I do not think that most Americans care about Memorial Day.We get the day off of work. Most of us eat some hot dogs, celebrate summer, and relax in the sun. Americans have not been drafted to war since Vietnam. We see war as a distant unnamed thing that others sometimes take part in and that we read about in the New York Times and make judgements about. Maybe I should speak for myself. I see war that way. I have never felt close to war. No one in my family, that I know of and have met, has ever served in the armed forces. The closest I’ve come to war is the war narrative and that preview for the TLC show where they bring home soldiers without telling their families.

I would like to have a lot to say about the brave, strong men and women who have fought valiantly for our nation’s freedom and protection. I don’t.

But summer, in all of its glory, has arrived.

My google reader is back at 0. Life has slowed to an relaxing crawl, and the recovery process has begun. Today begins the second week of summer, and my ducks are just beginning to squeeze back into an uneven line. I spend my mornings reading the New York Times, drinking coffee, and replying to the mass of emails, letters, and voicemails I neglected during finals week. I finished the short story I spent most of the semester sporadically working on. I finally have time to plan my time in Europe this summer. I actually know what is going on in Syria.

In a way, I feel like I’ve crawled out of a very exciting and busy hole and back into the world of the internet.

To finish out a few months of internet black-out, here is a brief update of events:

I did more than survive  Plan II  physics, the class from hell. I learned to calculate relativity, use dimensional analysis, and read three non-fiction books about the universe. Surprisingly, my liberal arts self thrived in physics, scored above the curve on the test, and was exempt from the final with an A in the class.

As of last week, I am halfway done with my undergraduate career. The University of Texas is the perfect fit for me. I cannot imagine my last two years anywhere else. More than that, I cannot believe that it has already been two years since I decided to don burnt orange and become a longhorn. It is surreal to grow up.

More surreal than my own year finishing is Trey’s graduation. On Friday, the boy graduated from the University of Texas with an undergraduate degree in Architectural Engineering. Luckily, his studies continue here for the next two years as he pursues a Master’s in Civil Engineering, so I don’t have to confront being a real grown up just yet.

My internship at the Ransom Center concluded a couple of weeks ago, and I left reluctantly with heavy boots. I loved my time at the Ransom Center. Several of my articles for them will be published in the coming months, but my physical time in the building is over. Next year, though, I have scored a stellar editorial internship at the Alcalde which is the alumni magazine.

By the end of next week I will have read every book Toni Morrison has ever written. I am currently midway through Paradise, and starting Love soon. I may write my thesis on her career. I have loved every book that I have read by her, some more than others. There is nothing more beautiful to me than a well written book about tragedy. Morrison’s books are a cocktail of abandonment, loneliness, hardship, brutality, and discrimination. They are my kind of cocktail.

My own work has slowed to a brutal honing. I have written two short stories this semester. The earliest of which I have moved past at this point, and the newest of which is too new for me to evaluate for quality.

I’m currently preparing for my study abroad program this summer at Oxford University, and my 10 days of play-time in Europe before hand. I hope that I will chronicle my adventures and the events leading up to them better than I have catalogued the events of this semester.

For now though, I will update my iPhone software, send some mundane emails, drink TopoChico from the glass bottle, and relax in the free time I forgot I could have.

In January, when this semester began, I took off at full sprint. I do not regret it. It did not wear me out to early, or make it impossible for me to keep running. Simply put, that initial sprint was great foreshadowing for this semester.

While every week, every day, is a full sprint at full speed, the semester is 15 weeks long. It is really a “marathon of sprints”; one after another for the entire semester.

My physics professor gave our class these “I love you” balloons on Valentine’s day. Physics is a miserable class. Our homeworks take approximately 23 hours a week to finish, and on top of that we have to learn the material. He gave us the balloons in order to do a homework experiment (stand on a bus, tie keys to the end of the balloon string, what happens?)

I should have gotten rid of this balloon a week ago. It is not a profession of real love. It does not hold sentimental value to me. It is not even the type of love profession I normally enjoy. Write me a note and read me poetry any day. I think balloons are tacky, and Valentine’s Day even tackier. But the balloon stays.

I like the balloon because it has something to say and it’s bold about it. I LOVE YOU it screams at passerby’s. I LOVE YOU it yells as it is loosing strength, deflating into my bedroom wall. I LOVE YOU it will say long after it is flat and tired, and has been unwillingly trashed and driven to a place where it will never, ever decompose because it is made of weird plastic cellophane.

I like the balloon because it is deflating, and so am I.

I had a glorious winter break. I relaxed with my family. I read some really incredible books. I even wrote a short story. I came back from winter break a full balloon, ready to take on the semester. Like the balloon, things have been consistently hard. No one is trying to stab me with scissors or snag me on a door-frame. I have not run into a field of cacti or children who squeeze me too hard. For me and the balloon, the hard part is simply staying up.

But we are getting there, me and the balloon. We are continuing to hang high in the air, and though we are deflating, we are still proclaiming.

I LOVE YOU says the balloon.

This morning I have been thinking about what it is exactly I am proclaiming. What am I yelling at the people on the street? What kind of encouragement am I offering those around me? I LOVE YOU says the balloon, but what do I say?

I ate a donut for brain power.

I think I’m proclaiming, from the middle of the marathon YOU YOUR BEST THING, YOU ARE. Which is, most obviously, a tribute to the encouragement I wish to contribute and my most favorite author Toni Morrison.

In this marathon of sprints, I want to be like the balloon. I want to proclaim things that are encouraging and uplifting as I deflate . I want to encourage those around me. I want to remind people that the marathon ends in may, and that we are almost there. And I want to remind myself.

So dear readers,

I LOVE YOU. YOU YOUR BEST THING, YOU ARE.

Oh What it is to be young!

I am twenty years old. This year I will turn 21. I am financially independent, living in a great city, learning a ton, and childless (for a very, very long time). I have opportunity and possibility abounding. I have the life station to take big risks, and spend 5 weeks in Oxford, and conquer Plan II Physics.

So, some 2012 resolutions:

Learn to Rest: I am a workaholic, and I run myself into the ground. I schedule out every second of my day, and I have a running to-do list. I am not naive enough to think that I can change this, but I need to rest. This year, I will intentionally schedule restful events to keep myself from overworking. Practically: I plan (bahah) to take a day to rest every week, probably saturday, and to go for walks.

Live Spontaneously Last year was the first year of my life that I did things spontaneously. I went on a week vacation to Colorado with little planning, and I had a great time. This year, I want to continue this. Not to say that I will avoid my detailed agenda, but simply that I will not let it rule my life. I will give myself freedom from my iPhone, and my Facebook, and my Twitter when I need to in order to enjoy having few ties and plenty of freedom.

Read Intentionally There is no doubt that I will read in 2012. 2011 brought 62 books under my belt and a new favorite author. This year, I will create a list (in the next week) of Classic and award winning novels which I have neglected for modern fiction or fear. This will begin with To Kill a Mockingbird and probably include Russian fiction. I will also (deep breath) attempt to read award winning non-fiction. maybe.

Write With Passion I’ve grown nervous in my writing. All of these mounting rejection letters and struggles have brewed in me a fear of my own inability. I have struggled to write anything at all. When I spoke with my English professor about my “plan to get published”, he calmly reminded me that I should write what I feel, what I believe, and what moves me. To write with passion, and not to write to get published.

Dream Big, Act Small Self-explanatory. Eat well, be active, read often, do good work, pass plan II physics. Break all of my crazy big dreams into tiny pieces. Take become an author, and break it into write 500 words a day. Tiny steps in 2012.

Oh What it is to be young!

I read 62 books. I moved into my first apartment and decorated it well. I avoided the freshman 15. I became more active. I did not buy a puppy. I ate healthier. I finished my novel-and it’s readable.

The lessons I learned this year were forceful. Despite my artistic past, I am not a visual learner. I do not learn from pictures or sound or reading. I learn by experience, and this year I experienced plenty.

I learned to be disciplined. This summer I was a full-fledged writer. I created my own schedule, worked my own hours, and fought my own battles. I wrote every day, and I wrote well. I learned to work even when I didn’t want to.

I learned to use wisdom even when it hurts. I made decisions this year that were not easy to make. I hurt feelings, I changed my mind, and I discovered aspects of my personality that were hard to reconcile. This year, I learned to be confrontational with reality, and to make decisions in wisdom, and not in convenience, ease, or emotion.

I learned to be rejected. Which hurt, and sucked, and grew bitterness and frustration in me. I know i haven’t fully learned this lesson, but I’m getting there.

Most of all, I learned to stop placing my identity in milestones. In 2011, the biggest lesson I learned was to be satisfied with myself no matter how little tactile substance comes with that. Sometimes, I will not get the A I think I deserve, or a full request on my novel, or the perfect plan. I am learning, slowly and painfully, to be happy with where I am, and to be proud of myself no matter the response from others: be those people literary agents, or professors, or friends.

2011 has been a hard year, and one that I would rather not have had, but progress doesn’t come from easily accomplished goals and lack of trial. Progress comes from struggle, and heartbreak, and stacks of rejection letters.

Toodles 2011.

5.All The Living by C.E. Morgan. All the Living is C.E. Morgan’s debut novel. It is a short, meandering account of Aloma’s decision to move to an isolated tobacco farm with her young lover. This is a story about loneliness in intimacy, desperation in love, and man’s constant battle with the earth.

4.Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I read Gone With the Wind in the two weeks after I finished my novel. Cassie Jo recommended this to me, and as an avid reader you know I can’t deny a good recommendation. Mitchell’s story of heartbreak, brokenness, and the ever famous Scarlett is well worth the 600 pages you have to leaf through.

3. History of Love by Nicole Krauss. When I finished History of Love I laid on the floor of my apartment for twenty good minutes. I felt the emotional equivalent of the two hours after Thanksgiving dinner. This novel is so packed with emotion, so overwhelming in its beauty and character development, that Krauss cannot help but leave her readers as full as her plot.

2. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Morrison is gripping. From her first line “124 is spiteful” to her crushing prose and heartbreaking story, Morrison breaks her readers hearts again and again. I will quote this book for the rest of my life. “You your best thing Sethe, you are.” I will read this book again in 2012.

1.Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. My English professor this semester, whom I came to greatly admire, recommended this book to me. Despite Robinson’s pulitzer winning second novel Gilead (which I am currently reading), I had never heard of her. Housekeeping is a carefully penned and beautifully structured novel that tracks the abandonment of two young girls in a small idaho town. I read Robinson’s sentences out loud to my unwilling roommates. I gasped for breath at her descriptions of even the mundane. Housekeeping is the only book that I have ever read cover to cover-in the sense that that the second I finished it, I flipped back to the beginning and started again.

The only part of the Christmas hulabaloo that I genuinely look forward to is snowflake making. I love to cut my printer paper into snowflakes. Even more, I love to do it on the internet where I don’t have to pick up tiny pieces of white paper for weeks. I like it because it is easy and anyone can do it. I like it because I can transform something bland and boring into something beautiful. I don’t add anything. I don’t glue glitter onto my snowflakes, and I don’t go crazy with colored paper. I only cut.

This has been a year of cutting in my life.

Not to say that I have been doing any of the cutting, but simply that it has been happening. My pride, my ability, and my confidence have all been cut. 2011 has not been an easy year for me by any means, and as I approach the holiday season it is easier and easier to look back and see the cuts.

I see the rejection letters darted to the wall.
I see the years of hard work that have yet to pan out.
I see the long hours with little rest.
I see the endless days, and the constant work.
I see the writer’s block that I have created.
I see the times where I have been a jerk for no reason.
I see the ways I’ve failed and the areas I’ve struggled.
I see my pride.
I see my impatience.
I see my lack of generosity.
I see my lack of grace.

But I’m starting to step back from my microscopic, daily evaluations and look at 2011 from a broader perspective, and from far back, this year doesn’t look so bad.

It is easy for me to get caught up in my failures and missteps. Even easier for me to dwell in them. Stepping back shows that those cuts and failures are not without purpose: that this period of waiting–this period of rejection– is creating beauty.

All those cuts are making me into a pretty okay snowflake.

I spent all of summer break in this house, and it was one of the best summers of my life. I learned what it looked like to be a real writer, and how to work even when eight hours produced nothing of substance. I learned to love the written word in this house. I learned to be a writer here.

This winter break, I am learning to rest in this house. It is a much harder lesson for me to learn. Yesterday, I wrote for an hour. It was a big deal because I hadn’t written in so long. Are my eight handwritten pages complete crap? Damn right they are. But I wrote them, and I felt accomplished. Okay, so I spent an hour yesterday writing. Besides that I read, watched 3 episodes of 30Rock and lounged.

I am not a good lounger. I’m a good worker-bee. I’m a good student. I’m a decent writer. But I’m not good at relaxation. I want to fill up every moment with work, and that’s impossible because I have no story direction and I have no agenda.

But today, I will write for another hour. I will dance in the kitchen to the satellite radio and brew coffee to warm myself up and then I will write. I will write because I need to. And I will write so that I can justify the rest of the hours I am awake. Which, let’s face it, will probably only be 14.

This is not to say that I do not sleep in college. In reality, I think the women of my apartment get more sleep than most college students. Yet, there is something wholly unfulfilling about the way I sleep in Austin. Maybe it is because I can feel the presence of my roommate while I sleep. Maybe it is because I work myself into the ground. Maybe it is because I create to-do lists in my head as I drift off. No matter, I don’t sleep well.

I forget what real sleep feels like until I’m on vacation. Here, in my parent’s house, I wake up and feel  like I’ve slept. Instead of feeling like I briefly closed my eyes, I feel refreshed, awakened, anew. This real sleep leads to more than a less grumpy morning Kelsey. This sleep allows me to read without distraction, to think without interruption, and to evaluate without the lens of my schedule.

In this clarity, I have noticed several things, but the most stunning is that I’ve been lying to myself. For about a month, I’ve been telling myself and others that I think I have “writer’s block.” This is humorous.

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

Before this semester, other writers used to ask me what I did when I was blocked. I would tell them, honestly, that I didn’t believe it existed. I would tell them that the muse is a product of discipline, and that good writing comes only from devotion to word choice and precaution with syntax.

And then I forgot.

It has been three months, two weeks, and six days since I have written anything good. Really, in all of that time, I have spent maybe five hours seriously working on my craft. I have neglected my blog, and my journal, and fiction at all costs. I’ve neglected them because I am scared. I am scared of more rejection. I am scared that I am wasting my time. I am scared that I will never be a writer, and I am scared that I am delusional about my own ability.

It creeped up on me. With each rejection letter, my fear has grown. I have gotten better at accepting rejection. I have grown up in the past three months, but I’m still harboring fear deep inside of me and letting it fester until it encompasses all of my creativity, ability, and talent.

I don’t have writer’s block. I have a lack of discipline because of internal fear about my own ability. That fear, as I have allowed it, has taken that ability and smothered it with self-doubt.  My writer’s block is not a lack of the muse, but my own forceful blockading of her. My writer’s block is not an inability, but a denial of ability.

My writer’s block is not an immovable wall that will torment me until my ability is magically renewed. My block is self-made.

And it will be self-destroyed.

Today, after two solid nights of sleep, I will write something. I have no doubt that it will be bad, but I will write it. I will write  because my block is not making me better. I will write because it will renew me.

I will write, because I need to remember how much I love it.

Last year I cheated, but the result of that was a finished first draft of what is now a query-ready manuscript. So, I am satisfied with my decision, however immoral it may be perceived.

NaNoWriMo taught me more things than I could contain in this blog post. It taught me time management. It taught me an appreciation for literature. It taught me how to lose sleep, drink black coffee, and estimate the amount of words on a page. NaNoWriMo taught me that normal people can create substantial things. It taught me how to plan for a major project, and to succeed in following that dream to completion. It taught me that sometimes hard work results in really bad writing. It taught me how to type with good form.

Overall, NaNoWriMo taught me something that nothing else could have: that I have not only the ability but the drive and the passion to write novels.

Today is the first day of November. My word count is over three thousand, and not one of those words is for NaNoWriMo. They are in journals, planners, and class assignments. They are in word documents with cryptic titles and on sticky notes.

Today is the first November since 2005 that I will not be writing 50,000 words of fiction in the month of November.

I am sad because my Twitter feed is covered in NaNo junk. I am sad because I miss working so badly that it hurts sometimes. This pain, of course, comes in the form of a twinge inside my wrists from not being worked enough, or a phantom cramp in my right hand from a lacking hefty pen grip.

My saddness, though, is outweighed by the knowledge that I am growing as a writer. These months are hard. It is hard to be rejected. It is hard to learn broad ideas about literature. It’s hard to know that I have so much to learn and not be able to learn it any more quickly.

The hardest thing though is the knowledge that I am already a better writer than I was this morning, or yesterday, or when I finished my novel.

But I guess that’s also the most beautiful thing.