Okay, so I had this assignment in Theater class to write and perform a monologue based on my own life.  Here's what I came up with:

There's More to Writing than Spelling

            Huh…Do you ever get the feeling that maybe your life is just some kind of twisted parody of someone else's life?  And that everything you do bears only a darkly humorous resemblance to reality?  I know it's not true, but I think I've been unintentionally slipping into that mindset for the past year or so.  You probably don't know what I'm talking about, but…

            Let me rewind a little bit: I'm a writer.  I'm not a student, I 'm not a teenager…I'm a writer.  I watch things happen, and then I arrange a bunch of letters in ways that amuse me.  I like to think that I'm pretty good at it, but if I were to try to sum up my life thus far…well, I'd be at a loss for words.  Basically, my operating principle was to enjoy the good things, and when it came time to do things that I hated, I worked relentlessly, and I basically kicked the crap out of them.  Until last year.  About halfway through my junior year, it dawned on me that life was in fact kicking the crap out of me.  I was staying up until all hours of the night working on school work that meant nothing to me, and I was tired all the time.  What's worse, I feared I was becoming a robot…a machine.  I wore myself down so much that I shut off my ability to feel.  I watched as friends moved away and the world spun around without my consent, and all I could think about was some idealized time when everything would be peachy: the weekend…spring break…summer…any point in the future that could help erase the present.

            But then suddenly, it hit me like a lead-filled Koosh ball: The present is all we get.  You know, petty and senseless as life sometimes seems, we're not guaranteed tomorrow.  I could be mauled to death by a cougar tomorrow morning while I'm pouring my Golden Grahams.  What it all boils down to is that…Well, this could be as good as it gets.

            Finally, I turned back to God—the one constant I have in all this—and He's been showing me things in the present that are too beautiful to fully understand.  Take for instance this trip to Oregon last week.  I saw snow-capped mountains scraping the horizon.  I sat on the ground, looked up at the sky, and saw every flippin' star laid out before me like the roof of a giant tent.  I ran into the Pacific and felt water that was so cold, I stopped breathing.  And I realized for the first time in a long time—Good God, I'm alive!  For crying out loud, I'm a human being, not some broken piece of machinery.

            In Oregon, I saw beauty that was so obvious I'd have to be dead to ignore it.  In a way, it made me more aware of the simpler beauties in life—the ones that show up even when you're wallowing in self-pity.  I see beauty in lots of things now—in dandelions fighting their way out of the sidewalk cracks—in the way my girlfriend looks at me when I kiss her forehead—in standing on the trunk of my car, spreading out my arms, and catching the first drops of rain before they hit the ground.