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I thought I'd regress a bit today and take a trip back a couple of months to where this all began.
Alright, I actually have to go back a few years, back to just before the year 2000 - when we were all about ready to throw our computers away and start hunting food again after Y2k took over. It was around that time that I decided to go back to studying, time for a real qualification this time, a degree. Scary though that, having being out of school for 2 years already and already been working for a couple of months. It was back to the grindstone, and parties of course.
When I arrived for my first day at the campus I picked up my timetable and sauntered around, looking for the best spot to catch some sun and start relaxing a bit. Then I looked at the little piece of paper that defined my next twelve weeks worth of work, no sun for me. My first subject was communication studies.
I had been exposed to this phenomenon, of communication without the use of a cell phone or computer, but it never really made any sense so I thought it might actually be a worthwhile subject. Now to get an idea, I hated English at school. I also hated Afrikaans but that's just because I refused to learn a language I would never need to use at work anyway - doesn't help me that this year I started working on the West Rand. Anyway, English as a subject was pointless to me, I hated reading, I hated poetry, I hated grammar and I most of all hated writing. I remember years of first terms at school, writing a two page essay on "What I did during the holidays". Puke.
So I sat down at the back of the class while the lecturer, as nervous as hell in front of 150 first year students with too much attitude. She tried to control the class and inspire us about the joys of communication and how it will be create the building blocks to our careers. I chuckled and started drawing pictures on my notepad.
I didn't listen at all that lesson. Later that week, however, was the first practical lesson. Our subjects were all split up into lectures of around 150 students, and workshops of about 20. No place to hide in those, so I decided to show a little interest and actually get some work done. The first assignment, and there would be twelve, was to write a single paragraph on a topic that escapes me now. The aim was to create the perfect paragraph describing something or other. So after an hour of writing, editing and reading out aloud the lecturer took our scraps of paper and reviewed them over the following week.
Imagine my shock when mine came back, 85%. The highest mark in the class. And I was the shy guy sitting at the back who no one noticed. The rest of the semester went really well, I did speeches, presentations and persuasion techniques. I scored second highest mark, out of 150 or so students. Only one -bleep- beat me, and I reckon he was sleeping with a number of lecturers at the time anyway. But I'm not bitter.
It was an opening to a new world. I realised that with the little bit of faith in yourself, and of course the faith that someone will care to read or listen to what you have to say - you can move mountains with words.
And things died down. For five years.
At the beginning of this year, I registered with a website that's sole purpose was to create an album of cell phone pictures with short descriptions. And for some reason, when I was writing a description one day of a photo I took in a pub, I didn't stop. I wrote about two pages wort, and it was pretty entertaining. Boring as hell to everyone else, but I laughed every time I read it. Not much has probably changed in fact.
And so it continues, now I write for two websites and have two blogs - so that's four spots on the web where I am just a little bit exposed. I have also had a short story published on an American "e-zine", but I don't like fiction that much anyway.
So why do I write? I guess it's just a hobby, and will hopefully earn me a couple of happy meals in the future, but at the moment it's just something to do. It helps me relax in fact, and gets my mouth back into sync with my brain. I have been known to speak before thinking. Sometimes three weeks before thinking in fact.
So I guess its therapeutic as well, and of course, my spelling has improved. Now I just need to work on punctuation.
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