Nothing to Write About
By Jonathan Lam on 05/16/16
Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-thought
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Just fifteen minutes on the clock. Fifteen minutes, counting down. Fifteen minutes ticking away.
Is it time wasted? Or is it time learning?
I've written my Sophomore Speakout about learning, but I feel so hypocritical. I say I feel the joy in learning; that I have endeavored to practice English, to make it better and easier. I have even related a story of me learning how to freewrite. And yet, I haven't really freewritten since then. And here I am, back at it again.
It's a little after the fact, because there are no more major papers due this year. But this is for next year. For the long term. Looking back on my hard efforts in the winter to improve my writing at the darkest depths of my English grades, I see the effect it had on the beginning of this semester of school. But it has long since faded again, along with my optimism for the Sophomore Speakout.
So I have a dead Speakout due in a few days, a deteriorating writing talent, and a motivation to learn. But where will it get me?
So I've decided just to write again. To write about anything. But the problem is, I've found that I've had less and less to write about.
I'm writing about nothing.
These paragraphs are short and bereft of content. I've only used one new vocabulary word —"bereft" from the previous sentence— and I feel that I've learned nothing. Five minutes on the dot have passed, and ten minutes are left. So I'll just write some more.
I had an interesting weekend. It was very busy. I began with a bowling tournament, the scholarship one that happens at the end of every session of the Junior league at Nutmeg Bowl that I regularly participate in. My average was a 165, but I averaged exactly a 2221 that day, finishing 58 pins above average per game to win with a whopping 174 total pins over average. And so here I was, winning the league tournament for the first time with a $350 scholarship, despite the fact that I had participated the least in this session due to my involvement with track. So I was excited and content with myself, only worrying that it would not be a reproducible result. Even if I could do it again, I would probably be accused of sandbagging. So I probably won't win, deliberately or not.
A second adventure was my homework life. What a surprise. What a dreary and monotonous tone I have right now. My hands lend not even an exclamation mark, a double key-press. So I had my essay on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein due, and I decided to take the challenge with the alternative method she gave us: a Prezi. I thought it would be interesting, and that it would give me another creative writing experience such as the one that I'm doing right now. And so I wrote an essay out first to sort out my ideas, and I made a Prezi.
The problem was, it stunk. Stunk in the informal-American sense. Stunk in the regular sense as I sat in a cloud of brain-fart.
Luckily, my big sister was there to help me sort it out, and reading it out loud a few times helped sort it out. And so I finished that Prezi and handed it in today, a mere six-hours of Prezi-time later, perhaps the shortest for a final literary analysis. I don't think I'll get a good grade.
This experience is now coming to a close. I have less than a minute left, and I wrote quite a bit. I don't really know what it means for me, however: I wrote in random trains of thought, trains that collide and smash and derail. My mind is a train wreck. I'm working on it.2
1: Yep, that's a 666 series of three games. And it's just after Friday the 13th! I don't know what this means for my future.
2: The links were added outside the fifteen-minute range to allow for a fuller writing experience.