Writing Rejuvenation

 

“It looked like a tornado swept through!” Every time my parents would walk into my room when I was younger, they would utter some derivative of this phrase. My imagination never rested and my toys showed that. The dress-up clothes. The soccer ball. The easy-bake oven. The Nancy Drew book. The puzzles. The paint. The paint found its way throughout the room. It was perhaps the only thing besides my imagination that brought the room together.

 

While my room is cleaner, and perhaps more coherent now, I have always been interested in a variety of things. I am happy as long as I am doing something. Even stuck in a car. My family and I used to drive twelve hours from Michigan all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina to visit family. Bored as possible, it was the space in which my made-up games were complimented by family stories. I had not realized at this point, and perhaps do not even realize the full impact of this space now, but it had a large impact on my ability to think abstractly and concretely. I was able to think abstractly by imagining games, and concretely by listening to real life stories told by my parents. The connections I have formed between the abstract and concrete are ones that have stayed with me – blurring the lines between the black and white into the gray.

 

Despite these stories, I was awful at writing when I was younger. I was always better at math and sciences. Writing bored me then because at that time I did not have the opportunity to add something new. It was about repeating what we had talked about in class- the only difference was the person writing the essay. I could not relish in the boredom as I did on road-trips because I could not create. By middle school, my teachers put a heavy emphasis on writing. First, I hoped the emphasis would pass. Then, I realized high school would put even more emphasis on writing. I had to figure out some way to survive all of this writing. I slowly made a conscious effort to improve, because I knew my grades would suffer if I did not.

 

By my senior year in high school, I was actually starting to take risks with what I was writing about. For my senior year English class, we had a writing assignment in which we had to write about a true story in the form of a movie script. I wrote about one of my family’s Christmas gatherings. The next day, my teacher told me that I should pursue writing in college. I laughed, assuming he was crazy. Writing and me? I couldn’t do that! NEVER!

 

Yet four years later, I am writing this essay as a writing minor in an attempt to explain how I use writing and I think back wondering if me following his advice was a subconscious effort to tell stories. I had figured out how I was able to write about people, explain situations and talk about something that interested me. I liked to read the books, but reinterpreting what we had already talked about in class bored me. Move on already, we’ve covered it.

 

But for now, I am focusing on how to write with analysis, with adventure, with creativity by adding something new to what is happening around me. Last year, there was Coffee. I studied abroad in Rome and as I walked into my first café, it was embarrassingly obvious that my normal order of a Grande black coffee would not suffice. The coffee culture of Italy was all around me, and I was lost in the whirlwind. I curiously adjusted and got used to the marathon-style of coffee drinking. In the morning, after lunch, in the afternoon and after dinner. There were four times (at least) to drink some sort of coffee drink, and each one had a different custom. As an avid coffee drinker, I did not want to sit as the lone American coffee drinker. I wanted to drink like the Italians. When my course on Italian Food Culture assigned a research essay, I took the opportunity to get credit for immersing myself in coffee culture by connecting Italy with coffee, and subsequently my life at that moment: “The worldly and local importance of Italian coffee stems from its social and consumer culture that combines Italy’s history with Italy’s future in order to create a phenomenon for citizens and tourists. It is a symbol of the hard-workers, politicians, tradesman, the religious, the amicable and the informed combined with national unity and national pride” (Italian Roast). My writing started to focus on cultures and people’s responses to such culture. I was interested in where the coffee phenomenon came from, and how it related to Italy. This was also one of my first large, independent research papers. I chose coffee because it was what I was learning about in the present. However, it was difficult to connect this present to the past, and then back to myself as a tourist. The newfound independence of research writing allowed me to explore something unique, something pertinent to me and something that was happening around me at the time. As a still avid coffee drinker, I have gone back to my Grande black coffee order. Sometimes, though, I will indulge in a cappuccino before breakfast or an espresso in the afternoon, remembering how the culture of coffee in Italy impacted me in more ways than just a simple order.

 

Last semester, there was Manet. Not too long ago, I saw the name “Manet” and simply thought someone had misspelled “Monet”. Needless to say, my art history knowledge was weak at best. However, I wanted to learn more. It was a secret world that I had had no knowledge of. I had taken sciences, histories, humanities but never a history subject to so much interpretation. I had created art, but never learned its significance. I waned to connect the visual with culture, history and real-life scenarios. When I took a history class, I was able to research and interpret Manet, moving on completely from Monet. While now my knowledge of art has improved, and I may be able to walk through a museum, I most enjoyed connecting this idea of the visual with people. “Landscape in 1860s was contemporary because popular culture is linked to the traditional forms of life, extending beyond the bourgeois classes into the lives of common and struggling people and during this time Parisians sought relaxation outside of the city” (On the Beach). Much like my paper on coffee, I was writing about culture. The difference was, I was exploring a change in culture and I had to conduct research in order to come to my own conclusions about how to interpret the painting. To me, the painting simply looked like two women playing on the beach. However, I would quickly find out that everything in the painting – even the ocean – had some sort of significance attached. It was at first overwhelming. I learned how to adjust to the information in front of me and interpret it. It was overwhelming still. Despite being out of my comfort zone, this paper encouraged me to approach a lot of different information in a new way. I want this paper to be in the spotlight because it started as something I was entirely uncomfortable with, and it turned out to be something I was proud I had taken on.

 

At the same time as Manet, there was Dierdre McCloskey. McCloskey, a historian and economist, unknowingly saved my interest in economics. At the point in time when I was taking Economics 494, I was losing my interest in the subject. I was thinking all about the problems, instead of why I was focusing on these problems in the first place. I had just finished the required math-based courses, when I had wanted to go beyond just the math part of economics. Although my writing on McCloskey was a short project, it took me back to the reason I started to be an Econ major in the first place. I remembered how to use Economics to interpret what was going on around me in a new lens. McCloskey came to our class to talk to us about the relationship between Economics and the Industrial Revolution while explaining the modern world with a simple event. Yet she conceded that while economics could explain some, we had to challenge ourselves to look through a new lens because there is what we can see and what we cannot see. We cannot explain everything. “This theory is important for McCloskey to prove because the series of cultural events could help us explain how business and innovation happens today as well as how class systems are approached differently in different cultures” (Report). Once again, I somehow incorporated culture with something I was learning about – in this case it was my major of economics. I had never thought about why the world, with vast differences in health, freedom and opportunity, was so different in different areas of the world. Recognizing that not just one skillset would be able to explain this difference has had a profound impact on me. Not in the lens of wanting to research the Industrial Revolution, but on how the future is a product of the actions we take now.

 

Moving forward, I am combining these ideas in a completely new territory. The only experience I have with the Olympics is as an observer. But, that is what I like about the project. It is my own challenge to involve myself in something I have limited experience in. I did not want to end my courses at the university with something that reflected what I had done. Rather, I wanted it to reflect what I had learned. Much like my past research papers, I am trying to combine these concepts into an overreaching topic. I am going to take a chance on researching something I have never researched before. Now I can look out of the box to explain things. In my Olympic essay I hope to combine ideas to promote the idea that the Olympics, although cannot be explained solely by economics, relate to the bigger idea of world piece.

 

At Michigan, I learned how to tell stories in more ways than just using creativity. The “tornado” has passed. I can use economics. I can use stories that are not even that clearly a “story”. However, the word story to me is very abstract. And I am able to use the abstractness to create something concrete. As I am preparing to graduate college, I realize that the future of my writing that will actually be looked will most likely entail project proposals. Yet this does not upset me too much because I can still create with ideas. I can still analyze with my economics. I can still take chances with what I am proposing. I will find my own, new adventure in this writing. I will have to.

 

Bibliography

 

Gariepy, Jourdan. Behind the Italian Roast: Exploring Italy’s Coffee Culture. Roma Tre University: Food and its Visual Representation, 8 May 2013.

 

Gariepy, Jourdan. On the Beach: The Evolution and Mystery of Manet. University of Michigan: History of Art 271, 12 December 2013.

 

Gariepy, Jourdan. Report: Dierdre McCloskey. University of Michigan: Economics 494, 30 October 2013.