsible for why I can't paint watercolor caterpillars and be equally successful as a medical doctor, AND have one be a means to the other. We humans I think, really like to compartmentalize things. We like to put things in order, we like to section off bits and pieces for times and places, and generally defy the natural entropy of the universe as it forces chaos on us (too much? okay, too much.) It's too much to ask, I know. (Sorry if that was a strange aside... but Hurrah if you've had the same contemplations) So here is my compartment for Creativity. Writing will have to do since I just got a new computer and would rather not watercolor all over it. I'm pretty sure that would ruin it.
Moving on...
I finished a book. A real one, with characters and a storyline, a beginning, middle and end. Actually over the course of a year I have finished a few...but most recently I have to rave about Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Susan Jane Gilman's Undress me in the Temple of Heaven.
The God of Small Things really reinspired some wanderlust that had been swept under a rug. I now have a strong desire to travel to India, if only for the sensory stimuli.
Undress me in the Temple of Heaven was insightful about the 'backpacking' culture around China in the 1980's. Culture clashing, that is. How it is a pastime of the privileged, of those who can afford to fantasize about having "less" to understand "more". I realized after reading this book that I too often make this assumption, "if only I was stripped of everything (willingly of course), I could better understand the world through suffering with the world."
