A Tale of Two Loves

School is definitely getting to me. I have never been so worn out and drained in my entire life. I have classes that finishes at night 3 times a week. I have the world of midterms coming up, insanely closely packed midterms, a design project that I can’t seem to make heads or tails out of, and a labs that seem to be entire course topics on their own. Add to that the fact that I am now the IVCF Bible study coordinator and a daily blogger. As you may have rightly assumed, I have rather little free time.

Anyone with this much of a workload would do the logical thing and avoid adding anything else to it, at the risk of it all crashing down on them, and flattening them like one of those cartoon characters from Tom & Jerry. But logic and I aren’t really good friends. I ignore him when he’s talking and I tend not to return his phone calls. I just had to go and add something else to the churning maelstrom of chaos I’m already in.

You see, today, my friend Elizabeth’s blog post had some stuff about NaNoWriMo . For those of you who are wondering what the heck a ‘nanoreemo’ is, it’s actually an acronym for National Novel Writing Month. It encourages writers around the world to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch starting at midnight on November 1st and ending at 11:59:59 p.m. on November 30. There is no prize except knowing that you finished writing 50,000 words in a month. And as you may have guessed by now, this year, I want to participate.

I’ve been a fan of NaNoWriMo on Facebook for a while, but I never took part. Somehow this year seems to be the year for me to do all the craziness that I’ve ever wanted to do. I think I fell and hit my adrenal gland somewhere and now it won’t shut off. For me to achieve this goal, I need to write approximately 1667 words everyday. That would mean that I’d have to pull a couple more hours per day out of thin air. I’d have to give up watching anime and reading manga. No more Fringe, The Event or any of the new episodes of Burn Notice. No more Castle Age, Ninja Saga or Nightclub City on Facebook. And, I’d have to cut back on my biggest vice: less sleep…I think my brain just kicked me in the skull.

But the real reason why I’m doing this isn’t so that I could get some adrenal high or a sense of accomplishment. The truth is that despite the fact that I’m majoring in Industrial Engineering, I don’t want to be an engineer, or at least not one for all my life. I want to be full-blown writer. But you just can’t start off begin a writer, because every good writer knows that you need a steady paying job to start off with, or you’ll more than likely starve to death. Engineering was somewhat of a second choice for me, seeing as how I always liked science.

I’ve always had two loves, science and writing. But since I started engineering, science has taken up all of my time. She stopped being my love, and became my life. Writing just got kind of pushed to the side. I didn’t call her as often as I should, didn’t take her to the movies as much, and made up excuses as to why I couldn’t spend time with her. I thought that I was doing they right thing. Once I was done with my degree, that I would have all the time in the world for her. But I came to realize that that wasn’t true. That that was no way to treat something I loved. Saying “I love you” could never compare to showing “I love you”.

So this isn’t some thrill trip. This is me trying to love writing in the way that she deserves to be loved. Everything else can wait. She needs to know that I still care for her.