On writing papers and a brief history of my literalist childhood.
Leave it to Sarah to turn a ten page paper into something that can possibly be twenty or more pages. I have a ten page paper due Saturday and I'm six pages into it right now and am not even quite close to being ready to finish it. I did that all through undergrad, my papers were always longer, and the professors were typically okay with it. But this paper is for a panel in which I have twenty minutes to talk, so two minutes per page. I'm sure my professor doesn't want to read a longer paper. Oh well. It's better to have too much to work with than too little, no?
But what a glorious day. Seriously. I love my solitude. I've been sitting in bed all day watching the campaign trail and writing this paper. I also wrote two poems. Kind of. I want to participate with the NaNoWriMo, but I don't want to write a novel. I just want to write as much as I can of whatever. School stuff doesn't count, but I want to fill up a 200 page notebook with writing by the end of the month. It's all prose and it's all just a bunch of observations, musings, etc. But it is indeed very inspirational, and I got two poems out of it today. Too bad those poems don't count for my actual assignment for tomorrow, which has to be in form. And it has to be about a childhood toy. I came up with interesting ways to go about it. For instance, if you look at childhood Christmas pictures of me, you are bound to find several of me laying on a couch with my new, favorite toy from that Christmas. Almost every year as a child, I would have the flu during Christmas and would therefore be lounging on the couch in the living room with my new toy, a rag on my head, a ghost-like face, and limp, wispy hair. Yeah, I used to have limp, wispy hair. Not anymore. Ha! I remember throwing up in the toilet one day when I was a child. I threw up a glob of water and mucus that floated in the toilet. I asked my mother what it was and she said it was the flu. So, for a while, I thought the flu was a tangible, disgusting blob inside a person. I guess you can still think of it that way. And I remember sleeping in my old bedroom as a child, sick and coughing like crazy. Earlier that day when I was in school (second grade or something), my friend Levi told me that he knew a guy who coughed his heart out (didn't realize that it was just a phrase) and I was laying in bed all night worrying about coughing my heart out. Those were the days I would sleep with a night-light and make shadow puppets as a child. But my shadow puppets weren't that elaborate or fun...they were just my hands folded into beaks. I would make my hands kiss because that was on my mind a lot because my sister was always kissing boys on the porch. She babysat me a lot and had all these guys over. Those days, I loved doing chores. I loved doing the dishes, and well, my sister loved the fact that I loved doing chores and making things shiny. She would fill up the sink with hot soapy water and pull a chair over to the sink so I can reach. She would go out on the porch with a guy that would constantly pull my hair or call me names. She would kiss him in the corner where no one can catch them. But me. She also dated this guy that I think we called "Jumbo". He would take empty pop (soda) cans, step on them, and walk around with them still on his feet. I fell in love with him because he did that and I became jealous of my sister. I liked older men even back then. I liked my older cousin Jason, to be honest. I really don't know why. And for once in my life, my closest friends are men because gosh, am I sick of some women. And here I am, in love, and with an older man.
And I'm glad that everything turned out the way it has.