And I haven’t gotten my wise self up off my knees ever since

You may remember when I was passing off assignments from my writing class as original blog posts. One of the assignments I didn’t post was a letter to my future self. Partly because I thought it might be fun to post it in the future, but mostly because I’d forgotten to do the assignment.

I tried to write a letter to my past self once, but writing a letter to someone that dumb wasn't so fun after all. But writing a letter to a hypothetically wiser version of myself? Kind of intriguing. I started making mental notes as soon as it was assigned. I had a million ideas flying around in my head. But on the day we were supposed to bring it in a stamped, addressed envelope so that our teacher could mail it to us sometime in the future, I was hanging around in the creative lab when a girl in my class asked me about my letter. I cursed my inner ditz, looked at the time and ripped a 4X6 sheet of paper out of my notebook. And this is what I scribbled:

Hello there you (me),

You’ve got to be smarter now than you were on Nov. 25, 2008, that being the day you were supposed to turn in this letter to yourself and then you forgot because you are ridiculous. So this is all you get.

Get down on your knees and thank God and the Universe that you are NOT. IN. SCHOOL.

Get to work.

I got this little missive in the mail recently. I remembered something about having a whole lot of brilliant ideas that I’d planned to write about until I ran out of time. But I couldn’t remember any of those ideas.

And then I thought, Ideas, Schmideas. That second paragraph nailed it.