just a friendly that's been juniorized.

I started writing when I was in the first grade, at least that's the earliest I remember writing, and this is my journal, so we're going with that. I wrote these "novels" about a character named after my best friend who was a cheetah, my favorite animal at the time. It was only lucky that my best friend Charity had such great alliterative possibilities with my favorite animal.

By novels, I mean stories that probably would have ended up being half a typed page long, written on sheets of illustrated notebook paper stapled together with three staples evenly spaced apart on the left edge. I sold them to my classmates for a nickel apiece. It was a loose definition of novel, but no one seemed to mind.

As far as writing for fun went, I pretty much stuck to Charity the Cheetah for the next couple of years, though I did write a novel about an Native American princess named Running Flower or something like that who had a pet dinosaur. The whole thing strikes me as historically inaccurate now. Once I tired of having Charity get caught by the hunter and devising yet another clever way of escaping, I began experimenting with other forms of writing, specifically song lyrics and poetry.

I did poems and lyrics for years. Most of them were about my pet cats. I say "most" only because I mean "all" but don't want to appear completely weird. Most of these historical relics of my writing past have been lost or burned or shredded or torn to tiny tiny pieces and then burned, though I do remember the lyrics of one of my songs, one about a cat named Friendly Jr., the son of Friendly. I was very fond of descriptive names in those times. This was the chorus:

He's not Friendly, he's not junior,
He's just a Friendly that's been juniorized.
He's just a Friendly that's been juniorized,
in his eyes.

It was a classic tune, about struggling to be seen as your own person apart from your family while still being able to be a part of the greater whole. I'm really not sure where I got the inspiration.

I stopped writing poetry and song lyrics completely around the sixth grade, when I finally realized that I was terrible at it. As bright as I was, it really did take quite a while for me to figure that out. It took a whole notebook full of pink paper with a cat on the cover full of poetry to convince me that I was just really rotten. I also realized that I didn't sing very well either at about this time, and found myself in the despairing position of being nearly thirteen years old with no direction in my life. I dabbled in fiction some, but found no comfort in my stories about the dectective who solves the painfully obvious mysteries and had the same name as my new best friend. It may have been around this time that I decided to be a computer programmer, so deep was my despair. I had pretty much stopped writing for fun anymore, thinking that it was just another one of those silly things I did as a kid. I like to call this period my awkward stage, both in terms of my writing and my life in general.

The awkward stage of my writing continued until the eighth grade, while the awkward stage of my life continues even now with no apparent end in sight. It was at this time that I was assigned a major class writing project, an autobiography. It was about seventeen or eighteen chapters, each chapter having anywhere from two to half a dozen writing prompts about life. It was no trivial task to begin with, but it was one of the few projects where I showed myself as an overachiever, and not merely an achiever. Some of the prompts I found little to talk about, such as my favorite kind book to read and things like that, but others really sparked me and I took off, writing pages and pages about things I didn't even realize were important to me. I tried all kinds of different angles for different prompts (including writing an interview between TV Guide and myself to answer the prompt about my first experience on stage, as well as an in-utero monologue about my nearly-tragic birth), and found myself editing and re-editing for weeks. The thing turned out to be about 130 pages long, typed and double-spaced, with pictures supplied from my family albums. I was so proud of this work, this masterpiece, that I kept all the original hand-written first drafts as well as the final book.

The experience of my autobiography reminded me why I had liked writing so much as a kid, and taught me both that my strength lied in nonfiction essays and that nonfiction didn't necessarily have to be boring. I threw away that silly computer science profession idea and steered myself for a life of productive and unappreciated poverty as a writer instead.

I still didn't write much for anything but class, which concerned me. It was a general lack of inspiration and desire, and I figured that real writers probably wrote for other reasons than deadlines. I wrote some prolific pieces for English class, including a poem about how much I hated writing poetry, but other than that, I generally concerned myself with being a teenage girl instead, which took up a surprising amount of time.

I was particularly productive during my senior year of high school, both from English class and the ridiculous amount of essays I had to write for scholarship applications. The application essays appealed to me because they forced me to think a little outside the box to make myself stand out from the hundreds of better qualified but perhaps less articulate applicants. There was one essay in particular that I remember writing for a completely mundane prompt about my hobbies or something. I was so bored from the prompt that I ended up writing a third person narrative that answered the question. I didn't really intend to use it, except that the scholarship had some 8,000 applicants and chose fifteen finalists, the average SAT score of which was above 1500. I figured it was a lost cause anyway, so I sent off the essay and forgot about it. When I went to my series of interviews with the fourteen other finalists, every single interviewer asked me about that essay. I didn't win. Apparently, one of the other people had saved a busload of orphans or something and then taught them to read, and no essay is that good.

From my rebirth after my awkward stage up through high school, I was always very private about my writing, almost neurotically so. I let my English teachers read it, because I had to, and I let my mother read it, because I had to have some sort of outside editing and she was guaranteed to like it, being that kind of mother. But that was it. We were encouraged to let our classmates edit our work, a suggestion I completely ignored. For the most part, I did my own editing, much more obsessively than a classmate would have done anyway.

And now we arrive here, to the point where I write this and put it somewhere where you read it, where anyone with a computer, an internet connection, and the right combination of letters can read it. To update you, I am a computer science major with an online journal updated semi-regularly viewable by the public and a passion for garlic mashed potatoes. It's the first time in my life that I'm writing for the sheer fun of it, writing because I enjoy it and writing because people can read it and relate to it, even if it's not always very good. Take this seriously, dear readers, because who knows if I'll look back on this time and call it my glorious beginning or my short period of productivity. Regardless of where it leads, I'm enjoying it.

Besides, if this whole computer thing doesn't pan out, I can always go back to song lyrics about cats.