‘Author’ Note/Coversheet:

There seems to be a preoccupation with content, as opposed to process, in our class meetings. That’s understandable because we all have varying purposes, some with real consequences. We can all agree that we are all writers and that is our common ground.

Assumption!

Whatever we write, we can always talk about how we write. For me, I start out with pen and paper, scribbling in margins and on post it notes. I draft and draft and then I walk (sometimes run) away. Other times, I throw a piece together willy nilly, combining whatever influences that come to the front of my line of thinking. I have a corkboard on the wall covered in the beginnings and endings of novels and plays that I haven’t written yet. There’s a reading list that grows so fast I can never hope to gain ground on it. I want to step back from my little project and write about writing for awhile. See where the wiki takes me and then wonder how I got there.

So here’s my portfolio of emergence: I have stolen random bits of prose from each of you and attempted to make one document out of it. Each of us has his or her own voice, but can we shape a collective out of it? I hope so. In other words, it’s a remix of bits of everyone’s work. As I combined all of us, I marveled at how my brain wanted so desperately to make sense of the emerging whole. How does your brain make sense of this portfolio?

Since this portfolio is a representation of all of us together, please do whatever you want with it. It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. We are the writer and we are the audience and our purpose is to expose compositional strategy so that we may learn something about this funny little wiki.

Without further ado, here is my portfolio of emergence:

The Rulebook for Arguments Ch 1. The point of arguing? To explore ideas. ID Premises and Conclusions. Start from Reliable Premises. Be Concrete and Concise. Build on Substance, not Overtone. Use consistent terms:

The Great Indoors will be an indoor playground for children between the ages of 2 and 10 years old, and will provide a safe atmosphere that encourages children to exercise and stay healthy. It will offer all of the environmental benefits of outside playgrounds, but will provide a much needed alternative to the heat, allergens, and tropical weather. It will be roughly the size of a grocery store, with synthetic grass, unique jungle gym equipment, and a small café which will offer light and healthy meals. In addition to inexpensive passes for access to the playground, it will also offer programs such as childcare, afterschool care, yoga for kids, and special events like story times and birthday parties. In addition to being a place for healthy, family-oriented physical activity, and as to define transfers itself to to be exotic the goal as upon the skin to college that thing common to and arrives simultaneously, howl shifts from to be transformations same gesture. I I had motivation, world is not that the world Sometimes the image their instruction of color. There is different levels of world seems vaguely The question, "Of so when I mistake after it the motivating force perceptual abilities and way into being they ARE being    need, to promise many times it affects countless amounts from the dorms & orphans… I did seem to grow out of these issues by and large. I still had some issues, but doesn't everyone? I didn't worry about it until after I had my first child. My pregnancy was difficult, to put it mildly, and I continued to have problems afterward - strange neurological episodes that gave me weird sensations like water dripping down my head, muscle spasms and swelling, a hand that went numb and ice cold, and pain. Lots of pain that seemed totally random. My joints started popping in and out of place all over my body, including a rib that will painfully dislocate at the drop of a hat.

For almost 13 years I searched for answers, but no one had any to give me. Last month, a rheumetologist finally did and that is when I found out I have EDS Type III, also known as Hypermobility Joint Disorder. I had been saying for a long time that I just wanted an answer and that I could handle any diagnosis, just give me one. That was what I had been telling myself, but that wasn't quite true. I wanted an answer because I wanted a fix; risk and freedom go hand in hand. To be free, one needs to open themselves to the possibility of risk. It is certainly safe and secure to live within walls under protecting eyes, but to do so requires the cost of self-reliance. The result can be one of utter despondency, of shame, of anger at the sense of being deprived of seeing and knowing what is out there. It is an anger akin to sensing one's own potential being chipped away by a hammer of expedient security and being shaped into mediocrity. To live is to risk oneself. Risk is the cost. Just as security, then, requires some cost of freedom, freedom requires that level of opening oneself up to the dangerous unknown. Turning this to a wider perspective, the United States, famous as being the Land of the Free, in the last decade has had its values of freedom which Americans so pride themselves in, be put under trial. For so long, the U.S. has proudly hailed itself as a land of freedom. However, with the events of 9/11, the planets flew toward the earth, growing large and fast over the horizon. I don’t think all eight lined up, but definitely Mars, Venus, Pluto, and Saturn. I stood on my porch, an adult at my childhood home, and watched. I wondered what was happening, was I dreaming.  As I watched, the orbs exploded like they were shot with a bullet. One at a time, the planets turned to a sparkly dust that fell back into the clear evening sky. My neighbors came over, their faces weren’t recognizable.

Someone got our attention and organized us into a sort of militia group. I didn’t know why but we got our yard tools—rakes, shovels, brooms, garbage can lids. The weakest of the group wore pots and colanders to protect their heads. The group of us, now foolishly armed, carefully walked down the street looking for the enemy. The entire school was buzzing with excitement - for the teachers, they finally got to find out if their hard work drilling the five-paragraph essay into our ten year old brains had paid off, and for us, the students, we got to find out how much bragging we would have the right to do at recess. Seeing a near perfect score on my test was one thing, finding out I had the highest score at my entire school meant I lost my bragging rights, I was now a goody-two-shoes. But I didn't care; the pride I felt on the inside as I folded my test neatly in thirds and tucked it away in my pajama drawer was far more rewarding than World War Three on the playground. Over the many years since that fateful test, my relationship with my mom has been distant and at times tumultuous.

When she walked out, the room got very quiet and there was a slight brush of air as the machine whooshed on. Then clicking, clanking, a strange light from far inside the cavernous machine. It pulled me closer, slowly, with a low humming that was slightly unnerving, and once my lower half was in the small tube, the real noise started. Looking up, I saw a small digital clock that would count down, each time the little pieces inside were settling. Then the machine would fire up like a loud steam engine and I got this funny tingling sensation in my legs-- I swear I could feel those magnets! And the clock would countdown- first from 6 minutes. Then more noise from inside the machine, more shifting and clicking, and a new clock would appear. Sometimes it was 3 minutes, sometimes 2, sometimes 6.  And I found myself in the peculiar situation of feeling afraid. As more and more time passed, an unusual fear crept in. I laid there and prayed for good news. Please God, no broken bones. Please God, no surgery. Thank you God, for all the beginnings essentially start off softly/Endings complete the chain abruptly/In the scheme of life what are we/
Considering galaxies; nothing/Are there any words for the dreamers/Any satisfaction for the philosophical mind/Am I just wondering an endless road/Or is there some point of intersection with another/place where my eyes remain open/Rather than closed most of the time/Silence alone condescends me/alone under the night sky/Does that constellation truly tell stories from ages past? She asked me why. I said that when she loses her memory and talks about some place that doesn’t sound familiar to me and I’m confused, now I will know where she went. I thought of asking her this after I met a man who said his father lives here in Florida, but thinks he’s 35 years old and living in NY. Maybe people ‘go’ to where they had the most fun, the most pleasant memories. I told her the story about the man who thought he was still 35 years old. She said her favorite time was when she lived in Los Angeles for a couple years, when she was 17 and 18 years old, with her oldest sister. I said that if she ‘goes’ to California she will be a pretty young chic. She laughed. I wished that her oldest sister was still alive (may she rest in peace) so I could tell her that apparently that was one of the best times in my mother’s life. 

The interesting thing is that my mom really didn’t want to move to California. She stuck out her thumb and caught the first cab the hell out of there. Some kind of (culture) wars just aren't worth fighting. So I raised the white flag and planted the pole in the soil of my imagined nation, where 'good' and 'bad' withered back into a stifled binary that I could ignore. But those gold fettered pages cannot wither or fade. Nor should they: we need them as the measured needs the ruler, as the weatherman needs a Bob Dylan lyric. That's pretty crazy. Now I'm thinking about what I would do for money. This is interesting, check this out. So it goes back to the cheating thing. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases the evidence is massive. Consider what happened on a spring evening at midnight in 1987. 7 million American children suddenly disappeared. What? The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15th and the IRS had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a social security number. Suddenly, 7 million children- children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year's 1040 forms- vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States. So people were claiming children to get more money from the government because they didn't have to prove it? Whoa, when was that? 1987? Yeah, imagine how many years that was going on. Imagine how much extra money people were gettting. Wow, that's crazy. 7 million children disappeared. Cheaters. And that was weird because the space just took it and made it go away. Like, with all this space around, it made me forget, being so spacey and all. I didn’t know what to do so I said something like “What?’ and there was this long time where nothing happened and Sally didn’t say anything and so I started to wonder.

There was so much space just totally surrounding us. It was behind us and in front of us and all around us and if you looked around hard enough, you could see things in it. Things like a lamp and some shelves and a T.V. It made think that there was something else to do. Like, with all this stuff, there was something else to do but stare. But then, that was all just stuff. The same way this was all just space. Then I thought about that for a long time and then of Sally and how she was just stuff and how I was just stuff, in this space. Then that started to freak me out so I said something like I can make a difference is this world by doing my part in helping my community around me and having a big enough heart to be able to give up my own time for the greater good. I can hope and try to promote others to join me and show them just how much of a difference any little bit helps. I think this world needs more helpers and contributors and less skeptics and people who push the less fortunate down just to benefit themselves. I know that I can have a bigger heart and stop and just take the time to volunteer to help whether it be cleaning the roads or preparing the food at the local soup kitchens because somewhere out there lies a wishing well/Inside you will find love, hope, and truth/Send not someone else to find them/Simple things like those can often be lost or stolen/You will find them and know they are true/Wishes aren’t simple; rather complex ideas/If you have the hope you’ll never need wishes/Love will show you all the people you need/Show these people the love and hope you possess/Only then will they see the truth that lies in your heart/Never worry if they for get to show you how much they care/That worry belongs to them. They now pass into the mainstream of society, left with little choice in employment and the vulnerability of being exploited, or they wander through life as case numbers within the welfare or correctional system.

Therefore I question what our responsibility as a society is to these individuals without pointing fingers to that first deep breath after walking out of an office building at 5 PM on a Friday afternoon. The breeze taps on the shoulder as if to say, “Hey you, where have you been?” The weekend is upon us, the time that belongs to you and you alone, the breath of fresh air. Then comes the phone call that is very much expected from a friend that feels the same, “You want to go out tonight?” Duh. I’m not a drunk, but I drink. Sometimes I even drink a lot. My only excuse is that it’s Friday and I am in my early to mid twenties.  Don’t judge me- I hate when you do that. The warm water shoots out of the shower head like a fire hose but doesn’t come close to putting out the fire inside. The soap beats the bacteria off of my skin earned from a hard day’s work. The radio plays in the background but the music is swallowed by the sound of the water smacking the bottom of the porcelain tub and my awkward singing voice singing along badly. "May I have one?" He looked at her, a cigarette hanging limply from his lips.  His hand cupped a lit match as he pressed it to the tip.  A line of smoke rose to the ceiling, coiling with the tremors of his hand. "This is my last one." It bobbed with each syllable, as the open corner of his mouth, wet with saliva, spewed smoke. She smiled, and he turned to the open window. The street lamp shone over his shoulder. It blurred the silhouette of his head into light. It seemed that, from the light, smeared into the glass, the smoke drifted. "Anne," he said, "I've got to tell you something." He lifted the cigarette, and the light spat smoke. "What?"

I'm not sure what to do with the Wiki.