Rebecca HarmonProfessor BudrisWriter’s Mind Portfolio12/17/14

A Perfect Life Packed Away

There will be times in our lives when we will encounter a special kind of pain. It will

give our hearts so much weight, leaving us unsure of whether our minds and bodies will be

able to hold them up any longer. It doesn’t matter what kind of attempts we make to drown

this pain; there are no words, drugs, or gestures that can make it subside for any longer

than just a moment. Today, I suffer from this pain especially, as I pack up my things to move

out of my freshman dorm.

I pull my dresses off their hangers, folding each one up and placing it neatly into the

dark red suitcase that holds the rest. Evanescent films flash through my mind; in them I can

see myself wearing each and every dress on all of the most perfect, most dear to my heart

occasions. The blue long-sleeved that I wore the night I locked myself out of my building,

moments prior to the hours I spent lying in the community bathroom, with my roommate,

Kaitlyn by my side, and my elegantly curled hair dipped in the toilet. Next is the tribal print

dress that was unzipped in the middle of a conversation at a house-party by a boy I didn’t

know, and lastly, my favorite, the gold lace dress that found a thousand ways to fight with

my ex boyfriend on any and every occasion. I zip up my suitcase as I remember these so

incredible nights for what seems like the very last time.

I pull a box of shoes out from under the bed. I pick up my favorite pair of glamorous

leopard printed Target-brand slippers and place them on top. The slippers that guided my

feet up and down the elegant freshman stairwell so many times throughout the tiresome

days and interminable nights. How beautiful it was - Scurrying around this old historic

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brick building, lying to my ex-boyfriend on the phone, waking up in the wrong part of the

building, and sneaking back to my room at 6 AM so many times. I’m afraid to say that these

slippers will never guide me along so blissfully again. I hope they will remember all of these

incredible moments, because I’ve already begun to forget. I close up the box of shoes and

slide it closer to the door. Another part of my life is packed away for good.

I can hear the police and ambulance sirens outside the window. I realize how

comforting it is that they never quite seem to fade away. They served as a welcoming

chorus the day that we moved in, and a goodnight lullaby every night since. But today they

sing a sad melody that sounds like goodbye. I can also hear the girls next door, just as I

always can. It makes me recognize how truly lucky I am to have gotten the chance to live

with so many lovely girls. I’ll miss the eye contact we make in the hallways from time to

time, all of their late night phone call arguments, doors slamming shut so I always knew

when they were leaving for 8 AM classes, and especially, I will miss the times their

boyfriends would come into the bathroom while I was just getting out of the shower. How

nice it was: having so much company all the time. I wish I did not have to say goodbye, but

sadly, I know that moving out of this room means I will have to. I will miss those girls, as I

will miss all of the wonderful people I have met.

A tear comes to my eye as I pull picturesque photographs of memories off the walls.

When I was moving into this dorm I thought I would never be able to find friends who were

so smart, so determined, classy, inspiring, and so much like me. Now I find myself thinking

of ways to say goodbye, as I place into a pile snapshots of us peeing in fraternity house

bathtubs and crying on the floor surrounded by Domino’s pizza. These flashbacks make me

wish I could live in a fashion so wonderful and so lavish for the rest of my life.

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Unfortunately, they also remind me that my wish could never become a possibility. This

scotch tape, covered in dust and hair, that gave no effort holding these pictures up all year,

now seems to be even stronger than I am. It’s almost as if these photographs know they are

fading into commemorations of the past.

The room is beginning to look more and more like it did on the day that we were so

anxious about moving in. Will there be a trace that shows we were even here? If the many

layers of dazzling white paint on these walls could talk, I know they would tell the eloquent

tales of love with our very best friends and dalliance with boys we thought we knew. They

would warn the incoming effervescent freshmen of all the things they should come to love

and especially come to regret. They would never tell our deepest darkest secrets of

sneaking cookies or pulling the fire alarm or skipping way too many showers. They would

speak clearly of ecstasy and they would laugh the way that we have laughed within them,

except probably at our expense.

How do you say goodbye to a home? How do you let memories fade when they are

something you want to hold onto so dearly? By replacing them with newer ones? I am

disheartened at the realization that there may never be again, a memory of mine so idyllic

and so sublime as the life I have lived inside this room. I try one more time to whiteout the

area where we accidentally ripped off then glued back on a part of the wall. It’s almost like

you can’t even tell, like there really isn’t a trace. I glance around the almost vacant room as

feelings of sadness overcome me.

When I arrive back home to my Mom and Dad’s house, I’ll take off my shoes, sit on

the brand new living room furniture, and try to ignore that there’s no horrible girls next

door and that the bathroom doesn’t permanently smell like vomit. Until then, I will spend

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these last few moments with my roommate, my hall mates, and my best friends. We will cry

together as our parents come to remove us from the place that has stolen our sanity – the

place I now know as the best home I will ever have. I will try my hardest to keep this

wonderful place and all of its memories in my mind for the rest of my life. There is indeed a

special kind of pain that comes along when it is time to leave the home where you belong.

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Finding My Own Writer’s Mind

Introduction-

During The Writer’s Mind class this semester, I have had an amazing opportunity to

grow as a writer. I feel that all of the aspects of Core Value One were thoroughly taught during

this class. I finally learned for the first time what a rhetorical situation is, and how to consider a

rhetorical situation during my writing process. Not only that, but for the first time, I learned to

consider my actual writing process during all of my assignments, rather than to just begin

writing. This includes paying attention to my audience, voice, rhetorical situation, and

discovering new ideas to write about in any genre, whether they were already in my head or not.

I never even thought about my writing process before, and now that I have learned to, I can not

imagine creating a piece of writing without considering all of these things. I also learned how to

write about topics that are hard for me to discuss, which makes it much easier to write about

everything else. Even only throughout my assignments this semester, I have seen myself grow as

a writer.

Calibration Assignment-

For the calibration assignment, my intention was to demonstrate self critical awareness as

discussed in Core Value Four - to analyze myself as a writer from my own point of view and also

from an objective point of view. I think I did a good job with this at the time, although, looking

back at the assignment after learning so much this semester, I can now even better analyze

myself. At the time of writing this, I definitely felt that I took all of the necessary steps to writing

a short scene. Now I notice that I did not consider my audience as much as I would now, I did

not consider the rhetorical situation at all, and I only wrote one draft of the assignment before

turning it in, which I probably would not do today. I definitely am achieving my intentions for

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this written assignment as more time passes by, because I am becoming more self-aware as a

writer, and I am able to see the mistakes that I did not know that I was making when I wrote the

piece that I was analyzing.

Shadow Poem-

Writing a shadow poem seemed difficult to me in the beginning because I had never

expressed such personal feelings through writing, and I definitely have never shared anything so

personal with my classmates. I really surprised myself when I began writing my poem. I think I

did a good job with expressing my own feelings, and when the poem is explained, I think that my

readers can relate to the feelings that I have, and are moved by the these feelings as they are

reading. The shadow poem assignment really helped me get a feel of the power of the written

word, as discussed in Core Value Five. However, I am aware that even after my revisions, I left

my shadow poem far too ambiguous. When I read the poem over after I made the revisions, it

seemed so obvious to me what my metaphors stood for. Now I can see that it was not as obvious

to my readers. I have been working on the poem since I handed in my final copy for The Writer’s

Mind class, and now, as opposed to when I handed in my final copy, it is finally at a point where

my audience can successfully identify the shadow and the metaphors throughout the poem.

Memento Narrative-

For my memento narrative assignment, I wrote a scene from my childhood where my

best friend and I were arguing over which one of us got to play the “sled dog” in a game that we

made up. I then wrote a scene from this past year where my ex boyfriend bought me a very

expensive gift for no special occasion. In these scenes I was trying to reveal a moment of

realization that material items are not as important to me as things such as friendship, honesty,

trust, etc. This was a very interesting genre of writing that I have never gotten to experience

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writing in before. This gave me a whole new understanding of the genres that are referred to in

Core Value One. I think I did a really great job picking two scenes from my life, I did a good job

writing them both and showing emotion in them, but I think that I was once again too ambiguous

when it came to identifying the specific strength that I chose to reveal. If I got to do the

assignment over, I would make the strengths and overcoming weakness that I chose more

obvious to my audience. I think doing this would really improve my memento narrative and

better achieve what I intended on.

Parody Assignment-

When I first received the parody assignment in our class, I was very excited to start

working on it. I had never been assigned such a funny paper to write in any of my classes. I was

pretty sure I knew what a parody was before the assignment was given, and I was positive that I

knew what it was by the time I was ready to write my paper. But once I started writing, the idea

of a parody became very fuzzy to me again.

I chose to write about moving out of my freshman dorm because I remember how sad I

was at the time, and how hilariously ridiculous that is, because everybody knows living in a

freshman dorm is a terrible time. I spoke of packing away many different items in the room that

brought sadness to me as I remembered using them all throughout the school year.

As I got further and further along with my paper, the idea of what a parody is supposed to

sound like only became fuzzier. I lost the idea that was in my head and I could not seem to get it

back. I was fully aware that my paper was not correctly written when I brought in my first copy

for peer reviews, and I looked forward to the feedback that my group was going to offer.

After the peer review session, I still could not get the idea of a parody back into my

head. My partners gave me good advice on the paper, but they weren’t able to help me with my

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overall struggle, which was turning it into a parody. I think my writing confused them just as

much as it confused me, because they seemed to think that it was a parody. Now I can see that

even though I was over exaggerating the seriousness of my sadness, which is why the assignment

almost seemed to be correctly done, I was also acknowledging the fact that the dorms were old,

ugly, and disgusting. That is the aspect of my writing that kept it from being a parody. I was

writing from the viewpoint of, “It was a dump, but it was my dump!” when I should have been

writing of the viewpoint of, “This dorm is heaven on Earth.” I wish I were able to see that before

I handed my final copy in, but it’s better late than never, right?

Getting the chance to rewrite this assignment for my portfolio really helped me develop

as a writer even more. Once I received comments from my Writer’s Mind professor, I was able

to identify the places in my work where I was heading in that fuzzy direction of, “What is a

parody, again?” The first thing I did was getting rid of all the acknowledgements of the dorm life

being disgusting. I left in all of the funny terrible memories, such as falling asleep with my hair

in the toilet water, and listening to my hall-mates yelling at each other, but I narrated the paper as

if these memories were ideal.

Some parts of my paper had to be deleted entirely. I took out the whole section of

packing my movies away, because I could not find a way to make this paragraph seem like a

parody without straying too far away from the story that I was telling. I replaced the paragraph

with one that talked about my appreciation for the sirens and police whistles outside – something

that I had only briefly mentioned in my first draft. I thought this topic fit better into my

assignment and deserved more emphasis, especially since that was a really scary part about

moving to Glassboro.

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At this point, I feel that my parody assignment is correctly written. I do not acknowledge

the disgusting aspects about living in the dorm, but rather exaggerate the greatness of the

building that I lived in as well as the experiences I had living in it. Rewriting this paper took a

great deal of understand of the Core Value Four, which is all about self critical awareness. I

needed to understand what I was doing incorrectly as a writer, and how I could fix my mistakes

to make my paper better. It took me a long time to be able to understand how to tell my story in

the format of a parody, but after many revisions I believe that I have been able to accomplish just

that.

Conclusion-

The Writer’s Mind is the first class that I have ever taken where I truly felt I was growing

as a writer. I have never been challenged to consider so many things while I was writing, and

now that I have, I see all of these things as the most important things to consider. I think that

every student should take a class like this so that they have the opportunity to learn how to write

for certain audiences, to contribute to rhetorical discourse, and to gain the ability to write for all

different genres, as discussed in Core Value # 1. I see myself as a different person when it comes

to my writing, and I will take the things that I have learned in this class with me as I continue on

the journey of college, as well as the journey of life. I consider myself a writer now more than I

ever have before thanks to this class.

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