Losing the Muse

Alright. I'm not gonna be happy unless I write something on this blasted thing, am I?

I haven't written anything here for a little while because, well, let's be honest. I don't know. Yesterday I started two separate articles and decided I couldn't back them--they were stupid and mean-spirited and after writing one for twenty minutes I decided I hated it and it was total bullshit anyway (it was about hipsters, and why I find them so fucking annoying [it's mainly the ones who are totally insincere that bother me, the ones who dress like hipsters but have no convictions about anything. We get it, man. You've taken the "I'm so cool, I don't care" thing and turned it into a style. The only thing you forgot was that your "not caring" just shows that you actually care the most, and just want to be accepted by anybody who doesn't have the balls to challenge you. Fail.]) and made me feel like I was treading water verbally, instead of just coming out and saying what I wanted.

That's my biggest problem with writing, and writing while in school. In my writing, I write to please me. Whatever works. If it's a sappy story about the nerd falling in love with the cheerleader and her shooting him down, but then realizing he's great, so be it. If it's a science fiction story about robots or a horror about rats in an attic or a fucking two pager about bed bugs, so fucking be it. I don't need anyone else to look at it to know I like it, because it's for me. Writing stories and poetry and all that jazz is selfish as hell. Yay for selfishness (sometimes), it gave us great works like East of Eden, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Great Gatsby. Stories like American Gods and Misery and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Those were written for the author and them alone. They weren't staying up late for deadlines and money, they were writing because they needed to get it on the page.

But with school, it's a whole different ball game. With school you write for another person. The whole fucking time. You can't just say "Book A is useless and boring and sucked six ways to Sunday," you have to say "Book A is considered to be one of the greatest books of all time. Joe Shmoe from Cocamo praised it winningly, stating, 'it is as lovely as the smell of my own farts on a windy summer's day (Shmoe 98)." Half the time what you really think of the book is lost in useless rhetoric that you have to use simply because if you are too direct, you might be plagerizing someone you don't even know about. In acedemia, there's no room for your opinion unless other people back it, so the only way to have any type of opinion is to have someone else's opinion. And then, even if your ideas are valid, your prof might fuck you just because they disagree. There's no way to tell.

So, I'm having a hard time writing. Could you tell?