The Vacuuming of Nonexistent Ideas by Marcy Shieh

I was an adolescent who almost hated the world. It was such a clichéd feeling that I was almost embarrassed by the fact that I felt it. I felt like a product of some hipster film-maker's imagination and I was disgusted with myself. Shame boiled up within me, enough for me to realize that there were indeed times where art had the full potential to imitate life, may it be a memoir or a unicorn story.

I didn't really hate the world, though. Everyone liked to think that I hated people, butterflies, plants, canoing, washing machines, and everything else this gorgeous world had to offer, but that was far from the truth. If that was the genuine truth, I would no longer be that living, breathing entity who grudgingly remained locked in my room every weekend.

I was revolted by the heat. I didn't like hot weather, almost as much as I didn't like cold weather. My favorite kind of weather was the kind I could wake up to on an April morning where a tee-shirt and a light jacket were the only necessities to feel fabulous about myself and the human condition. I wouldn't have to hear teenage girls whine about the heat, as they stripped down to their tank tops, or how it was so cold, even though they were only wearing next-to-nothing.

I stared at the blinking cursor on my computer screen. Page two. I was working on a novel, you see. A novel that I would never complete, but a novel that I wanted to tackle, nonetheless. But thoughts kept plaguing my literary thought process, which I had very little of. I knew I was losing focus.

Page two. I didn't really have a story. My life was boring, so even if I were to begin writing about my life, it would be completely unnecessary. I would fall asleep in the torturous process. Not only would my art not imitate life, there was almost nothing to imitate. I was a teenager who never experienced romance, death, or passion. I was a zombie, disguised as a living, breathing entity.

I looked back at page one. What an endless page of drivel. Where was the substance? As I read the page over, in its generically boring Times New Roman, twelve-point text, I couldn't help but wonder if the tears dripping down my cheeks were tears of disappointing devastation or tears of sadness.

Story one. A scientist somewhere was trying to find a cure to cancer. No, scratch that. I mean, I could imagine him or her in a white lab coat, perhaps a pen or two in his or her breast pocket, looking into a completely sanitized microscope. The laboratory was probably in the middle of some desert in Arizona, but who cared about the desolate location when one was so close to a brilliant scientific breakthrough?

That was a ridiculous story. I didn't know anything about science. I could dream all day of writing something about a scientist or mathematician or physicist, but it would make no sense and it would make my ignorance seem more obvious than it had to be.

Story two. There was a writer in the middle of nowhere right now who was working on the next literary masterpiece and he or she was most definitely not me. I could almost hear the typewriter keys drumming away and the writer's fingers trying to survive as his or her destiny wrote itself into the hearts of possibly millions of hopeless individuals who starved for adventure and romance in the constant rush hour of relentless city lights or the somber emptiness of suburbia.

Typewriters? Long extinct. I didn't know how it felt to be a successful, professional writer. Yet I didn't want to write about something I understood. That concept, in its purest form, would be too painful. I was well-aware that there were highly emotional novels about depressing lives or periods of times, but I couldn't bring myself to exploit my own feelings. I felt that, for me, being a storyteller was a source of escapism. And truthfully, there was not very many things I would like to discuss in my life. They were boring. And for the things that were interesting, I was not yet prepared to to see it in print. I was a shamelessly repressed writer.