I'm giddy. Seriously, completely giddy. Why, you may ask. Well, mostly because it's now 10:40pm and I'm still up. It's that electric, tight, excited feeling in your chest that you used to get as a child when you knew you were staying up way past your bedtime. Exploring the unvisited, unknown, taboo times past the point of your waking hours. Yes, I am a little old to be experiencing that feeling, but it's there, radiating out of my chest and into my arms and legs, and yes I am bouncing a foot as I write this and smiling a big cheesy smile at the world beyond my bedtime. True, this could be caused by the caffeine in the tea I am drinking, or the nicotine in the cigarette (something that didn't enter the equation when I was a child), but I don't think so. I really, honestly believe I am giddy simply because I am awake.
I didn't realize until this moment how strictly I have asserted my waking and sleeping patterns. For many years now I've been working different early morning jobs, or attending early morning classes, and because of that I have acquired the habit of going to bed early so that I can be sharp for the following day. This regime became even more strictly enforced when I started working the baking shift at Melange. Since I had to get up at 3am so that I could eat and get to work by 4am at the latest, I found myself going to bed before the sun and waking in the dark hours that should honestly still be considered night. I did this for several months, both during the semester and then into the summer, living in a waking sleep for the rest of the day because my schedule was so thrown off. Well, my position at Melange has been dissolved, leaving me unemployed and unencumbered with a ridiculous sleeping schedule.
As you can see, I'm now indulging myself!
However, I don't think that is completely the cause of my giddiness this evening. I think I am partly giddy because, yes, I am breaking my own rules and staying up, which is wonderful, and partly because... well... I'm almost at a loss for words! I feel very childlike tonight. Not to be confused with childish, I don't feel like pouting in the corner or laughing at ridiculous slapstick. I feel enchanted with the world. This is probably caused by all of the fantasy I've been reading lately. I feel the world is endless with possibilities, filled with the unknown and unexplored, romantic and magical, bursting with potential and unexplainable wonders. I have to admit I love this feeling!
Mum used to call it being "high off life." Which, I suppose, it is a bit. It's a little piece of childhood that I hope to carry with me for the rest of my life. It's that little piece that the world in all its reality tries to gnaw away at and tear away from you, but I think it's a piece of the human puzzle that is essential to the whole. I think there needs to be wonder in life. There needs to be awe, there needs to be the unexplained and the magical and the amazing. This feeling was what drove me to start writing in the first place. It's something that life almost made me forget for a time, but that never died. It was quieted for a while, but hibernating, not dead.
In a world filled with explanations, hard science, and cold facts, I ventured forth in search of the awing, exhilarating, unexplainable wonder. I wanted to be an adventurer, an explorer. I found that in books, and I still do. I love the travel I experience when I read a good novel, and I really do feel like I've experienced the whole trip when I'm done. I started writing, conducting my own excursions into the unknown. The first stories I wrote were all fantasy or sci fi. I wandered strange lands, spoke with mythological creatures, rescued the captured and forged new paths for future explorers. Writing a story was as exciting for me as reading one. It's funny, but when I started to pursue creative writing as a subject of study I was pushed away from the true reasons I wanted to write.
For two years now, in most (not all) of my fiction writing classes I was strongly deterred from writing what I loved to write. My teachers wanted me to write stories about, well, about the factual, cold, scientific world I was trying to escape from. I was to write stories that smacked of reality and the mundane. And, frankly, because these weren't the stories of my heart I felt that my short stories began to lack soul.
My tutelage, along with a full helping of life in all of its demoralizing glory, helped to quell this childlike feeling of excitement, awe, and wonder that I'm enjoying now. However, I have discovered, if you look hard enough this little piece of childhood can be found. I found it in the joy of the silly little things around me. Like staying up late, or chai with honey and milk, or movie marathons (today it was Rambo!), or really good novels. I beam in the glow of simple pleasures and revel in the happiness they bring.
This has also brought about a little determination in me. I am determined to return to my roots and to seek out my pleasure for exploration in my writing once again. Yes, that's right, you heard me, I'm going back to writing fantasy! I love fantasy, and all the research that goes with it. I have books upon books of world mythologies and I'm not afraid to use them. I hope to maybe bring fantasy back to the basics and explore the beliefs of our ancestors and how they believed things worked in the world of the fay and the fortresses of the gods. If Neil Gaiman can do it, so can I!
Okay, I think my rambling is coming to an end. If anyone has made it this far, thanks for keeping me company on this little journey of discovery! I hope that you too can find that little piece of childhood and delight in something wonderfully simple and maybe stand in awe of something that never needs to be explained!
Goodnight! Sleep sweet one and all, and remember, take time once and awhile to revel in the joys of staying up past bed time! :-) *Huggles all*
