Help Me Home (College Post #4)

“Your first free write is to describe a setting,” my Creative Writing professor says. “Any setting. Go.”

My classmates’ pens hit paper like divers launching into a swimming pool – a blur of movement, and they’re off, splashes of syllables and sentences trailing in their wake. Meanwhile, I clutch the edge of the desk, my pencil forgotten in the kiddie pool.

“I cannot believe you would date him,” I say. “He’s clearly an idiot. Like 2% milk, just replace ‘milk’ with ‘brain cells.'”

Wait, I think, that’s dialogue, not setting. By the time I finish one sentence about a sprawling suburbia filled with shallow parents longing for their kids to do something other than each other, my professor calls time. I glance at my friend across from me, and I take a small breath of relief when I see she’s only written a couple of sentences.

Until she flips the page of her notebook, revealing several fleshed-out paragraphs. Go figure.

Is Having Babies Selfish?

Baby me. I used to be so innocent and adorable, I wonder what went wrong…

Here’s my foreseeable future: go to college, get an undergraduate degree in English/Psychology/Philosophy, go to graduate school, solidify a successful career, get married, have kids. Sounds like a plan, especially after throwing in a mother with anger issues and the fact that I don’t know how to drive yet. As you can see, I’ve thought about my future a lot.

But here’s something I haven’t thought of yet: why do I want kids?

It’s Not You, It’s Not Me, It’s…

Last week, I made a mistake. I judged someone.

And I was wrong about them.

Sort of like how I was wrong in thinking that lowering my book goal would help me reach it… summer, where art thou.

I like to think that I know people. I like to think that I am aware of people’s personalities, their desires, their strengths and their shortcomings. To an extent, I am – not in a creepy way, but in a cognizant, perceptive way. While I don’t think that I am by any means a mind reader, I feel that I possess some level of interpersonal intelligence, just like most people do.

On the other hand, I know that I have good morals. It’s one of the few things I will admit about myself confidently – there is nothing that upsets me more than when someone violates my strict mental set of morals. Incidentally, I have been wanting to write a blog post about cheating, because it has been occurring often in my school and in my class. Just wait until I write that post to see how frustrated cheating causes me to become.

So imagine my surprise when someone who I thought had good morals, someone who I was not exactly close to, but at least an acquaintance with, was caught cheating.