| R | Writing | Monologues | Limited Time Only

My name is Marcelina Reyna. Standard introductory sentance. Now, I'm supposed to go on this huge spiel about how slow and ordinary my life is. Let's get going.

I was born in Patuxent River, Maryland on the tenth of February, in the year 1988. I now live semi-comfortably in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with my parents, sister, niece, and doggie. (Ruff ruff!) I am an angsty 18-year old, and my life sucks. The end!

Only not.

I've found over my high school years that life is spent sitting and wondering, lying in bed late at night, contemplating one's academic future, marriage, children, or what to have for breakfast tomorrow morning. I've learned a lot in my thinking and wondering career, but nothing so staggering or monumental as to affect my entire life thereafter. What I have learned is now to successfully think and wonder without hurting myself. It's the sort of thing that isn't taught in schools. Therefore, if you ask me where my most valuable lesson was learned, I'd tell you that it was learned while sitting and wondering, lying in my bed late at night. That's right, my most valuable lesson wasn't taught to me by anyone. Rather, it simply came to me, like most good ideas do to the great geniuses of our century. Whether such a lesson is ahead of its time, or it is actually contemplated by most of my peers, I don't know, but it's something to think about. Here's something else to think about:

Freshman, sophmore, junior, and senior years. They're all the same. The teachers teach you to memorize, and in order to move on to the next year, you must prove that you've memorized everything they have asked of you. It's a simple, repeating cycle of memorization, enacted within the classroom and at home with the 'rents. You either catch on, or you don't. I suppose it depends on how well you can memorize things. C'est moi, I memorize the things I'm told to memorize. Some things don't stick as well as others do, but that's just something else to think about.

Of course, everything has an end, and so this cycle of memorization can't continue forever. It has finally found it's inevitable, unfortunate end in my senior year, which is filled with teachers of memorization that somehow reject the theory of memorizing information in order to proceed to the next year. In these teachers' classes, I'm confronted with a horribly confusing prospect: Being taught to think. People say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and this saying has been true for me up until now. Haven't these teachers realized what they have done? They've asked me to dismantle and reassemble my thought process, my system, my very body and soul! It's such a calamity that only the most skilled thinkers could comprehend. It is a regular Shakespearian tragedy. Story of my life, right?

Well, in the end, shaking up my jenga game-of-a-mind was beneficial for me. The result was the same, exact jenga game, but this time, something was different. The little jenga blocks now came in assorted bright neon colours, which were available for a limited time only!

Yup, a regular Shakespearian tragedy.

Maybe I liked the plain, unfinished wood of the older jenga blocks. Perhaps I was more than a little fond of not knowing which block I would pull out next, the lesson I learned that amounted to nothing, but meant something. But now everything is colour-coded and organized, with my future already plotted out on a sheet of college-lined loose-leaf paper. The alphabet soup I used to call a brain has been ensnared, and molded into a solid, pink, jelly-like apparatus. There are no more jeopardy games or spelling bees. There are less memories of recess, and more lavish plans of marriage, motherhood, and which nursing home I'll eventually be left to waste away in. I have been grown, nourished, stripped, and processed for investment. Available for a limited time only!