Well, here I am again, and I can't believe it's only been 5 days-- it feels like a month or more since I wrote! What can I say? it's been a long five days!

I've been meaning to write for a while, but i have been and still am too exhausted for the detailed essays i want to put down. Done too much "serious" writing in the process of applying to grad schools and fellowships, and I have a headache because of a bad cold, so there's no way those essays in the offing are getting written just yet. Maybe another time. For today, I want to explore this stress itself.

stopped going to my old pottery class a few months ago... for many reasons, but the main reason was just that they emphasized technique and skill too much, never allowed space for playing with clay. I appreciated their emphasis on skill, but i'm doing pottery to RELAX... wasn't worth it if i was just going to get stressed out over it.

Recently, a friend of my father's mentioned this lady who is a professional potter and has a studio about 2 km away from my house. She doesn't give formal classes but she was happy to meet up. It felt worth investigating, especially since she is so close by, so i called her and walked over to her house a few days ago. I really enjoyed talking to her, and I decided to take up her offer to do informal classes at her studio-- structure it according to whatever time and day works for us both, and pay her for materials and lessons per class rather than have a structured 6 month plan.

In retrospect, i think i know what made me accept her offer so readily. In a pause in our conversation the first day, she suddenly said, "I just love pottery... it's such a great feeling to make these things." She went on to talk about how excited she is when she opens the kiln, how she sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night to check the temperature on the kiln, to see if it can be opened an hour earlier. She talked of the feel of the clay in her hand. I told her how i often used to stay in the ceramics studio at college late at night, right until it closed, especially during my advanced class-- shaping a sculpture, testing a glaze, painting a finished piece. And i realized just how long it had been since i had talked to someone about the sheer joy of creation. I knew I wanted to study under soemone who knew that joy, who hadn't forgotten the pure excitement of opening a kiln even decades after she made her first pot.

I think that's something i need to visit in my writing as well-- just the sheer fun of it. Lately, so much of my writing has been high-pressure, writing to meet deadlines, writing to try and fit as much important information as possible into page limits, word limits, and even character limits! In the process, I haven't had time to savor words, to roll them over my tongue, to write gibberish when I feel like it. I haven't had time to actively participate in writers' groups, to share words with others who love them as much as I do. And somewhere in that process, writing is becoming like my old pottery class- something i know I love, but something i'm lately jsut not being able to enjoy that much.

I found a way out of the dilemma in the case of pottery (I went for my first class yesterday, and I did enjoy it much more than I had in a while; she's probably stricter about technique than even my old instructors, but it's not restricting, perhaps because she starts the class with "so, what do you want to make today?" and lets me follow through with my answer). I need to find a similar way out in writing. And soon, before the blank page overpowers me completely!