Monday, August 30, 2010

Birth of the Blog

My first encounter with a sleepless college night came not from a heaping pile of previously procrastinated assignments or a looming exam but from an overloaded mental pallet.  I set myself in my top bunk at 2:57 AM only to feel the restless surge that always seems to present itself on those nights where sleep is simply a destination of your conscious dreams.  I heard STOCK's hourly clock beep, telling me that it was now 3 in the morning.  I told myself that I would be hearing it again.  Kicked off by the thought of what a self fulfilling prophecy that would be for me to actually lie awake for a whole hour in thought, I streamed into a mental, emotional and strategical review of my past two weeks at American University.  Since arriving on campus, I had entered a sort of information overload.  Hundreds of people have been introduced to me along with new transportation systems, maps, responsibilities and costly methods of cleaning my clothes.  I have already learned more in these two weeks (1 week of classes) academically than I think I did in my whole senior year of high school. (Among the most interesting is the Top Ten Common Faults in Human Thought article, linked below, that slightly altered my thought process and attitude within five minutes of reading it.  I don't know how long psychological effects of reading it will last, but check it out anyway. ) Yet, what continues to awe and impress me is how much I am learning about myself: my tendencies to solve problems, meet people and project a self image in a new environment.  An aspect of my persona that I have already discovered of myself is that I choose to entertain people by being zany and unpredictable rather than routine and conservative.  I am also starting to see what a perfect blend of Charles and Annette I am.   
Prematurely as it was, I pitted my time at American against the times I spent in Brick Memorial High School in a detailed battle of compare and contrast.  My memories of high school friends and shenanigans proved more noteworthy than the past two weeks.  But the expanse of opportunities available to me at American University make me optimistically confident that I will invent memories suited to this point in life as time goes on.  I imagined all the different things I could and should get myself involved in during the next four years.  I thought of what to try to get accomplished before getting out of college but the high school memories squeezed into my psyche one last time to remind me not to lose track of the people or places along the way because the specific, detailed context of the story is what makes it a memory.  So I realized tonight, lying in bed wide eyed and awake that I should create a Blog (an idea I have been tossing around since Junior year of high school) in order to communicate with present and future friends alike, to document my life and daily thoughts and to transfer as much of my personal college experience to those interested.  Everybody always tells me that college is the best years of life so why not, at the very least, make my good times public. 
Yeah, so, I rolled out of bed after hearing STOCK's hourly clock beep and started walking around the building I live in, thinking of how to start my blog, or as I better like to think of it, My Social Journal of Higher Learning.  Gotta watch out for that self fulfilling prophecy bullshit.  It will get you every time; Unless you got a positive prophecy in mind.  Then I say Believe it and go for it.  Nobody knows your purpose better than yourself.

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