Random thoughts for myself...

- I got punched in the face (accidentally, of course) while dancing last Saturday night. I keep forgetting about it, until I move my face, then I remember.

- The opening/closing ceremonies for the Olympics were the two most amazing spectacles that I have ever seen.

- I've been up and down and all around this summer. I wish it were different but many things in ones life are uncontrollable. I have to live, learn, and move on.

- Work is just work right now. I hope that sometime, very soon, my next move comes to me.

- I have too many interests, if that's possible. Focusing on one is difficult.

How I learned to write "good" pt.2

I don’t even remember middle school, so I’m skipping straight to high school. High school was total crap. Teenagers are mean, petty, materialistic, and confused. I did my best to make it through, and just barely survived with only a minimal amount of emotional scarring. I wasn’t completely innocent, though, and had exhibited a bit of my own teenage angst. I wasn’t smoking in the boy’s room and doing shots of Jaeger before Algebra class, but I wasn’t exactly the most cooperative child, either. This was most apparent during my junior and senior years in lovely downtown Mount Clements.

I’ll leave out the fine details, but suffice to say, I wasn’t the most innocent young man in my class. Somehow, and I have no idea how, I still ended being up the class valedictorian. I had a friend working as an aide in the main office, and he overheard the assistant principle actually say, “he has to be the most belligerent valedictorian we’ve had at MCHS in years.” When you’re 16 or 17 and as dense as I was, you take great pride in such criticisms.

My belligerence extended very readily into each of my English and writing classes. My creative writing teacher disliked me so much, that she would purposefully give me bad grades on my well written papers, and good grades on my poorly written papers. She must have gotten some enjoyment out of messing with me.

When I would have to write a paper, I would sit quietly at the desk in my bedroom for hours, staring at the wall, not writing. If I had a paper due, it would haunt me until 11pm the night before, when I would finally give in and write the damn thing. Writing, aside from perhaps talking to girls, was the most frightening experience for me in high school. I was a decent writer, relative to my classmates, but the truth is, I had no confidence in myself. I wrote like a scared kid, and subconsciously I knew it.

It wasn’t until my 3rd year at State that writing began to make sense to me. Similar to the moment that I had in Mrs. Arf’s first grade classroom, something clicked for me while I was writing a paper in this summer Shakespeare Film class. I remember sitting my room on Gunson Street, starting at the wall (old habits die hard), when something hit me. I realized that I didn’t really care what the instructor thought of my paper. I decided to just write it exactly as I wanted to, completely detached from my opinion of what the instructor would, or wouldn’t think of it. That was one of the best papers I had written, and my grade reflected that.

Confidence in oneself, I believe, is the key to unlock one’s own writing potential. Without confidence in who you are, what you believe, and most importantly what you feel, you cannot write successfully. Writing is hard enough as it is, without the added obstacle of personal inhibitions to slow you down. Until you can stand up, and simply say “I don’t give a fuck about what anyone else thinks,” you cannot live up to your potential.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m a work in progress, and I’m far from becoming a decent writer. You never know, thought, I might turn out alright someday. If not, I can always become a professional superhero tracer; I hear there’s a market for that Japan.

How I learned to write "good" pt.1

When I was a young and still running around the mean streets of New Haven in my favorite green, Velcro, Incredible Hulk tennis shoes, I was a very happy kid. I had red hair and freckles for a while, but they eventually wore off and gave way to the dirty-blond hair and the pale, Scottish-Pollock skin that I still sport proudly today. I read Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books by the dozen, and drew or traced every superhero, villain, warrior, and monster that I encountered. I am told that I was a “self-actualizing” child, and that this was a good thing. I’ve recently come to realize, however, that only-children tend to be that way out of necessity.

I was so “well adjusted,” in fact, that my parents decided to get me the hell out of the house one year early, and tossed my skinny little ass onto the school buss at age 5. My first day of kindergarten was a huge success. I got off the bus, took one look at all of the strange kids filing into the front doors of Seifert Elementary, and immediately decided that it just wasn’t for me. So, I did what any kid would do in that situation, I clutched tightly onto my Star Wars lunch box (yes, the kind with the thermos) and made a break for it. I ran at top-speed across the front lawn of the school, and eventually took shelter behind a giant pine tree. I’m sure the pine tree only looked GIANT to me because I was about 3-feet tall at the time, but I do remember that it provided excellent cover for my stealthy escape operation. It took a while, but someone eventually blew my cover, and they found me. So began my colored educational career.

To say that my hatred for writing began a young age would be equivalent to saying that the surface of the Sun is a bit on the warm side; it was a slight understatement. I hated everything about it. I hated pencils because I hated those messy eraser shavings. I hated lined paper because it got in the way of my drawings. I hated letters because there were just too damn many of them, and putting them in the correct order to form words seemed way too difficult. Oh, and my handwriting was a friggin nightmare. In fact, it was so bad, that my dad actually made me hand-copy entire chapters from my Wizards and Warriors books, one letter at a time, to practice (I came across that writing in an old box a few weeks ago and… WOW was it horrid).

Eventually, I did give in to the system (and my father), and I learned to spell and write somewhat legibly. The big breakthrough, and I remember the moment as if it were yesterday, was in the first grade. I had to spell a series of words, and this really pissed me off because the words were big. I complained and stated my intentions to give up. After all, spelling “together” was a daunting task for any 6-year-old. In that moment, Mrs. Arf looked at me with her calming, patient eyes and simply said, “to, get, her.” The light-bulb went on inside my dense, adolescent brain, and spelling has never been an issue for me since. Mrs. Arf was, quite simply, the BOMB.

To be continued...

Read this first

This blog is secondary to my original “30s in progress” blog. I’ve created “30s in progress 2” as a container for the observations and happenings of my life that have a more personal tone. You may never read this blog, which is fine, I’ll just have to find a way to deal with it. This blog is for me and my close friends, and for those of you who want to stalk me. Thank you and welcome.