It has been a while since I&#039ve written a real rant. I suppose that like my big sis, I have the unfortunate tendency to ignore what I&#039m feeling or just not think about it, figuring that if I don&#039t pay attention to it long enough, it&#039ll just go away and I can move on. Well, I guess I really just can&#039t. Evenings like this where my mind goes into hyperactive mode pretty much prevent me from wanting to do anything but write it all down, get it out. Maybe this is part of the reason why I haven&#039t been sleeping too well.

Am I depressed, you ask? No, not really. Were I depressed, I would express that in the title. I&#039m just pensive, really. I&#039m not thinking the dark thoughts that most people wouldn&#039t even dare to whisper when alone late at night in bed. I&#039m just thinking. When you never stop thinking unless unconscious (and even then I&#039m dreaming), deep thinking surfaces amidst the chaos. I&#039m not entirely sure where this long thought started, whether it has been forming for a few hours, days or weeks, but I know that I simply cannot not write something regardless of its coherence to everyone else. I need this. I&#039ll start with this evening and see if I can&#039t reconstruct my thought process to get me back to where I am now.

Tomorrow there is a poetry reading which I am attending and participating in, so I needed to have some hard copies with me to read from. Not keeping many hard copies at hand (most of them are packed up or are out-of-date), I grabbed a back-up disk from Uriel and popped it in Buster, pulling up a few new poems which haven&#039t been read to death at other poetry readings. I pulled the more recent ones, say, back to about a year ago, and began copying them out onto notebook paper. Going through poetry is always emotional for me (If it&#039s good; if it&#039s bad, it&#039s just frustrating.) and going through my own is much more so. I began thinking about what was going on in my life when I wrote them: love poems, nature poems, poems about pain (real and internal)… Memories coming back from even further back about other poems simply added to it. I began thinking that perhaps I would add some of the newer poems to the page becauase most of them have never seen the light of day.

I keep an html file in my web page&#039s directory to serve as a template for adding poetry. After connecting to Brigid, I started going through this directory, realizing that I have a lot of pictures and secondary and tertiary webpages in there. I flipped through all the pictures, then began looking at all the secondary pages which I haven&#039t seen in a long time. I have been posting to my webpage since July 2003 although I didn&#039t get the domain name &#034Writing in Green&#034 until the following March. The first format was not in Rantfest style, so my really long posts had secondary pages added to them to hold the extra length. The first of these that I came to was &#034religion.&#034 The mentions of France and my freedom from religion there made me think about the semester I spent there three years ago. It also made me think about my future year there when I am getting my PhD. Added to the fact that I spent about an hour and a half archiving a Frenchwoman&#039s comic blog, the nostalgia was enough to get me thinking pretty hard about how much I miss being there and how much I want to go back…sometimes wanting to go back permanently.

The second rant I came across was &#034swimming&#034 which details a little bit about how I view the ocean of world religions and how everyone is choking on the backwash of everyone else&#039s views, unable to get a fresh drink of their own or even just stand on dry land a while. Again, religion figured heavily which brought back this year&#039s irritation at Easter and yet another year of people wading in and out of conversations asking what I was doing for the holiday. I was no longer thinking as much about France as I was about all the various rants I&#039ve written about religion and my beliefs. I looked up my post about the movie The Passion (March 10, 2004 if you&#039re curious) and found a few other, minor posts about religion along the way. It&#039s something that really gets to me, and last year I&#039d even begun writing up my own treatise on existentialism to post as an essay on the writings page so I can direct people there instead of having to explain my esoteric philosophy in person. More religion means more thinking means more morose. <Deep sigh>

The third and last secondary page I found was &#034tutoring&#034 and was partially about religion but mostly about my former job as a grad assistant. Reading it, my mind turned away from the spiritual issues to the wordly issues of employment. I had forgotten about this post (as I&#039ve forgotten about most of the several hundred I&#039ve written), and it made me wonder whether these same people still talked in hushed tones about me behind my back, or if they&#039ve finally figured out that I am a kickass employee and they shouldn&#039t even think about contesting that. I don&#039t know. It&#039d be interesting to find out, but I doubt I ever will. This post, of course, got me to thinking about how long I have been at ISU and how much longer I will be there, still in the same department, until Ian graduates from nearby Ivy Tech (which, technially, is still in the works and not finalized). My life could very easily be quickly upheaved if Ian and I decide to leave Terre Haute because I would have to find another job. That&#039s a scary thought because I have had a job at SASC for about five years now, and anything else is going to feel very drastic. Even going to school for my PhD will be strange because I will most likely be teaching at the school I&#039m attending instead of here in Terre Haute. The idea of the PhD coming back just reminded me of France all over again which always brings to mind religious freedom, so I was circling around and around the same few themes again and again. When my thoughts and life seem to pick up patterns like this, it makes me wonder just how repetitive I am, as if I live my life in circles to avoid drastic change or upheaval. It&#039s like a slinky of sorts where the circles are all the same size and shape, just further along the ground than the previous one. School, religion, work…religion, work, school…work, school, religion…

The more I think about these things, the more old rants I went through, the more poems I recalled, conversations I replayed, the more my thoughts and ideas condensed themselves into one coherent thought: I want to write this. Actually, it was more like I need to write this. Whether anyone reads it or not, I need this outlet, I need this medium to be able to continue functioning, to be able to continue thinking and moving along this cyclical path I&#039ve chosen. Everything has come back to writing somehow: the poetry, working on my novels in France, schoolwork, ranting, journals, whatever. I write it, I write about it, and that&#039s what I need. I may be able to ignore my emotions for a while, even pretend that I don&#039t have any at all, but I can&#039t pretend that I don&#039t need to write. It&#039s air, water, food, clothing, shelter, love, pain, happiness, hatred, fuel, pillow, jumpdrive, fear, ecstacy, ballcap, cat, husband, adventure, everything. I just needed to write, and now that I have, I feel better, I feel less morose, I feel like tomorrow will be the same as every day but that&#039s okay because they&#039re the same in that they&#039re always different. For any of you who&#039ve read any of this, I&#039m amazed, and for those of you who&#039ve skipped to the last paragraph or two, that&#039s fine by me too. This isn&#039t up here for you to be enlightened (because I don&#039t think that I&#039m capable of that, nor would I be so egotistical to think that I could ever); it&#039s up here for me to express myself and to get my thoughts out where they don&#039t cause so much friction in my brain that I spontaneously combust. Seeing as how it&#039s late (and I&#039ve been writing for over an hour now), I&#039m heading out. Peace, yo.

P.S. This is the second time that I have written this post. I was in the middle of typing it into the Rantfest screen and my web browser threw me back to my main page before I was even halfway done. I hope I remembered everything that I&#039d written. If not, well, shit happens. -ED