It was a graduation present from my parents, and a great improvement from my first guitar - the cracked, nylon string recovered from a closet of my uncle's younger days.
It's a very pretty little steel string acoustic, with a cut-away. Not that I know how to use the frets down there yet, but I'm sure it will come in handy...
I started teaching myself with a guitar Ananda W left in my room while she was away for a month. She also left her book of the easy version of Beatles songs. I figured out chords from that. I was SO eager, I would rush back to my dorm room after a quick lunch to squeeze in a few more minutes of practice. Where has the motivation gone?!?
I started writing songs in a music class my last year of college. Our assignment was to create a melody every day! I couldn't play piano, and all I knew on the guitar was chords, so the melodies had to be sung. I started with bits of poems I'd already written that seemed to lend themselves nicely to music. The assignment only required a few bars, but once I got going with a verse or a chorus, it usually spilled out easily into a full song. A lot of my first stuff was "poor me, he doesn't love me" type of things, cuz that's the space I was in at the time. I don't write quite so often at the moment, and I'd like to get better at both guitar and music theory so I can expand my stuff, but this will require motivation and dedication on my part, since I graduated in 2001 and don't have a teacher to nudge me along.
Right now I play for friends, and the occasional open mic night.