On Keeping a Journal

I began my summer school at cnm not knowing what was ahead of me. Would my teachers be nice? Would they be worth the time, the effort, the money? Or would it be just another semester of uninspired professors and equally uninspired students. English 102 is one of those core classes that everyone must take. This often leads to a certain amount of blah, a lack luster class full of busy work on things you already know or things you don't really want to know. Even still it is also one of those classes that needs to be taken by everyone, like math, English is one of those subject you build up on, and until you have the basics down, you're nothing more than mediocre. Indeed, even after taking the class you are more than likely going to still be mediocre, but the things you learn in such a class are valuable. A review of grammar, spelling, and most importantly a higher level or writing. Higher expectations. A higher degree of analysis. Deeper, more complex stories and plots. Unfortunately this is something you need to be guided on. You need a good teacher in order to get the most out of a class, especially one like English. My 101 professor, for example, was pretty bored with the whole thing. He was being forced to teach the intro class because there weren't more than a few high level poetry classes available to teach. And it showed. I went through that class with a minimal amount of effort, I don't even remember the essays I wrote, much less the stories from them. Essentially the teacher didn't want to be there any more than the students.

This summer however I was put into a situation where the professor cared a lot about his class and his subject. He had a PhD in English, was a journalist for the majority of his career, and genuinely cared about his students. In other words, I actually had to put effort into the class. The very first day he did something unexpected, one of our major assignments was to keep a journal throughout the summer. In order to make sure that we were keeping it we would have to turn it in every time we did a rough draft of an essay in class. This surprised me because I hadn't ever encountered a professor that gave us an assignment not just for busy work, but for our own, 100%, improvement. I started this blog because I believe the more you write, the better you become at writing. It's been iffy, but I do feel like I've improved somewhat. I can express myself better than when I started, I think anyway, I can put my thoughts down onto paper--so to speak--with more ease, and if nothing else my brain isn't as cluttered as before. This ideal was his as well, but instead of a blog, it was a journal. There was no page requirement, no topics given, it was completely up to us to put whatever we wanted down. Now I've had my fair share of experiences with journals, none of them have lasted, so I was somewhat skeptical of the whole thing. This is because I have always had in my mind that a journal was a daily log of what you did, I'm sorry, but that is horribly boring to me. My life is nothing special, I don't do anything fascinating enough day-to-day to put down, nor am I introspective enough to be able to analyze my day-to-day existence in any sort of self improvement way. So I thought about it, and thought about it, and finally shrugged, I would write what I would write. I wasn't going to put the date, I wasn't going to put what I did, I was just going to write. It essentially became another blog, but with no standards. Even though I knew he was going to read it, I didn't feel the need to make it as polished and complete or even as coherent as my blog is. In fact, it was rather strange, but the reason I didn't keep up with my journals previously is because I find the idea of reading my own stuff boring, I need an audience, I am and always will be an attention whore. What is this blog? It is of no importance, I have few readers, but those that do read drive me to keep writing. It may be a sad reason to write, but it's true, I'm an attention whore. I need people to read my writing even if they don't agree, I need them to validate me and make it so I'm "worth" something, even when I know I am not. That is exactly what happened with this school journal. I wrote and wrote and wrote, not because I had any real interest in it, not because I believe I will ever go back and read it, but because deep down I knew that this professor was going to read it.

The sentences spilled out, the paragraphs formed, the entries added up, and the pages flew by and you know what? I enjoy it. I think that it has even become something of a habit, albeit a rather random one. I don't write in it every day, I never planned to, but about once a week I'll sit down with it and just write. I don't feel restrained by the idea that someone is going to read it, because really even if they do they can't really comment, even if they do it's just a note here or there, whereas here every word and entry is criticized and analyzed by people. I think its a good thing for someone's writing to be torn apart, it helps improve it, and gives the author an idea of what they need to do to become better. But I have found that with a journal I can write merely to write. I've said here in the past that I write only to write and I don't care what people think, and that's true, to an extent. With a journal I've found that I can put anything down, no matter how absurd, incomplete, or random. It's rather refreshing to be honest. An essay is written to be torn apart by your professor, just as this blog is written to express my opinion and let others respond, but a journal is just for me. It's a place I can write about the stupidest or most profound things, and it has actually inspired some of these blog entries. It's like a rough draft for here, and if it doesn't make the cut, what the hell I still got it on paper; I still got the experience from the very act of writing. It doesn't all have to make it here, indeed, a lot of it is just getting my thoughts straight about my ideas, and I think it may actually help my writing not be so jumpy. I tend to figure things out as I write and that makes it difficult to follow from a readers point of view, but with my journal, if I have an idea or thought about something I can write it, expand it, change it all I want and then when I come here to actually express my thoughts they're more thought out.

As you can probably tell this isn't one of those that came from my journal, but hell writing by hand is also really, really hard. I find that with my sloppy handwriting two pages is maybe a page typed up. It's a slow, tedious process, but it's actually enjoyable. I also have the selfish idea in my head that, like some great authors, in the distant future my journal may even be published. It's silly, I know that, but I also feel that this blog may even be published! We'll see what happens! Besides you never know, something like this may actually be popular, I don't know why, but people are strange creatures.