Finishing a personal essay

Well, first of all, writing a personal essay is difficult. More difficult than writing an academic essay, by far. Yes, I love writing creative non-fiction, and yes, I do enjoy writing personal essays, but man, it’s tiring and mentally exhausting and can be veeeeerrryy loooooooong. Sometimes that works to my advantage because I often tend to write a lot, but that makes editing difficult too. This essay turned out to be just over 4,000 words, which I think is the longest personal essay I’ve written so far. Definitely the longest in the class so far.

But when you finish writing it — oh, such relief. Well, it’s more like resignation, but after an hour or two, you really realize that you accomplished a pretty big feat, and yeah, I deserve props and acknowledgement for that. Now if you excuse me, I’m going to watch the new season of The Amazing Race with my mommy and tell her what I accomplished today.

 

Blah blah blah

Don’t know what to say today. Had my first class for Intro to Playwriting. It was fun. I wrote a little scene about two guys arguing over eating dogs in China. I think the class will be fun. That is all.

Success and failure

My agenda asks, “In  your school career, what was the most successful group project that you participated in; what was the most disastrous?”

I answered, “Successful: my AIDS project in Gr. 10. We succeeded cuz we like each other and it was actually semi-fun. Disastrous: skit for French class in Gr. 10. Disastrous cuz we didn’t have the props and [something else. I think I remember it. I was with Jordan, who was actually in Gr. 9 and whom I had a giant crush on. I think the skit was going to a summer camp and one of us had a snorkel. I don’t remember it going badly, but I do remember not knowing the what hell was going on and not working on it very much, which is probably why it ended up being so disastrous. Oh well.]

The World Behind Closed Doors (part 1)

Last year, I took a Creative Writing Non-fiction class, and despite the not very good teacher, I had a lot of fun writing and re-writing the two assignments that we had for the course.  Although I’ve previously written about my first relationship, I decided to write about it again, since it was a familiar experience and as my first big assignment, I didn’t want to do anything too out there.  Anyway, I’ve been hesitating to put it on my blog because I considered sending it around to publications but never got around to it.  I figure that I can still send it out and if it’s an issue, I could always take it down from my blog.

With that said, enjoy.

The World Behind Closed Doors

Like all Harlequin romance novels begin, it started with a message – sent via an online dating site.

I was 19 at the time, and my world was built upon piano keys, papers of all sorts of writing, and crushes on boys who would, one way or another, never end up with me.  Because of my lack of any working gaydar, I had resigned to meeting other gay people online by signing up on a few gay online sites.  I met Kemuel that way, and assumed he was just going to be another name added to my list of people I met online who, after meeting them once or twice, would be yet another boring guy I’d rather not talk to again.  I remember the message he sent me: he mentioned that from my profile, I liked music and went on to tell me he that music was also fundamental in his world – he was a student at UBC in the Music Program.  At first, this surprised me – not because he was in the Music Program but the mere fact that someone in cyberspace had 1. bothered to read my profile despite it not having keywords like “bottom boy”, “casual”, or the popular misspelling, “cum”, 2. sent me a message that didn’t include the aforementioned words or have the generic “how r u?” and leave it at that but instead, 3. sent me a message that actually mentioned my interests and started a stimulating conversation.  Now this was profound.

We instant-messaged each other a few days before he wanted to meet, insisting sometime soon.  Still being wary of meeting people from online, it already felt rushed to me.

(continued in part 2…)

Final Closure

More emo poetry from this whole page of poems I wrote during Math 11 class. Here’s a picture!

Final Closure

My mind flows
consistently, never faltering
unless the pain arrives, brought
on by the sight of the
person who has hurt me
all these years, and
yet brought me more than I ever wanted, which
is why I must block you out.

Whole bunch of crappy poems

The Hill

Jumping forward in time to the present, here’s something I wrote last month, also for my Creative Writing Poetry class.  We had to write a poem with exactly 25 words, no more, no less, if you’re wondering about why it’s uncharacteristically short. And yes, it’s a real place too.

The Hill

North Shore mountains’ lights shimmer
Like teary eyes against Petro Canada’s red glare
Soft hum of Knight Street traffic
Someday, He’ll fall for me here.