fromcompcitoenglish

[fromcompcitoenglish]

I Get Swamped With Thoughts and They Don’t Leave my Head Until I Write Them

I’ve been thinking about the first time I can remember coming into contact with the police. I was about 5 years old and they had come to my house in West Philly. If I recall correctly, they had come because my dad had been in the upstairs bathroom when someone shot at the window. Thankfully, it was just a BB gun so the bullet didn’t kill my dad or anything.  It didn’t even penetrate the window actually, just broke the screen and cracked the glass a little. But I don’t think we knew that at the time and still BB guns are dangerous so I think the next step was to call the police. 

We lived around the corner from a police station so it didn’t take long between the call and when they got there. I think my grandma must have embellished the call as if an actual shooting had happened, because it was a whole group of police officers who came. I remember sitting at the top of the stairs probably still in pajamas because it was summer and I often just wouldn’t get dressed. They were all standing in between the living room and the dining room. Even if I could only half grasp the weight of the situation, I definitely wasn’t feeling at ease. There was this tension in the room as they stood and listened to my father and grandmother. 

I didn’t understand then, but now knowing my father’s history with the police and what happened during my custody battle (which is a short story within itself, and one I’ve never heard the whole story to) the heavy feeling in the room made total sense even if we were the ones making the call. 

I think this one experience tinged all my future thoughts about police, because I didn’t come into close contact with any police afterwards but passing them just gives me this tense feeling. I also didn’t get the full picture of what my dad had gone through until 2 years ago. 

[fromcompcitoenglish]

Day 4 - When you were 16, what did you think your life would look like? Does it look like that? Is that a good thing? (Late)

Wow this is a big question I am not fully prepared to answer a whole day late. Am writing this now to remember that I still have to do this later! Short answer is: Yes and No to Everything. 

[fromcompcitoenglish]

Day 3 - Think About The Last  Time You Broke A Law. Were You Burned, Or Did Things Turn Out For The Best?

The last time I broke a law was in an Ulta the day after Christmas. I won’t go into details but things turned out okay. I’ll never go into that Ulta again so I’m not worried about being caught or anything. This sounds really incriminating but it was nothing that bad. 

Short blog post today, so I think now I’ll write about what I’m going to do tomorrow. Tomorrow is the Women’s March on Washington and I’m going to it with my school. The buses are leaving at 5:30 AM, so I have to be up by 4:45 so I can make it to the bridge with my friend by 5:15. 

One one hand I’m nervous because the climate around D.C. right now is not good. I just read about how hundreds of protesters were arrested today after his inauguration. The people there were doing things that were not acceptable, to be honest, but I’m sure that there were also peaceful protesters there that just wanted to express their discontent with the government. I think that the march I’m going to tomorrow will be the safest march to go to, but there’s so much to look out for that one can never be certain. I don’t want to be arrested or shot or tear gassed. I don’t want to have to post publicly that I don’t want to die tomorrow if I’m in a situation like Sandra Bland so that the police can rule my death a suicide and sweep it away. 

I told my mom I was going to D.C. but not my dad. He would disapprove of me going no matter that I have all of my classwork done for the next week. I disagree with him disapproving. So to avoid any problems I just haven’t told him that I’m going. 

[fromcompcitoenglish]

Day 2 - Describe Your Last Attempt To Do Something That Did Not Come Easy To You

The last thing I tried to learn that did not come easy to me is why I’’m writing right now.  

When I attended a college preparatory high school, the first thing we had to decide was what major we wanted to choose and so the first things we did were take lots of personality and career quizzes to see where we would fit in best. All of the ones I took pointed me in the direction of computers and programming most likely because these are careers where your interpersonal skills don’t need to be the best to succeed. “Yeah”, I thought, “a job where I can interact with people the least, its growing fast, AND I can make boat loads of money fresh out of college? Sounds perfect to me”. 

Except I ignored that my math skills were not up to the standards needed for my intended major of Computer Science. I figured that the descriptions I read where math was placed under high importance where exaggerating. And if I’m talking about programming alone, then yes math isn’t as important a skill to have for programming because it’s all in english. But the mindset of someone who can program well is very much someone who can do well at math. You have to be able to look at a problem and order through it in a certain way that I am not good at even describing. 

Suffice to say, my first programming class went horrible. I knew I couldn’t stay in the major anymore and needed a change so I decided to switch to English, which I know I have a natural talent for. And this will be my first semester as an English major. I’m hoping that it goes well. 

[fromcompcitoenglish]

Market Street, Dust Bowl, Rebirth

Starting a 365 writing challenge 18 days late because I have decided to change my life right in the middle of it. Today’s prompt was free word association with the words Home, Soil, and Rain. The easiest one to decode here is the last, Rain. Rain conjures up an image of a parched plain land that is finally seeing the relief of a midsummer thunderstorm rolling in for me. A single rain drop falls on a wilted flower surrounded by cracked earth and tumbleweeds and as if controlled by magic the whole flower begins to slowly bloom again. 

Soil is Dust Bowl to me because during middle school and early high school I accidentally read a lot of books set during the Great Depression. However, I couldn’t originally understand how the Midwest had become so... dusty. Until I read a book of poetry (that of course I can’t remember the name of now) about a young girl who lived with her recently widowed father in the Dust Bowl on a failing farm. She explained the Dust Bowl as over farming practices damaged the topsoil of the region and then winds from somewhere further West of them would come in, stirs up the dust and swirls it around until it’s too dangerous to even stand outside. 

Home was a tough one and I need to admit that I sat before giving in to my first thought and writing it down. Market St is the street name of where me and family last lived but I would not consider it Home completely. It isn’t even where we moved after we moved from Home. If I had to choose where Home was I would say it is Redfield St, my first home where my father, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, and I lived for the first 8 years of my life. But I tried to make Market St and by extension the whole city of Trenton a Home so therefore it is my first thought of what a Home should be.

-A