Love of Lights

I have 9 days left in the UK for at least three months. I'm feeling weird about it, but mostly because I'm not feeling that much about it. So I thought I would use this space here to lay out my thoughts and perhaps in turn try to feel more about it. I begin my Italy placement in 9 days. I'll be going there alone; just me and a few essentials to begin a temporary new life in Italy for around 9 months. I suppose that's what it is, really, isn't it? A temporary new life. I'm trying to wrap my head around it, present it to myself in such a way that I can feel its magnitude, but I'm having difficulty. I fear that, with experience and my collection of emotional hurt, I'm losing my ability to feel as much as I once did. Before moving to Edinburgh, I had high-falutin ideas  about my own personal independence and growth and entrance into the world, but now all I can express in my heart is that this experience will probably change me in ways that I cannot yet fo...

I think there was a time in my late teenage years when I put too much emphasis on the notion of sex. Of course, I knew that was a bad idea intellectually, but because of its position in our culture, I still secretly craved for it. I've been sexually active for a while now, so I can finally put down some fuller thoughts on it. I think sex has taught me a somewhat valuable lesson about people. The thing about sex is, it's this thing that feels good for a few minutes but then ends. On its own, sex is rather uninteresting. It feels good, but it's only exciting if you're excited about the person. My sort of earlier, naive craving for it seems to me now misplaced. I should really crave the person first and foremost, crave some kind of rapport and relationship, so that the sex doesn't actually matter that much. The thing about sex is it can be great but it can also quite easily be just average or poor. You don't want the main thing about the relationship being the se...

The first thing I write doesn't have to be the thing that wins me prestige. I should try to create something good, not perfect. Perfect doesn't exist. Good is subjective, but the subjective and the objective are linked closely in art. People share subjective tastes and end up calling the taste that is most shared 'objectively' good, so I should aim to find what subjective taste I have and try to make what I do good within that subsection of art in general. I am 20! That's really young, just about not a teenager. 0 - 18 is formative; 18 - 30 is development; 30 - 50, then, is about execution, and 50 - death is about reaping the rewards of your execution. (N.B. I'm using development to mean strengthening what was discovered during the formative years). So really I'm still in my development years. It's fine if I don't achieve everything I want to by 30! I need  to reconfigure my mind to understand 30-50 to be the execution/achievement years. I'll...