Things to Remember (Freewrite)

Remember how when you were younger and you learned about Beethoven and rhythm in music class? Then, you went to math class and learned about how numbers can be equated to each other to derive an equivalent? In English class, you sat behind that boy who made your heart beat a little bit faster. You were too shy and too focused on writing down the vocabulary words and keeping up with the teacher's instructions on how to cite a source, though, to ever talk to him.

After math, it was lunch where you were given meat, vegetables, and a sweet on a compartmentalized tray. You didn't much care for any of it, but your mom had to work early and didn't have time to pack you a lunch. With all the video games you played, you could barely get up early enough to eat breakfast, let alone make food for later. So, you ate it anyway because you felt shaky and sick if you didn't (Trust me, you'd tried. The granola bar you'd grabbed on your way out the door didn't suffice as a substitute.)

But feeling full of carbohydrates and processed foods you felt somewhat satisfied--or drowsy, maybe, and it was time for history where you learned about the revolution and the civil war. These things didn't really make all that much sense to you, and you felt like you could go to sleep in that stuffy classroom. Who cares about wars? They're over. Learn from the mistakes and move on, you'd said.

Art class was always a nice change of pace from the notebooks and desks. They gave you inks and clay and anything messy to just do exactly that; make a mess for an hour. At the end of it, you got to call it art and joke with your friends about who's was the most phallic looking. Science, too, peaked your interest with the study of fossilized remains and the water cycle, and how pollination and reproduction worked.

Remember how you felt when--in that moment while painting and gluing together your science board for your science fair--you realized how it all was inter-related? Beethoven used math when composing in his rhythm and harmonies. Artists and writers were the people who incited revolutions and stirred up public thought. Science, well, science was a lot more than a fair. First of all, you'd realized, you were creating a piece of art that really had nothing to do with an egg being sucked into a jar. Sure, there were scientific processes of vacuums and chemical reactions and forces of pressure; but here you were using numbers and math to calculate them. You were making sure your thesis was expressed concisely, was grammatically correct, and you made sure the board looked awesome with the right layout, measurements, and illustrations (the color copied ones with the cool looking arrows on them for awesomeness, of course.) And damn it! Those vocabulary words, you noticed while reading them, were in your books and newspaper all the time. You understood what they meant, and you should have gotten to know that boy.

In that moment, compartmentalization of learning made as much fucking sense to you as school lunch. Learning was not made of separate notebooks and separate subjects. Everything, you realized, should be in one notebook--a journal. Learning, you now understood, was about relating these things together. People could not be separated out into rows or columns of desks or knowledge. We, you'd said, were not separated into religions and apartments, but were all related and joined to each other by everything.

The limits and bonds once trying to secure you to the sectioning of the fabrication of your life fell away, and you were left floating aimlessly; to question and explore everything. The things your parents taught you seemed not to be so cut and dry, or black and white anymore. The world was a murky, damp puddle of gray that you waded through, occasionally slipping into too deeply. You, or someone, always pulled you back out though, and you learned how uncomfortable it was to walk in wet clothes for a while.