I am not a poet. But I am trying to get myself ready for a semester of Capstone work, and this is what came out from thinking about my Capstone this evening. Maybe posting this is the therapeutic part of writing it. Enjoy!
In her dreams
He's
One giant pill
The big blue rectangle, not the harmless white circle
And she can’t tell the difference
Between that
And the real thing
She thinks she should stop him
But there’s nothing you can do, she tells herself
You’re only 16, she says to the mirror
He did this to himself, she whispers to her teddy bear
But it doesn’t help
Dull the pain she feels
For letting it happen to him
The guilt keeps building
Everywhere she is, Guilt is too
Until she thinks she’s going to break
Burst at the fraying thread seams
And the burden of keeping it a secret cripples her
And she wonders how they don’t know
Pills rattle again and again
Disappearing one after another after another
Until there is nothing left of him
Her parents don’t notice
Until it is much too late to save him
Mother cries, Father yells
Then Father cries and Mother yells
And they ask her: did she know?
Did she know?
Showing posts with label Core. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Core. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Capstone summer post 2: beginning writing
So, over the course of the summer, I am supposed to post three more times about my Capstone project, and how it’s going along, what I’ve been considering about it, what questions I have, what I have learned about my topic through research, etc. The requirements for these posts are pretty rigid (the impact on your project of your: summer reading, a conversation you have had, other discoveries and experiences). Considering that the only thing I have read on my summer reading/research list is Less Than Zero and its sequel, and I wrote a novel length entry about them already, I will save that post for another time. I also have been a coward and not told my parents yet, so the conversation will also have to wait. Which leaves the “other discoveries and experiences” post. Well, I discovered that I need to actually start writing about my brother, and talking about him in general, in order to prepare for the Capstone, so I threw together a little piece as my first summer entry to help me do just that. I hope this counts as a discovery.
Enjoy!
#
All my life, I have been told by my parents and relatives that building a good relationship with your sibling is the most important relationship to build because they are, statistically speaking, going to be in your life the longest. “Blood is thicker than water,” as they would say. My brother and I are exhibit A of all the ways that I don’t follow the rules. To be it simply: I hate my brother. To make it more complex: for the first sixteen and a half years of my life, I idolized everything about him, and fantasized that if I tried hard enough, I could become just like him one day. As you can probably guess, that dream came crashing down in flames all around me, and now I wish that he never had to be a part of my life again. You can’t choose your family, I guess.
To start at the beginning would be to try to start before my memory allows me to remember. So, instead, I’ll start with what I remember from the good ole days, and you can tell me, when I’m finished, how wrong I was. As I go along you can jot down the signs that I have gone back and looked for time and time again. Maybe you can tell me all the things that I did wrong in loving him.
II.
Growing up in St. Albans, Vermont, there wasn’t a lot to do besides torture each other. And torture each other, we did. You see, my brother Doug, is seven years older than I am, and so he should presumably be seven years wiser than I was, or am. But he learned from an early age that if he blamed the baby for everything that went wrong, we were both a lot less likely to get into trouble. So, when Doug and his best friend Brian tied me up and locked me into my grandmother’s bedroom (the locks were on the inside, by the way,) he told my parents that we were playing a game. No one asked me what had really happened.
Then there was the slave game, a popular tale among my friends. The game was simple, really. It involved my brother playing the King, my cousin Meagan as his loyal secretary, and my cousin Matt (only a year older than myself) and I as the slaves. All we had to do was everything that my brother asked us to. This ranged from simple things like getting him a snack or grabbing him another can of Pepsi (always Pepsi) to more time-consuming tasks like doing his laundry or cleaning his room. When we could have been outside playing, we were inside cleaning out the gunk from underneath his bed. And you didn’t challenge his authority because the punishment was that you had to stand beneath the stairs for an hour, and if you tried to move, you were struck with a metal bat by the other slave. If we both rebelled, my brother held the bat, and he took no mercy.
Everyone who’s heard the story always asks me why I didn’t tell my parents on him, but truth be told: the games never really bothered me. I didn’t care that when we played hide-and-go-seek he would trip me down the stairs or bang my head into the wall. I didn’t mind that when he was baby-sitting, he would pretend to call up my grandmother and tell her that I hated her. It wasn’t even that bad when he nearly stabbed me with a butcher knife. I didn’t matter to me because he was paying attention to me; he was treating me like I was one of his friends. He told me secrets. He let me in on his fears. He let me watch him play Resident Evil. He taught me how to achieve a flawless victory on Mortal Kombat. He introduced me to his friends, one of whom I was convinced I was going to marry from the age of four until I was fourteen.
If you don’t have an older sibling, you might not know what I’m talking about here. What I’m saying is that all I ever wanted was for him to think that I was cool, and I would have done anything (and I mean absolutely anything) to make him think that. And, to those of you who are the older one, hang out with your young brother or sister. You’ll make their life.
III.
As I got older, I started to idolize my brother for different reasons. He was a starter on a winning soccer team. At the age of five, I began playing for my own soccer league as the goalie, and my brother was very good at teaching me the rules to the game. I was the only person on that soccer team who knew what “off sides” meant, and I thought that made him king of the world for telling me. He would practice with me after school, and all through grade school and junior high. I would ask him for advice on how to block certain shots (even though he played center field) and he would drag himself outside to take practice kicks at me until it was dark and our mother dragged us in.
My brother was also the person who taught me how to read. Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and even most of third were marked with my inability to spell my own name. I would write “Pat” on the tops of my assignments in hopes that the teacher wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t spelled out the entire thing. I got away with it for a surprisingly long time until another Pat entered my class and the teacher started to ask us to write our full names on the tops of our papers so she wouldn’t get confused. Suddenly, it was phone calls home to my parents and a special reading class that gave me picture books to read out loud to a mentor who would correct every mispronunciation I made (essentially, every single word except for pat). Soon, I was sent home with a stack of books that I was supposed to read out loud to my parents every night. I would sit on the big couch and stumble over the simplest of words while my parents would look on in their teary-eyed passive way that had disappointment written all over it, and whisper to each other about how it was just their luck to get a stupid child. My brother was the only one who never got mad at me for not being able to read.
The summer before fourth grade, he sat me down on the cement floor of his basement bedroom and asked me what I was interested in. I told him the usual suspects—soccer, unicorns, dragons—and he brought me over to his old bookcase full of hardcover books and handed me a book on Norse mythology. He told me to bring it up to my bedroom and read it under the covers by flashlight after my parents forced me to go to bed, and not to read it out loud. He said it was the only way to read a book. I believed him because, at nine, I believed everything that everyone told me, especially him. That summer I read my first book. Furthermore, I read it multiple times, cover to cover, without stumbling over a single word.
IV.
When he left for college, it was devastating to me. I had lost my other half and I spent a significant amount of sixth grade sulking, even though I got to move into his blood red room in the basement, something which I had fantasized about for years. It felt bittersweet with him gone. On the one hand, I had the whole basement to myself and since my parents never had any excuse to go down there, I had all the privacy any eleven year old could dream of. But on the flip side, I was on my own. For the first time in my life, I had to formulate my own opinions on things. My brother wasn’t around to force feed me his thoughts and convince me that they were also mine. It was scary to have him leave and realize that everything I loved was because he loved it first.
V.
The first time that I thought my brother might have a drug problem, I had just gotten my wisdom teeth pulled, so I couldn’t be sure whether what I was experiencing was real or laughing gas induced. He came in during his lunch break from work at the chocolate factory (packing fudge, which in no way relates to this story, but I still find amusing) on that cold spring break day, and he was looking for something. I was in a stupor on the couch, zoning out to an episode of Hey Arnold, so I didn’t hear him when he asked for the Oxycontin, and I didn’t really see him when he took the whole bottle. I was only able to add up the pieces when, that night, my mother began a desperate search to find them and screamed at me when she could not. I remember thinking that it couldn’t be a good reason that he had taken them, or else he would have asked. He also would probably not have taken the whole bottle of medication that was prescribed to my missing teeth. When I would ask him later about it, he would simply tell me that he needed them more than I did, that he was in pain too.
VI.
After the incident with my wisdom teeth, everything began to spiral out of control in rapid succession. He asked me for $400 to pay for a speeding ticket that he had gotten and then requested that I not mention the transaction to our mother, who works at the bank my account was at; he showed up at my high school in the middle of the day to ask for more money to get out of town for awhile, and would not leave until I gave him my debit card pin number; I came home from soccer practice to a sheet of paper that had my name written in cursive over and over again, more closely resembling my signature as the paper went along, and a missing checkbook; my graduation money went missing from my grandmother’s purse, and he came up with the excuse that his girlfriend had stolen it to get an abortion he knew nothing about; he asked me for more money to take his dog to the vet because of a limp that only he saw; I came home Thanksgiving break my freshman year at Champlain to find all the change jars throughout the house were gone; I woke up almost every single summer morning to screaming and crying as my parents discovered another monetarily valuable thing missing; I came home one weekend during my sophomore year at Champlain to find all my movies and CDs and books had gone missing, probably ran away; and most recently, the call from the funeral home that buried my grandmother two days after my twentieth birthday saying that the check had bounced, and finding out that he had stolen the insurance check from the mail and spent it in increments of one thousand dollars. My parents say that it’s the final straw that broke the camel’s back, but I’ve heard it all before, and it all sounds the same as the lies that he tells.
And the lies have been plentiful. Speeding ticket, abortion, the check didn’t come in, I let a friend borrow your movies, I lost a bet to the fucking Pope, the dog needs to go to the vet, I’ll pay you back tomorrow, this time I swear I’ll pay you back, give me this one last chance to prove myself to you, tomorrow I’m getting paid and then you’ll get your money back. At this point, I don’t think there’s a lie he hasn’t told in order to get money to buy his pills. In fact, just today, he called me up and asked for $100 to pay back this loan shark he borrowed money from who is threatening to kill him if he doesn’t get his money back tonight. Kill him? Over $100? And I’m the most beautiful girl in the world.
VII.
People tell me that I don’t understand, that I can never understand, because I’m not a drug addict. And I tell them that I hate my brother, and not because he’s a drug addict. The addiction I can handle because we’re all addicted to something (for me, it’s falling in love, or lust, or whatever you want to call it). I hate that the person I grew up idolizing is gone, and I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. I hate that he stole our dead grandmother’s funeral money and no one had the balls enough to report it to the police. I hate that he can’t ask for help. I hate that after five and a half years, nothing is different. Mostly, I hate that it still bothers me so much.
Enjoy!
#
All my life, I have been told by my parents and relatives that building a good relationship with your sibling is the most important relationship to build because they are, statistically speaking, going to be in your life the longest. “Blood is thicker than water,” as they would say. My brother and I are exhibit A of all the ways that I don’t follow the rules. To be it simply: I hate my brother. To make it more complex: for the first sixteen and a half years of my life, I idolized everything about him, and fantasized that if I tried hard enough, I could become just like him one day. As you can probably guess, that dream came crashing down in flames all around me, and now I wish that he never had to be a part of my life again. You can’t choose your family, I guess.
To start at the beginning would be to try to start before my memory allows me to remember. So, instead, I’ll start with what I remember from the good ole days, and you can tell me, when I’m finished, how wrong I was. As I go along you can jot down the signs that I have gone back and looked for time and time again. Maybe you can tell me all the things that I did wrong in loving him.
II.
Growing up in St. Albans, Vermont, there wasn’t a lot to do besides torture each other. And torture each other, we did. You see, my brother Doug, is seven years older than I am, and so he should presumably be seven years wiser than I was, or am. But he learned from an early age that if he blamed the baby for everything that went wrong, we were both a lot less likely to get into trouble. So, when Doug and his best friend Brian tied me up and locked me into my grandmother’s bedroom (the locks were on the inside, by the way,) he told my parents that we were playing a game. No one asked me what had really happened.
Then there was the slave game, a popular tale among my friends. The game was simple, really. It involved my brother playing the King, my cousin Meagan as his loyal secretary, and my cousin Matt (only a year older than myself) and I as the slaves. All we had to do was everything that my brother asked us to. This ranged from simple things like getting him a snack or grabbing him another can of Pepsi (always Pepsi) to more time-consuming tasks like doing his laundry or cleaning his room. When we could have been outside playing, we were inside cleaning out the gunk from underneath his bed. And you didn’t challenge his authority because the punishment was that you had to stand beneath the stairs for an hour, and if you tried to move, you were struck with a metal bat by the other slave. If we both rebelled, my brother held the bat, and he took no mercy.
Everyone who’s heard the story always asks me why I didn’t tell my parents on him, but truth be told: the games never really bothered me. I didn’t care that when we played hide-and-go-seek he would trip me down the stairs or bang my head into the wall. I didn’t mind that when he was baby-sitting, he would pretend to call up my grandmother and tell her that I hated her. It wasn’t even that bad when he nearly stabbed me with a butcher knife. I didn’t matter to me because he was paying attention to me; he was treating me like I was one of his friends. He told me secrets. He let me in on his fears. He let me watch him play Resident Evil. He taught me how to achieve a flawless victory on Mortal Kombat. He introduced me to his friends, one of whom I was convinced I was going to marry from the age of four until I was fourteen.
If you don’t have an older sibling, you might not know what I’m talking about here. What I’m saying is that all I ever wanted was for him to think that I was cool, and I would have done anything (and I mean absolutely anything) to make him think that. And, to those of you who are the older one, hang out with your young brother or sister. You’ll make their life.
III.
As I got older, I started to idolize my brother for different reasons. He was a starter on a winning soccer team. At the age of five, I began playing for my own soccer league as the goalie, and my brother was very good at teaching me the rules to the game. I was the only person on that soccer team who knew what “off sides” meant, and I thought that made him king of the world for telling me. He would practice with me after school, and all through grade school and junior high. I would ask him for advice on how to block certain shots (even though he played center field) and he would drag himself outside to take practice kicks at me until it was dark and our mother dragged us in.
My brother was also the person who taught me how to read. Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and even most of third were marked with my inability to spell my own name. I would write “Pat” on the tops of my assignments in hopes that the teacher wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t spelled out the entire thing. I got away with it for a surprisingly long time until another Pat entered my class and the teacher started to ask us to write our full names on the tops of our papers so she wouldn’t get confused. Suddenly, it was phone calls home to my parents and a special reading class that gave me picture books to read out loud to a mentor who would correct every mispronunciation I made (essentially, every single word except for pat). Soon, I was sent home with a stack of books that I was supposed to read out loud to my parents every night. I would sit on the big couch and stumble over the simplest of words while my parents would look on in their teary-eyed passive way that had disappointment written all over it, and whisper to each other about how it was just their luck to get a stupid child. My brother was the only one who never got mad at me for not being able to read.
The summer before fourth grade, he sat me down on the cement floor of his basement bedroom and asked me what I was interested in. I told him the usual suspects—soccer, unicorns, dragons—and he brought me over to his old bookcase full of hardcover books and handed me a book on Norse mythology. He told me to bring it up to my bedroom and read it under the covers by flashlight after my parents forced me to go to bed, and not to read it out loud. He said it was the only way to read a book. I believed him because, at nine, I believed everything that everyone told me, especially him. That summer I read my first book. Furthermore, I read it multiple times, cover to cover, without stumbling over a single word.
IV.
When he left for college, it was devastating to me. I had lost my other half and I spent a significant amount of sixth grade sulking, even though I got to move into his blood red room in the basement, something which I had fantasized about for years. It felt bittersweet with him gone. On the one hand, I had the whole basement to myself and since my parents never had any excuse to go down there, I had all the privacy any eleven year old could dream of. But on the flip side, I was on my own. For the first time in my life, I had to formulate my own opinions on things. My brother wasn’t around to force feed me his thoughts and convince me that they were also mine. It was scary to have him leave and realize that everything I loved was because he loved it first.
V.
The first time that I thought my brother might have a drug problem, I had just gotten my wisdom teeth pulled, so I couldn’t be sure whether what I was experiencing was real or laughing gas induced. He came in during his lunch break from work at the chocolate factory (packing fudge, which in no way relates to this story, but I still find amusing) on that cold spring break day, and he was looking for something. I was in a stupor on the couch, zoning out to an episode of Hey Arnold, so I didn’t hear him when he asked for the Oxycontin, and I didn’t really see him when he took the whole bottle. I was only able to add up the pieces when, that night, my mother began a desperate search to find them and screamed at me when she could not. I remember thinking that it couldn’t be a good reason that he had taken them, or else he would have asked. He also would probably not have taken the whole bottle of medication that was prescribed to my missing teeth. When I would ask him later about it, he would simply tell me that he needed them more than I did, that he was in pain too.
VI.
After the incident with my wisdom teeth, everything began to spiral out of control in rapid succession. He asked me for $400 to pay for a speeding ticket that he had gotten and then requested that I not mention the transaction to our mother, who works at the bank my account was at; he showed up at my high school in the middle of the day to ask for more money to get out of town for awhile, and would not leave until I gave him my debit card pin number; I came home from soccer practice to a sheet of paper that had my name written in cursive over and over again, more closely resembling my signature as the paper went along, and a missing checkbook; my graduation money went missing from my grandmother’s purse, and he came up with the excuse that his girlfriend had stolen it to get an abortion he knew nothing about; he asked me for more money to take his dog to the vet because of a limp that only he saw; I came home Thanksgiving break my freshman year at Champlain to find all the change jars throughout the house were gone; I woke up almost every single summer morning to screaming and crying as my parents discovered another monetarily valuable thing missing; I came home one weekend during my sophomore year at Champlain to find all my movies and CDs and books had gone missing, probably ran away; and most recently, the call from the funeral home that buried my grandmother two days after my twentieth birthday saying that the check had bounced, and finding out that he had stolen the insurance check from the mail and spent it in increments of one thousand dollars. My parents say that it’s the final straw that broke the camel’s back, but I’ve heard it all before, and it all sounds the same as the lies that he tells.
And the lies have been plentiful. Speeding ticket, abortion, the check didn’t come in, I let a friend borrow your movies, I lost a bet to the fucking Pope, the dog needs to go to the vet, I’ll pay you back tomorrow, this time I swear I’ll pay you back, give me this one last chance to prove myself to you, tomorrow I’m getting paid and then you’ll get your money back. At this point, I don’t think there’s a lie he hasn’t told in order to get money to buy his pills. In fact, just today, he called me up and asked for $100 to pay back this loan shark he borrowed money from who is threatening to kill him if he doesn’t get his money back tonight. Kill him? Over $100? And I’m the most beautiful girl in the world.
VII.
People tell me that I don’t understand, that I can never understand, because I’m not a drug addict. And I tell them that I hate my brother, and not because he’s a drug addict. The addiction I can handle because we’re all addicted to something (for me, it’s falling in love, or lust, or whatever you want to call it). I hate that the person I grew up idolizing is gone, and I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. I hate that he stole our dead grandmother’s funeral money and no one had the balls enough to report it to the police. I hate that he can’t ask for help. I hate that after five and a half years, nothing is different. Mostly, I hate that it still bothers me so much.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Capstone: summer plan
I must say that I was not expecting to have to update this blog anymore with Capstone thoughts, but since it seems that the blog, the Capstone, and I are going to be engaged in an academic three-way for a little while longer, I will try to make the best of the situation. That being said, I should give the update about what the hell it is I’m doing (because I have decided at long last).
As I said in my proposal, I have always avoided writing about myself. It makes me very, very vulnerable, which is something that I loathe being. But I made a promise to myself to make my Capstone challenging. To me, the best writing is the stuff that is hard to write. It’s the author’s bare bones on the page (or screen in the case of a blog). It’s standing naked in front of a room full of your closest friends and having them point out your flaws. I realized that the only way for me to become a better writer is to leave my comfort zone and write about things that I thought I never would. That’s why I’ve chosen to write my Capstone about my brother, whose drug addiction tore my whole world apart and destroyed my family.
Where I stand in my thinking about the Capstone is this: I need to start writing. Memories fade with time, and mine are no exception. I’ve kept a diary throughout my life, but I was careful never to mention my brother because I was afraid of my parents finding them and getting angry with me for writing it down. So as it stands right now, the only things I have about my brother’s addiction are the only that are in my head. So I really need to start jotting down notes and making a timeline of events before everything begins to blur together any more than it already has. There is one person, my closet friend, who knows all the tales and all the heartbreak that I have endured because of this, so she is the one to talk to about getting everything straight. That girl has a memory like an elephant, so I know she’ll be able to correct any mistakes that I may make in my timeline.
I also know that I need to talk to my parents about this Capstone before I’ve finished the thing and everyone in my senior Professional Writing program is reading this story, and it’s too late to tell them, or warn them, or whatever. Because if I write the honest truth, no one in my family is coming out clean. We are all guilty, and we will all be villainized in some way. I mentioned to my mother, off-handedly, once that I wanted to write my Capstone about my brother, and she simply said, “Absolutely not.” Case closed. I know I won’t ever get their approval, but I need to at least get them out of denial about me writing it. And I need to accept for myself that they don’t approve and probably won’t ever read it. Like I said before, the hardest things to write are the most worthwhile. (I hope.)
Once I get those two things out of the way, I know that I need to start tackling the list of resources that I made for myself in my proposal. They are mostly movies, which should be easy to watch given that I am dating the biggest movie buff I have ever met, who would be more than willing to sit down and watch a couple movies with me. (He might even (il)legally download for me.) I was asked an interesting question by one of the professors in charge of the Capstone: am I planning to make this story into a script? That is something that I need to consider, I guess. I had planned to write a standard non-fiction piece, but since I am watching so many movies to prepare for writing it, maybe I should write a script.
Basically I have a lot to figure out before I have to start writing this beast. But luckily, I have the entire summer to think about it before any actual work starts. So, I am going to take these next few months and plan out what I want to do. Maybe even make an outline of what it will look like. And I’ll see what happens from there.
Wish me luck. I’m going to need all that I can get.
As I said in my proposal, I have always avoided writing about myself. It makes me very, very vulnerable, which is something that I loathe being. But I made a promise to myself to make my Capstone challenging. To me, the best writing is the stuff that is hard to write. It’s the author’s bare bones on the page (or screen in the case of a blog). It’s standing naked in front of a room full of your closest friends and having them point out your flaws. I realized that the only way for me to become a better writer is to leave my comfort zone and write about things that I thought I never would. That’s why I’ve chosen to write my Capstone about my brother, whose drug addiction tore my whole world apart and destroyed my family.
Where I stand in my thinking about the Capstone is this: I need to start writing. Memories fade with time, and mine are no exception. I’ve kept a diary throughout my life, but I was careful never to mention my brother because I was afraid of my parents finding them and getting angry with me for writing it down. So as it stands right now, the only things I have about my brother’s addiction are the only that are in my head. So I really need to start jotting down notes and making a timeline of events before everything begins to blur together any more than it already has. There is one person, my closet friend, who knows all the tales and all the heartbreak that I have endured because of this, so she is the one to talk to about getting everything straight. That girl has a memory like an elephant, so I know she’ll be able to correct any mistakes that I may make in my timeline.
I also know that I need to talk to my parents about this Capstone before I’ve finished the thing and everyone in my senior Professional Writing program is reading this story, and it’s too late to tell them, or warn them, or whatever. Because if I write the honest truth, no one in my family is coming out clean. We are all guilty, and we will all be villainized in some way. I mentioned to my mother, off-handedly, once that I wanted to write my Capstone about my brother, and she simply said, “Absolutely not.” Case closed. I know I won’t ever get their approval, but I need to at least get them out of denial about me writing it. And I need to accept for myself that they don’t approve and probably won’t ever read it. Like I said before, the hardest things to write are the most worthwhile. (I hope.)
Once I get those two things out of the way, I know that I need to start tackling the list of resources that I made for myself in my proposal. They are mostly movies, which should be easy to watch given that I am dating the biggest movie buff I have ever met, who would be more than willing to sit down and watch a couple movies with me. (He might even (il)legally download for me.) I was asked an interesting question by one of the professors in charge of the Capstone: am I planning to make this story into a script? That is something that I need to consider, I guess. I had planned to write a standard non-fiction piece, but since I am watching so many movies to prepare for writing it, maybe I should write a script.
Basically I have a lot to figure out before I have to start writing this beast. But luckily, I have the entire summer to think about it before any actual work starts. So, I am going to take these next few months and plan out what I want to do. Maybe even make an outline of what it will look like. And I’ll see what happens from there.
Wish me luck. I’m going to need all that I can get.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Capstone/Core Cross-over
So I've been giving the ever-present Capstone project a lot of thought since my last post, and I think I have found the way to incorporate all that I've learned in taking the Core classes with my writing. It's still a work in progress and most certainly rough around the edges, but I'm working on smoothing it out, so bear with me.
I'm going to put together a publication (probably a mix of my work and the work of other writers) that is broken up into sections that tackle some of the topics that I've talked about in my past three years in Core. These are the categories that I've thought of so far: Concepts (of the self and community, these would be the nonfiction-esque pieces that talk about how life experiences have shaped them and those around them); Religion and Politics (for Capitalism & Democracy and Secular & Sacred, these would be pieces that in some way addressed religion or politics, maybe an explorative essay or two); and, Global World (Technology & Development and Human Rights, these pieces would discuss how the world is changing in some way). I have yet to think of ways to incorporate Aesthetics Expressions, Scientific Revolutions, and the Middle East Core classes, but I can assure you that I will.
I know that it's rough and I have a lot of work, and writing, ahead of me if I want this publication, or collections of my works as it may turn out to be, to look like how I envision it looking, but I committed to getting this thing accomplished. I have spent far too much time thinking about it already to have it not happen.
That being said, suggestions?
I'm going to put together a publication (probably a mix of my work and the work of other writers) that is broken up into sections that tackle some of the topics that I've talked about in my past three years in Core. These are the categories that I've thought of so far: Concepts (of the self and community, these would be the nonfiction-esque pieces that talk about how life experiences have shaped them and those around them); Religion and Politics (for Capitalism & Democracy and Secular & Sacred, these would be pieces that in some way addressed religion or politics, maybe an explorative essay or two); and, Global World (Technology & Development and Human Rights, these pieces would discuss how the world is changing in some way). I have yet to think of ways to incorporate Aesthetics Expressions, Scientific Revolutions, and the Middle East Core classes, but I can assure you that I will.
I know that it's rough and I have a lot of work, and writing, ahead of me if I want this publication, or collections of my works as it may turn out to be, to look like how I envision it looking, but I committed to getting this thing accomplished. I have spent far too much time thinking about it already to have it not happen.
That being said, suggestions?
Thursday, February 25, 2010
And then there were two.
I want to start off by thanking all my lovely Champlainers for the advice on how to tackle this Capstone monster. I've been thinking a lot about the three options that I threw out there, and I've narrowed it down to two fine candidates. More advices and comments are always welcomed, of course.
1) The Screenplay. I was wavering a little bit on this during my last look at Capstone, but since reading everyone's great words, I'm feeling a lot more confident. I could write a screenplay. I could be a screenwriter. No, that's not right. Let's try it with more force. I COULD BE A SCREENWRITER! There. That's much better. Now all I have to do is buy the full version of Final Draft (or marry a rich man who can afford to buy it for me), take Screenwriting II, and write, write, write. Easy. Right?
2) The publication. I was really confident about this one last time around, and now I'm wavering (funny how that works). I could do it, that's the problem. I'm just not sure I could make it like I would want to in a semester. If I'm going to do it, I want to do it in a big way, and I'm afraid I would have to hold myself back a little bit because I would also be taking four or five other classes in addition to making it. I know I would procrastinate. I know I would put it off. A project like this deserves tender love and care, and the most I could give it would be the occasional smile and pat on the back. So, it may go on the back-burner.
Basically, I have not come to a final decision. Help!
Friday, February 12, 2010
The Game Plan.
Since setting foot onto Champlain campus almost three years ago, (wow, has it really been that long?) it seems like every assignment and class is a result of the teachers sitting around a table saying, "That seems like it could work. Let's try it!" My class, the class of 2011 that is, is lucky enough have been the guinea pigs for a thing called Core, which was met with many mixed reviews from my fellow classmates (but that is another topic all together, saved for another time). For now, it leads me into my discussion of what I want to do for the Capstone, yet another new Champlain creation set for the upcoming year.
Here's the thing, though. The Capstone Project isn't creating a self-portrait (Concepts of the Self, freshman year). It isn't creating a new amendment to the Constitution (Capitalism & Democracy). It isn't creating an altar to something (The Secular & The Sacred). It's a project of my own design. If I fail, it's on me. If I succeed, it's because of my own doing. Welcome to senior year, folks.
So what do I want do for an entire semester? Let's brainstorm.
1) Recently, I've been really interested in the environment. I've been investigating Greenpeace as an option for after graduation. I just wrote a paper on the effects that climate change is having on Antarctica (for yet another Core class) and it was something that I got really into. It's an important topic to inform people about and I can't say that about a lot of topics that I've written papers on. I'm not entirely sure that this is right for the Capstone Project, though. I'm a writing major. Shouldn't I be a little more creative with my final project than to write a standard thesis paper? I feel like I should be doing something that's more writing and less research. But then I see the footage of the polar bears drowning and I know in my heart that I won't think of a more important topic to dedicate myself to.
2) I'm taking Screenwriting right now and I am loving it. Sitting in that class every Wednesday morning, I think I could write a screenplay in a semester, or at least get a good chunk of one written. Then I come home from the class and I think I'm going crazy. I get bored. I get distracted. I get discouraged. A screenplay is a lot of pages to stay engaged and focused for. But maybe that’s a challenge that I need to have. If I have to write it, if my degree is dependent on writing an entire screenplay, write it I will. And I will give it my soul to not fail. So, that's something to consider.
3) I want to be a publisher. That's the end goal. So why not have an immediate goal to path the walkway for the end result? I could make a publication. I could work with writers to find their raw talent and create a work that is the fruit of my labor if you will. I could polish up my editing skills and give my opinion a workout (because everyone knows I need that). It would be the most work of the three options, I dare say, but great success comes with great failure.
Needless to say, I have a lot to consider. Stay tuned. It's going to be a wild ride as always.
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