Pre-New Year's Changes #1

Dear repentant revelers (in 2 weeks time),

New Year's resolutions never work out for most people. If you want to guarantee something not happening, then make a resolution about it. By that logic, the Republicans should resolve to pass a healthcare reform bill, and the Democrats should resolve to curb deficit spending.

There's an all or none mentality; if you cheat and eat a cookie, then you're condemned to eat the whole box. And you can't make another resolution to quit eating until next year. It's a vicious cycle, one that gyms and diet gurus exploit yearly.

So I'm not going to make a resolution to start effective January 1st; I'm going to make a couple of changes effective immediately. The first will be to write regularly, even if the writing sucks. Back in high school when I was taking the Advanced Placement tests for English Language and English Literature, our slavemasters would beat us mercilessly with red ink and stares of disappointment, driving us to write until our fingers bled.

The main tyrant was a 6-foot plus, blonde-ish (her hair was going gray) former army vet. She ruled with a sharp wit and tongue, crushing elevated egos and rebuilding solid (if boring) writers. Twice a week or so, she would cruelly force us to write about some boring prompt for 20 minutes.

'Novels and plays often depict characters caught between colliding cultures -- national, regional, ethnic, religious, institutional. Such collisions can call a character's sense of identity into question. Select a novel or play in which a character responds to such a cultural collison. Then write a well-organized essay in which you describe the character's response and explain its relevance to the work as a whole.'

Blah, like eating cardboard or whole wheat toast.

I could never tell whether my stuff was any good until I got the paper back emblazoned with a score from 1-9, 9 being the highest. As the year progressed, my writing improved as evidenced by the increasing marks for the timed writings; I started with a smattering of 4s and ended with mostly 8s and even a 9. But I wasn't sure whether my writing truly improved or whether Ms. H was just padding my confidence for the real AP test.

Nevertheless, I made 8s and 9s on the essay portion of the real thing. It translated to a score of 4 out of 5 on the AP test. A mark of 3 would warrant college credit at a vast majority of universities. I also had a 5 on AP Chemistry that year, but that was more of an afterthought--anything less than a 5 in Chem would have been a disappointment. But the 4, the 4 was my love-child with that part of me I had never known to exist (is that autoerotic or just narcissistic?)

The writer extraordinaire continued with a 5 in English Literature the next year, as if to reprove any critics who would say the 4 was by luck. And it was all due to practice. Hours and hours of being stuck at school in that room on the second floor with a window facing the patch of grass bordered on four sides by the concrete of the building.

I had told myself that I was getting the English out of the way so I didn't have to take it in college (mission accomplished, btw, I came in with 52 hours of college credit, 9 of which were English related). Little did I know that I would come back to it.

And so I will return to the writing days of old, with daily practice in a craft I hope to call my own. To slightly alter Gandhi's quote, I will be the change I want to see in myself.

To my readers, what are the changes you want to make this coming year? Or better yet, what change can you make this very moment? Look at the swoosh mark on your shoes and just do it!