Tick-tick-tick

My eyes lazily scan the white nothing on my screen. I check the time limit. Forty minutes remaining. I return my gaze to the white nothing, imagining the words I should write. I write something meaningless. I check the timer again. Ten minutes left. It takes me a moment to realize that I just wasted thirty minutes on a total of around twenty words. I quickly type a large pile of crap sentences and worthless words. What a great use of time.

I've never been good at writing under time pressure. I've stayed up long into the night knowing I need to go to sleep. I've quit video games entirely because of the last level I have to finish in five minutes. I've successfully overcome all those obstacles but the one I've never become good at is writing. On the computer or in a notebook, I am quite deficient at all of it, so long as it is timed. The words float, disconnected, within my skull. Unable to neaten themselves due to the wicked tick-tick-tick of the clock. I don't know why time pressure has always bothered me but ever since I can remember, I've never been good at handling timed assignments. Not just in school either. I've been known to stand in stores for hours, shifting my eyes from one item to another as my dad walks at a slow pace away urging me to go faster. Each of his steps another second. Step, tick, step, tick; an unholy noise. I've found only one solution to my dilemma in all my years, it's music. Music works because when you get into it, there isn't really a sense of time in your mind. It has been replaced by rhythm, rhyme, and a sense of security. No longer do you hear tick-tick-tick that slowly pounds you into an inescapable crater of writer's block. You feel at home with music, unlike silence, which feels more like standing in a field at night wearing nothing but your undies. Unfortunately music is not aloud in school so I must find other means of self distraction.

Now, if given the option to write anything I want to, I can fill my notebook in forty seconds. Now-a-days children seem to have trouble producing their own ideas and prefer being given very specific guidelines. I hate guidelines in writing. It's like chaining a bird to the ground so he can feel his potential but never truly meet it. I guess some kids are OK with being sub-par but I'm not. If you want me to write something, great, give it here, but the second you tell me it has to be addressed to my "pen pal" about my first day of school and I have four minutes, my brain falls apart. I don't care about my fake pen pal and how his first day of school was! I want to write about zombies, explosions, and funny noises, not something that'll go in the trash after the teacher reads it! I want to like what I write! There is no greater waste of paper then words made to be thrown away.

Anyway, that's part of the reason I hate timed writings. They can never be about what I want. So when teachers want to either let me get creative, or cut the time crap, I'll be happy to write for you. But until then, I will sit, slumped and sad, staring blankly at my writing medium. Keeping all of my favorite thoughts inside, I will feel frustrated and caged in. My only consolation will be the steady tick-tick-tick of the world's contraption of control. Thank goodness for blogs.