Sometimes I don’t know where to begin. I obsess over first lines. I did it when I was a reporter, I do it now. I cannot start any short story until I’ve got the first line. Once I get that line, I’m off. But birthing that initial sentence is tough. I’m frozen until it’s written.

I’m having that problem today. I want to write about last night’s last night of class that will live in infamy, but it’s hard to know where to begin. The night can be cleanly cut into three distinct segments, and I don’t know where to begin.

The journalist in me wants to revert to inverted pyramid and start with the most interesting/important/newsworthy, and then it would start with:
Last night at Grumpy’s The Hottie busted out a version of Pearl Jam’s “Alive” during Staraoke that made jaws drop and women swoon while saying a little curse about his lucky, lucky wife.

The 22-year-old girl in me (who came to visit last night) wants to screech it all in one long sentence that would only make sense to the people who were there, and then it would start with:
Oh my god and then we kept waiting for Baby Baryshnikov, who butchered The Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” do a pirouette, and K-Fed was doing pelvic thrusts, and then Middle Management got up and tried to sing some Stone Temple Pilots song and it was so awesome.

The meticulous documentarian wants to start at the beginning with Kelly walking into class and then moving on to the workshops and how Vonnegut snorted and laughed throughout out my entire workshop and I could never figure out why.

And even after all that, I still don’t now where to begin.