For one year in my life, I got straight As.

It was sixth grade, and my mom and I had just moved (again). This time the move was close — the actual distance maybe only 20 miles — but I was in a different school district, brand new to middle school with no friends and no comfort, except for rice cakes, which I took an exceptional liking to that year.

Mom was thrilled, perhaps not so much about the obsession with rice cakes as about the grades. She plastered “My child is an honor student (AKA brown noser, loser, socially inept, always picked last for dodgeball) at Arnold Junior High” onto the back of our black Nissan Pathfinder and made sure I kept the idea of college looming in the back of my mind at all times.

Every day I would come home off the bus (on which I spoke to no one and sat in the smelly, butt-sweaty seats with my nose crammed into a book), let myself in and walk my dogs and do my homework. This is the year early adolescence began to set in: I became bossy, cynical, completely defiant. My bottom lip permanently stuck out, my arms were forever crossed over my chest, one skinny white leg planted diagonally to my side in my best full-body scowl.

It’s also the year I learned to write — to really love it and really write, all the time. Even if it wasn’t good — even if it was angry, or sad, or just a silly simple rhyme about my dog in a spiral notebook — it was more than most other 12-year-olds I knew were doing.

I also became extremely odd that year. I developed an intense case of obsessive compulsive disorder (which, after some research, I discovered is pretty typical of that age range, and something most kids grow out of — I definitely did, though a few of my old rituals haunt me occasionally). When turning a left corner, I always had to spin before making the turn. I ran everywhere because of an intense fear of becoming fat/being eaten by lava. When I left a room, I raised my right foot up and upon closing the door, tapped on its handle with my right index finger six times before finally stalking off. I said my prayers between 12 and 16 times each night.

I could write pages about the daily rituals of that year, but you get the picture. I’m not saying I associate my odd, prepubescent behavior with the fact that I was getting good grades, but I know I was a lot happier two years later when I wasn’t.

Once I got to high school, I visibly stopped caring about school work. I continued to be a smart ass. I mouthed off. During track practice, I ran fast. I went to class a sharp and politically aware kid with no interest in pleasing teachers. You couldn’t pay me to care. And after my freshman year, we moved again — this time from Texas to the Seattle area. That really killed any motivation I may have had to be studious or do anything to make my mom happy (so. much. angst — when you think about it, how did any of us survive high school?)

My teachers shook their heads, called my mom, put me in detention, held me after class. I failed a math and physics class more or less on purpose, but I was voracious in my English and humanities classes. We read Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Steinbeck, Oedipus and the more appetizing classics and I couldn’t get enough. I quoted them. I wrote them down so I would remember them. Scholastically, I didn’t care about anything else. Maybe we all get that way when we figure out what we really love, what we were really built to do.

I still can’t do longhand division and couldn’t recite 10 elements from the periodic table, but there are Macbeth and Turn of the Screw quotes lodged so deeply in my memory sometimes it feels like I came up with them myself.

This is exactly how I felt tonight. I sat there in the basement of Kidder Hall from 6 to 10 p.m. in my field production class wondering how long it would take me to graduate if I switched my major back to political science and took 23 credits a term.

In general, I love new media. I spent all summer at the Capital Press editing reporter videos on an archaic version of iMovie (I think it was released in 1996 — not kidding), and those were the afternoons that flew by the quickest. In those projects, I got to be artsy and creative. I figured it out and went at my own pace and ended up with videos I was proud to put my name on. I love photo and video projects like that, that are more documentary or gallery work than some lifeless regurgitated assignment. But at the end of the day, writing is what I love best.

Tonight, we learned to edit with Final Cut Pro. I’ve used it before and fared well enough, but tonight it had me completely demoralized. I was almost in tears by the end of the class — I was far behind, I couldn’t work fast enough and everyone else was packing up to go home, which is the worst feeling of panic, in my small experience, aside from being in a tightly crowded underground tunnel in Europe or maybe a dark, sweaty rave when someone starts to have a seizure.

Anyway. The entire time, I wanted to quit. I tweeted and scoffed and groaned and cursed under my breath, maybe not even discreetly. “I’m a writer!” I cried to myself in vain. “When will I ever need this?!”

The painfully dull and honest truth, I realized as I walked out at 10 o’clock with my tail tucked between my legs, is that the future of journalism is uncertain. I want to write books, yes, but foremost I want to be a reporter, I want to tell stories. And today, you have to be able to do that in 80 different ways to a million different audiences that, while you’re screaming and blogging and tweeting, barely hear you at all.

So we have to be armed to the hilt to brace for today’s audience — for them, apathy; for us, exhaustion.

I have one more Bacc. core class to take before I graduate, which I’m taking in spring. It’s Biology 103. And I don’t care what anyone says… I love to write, and I still hate science.