Blogging Around

I responded to Hannah's blog 'Change of Mind: Real Love.' Hannah wrote about her changing opinion concerning love, after comparing the film Once, and other films she’s grown up watching like The Notebook and Dear John.

Dear Hanz,

I also have had a shift in my opinion of ‘love’ recently, similar to yours after watching Once. To be totally honest, I love love love love Nicholas Sparks movies. In case you didn’t realized, ABC family played The Notebook, The Time Traveler’s Wife, A Walk to Remember, and Leap Year all back to back Saturday and Sunday. I was devastated to realize I wouldn’t be able to sit on my couch having a movie marathon, due to studying for AP test and other homework. While I did manage to catch the end of The Time Traveler’s Wife, I watched it with a different perspective than when I have first seen it, as a hopeless romantic in 8^th grade. I’d still call myself a hopeless romantic, but what I find romantic is far different.

In the two years that had passed between that original viewing and now, I’ve been exposed to more ‘real’ love. Entering high school, it’s hard not to have your views changed when there are teenagers hooking up left and right. Is that love? It’s surely a physical expression of it, but which is more important? The physical or the emotional side?  

What all of the crazy love story movies have in contact is a lot of physical contact. After all, most of them are just a bunch of bad acting, which ruins the emotional aspect of the story, with a lot of special effects, kissing/sex, and staring into each other’s eyes to distract us from what love should actually be. Let’s face it: the couple that’s gushy all the time is downright annoying. I’ve seen many relationships that are far more stable than Ally and Noah’s, or Henry and Clare’s. Those are the couples that spend hours talking, can adapt from hanging out with friends to a date night, and make each other laugh. And they’re often normal teenagers, who get stressed and have bad hair days and lots and lots of flaws.

I think there’s a saying somewhere that falling in love means loving another person flaws.  Characters in movies rarely have flaws, or at least not ‘real’ ones. They’re perfect, but I know that when I fall in love I will be nowhere close to perfection. I hope that there’s someone out there willing to accept that, and help me get a little closer.

Did I still record a bunch of those sappy movies to watch next weekend? Of course. But more of the fact that I love watching them with my friends and I wish I had Rachel McAdams’s hair versus wishing for a love story like the one on screen. So, movie night after the AP? I still think the academy guys would benefit greatly from watching The Notebook.

Much love,

Charlie 

I also thoroughly enjoyed Derek’s blog ‘It Matters: Groupthink and the GOP’. He wrote about the zigzagging GOP campaign and the rationale behind it: we all follow the crowd.

Dear Derek,

We’re in high school, another perfect example of the concept you describe in the above blog post. In my two years of high school, we’ve already seen crazy fashion trends come and go, no matter how bad they actually look when everyone starts wearing it, most of us teenagers feel the need to conform as well. In the movie Mean Girls, a prank is played on queen bee Regina George, to have two holes cut into her shirt. Instead of being ridiculed for having holes in her shirt, all of the other girls cut holes in their shirt and it becomes the latest fashion trend.

Whether it be fashion trends or presidential candidates, if something is getting attention we hold it in higher esteem regardless of its face value. In fact, I’ve seen your theory about endorsements in action. On Election Day a few years ago, I remember asking my mother who she was voting for. She was informed about the major elections like for President, Vice President, etc. but for lower level positions, like new judges for Cook Country; she said she was simply voting for whoever the Chicago Tribune was backing.  

Now while I was far less informed than her about voting, safe with the knowledge that it wouldn’t be my responsibility as a citizen for a couple more years, I was still curious if that was an accurate way to vote. My mom is still far more politically active than the majority of the population, she often writes to politicians with her opinions, which leads me to think: what about everyone else? When the rest of Illinois and the U.S. votes, do they know what exactly they’re voting for, or are they just voting for whoever is flashiest?

           I don’t think that’s an accurate way to govern a country, but perhaps like Mitt Romney, it was inevitable. Informed citizens can only hope that the top-level media is getting the facts right concerning candidates’ platforms and accurately informing the voting population instead of being influence by donations and super PACs.

            Derek, your prediction was accurate. There were still some highs and lows, but three months later Romney is the GOP candidate still standing. Best of luck to him and current President Barak Obama on the long road to November.

Inevitably,

Charlie

Dialectics: Fate and Control

Harry, you don’t need to worry about the future. It’s already been decided for you, long before you were born in a room with a crazy old lady and an evil, evil man. Neo, you too. You’re ‘the one’? Don’t know what that means? You’ll figure it out, we all have oodles and oodles of faith in you because we’ve heard it our whole live. We might live in this horrible wasteland, but we all know that you have the power to get us out.

You say I should go to the Oracle, because what she says is law?  But what if she tells that the one who had guided me all this way will die, and it will be my fault? This is insanity! I don’t want to be ‘the one’. That’s not how I want my life to end up! I can be whoever I want to be, just like my parents told me when I was a kid! I can make my own decisions, thank you very much.

I am all-knowing and all-powerful, and I can’t be defied. I may not have the power to change things, and make them my own, but what I can only speak the truth. I speak of the future, I speak of the past. I can inspire hope and dreams but also crush them. I can tell you what your ‘fate’ is, but are you ready? The future is heavy stuff; best leave it up to me. You can delude yourself with these ideas over ‘control’ and ‘freedom’. I might even let you make a few harmless choices along the way. Alas, the big stuff, I already know.

Even love? You’ll take away finding the most wonderful part of life from me, and expect me to just love this women [who only loves me because you told her she would] unconditionally? Why can’t I choose for myself, experience some heartbreak and maybe some happiness along the way? Ever heard of ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’? I don’t get a journey, thanks to you all knowing fate. All I get is pain and far too much stress to be any good.

You’re unhappy now, but what about afterwards when you’re a celebrated hero? Will you think your destiny is so bad then? All this wandering around, trying to figure out what you’re good at and who is trustworthy, isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It just leads to useless dead time in an already short life. The better alternative is just being told your inevitable strengths and weaknesses, and other tidbits to, well how put this: take you to the right path.

But what if, even if I knew this information, what I was ‘born to do’ right from the state, but even with all that, not end up on the right path? What if some extraneous event occurred, one that you didn’t see coming when everything was decided that set me free? What if I could make my own decisions then? Would your word still be law? Would that convince all this people that I’m not ‘the one’ and I don’t want to be? Sure, being able to move at the speed of life is cool, but so is being able to go to sleep without fear at night.

Oh but my dear, that would assume I made a mistake! After all, I’m just another part of the matrix.

So what do we know? What is the truth? All we know is that we don’t. We could be controlled by some outside force, guiding out every move or manipulating our minds to do their bidding. Or we’re all just random parts of the universe, interacting randomly at a matter of our own will and the will of those around us. It’s up to us to choice which one we believe, and then to guide our actions as such. As Neo knows, it is possible to defy fate, if fate is real at all.  

Metacognition: Mashups

Ever since I was a child in my kindergarten art-class, I’ve loved to create things.  Being able to escape by creating something, feeling something come to life in my hands -whether it be knitting, bracelet-making, or elaborate Valentines Days cards (yes, I was that child in elementary school) - could calm me down and provide a wonderful distraction.

As I've grown older, I've moved from the 'physical' creating to the virtual. I've discovered to love writing; filling pages with my own words or formatting and creating files for debate just to my liking. When I discovered the Jane Eyre Mash-up, I saw at as another opportunity to express this desire to build and make something.

Once I had settled on a topic, challenging the status quo, I knew almost instantly what elements were going to be essential. I was bursting with ideas: the recent Arab Spring revolutions, a current favorite song by the artist Linkin Park, and the feminist revolution in Jane Eyre. I was interested in all of them, which made doing the mashup a lot less painful than it could’ve been.

Unfortunately, in true Charlie fashion, I ended up doing what I liked first, finding all of the outside elements and quotes I’d need, and realizing I had less than 36 hours dig through Jane Eyre and other English texts to find the rest of my required elements. This proved problematic, after remembering that the book was over 300 pages long. I had to plunk down at the library on my day off, and work for nine hours. It was an exhausting, but productive experience. My thought process was focused and much less distracted than I would’ve been at home. I sifted through the pages, and the plotline began to come back to me, the small details that I’d forgotten that had the potential to fit perfectly in the story I was about to weave.

After gathering all the elements, I then had too decided just what to do with them. One of the greatest elements of the project was that it was open to a substantial amount of interpretation by each of us (or our respective partnerships or trios). I had created my website, and had pages for all of the separate categories of elements. I would keep flipping back and forth between the pages, reading Jane’s story, then Orlando’s, then those of protesters in the Middle East, the words of Margaret Thatcher, in hopes that combined I’d be able to make something of it all. I realized that they were all stories of defiance, brave stories with common goals: to create a better life for themselves, and draw strength from the fight regardless of its success. I thought more about it, and their struggles were all quite similar – it would be possible to combine certain elements to paint multiple stories of ‘challenging the status quo,’ and that ended up being how I organized my mashup. Playing around with the quotes, I put together six different tales, ending with the more modern form of status quo rebellion: the revolution.

My mind kept firing as I created the stories, I was back doing what I loved – combining snippets of dialogue and pictures into a larger meaning, like the yarn I previously intertwined into a scarf or a pac-man bracelet.  Putting the mashup into the perspective of something I was familiar with made it much less intimidating than I had originally thought. It also made it considerably easier, and much easier to ‘flow,’ or develop the single-consciousness dynamic that was the end goal. The rest of the mashup took less time, and was a lot more fun once I figured out the idea of stories, it was amazing.

 I’d heard from my peers that for them, organizing the mashup was the hardest part but for me it was the opposite. They found collecting the element to be easy, but I didn’t. In the future, I need to ‘suck it up’ and always do what I think I’ll dread the most first to avoid another time crunch, and possibly be able to enjoy my birthday next year. Overall, I was really happy with how my mashup turned out, even after I ended up cutting my favorite Dumbledore quote. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream Reflections

Going to see Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, I was excited. Over spring break, I had indulged in a little chick-lit reading of Sophie Kinsella's Mini-Shopaholic, the latest in her Confessions of a Shopaholic series. The main character, Becky, throws her husband a party based off of the play with an elaborate setting described as a wonderful, magical forest and one of Shakespeare's best creations. The description drew me in, and excited me to see it live.

We sat down in the theater and were transported into that same magical forest, this time on a wraparound stage instead of in a castle, like the book. The trees were a screen backdrop that would change by the scene, but still created an aura of mystery. For two hours, I was enchanted by crazy characters and twisting plotlines; not all of which I understood due to an iffy ability to comprehend the old-English language on the spot, but I felt I was able to get the gist of it. The actors were fantastic and I overall found it easier to follow than Macbeth, and much more entertaining. However, my classmates and I seemed to collectively be distracted by one thing: Puck’s gender.

When the lights went up to begin intermission, the first I did was ask Alex, who is much better at Shakespeare than I am, about it, thinking that maybe I had just missed something. The actor seemed to have both male and female ‘parts’ as well as both masculine and feminine characteristics. We were prepared for this phenomenon, due to our reading of Orlando, but were curious nonetheless. None of us had read or seen the play before, and didn’t have any context if Puck should’ve been a boy or a girl.

After some post-show iPhone-googling, it was determined that Shakespeare had intended for Puck to be a boy, leading us to assume that the actor was a women playing a man, or a male fairy. It was an interesting take on the original work of Shakespeare, where girls weren’t even allowed to be in the plays. Female roles would be played by males dressing up like girls, having a women in a play playing a male character would’ve been unheard of!

Our fascination with the sex and gender roles in the play was not surprising, given the current media frenzy surrounding birth control, reproductive rights and the Miss Universe scandal concerning Jenna Talackova. As we as humans evolve, we’re changing how we want to act and trying to break down as many barriers as we can – class, race, sexual orientation and now gender barriers. Our distraction by Puck is just an example of the traditional roles we’re used to, and how change and progress in this area will be slow to come. Maybe we’re just maturing teenagers, but Academy students tend to be fairly open in our beliefs and being shocked by the cross-dressing was not an open response.

The students did get over the issue quickly, instead focusing on how dedicated that woman was to her role – she clearly shaved her head to play the part. From a girl’s perspective, that takes guts. She played a fabulous fairy in her mischievous ways of confusing both the audience and the characters in the forest and for that, she gets a thumbs up from me.

Metacognition: Short Stories

Overwhelmed is a characteristic that both myself and my short-story heroine, Althea, have in common. Writing the ending of the story, trying to find the perfect cliffhanger tend it, was so frustrating. I knew exactly how I wanted the end to play out in my head, with just a dramatic last few words from the main character and an abrupt closing, I could see it, touch it, hear it. But I couldn't put it into words.

It was nearing nighttime on a Sunday, the night before a week of, to put it straight, hell. Multiple tests in every single class, new Oracle assignments, and leaving on Thursday for nationals in debate. It’s not like there was pressure to do well or anything, coming from a school that's placed in the top 5 for the past 2 years. I wanted to bake for my friends' birthdays this week and make cards. I also wanted to do all of the above in a top notch fashion, being the perfectionist that I am.

I had spent the last 3 hours editing the beginning two thousand words of my story, writing a short middle so I would have some space to write a detailed ending without having the story be 13 pages. I was now sitting in at my kitchen table, eating blueberries and staring at the screen trying to have the words come to me. When they didn’t, I would switch to a new song on Spotify, or continue the gchat conversations that I had left with a ‘brb working’ message. There was always going to be something I could do to occupy my time, I thought, until I hit 3am and everyone else but the never-sleeping Bobby S**w had logged off. I thought about reaching that point, and how unbelievable horrible I would feel the next day, while testing the whole week, and when I would be debating in Round 6 fighting for a spot in elimination rounds. It wouldn’t be worth it.

It was time to suck it up and take the final step. I switched the dreaded ‘connect to wifi’ button on my laptop off, watching the yellow light switch to black. It was now just me, my iTunes, and Microsoft Word. I went back into my head, to imagine Kendrick and Althea, the lonely, unable to communicate girl with the friendly, helpful boy; and how I wanted to betray and surprise them. I knew I wanted Althea to become the enemy with a few simple words, but finding just what she would say was agonizing. It would be impossible to find the perfect words, and I ended up having to settle for what I could think of. It was a frustrating experience, not being able to find what I wanted. I wasn’t used to it, I can normally easily articulate my thoughts, but not this time.

It was an act of prioritizing, because I knew that even though what I had written wasn’t what I wanted it was good enough and I had to complete my other lists of tasks. I after writing ‘Can you understand me’, I shut my computer off to bake some delicious sugar cookies. The art of baking, and getting away from the past four hours of my dystopic word, calmed me. After cleaning off the last metal sheet, I went back and began to edit the ending, see how I could make it better. I ended up changing a lot about it, but not those final words. I was content with them, and had grown to like them.

The struggle to write, and to write exactly what you want is a constant battle for me, especially with creative writing. I hope that in the future, I can learn to write freely and maybe let go of the perfect picture in my head because things change. Trying to be perfect only leads to procrastination and writing in very small chunks, which is ineffective and can lead in inconsistencies in the small details. It’d like to be more flexible in the future, because no story is ever concrete, especially if you’re the one making it up. Maybe then I’ll be able to get a sufficient amount of sleep, or bake a cake!

It Matters: Equal Rights

At the beginning of our unit on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, we had a discussion about feminism and the current state of women’s right. A lot of points were raised, and a lot of them were unsettling. From women themselves thinking that feminists negatively affect them, and treat them with a negative connotation, to that fact that even though women are supposed to have equal rights in industrialized, first world countries like the United States, they still don’t exist. What hope does that leaves for women in third world countries and developing countries, like women in Africa or those oppressed under terrorist groups like the Taliban? How long will it take for them to find their voices, and have a say in what will happen to them?

The day after our discussion was International Women’s Day, and it got me thinking about what I want to do to make a difference. I do what I can to cross boundaries, I’m normally the lone female when I travel for debate, but I wish there was something more I could do. I did some research about the current state of women’s rights. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that difficult – the ‘women’s rights’ in google news gave me 11,000 results in the last month alone, with the majority of them about the decaying state of women’s rights. I discovered that an activist in Afghanistan had been arrested, and then there has also been women in the United States arrested. Scrolling through the titles left me disheartened.

However, one left me with a little hope. The Huffington Post had an article about an Occupy Women’s Rights celebration on in Seattle. There was a quote that sparked me attention. A student attending the rally said, “According to the most recent United Nations statistics, the majority of the earth's human population consists of non-white females who are under the age of 25. They are the future!” Before, in the time of Jane Eyre, no one would ever say women were the future. Even if the world was populated with a majority of females, they weren’t considered of worth of influence.

Brontë’s work was truly ground breaking for the time period. She paints a vivacious, unafraid character in Jane which was rare. Women took the brunt of a family, took criticism and were never expected to speak their mind. Nowadays, speaking your mind is a norm and not something uncommon even if in some corners of the world it’s punishable, and that’s a good distinction. It’s good because free speech is a known idea, whereas before it wasn’t.

The article also made sure to include the men in the celebration too, breaking another common feminist stereotype –that it’s all about the women. The reverse is true; it’s about the common, equal ground between both genders.

Our discussion about equal rights reminded me of what I, as a proud feminist, stand for and finding out what other people are doing to raise awareness. Things like the fight over female reproductive rights and comments made by Rush Limbaugh have sparked a new round of female activism for equal pay, the right to choose, and the fight against stereotypes. I can remember that while we’ve come a long way, we still have a ways to go. I want to make that way just a little bit shorter.

'an article' in the 3rd paragraph is hyperlinked to the article

An Inconvenient Truth: Most likely to be a Serial Killer

One of the best parts of finishing freshman year was creating on and voting for Academy superlatives. Through our Facebook group, my class listed 'most likely to work on wall street,' 'most likely to be a teen mom,' and 'most likely to get 3 hours of sleep in the next 3 years,' the one which I unfortunately ended up winning. As we've read Heart of Darkness, I discovered one to be added to this years life: most likely to be a serial killer or a psychopath.

A main part of our discussion of the story revolved around how far people can be pushed, and who is the must susceptible to losing humanity and their sanity. Mr. Kurtz, who had been described as a intellectual and genius, with wondrous talents in writing, painting, entrepreneurship, and speaking was pushed to his limits before a common Russian man, or the majority of other Europeans. Did his intelligence, while helpful at home, serve as a detriment in Africa?

What really struck me was when someone said sometimes you can push yourself to the edge, and find wonderful new things to explore at the heart of yourself, but sometimes it's empty, cold, barren. That's a scary thought, and the folks who want to reach that edge are usually the learners and the students. We’ve all heard modern day examples of Kurtz’s, where the criminal is a genius and has done good things but takes one wrong turn, because their brain overshadows a sense of right and wrong. Voldemort, from Harry Potter such a character, as described by Garrick Olivander in the first book, “After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things. Terrible! Yes. But great.”ile helpful at home, serve as a detriment in Africa?

I consider myself to be a relatively smart person, and I know that I have strong morals and opinions. Reading this book and hearing these stories make me question myself, am I really as selfless as I’d like to be? How would I react if I was put in these situations? Would I keep my restraint, or would I lose it on a heartbeat? Am I going to be ruthless from knowledge? The scariest part is that I have no idea.

In addition, there’s the possibility that my classmates could exhibit

these tendencies in all of their glory and brilliance. There’s a stereotype about Academy kids that we’ll all go on to change the world and make it a better place, but in 30 classes of 30 kids, has there ever been a bad egg? I consider my peers to be some of my closest friends, and I’d never doubt any of them, but could I be misinterpreting someone? Could someone in the class of 2014 end up on America’s Most Wanted instead of most successful?

While these thoughts are scary, both my classmates and myself are if anything rational and logical people, and we care. If an issue were to ever arise, I have faith that we could help the struggler through his/her issues. Kurtz was all alone in the Kongo, without any help or familiarity, but we will always have each other.