"Extraordinary Eruptions of Information"
Musings on Literature, Art, Writing, and Life in the Age of Quantification
So I’m in my late 30s. This is an age that I think a lot of people dread, because 40 marks the beginning of middle age, the no-good, very bad slump that follows young(er) adulthood where we’re all suddenly used-up malcontents who are either beaten down by life or on the verge of launching headfirst into a sitcom-like midlife crisis.
That is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But I have noticed that birthdays that end in 0 tend to cause panic in adults.
Grad school is out for the summer, which means I finally have more time to decompress…and think, and write, and read about things that aren’t part of my grad program. Someone once described grad school to me as intellectual boot camp, and I think there’s a truth to that. I would actually call it emotional boot camp as well. This isn’t my first grad program, so I knew going in that it would, at times, encompass a lot of my brain’s energy.
I’m also doing it with a chronic illness (which keeps throwing new and interesting symptoms at me), and a searing need to write. And writing is what I’m here to write about.
I don’t post as much of my writing publicly because it’s shifted. I had a few realizations as I got older, and one was that my early fixation on publishing had less to do with publishing and more to do with wanting to feel heard.
