Fabulous Geek

I’ve been searching for my baseball glove today. It’s needed as a prop in My Left Brest. in searching a bit, i came across some old school papers of mine (not unexpected, they are every where in my house) when i suddenly stumbled across a notebook with the title scrawled in my “neat” hand writing:

Alex Riviere
5th

Look at me
I’m writing
without looking at
the paper

Purple (in the color gold)

Green (in metallic green then written over in black)

In looking at this i thought “What the hell is this? i don’t remember this…”

So I opened it up, and here’s what I see:

1-30-01

Well, I’m now writing in a new journal. and I have a terrible headache. there is a girl I’ve seen in the hall twice today. she looks sad, or scared or something.I need to work on my art project a lot this week. it’s due friday. Amelia is sick and doesn’t want to stay home. I’m trying to convince her to, but she won’t listen. she is always trying to be a super teenager. she’s always nice to people. always thinks of others first. I need to read 2001: A Space Oddysee. then do a report on it. Christina and I need to start working on our science project. There’s a math quiz tomorrow. I’m going snow boarding on saturday. that should be fun. My cousin in oregon went on a class ski trip. one of the kids died on that trip. went off an embankment and fell into a tree and died. it’s scary to think what his last thoughts were. knowing your going to die. very scary.

Upon seeing this, this prompted me to think: Why the hell was I (Mr. I despise writing) keeping a journal my freshman year? obviously someone was forcing me since there are entries every day. but who? And where was the first journal since this starts second semester?

upon further examination of the document, i found an entry written to my Literature teacher Mrs. Sanders from my freshman year. It was about then that it all came back to me. She made us write every day for 15 minutes. sometimes there would be a topic, some times there wouldn’t. I never really understood why she made us do this until this moment 6 years later. Part of it was to have us write on a daily basis. another part of it was simply to document our thoughts the entire year. This was a time before i had an online journal of any sort (i didn’t start blogging until march of 02) and now, 6 years later i’m reading what i was thinking of in high school. I soon found the first half of the journal. it’s amazing some of the things in there. I’m going to have to go back and read through some of these entries.

I hated writing it at the time, but now I’m oddly thankful to my lit teacher for making me. and I regret the days I didn’t write anything.