So I have decided that I must start a blog. It should be known (or it shouldn't, as it's fairly embarrassing) that this is not my first blog. I suppose the beginning of my recorded written thought was in my childhood, lined notebook diary ("I felt the baby in Mommy's stomach kick today!") I then graduated to a slightly more high tech diary, password protected (password? mall), where you would shout into a mysterious hole and the diary, depending on how the mechanism was feeling that day, would open. Oftentimes, the mechanism would malfunction, which would result in a lot of throwing the diary against the wall hoping it would fall out of the plastic encasing. No matter; that diary was full of thoughts like "I have a crush on Cody! I pretended to like the WWF wrestlers on his binder today so he would talk to me!" (sad how little has changed). Incidentally, Cody pierced his ear the next year (the fifth grade). Cody now, according to a little facebook stalking, is a community college dropout and may be a baby daddy (or just really likes holding kids and being photographed doing so).
Then came the angsty middle school years, where, with my computer-savvy, I started a "diary-x." This blog was full of Dashboard Confessional lyrics and the like. I'm sure if I ever run for office it will be retrieved from the netherworld of the internet and I will be thoroughly embarrassed. Hell, it could probably make for a good smear campaign ("She was just a very weird kid..") Then, I had a very short lived blog my freshman year of college with two funny little vignettes, but I suppose binge drinking and crushing on the frat star of the week got in the way of any meaningful genesis.
But back to the reasoning for the blog, which coincidentally can be traced back to the Cody crush era. In North Carolina, the fourth grade public school students are made to take The Writing Test. For anyone who ever went to public school, such barometer style tests are apparently good measures for both students and teachers. Thus, terrified teachers would make the students take practice tests over and over, drill the concepts into student's heads...essentially "teach to the test." I won't even get to how wrong that is, how dysfunctional NCLB and all of those policies are and the brokeness of public school systems in America; this goes without saying, and I majorly digress.
We began taking practice tests for the North Carolina writing test in the second grade, because naturally two years were needed to teach our empty heads the concepts for a 2 hour test. We would be given a prompt, a double sided sheet of wide ruled paper, and a number 2 (IT MUST BE A NUMBER 2! and I never figured out why..) pencil. We were then instructed to write until we saw the "Stop" instruction on the back, which was inside a little stop sign shape (For the illiterate children who had been passed into the next grade by a disgruntled first grade teacher and had no business taking a writing test). The test was graded on a scale ranging from 1 to 4; you could also get .5's added to your score. And from the second grade on, from the anonymous graders who in my mind I pictured as robot-like clones sitting at a long table, I received 4's. Only 4's. I think I got a 3.5 once and was completely outraged, but otherwise, I consistently got 4's on these practice writing test.
In elementary school, the people who gained respect and admiration had the fastest mile time or had gone to the grand opening of the abercrombie kids store. That was all well and good, and I understood said social hierarchy. I wasn't pretty enough, assertive enough, and frankly didn't give enough of a care to be an "alpha" girl, a term that well meaning social psychologists popularized in the early 2000's in an attempt to explain why pubescent school girls are such raging bitches towards each other. Thus I slid without remorse into my role as a "beta", happy to have some kind of post, as the conduit who let the alpha's crush know she was interested, or some other mean task. But I clung to those 4's as a source of secret pride. And then one day in the fourth grade, a notoriously curmudgeonly math teacher, (whose math class I was too dumb to be in, actually), said, "You're Cecily? Oh, you're the really good writer. I hear you're the best writer in the fourth grade." I'm sure I beamed unbecomingly in my newly purchased abercrombie kids duds.
Thus from the time I was a bespeckled fourth grader, I have only really been set apart in a consistent way for my writing. I was decent at student council, lacrosse, and whatever else I did in high school. I suppose I'll be a decent leader next year when I'm president of my sorority. But I've never been set aside as really good at any of those things. So what do you do when you're faced with the fact that you're graduating next year and need to figure out what you're going to do with your life? You stick with what you're told you're good at.
I guess I'd say my career goals would include being the next Megan McArdle without the libertarian politics. So maybe I mean a Caitlin Flanagan. There is no denying that both of them are phenomenal writers, and it is extremely presumptuous of me to think that I could ever follow in their footsteps, or work for such a highly respected academic magazine like they do.
But I'm part of what has been termed the Peter Pan generation. I will ignore the pallor on my dad's face when I talk of "unpaid internships." After all, the same teachers who frantically shoved the fourth grade writing test in my face have been telling me I could "be whatever I want to be" since I was 5 years old (If you didn’t get follow that the last few sentences are tongue in cheek, let me clarify. I refuse to be identified with or used as an example of the Peter Pan generation...yet.)
So I'll set my careers goals lofty and steel myself for crushing defeat. After all, Megan McArdle started with a blog.
