FUN!

When I'm having a bad day, this song always makes me feel better. When I'm having a good day, this song takes that day from good to great.

I've been having something along the lines of writer's block recently.  Obviously I've gotten over it to some extent, but I still feel like something is trapped or blocked off somewhere in my head that needs to be gotten at in order for things to progress.  Letting go of the issue entirely sometimes helps things to surface, like when I used to do math homework and sometimes the answers to hard problems would come to me if I stopped working on them.  That's where all this music comes in.

Distraction







That last one is kind of old, not to mention awesome.

The writer's block started, I think, when I got something published.  Of course, the issue I was supposed to be in was late, and for a while I was convinced that my writing had somehow driven the whole operation to shut down.  It usually comes out on the 20th of every month, but the May issue was delayed until just a day or two ago.  If you want to read a few of my poems, along with some other really good stuff, click here.

Anyway, at the time I found out that someone, no matter who, had read things I produced and liked them, I thought I could send things elsewhere and have similar results.  Not the case.

Being rejected is not the worst thing ever.  However, having that rejection contain something so odd you can't even process it makes you kind of want to give up.  I'm sure whoever wrote this particular rejection letter was just trying to make me feel better, and I know it's really hard to give someone bad news with some sort of positive spin, but they really could have done better.  I might be overreacting.  All they did really was call my poem "fun" but essentially not right for their publication.  That word "fun" is the problem.  What I sent them was not "fun".  It was very painful and personal, as most poems are, and I was hurt by what I'm guessing was either a complete misunderstanding or complete disregard of my work.

So, being a person who is all too easily impacted by every minuscule event, I began wondering if anything I write makes sense to anyone other than me and if that other website who took my poems was only being nice and etc. etc. on until all manner of depressing thoughts had been explored.  Then I couldn't write anything.  I try to get out a poem a week, just to keep up some sort of schedule and because I now have the time for such things, but almost three went by and nothing was happening.  The word "fun" had totally destroyed me.

Then some nice things happened.  My friends came home from school, so I had some people to talk to, interact with, and places to be at other than my house or work.  I also found the music I used to listen to back in high school, the punk and the hip-hop stuffs I had been shamed out of keeping around by my cooler hipster college friends.  Now, I've always held on to music like what I mentioned earlier, but that's mainly because it's supposed to be stupid, lighthearted crap for laughing and jumping around.  "Fun" you could say.  What I'm talking about now meant a lot more to me than that.

What I've found out from re-listening is that it still does









And I started feeling better. I am, dare I say it, having fun. There's still that feeling of not-quite-ness in my writing, but at least I am, in fact, writing.

I've taken all this new found energy and put it in to a fun poem.  I've sent that fun poem to the same publication that mistakenly took the other to be "fun".  Maybe they'll notice a difference?