Before naptime...

For some reason, these past few weeks I've been plagued with a constant feeling of nostalgia. I've always been a little kid at heart but it seems like lately my desire to be 12 again is particularly fierce. Ever since I graduated last June, I've felt like a lost puppy. Don't get me wrong, I definitely don't miss the days of trudging downtown through any insane weather temperature or condition...just thinking of it makes me shudder. Maybe its because I live behind an elementary school. Everyday, at 10:20am, when I'm usually home alone, the silence is broken with sounds of recess bells and yelling kids. Everyday, at 10:20am, I think about how much I wish I was out there with them.

My childhood was definitely epic. I lived in a fantasy world created both in mind and shared in the minds of my two across-the-street neighbours. We wrote books (and did our best to live in the stories we invented), we rode our bikes to what seemed like the other end of the earth, we made movies, we held seances, we told scary stories, read scary books and lived for Halloween where we could truly express ourselves in the years most creative holiday. We loved every second of it. Life was so simple, yet so interesting, so fulfilling. And now I'm free from the bonds of school and university and responsibility and all I want is to feel as free as I did in those days...

But the sad thing is, I'm not 12 anymore and life isn't the same fantasy it used to be. It hurts to write it as a statement because |I spend so much of my time denying its truth. I express my longing for the past through my addiction to cereal, cartoon, Disney, Barbie, children books and fairy tales. Its embarrassing to admit that amazon.ca's daily recommendations for me include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Platinum DVD addition...and even sadder that I actually contemplate ordering it every day. Don't we all just wish we could be kids again?

The seal is broken.

So, this is it. My first ever blog. My first ever anything that involves me sharing any personal thoughts with anybody except for my journal (and yes, I do refer to my journal as a real person--or else I'd feel like I was just talking to myself and let's face it, I can save a lot of energy by just doing that in my head). I must admit that I'm pretty nervous. I signed up for blogspot almost a week ago and it took me this long to muster up the courage to actually write my first post. Am I crazy for having these anxieties? Am I any good at this? Will people like me? Will people like my blog? Is my title good enough? Should any of this even matter?

I haven't experienced the thrill of freestyle writing for quite some time now--not since I left elementary school and got the creative life sucked out of me by high school and good old theory-loving university. I'd like to thank my talented friend and budding journalist super-star Erica for inspiring me to start this project. You can check out her blog at http://erica-ec.blogspot.com/. I'd also like to thank my dad for always praising my creative writing projects in school and proudly showing them off to anyone who was willing to listen. Now let's hope that I continue to inspire myself to write more entries and not get bored and abandon this project like I do so many others.

So since this is starting to sound like an acceptance speech, (for an nonexistent award, might I add, which I have created in my mind the same way that I created my friend, Journal) I think I'm just gonna sum this up with this: hello, blog world. It's nice to finally meet you. I really truly believe this could be the start of a great relationship.