Post #9: Posting on a Whim

"I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it."

- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I don't really have anything in particular that I plan on writing about; I'm just glad that I'm feeling the compulsion to write again! I've been reading other people's blogs tonight and just feel inspired to start transforming mine into something worth reading. I used to share short stories, poetry, pseudo-intellectual observations, etc., on my Xanga blog in high school. I even had another blogspot blog in college, but I left it in the dust.

Interestingly enough, I stopped writing right around the time I started dating my husband. This kind of makes sense because a lot of my writing stemmed from the pain of unrequited love or just general teen angst. I met him just before my 19th birthday and started dating him about eight months later. So it might just all be a coincidence, but who knows?

That also ties in my quote that I used at the beginning of this post. I chose it because I felt like posting for the heck of it, and The Catcher in the Rye is my all-time favorite book. It all makes sense now though because I gave my husband a copy of it for Christmas; he had never read it before! Can you believe that? Anyway, I think he read it within a day or two of my giving it to him. I felt like I was sharing a part of my past with him because I fell in love with that book when I was 12 and then again at 16. The first time I read it, I remembered feeling like I wasn't alone in this world. That might give you the impression that I was a really cynical, frustrated young girl. I wasn't. Quite the opposite, actually.

I was always optimistic and outgoing, but I still related to something about Holden on this deeper level. Salinger really knew how to get to our age group, I suppose. I wasn't as unique as I thought, which I guess is part of the irony of the whole story. We think we're alone and special in some dark, tragic way when, in reality, we're just in the middle of a phase that everyone goes through at that age. We just haven't lived long enough to be objective and realize it isn't the end of the world.

For a while, I was worried that I had outgrown blogging. It seemed like its only purpose for me must have been to get out all that angst I mentioned earlier. Without it, I felt like I wasn't creative or interesting; it was my drug. Now that I'm in what I think may be a state of full recovery, I'm starting to realize that life can be just as deep and meaningful in a simpler way. Being happier and more content need not mean that life is boring.

Oh, and I may be a married woman, but my husband won't deny me my handful of celebrity crushes. Here is my all-time favorite, James McAvoy: