Battery

Wind me up like a little blue tin robot.

I'm so tired lately. The days just slide by, traces of memorable moments fading fast as a new day repeats everything all over again. I wish I could see an end to the monotony of the current everyday life.

I love to write. I love literature and the way language twists and turns in the wind as new people come to explore it. I hate spelling mistakes and SMS shorthand but I love that it exists and that people bend the language to make it fit their medium. I love the way the words become more than just arranged letters and that each word takes on its own history and that words become taboo and the way words are reclaimed and reimagined. I love that we can stereotype people with simple classifications that do a disservice to the individual and deftly identify them. I love the way words feel in the mouth: plough is the most disgusting word in my vocabulary and the most sensuous. I love emphasising syllables and including forgotten letters.

I love playing with punctuation.

My worry is that my writing will stop being common. This feels absurd to write, as if the 'real writer' has to stand out in floury prose, in languid metaphor, 'like totally' simile and defunct abstract imagery. I would like to think that people still have imaginations with the capacity to thinkreate (thincreate?) the characters they see and be comfortable with it. I don't need mundane descriptions of the individual creases on a face unless each crease has a purpose - although, if every mundane crease has a place in the narrative I've probably stopped reading already.

The first pages of a book sell me the idea and I'm very quick to stop reading. This probably makes me a bad reader. I'm also likely to stop drinking bad milk very quickly. Does this make me a bad drinker?

I'm trying hard to not stop writing when it goes sour.

But lately I struggle, like a tiny little blue windup robot at the end of the day.

I've recently wondered how many years of struggling teachers go through before they give up and settle on a programme that won't work next year like it didn't work last year but it'll do, DAMNIT, so that I don't have to take my BLOODY work home with me so I can FINALLY SLEEP at night. I wonder if other jobs reach that tipping point.

I wonder if they'll let me back in if I promise not to become a revolutionary.