Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

English is a funny language. So many words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different meanings – that’s gotta be pretty annoying for English language learners, I imagine. Although, from what I understand, Manderin Chinese is much worse (or, rather, much more difficult) to learn.

cats have all the answers

When I was young I’d read these books about times past when they’d send young girls (of a certain social or income status) off to be, well, “finished” at a finishing school. This seems to have involved lessons in deportment, charm, and whatever else was considered “must have” knowledge for “ladies” of that time, who were mainly expected to be ornamental. I think there are such places still around, under different names and with slightly different goals, but I think the majority of us remain undone (at least, by those standards).

I’d like to finish school, at least paperwise. Learning is a lifelong adventure, so should never be finished, but school can be completed to someone’s satisfaction, I believe. I read a lot – have always done, from the time I was a child – but there is always more to learn so I have started with an online college to do that very thing. My life is too … not always chaotic, but unsettled and often constricted (caring for an elderly parent, for one) for me to effectively and consistently attend a brick and mortar university for at least this part of my journey. I need to be able to carry my school and work with me, wherever I go and under whatever circumstances I live, so online it is, with local brick and mortar support.

The thing is, mostly I want to write and to finish. Writing, that is. I’ve looked around at different people who can just sit down and rattle off a ream of stuff, whether the writing is professional or casual, punctuated well or stuff just haphazardly thrown in, meaningful pieces or utter nonsense, and I noticed the one thing that many of them seem to have in common is having attended someplace where writing a lot and quickly and actually finishing the item was required of them. For most, this was college, so while I was offline I made the decision to sign up, got in touch with them the next day and a couple of days later it was all done. I start on Monday.

This may seem a bit of a drastic solution to cleaning out my burgeoning drafts folder, but there is more to it, of course. Besides feeling that it is time to do this, and that there was more I needed personally, I kept coming up against roadblocks (some put there by me) when attempting to start my book or to write other things that I feel are important, so this seemed a good way to feed many birds with one seed packet.

It’ll turn out great, I think, this school for finishing stuff.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 7:16 am and is filed under bellybutton bedazzlement, learning stuff, stuff, telling our stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.