G is for “Graduate School”

Welcome to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’ll be sharing a short bookish memory with you.

When I was an undergraduate, I was told that there was a specific way you were supposed to go about choosing a grad school if you wanted to study writing and literature. You were supposed to choose a school from a list of the best universities in the country. You were supposed to do well on the Graduate Record Exam so you would be accepted to whatever prestigious university you chose. When you got to grad school, you were supposed to study classics and adult literary fiction.

I took the first few steps along the path to grad school without much drama. I picked some well-respected schools from the list. I spent a year reading boring books and memorizing vocab words for the Graduate Record Exam.

Then, two things happened: First, I completely bombed the exam. A year of studying couldn’t overcome the fact that I’m the worst test-taker in the world. I'm much too anxious for tests. I should have known this exam thing would never work out.

Next, I admitted to myself that I didn’t really care about classics or adult literary fiction. I enjoy reading those genres, but I’m not passionate about them. I didn’t think I’d be happy spending 2+ years studying them.

But, I still wanted to go to grad school. I’m passionate about children’s literature, so I started researching schools that would let me study kids' books. None of the universities on the "top universities" list had children’s lit programs. I was forced to leave the “supposed to” path and make my own path. I ended up at a school that most people haven’t heard of. I’ve never seen it on a list of prestigious universities, but I don’t care. I’ve never regretted studying what I love instead of following the path I was supposed to take.

Welcome sign at the start of my first semester.

What about you? Have you ever followed your passion instead of doing what you were told to do? Did it work out for you?

F is for “First Blogging Failure”

Welcome to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’ll be sharing a short bookish memory with you.

Read All the Things! is my first book blog, but it isn’t my first blog. I’ve been blogging on and off since 2005. My previous three blogs were about humor/lifestyle, the history and ethics of capital punishment, and food. You’d think the capital punishment blog would produce the most angst in the comment section because people are very opinionated about the issue. But, readers of the death blog turned out to be pretty cool. Morbid, but cool. The comments on my lifestyle blog were also very positive.

I never understood how hateful the Internet could get until I tried blogging about food.

On my food blog, I tested out different diets and kept a record of how they made me feel. The comment section of the blog was never the happiest place on Earth, but things went downhill quickly when I became a raw vegan for a month.

“Raw vegan” means no animal products and no food that is cooked or heated. I was basically eating raw fruits and vegetables for every meal.

I hated the diet. It made me lose weight like crazy, which is great, but I felt horrible. I was weak, dizzy, and headachy. I had no attention span or desire to get out of bed. After a few weeks of raw food, I was so sick of it that I would rather not eat than put more lettuce in my mouth. Still, I was determined to get through the whole month. A lot of diets make you feel worse before you feel better, so I tried to be optimistic.

I was honest about all of this on the blog, and people went nuts. (Haha "nuts," one of the few foods raw vegans can (sometimes) eat.) The comment section turned into a war between raw vegans and non-vegans. I was caught in the middle. The raw vegans thought I was insulting them, and the non-vegans thought I was proving them right. Very few people were nice about their opinions. I became a reluctant (and extremely hungry) referee.

I didn’t think the comment section could get any nastier. Then I accidentally ate balsamic vinegar and caused the apocalypse.

It was a careless mistake that happened near the end of the diet. I’d spent weeks Googling everything I put in my mouth to make sure it was raw and vegan, but I was starving and in a hurry to get to class, so I just dumped some salad dressing on my lettuce and ran out the door. When I posted my food journal that night, a hatefest ensued.

The salad dressing had balsamic vinegar in it. As the people in the comments pointed out, balsamic vinegar isn’t raw. It’s made by boiling white grapes to get the juice out. Oops.

The hate was so bad that I had to turn off the comments section. People were calling me stupid and uneducated. They claimed I hadn’t done any research before starting this diet. (I did a lot of research, just not on that particular brand of salad dressing.) They claimed I’d been cheating on the diet the whole time, and that’s why I felt horrible. (I swear the vinegar was the first time I screwed up.) They said I was just writing these posts to make raw vegans look bad and wasn’t really on a raw vegan diet at all. (Not true. I don't have anything against raw vegans. If the diet works for you, that's great. It didn't work for me.)

After I removed the comment section from my blog, I had a What the hell am I doing? moment. This whole situation was idiotic. Strangers were harassing me for accidentally eating boiled grapes. Blogging was a hobby. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, and this one was making me miserable.

So, I deleted the entire blog. I didn’t post a goodbye message or anything. I just deleted it and never looked back. As soon as my blog stopped existing, I felt better.

I love being a blogger, but I’m not perfect. I learned that one of the keys to enjoying blogging is to find a community that will support you instead of tearing you down. I needed to find people who would forgive me for my balsamic vinegar moments. I think I’ve found that in the book blogosphere. You guys are awesome.

I assume that most of the people reading this are fellow book bloggers, but if you’re not, what do you blog about? If you are a book blogger, have you ever tried blogging about non-bookish things?

E is for “Escapism”

Welcome to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’ll be sharing a short bookish memory with you.

When I was younger, I didn’t really care about the literary quality of a book. I didn’t pay much attention to structure, themes, symbols, motifs, or writing style. I mostly just read for escapism. If a book made me forget about the real world, I liked the book. Some of the novels I obsessed over when I was younger would probably make college literature professors cringe.

Did any other 1990s kids read the Countdown series? No? I don’t blame you. If I reread them as an adult, they’d probably give me a brain hemorrhage.

Stephen King was (and still is) one of my favorite escapist authors. I can read his novels for hours and be so absorbed in them that I don’t notice time passing.

For me, the lure of escapism is strong. When I was 20, I won a poetry contest and had my poem published in The Denver Post newspaper. The paper gave me a bookstore gift card as payment for the poem. I had planned on spending the card on craft books that would make me a better reader and writer, but when I got to the bookstore, I walked right past the pretentious craft books and spent the whole card on Stephen King novels. No regrets.

Tiny part of my Stephen King shelf. Yes, he gets his own shelf in my house.

I still read for escapism. Right now, one of my favorite authors is Victoria Schwab. I can’t imagine her books will ever be common assigned reading in schools, but I don’t care. Whenever I want to escape, I reach for her novels. I think escapism is a very valid reason to love a book.

Which books/authors do you read to escape?

D is for “Desperation, Depression, Decisions”

Welcome to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays), I’ll be sharing a short bookish memory with you.

In high school, I wasn’t the greatest student. I had a terrible attitude and did the minimum amount of work I needed to graduate. When I met with my guidance counselor to talk about my future, I said I wanted to be a crazy dog lady, live in the woods, and never see another person again. I didn’t want to go to college. I didn’t want a job. I didn’t want a husband or kids. If we’re being honest, I didn’t want to be alive. My teenage years were very dark, very angsty, and very strange. In one of Stephen King's books, he uses the phrase "going out of the blue and into the black." Yeah. Teenage-me was deep in the black and had no intention of trying to get out of it.

One of the few things I enjoyed about my senior year of high school was my creative writing class. Instead of taking a final exam, we had to revise the stories we wrote for class and create a portfolio of our writing. I worked abnormally hard on my portfolio. Seriously, it had been years since I’d put that much effort into anything, especially a school assignment. Teenage-me was much too angry and cynical for school. I turned in my portfolio and hoped for a good grade.

The teacher gave our portfolios back during the last week of high school. Creative writing was my final class of the day, so I walked halfway home with my portfolio, then sat under a tree and flipped through it.

My writing teacher had been supportive of my work all semester, but I was surprised by her comments on my assignment. She said a lot of nice things and thought I had a talent for writing. She didn't want me to give up on it.

I had never thought of myself as talented at anything, but I started to wonder if she was right. I loved books, and I loved writing, and I really loved writing about books. My portfolio was proof that I could work hard on something and not fail. If one person in the world thought I was talented, maybe others would, too.

A few weeks after I graduated from high school, I signed up for literature classes at a community college. It was a brilliant decision. I loved college so much that I went for 11 years and ended up with three degrees. All of them are related to writing or literature.

And, I still have my portfolio with my high school teacher’s comments.

If you went to college, how did you choose what to study? Did you have a teacher who influenced your choice?