Evolution of an essay that missed the point (445 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesRating: 0.9 on 6 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by mike <mikeeegeee.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2008-01-04 19:07:12 EST
It's Monday evening at nine o' clock. The usual panic takes place. I don't have any writing done for my Writing Rhetoric class tomorrow. I've had a pretty large period of time to get something down on paper, including the entire weekend and almost all of Monday, yet of course I'm here only a few hours before bed time trying to churn out three pages of "new or heavily revised writing." This isn't something new for me, I've been in this state many a time before. It's in my, or almost any college kid's, nature to be in this ultimate position of procrastination where there's literally no time left to do anything but sit down and do the assignment. Which of course isn't to say that I dislike the writing process: a few weeks ago I had a truly inspired idea... at least I thought it was.
"-No, no, no, it's not a copy off of March of the Penguins. It's kind of like a parody, I swear!"
"Mike, are you seriously going to write about a penguin named 'Shiny Lil' Bucket?'"
"Will, seriously, it's a great idea. I mean, I've already written a page and a half in fifteen minutes." I was sitting in my friend Will's room watching him play Halo while writing my essay for the week not on a Monday night but a Sunday night. Clearly, I was passionate about this one. I was so eager to write about it that I literally did not procrastinate. Truly an admirable feat. The essay began in my Writing Rhetoric class about three or four days prior to these events. We did a writing exercise called "one-inch picture framing" that involved describing a scene as vividly as you could. Mr. McIntosh, our teacher, told us to go anywhere we wanted to and sit down and write for about half an hour. I chose to sit outside on a cold stone bench. The cold stone bench was all I could think about, so I wrote with cold thoughts in mind. I decided to write about penguins and the North Pole, mainly because the cold stone was so numbing to my legs. I then decided to use that piece of writing as the beginning for my essay, which I was trying to get a good start on in Will's room. The words were just flowing exactly as I figured they should, straight from my brain, down through my fingers and into the clickity clack sounds of my laptop keyboard. I was writing with such a furious pace that I was losing track of time.
"Mike, I hate to interrupt your penguin-fest, but don't you have to be somewhere?" I glanced over at the clock. 10:04! Will was very much correct about my having to be somewhere. Every Sunday night at ten o' clock my fraternity had a pledge meeting. And God knows if you were late to any particular frat event, you were going to regret it. So I closed up my laptop, threw it into my room, and ran out of the dorm towards the frat house.
But I think I exaggerated. While I did run out of my dorm, I can't say that I ran from my dorm to the frat house. Because it's OK to run through the hallways of my dorm, or to quickly descend a flight of stairs, but once you get outside of the dorm, it's kind of a different story. You look totally goofy if you're running down the street in clothes that aren't made for running. I think about this all the time. Walking to class in the morning, you never see people running to class. Even if they're late, they know to just walk it or else they'll end up looking ridiculous like that one kid that you rarely do see running to class in the morning. I don't know, maybe I'm the only one that thinks this way. So I set out for the frat house with a brisk walking pace.
I got to the house at about 10:10, fully late for the scheduled meeting, but my mind still very much focused on the essay I was writing. As I opened the door to the meeting room, thoroughly expecting to be met with 32 sets of criticizing eyes, I was actually underwhelmed to see that only three people of the 32 that were supposed to be in attendance were actually there. As it turned out, the meeting had been delayed. This wasn't any surprise to me at all as I'd quickly learned earlier in the year that anything organized by a fraternity was done poorly at best and rarely took place when it was supposed to. But still, I had to worry about being late for fear of legitimately being late just that one time and having to pay for it. The reason for this most recent delay? The Bears game had gone into overtime. I should've known better than to assume the meeting to take place during the highly revered Bears game.
So after sitting around and twiddling my thumbs for a while, with my mind on nothing but finishing my essay for the next morning, the Bears game ended. Gradually, the rest of the pledge class filtered into the meeting, which ended up officially starting at 10:45. Oh, Greek life.
"So let's see, there's some announcements to make before we get started. Everyone needs to be here at..." droned on Jim as everyone found their seats.
Jim was the older kid put in charge of all of the pledges. The first time I ever saw Jim, I immediately knew that he would be perfect for the job. Jim was viciously condescending when he needed to be, which worked perfectly for putting the younger kids in their place. He was uncannily witty and could string together a slew of bad words better than my grandma could string together a new scarf. But after hearing his clever insults and retorts so many times, I'd started to learn to tune them out, which is exactly what I was doing at that moment. Though I needed to be at the pledge meeting to hear what had to be said, I was totally engrossed in the idea of finishing my essay. I couldn't help but feel as though my time would've been better spent typing the penguin story rather than sitting and listening to the same meeting...
"...throwing your shit down the stairs and into the foyer. And if I ever catch whichever one of you assholes got drunk and thought you'd pull a fucking Home Depot by painting the inside of the house with the fucking fire extinguisher..."
...I mean, maybe, just maybe, it could be a good essay. Even though it almost certainly went against the mold of the types of essays we were supposed to be doing, maybe I could make it work...
"...fail any more tests and I'll start to wonder if you're as retarded as Gambrel." The room looked at me. I'd only caught the last bit Jim said. It was awkward, I smiled back. Jim hated me, but I loved his antics. And I didn't care that I did badly on the frat tests (stuff like memorizing the creed), because I knew that I should really put school stuff ahead of frat stuff. So while I was notoriously bad at the Greek tests, most everyone knew that I wasn't the "retard" the grades made me out to be... "...get your shit together or else the rest of this semester is going to be hell." And the meeting was over.
The cold air whipped against my face as I made the walk from the frat back to my dorm. The meeting didn't end up getting out until 11:30, so colder temperatures had set in, reminding me that fall was around the corner. With my mind on nothing but finishing my essay and getting to sleep, I walked into my dorm and made my way up to my room on the fourth floor. I took the stairs. Stairs were the only option. I had the wonderful fortune of being assigned to live in the tallest dorm on campus without an elevator. It made getting my laundry done a little more interesting and those late-night walks home from frat parties a bit of an ordeal. The urge to "give up and quit" and set up camp halfway up the third flight of stairs grows proportionally larger with the amount you've had to drink. It's science, I'm pretty sure.
When I got to my room, I opened my door with extreme care. As I had suspected, my roommate was already asleep. And he had almost surely been sleeping since ten o'clock. You see, on the housing sheet that you fill out before you attend school at any particular college, they ask you if you have a roommate preference. I wanted to expand my horizons, so to speak, so I decide to blaze new frontiers and check the "random roommate assignment" box. I make such mistakes, yet I'm in the honors dorm. Fuck. They give you a little survey to see what your interests are like so as to better match you up with someone who you'll get along with. Sure, me and Noah (my random assignment) get along just fine, but I'm a pretty easy going guy. Do we have anything in common? That's an essay in and of itself. It's like the housing people got my survey and Noah's survey and they just thought to themselves, "fuck it, put them together, I'm going on break. Hell, you could make a sitcom if you filmed these two living together." I filled out my survey in a completely falsified fashion. Well, not falsified, but exaggerated. I exaggerated every detail about myself to fit the description of a huge partier because I knew I was going into the honors dorm where there would be no huge partiers. I just wanted to avoid the 1% of kids that fully fit the stereotype of "honors dorm kid," just because our habits wouldn't agree.
And while the survey doesn't ask you whether you drink or not or how habitually you smoke the marijuana, there are questions that allow you to hint at such truths. Such as "I like to stay up late: strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree." Strongly agree. "I like loud music," same deal. "I am an early riser." Yeah, not so much. So, I got matched up with Noah, the exact opposite of everything I filled out on the survey. He woke up at 6:15 every morning and went to bed by 10:00 every night, which is how I figured he was asleep when I got back to my room well past his bed time. And he smiles when he sleeps...
So I tiptoed into my room, grabbed my laptop, and went out into the hall where I sat down to finish writing my essay on penguins. After only about an hour, I'd finished and decided to call it a day. I wasn't sure how my writing group was going to receive it when I had to present it to them the next morning, but I was optimistic.
I awoke the next morning, not once, but twice (the first time due to Noah getting up at his ridiculously early hour), and groggily made my way to class after accomplishing my morning routine of showering and eating Lucky Charms for breakfast. I was kind of nervous, walking to class, on what the writing group would have to say about the essay. I knew it went against any kind of form we'd been looking at in the class, but I had hoped that that little detail wouldn't matter if I could stick to one or two of the criteria our essay was supposed to fit. The writing group I was in consisted of four other people: Daryl, Jacque, Dan, and Brittany. We were five kids who, each week, were supposed to take turns reading what we'd written, ideally taking up about twelve minutes of time a piece. When someone got done sharing their essay, we were supposed to critique it.
Unfortunately, I think we're all a little too nice for our own good. Generally, the criticisms are hard to make, though valuable when we do make them. And there's usually a wonderful awkward silence between the last criticism and when everyone would hand the copy of the essay they were reading back to the writer. It left you with kind of an exposed feeling, having just read something of yours to four people who you really didn't know too well, but it helped with learning about what you could do differently to make your essay better. In my case, I was hoping they wouldn't tell me that the something I should do differently was walk myself off a cliff for writing such a ridiculous story about penguins. But I was so sure of the topic, I probably wouldn't have listened anyway.
When the time came 'round for me to read what I'd written, I was thrilled. I was like Ralphie from The Christmas Story dreaming about his Red Rider B-B Gun. I quickly read over my completely fictionalized tale of documentaries, flurries, penguins, hippies, and Santa Clause. When I'd finished, I prepared myself for the barrage of generally nice criticism we tended to receive. But oh was I mistaken. Not unlike Ralphie who dreaded to hear the phrase "you'll shoot your eye out," there was one phrase I had in mind that I refused to hear: "does this topic really work?" And sure enough, someone asked, though I can't remember who. It was suggested that I asked Mr. McIntosh if it was a workable topic before getting too into the story, which was advice I probably should've followed more earnestly.
For the next two weeks, the same events repeated themselves as I added to my essay. I didn't ever contact my teacher to ask if the topic was okay, but I figured with a little creativity and ingenuity I could pull it off. Sunday would roll around and I'd go to my frat meetings; Monday would roll around and I'd frantically type three more pages to tack on to the original essay. I couldn't ever get the feel of the subsequent writings to be quite as whimsical as the original was, but they were close. The story the three pieces told was still solid enough. And as the weeks went on I began to dread reading my essay to the writing group. By the time the third installment of the eight page short story was created, I had grown so tired with the topic that I could hardly come up with three new pages of writing to bring. And even then, the pages I did come up with seemed forced and contrived instead of natural and clever. It wasn't long after I finished the last installment of the short story on penguins that Mr. McIntosh announced that we'd be doing conferences with him to discuss our second essays.
Two thoughts occurred to me when I heard about these conferences: "Yes! Finally I get to know if this topic is workable!" and "Wait... if it isn't, aren't I kind of screwed at this point?" I was particularly anxious about the possibility of finding out that my essay wouldn't work for the class because of how little time was left in the course. I'd spent three or four weeks on that penguin essay, and that time might have been spent in vain. And then finally, the time for my conference rolled around. I was supposed to meet Mr. McIntosh in the student union by a Starbucks. It would be a twenty minute session, no big deal, just a nice little talk. It ended up being kind of hilarious, in retrospect.
I walked to the Starbucks just in time for my meeting. After I spotted my teacher I hurried over and grabbed a seat next to him. We exchanged greetings and then got down to business. He started off with a question that went kind of like "Can you tell me what your second essay is about?" or something else roughly that deceptively simple. So I told him. But from the first sentence or two out of my mouth I could tell it wasn't going to be good: "Well, it takes place on the North Pole, and I'm a documentary maker..." his expression began to change, "...and I'm filming these penguins, like in March of the Penguins, but I'm writing a journal about my experiences..." his brow furrowed as confusion began to set in, "...and it ends up being a commentary on war in today's society. But symbolically. Like an allegory. Oh, and Santa makes an appearance, too..." at this point his face suggested that he might've been a pirate with two peg legs who'd accidentally plundered a treasure of shoes. The rest of the meeting went as you'd expect. It was deduced that my penguin essay did very little correctly with respect to what the course demanded it should do. Well that's not necessarily true. It did a lot of stuff right, it just didn't do most any of the fundamentals at all. The biggest point was that the essay was supposed to be entirely non-fiction, which is a rule I think I can admit that I followed somewhat loosely. Mr. McIntosh suggested that I rework the structure of the essay into a different type of essay that could work for the class. "Perhaps," I thought, "perhaps."
"Perhaps not" ended up being the case. My idea I had been so enthusiastic about ended up being a lost cause. It wouldn't end up working in the end, I figured. I'd been blinded by my enthusiasm all along. In the following weeks, I stumbled across two topics that worked really well and also fit the requirements of the course. Both were nonfiction, and both raised questions to fulfill the requirement of writing rhetoric as inquiry. I decided to use those for my second and third essays. One of those ideas ended up being this essay you're now reading. The other... Well, hopefully it works out a little bit better than my last one.
User Reviews
Submitted by Berty (user info) at 2008-01-07 06:44:29 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Goodness you're neuroric. Still, it's kind of interesting to read about a fellow walking a tightrope of anxiety and terror whilst not looking down at the vast, yawning, void of existential horror beneath him. Also I've always assumed fraternitys are all like the police academy movies.
So yeah. *complicated hand gesture*
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2008-01-06 20:10:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
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Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2008-01-06 20:09:55 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by sadie73 (user info) at 2008-01-04 21:13:27 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Only because you will need it. Trust me.
Submitted by Sacrilicious (user info) at 2008-01-04 19:22:32 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I'm sorry to say I couldn't get through this. I enjoy the conversational tone and I was interested at the very beginning, but after reading about 2/3ds of it and nothing really going on, I got bored.
One thing I notice is that you use a lot of unnecessary words. I sometimes have this problem too.
"I literally did not procrastinate." Literally? You either did, or didn't.
"Will was very much correct about my having to be somewhere."- He's either correct or incorrect- no very.
And God knows if you were late to any "particular" frat event, you were going to regret it.-Every event is a 'particular' event.
Walking to class in the morning, *you never see people running to class.* Even if they're late, they know to just walk it or else they'll end up looking ridiculous *like that one kid that you rarely do see running to class in the morning.*
Do you see the pattern I'm talking about?
I'm only taking the time to comment on it in detail because it's about writing, and choosing your words carefuly is an important aspect of good writing.
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2008-01-04 19:11:38 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
i'll wait