05.02.2003 - 8:39 a.m.

I escaped at intermission, not even stopping for cheese and tomato and basil leaves on bread, or for those scrumptious little tea cookies rolled up and lined with chocolate, because I am the type of person who would have preferred pizza or popcorn or, if they�d had it, cold mac and cheese. No, correction. I did not stop because I could not press myself politely through the mill of people who all knew each other, but not me.

Outside it was better, a cool evening wind brushing at my hair, my jeans moving warmly against my calves. Stars.

I was leaving a reading of the school lit mag. It was my first time in print, just a student-run journal but at least a selective journal with a real, soft-cover book binding. I think I didn�t like it. Print, even more than a computer screen, cripples the look of a writing. You can�t change it anymore, ever, but you can still see all the things you�d want to.

I read mine second, and there was applause. For every reader after me, there was more, I am almost sure of it. And that is why I left, not because the other readers got more attention, exactly, but because I agreed that they deserved it. More than me. When most of them are at least four years younger.

See, I claim not to be a competitive person, but this is not precisely the truth. I hate competition because this is what I always do to myself, to no productive end whatsoever, but I am still profoundly competitive. It has always, still bothers me to know that there are those who do more with lives exactly like mine.

I feel beaten. It makes me wonder, if I hadn�t spent all that effort worrying, all that time in hesitation, if I hadn�t wasted those three years dying, where could I be now? My competitive spirit drives me not to prevent failures, but to punish them after the fact.

And writing about my own envy somehow saps my creative spirit, perhaps because this is little more than another way to worry over my tendency to worry too much.

If I�m going to be punishing myself for failure to write better than a twenty-year-old, or any similar absurdity, then this is my penance: to post this ramble, in its entirety, so I can always look back at it and think to myself, that was dumb. You wanna write better, go practice.

You wanna quit worrying, stop.

You wanna be proud of your life, go live it.

Because I said so.

-stonebridge

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