It appears that nearly every essayist finds the need to write a reflection upon their genre and the reasons why they chose to enter it. Here, I will attempt to do the same.

Let's do a mental exercise. Imagine a glass of water. You can use your favorite cup, your boyfriend's mug or a flimsy plastic wine glass from the reception of some event. Just make sure the water inside is tepid. Look inside your cup. Shake it a little, watch the water ripple. Now take your water, and drink it. But note every detail as you do so -- the way your fingers curve around the cup, the feeling of the rim pressing gently on your lips. The water gliding over your tongue.

One of three things has happened.

1. You didn't stop to try. You've continued to read, and do not plan to stop and try because what will that do? You do not have to stop and actually imagine drinking a glass of water in order to understand how it feels. Presumably you will actually drink a glass of lukewarm water in the near future and perhaps you will think of this essay. If you have chosen not to imagine this glass of water, I urge you to stop reading. Try it.

2. You tried, and you failed. Yes, you imagined having a cup of water, and yes, you imagined drinking it, but did you really experience it?

3. You held the cup, balanced it between the grooves of your brain. You watched the water ripple. You felt it slide down the back of your parched throat -- the disappointment! It's unbearably warm, no, not even warm, and not even cold. It's at that temperature where you can't even feel it traveling down into your stomach because it has, in mere seconds, become the same temperature as the indistinguishable slimy interior of your esophagus.

Now swallow. No, not in your head. In real life. Feels good, doesn't it? I will now ask you to remember this simple euphoria for later reference.

In doing this exercise, you have partaken in the past, the present, and the future.

Past: Accessing stored memories of cups and water.

Future: Lifting the cup to your mouth. In your head, of course.

Present: Swallowing.

And there we have the three basic building blocks of any cognitive task. Retrieval, planning, action. All seemingly autonomous. We don't even have to think about the steps. We may not even realize they exist until we do something as utterly pointless and stupid as imagining ourselves drinking a glass of water. If I had asked you to drink a glass of water, you would have simply picked it up and emptied its contents without thought. In fact, we have to fund entire departments at major research universities to study some field called "cognitive science" just so we can feebly attempt to separate ourselves from our own automation and strive to understand it. Hell, I'm even majoring in it.

How do we make the processes of retrieval, planning, and action conscious? You could construct the very popular "mind palace." Imagine that every memory is stored in a different room, and walk there. Walk to another room to plan your action. Then actually do it.

But a mind palace, no matter how expansive, can never be effective. We cannot use excessive effort to control something which requires no effort at all. Think less. Or perhaps, think more.

I began writing at the age of 6. I wanted to publish a fiction novel about a horse named Marble. I wrote one page, and gave up.

Senior year of high school: "Honors Reading and Writing the Genres." In other words, Creative Writing, taught by a pompous man who could not settle for a two-word class title. In fact, the first semester class was titled "Honors Reading and Writing the Genres: Poetry and Nonfiction," while the second semester was titled "Honors Reading and Writing the Genres: Fiction and Drama."

Poetry and Nonfiction. The two most utterly boring things that I, as a 16-year-old girl, could ever imagine having to write.

What is poetry? Poetry is elementary school children reciting, "Two roads diverged into yellow wood, and I took the one less traveled by." Poetry is that cryptic Shakespeare sonnet that was assigned during English class. Poetry is what your "Honors Reading and Writing the Genres: Poetry and Nonfiction" teacher writes on the board on the first day of class.

One, one

two,

and three.

Linguistics is a curious sector of cognitive science. It is, for many, the most interesting discipline. I, personally, am not one of those people. Nevertheless, it is an important topic to study. It is discussed in nearly every 100-level course on Cognitive Science. We insist that language is what differentiates humans from other social animals. And we use it every day. Put shortly, we have an obsession with language. But most interestingly, language is the very medium through which we learn about language itself.

Language limits us. It forces us to categorize, and label, and deconstruct. It prevents us from seeing.

And that is the beauty of it.

More importantly, language makes information important. Without language, information would be useless; in fact, it could be said to be nonexistent.

I will endeavor to explain this to you via example. First, I will present two words: pat waing.

I presume that those two words mean absolutely nothing to all but the select few who have an extensive knowledge of Burmese music.

Now, if I showed you a picture of a pat waing, a few words would emerge in your mind. Perhaps one of the following: drums, twenty-one, circle, instrument, gold.

Note that I have not inserted a picture of a pat waing into the text. In this Age of Information, you can easily look it up on your smartphone or computer or tablet. And you probably have. But you would not have understood the function of this contraption if you had not known what a drum was. You would not have been able to comprehend its structure without the understanding of a circle.

However, the most important thing about this example is the fact that less than half a page ago, pat waing meant absolutely nothing to you. It held no significance. I knew what a pat waing was, but it did not matter. You would not have known that I knew what a pat waing was. It became relevant when I told you what it was. It became information when it was put into language and transferred, from me to you. Language matters because it allows for the distribution of information. It makes information important by allowing it to be interpreted by another. Therefore, language is information, but information is also language. And neither can exist without both a sender and a receiver.

But this is not why I write. In order to understand why I write, we must consider how language happens.

Perhaps it first enters through the phonological or orthographic input lexicon, travels through the semantic system, and exits through the phonological or orthographic output lexicon.

More simply put, you think of what to say, and then you say it. There is the pre-information, and then there is information.

We are all capable of mediating the thoroughness with which we process this pre-information. Perhaps you will sit in an extended silence which is only broken by occasional "hmm's" and "uhh's" before you provide a response to a complex argument. Or perhaps you will endeavor to say something "without thinking" — an act which is ultimately impossible — and the words will tumble from between your teeth in an incomprehensible fashion.

Or perhaps you will write. You will extend the thinking process indefinitely. Reread, revise, rewrite, reread, revise, rewrite, until the neural circuits in your brain have been rewired to the point that your first draft can only elicit disgust and pure disappointment.

I will now ask you to recall that euphoria which I elicited at the beginning of this essay via an imaginary glass of water. If I had asked you to drink an actual glass of water, the feeling would not have been so great. I am not the only person who has toyed with this idea. The never-ending coda to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony drags on for bars upon bars, the unresolved chord being repeated as sweat beads in the breathless air and the audience begins to slide off their red velvet seats in anticipation of the conductor's final signal to end the piece in a resonating C Major chord. The extension of the anacrusis creates a feeling of release which is incomparably rewarding. During everyday speech, the anacrusis lasts mere milliseconds. In writing, it may last forever.

"Reading and Writing the Genres: Poetry and Nonfiction" began with a poem. It resulted in an understanding of what a poem is. Poetry endeavors to create information. It is the poet's job to retain this information for as long as possible, to preserve it in a state of pre-information until all words are excised, except for those which are necessary. Poetry has a singular role: to take experience and transform it into transferrable, relevant, concise language. To package the world into consumable pieces, albeit sometimes too dense to chew.

Our final exam for this class consisted of writing a poem, and then writing an essay which expanded upon the same themes and ideas. I think it should have been the other way around. I will offend many when I say that the essay is the result of lazy poetry. But that is what it is for me.