Decisions

I’ve been working on the assignment for the last few days, and I’ve discovered that it’s tough.  There are so many parts to your identity, how do you decide which are important enough to write about?  Obviously, you know some parts that you definitely want to cover.  I knew right off the bat I wanted to talk about reading and writing.  And I figured that gaming was a good thing to talk about, especially while I was procrastinating on the assignment a few nights ago by playing on my Xbox.  But there were some things that didn’t make the cut due to the page count, even though they are very important to who I am.  For example, I originally mentioned switching to English in academia, but I did not say where I come from or why.  In fact, I barely even talk about school, even though being a student is a large part of who I am right now.  And while I talk a lot about reading, do I once mention the fact that I have worked at the library for years?

Even after I’ve decided what I want to talk about, I’ve had to cut out some of the little embellishments I originally added.  The five pages wasn’t enough room for most of the story about biking.  I was part of Westgate’s Cycling Team back in high school.  I once came dead last because a friend of mine was racing with me.  I was in better shape and would’ve beaten her by a long shot, but I was so happy to have someone at the back with me that I stayed with her to chat; she beat me on the last hill because I braked and she didn’t.  Or how about the fact that our team always won, not because we had the best bikers (although we had a lot of really fast people), but because there were so many of us, we filled in all the rest of the positions and got more points.  Strength in numbers.  I’m still surprised that after four years in a row, the other schools didn’t catch on.  Maybe they did after I was finished high school, but I know they didn’t at the time.  Anecdotes like these, while entertaining, just couldn’t make the cut.  The former, while illustrating part of my identity, didn’t add enough for the assignment.  And the latter one was more about my school than my self, so it had to go as well.

Unfortunately, these cuts have not been limited to the embellishments alone.  I’ve had to cut whole chunks out of what I originally wrote.  Gone are the three paragraphs devoted to reading, writing and gaming respectively.  In their place is one paragraph combining the three, and then a lot more discussion about how they form my humanist identity.  This is a real shame, as I really liked the original discussion.  But that discussion took up too much room which was needed for other things.  (The line about me switching to English was part of this discussion.  As of right now, it’s gone).

I’m sad that I’m cutting out my last paragraph to make more room earlier in the paper.  The paragraph in question reads like this: “This assignment is also turning me into a subject.  With the five page limit, I can only look at certain aspects of myself; there is not enough space to write about everything.  And while looking at those aspects, they are fragmented.  It’s very difficult to bring gaming into the discussion about biking.”  Hopefully I’ll be able to work parts of it back into the assignment at a later date.  But as of right now, while I like it, it isn’t a strong enough ending.  So out it goes!!!

Hopefully I’ll be able to finish the assignment tonight.  And hopefully I’ll be happy with the final product, even with all of the cuts I’ve had to make!

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