This essay concentrates on literacy
throughout our lives.
"The Sybilistic Process in a Volkswagen Bug"
"Mom, do we GOTTA keep
her?" My mother nods towards my little sister who is sleeping
peacefully in her bassinet. I sigh," Well, I guess we should for tax
purposes." My mom was so shocked at my response, which was at the age
of five, that to this day it is the funniest thing I have probably
ever said. I have only The Cat in the Hat , Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers to blame for my
young, developed brain at that time.
It has been a winding
road ever since, but the process of my learning, including all that I
have read and written, has made me into the person I am today. That
is a scary thought, I know, and yet who would I be without having
read some of the things I have or even some of the things I have
written? Through reading and writing I have filled in the parts of
myself I would have never known. I admire the flow of my life that
resembles my hair teasing the air molecules as I drive my Volkswagen
bug full of a creative capacity unknown even to me. My street in this
crazy city of life has been to find myself through reading and
writing and soon enough teaching. As I am growing in this existence
someone great has created for me, I find that my process through life
outweighs the product of what I will become. It is very similar to the ending of
this essay because the creating of it, like living, is where I become
the most fulfilled.
My love for books started
early in life, begging mom and dad to buy the books in the newspapery
flyer we would get from my private elementary school. This paper
towel advertisement of great books came once a month and it was like
Christmas for my bookworm being. It may have been the competition
with the richer students, who seemed to get their own box full when
our shipment came in, that made me want to buy all of them, but I did
read a good majority of the Babysitter Club booksthat my parents gave
into and purchased for me. Just owning them made me feel special. It
was better than trekking to the library to read one that a kid had
slobbered on.
All these books needed a
place to inhabitat, so my mother, being the artist she is, painted an
old bookshelf adorned with monkeys. These creatures scared me with
their eyeballs once in a while when I would remove a book, but
nonetheless, we had a bookshelf toppled over with books from either:
garage sales, my grandmother because she lived by a school that was
always getting rid of them, or those very book orders. Childcraft
encyclopedias filled one shelf, another was occupied by a variety of
Highlight magazines and the remaining space was packed with
half-filled notebooks or old computer paper from my mom's office that
we had scribbled our Picassos on.
I remember my worn Ramona
Quimby paperbacks the most because I used those books repeatedly
throughout my bookreport years. Ramona was so much like me, not
understanding things in the world, like when your fourth grade
teacher has you read something other than Ramona Quimby. Well, when
my turn to talk about this other book came about, I knew nothing but
pretended. She was smarter than I though. Soon after in my teens, I
would lie to my mother about the huge Danielle Steele novels hidden
underneath my pillow. Danielle Steele, who was probably not the
greatest substitute for Ramona Quimby, was my guardian angel during
my teen years who took me on adventures to the strangest places I
feared I would never go. She taught me about relationships and boys
too. I admit it, but who was going to tell me otherwise?
I read all her books one
summer and was so interested in the idea of writing my own story that
I started to. My first was pretty cheesy and much like that of a soap
opera making the characters these beautiful beings that had better
lives than I ever would. The next story, the one I am still trying to
complete right now, Feed
the Bunnies and Eat the Pickles , I actually like and I started it in the middle of
my highschool years. The basis behind it was the life of a very
independent girl, named Tatum, whohad extremely rich parents, but at
the age of ten she ran away into the nearby woods to live in a
treehouse with her best buddy Herbert. The story takes on from there
with those two and their funky entangled life together. It is a
When Harry Met
Sally with a Sybilistic
twist on the rocks.
During those very same
highschool years when I had crushes on five senior football players
at once and played vigorous tennis to beat any of the Fargo teams, my
imagination's need for more cells seemed to stir within me needing me
to write, create, or go nuts. My freshman and sophomore years did
nothing for me, just like the middle school. My freshman year I sat
in Mr. Boring Bollinger's class and listened to old old tapes of
Great
Expectations and
wondered if he was boring on purpose or if the school paid him to put
us to sleep. We piddled in some Shakespeare with Romeo and Juliet my sophomore year but I knew of it
already and everyone was just too anxious to be the beautiful Juliet.
These were also the years my poor self-esteem took up residence in my
mind. The writing before my novel period was that of depression and I
am glad I climbed out of that hole as soon as I did because I
remember the visions I would have in class of my own funeral. But my
junior and senior years would end up being my glory years and wipe my
plate of sad thoughts clean.
They, those antsy cells
of my imagination, finally became well satisfied once Mrs. Morris, my
junior English teacher, introduced us to Henry David Thoreau and
Ralph Waldo Emerson. I bolted my bug immediately onto the road of the
transcendentalists that led my vast and continuing journey into the
forests of thought and philosophical questioning. They started the
beginning path of my more individualistic thinking that had been
sitting on a lounge chair in my spirit. Once this was awakened, the
bees wouldn't stop buzzing inside me. Mrs. Morris, the mother of
these bees, fed us pieces of Walden
. While the other students were complaining of homework, I was
drooling in the corner, outlining Thoreau's amazing sentences with
eye-splitting yellow marker. The ones I have memorized to date are:
"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life," and "I
did not want to come to the end of my life and discover that I had
not lived." This kicked my depressed butt into gear. As for my
constant struggle with religion through my life, Thoreau vibrated my
same attitude. He was asked on his death bed if he had made his peace
with God and he simply replied- "I was not aware that we had
quarreled." Mrs. Morris couldn't spend forever on these two great
guys, but the rest of the semester was just as fun trying to figure
out The Catcher in the
Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird .
She also encouraged
writing outside of her yearly assigned paper, which I coincidentally
did on run-aways after always wanting to while in my depressed stage.
I had written in a diary or journal since sixth grade about boys and
kissing, but this was the year I began to really write creatively.
And the stuff that had been sad started to diminish. Mrs. Morris took
gobs of this individualistic commentary I had about people in the
world that I wrote in poem form, and she gave me extra credit for it.
One that I did for class was a poem about our childhood and she
entered it into the F.Y.L.I ( For Your Literary Information) school
magazine contest. I won not only that but the respect of my future
senior English teacher and mentor, Mr. Wall. He really liked it and
it bewildered me because it seemed almost too simple and child-like
for sixteen. The title is "Yesterday"-
yesterday my momma told
me wilson died
my bunny, my only friend
yesterday i wore pig-tails and bibs
i drove my tricycle around the block
i was the tomboy
barefooted, tree-climber, frog-catcher
yesterday i got sunburnt
momma told me dont do that
i became a sister yesterday
she cried a lot and
i caught the chicken pox with her
yesterday momma said another one was coming
and another one that cried
i went to kindergarten
learned, played, built, and grew
yesterday momma found a black cat
on a day that was bad, thirteen
i liked her, my cat, named lassie
yesterday momma told me i was big
and now i wished she hadnt
cuz now i am a big tomboy
just like yesterday
Mr. Wall cultivated the
growing interest I seemed to naturally have to write and he is
responsible for the high self esteem I have now only for my
writing.
I took his class during
that summer so I could concentrate on the big senior paper. Besides
that assignment, which turned out to be more of a learning experience
than a chore, our other tasks were to read Animal Farm by George Orwell and Hamlet
. Under Wall's direction, it was impossible not to master an
understanding of Shakespeare and his style. My research paper became
a fascination of mine for the entire summer, which is an
accomplishment if you ask any teacher. I decided on trying to figure
out how the brain processes or produces creativity. I found so much
information, a three page paper seemed too small. But I did it and I
still feel that it is a good paper to this day. The last paragraph
still makes me tingle:
Creativity is the bringing into existence of what did
not exist before. Unfortunately, no one gets high anymore, A high
that can be had from creative thoughts threatens youngsters and their
parents. A high that can result in INVENTIONS that take us out into
universes and cause us to QUESTION the old. Creativity can lead to
some pretty scary things, like truth, or justice, or love. We must
expect no limitations on the brain- it is limitless!
Creativity was never really advertised in highschool, although many
of my classmates and I smelled of it, so when I was complemented on
how creative certain things were that I produced in college, it
shocked me. It had always been the way that I did things. It was my
process. And it is funny but sometimes I credit my art teacher in
highschool, Mr. Pfliger, with how I function today as a person and
writer. He allowed the freedom in his class that most of us, the ones
that cherished thatoutlet into our right hemispheres, adored and miss
and want to capture in our own teaching. I thought then that that was
the reason I wanted to go into architecture in college, so I could
keep my artistic finger and make money. However, it hit me a few
summers ago, after not making it into the architecture program, that
I wanted more out of life. I want to help others through their
process in life and be that Mr. Pfliger or Mr. Wall; money has no
longer become an issue for me.
My process of literacy
through highschool was one that had its definite skies and cracks,
but it didn't prepare me for the adventure I would find at college.
Leaving home is not suppose to be the happiest moment in a person's
life but for me it was my very needed turning point. My imagination
no longer had ties to being a good little girl by not swearing, going
to church, or thinking crazy thoughts. At home I was usually in fear
that someone, particularly my mother, would find my poems and journal
entries. Even when I wrote my novels on the home computer, I typed
when she was at work and typed all fifty pages out before I came to
NDSU. My writings were too precious. I needed to find an outlet where
I could explore what I needed to say.
During my journey through
the college scene, I have learned much about myself through all the
books, teachers, and essays I have had to hurdle. In my creative
writing class, I found myself to be considered a surrealist writer,
and was awarded a banana for it, and took a liking to it.
Practices in
Criticism taught me to
just write whatever you want sometimes because you will probably not
please the instructor anyway. The novel assigned in the same class,
Haroun and the Sea of
Stories , showed me so
much about other cultural writers and the amazingness of stories and
their own process and potential in people's lives. Taking
World
Literature was the
greatest boost I could have had for finding authors not of European
decent that I would love to read. My favorites became Naguib Mafouz
and Forough Farrokhzad. Intermediate Composition was a nice class to be thrown into after
all the more serious writing. It was almost hard to remember what you
did before college because you had been so caught up in the tornado
of important knowledge. I feel I have come of age with my writing
here and only
hope to improve it further as I teach and maybe use it as another
source of income if I can find anyone crazy enough to publish or even
read it.
I have recreated my
childhood. I have a bookshelf plump with books, I write on little
sheets of paper at work or bits of a poem in different classes, and
whenever I venture into Barnes and Noble I know I will buy something.
My precious drafts of papers from classes long gone all occupy an
enormous binder that I flip through from time to time to see just how
far along I have come. The places that I have left to travel to are
unimaginable.
And I am only twenty-one.
This literacy voyage has
only proved to me what I decided only days ago and that is that my
life has always had an underlying connection to my reading and
writing at that point in time. When I was depressed I did a paper on
run-aways, when I was young and curious I read Danielle Steele, and
now at this point when I am becoming more and more engrossed with
religion and all its fun attributes, I am reading about Buddhism and
getting yoga positions from the internet. I simply hope that my
approach to life does fulfill me when I come to the end of my time
here. Like Thoreau, I do not want to come to the end of my life and
find that I have not lived it. I don't ever want to stop learning or
searching for more knowledge which makes teaching almost a god-sent,
or Buddha-sent, career for me.
In one of Naguib Mafouz's
stories there is a man constantly searching for another man, a
medicine man, named Zaabalawi to cure him, but he never finds him. In
class we discussed what Zaabalawi could be. For me he was happiness
because the man traveled and traveled and it was only in his craziest
state, drunkenness, that he came close to Zaabalawi. It will not only be
through my greatest struggles or triumphs in life that I will be
closest to Zaabalawi, but also in those moments when I am simply
laughing with my sister, the one we decided to keep for tax purposes,
about Days of Our Lives over a glass of Koolaid. It is through living that we live
life.
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