11 days and counting

Mood: emotional :/
Happy thought: baby birdies

For my English capstone course, we each have to complete some sort of final writing project. It's pretty open-ended. People are writing academic papers (God bless them... because, seriously... I couldn't do it). Some are doing fiction and poetry and just all sorts of stuff.

Mine is this, essentially. I'm doing my 100-day journal/chronicle of the last 100 days of school. I'm doing an online version here on the blog and then a different (though occasionally overlapping) version just for class purposes.

The idea of doing this project apparently shook the whole world for a classmate of mine, who never fails to tell me at least once a week in class how badly I scared him when I announced to the whole class that day in early February that we had only 100 days (calendar days, not even school days) left of our Drake experience. Scared HIM? I'm the one DOING this project. I'm the one TACKLING this beast. Talk about scary.

Anyway...

Today we did our capstone presentations, which was essentially just a reading of our work. We didn't have to read if we didn't want to, but I was feeling up to the challenge.

I was much more nervous than I thought I would be. After 76 years or so of writing all sorts of papers and stories and what have you, I've grown quite used to the idea of people reading, editing, and commenting on my work, then being confronted with the whole class as they discuss what I've written.

The rules of each peer workshop changes from class to class and professor to professor. Last semester I wasn't allowed to talk or respond to the criticism as my work was being reviewed. I had to sit there and take notes and just listen as they talked about me like I wasn't in the room.

"Real authors can't respond to the stuff we say about their work," said the professor.

That's valid. But that didn't make it less terrifying.

The point is, having people read my stuff on their own is very different than reading it TO them. On one hand, it's a good thing. I can rely on things like inflection and body language and facial expression to convey whatever it is I'm saying, and worry less about what's getting lost in translation.

On the other hand, whatever separation there once was between writer and text, between the author and their product, is completely obliterated. I kind of love the idea that I'm not necessarily what I write or, really, who I write. I love the idea that I exist independently of my own words. But, when you read out loud... that barrier vanishes.

Not that I didn't enjoy it. I made a girl laugh so hard she seriously began to cry. And hearing the project out loud helped me identify parts I'd like to go back and change or fix. So the experience was a good one, but odd and terrifying, too.

Then, of course, in class it kind of just hit me that it was our final meeting and that was pretty emotional. The professor was getting all choked up, so I was getting choked up and she said something like "This is me not saying goodbye..." and that pretty much just did me in.

I've been in classes with her since freshman year and I was not at all warming to the idea of the end.

After we did the reading, I hung around as long as I possibly could before walking quickly away and retreating to the fortress of my car (because nobody can see me in there.... riiiight...) so I could open the flood gates.

11 days and counting and I'm going to be a total mess for allllll 11 of them.