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*

I was cursed recently by a fortune cookie. Twice really, since the print looked as though it were printed twice in rapid secession which caused a shadowed look to the words. Bam bam, rapid fire curse casting; two hits, dead on. What was this horrible curse that my unfortunate cookie cast upon me, you may ask? The little, white, two inch piece of paper simple read, "You will live in interesting times."

Interesting times? Is that so bad? If you have to ask that then apparently you have never really lived through interesting times. Think about history. What happens during those interesting moments in history that we tend to remember and study? Usually it's something pretty drastic, like war or massive outbreaks of disease, or act of God type things. Now that doesn't mean that I believe my fortune cookie has now caused some sort of butterfly effect that will create global disaster, but I don't like the omen that my life might be "interesting" in the sense that I've already lived through some pretty "interesting" times and have had experiences that aren't the norm, and now I kind of just want to live and nice quiet little life were there isn't so much emotional upheaval. "Interesting" and emotional upheaval tend to go hand in hand, trust me.

This all leads up to my big question which is what truly IS normal? A nice, normal life; a nice, normal relationship; what is normal? Can you really make it to twenty-six (which is just where I'll be come March) without accumulating piles of emotion baggage? If you start a relationship now is it basically guaranteed that you are both going to be dinged and scared from past relationships and cluttered with doubts and uncertainties that will have to be dealt with? That could taint or corrupt the new life, the new relationship that you are trying to build? Once you live through interesting times is it pretty guaranteed you will continue through interesting times simply because they brand you and create more upheaval?

Why wasn't I hit by the knowledge wand when I became an adult so I could have the answers to all of these questions? I thought adults were suppose to know these things! I am greatly disappointed to discover that it was all an act and that even once you reach "adulthood" you are really just as ignorant about the big issues as when you were a child, only now you can understand that the big issues are WAY more complicated than you can ever imagine and that you have no real hope of every really solving them. Adulthood means you know the hopelessness of your situation and now you just trudge on as best you can, making up your own rules as you go along all the while pretending that you have it together and that you know what you're doing.

I still feel twelve.

I have way too many of these things! Thing being blogs. I completely forgot about this particular one, to tell the truth. Currently, if I write anything on a blog at all, it will usually end up on myspace. Aside from that you can pretty much follow my trail from blogger to xanga and everything in-between. I think I picked this site up because of travelpunk. The only posts on here are about my trip to China that took place two summers ago. (I think it was two?)

The trip to Chengdu, China did turn out to be the biggest adventure of my life. At least, as far as travel is concerned. I spent an entire week in Beijing before flying into Chengdu in the Sichuan province of China. I studied there for five weeks, living in three bedroom apartment with two other students. Actually, my things lived in that apartment and for about four weeks I was pretty much living with a friend in his studio on the twelfth floor of the apartment across the street.

I have a ton of pictures, all of them still unsorted, but all well treasured. I still talk to a handful of people I met. It's funny how you leave a place fully believing that you will stay close with these new friends all your lives, and then two years later you maybe say hi to them via facebook once a month. Ah well, so things go I suppose.

Now I am on to other forms of adventures. The setting is no where near as romantic as China, but I think the relationships are a little more lasting.

Ohmygoodness I am so nervous about this trip! A part of me is really excited to go, but another part wishes I had just opted to stay here for the summer since I'm going away to school in the fall. I am going to miss my family when I'm off in college, and here I am running away for five weeks? What was I thinking?

On top of that I have just recently been able to hang out with my little sister and go to local pubs to hear live music. I have a BLAST doing this, and we found a couple of really good spot, and now I can't take advantage of them!

Also I am completely distracted from my preparations for this trip because my boyfriend of a year and... three months... broke up with me. I adored him! Honestly, I know you always believe that "this one" is "the one", but I really did love him dearly. He wasn't my first boyfriend, but I think he was the first person I ever really loved. So I am crushed. Absolutely crushed. It's been a few weeks, and I keep hearing I have to just let it go and move on. If you had told me a few weeks ago how hard it would be to "get over him" I wouldn't have believed you. Now, now I'm just trying not to think about him as much each day. Not to think how much he would love some view, or song, or joke that I encounter during my day. Trying to remember not to call him when some minor event happens, or family concern arises. I wish I could just stay mad at him, but I was never able to do that. I feel so broken.

So, of course, I am wondering if my trip somehow broke us up. If maybe, somehow, things would have happened differently if we were spending another summer here, together. Last summer was a dream! Every day I spent with him was some little adventure here in town. I will never look at Chicago the same way again! I never enjoyed it as much before I met him. Honestly, did I really have to go on this trip? Wouldn't it have been better to spend another summer in Chicago with Jon?

So, yeah, I am having second thoughts, doubts, about this trip. It doesn't help that I am scared to death of flying!!! I've done it a few times now, but it never gets easier for me. So... here I am, two days before I leave and a completely bundle of live nerves!!!! I hope this improves somehow.

Hmm... first post, well, this blog was meant to capture my thoughts whilst traveling through China. I shall be spending a week in Beijing and then four weeks in Chengdu. I'm REALLY nervous about my trip, but I am excited as well. So, we'll see how it goes.

Short post, I know, but I'm chatting away on aim! Besides, I haven't left the country yet!