At the end of my first semester in the Propel Program, I cried. And no, I don't mean that I shed a single romanticized tear, or welled up with mist at the thought of leaving. I mean that on the last day of my time in the program I bawled my eyes out. Now, I'm sure that I could probably just blame this on the fact that I am an over emotional teenager with a fear of goodbyes and call it a day. But that wouldn't reflect the amount of time I have spent analyzing my experiences in Propel. It wouldn't account for how grateful I was to be involved in the program in the first place, or how ecstatic I was when I was offered the chance to come back.
I'M DONE!!!!!!! You know when you go to birthday party's and you get those baby confetti cannon things? Well I feel like about a hundred of those things are going off in my head right now, along with some preppy music and possibly disco lights. In other words, I'm pretty jazzed.
Christmas traditions are very abundant in my family. Christmas eve, christmas day, and even boxing day are always filled with cheer and other cheesy christmas cliches, as well as my family's unique twist on the holiday. My christmas routine ever since I was a kid has been filled with food, games, and presents. We even set out carrotts for santas reindeer along with the signature milk and cookies.
I kind of feel like I have exhausted my use of words in the last week. I feel emotionally drained, and physically exhausted. However, this isn't anything to panic over. As much as I feel stressed out right now, this feeling will go away within the next couple of days. Even this morning, I felt a massive weight lifted off of my shoulders as several roadblocks were taken off of my plate.
Over the course of the semester I have spoken a lot about the environment of the ProPEL classroom. But I don't believe that I can really stress enough how united we are as a group of students. I know 'united' seems like a bit of a stiff word to describe a bunch of teenagers. However, there is really no way to verbally desribe the comradery within our classroom. Between both students and teachers. It may be a little cheesy to say, but our little community has become more of a family then I had peviously believed a bunch of teenagers could be.
Now that the development of my characters has been completed, I have been able to continue on with the development of my plot. At the beginning of the week I was having a very hard time figuring out what I wanted to happen in my play. I believe that the biggest mistake I made in this process was in where I approached creating the plot. Rather than considering what message I wanted to leave my audience with, I focused on where my characters would find conflict.
Last week I worked on developing my character Harley Tenner. The end result definitely proved to create the artistic, closed off person I was looking for. However, Harley isn't the only personality I need in order to move forward in writing my play. After developing Harley as my female lead, I proceeded to create a companion character for her.
Currently I am working on writing an entry for MAP's high school playwrighting competition. My play is very focused on dialogue and mental conflicts rather than visual and physical conlflicts. This will make it much easier for my audience to connect with my characters, and therefore invest more of an interest in what I have written.
This Friday we went on an excursion to Innovation Alley, where we talked a lot about opportunities for those who wish to start up their own businesses. This evidently doesn't really play to my area of interests. However, It was still interesting to see some of the options that are open to discussion.
Most people find it scary to think about the future, but I have never had this problem. Instead of worrying about taxes and work, I find it comforting to plan on there being a tomorrow. However, this is not to say that I use tomorrow as an excuse. The future is not meant to be used as a tool for procrastination, but rather an incentive for chasing opportunities.
It's not always easy to take advantage of the present, but I have found that productivity just generally increases my positivity when entering tomorrow. |