Saturday, August 11, 2007

4:32 PM | To Dean and the LitCritters

The thing is, without LitCritters, I may as well be one of those living dead that I see walking around me, people whose lives have lost the color of art, of spontaneity, of the occasional abandon of one who has a pure zest for existence. The toil of the regular days—when work and other seemingly urgent responsibilities take too much out of life, and yet soon reveal themselves to be mere emptiness—has a way of getting into our adult lives, and when we’re not too careful, we become like zombies. Paranoid ones, jaded and bitter.

I know of one beloved mid-level administrator who came to S------ a few years ago, right about the time I got out of college and was experimenting with my days as a new graduate. She hired me and some of my friends to do a video for the first big event she was supposed to handle as the new director of her office. She was full of life, and full of ideas—and any creative idea we threw at her she accepted as a kind of dare, willing to propel the event from the timid ho-humness that it was getting to be. We soon finished the video—a very good one at that—and presented it at the Big Event, which many people liked, but which also created for her some new enemies, those pond scums who are quick to snipe at innovative up-and-comers. Flash forward seven years. That zesty administrator has become a shade of a nervous wreck, has become too careful for comfort, has grown exceedingly old from dealing with internal politics and such. She is still lovely, and caring—but I miss that old spark. Sometimes, I’m afraid to become like that.

Which is why I love LitCritters. Every Tuesday night, we—that is, me and eight young college students who are among the brightest in the University—meet and discuss stories and the craft of fiction, and every four weeks, we try our hand in creating our own. Without fail, Tuesday nights revive me, and I always go home feeling fulfilled, feeling vindicated, feeling that I do have the choice to not become one among the walking dead.

So thanks, Michelle, Dirgy, RJ, Lyde, Marianne, Jordan, Odie, and Justine. And thanks, Dean, for the wonderful idea of having LitCritters in the first place. (And happy birthday to Manila LitCritters Andrew and Alex!)

Labels: life, LitCritters

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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