Unedited Entry from my Personal Journal 08-16-04 3:31 pm:

I feel like I haven’t written enough lately. The truth of the matter is, I haven’t been writing here and I haven’t been writing my book very much and I haven’t been writing on the blog very much. I don’t particularly feel empty. I feel tired, so I have been doing the bare minimum to keep me afloat. Of course, we are starting another week and I have another chapter due for the book and I have some blog entries that need to be written and I am just cracking my morning pages at 3:30 in the afternoon. What is the matter with me?

We went camping last weekend, and I thought that the quiet would give me a lot of free time to read and write. All I did was read the new book that I got from the library. I haven’t done anything else. I read while I exercised at the gym at lunch, but I haven’t done anything else. This is the first real time I’ve cracked the keyboard since the weekend ended. Sure, I’ve been leaving messages on the DDR message boards, but I haven’t really been writing in earnest anywhere. I have a blog entry due tomorrow. I missed Sunday. All I did for today was post a chapter for the book, but I need to get cracking on the book or I won’t have anything to post in a couple of weeks.

I must admit that I like posting chapters once a week because that is a day of the week that I don’t have to worry about writing for the blog. I like to write fiction sometimes and this is a way for me to be published. It’s one less day each week that I have to write personal stuff. What am I hiding from? Hell, I’m even hiding from myself. We are over halfway into the month and I’ve written less than four pages. I must be hiding from something. What is it?

I have been playing a lot of DDR lately. It isn’t the kind of exercise that is really conducive to thinking. I end up with tons of songs in my head, but I don’t end up with a lot of ideas of what to write. I didn’t really get any ideas when I was riding the bike today either because I read the whole time. I must admit that running is really good for thinking about writing. I don’t know if I need to get back to running or learn how to meditate a different way. I just don’t know what’s going on. I guess I’ll just do the exercise that is the most fun and worry about writing at a different time.

Of course, when I’ve had a ton o f time to write, I’ve caught myself just surfing the Internet or reading online comics. Sometimes I get good ideas of what to write while reading the Internet, but most of the time, it’s just escapism. I’ve gotten more ideas for writing while I’m doing my morning pages than from things on the Internet. Sure, they can be springboards, but the best way to think is to actually sit down and think.

I don’t know what I’m hiding from. I’ve been doing really well on eating healthy lately. I ate poorly on the campout, but I decided that I wasn’t going to follow the program and I was going to let myself enjoy it and not feel guilty afterward. Now, I’m going to follow the program strictly for the rest of the week to make up for it. I plan on eating the minimum and exercising really well all week to make up for the weekend. I know it would have been better if I had kept track of everything so that I could know exactly how much I needed to purge, but I’ll just do the best that I can this week and see what happens at the scale. Then I’ll go back to eating five flex points a day, but for now, they are being saved to make up for camping. I don’t feel guilty, but I want to see progress at the scale, so I’m willing to work hard this week.

Camping was simply wonderful. Mike and I want to go camping again soon, but we haven’t decided where to go. Setting up the tent and the bedding was easy and fun. I really liked setting up the tent, even though we had to do it in the dark. I enjoyed it a lot. I thought I would be more bugged by not showering than I was, but it wasn’t that bad. It did make the shower when we got home feel that much better. Mike made the best breakfast for Mom, Reed and me on Sunday morning. It’s amazing how well he can cook on a little outdoor stove. He really seemed to like to camp, despite all his stories about his Boy Scout experiences. I loved it and I want to go again this weekend and take Sid with us. Of course, we have so many things to do that didn’t get done on the weekend. We did all the laundry, though, so that was the important thing. We got a lot done, actually, when we got home. We completely unpacked.

I would like to find a packing list for camping so that we take everything that we need to. We forgot paper towels and soap this last time. Plus, it would have been nice to have a fire poker. We ended up using the marshmallow prongs to poke the fire and they aren’t quite strong enough to handle that big job. I would like to have a perfect little checklist that I could go through because I think that would make getting ready for camping a lot more fun and easy. It was the getting ready that was hard. Once we were there, it was fun and relaxing. It got a little hot, but I didn’t mind that. I just took a nap in the shade and I felt a lot better.

I had no idea how fun camping could be. My only experience with it was through the eyes of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes comics. His dad took him camping and he hated it. That was all I knew. Kids hate camping. From what I saw, the kids loved camping. I just really liked it. I would have liked to have a little more time. I would have like to sight see less because there really wasn’t anything to see at Lava Hot Springs and I would have liked to just sit at the campsite and read some more. Maybe I would have even liked to write something down. As it was, I didn’t write a word. I’m ok with that, but I think that I would have liked a little more down time and a little less shopping. I had to do so much shopping before the trip that I was feeling shopped out. I ended up getting a little sick from all the sun when we were walking around the town.

I’m feeling all this pressure because I have a blog entry to write for tomorrow and I have no idea. I don’t even know what I want to write about. I don’t even want to write. Sure, this feels good, but there’s no pressure here. I don’t have to edit it or worry about spelling or grammar or hurt feelings. I can just write and write and not worry about anything. I can just keep writing until the end of the page shows up and not a word before or more. I can just write everything that I’m worried about and everything that is just randomly passing through my mind without thought or care. I don’t need to worry about what is going to happen if someone I know reads this entry because it’s hidden in a file deep on my hard drive. That’s how writing was for me a year ago. I could just write and write without worry. Now, I’m worried about hurting feelings and looking stupid. Maybe I’ll just go back to writing how I used to write. Maybe I’ll just post this entry completely unedited on the blog for tomorrow. I don’t know. We’ll see…