Thursday, August 13, 2009

Assignment #1: Buy a Journal in Berlin

I did not buy a journal in Berlin. I brought one with me from the Pacific Northwest. It is purple to show my Husky spirit in Europe. I always make sure to carry journal with me wherever I travel, some of my very best works have been on trips.

When I was seven , we took a road trip and drove my grandparents from Tuscan to the L.A. airport. I wrote in my first journal about the "overwhelming sadness that drowned my heart" as I watched the plane “Air China” sour into the clouds "taking away the only people I loved". Along with the crayon sketches of me looking sadly out a window at a rainy world, it made my kindergarten teacher cry.

When I was 15, inspired the movie Election I saw on the plane to Florida, I wrote a speech on the plane ride back that got me elected as class president.

Freshman year in college, heart broken by a recent break up, I wrote a poem professing my never ending love while canoeing down a river in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The poem never made it to my high school sweetheart , but I’m sure it would have rekindled his affection for me and he would have taken me back if my journal hadn’t fallen out of my bag… as I was fighting off a caiman in the middle of the night.

Here in Berlin, I have great hopes for this journal. I hope the right words will find its way and fall neatly onto the college ruled FIVE STAR® notebook. I hope that my sentences will be touching and lyrical and form stories that will make everyone at home jealous of my time abroad. Most importantly, I hope that something I write will be worthy of the praise of Shawn Wong.

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