Getting Serious

With a little over a month left to whip up my final project I've forced myself to get serious. I've rearranged my work schedule so that now I can devote every Tuesday to working on my thesis/project/whateveryouwanttocallit. This has necessitated some painful sacrifices: I had to swap my Tuesday schedule with Friday--my only free day of the week. So instead of being easy and bookish on Fridays for the next month and a half I will be working till past 4pm on Fridays. Ack.

Nevertheless, being unusually productive this past Tuesday for my first thesis jam has rekindled in me an old feeling I thought I may never experience again. I'm very fortunate to be in my current program of study which let me craft whatever curriculum and project I wanted out of my college education over the last few years. As my final project I'm going through my archives from here and More to Life and turning many of these sometimes-scribbly, sometimes-ranty entries into substantial, reflective pieces. Some of these pieces are deeply emotional, some deeply personal, but all are deeply meaningful to me. This makes me so grateful right now that I'm not toiling over some obscure, dry, academic senior thesis right now.

This past Tuesday, I forced myself out of bed around noon, had a leisurely brunch, and then marched up the hill for my first and only class of the day. After 50 minutes of a rather routine boredom I paced over to the library and situated myself at an open desk beside the big windows overlooking the Arts Quad. By 2:30 p.m. was reading through my drafts and starting to scribble down some notes. A bit later, I yanked out my computer and started to transform the pieces.

The two pieces I worked on this Tuesday were Lux et What?! and Cycle of Friendship. I managed to add a nice amount of detail to L&W?!, though I still feel it's kind of cutesy in cliche, tongue-n-cheek kind of way. CoF was what I really sank my keyboard into though. Wow. Having lived over a year past that first encouter, my experience has shown me that a nice simple resolution as the one I first suggested is just way too simplistic. In reality, "cycle of violence" in the Middle East hasn't ended and she didn't stop wearing that necklace...

Suddenly I started to go real deep with that piece. The essay carried me back to the days I lived in Israel. They made me relive Yitzhak Rabin's murder, and consider on a deeper level what sacrifices we make amongst ourselves for peace, and what raising a generation to seek peace means. The story then fastfowarded me back to the present and forced me to choke up how living all too comfortably, far away from the warzones, has changed 0r obscured my attitudes and values regardless of whether I wanted them to change or not.

Eventually at 7:00 p.m. I gave up. The writing got too personal, too real, and too emotional to continue. It got to the point where I felt like every push on the keyboard tugged at my heartstrings and it was too much to bear in the library and after years of growing numbness and apathy. At the same time it was a good feeling. Magic happen upon discovering such an intense connection to the writing. I just hope I can bear repeating this over the next month. Who knows where this might go...