I'm a control freak; you'd think I'd have mastered self-control by now.

I am not a very religious person. This is a statement that really shouldn’t surprise much of anyone, but I thought it was necessary to state because where I’m going with this post is going to verge on ideas I’ve grown up with, being raised catholic.

I’ve been feeling like shit for months- overworked, under motivated, and generally as if most of what I’m filling my time with is worthless- as if I’m wasting myself. So I began to try and recall the time in my life when I felt most successful, healthy, happy. I landed in my junior year of high school, sometime after my birthday up to about a month before the end of the school year. Anyone familiar with both school calendars and catholic calendars will be able to identify this time as lent.

While there are many parts of Catholicism that make no sense to me whatsoever, I’ve recently understood Lent in a way I never did growing up. For years I thought of it as ridiculous- what did God care if you stopped eating chocolate until Easter? Even my shaky theology now is sufficient to say that he doesn’t. But there’s something to it, this idea of “giving something up.”

There’s something about depriving yourself of something unnecessary that makes you feel really amazing, especially if it’s something you’ve begun to depend on too much. My mom usually gives up chocolate or soda, and while that may seem frivolous to you, I get it. The chemicals in these things are emotional satisfiers for her- a kind of self-medication that sometimes gets out of hand. Forcing yourself to abstain from something that has become a chemical or emotional dependence for you is empowering.

Like your body, your self-control has to be exercised every once in a while to keep working at all. I find it interesting that a religion that goes very far to allow for confession and absolution to make up for loss of self-control also includes a specific time of the year where we must exercise our self control, where the community holds you responsible for a promise you’ve made (in their hearts ‘to god’ but in my heart) to yourself to exercise your self control.

Even non-Catholics do this. We diet. We ‘cut back’ on drinking. We make New Years Resolutions to stop doing whatever bad behavior we’ve decided is worth taking a long look at, worth trying out the absence of. What lent gives us that New Year’s Resolutions and diets don’t is a time limit. If you’re on a diet to lose 20 pounds you might be on it for 10 weeks or 10 months. But lent is 40 days. At the end of 40 days without something you can be pretty sure to have some perspective. How hard was it to give up? How good do you feel without it? It might just make you appreciate it all the more.

The year I mentioned earlier, my junior year? I gave up red meat. A beef roast never in my life tasted as good as it did on Easter that year. Nothing to do with the holiday, just an affirmation of the old adage, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” And if it doesn’t, it probably means that it’s something you didn’t really need after all. And knowing you don’t need it is half the empowerment gained from self-control.

Whether you’re catholic or jewish or a witch or an atheist, I encourage you to think about what in your life you could go without for 40 days. Something challenging but not life-threatening. Like giving up candy, or fast food, or any little indulgence you think might be getting out of hand. Don’t call it lent if you’re not catholic… call it a “self-control experiment.”

So what am I giving up?

I’ve been struggling for a while with spending too much time playing video games, namely WoW. I don’t want to throw around the term “addiction” because I don’t think it is, but it is a time sink that has become a little too much for me. I checked out when my current subscription would end, thinking I’d keep playing until that came up and then I’d take a serious break. I can renew my account at any time, and until then see what I’d be doing with all that glorious time I’m currently spending on the game. When I checked my subscription end date, it was February 17th.

February 17th, which is also Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I don’t believe in signs, or providence, or fate… but that seems like some pretty perfect timing to me.

A Poetic License Never Expires

I have this theory- well, it’s more of a belief. We go through our lives trying to define ourselves. Maybe in words, but mostly in actions. Think about the last time you signed up for a social media site like Myspace, Facebook, ect. You had to fill out a section of space about yourself, about your interests. How did you go about filling it out?

I’ve read through a lot of profiles and most people tend to define themselves with a few vague adjectives and then a long list of “interests.” For example, my interests are theatre, literature, education, and if the site is less formal I’ll include my relatively recent interests in video games and web comics.

What I want to talk about right now is the things I never mention. The things that once were a big part of my self-identification that are now outdated hobbies. Like art. When I was younger I wanted to be an artist until I realized that I was awful at drawing. Then I discovered Photoshop and spent several years thinking I’d go to college for graphic design. Only four years ago I counted my three biggest interests as theatre, education, and graphic design. Based on my college schedule it’s obvious that education and theatre won.

Graphic design is still there for me. Every once and a while I’ll see an ad looking for a designer or an artistic submission and my heart aches a little knowing that if I’d made different choices I’d be there with enough education and experience to be good enough. I use my skills sometimes, too. For the past three years I’ve worked on the program for my high school theatre’s musical. It’s mostly ad work, but there’s something really special bout taking a couple baby pictures and kind word’s from a kid’s family and turning it into an ad to support them in the program. Not as artistic as the stuff I’d make for myself, but it warms my heart.

I think about these things sometimes. How if we won the lottery and I didn’t have to think about job security I might spend a few extra years in college just to dabble in graphic design, learn how to really polish the one thing I can really say I was never taught- something I taught myself and just had a knack for. Maybe I’d work on my photography or drawing skills.

What’s most poignant for me today is the fact that these things never go away. As much as I’ve suffocated my art it pops up every once in a while in the form of an irresistible desire to make LiveJournal icons or a header for a friend’s website. There are other skills that occasionally try to assert themselves- I haven’t sung in any venue but karaoke since high school, but every now and again I’ll see some choir recruiting and just wonder. There are also the things that I’ve gained over the years- poetry is one, and it’s making a mark in my life that I’ll have to describe at another time.

I guess the whole point is, the art is in me. Whether I’m called to draw, sing, paint or write a poem, it’s there. I’ve spent nearly 20 years struggling to find a medium for the words swirling around in my head. I’ve been moving around looking for a way to put things down, to express myself. And it doesn’t matter whether it makes it into my poetry, or my blog, or my about me section ever.

I am an artform. So are you.

If Teaching doesn't work out, I'd like to write book reviews...

It’s been a while since I’ve shared my revelations with the internet. Rest assured, it’s not because I haven’t had any. If anything, I’m more voracious than ever in terms of the material I’m chomping down on.

In two weeks, I’ve read three books, all by the same author. After reading Ishmael and Story of B last semester, I opened my year with a trip to the public library, where I checked out everything they have to offer by Quinn. Adding My Ishmael and Providence to my list of partially digested (mentally!) works, last night I curled up with After Dachau. At 4:30 this morning I’ve just finished it. It’s been years since I’ve devoured a book in one setting, and I wish I could say that this time it was because the book was so good. Quite the opposite.

Compared to the previous Quinn novels I’ve read, After Dachau is a supreme let down. What makes Quinn’s other works so irresistible is his ability to package challenging, paradigm-shattering revelatory philosophy in the structure of a cogent, evocative story. With Story of B, I felt he wavered marginally in this regard, getting caught in the story and neglecting his purpose. But if Story of B is a marginal misstep, After Dachau is an embarrassing tumble. The lesson of After Dachau is entirely incomprehensible by the story- While the exposition is handled flawlessly and the Shyamalan-esque twist is performed masterfully by Quinn, shortly after this reveal the plot spins out of control, leaving the intrigued reader high and dry.

This is not to say that After Dachau’s philosophy falls flat- rather, the story ultimately overtakes the philosophy, so that the potential of the novel is undermined by plot holes, an issue not found in Quinn’s other works because the story was always a vehicle for Quinn’s Purpose. In After Dachau, the story is in the driver’s seat, and the Purpose is left far behind. Readers of Quinn’s novels and Providence will be aware that many of his ideas have formed over the course of his lifetime, arriving in their current written form finally chiseled and distilled for full effect. Unfortunately, After Dachau is an evolved idea that Quinn presents as a whole novel which he more concisely explained in a previous work- in my opinion to greater effect.

Regarding Ishmael: Not since Jeffery Eugenides’ Middlesex have I desperately handed copies of a book to everyone I know in the hopes that the book would enact an understanding in them the way it did in me. For a number of months now I have been struggling with what I’ve taken from Ishmael and its sequels. I’m in a mindset now to say that I cannot recommend any book more vehemently than I do Ishmael. For me, the natural reaction to Ishmael is to continue along the path through Quinn’s other works. Upon completing each of Quinn's novels I have felt a distinct feeling of panic, as if I have been deposited in the wilderness and left to find my own way home. With the Ishmael books this panic was somehow empowering, but with After Dachau there is no panic, just a feeling of inexplicable angst, like an unresolved chord.

Unfortunately for me, After Dachau was a misstep, not for the story it attempted to tell, but ultimately because the “lesson” was hijacked by a plot that started strong, ended weak, and resisted all attempts at achieving Quinn’s signature “oomph!”