Now that Senior Year has rolled around, I’m now taking most of my energy attending school, sleeping, and doing my best to try to keep my mood as cheerful as I can possibly manage. Cheerfulness, togetherness, and collectiveness are not easy tasks to juggle, but I somehow manage it, probably because the classes I picked this year are the easiest I have ever had. The load I hauled onto myself this year is light and manageable. Instead of being too stressed at the beginning of the year to ever possibly making a good impression with the teachers, I’m speaking up, trying to be social and friendly.

In order to strengthen my mood, I cut my internet time a bit. My writing time has suffered a little as well. Nel manages to get a good number of pages a week, but nothing all too vivid. Nel doesn’t get a deep enough look into my life to really be able to determine what is going on with me. I only fill in parts I feel like when I have time. Those are normally the things that are on my mind. The things only I would care about.

You’re lucky to get that treatment not-so-often.

So yesterday in my English class, my teacher presented the Senior Project, an assignment all Seniors do no matter what. Since all Seniors do this project, it can’t be too hard, but really, it’s as hard and as easy as you make it. It can range from seeming like a piece of three layered chocolate cake with fudge and caramel sauce, or it can appear like a ton of heavy bricks. Each project varies with each individual student.

My basic understanding of this year-long assignment is that a student (like me) has to pick a hands-on project that is career and/or community service related. This can range from helping to organize a dance show to taking apart a car and putting it together again. This project must take at least 30 hours, and by the end of it, the student is required to have something to show for it, like the person organizing the dance show can provide pictures of its success, or the person taking apart the car can be able to walk anybody through the process and name every part of the car.

The second part of the project is to write a research paper on something related to the topic but doesn’t have to touch entirely. For example, my brother did an animation project. The animation’s intention was to teach how to drive. His written research project, however, was written about the domination of 3D animation over 2D. The research paper stood on its own, but it still was connected to a minor degree to his hands-on project.

When my English teacher brought up this assignment to the classroom, my peers seemed as if they already knew exactly what they wanted to do. Some ideas seemed extremely difficult. Some seemed to be very broad and not yet formed. Other ideas were so cool I didn’t know the possibility even existed.

“How come I don’t have hobbies or ideas like that?” I thought. “My life is so boring compared to, well, everybody apparently.”

I felt like I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I wanted to know! Since I have a lot of free time now, I went over to the College and Career Center to figure out my options. The lady who runs the center was glad to help me brain storm. She basically let me explore my options and supported any interest I had pop up in my head.

I left with a better idea, exploring my mind, thinking, “What are my hobbies and what are my career interests?” This situation is like one of those moments when you can’t find the remote for the TV. You search everywhere and then find the remote in the most obvious spot you can think of.

The idea for what I should do for my project smacked me in the face, “I should write and illustrate a full, real children’s story!” Aha! That’s perfect! “Oh! And I can go to the local library and see if I can read my own story to the children!” There I had it, a community project plus a career-related goal. Score!

I brought up the idea to my mother, who was encouraging. “That’s perfect,” she said. “Of course you should do that. I mean, children’s story writing was ingrained in your head since like the 1^st grade, remember? When you’d write stories and your teachers and stuff would agree that they were good for kids to actually read.”

The next day (today), I journeyed back to the career center again, telling the career center lady that I believe I found it. I told her my interest in children’s stories, and then she revealed that she has connections to a well published, local children’s story writer. When I looked up his name, I remembered seeing his books everywhere, but I also remember his books not grabbing my interest. They were for really young audiences (preschool to kindergarten), and they were too dull and simple to find amusing.

Me and my mother’s absolute favorite author when I was a tiny kid was Dav Pilkey. He still is one of my favorites, a genius for writing stories that appeal to not only small children but to the adults reading them as well. I was the little girl who liked the guy’s stuff before he got ultra famous later on (if you haven’t read A Friend for Dragon, you absolutely have to). There were also a lot of bright colors and designs in those dragon books, but beautiful simplicity in the illustrations.

Oh, right. I shouldn’t get side-tracked like that. So as I was saying, one of the requirements for this project is to have a “mentor” that has experience in my field of interest, so to have a mentor that is a many-times-published children’s author would be great! Like, really great, beyond what I could imagine of pulling off, and so to right off the bat have somebody say she can hook me up with an experienced author, again, score!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Lemon Journal Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.