Rebecca Gordon
Dear Ray,
Every Tuesday and Thursday at two thirty in the afternoon I sat with the rest of our twenty-something-odd writing 220 class and awaited your entrance. Every Tuesday and Thursday you would enter through one of the wood paneled glass doors, towering over the cluster of students that sat before you at the quitelongbutstilltoosmalltofitthewholeclass conference table we never bothered to adjust. If someone came in late they would sit off to the side like a planet out of orbit. Every Tuesday and Thursday you would most likely be wearing a variation of dark washed jeans, gray, black, or green sweater, and a skull cap. And every Tuesday and Thursday after you sat down at the head of the conference table, in the seat that became designated for you, you would ask us a question.
“What is your comfort food?”
“What is your favorite genre?”
“Have you ever worn a uniform?”
“What, aesthetically, is your favorite book?”
“Do you like Valentines Day?”
“What is something you’re good at that you do not particularly like?”
“Do you think you have met the person you are going to marry?”
“Who is your favorite person to talk to?”
“If you could take one human emotion out of the spectrum of emotions, what would it be?”
“If you could make a college with only three majors, what would they be?”
“Do you think you will get divorced?”
“If you had to live in one place forever where would it be?”
“If you had to choose one of these three characteristics to define you, what would you choose: Slutty, Dumb, Mean”
These are just the questions I can remember off the top of my head.
I began to not only await your entrance every Tuesday and Thursday, but also a question. I realized that many of these questions had purposes, like they were training our brains to think about what we were going to talk about that day. When we were in the process of writing the Why I Write assignment, you asked us, “If you knew you were going to make $100,000 every year for the rest of your life, what would you major in?” Almost everyone changed their actual major except for Gabrielle and me. I am a theatre major and she is a business major. All of the other business majors changed their major because it is not their passion and if they could make a steady amount of money doing what they actually wanted to do, why not? In fact, many of the students changed their major to theatre. Gabrielle, however, stuck with her major because she is confusing. Just Kidding. But you proceeded to point out that Gabrielle is at one end of the spectrum and I am at the other, with most people flying in the middle, making life choices with a reasonable amount of practicality. I am already in the kind of major that people in the "middle" steer clear of, because it is somewhat of a life gamble. I am not positive I will make $100,000 every year after graduation. With my career, I am not even positive I will be making $10,000. This made me think: Why am I at the end of the spectrum? Why do I feel so comfortable walking on the edge of practicality and passion? These questions all went into my process of drafting Why I Write.
I approached the draft of Why I Write from the perspective of Why I Act. The assignment enticed me because I realized I did not know. I am an acting major and a writing minor so it should be very clear as to why I am spending half a million dollars in tuituon to potentially end up starving on the streets of New York with an expired one-way ticket to Broadway. Or at least I know my parents definitely think I should know. Sorry, dramatic. But really, all I knew was that I didn’t want to do anything else, at least not now. By starting the first draft of Why I Write, I figured out that in order to answer that question I had to first ask myself many more questions, and those answers were not easy to find. By the first draft I had identified the contrast between the two, but had still not mastered the why. In the end, I figured Why I Act is similar to why I would major in theatre when I have no idea what kind of future that will bring, and Why I Write allows me to assert a certain amount of control that I otherwise do not feel like I have.
When we began the process of talking about and working on the Repurpose assignment, you asked us to make our own question. I asked, “Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist?” In all honesty, I initially thought of the question because I really wanted to know what your answer was, with your skull cap and booming voice (you made it pretty clear that you’re a pessimist- but I don’t think that’s true). When I asked myself the question, I didn’t let myself answer it. I was afraid to face something about myself I did not want to know. If I said pessimist that means I am sour and jaded, and if I said optimist that means I am naïve and sheltered. My Repurpose was in the format of a questionnaire in which I wrote and answered my own questions. In the simulation directions I made sure to specify that one should answer the questionnaire honestly, not thinking about what you think you should say or what other people think you should say. And so I tried to answer them by following my own directions and being as candid as I could while being as unbiased as I could for the purpose of my assignment. With every question I wrote and answered I became more cognizant of the question I asked in class. Am I an optimist or pessimist? Idealist or realist? I began to question which category most actors would fall under or if you could be a true pessimist or realist and still succeed in acting. The art of the revision was asking questions that could apply to all of the "–ists'
During our process for our Remediation projects, you asked us “What do you think is beautiful?” Much of the class identified something in nature; I answered the moon. As we thought more about this we discussed why many people immediately think of nature when thinking of pure aesthetical beauty. Possibly because of the longevity of nature. A person’s aesthetic beauty is fleeting; nature’s beauty has withstood the test of time. Possibly because of the grandeur, the mystery of how it got there and what it is. That day we also looked at some of the sample portfolios from last year’s gateway class and determined which ones stuck out to us and thought were beautiful. These ideas of beauty greatly influenced the way I approached my remediation.
I made a mini-documentary. I had played around with IMovie before this project but other than that, I had no idea what I was doing or what the correct format for a documentary should look like. The idea of nature popped back into my head. I decided that because I was interviewing people my focus was to stick with human nature and let that, or them, do the talking. I chose not to edit in pictures or sounds or extra videos, but instead focused on the pauses, the “ums,” the rambling, and the thought processes. I had a thesis in mind and rather than letting them know what I thought, I catered the questions I asked them based on what I was interested in hearing that particular person say in relation to my own ideas on the subject. This didn’t always give me the answer I wanted to or thought I would hear, but I found beauty in the unpredictability of the Remediation.
On the last day of class you told us that we had done a very good job of answering questions our whole lives, but good writing required being able to ask the questions. Every Tuesday and Thursday you asked us questions, and we got better at answering them. My portfolio represents me getting better at asking myself questions.