February rolls around again, and again I'm here, at home, still reluctant to stay behind in Melbourne like any self respecting second-going-on-third year university student is supposed to, lamenting the fact that I am what I am whilst clinging on what's left of my summer holidays. I'm happily despondent, so bear with me. I thrive on self-pity, however tiresome that may be. 

Now's a good time as any to start writing again, especially with the simultaneous threat and promise of the short-story writing elective I've happily enrolled myself in ... fuck, I sound like a librarian. Let's start over. 

This is it: me, looming on 22 and I haven't done a thing. Chanelling Harvey's slinky self-realization in Milk that there are things, important and not, and important in them not being so explicitly important, that I have not yet done -- though I've gone through them in my head a million times. The problem is that of not doing. Thinking, I have down pat. Simmering, festering, blooming -- adjectives dependent on the nature of the thought, you see -- thoughts of things I think I should be doing to ... move. Because it doesn't count if you don't get moving. 

I think that writing thrives on anonymity. For me it does. Attached to a name, a face, an identity, it feels contrived. You work at cultivating your personality in a certain way, like a twisted bonsai if you will, carefully avoiding or perpetuating certain stereotypes to either fit in or stand out of the crowd or of other people's expectations or how you are expected to behave solely because of your own insecurities. Personal, first-person blogging about one's own shallow existence wears out its superficial appeal the moment you realise what the fuck you're actually telling people. Are you really the sum of all your holidays? Your opinions on the last film you saw? The last time you saw a particular person and the multiple posed photos of yourself and those you deem worthy of displaying as your friends? It's a nilhist view, but it is what it is.

Enough venting. Feel free to ignore all of the above. 

By some fantastic virtue or another I have started reading again. God knows how long it's been since I attempted to start on Atonement before dozing off. I love reading, I really do, but I feel as if my attention span's been cut abysmally short in the past couple of years. I blame Architecture. Anyway, I got off to a promising start: I'm two-thirds through The Road, that bleak Cormac McCarthy post-apocalyptic survival story about a man and his son walking along (you guessed it) the road to salvation. That and the coast, for a reason that still escapes me, possibly because I keep forgetting what just happened which makes me less enthralled to want to know what happens next. Reading it does feel like what it must be to be on that road though, which I'm sure is a compliment to both book and its author alike, as I too feel rather bleak and despondent and oftentimes want to die along with the son who keeps having suicidal thoughts. Yes, it's a Pulitzer-winning book and the storytelling is very evocative and like all intellectual endeavours it is a little difficult to get through so I AM determined to finish it and see if they do end up dying in the end anyway. It's that kind of book. I'm hopeful of it. 

At the same time, which is telling of how short my attention really is (shameful!), I started on Rabbit, Run last night on a whim while whiling away my grandmother escorting duties. Now Updike I can do. Rabbit Angstrom is a character I can relate to, knowing how horribly happily despondent I am. Young men in quarter-life crises run and leave their pregnant wives and get lost and tangled in weary affairs ... not the story of my life, I hope. Updike's prose is mercifully punchy and right to the point, sex included. I have Revolutionary Road up after Updike, expecting a whammer by Yates after watching Kate and Leo burn up the screen in the movie. Post-war classics, set in suburbia, driving home the point that happiness is what you make of it. All at once candid and chilling. 

Early February is that time of year when birthdays roll about and films worth watching tease out things you never knew you had. Books get read, music is listened to and the last few days of leisure are lapped up like a thirsty dog before the crank and heave of the new year's work rolls in.

Tragic.