Story Teller

For as long as I remember, there have been two things I have loved with a passion: reading and writing. Long before I enjoyed cooking, talking or entertaining, I loved reading and writing. My love for the written word has not made me a connoisseur, nor has it made me a good writer--but it has made me a dreamer. Since I bound my first book in third grade, I have wanted to write a real book. This passion was met with a mixed reaction in my family: confusion at best, and disapproval at worst. No one understood why I would obsess over books of fiction, yet be less enthusiastic about my science and math books (hint: it is harder to escape into the minutia of plant biology and imagine living their lives). That is why I eventually perfected the art of reading in the near dark for years, and writing stories in the white borders of my school books, where everyone thought I was taking notes. It was my rebellion. If you find some of my old biology texts from high school, there are whole stories and poems winding and snaking their way around the books' text, punctuated with a single red, underlined word: MITOCHONDRIA, or whatever else the theme of the section was. That was my encoding method.

Now, I have online anonymity to mask me a little. Writing about my beauty (mis)adventures, brought back some other college memories, many of them painfully lucid as I never drank or used drugs, even when they could have possibly helped dull the pain (or shame). I think I will start writing about them, occasionally punctuated with something completely irrelevant: DIPLOID EUKARYOTIC MEIOSIS.