Rules are my nemesis

nemesis: “the inescapable agent of someone’s or something’s downfall.”

There are rules about this.  Ones I need to break.  If I could only break them, or ignore them, I could unleash my superpower. I have a superpower.  I am absolutely sure of it.  I’ve known since I was six, lying in bed, staring at the light switch, knowing I could move it with my mind if I could just get my mind to focus on one thing at a time instead of constantly switching channels.

There.  I did it.  I broke the rules. The rules that say that all the words in a sentence have to work together towards the goal of the sentence and that sentences have to make the paragraph work and that paragraphs… yawn. Do I need to finish this or can you figure it out for yourself?

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I recently read that the three-adjectives-in-a-row thing was a sure sign of an amateur.  Reading that flicked a switch in my brain and now everything I’ve written in the past three years is silly, immature, repetitive.

What I like to read: wandering thoughts, ideas with out description, intangibilities. I did not make that word up.

intangibilities: “incapable of being perceived by the senses. 2. Incapable of being realized or defined. 3. Incorporeal.”

I am incapable of defining my enjoyment of triplets. I just like things in threes. It feels like covering all the bases.

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I got caught up on the word journalist today. My eyes missed the ‘ist’ and just saw ‘journal.’ The entire world shifted. A journalist is a person who journals.

journal: “Verb ‎(third-person singular simple present journals, present participle journaling, simple past and past participle journaled) 1. To archive or record something. 2. To scrapbook.”

Nowhere in that definition is the word ‘report.’ Did you ever notice that?

Am I a journalist because I record and archive my thoughts everyday? No, I don’t scrapbook. yuck.

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judge: “form an opinion or conclusion about.”

judgmental: “having or displaying an excessively critical point of view.”

Add the word mental and it changes everything. Here is me at my judgmental best: Scrapbooks reek of female boredom. I sneer at scrap-booking, I judge the woman who partake in such an activity as searching for an excuse to play with glue and scissors the way they did in kindergarten and having nothing better to do with their time than trick themselves into making their past seem relevant to their future. Ooh nasty. Good thing I turned the comments off.

Does it make it any better that I am judging myself too? This silly blog, three years old today, such a waste of energy and talent. The idea was to write things that other people would read. But by having a blog, I’ve become one of the people I judge as not having enough talent to be recognized as worth the attention of readers.  That sentence makes total sense, to me anyway, and I’m the only one whose opinion matters. Contradictory or clever? You can decide, or not, I don’t care.

And anyway, my obsessive journaling is no different than scrap-booking. What is the point of recording today’s thoughts, other than to have something to read later on?

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I am happiest when I forget about the past and the future.  When the only thing I am thinking about is the right NOW.  It is all about teaching yourself to focus on one thing at a time.  Slow down. Make it last. Let the moment fill the mind. That switch will move.

But that sentence was written by a me from a minute ago. And now it seems silly.  This is NOW now.

I’ll never learn how to do this properly. Don’t judge yourself, I say to myself. And keep practicing. You’ll get it eventually. Which may or may not be true.  I will never know.  This self that exists in this moment will never know.  And honestly, you don’t exist, past and future selves, you are figments.  I don’t care what you think.

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Rules.  What rules?  If you see a gap, fill it yourself.

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