Today was a fairly good day. I didn't finish the whole car essay, but I wasn't expecting to because it's the biggest and most important essay. I plan on finishing it and doing the final one this weekend and on Monday, which puts me only slightly behind schedule.
The car is an important essay because all of these essays are about my experience with the world around me and how these experiences taught me to look beyond myself. The car was the vehicle that transported me to the world beyond. To get to all of the subjects of my essays except the yard, I had to be driven in the car. The car isn't quite like the other essays because rather than being any one place in particular, it was the gateway to other places. Besides the car's role in my childhood, I'll also be discussing my more recent experiences with the car, including my fear of learning to drive, learning to drive, the independence of being able to drive, and the recent car crash; this essay goes a bit further into my current life than the other essays, making it almost act as a reader's vehicle to my present self.
I'm excited to finish this essay.
Next week, I plan on finishing this essay, writing the next, revising my pieces, and deciding on an order for the whole collection. I'll be focusing on bringing out each individual piece while also fitting them together.
I met with Karin today, and we discussed the first three pieces. She gave very specific advice for each piece, and we discussed, mostly, focus, since the pieces I wrote were often a little broad, which is to be expected of a rough draft. We also discussed endings. My pieces did not have endings, really, because it's hard to write an ending while still figuring out the focus. But these bugs should be sorted out next week.
Here's an excerpt about when the car took me to the planetarium:
"The first time I went to the planetarium, I was sitting in the backseat on the driver’s side of the Toyota. I had no idea what a planetarium was, but its name sounded strange, and so I was thrilled to be there. It was the Christa McCauliff Planetarium, which is in Concord. As we were waiting, I made my first purchase at the dark blue star-spangled gift shop: a patch that said the planetarium’s name on it beneath a white star. I tried to put it on, but that back wasn’t sticky like a sticker’s back was. I had no patience for this unexpected complication and threw it away. When we entered the planetarium, the dome ceiling was a shining graceful combination of pink and yellow. The sky’s color gradually shifted to a lavender, then to a purple, slowly becoming deep and blue, until finally, I was looking at the night sky. A man standing next to the projector told us the story of stars. They weren’t scattered across a flat sky. They were giant balls of burning gas scattered across three-dimensional space, each billions of light-years apart from the other. A light-year - now that was an idea. That night, I tried to outrun light by flicking on my room’s light switch and running to the end of the room before the room was lit up. I failed. Now if I were to maintain the impossible speed of light for billions of years, I would have run as far as one star is from the other. And that’s not even a fraction of the size of a galaxy, and a galaxy isn’t even a fraction of the universe. That’s how much space is out there. I was so amazed that I lived in such a place that was so vast and diverse that it could never, ever bore me. There would always be something else to explore."
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