Sep 3, 2010 Journaling as Writing? (and lots of sentence fragments) . . . or maybe this should be College Frustrations ...hence it's location attachment to Feeling Like A Rubberband writings

The shoulds - - - I should be reading comments on class readings (my full intention when I turned on this PC);  I should be writing my own comments on the class readings. . . I should be sleeping.  Actually, it's 6:15 a.m. now, the time when I usually get up to run, but today I'd planned to sleep in until 7:30 a.m. and go straight to yoga class.  Instead I woke at 5:30 a.m. to attend to a family member's health issues (yawn).

Maybe grad school is not going to fit into my schedule this semester after all . . . but, I can't afford to drop out and delay.  Besides, this is technically my first semester in the program and I would probably have to reapply which would only add more stress.

However, I began this program to enrich my life and right now it appears to be just another stressor.  I am becoming quite disillusioned.  This class, though, has been a nice surprise.  I would hate to drop this class.  I write the word surprise because - really - "Scholarly Writing for Publication in English Studies" - sounded quite formal and stuffy to me.  Yet, I can't drop "Intro to Grad Studies" since it is a requirement for my first official semester in the MLA program.  Financially, I can’t afford to drop any class.

This brings me to the rest of my disillusionment.  I never anticipated time management to be easy juggling family obligations, classes, study time, assignments, volunteering, and work (or at present, searching for decent work that also offers healthcare benefits).  How did I ever work full-time and attend school full-time during undergrad and even  managed a social life!? Oh, yea, I was twenty-something.  Now, it is increasingly more difficult to plan my days than anticipated.  Syllabuses changes, books and readings added, more work on-line than I ever imagined . . . and with my environment at home not being conducive to studying, I now not only have to find a place to study, but find a place where I can study on-line.  I feel like a homeless person living out of internet cafes.

I'm not so happy about having to create an account on eBlogger to participate in a required class.  I have privacy issues and was just getting used to the idea and technology of PBworks.  eBlogger?  Really!?  The Underwood gets no respect!  Now everyone in class knows I have privacy issues and some are probably wondering who and if I am trying to escape or hide from.  It's no one's *%$@ business, but seriously . . . no one really even needed to know that I had privacy issues and it would have been nice to have been aware of some of these issues during, say, the decision making process prior to enrollment and spending all that cash!  Cash that I can't recoup now.  Cash that I dipped into savings for and forked over to enrich my life.  My life that has become much less enriched and much more stressed.  My life where assignments are now becoming an item to tackle on a to-do list instead of being viewed as an open adventure. 

And another thing . . . I didn't realize that the interdisciplinary program is, well, maybe not as flexible as I thougt after all.  It all depends on where your interests lie.  If all your interests lie on this campus then flexibility reigns.  I thought we were one big happy family.  I guess not.  I'm kind of feeling like I did when my former employer threw the St. Petersburg office under one of their real estate subsidiaries prior to the office closure; they said we were one big happy family, but most of us felt like the red-headed step child . . . in a family of blondes or brunettes.  (Different health care coverage, missing benefits, yada yada.)   

If I had more information prior to this semester's enrollment, would I be here now?  Maybe, maybe not.  If I could recoup even 3/4 of my tuition, would I remain?  Maybe, maybe not.

Oh self, remember Proust, maybe that's a suitable quote for this attitude readjustment, too; it worked well when feeling 'stuck' in Florida:  "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."  Nah, there must be something more appropriate.

Quite off track - - - or was I just . . .

Journaling as writing?  It is an interesting concept to think about.  It’s a concept I plan to explore more.  In my plans to  work with women in transition, even if only on a volunteer basis, I think it is a useful tool that gets people thinking about . . . well, it just gets people thinking . . . and exploring their mind . . . and their desires . . . their hopes, and dreams, and fears.  Maybe this semester's education will be all about something entirely different than what I expected, or came here, to learn.

Now . . . on to yoga and then those assignments.  Dorothea  Brande - "All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail."

Notes from Writings on Readings:

In The Craft of Research the authors state that we write to remember more accurately, to understand and discover, and then to test and evaluate what we think (12-13).  This leads me to believe that journaling as writing will, in fact, be a useful tool in my personal mission to work with women in transition.  By accurately documenting an experience, one can refer to the documentation when someone else possibly tries to deny the past.  Additionally, the experience can be evaluated more objectively to discover one’s own personal misconceptions or valid conclusions. 

The authors go on to state that when writing to understand, careful researchers do not wait until they have acquired all their data.  They write their ideas from beginning to end.  Later they can evaluate their arguments and rewrite when necessary.  It makes sense, then, that when exploring one’s own life it would be helpful to write it down.

WORKS CITED/REFERENCED

Booth, Wayne C.; Colomb, Gregory G.; and Williams, Joseph M. The Craft of Research.  The University of Chicago

     Press, 2005.

Check out Lauren's reasons for writing 

Return to Trina's page or Feeling Like A Rubberband

Responding to the end of this (the quote from Craft of Research). I would say that journaling takes up most of my time throughout any given day. I literally record everything that happens to me in words somewhere (online journals, daily journals, poetry journals, dream journals - I have them all). They come in handy in many situations, especially for "referring to the document when someone else tries to deny the past." I can't count how many times my friends have brought up something that happened in the past, misconstruing the details to fit their own ideas or agendas. "No, no, my friend" I will interject. "I was writing in my journal while that happened, and I had recorded it much differently" (I write/record a lot of dialogue between friends, etc.). Many times have I gone back to disprove their memories....and what can they say when they see the whole conversation has been transcribed or, better yet, recorded as audio? Many of my friends and acquaintances tend to watch what they say around me these days.

Even more helpful, these journal allow me to fulfill the last sentence of the quote. By rereading these experiences and conversations (and sometimes juxtaposing them with other people's accounts of the same experience/conversation) I am able to uncover what I personally tend to notice and not notice in any given situation. Sometimes I will read another's account of something I had been writing about and say "My God! I didn't even remember that that had happened!". Our ability to observe is limited. Our mind may, somewhere, be recording every little detail, but our consciousness only brings a certain amount of that to the surface as information to get stored as an easily accessible memory.

If it were up to me, everyone would record everything in some way. We could then use tools like the wiki to bring these writings, etc. together in order to form a more complete picture of what "actually happened". It still, obviously, would not be perfect, but the more input we have, the more details we can acknowledge. I am doing something like this right now. I have been working on drafting a fictional account of the last year of my life (mostly revolving around life at my old dwelling, Mound Park.) I am in the planning stages, and my first step was to create a "Mound Park Wiki" where I have invited everyone who was a part of that environment to come together and share their experiences at the Mound. The idea is to get the whole story from as many different perspectives as possible and then mold them all into one "fictional" account in hopes of answering the daunting question: "What is home?"

I can't do this alone. This project is about a "collective space" that more than one person created and maintained, and so I need the input of every creator and contributor. A "Creative Commons", like our wiki, makes this possible.

Perhaps I'm straying from my point: that journaling, at least to me, is the truest form of writing. Everything else that I create springs from the scribbled pages of stacks and stacks of old notebooks. However, journaling is typically a "personal" thing. We are writing for ourselves in order to document or evaluate. But, what happens when we journal in a collective space? Can a collaborative journal (such as the wiki I have started for Mound Park) express a more accurate picture of reality? Will a collection of subjective writings on a given event create an objective outlook on that event, or will it just become diluted with subjectivity (which may then lead to argument)?

I intend to find out.

Most importantly, keeping a journal makes it fun to go back and reread your experiences from your own POV. This alone makes journaling worth it. Wouldn't it be nice, at the end of the year, or the end of your life, to have some account to go back to and read? Some account of everything that happened from youth until the present? Or to have some distant ancestor (great, great grandson, perhaps) come across your notebooks in some dusty box in the back of their parent's attic and have to opportunity to read about your life in your words as it happened? Personally, I would love nothing more than to find some detailed account of my ancestor's lives written by their own hand. Only you can record your life, no one else observes  it as closely as you do. Why rely solely on memories (which will, probably, perish with our bodies) when we have pen and paper, or even computer (a medium on which your memories may last forever). 

(This response accidentally produced another aspect of your exploration of journaling: Collaborative Journaling, or "journaling in a "creative commons" - which relates heavily to our work in this class via wiki. Let's explore.)    -Adam