By Anabel Pasarow

I thought second semester senior year would be one big messy free-for-all. I would be the absentee punk kid opting for surf lessons with cool college-drop-out instructors by day and pulling all-nighters by night, or going to double features at the movies and feeling no remorse about not buying a ticket for the second show. These things haven’t happened though. While these delusions are not totally far off (I have been slacking off in school a bit), my plans for the semester were thrown off, in part by my Creative Writing class. In January, I stared at my schedule for the impending semester with quasi-excitement and some dread. Just the idea alone of having to crank out projects that probably required too much effort was kind of unsettling. I was close to dropping the class before the semester even began.

But what I had looked to with mostly indifference before the semester started turned into my day’s peak. Each new day of class became a 45-minute-long escape filled with blindfolded writing and iambic pentameter.

I sit pretzel-style at the same desk every day, taking in the signature sardonic, praising and witty commentaries of my classmates. There is the comfort of my little journal. I love to watch the contours of my pencil strokes and the way the ashes of my eraser collect in the seams of my journal. The tapping of toes around the room as we work in mellow calm is interchangeable with the passionate cries of students eager to defend their interpretations of and reactions to prose. The prospect of new writing forms and styles thrills me, the prospect of learning them, even more so. I am crafting stories and poems about faraway lands and dreaming up characters at the will of my pencil. Creative Writing grounds my days and serves as the centerpiece of my second semester. I produce work that I am proud of, and it only enhances my seniordom. This second semester is leagues better than the fictitious one I had dreamed up six months ago. I feel so lucky to have these sentiments.

Make it your goal to do what floats your boat. And even if it doesn’t float your boat, try it, because maybe you’ll learn that it does.