Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

I’ve spent the last five or six hours cleaning my room (I work best when I stay up all night), and I decided to be really thorough. So, I took down the crate from the top of my closet and began to sort the junk from the stuff that could be donated. When I go on these cleaning sprees, I often come across old notebooks in which I wrote very many silly things. I usually enjoy reading whatever childish poem I’d composed years before or old journal entries about disagreements with parents as well as checking my handwriting to see if it changed at all. I guess I can look at what I wrote and think that I’ve really matured since then.

This, however, was not the case last night. In reading essays that I wrote even just one year ago, I am usually upset by the unharmonious grammatical structure of overly-complicated sentences; errors are always appalling. And those are essays written in 11th grade. What I have come to determine is that I must have been illiterate as a middle schooler. That’s why I’m not pleased to have become more grammatically-correct and knowledgeable since then; there had to be some improvement or I never should have deserved to graduate high school. There was one pretty much unforgivable mistake that I am far too ashamed to describe here, but other than that everything seemed on par for an average, uninterested unperson (kids below high school level = unpersons). Some of what I wrote took me a minute to process—I am no longer accustomed to reading “l8r” and “b4″ (that one really shocked me) in real sentences.

I was also a very silly girl back then, far too concerned with being liked by certain people. I think I wrote in pink, too. And to top it all off, I discovered a (to my credit, never used) Backstreet Boys calendar at the bottom of the crate. It wasn’t even a practical calendar with boxes in which to write things, only lines across the bottom with numbers.

I realized after a few pages of the horriffic writing that I was clearly terrible with English back than and that, for my sanity, I should just stop reading and assume it didn’t get any worse. But no, once I started I had to explore all of my past. I survived and am ecstatic that I starting caring about English. I basically owe my life to Christina, without whose influence I shudder to think what would have become of me. (Thanks, Pookie!) At least I can give Stevie a proper foundation in grammar.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 6:44am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.