The Dream

There are several vague concepts floating around in front of my head that I want to grab and articulate into blog posts.  My dreams: that’s one of them.  A dream is something that you can lie down and smile over, a perfect thing that would feel incredible to experience.

The dream for me is to write.  I want to write short stories, novels.  Ever since I was in seventh grade, I’ve wanted to be a writer.  My seventh grade English teacher really made us write.  We had about a composition a week–or maybe it was really way less, I can’t remember now.  I was writing a short story, and I realized that I really liked to write, and that I wasn’t bad at it.  Looking back, I was pretty bad.  But hey, seventh grade.  I’ve always had a natural aptitude for spelling words and for correct grammatical forms.  I’ve gotten blatant encouragement to do something involving writing from my ninth grade English teacher, and just this year from my Reading SAT Prep teacher, though that wasn’t as blatant.  I scored a 720 on the writing section of the SATs.  So I’m not bad at writing, and I really want to take advantage of that.  But I still think my writing’s iffy.  I need to read more.

One good thing about deciding that I wanted to write was that I took the games that I used to play with my friend in the park across the street–the ones that we stopped playing because we realized that we looked like idiots running around flailing our imaginations–and began using them to get ideas for things to write.  I still got the same kind of ideas, I just expressed them differently.

Also, the dream for me is to draw.  I want to cartoon.  Well, not cartoon–I mean, do comic books.  But there’s no verb for that, I don’t think.  I want to…comic…book…  Yeah, that’s not so good.  But I want to do it.  Near the end of 10th grade I had doodled down this evil kinda looking fellow (so much for grammar).  I did up this Goth-looking girl, too.  I began doodling them on my school papers and drawing them a LOT.  And I got a lot better at drawing them.  I did a strip or two with them, and my friends began saying to me that I should do a web comic.  That never worked.  I can’t think of enough jokes for that.  It’s freaking hard.  But I had begun to think of a plot to use them in, and while now I don’t want to use that same plot, I still want to use them in comics.  I’m also now practicing cartooning slightly more realistic-looking cartoons, like in most comic books, but not quite that detailed.  I just think there’s more I can do with characters that look more realistic.

And the dream is love.  I used to think that maybe I fell in love easy.  But it’s not that; I just fall in love with the prospect of love, again and again.  When I get the idea into my head that someone actually likes me, I fantasize, and fall head-over-heels for the same love that always plays out in my head.  But my brain steps in; I want to love the girl, too.  It’s this that keeps the situation I’m in with a girl at school consistently awkward when she tells me that she loves me, and I can’t really respond.  But I don’t think there’s anyone at my school for me.  I think I should set the range of my scope farther out.

There are some specific things that I lie awake in bed and think about sometimes, or that I waste time in the shower thinking about.  One of them is getting a table at Artist Alley, at Wizard World, someday.  They tend to be dreams of moderate recognition and fame, and sincere love and affection.  I will have them, someday.