November 30, 2002

Journaling Refersher

More than a dozen years ago I took my second-semester college English class, ENC1102. It was my first taste of diagnostic writing sans the formulaic theme-body-closing shit that we were all ordered to write under severe duress.

The classí predecessor, ENC1101, taught precisely that. It was replete with an old bag for an instructor whose jowls hung from her cheekbones as plastic grocery sacks filled with one grapefruit each. Gravity was most definitely not a friend of the woman who constantly referred to The Miami Herald as, "That rag."

But my second college English class was taught by a man whose face was its own island surrounded by a sea of hair and easily stood taller than six feet. He required we keep a personal journal to record our thoughts through the six-week summer course. He could have cared less how we wrote them. Scratched in blood would have sufficed, but I chose to scribble mine on a yellow legal pad freshly liberated from my dadís law office.

Our instructor set a class full of fresh pups free with precious few rules. Our only path was an omni-directional finish line set 18 entries away. There were 18 years to chronicle and I didnít know where to begin, or where to end, for that matter. What a task. We wouldn't be graded on content, he had said, just how we told our tales.

There was nothing to write about but everything to say; or everything to write about and nothing to say. It was liberating. We couldíve written about anything, but I chose my daily life. It was my oyster.

My youthful exuberance met my first experience with journaling on wobbly legs. Just knowing someone would read the thing demanded it be written differently, conversationally. But true to my 18-year-old self I ripped into it as the first gift of Hanukkah.

More than a dozen months ago I wrote my first online journal entry.

O', how history repeats itself.

- Rich