http://www.nytimes.whsites.net/edlife/

Someone write something for this.


Anonymous
12:09:00 AM
5/01/2009

Aaah. Stress stress stress.

I'm extremely nervous about an in-class essay test for APUSH tomorrow. It's been a tiring week for me in particular, and I've always had a bit of an issue with timed writings. (I'm always the last person in the class to finish a test or an essay and I often end up scrambling to finish after the bell has rung to mark the end of the period.)

:(

At least writing about it helps. A little.


Anonymous
9/13/2007 10:58:00 PM

Tintedfragipan reminds me of that prudish man who writes a column in the N&O on grammar mistakes in the media.

However, as one who will undoubtedly commit some sort of grammatical crime in the very near future (or who just did), I salute you.

Even now I feel myself spurred towards greater grammatic perfection by the thought of your acerbic satire directed at my feeble prose.

Grammarians of the world, I hope you are able to turn back the tide of modernity. Or atleast prevent it from washing away all the conventions of our language.


Anonymous
05:04:00 PM

who won rfa?


Anonymous
05:22:00 PM

I just read my first ever NC-17 Harry Potter porn fic-- a Harry/George/Fred and Harry/Lupin, no less. It didn't make me horny, but it made me laugh my ass off.


Anonymous
10:23:00 PM

I write really horribly at school, and really well at school. Why? Because I can cry at home. I write better when I cry.

I'm writing this from school.


Anonymous
08:24:16 PM

Short story entitled "The Lock and Key Theory". A little too angst to submit to anything, but now here for your critique.

This is how beginnings are started:

She watches people race by beneath the giant pendulum, and she counts the seconds and minutes that pass by, her youthful time unspent. She watched him walk by, hunched over, at a pace slightly slower than the others. Her eyes follow him as he turns the corner. These were the things she couldn't -- and wouldn't -- understand; they were inexplicable and illogical.

She turns to return to her work, piling day by day upon her desk; obligations unwanted but slowly whiling time away. She turns back to feelings of familiarity instead of unwanted insecurities that would plague her at times like these.

This is how insecurities bloom:

She doesn’t know what to do. She finds her eyes unwillingly trailing his motions, awkward as they seem. Her friends catch her doing so and she cannot disregard them. He is a nobody, to her understanding, but seems to be everything to her. She's caught in-between time and space, enraptured with the sight of the otherworldly angel caught in turmoil ready to take the dive, the flight into the unknown, the oblivion.

This is unwanted and awkward confrontation:

He catches her in the library. The angel without wings turns and their eyes meet. She cannot turn away. They wait like this, minutes and hours confusing each other, until traces of Aurora threads weave through the brightening sky. Dusk into day -- it's quite simple now, the congregation of space and time and everything else in-between. The pendulum stops swinging, but only for a second. But words -- answers – usually superfluous, are naught today.

This is their congregation of time and space:

They don't see each other during the quiet weeks as peers but as strangers. They coexist without speaking and share the tiny world they live in. They do not speak.

She observes him and takes note sometimes, writing down in her perfect cultured handwriting that he regresses slowly as the pendulum swings. His limbs, typically slender and sinewy, have gone limp. Her concern for him grows. Her friends do not utter a word upon glancing at her face.

This is the realization:

She encounters him one day. Trapped within a corner, he is a wildcat. His gaze steadily holds her. Blue meets brown. There is a silence for a moment. He turns his head to leave, and she wonders—this caged beast, trapped within bounds, completely unapproachable by society’s standards-- if she thinks about it long and hard, there is a metaphor staring at her in the face and it all makes sense.

This is wrong:

They continue to talk in muted tones and shifty eyes. Should someone see them would the reaction be an enactment of chaos? Speaking to each other in hushed tones as if the world outside is silent. She knows she is a coward.

This is the end of their beginning:

They both are cowards – turning back to an enclave where neither can be found. Where people turn their backs and overlook their differences. But they turn to face the severe light, glaring at them with its evil eye. Too many people, a hundred against one, predator to prey. They're vulnerable. The walls are quickly tumbling down.

This is the end in which all things spring:

They part their ways. Neither looking back to the place where all things originated: where insecurities will lie forever dormant, where a secret can be kept and an oath never broken. Remorse and regrets tossed aside into a gale, a whirlwind of emotions. Society frowns down upon them.

This is coincidence, chance, fate at play:

They're back where they started. The red string of fate has knotted them together. Pressures rising, soul escalation, nerve endings electrifying and senses on overdrive. In a broken world, divine interventions are only cracks and minute dents; they bear no positive effect except to exist. In a broken world, where fate frowns upon them he will take the dive. And she? She will go after him.

This is the intervention:

The pendulum stops swinging for the two. It is a cruel cycle that both should want to abstain from uttering a word in order to save each other in front of the world.

This is the end of their storybook.

… Now all things fall into place.


Anonymous
10:03:57 PM

Dear --------,
I have never written a love letter before. I have always found them sappy, cliche, and weak, and I despise weakness in myself. But I have never been in crush/love (when does it cross the line from having a crush on someone to secretly being in love with one of your best guy friends?) with someone so much that I have cried knowing that between a relationship that will inevitably be temporary and a friendship that keeps me sane, I will inevitably chosse the friendship. I hate crying. But I do so, knowing at that for one moment...[specific detail]...I have been in crush. There have been people whose mere presence made live worth living the way yours does. There have been days where the absence of other people has dulled life, made it suddenly boring and pointless the way your absence does. But I have never written a love letter before. I just thought you should know.
Your friend,
--------


Anonymous
09:25:42 PM

I hate writing prose because it always ends up as fanfic for my life.


Anonymous
01:47:54 AM

C. S. Lewis described the Law of Undulation in his book The Screwtape Letters. It is proving itself very true for me.


Anonymous
10:33:29 PM

Last night I was reading through this thing I wrote when I was in 6th grade (and I wrote it solely for my own enjoyment, not for any assignment or anything), and one of the things that really struck me about it was when I said:

Things I think would make our country better:

Anti-Gay People Laws! No more gays!!!!!!!

Anti-abortion laws!!!!


To quote Jeph Jacques of the venerable web-comic Questionable Content, "If irony were water, this blog would be Lake Michigan."

Even though this isn't my poem, it's still my secret. I was happy when I came across it. This is an excerpt from Blue Spruce by Mark Halliday:

Secondly,--and here's the real charmer
among the attractions of verse:
it's so much easier to write than prose!
Poets don't admit this, of course,
and why should they?
If they're not going to get paid
they should at least be allowed to
milk the public for a little respect;
and in this country people respect work
That's right, I said work,
and no funny business. So a versifier,
in order to win any lasting respect
(beyond the glow of a few chuckles)
has goot to seem to labor.
Yet the secret fact of the matter is,
as indicated above, that verse is no sweat
relatively speaking; because

you don't have to plug all the holes;
in fact you're supposed to
punch out
new ones;
you can leave loose ends dangling
all
over the
bed
the
kitchen table,
your lover's
body
your
parent's lives,
and people accept them as part of your game.
In verse there is no final judge,
and they know it, and you know they know it, and as long as you tie up every fith string,
rougly, your readers and your listeners will imagine
that some of the four strings
are probably tied up, and who knows which?
Oh, it's a fine life, this making verses;
PROSE IS SERFDOM
in poetry the freedom is a blast.
("Blast"... do I mean that metaphgorically?
do I intend some ironic overtone of explosion?
Or is blast here simply a colloquial term
which I resort to for a touch of comic relief?)
Just leave them baffled
and they'll treat you right!
It's so easy when you get the knack,
I could die laughing about it sometimes--


(And there's more, but I'm probably too long already. Anyway, I feel like this a lot.)

Anonymous
11:39:01 PM

My life has quirky characters, paced scenes, and plot. I wonder sometimes if everyone's is like this, or if I'm just different, or if it's because I'm a writer.


Anonymous
05:44:44 PM