Growing Pains

Hello readers!

First off, apologies for being gone for so long; I just finished five weeks of biology (the bane of my existence) and when I wasn't sleeping, studying or catching up with friends for much-needed coffee, I was staring blankly at this screen....yeah, it was a tough month.

But it's over! Hallelujah!!!! For three weeks until fall semester arrives. Anyway, maybe it's entering into my senior year and not knowing where the past three years have gone, I realized it's time for me to grow up.

Now, you might say, "Victoria, haven't you already grown up? You have a job, pay your own cell phone bill, and cook four nights out of the week." And yes, I suppose that's pretty grown up. But there's a moment when it just hits you: I've got to stop this and actually GROW UP.

I think it hit me when I looked in my closet and realized I have nothing to wear, in the sense that I have a ton of t-shirts, mini-skirts and flirty dresses, but...pencil skirts? blouses? Nil. This, coupled with a look into my "virtual closet" (aka Pinterest) which consists mainly of office-appropriate outfits that also manage to be gorgeous, made me realize I have to grow out of the college student/ 21st century flower child wardrobe.

Senior year itself isn't a problem (two months from now I won't be saying this), mainly because creative writing majors don't have to write a thesis (the department figures that we'll be too busy writing literary essays and novellas). But in less than a year I'll be graduating. Then what?

The plan is get my masters in creative writing, go into teaching or journalism/Miranda Priestly's personal whipping girl while I work on my writing and then hit my big break at some point. Of course this is entirely hypothetical. And grad school alone means making a huge decision: wherever I decide to go - Bangor, Charlottesville, San Francisco - will make a huge impact on my life, and may even determine where I spend the rest of my life. That's just a little bit scary.

I guess the biggest thing I need right now is the support of my friends, just to let me know I'm not failing on life (big plans result in stress, and stress, yeah). And just focus on the positive; like in less than a year I'll have graduated! And I'm already starting to make serious plans for next summer, big plans. Will keep you posted :)

Any advice? Thoughts? Grad suggestions? Please comment!  

Oh how I hate writer's block, plus a shout out to Bono for saving my mind

There are few things I hate in this world. (Actually that's not true; I hate a lot of things but my likes far outweigh dislikes). Writer's block is one of the big ones.

I bet anyone's run up against writer's block at one point or another, whether it's a thesis, a novel or just a simple journal entry. (Spoiler: pretty much everything I've ever posted on this blog is delayed by at least two days. The culprit? Writer's block.)

So there's this story I've been trying to write about my experience of finding joy and beauty in the slums of Lima, Peru. As of right now it's a good 1, 019 words but lacks a concise theme and satisfying conclusion (two crucial points). According to the date on Word I started this story last September. The actual beginning happened somewhere between July 17th and 21st. So, I'm looking at a procrastination period of 347 days.

Yeah...that's pretty bad.

I'll admit it, this article hasn't been the primary focus of my life during this 347 day drag. I've had to prioritize classes, academic papers, work, traveling, babysitting, exercising, walking the dog, well, you get the picture; a lot of stuff has come up and this story has just gotten shoved further back on my to-do list. And the times I do pull it up I just end up staring at those endless lines and thinking "****, where do I go from here?"

And that's when Bono saved my life. Well, my sanity anyway.

Recently I was looking up info on The Joshua Tree (because why not? Also because I really want to find a Joshua Tree on my cross country road trip which I'm planning for sometime in the close(ish) future), and found a quote from Bono describing the conception of the album, which began after a humanitarian visit to Ethiopia:

"Spending time in Africa and seeing people in the pits of poverty, I still saw a very strong spirit in the people, a richness of spirit I didn't see when I came home...I saw the spoiled child of the Western world. I started thinking, 'they may have a physical desert, but we've got other kinds of deserts.'" (Rolling Stone (1994), pp. 68–69). 

It was crazy how much this description fit the memory I was trying to put into words but just couldn't. Almost immediately I was stoked to finish this story and put out for publication to share this amazing experience with my readers. Hopefully it'll be finished soon!


Moral of this: When in doubt, U2.