About This Whole Project
The Minor in Writing
So at the University of Michigan there's this program called the Sweetland Center for Writing. It's a department of the College of Literature, Science, & the Arts (LS&A or LSA, depending on if you're short for time/have a character limit). They have a program called the Minor in Writing. Said program has a required course, the Gateway to the Minor in Writing. This was written (in fact this website is the final project for) that course.
The Experiment Cycle
College writing classes love to call things Experiments. Every English class I have taken assigned Experiments rather than Papers or Projects, except a literature course which assigned none of the above. Gateway takes this a step further, and deals in an experiment cycle, a structured and recurring round of experiments. Two in total, and then a third "Extended Experiment."
My Experiments
This experiment cycle began with remembering a strange conversation I had with a friend in a group chat about getting lunch after the SAT. We pretended to be narrators of a strange hypothetical situation, dragging in great works of philosophy, expounding on the nature of existence, and trading deeply buried ad hominem (/fond) all about the ownership of a metaphorical shoe (being on the other's foot and used to walk a mile). Some of these texts amounted to short essays (the longest clocked 398 words, 2307 characters). Our friends continued to discuss lunch around us while we leaned down to contribute through parenthetical asides.
Those friends form the basis of our characters, albeit very far removed. Entire medical conditions, hobbies, vocal tics, and patterns of diction have been invented. Meanwhile, those strange personas were the inspiration for our Semi-Omniscient Narrators.
This project, overall, amounts to a love letter to absurdism, old friends, the necessary arrogance of engaging in amateur philosophy, and my lifelong obsession with science fiction and fantasy. It just so happens to take place in a Denny's, because that's where we all ended up after Homecoming 2018, and I've spent around 5 years wishing I ordered a milkshake.