Dabbling in writing

Eversince I could remember, I never had a problem with writing, it was probably one of the areas where I excelled most in school. However, neither the elementary school nor high school I attended, had a writing club where I could have allowed my artistic talents to flower. In college, there did happen to be one, but at the time, I had far better things to do in my whole 18-year-old smartypant's opinion. Blame it also on birth order. I was the middle child - the underachiever. My parents never had overly high expectations of me and never pushed me to study and so I never bothered either and was always just mediocre. I must say that passing though, was usually effortless for me. Looking back, I guess I do wish that someone had been more strict with me. Who knows what I'd have accomplished by now? Take for example a girl with whom I took some post-grad courses with. She went on to do a short teaching stint at our old High School, got fed up and continued on to Med School. Thirteen or so years later, she is a doctor. Meanwhile, I, on the other hand, did a short stint too at a law office in Manila, eventually also got fed up and decided to move back to Montreal. By now I have a clerical job and may not own a cookie-cutter house with a white picket fence but hey! I do have a magnificent and unobstructed view of the Home Depot from my high perch, a loving hubby and two beautiful kids. Now, do I regret things? Not really. But just the other day at the Jewish General, I bumped into another Asian girl of almost the same slight physique and petite stature as mine, probably even younger than myself, a resident, I assumed, the stethoscope slung around her neck giving it away, and I went, hmmm...

Going back to the subject of writing. With Quebec being bilingual (French & English), finding a job in my field wasn't easy because of my deplorable French, so I did a 180 turn. I took a short year and a half vocational bookkeeping course to at least get my foot in the door of the work force, so to speak. The subjects in the curriculum besides the accounting, included, among others, French & Office Management. We also had an English course. Our class was made up predominantly by immigrants from all over. Remember it was a vocational course with about 15 subjects, the duration of each being around three weeks. So to teach an actual, conventional English grammar course would've been quite ambitious, daunting and simply futile. So what we did for three weeks instead was, each day our teacher would give us an article that we would have to summarize or condense. I think our teacher kind of undermined our capabilities because she discouraged us from deviating or departing too much from the original text so it wouldn't be to difficult or so she thought. What was she talking about? No one was struggling with the task at hand. And I did as much highfalutin' as I pleased. Before the end of the daily one hour class we would hand in our work and the next day we'd get our results. I usually received, surprise, surprise! some pretty good remarks from my teacher, but one morning, she summoned me, and she was in stitches - she was quite amused at what I had written the day before. The article we had to summarize was about, of all things, the camel. The article sang the oriental beast of burden praises, so in a nutshell, I described the animal as being "versatile." My teacher argued that the adjective was more fitting for an inanimate object such as a Swiss knife, but I begged to differ, why can't a camel be considered versatile anyways?! To this day, I still wonder if her peals of laughter were called for (lol). You see I don't take to criticism very well especially if it's unwarranted (lol).

Anyways, with the advent of Facebook, came the opportunity to post my so-called fantastical one-liners. I had read someone's suggestion somewhere that maybe they should compile their funny expressions for when the novelty of Facebook one day fades. But I had a better idea, I had been meaning to create my own blog for sometime now but just wasn't sure how to go about it. And now that it is finally set up, I reserve Facebook for my little quips and the excess - the "and them some" - filters down to my blog. I had promised that I would spruce up it's appearance, but that's an activity I will, again, reserve for the days when I'm stricken with writer's block, when the creative juices just won't flow....