Doing Something Last Minute Deserves A Crappy Title

The hardest thing about being a writer isn't the fact that you can't write. After all, there are times where you suddenly get an idea for your story, visualizing it to the point where it's definite in your head. The hardest thing about being a writer is getting the opportunity to write. You may have a sudden burst of motivation, but unfortunately you can't just whip out your journal in the middle of calculus. I mean, you can, but people will look at you funny. Sadly, we haven't developed a device to freeze time solely for one person, to the despair of middle school boys nationwide.

The only reason why I've found the time to write now is due to a theatre assignment. Yes, I'll be presenting this in class, and by the time I read this again, will be reading this sentence aloud. If you're new to this, I break the fourth wall somewhat frequently, so get used to it. It's now, you're looking at now, sir.

"When will then be now?" "Soon!"

With the requirement of presenting this in theatre, I'm also forced to keep this under one minute, which is going to be hard, if not impossible, considering how I usually write these, so naturally I won't even bother and my teacher will cut me off halfway through a sentence. A minute is only an eternity from my perspective, and I have to keep speaking and fill every second and it will all sound like nonsense to you. I'm getting from a couple faces in the crowd that this has already happened. Remember, this isn't supposed to be long from your perspective!

Writing, as you can tell, is a passion of mine. A friend of mine once texted me to imagine what it would be like if two characters from different TV shows met, and I took the next several minutes before responding with a small story of exactly what he described. I would've gotten done sooner, but phones tend to have shitty keyboards.

It's at this point I've momentarily lost the point of what I'm writing (the pressure of writing it in the lunch before class doesn't exactly help). As per my senior year, I've been taking creative writing, and having started on an actual fanfiction over the summer, wanted to use the class to actually finish a full-blown story for once. Naturally it wouldn't be as simple as that as my teacher for that class decided to make us tell stories for the first half to get comfortable with opening up to the class. We told funny stories, ranging from weddings to drug deals to sketchy people, and in that period of time, I had an epiphany about myself in the fact that I have no stories.

Sure, I have things I've done that I can easily talk about, but the way everyone else told these stories made me realized that they were alive at those points in their lives. They were happy or sad or dying of laughter, but I realized most of my life I've never been any of these, but merely content. I can't talk about any enjoyable experiences I've had because I've never really had any. I've never been in a sketchy place, I've never walked in on a drug deal, I've never lived.

By this point my theatre teacher will have silenced me to allow time for the next person and I've probably stopped reading. If I'm still reading this out loud, I've apparently done something right. I have no idea what, but I'm sticking to that.

It occurred to me then that I need to embarrass myself, that I need to get myself out there and actually live. I realize now that people are gonna use that against me to make me do things I don't want to, but fuck it, I'm saying it, no matter how much I'm gonna regret this later, which I probably am. This idea of living my life to the fullest is probably going to kill me, but that's the idea. Life is meant to be lived, and I need to live it.

Also, if I by some miracle am allowed to read this far, it definitely won't be a secret, if it ever was one, that I didn't even begin the script assignment for this class, but what are the odds of that happening?

Well, at least I'll finally have a good story.