Get Organized: Cluttered Computer

At first, this blog assignment horrified me.

             

            I absolutely abhor organizing things. I am among those convinced that organization cripples the creative process (or at least among those who pretend to believe that to justify clutter). But I knew I couldn’t exactly avoid this assignment, so I started figuring out what I was going to organize. Right away, I knew which project needed my immediate attention.

 My computer is an actual disaster. On the outside, it may look harmless enough, but deep within hides the most cluttered, jumbled, indiscriminate assembly of files you could even begin to imagine. This may sound like a gross exaggeration, but I am being completely serious.

             

              It’s my own fault too. When I have to type things for school, a majority of the time I know I’ll never have to see it again once I print it out. Therefore, I don’t bother to title it anything. 80% of the time I use the default title the computer gives me to name my documents. This means that my documents folder is filled with files like Document21 and Document36. It’s also filled with impulsively titled documents that I can no longer decipher by title alone, for example a file called (and I’m not kidding, this is really one of them) “dafdsafdasasdaf”. Besides being inside the document folder, these files are not organized at all. I have writing assignments from 7^th grade mixed in with essays I wrote last week, and most of them are impossible to distinguish without being opened and then classified every time. I knew this project was going to be tedious and frustrating, but I was willing to do it.    

            

             My plan was to first identify and rename all of my nondescript files. The next step would be to relocate them to one of three folders: Archives, Freshman Year, and Sophomore Year. Within the Freshman and Sophomore year files, I created individual files for different subjects. Feeling a little less overwhelmed now that I had a clear plan in mind, I proceeded to organize the living daylights out of my documents folder.

           

             I proceeded with my plan and one by one opened, identified, classified and relocated document after nondescript document. In the middle of this task I started to discover really old writing assignments, which made me reminisce about my middle school days. It became less like a task to open up each document and more like opening a little present. Cliché metaphor aside I was genuinely entertained by old assignments I remembered; that is until I started to actually read them.

           

              I began to realize I wasn’t as good of a writer as I thought I was in middle school. Some of my older writing was really horrifying to me, if only because I had thought them fairly good pieces of writing then and now I was seeing them for how flawed they actually were. Ideas I thought were deep were actually shallow, my grammar was surprisingly poor in several places, and it was just not writing I would allow myself to turn in today. I was really upset until I stumbled upon an essay I had written for my English class earlier this year. Flaws I had committed in earlier pieces of writing were absent here; this writing didn’t make me cringe, and in fact I was quite proud of it. The realization dawned on me that I have grown a lot as a writer over the course of just a few years.

            

            By the end of this assignment I felt exhausted and victorious. My catastrophe of a computer had finally been tamed and I could not have been more relived. Organizing my computer must’ve had some sort of effect on my mind because I was thinking with a sort of clarity that I had never felt before: I had just organized my writing career from 7^th grade up till now and it made me feel a little more in control of my life; I liked it.  Besides feeling like I had just climbed a mountain in two hours by accomplishing what I previously thought impossible, I realized that I had actually climbed another mountain without realizing it: in the past several years I have grown immensely as a writer. My style has gotten more sophisticated, my technique sharper, and my ideas deeper. I had never realized it, it’s been hidden behind the clutter of a thousand essays and book reports, but I have truly become a much better writer.

           

Blogging Around: Kathryn and Anya

Kathryn: Inconvenient Truth: Fifty Percent Wrong

                 

              The focus of Kathryn’s original post was her process of coming to terms with the realization that people are always fifty percent wrong. After being introduced to the idea by her English teacher, Kathryn started thinking about how being fifty percent wrong all the time affected her life. She decided that this was not essentially a bad thing because it opened opportunities to learn. In the same way, after being introduced to the idea by Kathryn’s blog post, I started to think about how it affects mine.

                 

              Kathryn! Just like you were introduced to the idea of being fifty percent wrong by your English teacher, I have now been introduced to the idea by you, and begun to think about it myself.

             Like you talked about, the idea of being fifty percent wrong all the time can be frustrating. There are tons of things everyday that I just assume I am right about; namely (like Kathryn mentioned) my beliefs. I do this every day and never really notice it; however, they have a profound affect on my life. If I can’t have confidence that even the things I believe in most strongly are fully accurate, how am I supposed to even have beliefs about anything? A belief (whether it be which religion you follow or which football team is superior) is something you believe in. How am I supposed to believe in anything if I already know I am half wrong all the time?

             Like you, I have found a way to come to terms with it. I take being “fifty percent wrong” to mean that I am never correct about everything I know. However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t know anything, or am wrong about everything. I see this fact as an opportunity to have a constant learning experience throughout my life; to take what I don’t know yet fully and pursue it until I know as much as possible. In the same way, I don’t see it to mean that everything I believe is wrong, just in a constant state of philosophical evolution. Especially now, in adolescence, my ideas are changing and growing all the time; this doesn’t mean I didn’t know anything before, it just means that I know more now to change the way I think about something. Neither state of belief was necessarily incorrect, just incomplete, and now I am ok with accepting that my beliefs are still incomplete even now. Knowing that I am fifty percent wrong all the time doesn’t have to make me stop believing it anything, rather is makes me more open to ideas since I realize that I might not have the full picture yet.

Anya: Change of Mind: The Works of the Bard

                 

                 Reading Anya’s post( the focus of which was her relationship with Shakespeare and his writing style) was particularly interesting, because our experiences have been profoundly similar. Like me, her initial response to Shakespearan langaueg was lukewarm at first. Then she described how eventually she came to appreciate Shakespeare's words because there was value to be gained even from lines she had to struggle through.

                

               Anya! Like you, I initially saw Shakespeare’s use of language to be superfluous and confusing. If his ideas were so interesting, why couldn’t he just say them in plain English without any of this linguistic nonsense? I had trouble seeing through the words to get to the ideas they stood for. Even last year, during the reading of Romeo and Juliet, I had my doubts about the validity of using Shakespearean language to describe anything of importance.

However, this year, after reading Orlando, I have gained a profound sense of appreciation for the art of language and the art of conveying ideas. Something we explored while reading Orlando is the concept that there are ideas that cannot be communicated simply by stating them. It is truly an art and a science to convey abstract concepts to a reader, and it can only be done with the deliberate use of specific language. In this way, Shakespeare leads his readers to ideas like and artist paints on a canvas. By using poetic language and structure, he is able to convey beauty and significance in ways that would otherwise be lost by the use of simple or frank language. Like Anya, I have come to appreciate this talent more, and keep it in mind even when I am struggling to understand a Shakespearean novel, because I know there is meaning behind it.