Disjointed and coming back

My dictionary has failed me. It does not have the word "solipsistic" as one of its entries. Curiously, every word I looked up while reading Benito Cereno and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville was in it. Which leads to the question of how exactly they decide which words to include in those pocket dictionaries.

I have become a bit of a food hobo. I used to be really good. In my first apartment, we labeled everything meticulously. And even in my last apartment, we only ever shared milk and baking supplies. I would never have just walked in and taken those hot pockets sitting in the freezer (unless maybe they'd been there an inordinately long time...) But this past term everyone's been a bit more relaxed about everything, and they're always so willing when I ask... so yesterday I finally did it. I really and truly became a hobo. At breakfast I grabbed an unlabeled box of cereal and poured myself a bowl of Multigrain Cheerios then added milk from a carton that was not mine and chopped in a banana that I found conveniently lying on the counter. At lunch I rummaged through the fridge and came up with eggs, pizza blend cheese, green pepper, and orange juice. I kind of like the open kitchen policy. But everyone has to chip in. I mean, if you eat all the Poptarts in a single morning, you ought to replace them. As long as everyone carries their weight and contributes, it's a pretty low key system.

Sometime last November I came across a website for an event called NaNoWriMo. For those of you unfamiliar, this translates to National Novel Writing Month. Basically its the idea of quantity versus quality. You have one month to write a certain number of words (I forget how many) and a whole bunch of people do it and all encourage each other and have forums and readings and such. It gets you in the habit of writing and forces you to stop critiquing everything you do and just write. I thought it was a pretty cool idea, and maybe I'd like to do it. But unfortunately, November is right in the middle of one of the busiest parts of school for me. But I was just thinking, why not start my own? I can't be the only one who hasn't got time for novel writing in November. Maybe I could find some kindred spirits and start something. I mean, I could do it by myself, but it'd be way more fun if I could find people do it with (not to mention they could make sure I actually did it). It's a bit intimidating, I don't really write very much right now. Like, at all. One of my goals for the summer is to do more writing. I need the practice and the creative exercise. Ideally, I'd like to do something with writing for a career, so I might as well get some practice in now. So yeah, maybe I'll start fishing around for interested novelists.

Words have a lot of power. We tend to believe what people say, even over what our observation would tell us. It's like those psychology experiments where they showed that the words people associated with images and event affected their memories of them. You can change someone's whole perception of an event through words. Exaggerated praise or criticism can change how you feel about something after the fact. Why do we trust words over our own senses? Then again, why do we even listen to what other people are saying?

I will write more interestingly some day. Sometimes I feel I am a bit boring. But I'm told this is a highly detrimental and self-fulfilling thought pattern, so I may have to replace it.