On our basement computer, I somehow got it into my head that I could write a story. I think it took me a few hours, but in the end I typed about a page of a manuscript that was about a magic sword that flew, a boy, and a castle. I no longer have this story and am pretty sure it’s just the plot to Disney’s “The Black Cauldron” but shorter, more incomprehensible, and littered with grammatical errors. While it’s easy to see where my inspiration came from at that age, I did not pursue typing any further until after I took a keyboarding class.
Of course I wrote and typed in school. I did not consider keeping a journal or a blog until after flunking out of college for the second time. After college, I had a computer without the internet and not much to do with it. I still read books and was very much a fan of David Sedaris and Maddox’s web site. Trying to emulate them, I somehow landed a non-paying gig reviewing new CDs for a local music store’s website. I started writing not as Travis Olivera, but as “The Chopper,” for reasons I no longer remember, but it is a nickname that persists 13 years later.
I started writing with my friend John Nagy (who is no longer with us), and started a blogging website called “EmployeesMustWashHands.com” (that is no longer with us). Nagy wrote under the pseudonym “Rumpo” and together we achieved very little, save our own amusement. Having this freedom to write helped me decide to go back to college, and to eventually study journalism to learn how to write, something that for some reason never interested me in the past.
I was a General Studies major at the local community college in Utica, Mohawk Valley Community College. There, I started to find my voice submitting fashion reviews (from the perspective of someone who does not understand or appreciate fashion) and reporting on news written on the inside of campus bathroom walls in the student newspaper. Eventually I took a job at that newspaper, somehow thinking that I could do a better job than the people that were running it. I was wrong. Even helping publish a lackluster weekly newspaper is an enormous amount of work, and left little room for writing. Additionally, it was impossible to please everyone and was a frustrating experience overall.
At this point, I transferred to SUNY Purchase, in White Plains, NY, and changed my major to Journalism. There, I took a course called “Creative Non-Fiction,” which further explored my ‘blog’ writing, but didn’t really help with my journalism writing. The assignments and due dates helped me really focus more on writing differently and using different subjects. I was still writing opinion pieces, but no newspaper would ever publish a 10-page editorial about why Billy Joel is terrible.
Outside of class, right before I left for Purchase, I met the girl who I would eventually marry. Of course, she stayed in Utica while I spent that semester away. The two of us spoke on the phone frequently but also kept a journal between the two of us - she would keep it and write in it for a week, then when we saw each other on the weekends we would hand the journal off. It was like a dual diary, and it allowed us to really explore what was meaningful to us for an audience of one. Purchase, for me, was one of the only times in my life where I felt true solitude. I would go to the library there daily and check out different religious texts and philosophical works and it really helped shape the person I was to become. All of this is documented thoroughly in that journal, along with transcriptions of conversations between pretentious art students.
My college journey led me back to Central New York, where I attended Utica College (UC). I never considered going to there, but my wife worked in the admissions office and processed my application for free. Since they offered me a better deal than I was getting at SUNY Purchase, I moved back home.
At UC I became completely engrossed in all things Journalism. I worked at the student newspaper and was a staff writer, online editor, and photo editor by the time I left. I stopped writing entertaining pieces to concentrate on news articles. It left me unfulfilled creatively, but my output was impressive. Weekly stories and deadlines about dull topics took the place of the multi-page essays about my experiences in a wedding band. I eventually grew to dislike Journalism, but not before sinking my teeth into an interesting story where our newspapers were allegedly stolen by a staff member.
After graduating, if I wanted to do anything related to Journalism, it would be to shoot and edit video, not write for a newspaper. I did take away some important lessons from my time as a journalism student, which are:
- Read what you write out loud before submitting
- Don’t rely on other people to do your work for you
- If you HAVE to rely on someone, annoy them until you get what you need
Between my fulfilling relationship with my wife and working a few jobs, I was too burned out to keep up a blog, and I wrote very little here after 2011. A few months ago when Rumpo passed away, I decided the best way for me to honor and remember him would be to write it down in the blog that he is partially responsible for. Now, it seems I’m writing in here again not to fulfill any spiritual need, but because of assignments. While that may be a partial drag, if I didn’t tell you that, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the difference.
After this six-week course, who knows, maybe I’ll go back and finish my book about the boy and the magic sword.
