Sitting in the back of a friend’s car on a frosty, December night, I didn’t care how it happened. It wasn’t even supposed to happen. For the first second of the first sip of the awful, cheap vodka, I just thought “oh okay this wasn’t so bad.” Then, the actual taste kicked in and turned to “oh, that’s fucking disgusting.” But you have to keep going because after a certain amount of time and a certain amount of drinks, it doesn’t matter.
I learned that drunk me is bitter and angry, not afraid to say the things that I thought. There’s a surprise, that’s how it works for everyone else too.
But I guess I scarred everyone for life or something and people didn’t look at me the same anymore. So for the rest of high school, I lived with the stigma of being the one that expressed my dislike of certain qualities of people directly to them. Today, that’s not so weird but in high school, doing this is unholy blasphemy that you will be eternally cast out for.
I think that the blog experience throughout the semester was interesting in that it allowed me as a writer to branch out and give focus to not only my own writing project, but also immerse myself into the writing of others. By doing this, you can not only view your own work through an attentive and focused lens, but also incorporate the work of others. It was a step out of my comfort zone, and it's something that I had to adapt to, becoming more used to it as we did more blog projects.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I felt as though this exercise was a deep and valuable learning experience. Writing about such different things every week and approaching every topic with a different mindset caused my writing to suffer, I believe. I felt as though I had a different voice in every post, whereas if I was focused solely on incorporating my own ideas, I might have had a more unified voice. In some posts, I felt humorous, and in others I attempted to express an artistic message in a sort of clichéd and brooding way. However, I feel like this exercise in incorporating the ideas of others not only changed my mindset as a writer, but improved the techniques that I can use while writing and implementing other ideas that aren't necessarily mine. If I could go back and write every new blog post again, I would utilize all of the things that I've learned and experienced from reading everybody else's blogs.
The idea of our blogs being a network of texts is also interesting because of the way in which our blogs were connected. The incorporation of a different idea and a different blog post in every new post expands the network of texts to a point that encompasses a large network. Barthes noted that “Text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works)” and this is true of our network of blogs – if it were to hypothetically continue to grow, it would expand infinitely into a much larger network that encompasses a wide variety of works by many different authors.
So overall, I think that despite me not being in top form as a writer throughout the construction of our network of blogs, I think I learned more from our blog network than many other writing activities that I've ever done. I learned the importance of seamlessly incorporating and considering other perspectives besides the one that you yourself have, and I think it's a valuable lesson to learn.