As if Mondays aren't bad enough already, my Mondays are always the longest, most tiring days of my week. I have four classes on Mondays - and in earlier semesters I've never had more than two classes in one day. World Lit, break. English lit, break. Creative Writing, break. Honors class. And today, I and another girl in my honors class are co-leading, which I'm a little nervous about but not nervous enough to really do anything else beforehand (although I may look over the readings again and jot down a few back-up discussion questions, just in case). My partner has never seemed too worried about the whole thing, so I'm following her lead.

I feel like I'm just doing work all day on Mondays. Most of the time I use my breaks in between classes to catch up on some reading I didn't finish, or edit whatever is due in Creative Writing that day. It takes about ten minutes to get from class to class because the campus is so huge, so a big chunk of my time is spent just commuting. At the end of the day, I'm mentally and physically exhausted.

On a sort-of related note, I'm going to post one of the exercises I did for Creative Writing today. We're focusing on setting, so the instructions for this particular exercise were to take a typical scene from your childhood and write about it using the long-shot, middle-shot, close-up method. If you're unfamiliar, it's basically a technique in which you begin describing your scene in a broad sense ("it was summer of 1995"), zoom in a little to the middle shot range ("the street in front of our midwestern house was deserted as usual") and then end on a tightly focused image ("I squirmed in my chair at the lemonade stand, shifting my legs every few minutes to unstick them from the hot plastic"). I don't know if those are the best examples (since I just made them up on the spot), but hopefully you get the picture.

Here's my piece. Honestly, it's probably my favorite bit of writing that I've done for this class so far.

The campus baked in the mid-afternoon sun, empty playground equipment and the metal sheeting of low-cost portables wobbling in the heat waves. There’s no bell, just a clock in every room watched by the teachers, and watched more closely by the students. At three o’clock it’s finally time, and we dart out of the low-ceilined classrooms, sneakers shuffling over the blue carpet and out onto the asphalt and dirt. Some parents are already idling in the pick-up line, and their corresponding students separate from the sticky herd, beckoned by air-conditioned vehicles. The rest of us make our way around to the backside of one of the buildings near the parking lot, a designated space of ground separated from the cars by a chain-link fence. I drop my purple backpack in the shade of the building, myself following. I wait, playing tic-tac-toe against no one, digging moats and constructing cities for ants until my mother’s minivan joins the cue of cars, kicking up dust, gravel crunching beneath the tires.