Semester Wrap Up

Well it's been a while hasn't it? Finals week managed to chase me off the internet for a fleeting time. I was up at 6 every day to go to the library and complete work in my carrel. I had a bunch of meetings too, but at the end of the semester what it boils down to is just concentrating and getting sh*t done. I'm not even that upset by it, because finals are the culmination of all that we have achieved over the past semester, and I am proud of all that I have accomplished. This was a great semester for me.

My Creative Nonfiction course taught me much about my writing and my personhood. My Classical Mythology course was fascinating because the class taught me how to look at the world within the context of myth and storytelling and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. For all that I might have complained about how difficult Semantics was, I appreciated the challenge, and I gained a set of skills that I do not find trivial.

That said, my favorite part of the semester was working on my independent study. By virtue of it being a course I created for my goals, it was everything I had wanted. I learned about translation, I learned about Sor Juana, and I learned more about myself along the way. This semester was a growing experience for me, and I feel like a new and better person for of it.

Cheers,
Talia

Forgetting

I forgot how to write an essay. It's always like this, I get my sources, I prepare, and then it comes to the blinking line on a freshly opened word document, and I freeze. How do I write an essay? What are words? How do I form thoughts, oh my goodness seven whole pages I'll die. Shaking in my worn out sneakers, panic. Breathe, I have to breathe and focus because I actually know a fair bit about both Harry Potter and Mythology so what makes me so scared? It isn't the grade, because I was fine with the test last week and I haven't worried about it. I think it's the writing. Every time I sit down to write I remind myself that this is what I want to do, what I am good at, but another part of me screams that everything I put to paper is shit and I will fail out of life.

Okay maybe it is a little bit about the grade.

But that doesn't mean it isn't also more. It's the idea of commitment. Dedicating myself to a topic, weighing myself down. But what is a commitment?

It's much easier to say that you are going to do something than to actually do it. But is a commitment really a commitment if you don't see it through?

Sometimes I wonder.

And I think (I know) that I spend so much time in love with the idea of doing that I lose focus on the present. I am consumed by my future, constantly reaching for that fruit just out of my reach, I am holding up a world that doesn't need holding and with a hush I let go and nothing happens but I don't know, I can't know that everything will be alright. Nothing feels alright, it feels broken, I feel broken and that love I put into the present seeps into the future. My future. Don't give up what you want the most for what you want in the moment, but when is my moment? When will what I want arrive? Will I ever be satisfied?

note-taking

I'm curious about the way that other people take notes. Mine vary by class, but some classes I mix it up. For example, my Semantics Professor puts all of our handouts online, so in that class I print out the handouts into OneNote, where I then use my surface and surface pen to make notes directly on the handout and on the side part of the OneNote page with rule lines on it. This works fairly well, with exception of when the professor hands out something that has not been posted on the online forum we use. In my Creative Nonfiction class, I make notes in my writing journal, and for my independent study I keep it almost entirely on my OneNote, with the exception of sometimes writing in a translation journal when I feel like doing something on paper.

My class that gives me the biggest issues is my Classical Mythology class. I simply cannot every decide how I want to take notes. The Professor talks very fast, And everything he says is interesting, and his slides are wall of text and I sometimes have no clue how on earth to keep up. What seems to work best is for me to Just write down phrases he says, and then look at the slides after class, but the sheer amount of information to learn can be overwhelming. I have a great advantage in that I have lots of knowledge about Mythology (Greek and Celtic in particular) but I still struggle at times, so I cannot imagine how it would be for someone with no Mythological background. The Professor is great though, and I'm glad I'm in this class, challenging as it may since I enjoy the material immensely.

Cheers,
Talia

Creative Nonfiction

It is certainly not the case that I don't like to, or don't want to write. For as long as I can remember, writing has been one of my most favorite things in the world. I think my problem is that I do not fully know what it is I want to write about.

Another problem is that I need time to fully grasp and anchor myself to an idea. Starting in on a writing project, I need to write two or three essays before I can go back and revise even the first one because I need the distance from the piece in order to see what I want from it and what it wants from me. Of course, sometimes that distance grows too far and I can no longer relate to the person I was when I wrote it. The beauty of it all is that these are still my words, and they can be adapted if I simply look at it as something to reflect on - that something being my somewhat flawed past.

What I am talking around is my struggle to write meaningful work in writing workshops. This (Creative Nonfiction) is the fourth writing workshop I have taken, and it is certainly more draining than the workshops I have taken before. I suppose it is because I find difficulty in writing about myself* since my life is a personal one that feels uncomfortable when exposed. That is precisely why I want to stay in this class however, because it pushes me to my limits and past them. If I only do the things that are comfortable in my life I won't grow at all.

Cheers,
Talia

*Trust me, I understand the irony of this being a personal blog post.