Tag Archives: high school

Song of Myself

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I don’t know why this topic came to me yesterday but for some reason I started thinking about a poem I had to write as an assignment once.  We were reading Whitman, of course, and our teacher (the wonderful Mrs. Boyer – now Williams) wanted us to write our own Song of Ourself.

Considering how much trouble I have coming up with titles, I think it is curious that the only thing I truly remember about the poem is the title “Out of Tune Beats 17.”  Yes, I was 17 at the time.  This just have been my junior year.  My junior year English class in American Lit was really a turning point for me and maybe more so than I realized.  And, not just because I wrote a 17 section poem, one section for each year of my life, but because I felt like I was conversing with words in a way I had not done so before in any other English class.

Junior year English started with the likes of Anne Bradstreet and moved us through our Dickinson, Whitman, Transcendentalists etc etc but we also read “The Crucible”, “Huckleberry Finn” and “Catcher in the Rye” to name a few.  I also felt the need to read Ayn Rand on my own. Why? Challenge perhaps?

I connected with characters in all of these diverse works of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and stage/screen.  I don’t think I realized how much then I also wanted to tell my story and the story of other people but I found I loved the connection you can make with people through their words and your own.

This was also the year of the impossibly hard exam that somehow, after hours of study, I ended up being the one with the best grade.  I was floored given the caliber of my classmates.  I was a good student (how geeky is it that I know and remember I was 7th in my class of 272) but I wasn’t the best student.  I even answered the few grammar questions correctly, which is something I STILL wish I had been able to obtain more education in.

In long or short, my Junior year, especially as it revolved around English literature, was a year when I started to settle into the introspective writer that I have become.  I recall my junior year with a lot of fondness.  I looked pretty cute at my prom, I was on the debate/speech team and I was still involved with Girl Scouts.  It was probably the last of my teen years when I was so centered because my senior year was tough, as was my first year of college.

Thank goodness my 20′s came around and rescued me!

What else do I have in common with my 17 year old self? No job :) yet. Ha!

The Cycle of Obsession

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I picked up this idea from Anne Haines’ blog and I thought I’d do a more detailed post after commenting on her site.

What things, for you, become a bit of an obsession?

I love to start a project (as my regular readers well know) but as I thought about this idea I realized, I have been like that my whole life.

When I was in grade school my fascination was with writing and putting on plays whether I had actors or if I had to do all the voices for my stuffed animals.  I loved putting on a good show.

I also loved to study things. I read biographies, I tried to teach myself Spanish, I loved learning about horses.

As I became a teen my obsessions went their natural course into collecting MAD magazine and Teen Beat. I was writing songs and thought maybe I could be a song writer even though the little bit of piano I taught myself was probably not enough.

Me and my debate partner, man, friend, fellow dork - Mike from high schoold ebate

Me and my debate partner, man, friend, fellow dork - Mike from high schoold debate

And high school, ah high school, that was the debate/speech team and trying to be in love.  And plotting ways to get out of town.  I made lots of plans. I was obsessed with planning and making lists. I also loved theater so much in high school that I one of my college majors (they changed so often) was Theater Education.

At 18, I was finally off. I was in college. I just loved being there.  There was nothing to be too obsessed about, except maybe planning classes. I loved to plot my schedule and everyone else who would let me. I’m such an organization geek. But, I did become even more in love with Poetry in college. I had already been writing but this is where I truly thought – what if? What if I went on and became an academic.

But, I was also obsessed with money, having never really had much of it.  So instead of going on to grad school, I just wanted a job and a way to start my life.

I don’t regret my decisions or my obsessions but after getting said job and getting married and settling into an “adult” life, I let my writing slide but I did become obsessed with studying world religions and reading, reading, reading. Maybe I was stocking up material for my future writing. And with all that working and all I still didn’t have any money.

Granted, some of it was spent on another passion – traveling! My family hadn’t been one to go on vacations so I loved the idea of planning (yep there it is again) out a trip and then re-planning it while you were actually on it.  Since I was 25 I’ve been to France, England, Japan, New York and San Francisco. There are so many more places, however, I’d like to go

And, sadly, most of my life became obsessed with my weight and finding a way to deal with it.  I still haven’t found a diet or an exercise plan or a non-plan of any of these that have worked.  How come I can plan everything else in my life and be relatively successful but not in managing my weight?

So I am still obsessed with that.  I’m still in love with reading and writing poetry. And what else?  Well, blogging I think and YouTube and movies and in general – being happy :)