Monday, January 31, 2011

Penny for My Thoughts: Writing Prompts



What is silence to you?


Silence is the absence of the sound.
It is what I value when I'm home alone in a determined mood, on a day off, to study and get some good homework done. I cannot focus with music on, sadly, despite my love for it. I'll sit down at the kitchen table with my mechanical pencil and calculator all ready, notebooks neatly aligned, and I'll just GO. Focus focus focus. No facebook, no TV, no lunchtime. Productivity at its best.



A list of things I'll never do.


This is funny because I'm always making lists of things I WANT to do, and if we're going with crazy and wild experiences here, I can't think of anything that I'll completely rule out before giving it considerable thought. I can't say I won't ever go skydiving or audition to be on the Bachelor or fall in love with someone twice my age. I CAN say that I do not ever want to have a failed marriage - divorce is not an option. I will never get in a physical fight with anyone, mostly because I just couldn't bring myself to inflict pain on anyone else. But see, even then I don't know what the future will hold. If some bizarre situation arose where my family members were being held hostage and tortured and I had the chance to deck the person/persons responsible, I might have to do that. But who knows. 


If I could get anything in the world for my birthday, it would be...


An all-expense paid trip to Disneyland for me and some friends. The Disney theme parks are something I dream about too frequently for a 19 year old young adult. You'd think I'd never been, but we DID go to Disneyworld around the time that I was 12 or 13. Before that it had been a long time, so long that I don't even have correct memories, I would say. They are the foggy memories of the 3 year old version of me, where everything was magical and nothing could ever go wrong. I remembered what I wanted, which is not much. I'd love so much to go back again with my friends who desire that same type of magic that our youths brought us. After all, the older we become the further away from our childhoods we get, and now is the time to seize the opportunities before we stop stop loving what we once did. 


A joke that makes me laugh is...


What do a duck and a wagon have in common? They both have wheels. Except for the duck.


Did you know Helen Keller had a playground in her backyard? Neither did she. (yeah, I'm sick in the head.)


Two peanuts were walking down a dark alley at night. One was assaulted. (a salted! peanut! haha!)


What would you do if you were the President? 


Resign.


What did you do before we had the internet? 


That was so long ago, relative to my lifetime, that
a) I don't really remember, and 
b) It is incomparable to life WITH the internet, because I was at a totally different age group where it didn't matter. 

I believe I got an e-mail address for the first time in 4th grade, and started IM-ing in 6th or 7th. Before the complete social network boom, I occupied myself with dance twice a week, extra dance in my free time, golf when I was little, and sewing lessons when I was even littler. I read a lot in my tween/teen days. During the summer we went to the pool. Yeah ... that's all I can think of.


Think of a time when you've won something. Tell what you won and how you won it.


First instinct was to talk about the sweepstakes I enter online sometimes. A while back I heard about a sweepstakes for Pottery Barn Teen on the internet and I probably spent an hour or two in one day just repeatedly filling out the form to enter over and over again. I ended up winning one of the smaller prizes, a $75 gift card, which I used to buy a nice duffle bag that I still use and lend to my mom sometimes. 


But the point of this question was probably to get at some accomplishment I'm proud of, and I guess the two that come to mind most prominently have to do with dance. When H & I won 1st place for our hip hop duet as juniors in high school, that was a pretty rad time. And later that year when I won first place in the state Drill Down competition for our division, that was pretty rad also. I don't know if I had ever entered a drill down comp. before then. I had always wanted to, but was always scared or didn't want to waste the $2 or whatever. But anyway, just that feeling of knowing you were one of the sharpest and quickest to respond to those tricky commands was something special. I remember practicing at recess and lunch, all the way back in 8th grade at least! It was just fun to do.


And the hip hop duet was cool because we'd never done a duet before, and it was a lot bigger and more meaningful than winning first place on a team dance, because that happened often with our company, and in those cases you were only a small part of the whole. With this dance each of us contributed 50% to the whole (100% effort!), and it was one of my favorite dances to DO. Also the choreography and costumes fit us perfectly, and later when we performed during a pep rally for the school, everybody got to see how cool we really were. 



What would your life be like if you had a pet dinosaur?

Hell yeah! Having a pet dinosaur would rock my world. He'd be my best friend, my mode of transportation, and my bodyguard all at once. I'd ride him to school everyday and then let him roam the mountains and poop wherever he wanted while I was in class. I'd tell him all my deepest secrets and we'd eat snowcones together in the summer time. If I ended up in a dark alley at night and was about to be a salted (hehe), my pet dinosaur (some sort of raptor, for sure) would be right there to kick the trash out of my assailant and make him wish he'd never messed with me. 

4 comments:

Danielle said...

I really enjoyed those questions. Can we actually go to Disneyland though? Also during the dinosaur question I imagined you riding a brontosaurus and I could easily picture it playing in the mountains. But that is a giant dinosaur and a raptor would be much more practical. If it was trained and didn't kill everyone with its crazy claws.

Shannon said...

Yeah, I would really like to go to Disneyland. And a Brontosaurus would be rad, but they are so large and slow. Raptors can run, thus delivering me to my destinations faster. And yeah, I'd train it to only maim the people I don't like.

Jake Whitaker said...

Wanna fight? ;) JK Fighting aint all its cracked up to be.

Mashell said...

Just this morning I was thinking about how I haven't been to Disneyland in a few years, and how I really want to go again. If I happen to win a trip, I will be sure to invite you. Don't worry, I don't think it's possible to be too old to think about Disney magic.