Blogging Around: Anya and Lizzie

A response to Anya’s blog concerning organization, and how she felt it helped her other responsibilities and clutter differently

Dear Anya,

I must say I’m shocked that you don’t like organizing! You always seem composed. I’m the opposite way, I like to organize things when I feel begin to feel overwhelmed, instead of when mess is really overflowing like you seem to. I have a habit of whenever I know I have a lot of homework; I have to clean my room before I start otherwise I can’t sleep or concentrate. I can almost always see the glass surface of my desk!

Even with our differences, I completely agree with the conclusions you drew from organizing your desk – places that we keep lots of ‘stuff’ and where we spend a lot of time should be taken care of, so that they can take care of us. Cleaning can take a load off of our shoulders, even if it doesn’t count for a grade or benefit us students when submitting college admissions, It’s a matter of looking at the big picture, which in our hectic lives gets lost,

I loved when you said ‘I realized something after this simple project of combing through and tidying my desk: organization can also be a way of letting go of unnecessary things.” That’s an idea that I’ve never considered before. When I clean, even while I like it, it’s just one thing to check off my list, but you see it as much more than that – it can ‘check off’ other things too, because we then realized what’s important to us after we explore all of our memories.

I wish you luck on your organization, and I doubt that your burdens will ever be too heavy. Have a great weekend!

-Charlie

This is a response to Lizzie’s blog about women in Shakespeare, and how insight about them brought her new respect for him.

Dear Lizzie,

I agree that you and I are lucky to live in a (for the most part) accepting society where we as young women have rights and strong futures ahead of it. Oh, how society has changed!

I remember when Mr. Allen brought up women in Shakespeare, and having a similar reaction to you. Growing up in the twenty-first century has shielded us from things that really aren’t that old, like the suffrage movements and women accepted in the workplace. Connections don’t happen as easily, but when they do, it’s like turning on a light.

It’s just another angle of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, but I found in interesting how in King Lear, and in other plays like Macbeth, the strong female leads are also two of the main antagonists. When the female is the protagonist, like in Romeo and Juliet, she was weaker and more of the traditional female character, I certainly haven’t read enough of Shakespeare’s works to see if this is true for everything he’s written (and I could be blatantly) wrong, but I think that for now, it could be indicative of the social norms of Shakespeare’s time that he could only push so far.

Either way, I hope that women who saw his plays and read his writing took away some of his female characters’ strength the way you and I do growing up with characters like Hermione Granger and Maximum Ride.

I hope your surgery went well and I’ll see you on Tuesday!

-Charlie