Thank the Goddess it's Friday...

Yes it's Friday and yes most normal people are out at bars, or enjoying the company of others, or at least live in a town where restaurants don't close for an entire month for cleaning. Instead I am enjoying being inside locked closely away from the frigid temperatures and 30 mph winds, it is actually so cold it is freezing snot in my nose before it can be excreted, I am reading, I am breathing (short inhales and exhales), I am trying to focus. The live guitar music in the background is only slightly distracting as I pick at my own set of keys. I wanted to get all of my reading done, wanted to be productive but find that even more than that I want to write. Just sit down and let it flow out of me. I have been writing in my head in my sleep for the past week, I can't stop-I don't want to. I toss and turn because in my head I am writing the two pieces I am working on one on preschool pedagogy, and the other on my own identity formation in regards to sexuality. I write them as performance pieces-I don't know if that is what I am supposed to do but I guess as I am writing them i am envisioning my bodily placement in relation to other bodies and characters and who could play them if not only myself.

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I never thought I would do well as a fiction writer because in my past I thought my stories would be too autobiographical and I wonder if most fiction generally is. But then at the same time I have been so annoyed with scholarly writing conventions that say topic sentence here, support here, analysis, and conclusion there. I remember my mother telling me years ago "You are such a good writer, I am so upset that your teachers [highschool] try to stifle all of your creativity into five paragraph essays. I just wonder how much benefit there is in that." As if we weren't drawn into the five paragraph essay formation enough throughout our lives, the same boring repetitions we tend to encounter as if writing scholarly articles mimics my daily routine, wake, shower, work, home, bed. It is all the same stupid story and it ends up being the slight disruptions that have the most impact. And performance and performative writing has disrupted my pattern and gives me something to look forward to a sense of joy . I just know there is a lot of pressure to be great at telling a performative story especially through performative writing and I worry that I am not good enough. I think i have good stories that I can tell-but worry that people will think my stories are not worth telling or hearing. And I want so badly to be good at this-because I need so desperately to be good at something and not for only myself that would be much too small, but I want to do something good in this world for someone, for "the other," because I am an other, and my best friends are others, and my mother is an other, and my lovers are others, and my girlfriends are others and even I see how great it is to make those human connections through art (writing, music, painting, poetry, cooking etc...) because those are the things we can and do connect through. Those are ways we create empathy and understanding for each other. So that is the first part; my self-centered desire to be good at performance writing and performance for multi-variant reasons.

The second part. Performative writing/performance has a lot of potential in my mind but I wonder if it is problematic to center human experience as the focal point of the exploration. I should clarify, there is no way to get around human experience and in reality this is the problem. If we cannot get around human experience then is it possible to argue or contest someones lived experience to really create dialogue? How can anyone speak to a situation that is not "their" personal experience except to offer someone their personal experience. I don't think this is wrong I just think it has the potential to be limiting. This is confusing and I am confusing myself as I write it. I just see it (tonight) as a situation that if we clarify or preface our stories saying, "This is my personal experience," that has the potential to be the end of the conversation because no one can say (or if they did they should feel kind of bad) anything negatively about the experience because it is someone's personal experience. it can almost sediment the experience as something that "is" instead of something that is perceived, negotiated or contingent. I just worry about that-I don't think it always happens but I think it can and sometimes does in certain contexts and it just worries me that no one can contest even at a slight level one's personal story and experience without looking like as asshole because people tend to walk on eggshells in this regard because if it is personal experience and especially if it is negative you don't want to question or offend someone. I know i am writing myself into circles because while I am ariting this I am kind of thinking well isn't that kind of the point with the whole thing to talk about personal experience and offer up differing personal experiences to create a larger more diverse composite of human experiences? I just don't want to see the interrogations of the self, the reflexivity of the self end solely in the personal experience, the location of the experience without reflexivity happen I guess. But in the end I have to finish in the only way I know how...I just don't know.