A funny thing happened...

A funny thing happened tonight while I was cleaning out a few boxes in the basement. C says we have so much crap for just two people. He's absolutely right. I have thse pack rat tendencies, I have to admit that.

I picked 4 boxes to go through tonight. I thought they were mostly magazines, but imagine my surprise when I came across some old sketchbooks. I thought I had organized these all in a box and gotten them all together, but boy was I wrong. I found 8 different sketchbooks, mainly from my first years of school. I'm not afraid to admit that my sketching skills are absolutely horrendous. I sometimes wonder how I even got into architecture school with those skills.

A little over a year ago I took the last of my models, photographed them just in case I ever needed them for a portfolio and then destroyed them. I'm not talking about just throw them in the trash can destroy, I'm talking about an all-out slamming them into the ground and trash can destruction. It was a fantastic feeling; all that pent up anger toward architecture school was let go. It was hard to see the hours of tedious, hard work go to the dump, but the sense of relief after I did it took me by surprise.

I had no second thoughts tonight throwing those little black books away. It brought back a rush of memories. I'm almost ashamed to admit that most of them were not good. That's for another day, another post, I guess. I neatly set them aside after glancing through them and then tossed them in the trash. They're out by the street right now just waiting for the trash man to roll through the neighborhood.

The other thing that caught me by surprise tonight were all of the writings I did in college. Most of the things I read through tonight I don't even remember writing. I expected to see the architecture essays, some of which I was quite proud of, but others I didn't expect to see... those English 1103 writings. Heh. I hated that class. Despised it. I started to giggle a little when I saw my reflection essay in my "portfolio" of the class. I had some guts writing that thing. I was so candid in that essay that I felt a little sense of accomplishment re-reading it. Weird, huh? I felt a sense of accomplishment in what I had written. I told the professor that I felt my level of writing had gone down since high school and that there was an unfair stereotype from the first week toward the architecture students when she said that she didn't care as much about us since we weren't going to spend as much time on her class anyways.

I remembered my love to write tonight. I remembered how freeing it can be. I read in there that I thought I was half way decent at writing. I'd like to think that again... but that would involve writing more. I mean, I still write here and there, but it's always for a purpose. I wrote a 3 page letter to the executive director at the Y a few weeks ago and was complimented on it. I wrote a short essay for Special Olympics last week for the Independent Tribune. I never write just to write.

A funny thing happened tonight. I was inspired to write.