Gracie Writes: Creative Visions continued.

Again, a Creative Visions piece. We were given the first line, which we had to finish and start our own piece from. I went against the general idea, and wrote about the actual atmosphere of the Creative Visions seminars and how they made me feel - how certain people made me lose hope.
___

I once did a course about imagining a future, but I never imagined how much it would change me.

We were in a cramped little room with very little air circulation; radiators blasted dull hot air at our backs as we sat awkwardly attempting conversation with some utterly incompetent wannabe authors and some pig-headed opinionated arseholes who would give us no choice but to listen to their loud booming voices as they spouted their conspiracy nonsense.
The guy I sat next to was the worst. He had a grating inconsistent accent and horrific erratic opinions to match. His social boundaries were non-existent, as was his respect for authority and, really, his understanding of how a lecture even worked – he’d interrupt the speakers, talk over his classmates and dictate his notes loudly as he wrote them. It was only in the last two weeks of the course that the lecturer would actually explicitly tell him to ‘pipe down and let other people have their turn’, and she was met with emphatic nods, suppressed giggles and silent applause.

I had faith in mankind, once upon a time. I fancied myself a humanitarian, not an optimist but a calm believer in that old lie that someday we’d get our act together and sort each issue out as it came; the ice caps, the wealth distribution, the dirty water, the increase in temperature, the hatred of all things different… However, after listening to my supposed peers rant and rave about energy sources, lies and phony possibilities fed to us by politicians, that faith fell apart.