Writing

I decided to create this blog mostly because I like writing but hate to actually write. See, I once heard someone say that a person who has messy handwriting has a lot on their mind. And this seems to ring true with me, at least. 

I grew up an only child to a family of people whose junk food came in the form of books. I read everything I could get my hands on and understand, so much so that my mom and nana like to tell people that when I was still learning to use the toilet like a normal person, I had a potty chair made with a comical little magazine rack on the side that I used for storing books so I could sit on the chair for hours and concentrate dutifully without getting bored. They even have a picture of it, much to my embarrassment. And another favorite tale of theirs is the time I fell asleep in a huge wicker basket full of my books, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

In grade school, stripped of the friends I had made a year earlier in kindergarten (I was put in a year ahead of my age peers), I was shy and kept to myself with the exception of my best friend, “Maye” (I’ll explain her later at length). I was the fastest reader with the greatest comprehension of the passages we were tested on, and I was known for having perfect spelling test scores for years to come, the sole defining trait that set the expectations of my parents, fellow students, and teachers high. This factoid is also something that prompts those who know me to ask me to spell a word without failure. They know they can always look to me for instant spell-check.

I don’t think I could mention much of middle school if I tried because I don’t remember much about it. That’s also for another post. But I do remember that a book followed me to school every day, and I would often whip it out when I was finished with my work (and often when I wasn’t, which led to horribly declining grades). This separation of me from the rest of the world made me alien from the rest of my classmates and invited scorn and finger-pointing and mocking. But I didn’t let that sour my taste for the stories.

High school hardly changed my attitudes, although it did mean to me more than middle school ever did simply because I was amazed that I passed the eighth grade at all and managed to go on. The classes before and after that tipping point never meant much to me, and when I look back now, they still don’t. I didn’t and couldn’t care less for those subjects that couldn’t be applied elsewhere and be meaningful in the process. Although I did learn a bit in my choir class that I will never forget… more on that later, though.

And all through middle school and high school, I read and read and read until tenth grade, when my mother took me to an optometrist and I got a sweet set of red frames because my eyeballs were all damaged from reading so much. And then I sat down and read some more.

A great deal of my love for reading comes from my love of writing. Given enough time, I can write a deep, meaningful story that makes you stop and think. I took a literature class that helps me write beautifully in ways I didn’t know I could, and now I have an appreciation for stories I didn’t know about before, like Shakespeare’s Othello and Kafka’s Metamorphosis and even simple fairy tales.

And yet here I am, typing all this out and ad-libbing the entire thing; I’m just writing it as it comes out. I could write it down by hand, but there’s a problem with that. The problem isn’t that I can’t read my own handwriting, nor is it that I’m afraid someone else will read it (Internet, I’m lookin’ at you). It’s that I have all sorts of thoughts and images and sounds in my head, and they’re going by so fast that my hand tries to keep up and starts hurting. So I stop. But typing is much easier: it’s writing with all ten fingers at once!

I am a college student, so I won’t post regularly (probably). But I will post again.