Weekly Composition Challenge

Challenge 6: Origins

Let's say babies are blank slates. The slates come in different sizes and colors, but the writing is only after the wrapping comes off. Where do you come from, really? What shaped you? Whether it was nature or nurture, what got into your young bones and shaped them? Tell me about your hometown. Your first best friend. Tell me the fairytale that rocked your soul. What's your origin?

Peter at PeterDeWolf.com
"Is it because Barney has one on 'How I Met Your Mother'?"
"Can you use it to meet girls?
"Have you turned fruit?"
To which I reply:  "Yes."  "Yes."  "I had one first."  "I guess."  "Not that I'm aware of."
(Man, I hope that I answered those in the right order.)

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...I used to say I was born on the bayou. I liked the image that conjured up: some voodoo baby with twigs in her curly hair, sweat-shiny and wicked-charming, naked in the southern humidity...

Kelsi at ThisCouldTakeAwhile.Blogspot.com
...the comfort of the coffee, and the solitude of the walk, the grim beauty of the pacific ocean and the quaintness of the town all live in the core of me to express how it is that, at the base of it all, i really feel the world should be...

Meg at PuritanJamShort.Blogspot.com
...We were pretty poor, apparently, but I didn't learn that until I was much older. Sometimes, when I talk to people about our vegetable gardens in the side yard, our wee pumpkin patches, our weeklong living room forts and extended backyard camp outs, people look at me like I grew up in a different decade...

Chavie at hicsuntdracones.blogspot.com
...Only after talking at length with me does the lilt in my voice come out, reminiscent of early Woody Allen. It is hard to explain why it is I identify so strongly with a city I left behind in my adolescence - over a decade ago....

Adrian at FearofLanding.Blogspot.com
...The timing worked out and I was on the last flight out, with my mom, in a cardboard carrying box. This would be the beginning of my life of cramped, cost-effective traveling...

Jamelah at Jamelah.net
...One of my longest long-standing jokes is that I am the only Arab redneck you will ever meet. Being an Arab redneck means that I talk a lot and I don’t like wearing shoes. In case you were wondering...

Lesley at HowNowWit.Blogspot.com
...I am, therefore, not the product of any hometown. And I fear sometimes that the ugly secret behind being from everywhere is that where I’m actually from is…well, nowhere...

Liz at TheLFactor.Typepad.com
...I come from traditional parents. Republicans. Don't fight in front of the kids. Go out to dinner 3 nights a week because marriage comes before children. Because I said so, that's why...

Challenge 5: Turning Points

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could"
-Robert Frost

In preparation to work with children, we're taught to present no more than three choices. For children, too many options is crippling. The inventors of Neapolitan ice cream have the psychology here pinned. But really, let's not overestimate our adult selves. Choices can paralyze the best of us. Pressure is placed younger and younger to make decisions that matter; when I was a kid, the first real choice you had to make was where to go to college. Now kids choose specialized High Schools; they pick private Middle Schools. They narrow down extracurriculars to no-more-than-three, they have a voice in custodial hearings between parents, they talk about whether drugs are the best option for behavior management. At each turn, life courses are altered. We can spend whole existences consumed by What If, but we don't. This society doesn't leave space for looking back. So we become, slowly, aliens in our own bodies. Plans go wrong, sometimes delightfully. Our feet go astray, and years later we are unrecognizable even in the mirror. Do you ever wonder about the other incarnations of your What-If selves, locked away inside you, abandoned, underdeveloped, undiscovered?

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...There would be talk of Germany, Hawaii, places that would open up for us beyond the post and the army-issue furniture because my entire life with him was an open door covered in knobs. There would have been toasts by our closest friends, and everyone would finally be saying how beautiful we look together. We would have proven that it could work...

Adrian at FearOfLanding.Blogspot.com
...The school day had not even started and my mind was racing. What to do now? I was struggling with what my options were. I went thru my day like every other day. But, it was no longer like every other day. Every time I switched classes I sized up each teacher...

Ryan at RyanOfTheZeitgeist.Blogspot.com
...I have never before, or since, completely lost my shit, but I managed to extricate myself from the brute’s clutches, and from that point on I was a raving banshee lunatic; in my mind, I threatened them with every conceivable horror I could fathom, but what it must have sounded like coming from my drunken, screaming mouth I don’t know. It worked, however, as I must have looked like some rabid, frothy-mouthed maniac...