Although, I'd be more inclined to say that procrastinating would be the last thing a person would want to do if there were no tomorrow. If there were no tomorrow, would you really just want to laze about, doing nothing? Me personally, there's quite a number of things I'd like to get into if there were no tomorrow, and they don't involve my present status of spending hours attached by the fingertips to this thing called a computer.

That's not really what I wanted to delve into with this particular journal, but I suppose it's as good an ice breaker as any. Ugh, hold on, let's call it something else. An opener, that's much better. I have come to detest the term "ice breaker" ever since orientation back in August when I basically just did a series of ice breakers for five days straight. It drove me insane and I still can't interact very well with my First Year Seminar class, who were the ones with me all throughout that scarring orientation.

But I can deal with that, because there are only six more days left of that class over the next four weeks, plus a final. Which is awesome in so many ways, the biggest of which being that my first semester of college is almost over. The thing is, most people warn that the first semester is typically a shock to most first year students, especially if you go far from home, like I did. But it wasn't really one for me, not really. It took awhile to realize that I didn't have to report in to my parents every moment of every day and it got frustrating at some moments when I realized I didn't have all the resources available to me that I used to (primarily a well stocked kitchen and a car). Beyond that, though, it wasn't that big a deal for me to leave home and live on my own, away from most of my family and friends. Yeah, I missed my friends horribly and I missed being surrounded by them every day, but in all honesty, it wasn't that bad. Maybe this just means I'm adaptable or well adjusted or something. Go me, in any case.

Twitter and Facebook probably helped out a lot, considering I could still keep up with everybody, regardless of distance. Yeah, there's some people that I used to talk to everyday and now I talk to them maybe once a month or so, if that, but that's life, basically. And I know that with a lot of these kids, we can go for months without talking to each other and then meet up again one day and pick up exactly where we left off. We're growing up, but we'll still be the friends we were in high school.

I'm not entirely sure how I got onto this train of thought, but it works for me. I know all these things were in my head before I typed this up, but it really does help sometimes to commit the words to the page. It makes them real.

I think that's an appropriate transition to NaNoWriMo. Guys, I'm totally in love with NaNoWriMo. At this exact moment (it'll go up before the night's over), I have 21,632 words. I am a little behind, I'll admit (I should be at 28,339), but that's not bad. On my best day, I got 5070 words in. And I love it, because I can just sit down and type and type and not have to worry about making things sound good or totally coherent or whatever, because NaNoWriMo isn't about the content, it's all about the word count. Do you know how easy it is to write when you stop caring about what other people might think about it? I know for a fact I'm never going to let anyone read this story as it is right now. But I'm getting the story out there, I'm pulling it word by word from my brain and committing it to the page. I'm turning my thoughts into something real, something that I can see. And then once it's out of my head, in all it's assorted and miscellaneous parts, then I can finally work on shaping it into what it was in my head, where I couldn't clearly see it.

There's this old story I remember Chris Gutierrez telling about when he wrote his very first book and how he just liked to carry around the original manuscript of it, and I can finally see where he's coming from. You can hold a manuscript in your hands, you can look at it and feel the ink of the words on the page and say, "This is mine. All these pages, I wrote them." Once I hit 50,000 (I will, whether I actually make it before November 30 or not), I'm going to the school library and printing this whole bad boy out and carrying it around. There's not really a prize for participating in NaNoWriMo, but I think being able to carry around a manuscript of that size will be prize enough.

Back to writing~!
<3C
kxn