A Fresh Start

Well, I must say that it has been an uneventful and tedious week, and you know what? sometimes that happens. I have always felt uneasy during uneventful and tedious weeks. With it being uneventful, I feel as though I should be doing more, but with the tedium, I feel like I can’t. In times like these I normally take comfort in doing something physically active. While I still view it as tedious, it is at the very least eventful. If I am lucky, I can even allow my imagination to wander during exercise and occasionally come up with an idea worth writing down. Unfortunately tonight was not one of those instances, at least I don’t think it was, otherwise I probably would have remembered what I thought was important enough to write down. Given that it wasn’t I will just assume it was another time my mind wandered into an adventure story or tale of military exploit that I had read and reread at least half a dozen times. I do remember the push-ups, though, so even that is unlikely. Since I have not given any formal introduction, I take kickboxing classes. These have recently shifted to online, much like our classes at Temple, thanks to Covid-19 concerns, and one of the instructors testing positive recently dashed any hopes of a return to normal any time soon. Still, I have a punching bag, MMA gloves, and workout clothes, so another zoom class began. I cannot stress enough how important a good set of gloves are, even for practice. Your fingers are fragile, and your wrist is unstable, with a tendency to bend one way or another if you don’t line up a punch right. While I do appreciate a well choreographed fight in movies, or a well written one in literature, I have long since stopped hitting my punching bag with any sort of force before putting my gloves on. The boredom never lasts more than a few days, which is always nice. In any case, I have decided to give writing a second chance. In elementary school, I never liked it. I never seemed to be able to write fast enough and my pencils had a habit of breaking on me at the worst moment. In middle school, things weren’t much better. Somehow flash games managed to invade Microsoft word around then, and I threw my lot in with the former. In high school, I just did not care. I graduated from the public school system, probably somewhere around the middle of my class, and went to what was basically a continuation of that. My local community college was alright, I was finally free to choose what I wanted to study, and as an added bonus, the cafeteria food was so much better. Gone were the days of eating lukewarm mystery meals, now I could stumble in after an opening shift at my part time job, before I got laid off, and gorge myself on eggs, bacon, pancakes, and half-decent coffee. Then I would head to the library and make use of the comfy chairs in their study area for a quick nap before I went to class. If I was lucky (read, “if I competently scheduled my classes”) I would also have some time around the early afternoon free, so I could go down to the cafeteria again and eat to my heart’s content before going home. The down side was that in my first semester I had one of my least favorite English classes to date. The next semester it was followed by one of my favorite, but the damage had already been done. I graduated from there with an associate’s degree in psychology and set my sights on Temple. I’ll be honest, I liked the food at my community college more, mostly because we got to eat in a climate controlled building then, and not on a park bench where it can be hard to enjoy any food due to the cold and wind. Then again I did take one of the kinesiology department’s camping classes last semester and that was just amazing. I suppose eating breakfast while shivering on top of a mountain the morning after Halloween is just more exciting by nature than eating breakfast on a cold metal chair in Philadelphia after an hour long train ride while nursing a minor hangover. By the way, the full moon was so bright on Halloween last year that our camping group managed a night hike, on the walk back I was alone and out of curiosity I just turned off my flashlight. Funny enough, I could still see the trail, so I just walked back to the camp by moonlight. I think I also ate 2,000 calories at dinner that night. It was absolutely worth it. Taking a sharp turn back on track from our detour, I had just decided that writing really wasn’t my thing, and I would only do it as it pertained to my course work for my major, not as an elective. I usually try to spend my Sundays at my Dad’s house. He is a fun guy and as an added benefit, my brother lives there, too. Hanging out with them is always nice, we usually do a whole lot of nothing that culminates in me staying there until half past one, driving home, and not getting to bed until at least half past two. As you can imagine, this is not the best plan in the world. I have a class at nine in the morning on Monday, so six hours of sleep at most before a class makes it hard to concentrate. Here I have to thank my Dad, I’ll thank my brother in a moment. My father bought me a French press style coffee maker, so, in combination with my mom’s electric kettle which she has lent me for the time being, I can roll out of bed and start a pot of coffee pretty much right away. This has become a massive help on mornings where I stayed up too late and I happen to be dragging my feet. In any event, I said I would thank my brother and this is where that happens. He likes to write. In fact, a creative writing course taught by the same professor that taught my second semester English course at my community college is what got him into writing as a hobby. He and I were talking and the conversation veered off toward the most recent short story he was writing. I found it interesting and recognized that, without his creative writing course, he probably would not have started writing as much as he does now. So thanks to him, I did something I never expected myself to do. I signed up for a creative writing course. I hope this fresh start turns out well.