Blah Blah Blog
To blog or not to blog, that is the question.
I used to be pretty good at writing. I'm great at typing. Combine those and I should be an okay blogger, write? ;)
I aced the essay portion of my senior English class. I promptly bombed the poetry portion. It was an honor class, labeled as "College English". It was supposed to give me credit toward my first year in college. That's what they told me to convince me to take it. What they didn't know is that I knew it was only 3 days a week and that would free up some of my days. SIGN ME UP!
We had 2 semesters, 2 subjects. Essay writing and poetry. I'm a left brainer. Think about having a bit of creativity and coming up with some cool ideas in life. I haven't had any of those moments in my life. I live almost completely over there on the left side of the brain. I look back and believe this is why I aced the essay part and failed the poetry part. Essays are structured. Poetry is "art". Essays were easy for me to process. Poetry gave me nightmares. Here's how bad my creativity is... If the instructor gave me a subject to write about, I could go do a bit of research and write out my assignment in 15 minutes. If the instructor said come up with your own subject, it would take me a full weekend to think of what to write about and 15 minutes to put 500 words in essay structure. Our final assignment for that semester was a 5000 word research paper. I had 1 missed comma on my final that she forgot to correct in my revised copy. It just made sense to me how to write out the research paper following the guidelines of building an essay. The 2nd semester started... I wasn't 20 minutes into the first part of that class and I almost walked out. We were given poems to read and she went around the room and asked each of us to interpret the poem. She started around the room and I was listening to some of these people that couldn't even write an essay... Come on, its easy right? Simple structure, put words in a certain format with proper punctuation and spelling and you get a good grade... These same people were babbling nonsense about this poem and she was complimenting them on their thoughts. I thought they were nuts... THAT'S NOT WHAT IT SAYS! She got to me... Here is what I looked like.
I told her what I thought it meant... She was nice about it. I was clearly wrong. It only took a few days of assignments for me to understand that I was going to fail that class. Here's my idea of a good poem:
There was a man from blackheeth,
He sat on a pair of false teeth.
He said with a start
Oh Lord bless my heart,
I've bitten myself underneath.
Apparently, that's not good poetry. Pssh! It rhymes, its got some rhythm, and its funny. Fortunately, I have a wonderful mother that in fact is great at poetry. I aced that class too... Okay, okay... Mom aced that class!
Now you understand my question...
To blog or not to blog, that is the question.
I haven't written much over the years since. I have a couple of articles I wrote for the company I work for but outside of that, I'm more known for my technical skills. So, with no practice for 25 years, I'm rusty on the English language and grammar. If you can handle my lack of creativity and some missing commas (or extras), maybe I can bring a little something to your day. If this never gets read, I'm okay with that too. It just feels good to put things down on paper. Am I write?
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