What's this? What's this?

I feel a little like Jack Skellington when he discovered Christmas Town. I've just finished a homework assignment for my latest UCLA Extension course, Fundamentals of Reporting. I was going to describe it as "simple," but that would be a gross exaggeration - if you had seen me on Thursday night when we received the assignment, you would have thought someone handed me the head of my dead cat. Well, maybe YOU wouldn't have thought that, but trust me, I was ill. We were assigned to do a mini-profile on our teacher. It involved ten minutes of classtime to research on the internet, and 15 minutes of interviewing the teacher, all culminating in a 250-word paper to be written the last 30 minutes of class. Luckily the teacher had mercy on us and let us take the assignment home for the weekend. Papers could be e-mailed to him this morning. So, true to form, I woke up this "morning" at ten and proceeded to finish my paper. I figured I had two hours left of the morning, and in truth, it only took me one. That's because (and here's the point, my friends) I laid in bed for an hour thinking about what I wanted to write. And then I jumped out of bed and went straight downstairs to the laptop to get started. I practically ignored my roommate Ryan as I feverishly typed and researched and flipped through the online thesaurus. In short, I was MOTIVATED. Weird... My experience has been that writing, for me, is like going to Six Flags: about once a year I get really excited and go, and afterwards I am always nauseous and exhausted, swearing I will never go again. Except that, unlike roller-coaster driven theme parks, writing seems to be growing on me.
So I dove into this assignment this morning, and afterwards I felt a swell of pride as I re-read it... fifteen times. It's the actor's equivalent of staring in a mirror to practice your lines, I suppose. I had been planning to head upstairs to my new gameroom to reward myself with a little Rogue Galaxy before lunch. But I didn't go, instead I decided to write some more. On my blog, but still - perhaps you see where I'm going with this. My little tortured actor's soul is starting to really enjoy the writing thing. STARTING. Don't get too excited, OK? I might revert tomorrow. We'll see. For now, I'm Jack and it's Christmas. Ho ho ho.