Writing

Here we are, another day, but still in the month of May. You know, some days I sing whatever I’m saying. Sometimes it is to a real tune, and other days I make up my own tune. I guess it is whatever strikes me at that moment in time. Other days, I rhyme. Man, when I start rhyming, I tend to say random stuff because, honestly, you can’t always rhyme what you’re really trying to say. When I start the rhyming thing, my daughter and/or niece usually roll their eyes at me. I just look at it as keeping things interesting. 

The more I think about it, I think I learned some of these “characteristics” from my dad. He would do things like that to me growing up. Trust me, if my friends were there, we rolled our eyes just like my daughter and my niece do to me now. But it was fun, lighthearted, and kept things interesting.

The other day, I was texting one of these said friends, and she commented that I needed to write a poem like I did when we were kids. I can’t even remember what we decided the poem needed to be about, it was just the simple fact that I needed to write a poem about it. My dad once told me that when he was in school (can’t remember what grade), his teacher would assign the whole class a new paper every Friday due the following Monday. He said, sometimes it was difficult, but it caused him to become a good writer. Truth be told, the poems we wrote as kids, my dad usually helped me out on when I got stuck.

I once wrote a poem that got published. It was about a trip my cousin and I took to the zoo. Now here’s the real kicker, it was totally made up because my cousin and I NEVER went to the zoo together. The closest thing to going to a zoo together was the summer my grandparents, aunt and uncle, grandma’s cousin, my cousin, and I went to Charleston, South Carolina, to see my grandpa’s “brother.” We stopped somewhere in North Carolina at a “zoo” of sorts, but not the kind that had monkeys, elephants, and giraffes, but the type that had reindeer, which I fed an apple. 

Let’s just say I was really excited about that zoo because I’d never seen a reindeer in real life. They’re cool! I also didn’t know they ate apples. But now we all know that reindeer will eat apples. 

Then my uncle told me a story once about a horse show he went to. The story revolved more around the trip home… whew, it was a doozy. So I was in a short story writing class and decided to write that story up. Now, my version had to be a lot longer than his. I wrote more words and got it almost to the point of turning it in, then I needed my dad to step in and give me some guided assistance to make that 2,000-word minimum. He gave me suggestions here and there, and by the time it was said and done, I was closer to about 4,000 words. Not bad. I’m fairly certain I got an A on that paper. I should see if I can find it somewhere and share it sometime. Also, because I made some of it up to make that 2,000-word minimum, there was a lot of embellishment, but that year I printed it off and put it under the Christmas tree for my uncle :). Merry Christmas.

I guess the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s interesting that I wound up with a writing degree. I’ve always quite enjoyed writing, but I’ve also gotten bad cases of writer’s block. It was really bad in grad school when I had to write 20 pages about “The Rape of the Lock” by Alexander Pope” or the time that I had to proof read a book and give examples of how to make better changes. Oh, that paper had to be 20 pages as well, so that meant I had to really examine the book closely, and it had to be a long book, or I had to be long-winded. Would you like an even better story about that particular paper?

Okay, so the professor came up to me 2 weeks before the end of the semester, when the workload was already heavy getting ready for finals, final papers, etc, and told me, Oh, I forgot to tell you I needed this paper by the end of the semester. I just about had a heart attack. Somewhere, I had a list of everything I still had to do by the end of the semester, and it was a long list. I stumble across it every year about this time in TimeHop. I sat down one Friday afternoon and by Sunday afternoon (pretty much nonstop throughout the weekend) I wrote a 20-page paper scrutinizing that book, so that Monday I could walk in and turn in that paper and cross that “to do” off my list. I had that teacher twice a week every week that semester, so the next class period, she walked up, gave me the paper back, I got a B (which I gladly took), and then said, I misread what I needed for you, and I really didn’t need this paper. I thought I was going to cry. 

Turns out, I had her the next semester for a class, and it was that class she needed the paper for. She told me this on the first day of class. She also told me that since I wrote it the previous semester, as long as I was good with the grade I got, I didn’t have to rewrite it, but if I wanted to revise for a better grade, I could and resubmit. I told her I was fine with a B. I got an A in both classes, by the way.

Grad school always kept me on my toes. First and foremost, most people, when they go after their master’s, get it in something related to their bachelor’s field of study. Honestly, why would I do that? My bachelor’s degree is in Agricultural Education, 9-12. Yes, I have a teaching degree. So why wouldn’t I get a Master’s degree from the English department? I mean that makes perfect sense, right? Sure, it does. I told you, I love to write. Well, turns out I had grown a fondness for reading over the years between the time I graduated with my bachelor’s and the time I went back after my master’s. Good thing, because when you get a degree from the English department, there is a lot of reading involved. More so than writing, it felt like. 

Oddly enough, they looked at my transcript and thought I only needed 5 classes before I could enter the master’s program. There was British Literature 1 and 2, American Literature, a writing class with Dr. Meats, and there was a 5th one, but I can’t remember what it was now. So I could take a mixture of those 5 classes, which were all undergrad classes, and Master’s classes, but I had to have all my undergrad courses done before I hit 12 hours in the graduate program. The first semester I was admitted to the program, the school decided to do away with that particular master’s program; however, since I was already admitted into it, I got to graduate with that degree. I was also the only one who was in that master’s program at the time, and I got “grandfathered” in. 

Another story for another time, but it seems like all the way through school, I always had things like this happen. Kept me on my toes if nothing else.

So here we are, 1315 words as of this sentence. Why does that matter? Who knows. I guess I feel like I should wrap this up, but I feel like there is a big cliffhanger also, haha. Maybe the moral of the story is, I love to write, and so here I am, writing on this blog yet again.

I will leave you with this one last thought… I mentioned that my bachelor’s degree is in Agriculture Education and my master’s is in Technical and Professional Writing. Once I was asked, What are you going to do with those two degrees? My answer, “I’m going to eloquently pen about cows, sows, and plows.”