I will sleep tomorrow if it means that I can dream tonight...

I've only been to class once so far, and yet I feel that my mind is being unlocked, that I am being set free from some strange mental shackles which have bound my mind for a while now. I feel some of the passion returning, and though tomorrow I will likely envy those that now rest their heads on downy pillows and drift away into downy dreams, I don't feel like I can go to bed tonight -- not yet, at least. Anne Morrow Lindbergh said that "Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after,” and while I've never before had coffee, I'm beginning to understand better her sentiment.

I have a bunch of pages full of quotes and ideas and thoughts about what I've been reading from Writing About Literature in the Digital Age, and I've got no idea where to start, so I guess I'll just start...

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid. I remember writing page after page of stories in my third grade class, and I still remember mixing up variants of the word to/two/too and the perplexed look of my teacher trying to figure out what I was talking about. I think sometimes that my desire to write was more so a desire to be understood than it was a desire to share, but now the two have merged, and I feel some odd compelling force driving me. I wrote as a young man and penned many first pages to novels that would never reach fruition. I found myself always with a pen and paper and always writing down some idea, some connection, some image, but I could never get myself to write more than a few pages here or there for fun or the requisite 10 or 15 pages for a research paper. I wrote social criticism for a long time, but no one really knew about it except my best friend, Jordan, and maybe a couple others. I wanted to change the world. I still do, but I'm realizing that the world is a lot more complex than I perhaps one day thought it to be, and my ideas about how to influence the world are changing, too. I was always one of those people that wanted to write a best-seller, and I'm not sure then whether it was because I wanted to write a best-seller or because I wanted to influence people, to leave my mark. But I've thought a lot about now, and while I still want to write my masterpiece, I don't know that it matters so much who reads it or what acclaim it garners, because the real journey is the journey of one writer's beginnings.

Life has to be about the journey and not just about the travelogue.

I fought writing for a while, as much as I loved it. I always thought that I'd be better off pursuing a more steady, reliable career. "I'm going to be a chemist," I'd say to myself (and to others), but I still always had that pad and paper. "I'm going to be a doctor," I'd say to myself (and to others), but I still had three accordion folders full of writing scraps, pictures, characters, and quotes. "I'm going to be a writer?" I'd say to myself, and I'd look at myself in the mirror and wonder if I was losing it. And at last, "I'm going to be a writer!" I say to myself, and I smile at having taken so long to come to understand something that I had known all along.

I am an artist. I write not just to share my ideas but because language is beautiful. I think my canvas is changing, though, and I think that my mind is going to have to grow to embrace the world changing about me. But I'm okay with that. I'm ready for some change.