Five Words: Lazarus Edition

[jakebe]

Age
The older I get, the more I can appreciate the different stages of life. There's a really neat feel to the naivete of youth, and the sudden burst of freedom and exploration that marks adolescence and early adulthood, and that slow, steady congealing of personality as you move on into your thirties. Then there's the accumulation of wisdom, the hardening and sharpening of your intellect, the deterioration of your body, the introspection of how you've spent your days. I've become fascinated by the process of aging, and now that I'm knocking on the door of 30 I've begun to think about what my life will be like when I'm 40, 50, 60. I feel like I've spent the last several years casting about for a path, and now I'm taking the best bits of my experience so far and (finally) cobbling together a life that works for me. It's all a part of the process, and I love it.

Breath
This is an interesting one. :) Breath is one of those basic, basic, basic things that we all take for granted. It's automatic so we tend to overlook it, but really, it's one of the most powerful tools we have. It's our own personal internal clock, it's the reminder we have to come back to ourselves (to be aggressively hippy-ish about it), it's a way we keep our pace. Focusing on it, just for ten breaths, is a quick and easy reset; it breaks you out of a bad mental loop, it's a good way to forcibly check and revise your mood, it keeps you in the present. Breath is awesome. ;)

Apocalypse
I'm an apocalyptic junkie; if there's a movie or a book that explores the world's end and the immediate (or even historical) impact of it, chances are I'm interested in it. This is one of the remnants of my Jehovah's Witness upbringing, refashioned to a secular nature. I think it's endlessly fascinating for me, not because of that spectacle of death or some kind of nihilistic fetish, but because so much is revealed about people when their reasons for things break down. A lot of us do things simply because we're expected to, because it's the way to live in our society. Well, what happens when society no longer needs to be preserved? What happens when it all breaks down? Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a great way to explore what people's true natures are, deep down, unfettered by expectation and brought to the forefront by the need to survive.

Character
I'm a bit of a character actor. I *love* taking a character in a role-playing game and fleshing him out, making him a complete person. It's some of the most fun you can have, I think. It's really thrilling to me to make an entire person out of whole-cloth, someone with a history and a background, preferences and goals, whose life fits neatly in this arc of a story. When I'm really going, whan a character really takes off, it never feels like a 'creation' of mine. They become people with their own ideas about what they do. And it's a thrill to explore that, to realize that you're not in control any more, to feel like you're a conduit for some other thing. Writing for me feels like becoming a medium. I'm tapping into somewhere else, and these voices speak through me.

Addiction
Hee. :) I've had to deal with addictions of varying sorts in my family for a while, and they can be really destructive. Mine, thankfully, are very tame. I have a candy addiction, I'm not afraid to deny; right now, Chocolate Skittles are my own personal crack. Unfortunately they've been taken off the market it would appear. I also have had addictions to the Internet, to fast food, to role-playing games and texting. My addictive personality manifests in some really weird places.

I had this fear of being addicted to drugs or alcohol at one point, because of dealing with alcoholism in my childhood. Thankfully, I don't think I have anything to worry about. Liquor puts me right to sleep before I can get well and truly drunk, and drugs, well...that's a story for another campfire.