2011.08.22 Text 13 notes

  1. An anniversary.

    Today was my first day of class in my second year of college, and it was okay. I spent a lot of money on books, and found myself fretting over classes and deadlines that I won’t even need to for a month or two. It doesn’t feel so long ago that I first walked into my Introduction to Creative Writing course almost exactly one year ago.

    My jaw dropped just the slightest bit when I read the part of my teacher Nick’s syllabus that said we would have to write in a journal for fifteen minutes every day. I wasn’t dreading it, I was just surprised that a class demanded something like that. I thought, “Okay, college is demanding this of me. I’ll do this right and prove something to myself.” I was a bit excited for it, but I didn’t really realize what I had started.

    That course was split between English majors who were interested in everything the class offered, and other people who were there for an easy A and a few credits. Before class started I would hear people talk about how behind they were on their entries, and how they were going to catch up before Nick checked them and gave us our points. Most of those people never seemed to catch up.

    But as soon as I started, it didn’t feel like work for me. In fact, I enjoyed it. I kept doing it even though the semester ended. When the next one started, my new poetry teacher Deb asked, “Are you like, one of those hardcore dudes? Like, do you write every day?”

    I shuffled my feet and said, “Yeah, I guess.” I was sort of proud that I taught myself to write every day even if I lose a little sleep. I know that it’s worth it, and I thought it was cool that I took it upon myself to develop a good habit.

    Back in my apartment, my roommate asleep on the couch, I decided to chill out and watch a movie after my first day of classes. I read the comic the other day, so I thought I would get around to watching Ghost World. Call me a hipster or a stereotypical teenager all you want (either can be true depending on the day), but it really did something for me. I picked up my notebook and started something.

    But then it hit me really hard. Really hard. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of when I started writing in a notebook every day. Since then, I’ve filled two whole notebooks, almost a third (I’ll have to start a new one by the end of the month), and I’ve turned in lots of essays and papers and made some blogs here on Tumblr that I’m proud of.

    I’m way better off thanks to that assignment, and I think I should thank Nick for getting me started. I have been writing every day for a whole year now, and I have my notebooks full of scratches and scribbles and bad words to show for it. One year down, the rest to go. I’m walking down that road, as the metaphor goes.

    …After a year I should have something more clever to say there, shouldn’t I? Back to work.