MM: Last week of classes

It’s been awhile since I wrote a Midnight Message. I believe my last one was two weeks ago. Quit a few things have happened since then. I’m mostly getting caught up in schoolwork. I’m finding that I really dislike it. Maybe it’s just because I’m tired, but I think I’d learn just as much, if not more, by learning on my own. Maybe Theo’s attitude is rubbing off on me. Maybe I’m just getting discouraged by the fact that I have a research paper due yesterday still not done. Whatever it is, I am tired of school and it will be a welcome relief when winter break comes around. It’s not like I really do all that much studying, either. Most of the time, I’m off doing my own thing. But perhaps I should make better use of my time.

Doing TCF stuff has really brought a lot of joy into my weeks at USC. I’ve come to realize that I actually do know a vast majority of TCFers. And what’s even better is that they know me. Though I often get really insecure because people know so much more about me than I do about them, I still get a chance to at least give conversation a try. I don’t know what to say, but I throw out a few questions and then ask for elaboration. What’s the purpose of the talk? To get to know them, sure, but also because I’m really interested. Numerous times, our talk leads somewhere which leads to another thing and it quickly has a significant impact on my life.

For instance, quite a few Southsiders, and even those living outside Southside, have noted that they love my emails. I send reminder emails for all of our events, most commonly for Monday Night Bible Study and Wednesday evening HEAT. I enjoy writing them out, putting in a bit of my humor, entertaining people and making them smile. Theo suggested I do Creative Writing. I’ve always loved to write.

In elementary school, I wrote a story about a scientist with a Pentium II computer, or something like that. I started illustrating it, too. This was around 3rd grade or so. And this story grew to be several pages long, which is much longer than anything anyone wrote that early on. I never really finished it, and I don’t know where it is now. But I do know that writing is for me.

One of the biggest reasons why I need to write is that I have a terrible memory. If I don’t write something down, I will not remember it. Really, I wont. I don’t know exactly why, but if I don’t consciously try to remember something, or have a specific reason to do so, I just won’t. I have basic super-short-term memory, and some long-term memory, but almost nothing in between.

The other reason is that my thoughts are incredibly disorganized, in my opinion. I have connections between so many different thoughts that it would be impossible to map it all out. The structure required by words, spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and so on– it helps me put stuff together and force it into a little box. From there it can be expanded into different formats. It’s kind of like RSS feeds or XML syndication, if you want to take a geeky analogy. Websites all have different formats, designs, layouts, styles. But the feed has only the content. Regularly updated, in a standardized format, and just the content. From there, people convert it to HTML for their web pages; content for their newsreaders and aggregators; emails for their updates and newsletters; data for their statistics and so on. It’s in a universal format, so you can, with the right reader, view it on a PC, cell phone, laptop, PDA, other handheld devices, in your car, and so on, and it’ll be usable on any platform, any media.

That’s just a sample of where you can go with the written word. So simple, so unique, so expressive.