How important is the location of where I write my project? Is it the connection I feel towards the place that causes me to write in a certain style? Will I write faster as if I am running away from the processing of my thoughts on the hustle and bustle that is my train ride? Will I be much calmer and fluent in the presence of my own thoughts alone in my room where the only thing that supports me is my beautiful music? All these questions and more will be answered in this upcoming episode of Robert’s Blog Posts. 

Firstly, before I dissect the main area where I believe I will write my project, I must let it be known that I never go into a project thinking I must write it here or there, but rather let the ideas flow to me in whatever location I happen to be at the time I start the project. I do not simply say, “Hey, I can really write this better if I was in my own room,” or “Damn, I wish I didn’t have to write my essay on the train because I can’t concentrate here.” I truly believe that each location will just give you a different way to look at the prompt at hand while still being able to create a fluent and descriptive answer. The only real difference is the perspective you are looking through when writing the prompt. Now, getting back to the topic at hand, I believe (though I cannot say for certain) that I will write this autoethnography in the comfort of my own room with the music blaring from my earbuds as I shuffle through the “My Favorite Songs” category of Spotify. As I sit alone on my bed with the white door that enters me into this lonely, yet thoughtful universe stands slightly ajar in front of me, I settle myself in by placing the laptop in the valley of my body as I create two mountains by placing my legs and upper body at an acute angle to create such a valley. I turn my TV on to watch any sports show that is on just in case a red light will blast into the corner of my eye for any possibly breaking news of my beloved New York Rangers most likely trading Mats Zuccarello and Kevin Hayes.

Now that the scene has been set, I can finally dissect the true meaning of the place in which I am writing my autoethnography. With the door always being slightly ajar, I feel the air from the hallway breathe into me and somehow give me a jolt of energy in order to speed write from one main idea. This form of speed writing may seem unproductive from an outside perspective, but it, in fact, allows me to intertwine many ideas at once without feeling the need to worry about every little detail, which would, in fact, stunt my thought process instead of helping it grow. Furthermore, it allows me to truly go free into the thought process with an open mind of writing absolutely anything and not feeling confined to one idea, but rather go on this journey with myself, keeping myself guessing at what I will do next, which is best for both the author and the reader in keeping us both intrigued.

With the TV on in the background and at the furthest corner in the room, it appears to be in a different world that is so far away and essentially irrelevant to what I am writing at the moment. Yet, at any point, my fingers can stop typing on this keyboard, awaken myself from the trance of the music by pressing a button with two white vertical lines, and quickly turn my head to enter the world of sports. As I become fixated on the very small (though I actually never noticed how small it was until writing this piece because I am just so fixated on the show) TV screen, Don La Greca yells to the point where he is on the precipice of another epic rant over the hockey gambling bets he makes for the viewers of the show. In that short time, the gears of my brain that have been on absolute overload for this project get to come to a full and complete stop, and I can just enjoy this epic rant for what it’s worth. Now, once I get my daily laugh from The Michael Kay Show, I can go back to work, only this time rereading the past few sentences of what I wrote and looking at it through the perspective of what the reader would want to hear while still continuing the previous process and perspective of speed writing and interlocking all of my ideas together as I wanted. Essentially, the distraction of sports helps relax me enough to the point where I can calm down and only make my piece better while still including everything I want. This is not to say that I keep my same ideas throughout the piece, as I have had to make many audibles throughout many of my writing pieces.

Most of my writing audibles come from the music I listen to due to the fact that my music taste is so diverse. At the start of this blog post, I was listening to songs like “Begin Again” by Taylor Swift, “For the First Time” by the Script, and “In Your Pocket” by Maroon 5, and somewhere in the middle I began to listen to “A Lot” by 21 Savage and J. Cole and “Molly” by Lil Dicky and Brendon Urie, to finally ending up to where I am now, which is listening to “Simple” by Florida Georgia Line. Wait…that song just ended. It’s “Springsteen” by Eric Church now. In case you are not a music aficionado and do not know any of the songs, the main point of listening to all of them was to show how I could go from pop to hip-hop to country to rock in one sitting. Okay…so what’s the point (the question that always seems to matter in order to get an A instead of a B for an assignment)? The point is I could be jamming out and awkwardly dancing to one song and happily typing away at the keyboard as I try to keep up with a rapper’s lyrics while still fully comprehending what they are saying as well as what I am typing. Or, a slow, depressing ballad could suddenly come on and I begin to try to fully digest what is going on and fully visualize the situation, causing my thoughts to go askew and truly try to feel and understand what it means to go through something like that. If anything, I type even faster during songs like this because I suddenly have so much to digest and say that I have no time to go slow. If I were to type slow, I would suddenly forget and miss out on an event or detail that I could never gain again. Wait…can’t you just listen to the song again? Well, first of all, I don’t have Premium. Secondly, and more importantly, I can never regain that feeling again. I will experience something totally different and give me a new flurry of ideas that completely contradict the ideas I currently have on the paper at the moment. Now, that’s not a problem if everybody loves to read and write 100-page autoethnographies. However, since I already have come to this realization of this idea of never-ending perspectives when it comes to music, I can be more prepaed to type and more importantly, digest what is going on around me to truly understand what it means to go thorugh pain, happiness, and love, and the ramifications that it has on one’s life…and more importantly…my autoethnography.

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