Is it worth it, after all?

Have been through a couple difficult weeks, and am facing spring with with a distinct lack of energy that I hope dissipates as it gets warmer. The daffodils look darker this year, perhaps because of the snow right as they started to bloom, but they aren't their typical bright cheery yellow. They're kind of gold, worn-looking. That's how I feel, I guess. I haven't smelled any of them yet, perhaps that will help. I wonder if they will smell differently. I wonder if my own weathered perspective will make them smell differently, or if they will actually smell that way on their own without my twisted view of things.

What makes words so powerful? I love writing. Not necessarily writing things myself. I generally can find the right words for things, and get what I want to say across in a good, if not "just right" manner. But reading things other people have written, thinking about their thinking about what they write, is so fascinating. There are those writers who brood, and cross things out, and labor over every step, and there are those, like me, who just spew it all out there and walk away. Where do the words come from? Why do they choose this one, or that one? If a stream-of-consciousness kind of writer decides to labor over a work, will it get better or worse? I always hate revisiting anything I've written, because it's too hard for me to change it. I feel like I make it worse.

It's neat how sometimes, the words themselves are what make one gasp - the simplicity of them, the intensity - and sometimes, the words aren't all that special, but the thoughts behind them hint at ideas so amazing that the brain can barely take it in. Is that why I love reading so much?

So, yeah, I created this blog more for academic reasons than personal ones - to talk about my research and such, so I'll offer a few words. I'm still in kind of a funk in that area. I am trying to find theorists to put on my bibliography, and I don't like most of what I encounter. I'm sick to death of academic pomp and pretentiousness, and don't WANT to know what Joe Scholar thinks about the nature of thingness and the phenomenology of perception. I want to know what Joe Poet thinks about it, and how it makes him feel, and what he smells, and tastes, and how he uses words to describe that. I feel like the theorists distance me from the real, from what it's actually about.

I'm feeling rather empty these days...but relying on spring to sweep in and fill me up again.

"Still to come, the worst part and you know it...there's a numbness, in your heart and its growing." - The Shins