Cassie's Literary Journal Experiment

31 August 2018: Friday

I'm in King's Canyon National Park with Maegan and Curtis Taylor. It's been fun. They are cool people to travel with. They are very easy to be around.
King's Canyon and Sequoia are really remarkable places. These trees are so big and impossible not to gawk at. It's so impressive.
I'm worried that once school starts and I'm not able to escape and go travel when I get stressed out. I'm worried that I won't be happy even after I have checked all the things off my bucket list.


Variations:

1. Bullet points

• I'm at King's Peak 
• With Maegan and Curtis Tayor
• School starts soon

2. Flipping it (first last, last first)

Even after I check all the things off my bucket list, I still might not be happy. And that worries me. I escape when I get stressed and now that school is starting again I won't be able to leave on a moment's notice. I've been so impressed by the trees at King's Canyon and Sequoia National Park. They make me feel small; they make the world feel miraculous. I've been around people who are fun to travel with. 

3. Negative

Traveling with a married couple post-breakup is not fun. No matter how cool Maegan and Curtis Taylor are, it never leaves my mind that this was supposed to be a couples trip and I am missing my couple. The world is so impressive to look at and I wish I had someone to share it with. 

I've mostly handled the breakup by running away and not being in places we made memories together. When school starts, I'll be stuck in Provo, just surrounded by all the places that remind me of him. I'm already sad just thinking about it. Eventually though, I won't even have places to run away to anymore and I'll still miss him. I'm worried I won't be happy ever again.

4. Positive

Meeting Maegan two years ago was one of the biggest blessings in my life, and I'm so glad I like her husband. I thought I might feel like a third wheel, but they are both so chill that I haven't at all. It's so exciting to me to have friends that like to travel with me. We have gone to four National Parks on this road trip and right now we are in King's Canyon. The sequoia trees are taking my breath away. They are unlike anything I've ever seen. I want to go everywhere. There are so many places to see in the world. When school starts, I'll be exploring the world more theoretically from books, and that will be an adventure too. There is a never-ending adventure ahead of me and the fact that I don't know what comes next scares and excites me. Life is endless.

5. Key words

Kings Canyon

Sequoia

Cool

Maegan

Curtis

Impressive

School

Stressed

Writing the positive and negative version was the most interesting to me. Both stories are true and accurately reflect the feelings I had about that trip. It is interesting because on paper they sound so different, and like maybe one has to be true and the other can't be. But really a complex variety of emotions existed within me at the same time. And writing this I realized that I get to choose the narrative I pull out when I recant this experience. When I tell people about the trip, I always choose the positive side. But I also always know that the trip was really emotionally difficult for me because I had just called off a wedding! It's interesting how people can be multiple people at the same time. It is also interesting how form matters in telling a story. Whether I use bullet points or key words, or make the story more linear rather than how it was written so choppy, it affects the recall and highlights different aspects of the event. This was cool!

Buckets's Literary Journal Experience

An abbreviated passage from a my Freshman year journal.
April 11, 2015
I participated in the 24 hour theatre project which was immensely fun and incredibly long--24 hours, to be exact. The writers took had from 7pm to 7am to write the script and we had from 7am to 7pm to practice then perform. Then you sleep forever. I was with Margaret. Margaret was with Eurydice with me and in my TMA 150 class.

1. I woke up early to get to my play practice, then did that non-stop for 12 hours. There was only a one hour break before we performed and we used it to practice. Woof. Lots of my friends and Michelle came and afterwards I bought a liter of Dr. Pepper and hung out with more friends. (basic summary)

2. "Your play was great. I promise." I probably should have told Michelle there was a kissing scene in the play. Guess when you have 12 hours to perfect a 20-minute play, things slip you mind. So freaking tired. My throat was wasted when I showed up at Spencer's apartment, but the crew was there, so I hammed it up all over again.  (casual yet theatrical, made to build personal character)

3. -Jared, my director that made me kiss Margaret even though it wasn't in the script.
    -Michelle, coming to my play even after we broke up.
    -Spencer, who showed me his new fish named Lyndon B. Johnson.
    -Margaret, who went 19 years before kissing a boy. (bullet list and focused on others' narratives)

4. I'm so grateful for all the opportunities BYU gives me to make memories and be with other people (moralized, generic)

5. Margaret is tremendous. She has such a commitment to her character, and has really good chemistry with me on stage. During Eurydice she did a great job creating connections with every character; even though she had a minor role. She got into the acting program, and is so close to convincing me to audition. Her dark curly hair and occasionally funky syllables give away her Jewish heritage, but you could never tell when she acts. You could also never tell that she never kissed a boy before tonight, but that's just the power of acting, right? (Long, descriptive explication of a single subject)

Definitely a stretch to rewrite a journal, but doing so allowed me to get into literary thinking, not regurgitation. The samples were also much, much more condensed than my typical journal entries, which made it all the more challenging. Out of the styles I imitated, I liked style 3 the most. This one mixed this sort of absent-present with a grocery list. It proved to make me think about my interactions with other people and condensing them into simple, memorable bytes.

Julie's Literary Journal Experiment

Here’s a paragraph from my own journal, followed by variations.

We played Minecraft for our date night tonight. In the game, I’ve had this weird pink sheep following me all over the place, and I got so caught up in how adorable it was that . . . well, I forgot Joseph was there.
“You know,” he said from across the room, “all the guys in my program are so jealous of me. They really wish that their wives would play video games with them.”
There are days when all I think about is how much I love my husband. Then there are days when I get so caught up in chasing sheep and building staircases that I forget I even have a husband.

1. Work involved the usual stress today. I struggled over poorly placed footnotes and listened as my mentor sought my input on a difficult paragraph he was perusing. I still despise geology, but thankfully my editing professor gave us time to work on our project today (we’re practicing writing business documents in preparation for when we do freelance work). Because he gave us all that time in class, Joseph and I were able to do a date night tonight. We went to the temple and See’s candy, then settled down at home to play Minecraft. [basic summary of day]

2. My head pounded as I stared at the tangled mass of footnote in the chapter I’m editing at work today. Joseph and I went to the temple for date night tonight, then to See’s Candy, where I sampled delicious chocolates that melted on my tongue, delighting me with their bursts of fruity filling. When we got home, we played Minecraft. My surroundings instantly melted around me as I started working on my grand stone castle . . . and chased around a sheep practically glowing with vivid pink wool as I begged it to accept me as its master. [entry that appeals to senses]

3. --Don letting out a sigh of frustration as he puzzles over the manuscript that we’ve been struggling to improve at work

--My geology professor grinning as he makes another pun about how much geology rocks as I inwardly groan

--My head aching in protest as I get home from another long day of work and school

--Joseph flashes his usual smile that somehow still makes my heart flutter each time (as cheesy as that sounds) as he announces that it’s time for date night

--The hard day fades away in an instant

[snapsnot sequence of day]

4. Joseph is the ultimate master of creativity (and terrible puns). He’s creative in his approach to games, stories, dates, and (most importantly) Minecraft. Our world is teeming with life and color from the farms and diverse buildings that he’s built. He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice as he suggested we play Minecraft tonight. And then there’s me. I built my staircase wrong, so I had to tear some of it down. My cat fell off a cliff. I spent half of the night gushing over this pink sheep that follows me around. I have a long way to go before I catch up with the master. [description of one character from day]

5. Why do I want to be an editor, again? Will authors always see editors as heartless villains? How many more puns can I put up with--both from my professor and my husband? How is it that I still fall in love with Joseph each day? How did I get lucky enough to have a husband who unabashedly shares his hobbies and passions with me? [thought-provoking questions]

My favorite entry from this exercise was the one where I tried to appeal to the five senses--which required thinking outside the boxes, as Minecraft is blocky and hard to describe. Doing alternate exercises forced me to look at my day from different perspectives and remember different aspects of my day. I noticed little details about my day that I would have easily forgotten and was glad that I could write them down. It’s important to be able to write about one’s life from multiple angles so that one can produce the most accurate and/or the most meaningful reflection possible.