the idealism of inexperience (or, how sugar ray changed my life)

      

     Omens, creative stalemates, and a nearly-nonironic usage of Sugar Ray lyrics to assist the flow of ideas.


      I am writing this in a mock-news cuticle with Someday by Sugar Ray playing around me. 
      I have not yet made it known that I have seemed to have reached a creative equilibrium. To dissect what that means in relation to creative productivity, the amount of creative inspiration I am sonically receiving is the same amount of schoolwork I am being assigned, so the amount of effort I would regurgitate into the throes of my creative work (whether it is writing for this blog or elsewhere, making music, or creating some type of art) is stifled by the workload I am required to dedicate to my schoolwork. 

Someday
When my life has passed me by

      Being at a creative stalemate fucking sucks. I've never been at such a deadlock in my entire life, and I don't even know where to begin. I do not feel any motivation to create, a sensation that had once threaded itself into my being and congealed my blood into a gelatinous glob of artistry. Nope. Dead. I'm fruitless. 

In the eyes of a passerby
I'll look around for another try

     Omens and coincidences have been frequenting my life, something I attribute to a concept called planned happenstance. I'm a huge fucking poser, and so I'm ripping this right from a college course I'm taking, but planned happenstance can be best described as a person (or event) that comes into your life and completely shapeshifts the trajectory of your future. This influx of coincidences that have been plaguing my train of thought and actions (ironically, everything I do is a coincidence itself; I cannot even explain or cite any examples, there are too many) are due to a newer friend of in my life, someone I vaguely knew previous to these past few months. 

     We had formally befriended in an extracurricular club my freshman year of high school, but we grew closer through a group chat between mutual friends my junior year. That's when she had introduced me to the idea of omens, which are nearly-spiritual happenings that foreshadow something either good or bad that is about to occur. Ever since she brought the idea of omens up into the conversation, I had been seeing them, experiencing them, and suffering through them.

And'll fade away

     I had one particularly unequivocal coincidence--or omen, if you will--occur to me two nights ago. In the pursuit of a speech to write about as a part of as AP Composition assignment, I had pulled up Tavi Gevinson's speech at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2013; a forty-five minute long speech that I had seen once before in my freshman year of high school. Muddled by the amount of work I had to complete that night, I decided to calm my nerves (isn't this an oxymoron? Or a dramatic example of irony?) by compulsively downing two cans of Diet Coke, applying a goopey layer of chapstick, and sitting cross-crossed on my bed to rewatch the speech with a fresh pair of eyes and a more mature outlook on life (I guess). 

     Forty-five minutes later, my mind was fucking...blown. All of my thoughts over the past six months that I have been unable to formulate into words and sentences and phrases and full diatribes were explained within that quarter-of-an-hour time frame. I had speculated a reason for the deadlock, but I was unable to describe it with phrases that made sense to people beside my own self. With a click of the tongue, Gevinson summed up all of the thoughts on this lack of creativity I had fully explored and dissected in past journal entries and late night self-deprecation: The loss of inexperience.
     Quoth Roger Ebert, a quote to which Gevinson cites in her speech, in reference to the film The Virgin Suicides (ironically, a film that never resonated with me), ''And when the Lisbon girls kill themselves, do not blame their deaths on their weird parents. Mourn for the passing of everyone you knew and everyone you were in the last summer before sex. Mourn for the idealism of inexperience.''
      Damn.
      Ebert (and Gevinson) compressed the jadedness I have been feeling into one neat, compact anaphora. Droned I in a journal entry dated on February 7, ''I felt like I had taken a beating to my imaginative capacity; I felt no longer consumed by the magic of imaginative wander or splendor, a strange, wooden block clogging up the crevices that once could conjure up creativity and strange, dizzying delusions. After a break-up that had been hyperbolized and killed the idealism of inexperience, I felt that the ideal of romance and relationships I had built up in my head from a young age was killed by the striking of a stone. I no longer felt the need to fantasize. How so? (Well, the idealism of inexperience had dissolved and washed away).''

Just close your eyes and I'll take you there
This place is warm without a care

      I have been thinking in reds recently. I also have unintentionally been a dick. And dramatic.
      I'll survive this creative deadlock. I find beacons of hope in every blossoming obsession, every suppressed embarrassed gaze, every unsolicited text message, every shy conversational exchange, every note of a Girls song, every sunburn I spot on skin, every defiant tone, every calcified grin, and every time I think about vomiting.
      Just as Sugar Ray put it:

Some say

Better things will come our way

A journal entry fueled by my burning desire and appreciation for Valentine's Day (featuring an image from an issue of Cosmopolitan from 1958 and a vintage valentine)

Stills from Tyler, the Creator's ''Perfect''