Final Exam Journal Response

I took this class so that it could help me improve my writing skills, and I really feel like it has. I have always liked writing, and it has always been a hobby of mine, so it was nice to have a class time to focus on just that. I’ve always thought that one of my biggest weaknesses as an author has been describing details, settings, features, feelings, and other things…altogether, I’ve just always thought my biggest weakness was detail. However, I feel like my descriptions have greatly improved as I’ve worked through this class, particularly with my short story, Balloon. I knew that I wanted Balloon to be all about vibe, mood, and feeling, and after reading what I have done of it, I feel like I’ve done a good job of conveying the darkness in a hot sunny, southern, Georgia town. I come to like writing more and more the more that I do it. As a kid, I used writing to express cool ideas of action-packed stories, but as an adult, I use writing to express my inner self and my feelings. Stories I have written such as New, Balloon, and several of my blogs have been methods of complete catharsis for me. New is among one of my favorite works, and I’m sure that Balloon will be when I finish it. I really love and respect the stories that I pour my heart into because they are my thoughts and personal feelings taken out of my head and printed on paper, and it feels good to get them out. I expect to continue writing well into my future. The main things I will be writing are my own screenplays and ideas for my movies that I want to direct, as I want to write the majority, if not all, of my films. Aside from writing movie scripts, I wouldn’t mind writing a book or two in the future, and I would really like to publish short stories that I write. I would love to publish the ones I’ve written now, but they only deserve to be in things like The New Yorker and not “The Athens Mag for Kiddie Stories,” so I’ll wait until I can achieve something like that. For now, I need to finish Balloon, and next I will begin work on The Sleeping Lifeguard and the Drowning Girl.

Story continued...

After I got done watchin’ “Fabulous Life Of,” these thoughts were whirling around in my head, and I was beginning to feel a bit claustrophobic, so I got up and left our trailer and walked over to the small rickety swing-set that stood off to the side of our microscopic yard. The swings were nothin’ special, just some deteriorating plastic seats attached to some rusty metal. It was one of the nicer things that my parents had managed to afford for me and my sister when we were little. Normally, our yard would be littered with old toys that we never touched along with these swings if I hadn’t decided to clean the yard one day after I heard a joke on TV about how “rednecks” have yards that are covered with their kids toys. I was no redneck, or at least I didn’t want to be, and I cleared everything out of our yard except for those two swings. I sat down in the one on my left, and there I swung for almost a half an hour as I thought about my situation. I almost always preferred being outside like that over being inside our dumpy trailer ‘cause I felt like I could breathe outside. Our house confined me within it’s thin walls and mildewed ceiling, but outside I could see all the way up to outer space and I felt like flying there was a possibility. On that day, I just stayed in that swing and let the playful wind blow through my hair. I wasn’t in the mood for doing anything. I was drownin’ in my thoughts, and I just wanted to sit there and attempt to catch my breath. Momma came home soon after that with a couple of groceries and I helped her carry them inside. And sadly enough, those were the most eventful parts of my day. I did nothing else but stay in the house, eat dinner, and then I took my nighttime shower. We had a shower with a cheap plastic interior rather than some elegant tile pattern like the people on “Fabulous Life Of,” and my whole family shared the same shower.

Entry #42. The Valet

So I’m working in a valet and it sucks… At least most of the time. Usually some rich people come to me and just toss me their car keys and two bucks so that I can go park their fancy expensive cars, and it really pisses me off. Except for when I actually get in the car. It’s then that I have fun. Usually I take their car to the parking spot, and then I go crazy. I rummage through their glove boxes and compartments and I look around in their door pockets. I’ve found everything. I look at pictures of their kids and their parents and other family members. I find notes, reminders, to-do lists stashed away in the car. Sometimes I’ll even find the occasional used condom that has been stashed away in a napkin somewhere, probably the left-over evidence of a cheating scandal. Sometimes I’ll find hairs that have been shed in the backseat, next to some scratch-marks along the fine leather interior, and perhaps some sprinkled blood-drops, dried to a brown crust that chips off of the seats. Sometimes I find other stains that I don’t want to know about. If I’m lucky, the person whose car I’m parking leaves their cell phone in the car, and I get to rummage through that. I find the best stuff in the cell phones: the nude photos in the saved pictures, the quick thirty-second clip of a one night stand or a drunk college kid yelling in the saved videos, and the text messages from the wife telling the husband to pick up the groceries, and from the husband’s mistress telling him to stop by her house on the way home. I love thinking that I could destroy anyone of these people’s lives if I want. All these people coming to eat at this five-star restaurant where I work. All these rich people who are so pretty on the outside with their glam and shimmering jewelry, but so ugly on the inside with their grimy lives and dirty secrets. But rather than destroy their lives, I usually just soak up the little bits of their lives that I can, and I allow them to go eat their unsuspectingly tainted “five-star” food.

Journal Entry 41: Mini Story

They had nothing to say to each other. It wasn’t one of those awkward silences that makes you shift around in your seat as you desperately think of the next thing to say. It was the kind of silence where no one was talking because they didn’t want to say anything, and they were completely comfortable with that. Steve and Susan just drove down the street, knowing that what they had just done would inevitably catch up with them, but at the same time, they tried not to let themselves think that. That Hispanic boy’s body was probably still anchored to the bottom of the river with the ropes and bricks they had tied to him, and they hoped that things would stay that way. Even if the water did wear the ropes away, and the body was nothing but bones, he could still be identified by dental records. They hoped that he was an illegal immigrant. That way, none of his relatives would be able to hold a court case against them and put them in jail for the rest of their lives. They had their own young daughter that they had to take care of, and they couldn’t let a simple mistake ruin her life, their lives, and the lives and reputations of their entire families. They hadn’t meant to hit the little boy. It was so dark outside, and he had no business being in the middle of the road like that. So they just rode along, and they let themselves drown in the silence of the car. They didn’t want to talk about it now, and they didn’t want to talk about it ever. They wanted to forget…something that the matted chunk of bloody hair that was stuck to the front of the car’s bumper would make very hard to do.

Story continued....

I got up from the chair and crouched down in front of the scattered VHS’s to pick one out to watch. Some of them were old Disney movies that I got when I was little, but one in particular caught my eye. It had a white sticker stuck to the front of it with the words “Fabulous Life of: Secret Lives of the Mega Rich” scribbled in pen across it. It was a taped copy of the VH1 “Fabulous Life of” show that I had recorded off TV when our cable bill was paid for. The “Fabulous Life of” series was all about celebrity livin’, like how expensive their mansions and yachts were and how much money they tended to blow in a day. Most other people who had seen the show in my town considered it a show documenting how spoiled some people were, but I considered it a show about how successful or lucky certain people were. I picked up the tape, popped it into my VHS player, and went and sat back down in my chair. And there I sat for another hour watching the fabulous life of mega rich stars, rewinding the tape at some points to catch how much a certain item cost for a celebrity or who the famous designer was that made the certain item.
I loved watchin’ shows like this because they changed my perspective on life. I would sit there and listen to the narrator of the show say “Five-hundred thousand dollars!” and “For a total sum of three point two million dollars!” and I would sit there and think about my living situation. These celebrities had done something with their lives, and they were reapin’ the benefits of it. While they took their vacations to their very own private islands, my daddy was workin’ as an employee at a local gas station that was fallin’ apart and lookin’ for small jobs around town in the meantime while my momma sat on her ass at home and occasionally went to spend his hard-earned money on cigarettes or other groceries. Sometimes she would babysit one of her friends’ kids for a small sum, but that was about the only income she made. I would watch these shows and learn about how some celebrity had worked hard as hell to live a life of luxury and occasionally feed the poor, and I would question how my parents settled for what they settled for.