Looking back to high school, I remember sharing a tiny room with my mother. I can remember the tiny foldable table, the clothes on my head hanging from a makeshift clothes line, and a plastic storage bin as my chair. I remember how often we folded the table and moved the bin to open up the closet that it blocked. While this corner had been my buddy from snacks to dinners to all-nighters, it was very impermanent. As circumstances improved, so has my corner. I am still sharing my room, but we have the rest of the apartment now. I am still in a corner, but it’s a little bit more permanent now. I upgraded from a tiny foldable table to a computer desk, and I also built my own pc in addition to my laptop.

I intend on primarily writing my project in this tiny corner with my desktop computer. To be frank, I am a little worried about my mindfulness because this computer is meant to be my gaming computer. I spend most of my free days in this desk between watching and playing video games. It feels a lot more comfortable when I get to type on my mechanical keyboard, and my wide screen. I guess it is easy to think about how much I slacked off in this computer coming from a month long winter break. I do not only have lazy and terrible memories with this corner. Looking back to my senior year in high school, I remember having undergraduate skype interviews with admission officers. Recently, I remember having my graduate skype interview with graduate school professors. It just feels so surreal about how I have improved along with my corner. I had not really thought about it, but if anything else my corner has seen me grow as a person more than anyone else. Taking a step back and really looking at this place, it feels very tight and limiting. To my left is a dark closet towering over my desk effectively blocking the lightbulb, and to my right is a closed window with the blinds always closed. The width of the table is barely three feet long because of the radiator limiting my space. I guess looking at it from this perspective does not make it so appealing, but compared to my previous workspace, it is very appealing.

My secondary place of writing would be wherever my laptop is – may it be on the subway, on this same desk, at a park, a corner in Gillet Hall, my club room in the Student Life Building, or the library. I guess wherever the creative juices flow, or something in the middle of nowhere inspires me, as long as I have my laptop I would be able to work on it. Being in these spaces provide a new and fresh perspective than just looking at my monitor. At home, I don’t really have any other humans to interact with. I am mostly stuck staring at a wall or watching videos that can either distract or inspire me. On the other hand, public places would be a lot more refreshing to work at, because I could easily come from a great conversation and be inspired by that interaction or simply be inspired by the nature surrounding me if I were working at a park. I think that these two places will really be able to pull two different types of writing from me because of the different thoughts that they can provoke.

Being mindful will definitely be very beneficial when writing this paper, because I can easily be distracted at either places. Just thinking ahead, I know that on the weekends I will spend my time watching video games and attempt to write my project, and get nothing done in the end or end up with a really poorly written paper. Being mindful at home will definitely be helpful in writing about objective factual information for the autoethnography. I think it would be easier to focus on the research part of the paper not distracted by the outside world. On the other hand, I think that I can bring more of myself into the paper writing it on my secondary place of writing. In this case, I would be more present in the moment and be able to incorporate myself easier into this project. I believe that these two places of writing could only improve my project because context really matters a lot especially when writing a paper including myself.

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