What's Worth Writing About

Adam Anderson
Undergraduate/Creative Writing

I'm a reclusive 26 year-old senior. I hate meeting and getting to know people in situations where there's a lot of other people. I don't care for watching sports, attending parties, or drinking out at the bars. I would rather stay home and watch anime or play a video game. I don't wear brand name clothes because they don't let me express myself like a t-shirt with Mega Man would. I don't like a wide variety of foods, and if I could, I would try to eat alone. I don't listen to rap or have much knowledge of recent pop music, and I'd probably rather listen to something else when given the choice. I hate the idea of religion, but I like the idea of an afterlife.

Last year, I attempted to write several articles to try and reach out to people. I was lonely and I thought The Flip Side could help me meet people through venues I was more comfortable with. I went as far as creating a Facebook group with my roommate Josh called GOUP, which stood for nothing, to try and get people of the same interests in a place where we could easily meet them.

This unfortunately failed, due in part to Facebook's (feel free to look me up) stupidity and my own lack of ambition/ vision. I also received one or two e-mails that told me to stop writing. I wish I hadn't given them the satisfaction, but I did eventually stop writing. I actually got a girlfriend that year and was more focused on her than anything.

Girlfriends don't always last forever. Either you commit to them or you realize it just isn't going to work out. It was the latter in my case this past summer. There's a bunch of drama I could go into regarding that, but maybe that's material better off served for my memoirs.

School starts again, and I find myself much in a similar position as I was last year, but I've learned a lot. I learned that I'm tired of letting myself down and I'm tired of taking crap. I'm not going to go down before I have had a chance to shine, no sir. I'm going to write and I'm going to keep looking for people. Because I'm lonely and there's no reason to have to feel like that.

So, I struggled thinking about what to write about for this article. Really, I shouldn't have waited until the deadline to write and submit, but I didn't have a lot of choice with English classes taking up the majority of my schedule this year. I'm reading and writing a lot more than I ever wanted to. Yet, I'm still going to try to fit in writing something for every issue.

In all the rough drafts of this, I wrote about how I was getting sick of not being normal. I talked a bit about a girl I liked and my own inability to approach her because she's a normal person. Not a weaboo like me. I promptly erased it and several dozen other drafts because that's lame. Who wants to read about that?

That brought me to a topic that I often thought about last year: What's worth writing about? The idea came to me after reading people's complaints about things that were published in The Flip Side and some of the negative responses I received. Since it's the beginning of the new year, I think it'd be something worth sharing right away when people might still be on the fence about it.

What's worth writing about? Everything you can. Is everyone going to like it? Obviously not, but that's not why you should write. You should write because you want to share something of yourself with other people in a form of your complete control. Share your imagination, your opinions, your love, your interests, your top 10 of worst date movies, your social security number, and all your internet passwords!

Shitty poetry? Sure! I hate poetry, but honestly there's someone who will be impressed by it. They'll think you're a God if you can just rhyme a line. You wouldn't deny them of that experience, would you?

It might sound like I'm being facetious, but in all seriousness, it's true. We're not all bibliophiles who're going to tear you apart for the lack of literary merit. We're not all bitter husks of people that are going to treat you like shit. Someone somewhere has to like what you do, and honestly, fuck everyone else.