High School English/Looking Back

I've been finally sorting through some of my high school English notebooks and at once appreciated the exercises my teachers put me through and remembered just how desperate I was to get through those assignments. Junior and Senior year, I had teachers who insisted that we keep a "journal" of sorts. It pretty much consisted of a required x number of entries that could be anything from poetry to random musings. I really began to enjoy writing random free-style poetry Junior year thanks to the fact that I had a wonderful Romanian poet as a teacher who really believed in using anything and everything as creative fodder. (Hence my willingness to ramble and write about any topic.) So, my notebooks are filled with odds and ends of creative writing - much of it poetry that would *ahem* also conveniently fill up multiple lines very quickly. ;) Even though length really didn't matter, just seeing line after line of penciled in scrawls with crossed out words was so satisfying! I've been typing up some of the entries to keep it safe in electronic format in case I should lose the actual notebooks. (Will probably end up sharing them gradually in posts)

It's kind of interesting to look back and see just how much I've changed and yet remained much the same person all at the same time. I think the same voice comes through. The same priorities have remained. And yet, the quirks in my personality have changed, as well as what I think/write about. (I will come back to re-read this sometime in the future and likely make this same comment about the current me.)

These are from the same page Senior year quite close to December seeing how much I have college/Regionals in my mind on the next page.

Bedtime

Yes, it's bedtime. Yes, it's past midnight

Yet, there's a quietness here that I

cannot resist. Those noisy bedtimes

are long gone. The house is still, asleep,

Wrapped in the blanket of night.

So right around bedtime I get out

My red writing notebook and

Blue ink pen, and

Take the time to write.

This one should probably have been in an non-poem format, but it focuses on my journaling time at night, and it reminded me of just how precious those moments were. When the stress and busyness of the day would slip away and I could just have some uninterrupted quiet time...

This next one is quite funny - in retrospect, of course.

Oops

Oops, there's a lot of work due this week

Oops, I haven't started some of it

Oops, the stress is piling up

Oops what should I do because as you know

Oops isn't a happy word when you've got work due.