Tuesday, January 27

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As I write this on Tuesday morning, we are officially back to normal operations. Things are not quite “normal” yet for many of us:

  • Very extreme cold (plus wind chill) is our future for several days, so protect yourself.
  • If you are a commuter, I expect you to make your own decision about whether you can safely drive to campus, and if you don’t think it’s a good idea, please email me. Between the cold weather and the possibility that country roads still aren’t clear, driving might be a challenge.
  • I am not 100% sure I will be able to make it to campus. I haven’t been outside my apartment since Friday, and I live on a dead-end street at the very edge of the City of Mansfield. (I can see the line from my bedroom window, about fifteen feet from my bed.) It is a street with many apartments, home to hundreds of people, but we really are the edge of the world. No snow plowing yet. I will do my best, but my car is not made for pushing through deep snow. Watch your email to see whether I need to cancel class.

About Wednesday

All of this free writing may seem pointless—after all, if it is not for a grade, why do it? The answer is that writing of this kind is very similar to an athletic warm-up. Every athlete does things which don’t exactly count as touchdowns or home runs. They run; they do pushups. Some of it is simply building strength or muscle memory. When you sing in a chorus, the director will start the rehearsal with nonsense syllables, climbing the scale. Some of it sounds pretty foolish. It’s all there for a reason.

Besides the muscle memory, the point is simply to get you used to the idea of ideas coming out of your pen. When I was a little kid, swimming terrified me. I was certain that the next thing after falling into deep water would be drowning. For a member of the swimming team, though, jumping into deep water is no big deal. They simply start doing the stuff that they have been doing day after day for weeks. The terror isn’t there. The right motions are natural. Even if it’s an emergency—extremely cold water, for example—they have a history of swimming, so they are not totally lost. All this free writing is aimed at the same goal: getting you used to the environment of writing, so a specific assignment isn’t the terror (“OMG! I’m going to drown!”) that it used to be.

That required purchase

Beginning Wednesday, you will need a spiral notebook of some sort. (For the left-handers, I recommend the kind with the spiral at the top of the page.) The assignment itself is in the Blackboard folder for Wednesday. You will be responding to several prompts over the next month or so, putting your writing in the notebook. The reason it’s an assignment for points, is, obviously, that I want you to actually do this work—and the smart person does these things as they are assigned, not the evening before the whole thing is due.

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