Back to Basics

I've been trying to decide what to write about for a couple days now, feeling that if I leave it too long, I may not pick up blogging again. Unfortunately there hasn't been anything that has caused me to say 'thats worth putting into my blog.' However tonight there seems to be a theme in my way of thinking.

I'm taking a creative writing course at one of the universities here and I was given a writing assignment. I spent a few days writing up a piece about a woman who had had a miscarriage. I asked my husband to read it, for feedback. He said it was pretentious. It is. I reread it and tossed it; it's a pretentious piece of crap.

It got me thinking though. I know and have always known that simple is best. I admire Tolstoy for that reason (that and his honesty.) But his simplicity is what makes his stories so fresh and wonderful. I need to get back to the basics and need to stop with trying to make it poetic and complex.

This led me to think about getting out of the city, it's much too large and lifeless. Everything is so rushed and fake - I find it to be too much. So I'm working on getting out of the city for a week, heading a couple hours up north to my mothers. There isn't a computer or the internet and the heating is provided by a woodstove. As a teenager, I loathed this lifestyle; it's inspiration to me now. I was up there for the first time in three years a couple months ago and found that all I wanted to do was go out, walk around the fields and write. I need this right now, I need to get back to the basics.

I started to talk about it and realized that this is a generation that has lost much of the basics. Penpals are now corresponding online and not through mail. How we interact is online, something that is so easy to erase and lose. I called it the Eraser Society and my friend responded that it's actually the Delete Button Society. Goes to show how old fashioned I am...I still think of erasers. This is a generation where it's easy to lie, to fake who you are, erase mistakes made and destroy experiences had. I could have just wrote a sentence telling my deepest darkest secret and you wouldn't have known because I could just simply press the backspace button and it's lost. I don't hate technology, it has saved lives, and I'm using it now, so obviously I'm not against it. I just think people have generally lost the basic and simple way of things. We're a pretentious society.

Anyway, it's 1.30 in the morning so I'm going to head off. I can't seem to think straight, as you may be able to tell my thinking has been chaotic in places. Good-night!