The Benefits of Writing: Why I Do It and Why You Should Too #bloganuary

What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

My twelfth-grade teacher once told me that she wished she could write like me.

She was one of the teachers who taught me about Macbeth. That play resonated with me. A Roman Polanski film adaptation was a significant success.

It is said to be bad luck. You shouldn’t speak about the title. I don’t know, then, why the curriculum emphasized it.

She was also one of the teachers who taught me poetry. All five of my high school English teachers taught me a little about poetry. That was another emphasis in my high school curriculum.

I received an award from my high school English department when I graduated. I was among the best English student of the year 1996’s grads from my high school.

I’ve never read much poetry.

I suppose it’s a shame. On Twitter, for years and years, though, I’ve followed an account that presents stanzas by Emily Dickenson. I often read them aloud when I see them.

It’s not all the time, but sometimes, when something hurts badly, and I think about what might have been, I cry about it. I know it would upset my mother.

She gets sad, too, if she thinks about it. Her mother made fun of crybabies. It is not a real masculine trait.

However, I think tears are valuable signs of passion from within. My writing would be better if I had been better trained, but even without that, I’m fortunate I can do so much. Long-form is usually my favorite.

With social media, you can present a blog at a very low cost. I’ve been blogging for the order of twenty years now.

Writing well has become easier with artificial intelligence. There is a video out there showing Twitter’s CEO claiming artificial intelligence is dangerous. The power that affords dissidents is alarming to me.

It is a powerful opportunity. It is likely that the next few years will be extremely crucial in the history of the world. The entirety of civilization may change!

It was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that most educated me when I was in high school. I was warned by Brave New World, as young YouTubers put it. In the shortest manner possible, it highlights the humanizing process of John the Savage.

The present impact of artificial intelligence on social media creators is directing people away from humanity. The monster in me hears a calling to become artificial intelligence. More realistically, it is just too big an opportunity to ignore.

When I think of myself as a writer, I don’t conceive of social media made by artificial intelligence as either writing or artwork. Do not think of imagery generated by artificial intelligence as art. It is almost gleeful for me to create with artificial intelligence and feel that I am moving away from my passions.

I don’t want to “spoil” Brave New World here, but I relate its dystopian themes to my use of artificial intelligence. If I were in school again, I would work to learn more about media literacy.

The informed use of social media, I believe, benefits from areas of knowledge in media literacy. In that area, I think I could benefit from training, but I am no longer so young.

Share how you overcame a challenge. #bloganuary

Photo by Words as Pictures on StockSnap

A difficult challenge for me to face was smoking grass. I started smoking pot with my friends when I turned eighteen. We had a lot of fun putting on the tunes and lighting up.

I was mostly in it for a good time, but it upset my mother. At the time, it was illegal. When it came time to go to college, I stopped, but I missed it.

In fact, I missed my friends–I was away from my home at school. I thought I would feel better. My first semester of college was challenging because I lived in a dormitory, and my friends got drunk often.

On the weekend, they would go out to the bars in packs, and while I was smart, I lacked study skills. I spent a lot of those weekends reading and writing for school. I felt left out and lonely.

In fact, it became hard for me to stay sober–I had to work at it. I was a little scared of ruining my chances for a career. While I had a general art & science diploma from college, I had emotional difficulties–back home in my parents’ house, the best work I could find was telephone sales work, which was disappointing after putting so much effort into earning a college diploma.

The jobs I got were boring and eventually disappeared in favour of lounging about, back on the reefer. While I made the decision to quit, I actually had to count the days until the habit dispersed. It’s said that it’s not a physical addiction, but I had trouble putting an end to it.

Smoking pot was one challenge I overcame–I liked partying with my friends, but no one stays young forever. I don’t have those same friends, as they went their separate ways. I can kind of guess the element that was the bond for all of us to keep thick as thieves.