My Magazine Article

So here's how my Thanksgiving vacation goes. Beforehand I vow that I will work on getting my magazine article published while I'm home. Once home, I get caught up in playing the Sims. I tell myself that I will begin work on it on Friday. On Thursday evening my hard drive, which has the article and everything on it, dies.

My data isn't lost, I have a back up drive, and I backed up my hard drive a couple days before I left to go home. My mentor acted like backing up was unnecessary. She was wrong.

Some people might have gotten mad in my situation, but I didn't. I thought, maybe this is a sign. A sign that I shouldn't be trying to get it published just yet.

See, I have a plan. The first step is to get published in a major magazine. It has to be a major magazine, though if that doesn't work I will settle for a smaller magazine. But the bigger the magazine the better. I've read that if you get something published in a major magazine it's not uncommon for literary agents to approach you. And that is the goal. Even if they don't, I could mention in my query letter that I was published in a big magazine.

It seems like a long shot. But let me tell you something, I've read the two-minute memoir section of Psychology Today (the section and magazine I have my eye on). My article is better than any I have seen in that section, in my opinion. I don't know how well I'm able to judge my own writing, but I feel that my article is better written than pretty much all of my blogs and the majority of my book. And people tell me that that stuff is well written.

Now, on my blog I've made it clear that I think there's more to my condition than a mental illness. But the article is written as though it were just a mental illness, though I do mention I was never convinced that it was just that and that's what leaves the door open for more delusional thinking. What I mean is, I say that but I don't try to argue that it is more than a mental illness, I actually assume that the reader will assume that that belief is part of my illness. I describe a day where I'm a bit caffeinated, and I'm walking outside and for a few moments I get wrapped up in an episode of delusional thinking, where I briefly entertain the idea that I'm the second coming. The article is meant to be both informative about the way delusional people think and a bit humorous.

I've spent time on this one writing message board posting sample query letters in such, and I've learned that people seem interested in the Jesus delusion. It's a common delusion, but not a lot is written from the perspective of someone who actually had the delusion.

But anyway, the hard drive incident had made me decide to wait until the end of the holiday season to try and get published. My dad's going to have to pay for a membership to Writer's Market (it's relatively inexpensive), which should provide me with guidelines and information for how to submit to magazines and what magazines to submit to.

Seriously Funny

Wednesday was weird. That was the day that the teacher declared that I was the professor. After class I wrote a blog,  filled out an app to be a degree-seeking student at NIC, and then rode the bus home.

It was sometime around then that I started feeling seriously funny. It seems that seriously funny is an oxymoron, but that's how I felt. I wasn't manic. Or was I? I felt a higher energy.

Maybe it was just my hat giving me special powers. First it gave me super awesome professor powers, then it gave me the ability to beat Dan at chess. I don't really know how to define my chess-playing abilities, but I see myself as someone who's doesn't completely suck but isn't particularly good at it, at least for someone like me whose strength is logical thinking. But then again, I don't play enough to really know. Dan claims to be good, he's beaten me twice before, on Wednesday we played twice the first game was a stalemate and I beat him the second game. I'm not sure this chess incident is even significant, but I'm mentioning it anyway. At this point though, I was already feeling seriously funny, which I was quite vocal about. I took a klonopin, though I didn't particularly want one and I wasn't feeling anxious, I was actually feeling pretty freaking good. But I thought maybe if it was just chemical the klonopin would make it go away. It didn't really.

So I thought on this, this seriously funny feeling and what triggered it. It all came on very suddenly, not even over night. I realized it sort of started when the logic professor called me the professor. This wasn't a big deal, but I got the feeling of being recognized in a positive way. One thing I know is, sometimes when something big is going to happen, some big event that triggers a big feeling, when a smaller event happens that triggers a small but similar feeling it feels oddly significant. I've known this to be true from my own experience and other peoples'. I know someone who saw the Lion King as a kid and cried hysterically when Simba's dad Mufasa died. Her own dad died a few years later. Coincidence? No.

The way I feel about this seriously funny feeling, I think it's a feeling that things are going to change for me. Yes, I will move into my apartment and into aftercare, but that's only part of it. I think it might mean that I will be recognized in a small way, but in a much larger way than I was in class, of course. At least, in the near future it will be in a small way. But I didn't know how it was going to happen, so I thought maybe I needed to do something. I wasn't feeling a strong push, but maybe there was still some action necessary on my part. I thought maybe it's time to try to get published in a magazine.

So that's what I'm going to do.

Fashion Trends: A Fashion Industry Conspiracy

Today I was pondering the stupidity of fashion trends. Not the stupidity of fashion itself, because I don't think it's bad to wear clothes that look good and that suit your personality. But why do things that looked good in the 80's not look good anymore? I think it was probably because they never looked good to begin with. Like the big hair look. I mean, really big hair. Nothing's really changed, that never looked good.

I don't know why something would look good one year and then not look good the next. I asked Caitlin about this. Sometimes, the mere act of asking someone a question can lead to you figuring out the answer by yourself. I realized that it was a conspiracy. This is what the fashion industry does to make more money. So you are supposed to read magazines to figure out what's in and what's out. And then you have to keep buying new clothes so your look is constantly "in," and you can't wear your old clothes because they are "out."

True fashion never goes out of style. Or if it does, it's because you changed and you are reflecting that change on the outside. You, personally, changed. I follow my own trends. Like wearing a lot of makeup. That was a personal trend. And honestly, it probably never looked good. But I didn't know that and I thought it did look good at the time, so I was happy wearing a lot of makeup.

Or maybe I'm completely wrong about this. Maybe these people who follow fashion trends are actually more evolved than people like me who think fashion trends are stupid. Because they are part of a collective consciousness, and their minds are all connected and amongst them there is unity. So when really big hair was in, the population was collectively blinded to the fact that it actually looked bad. But if this were true, there would be no need for fashion magazines, because people would just know what was in style intuitively. So I'm going with my conspiracy theory.

But anyway, I didn't mean for this to be a rant about conformity. Though, in a way it is. It's about that and the fact that there aren't enough magazines of substance out there. If there were, maybe I could focus on a different magazine besides Psychology Today to get published in, because that seems like a long shot. But I suppose it will all work out in the end.