Closing Out High School & The Power of Choice High school has been a pretty shaping period of my life. The last four years spent transitioning from young teen to fresh adult while blanketed by the rigor of Troy High have been interesting to say the least. Academically speaking, I’ve learned a lot (though how much of it I retained is up for debate), which is to be expected as that’s Troy High’s brand. Throughout my years in high school, I questioned if academics were really the most important takeaway from my schooling. It’s certainly what I was told, be it explicitly or not, but it never felt to me truly as the most important thing. Education certainly was, but my academia sometimes felt like drivel, and my discontent with that state is what pushed me to this conclusion. Education was important to me, but in those situations where I was faced with an 18-page packet of regurgitating answers to questions we already went over in class, I could m...
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My Ego Needs a Break/The 'Genius' Who is TED and what is he talking about? Clearly his words rang clear to Elizabeth Gilbert because she really took the stage with some *excellent* prose about my new favorite cognitive construct- the genius. The greater message of Gilbert’s talk resonated well with me. I’ve kind of been in a place where I’ve been struggling to stay motivated, senioritis I guess, and I’ve really been getting myself down for it. This is just an example of the greater conflicts I experience with myself and the world around me. It becomes a vicious cycle of trying to contain everything in my life within my own ego, and then blaming myself when things go wrong. This problem is not one limited only to me clearly, and I think Gilbert’s way of thinking has really begun to recontextualize the way I digest the world around me. The main takeaway was the overload of the ego. Since the Renaissance, the sel...
Limerick and a Sentence. I don’t mean for my blog to become a personal venting ground but I barely have the mental capacity to put together more than one coherent thought right now and I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure out how to pronounce anapestic trimeter in researching limericks for the purpose of writing one, but then I felt as though just five lines of poetry was a little too short to dedicate an entire blog post to so I ended up trying to write the longest sentence I could without losing focus disguised as an intro to my blog post- 100 words (at the ‘post’) exactly so far- just to prove that periods are optional and run-on sentences don’t exist, and finally, to loop back to a previous idea, here is my limerick. Lobster of Gold There once was a lobster of old, Who sat on a pile of gold; The heat from the sun Cooked him- overdone, Forever the flavor of mold.
A Missing Piece Like most of my recent blog posts, this one is on the shorter side as well, but it is still important to me nonetheless. Throughout the past week or so as we’ve been listening to poetry in class, a missing piece fell into place for me in my understanding and enjoyment of poetry. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize because it seems so obvious now, but poetry is an oral tradition and therefore should be read/listened to aloud to truly be understood. For the longest time, poetry was not my favorite thing in the world simply because I found it somewhat of a chore to understand. I had to read it a few times and ponder it over and over again to connect with the speaker’s message, and to me that was just not enjoyable. After listening to poetry every other day in class however, I realized what I was missing in my enjoyment of poetry: the oral component. In having the poems read to me, I connected with them on levels I previously only got to with multiple rerea...
Poetryphobia If you ever find yourself in a highschool classroom, you’d most always hear a collective groan from the class when the teacher would announce the beginning of the poetry unit. Why are we so impartial to poetry now, however, when it was so widespread before? Simply put, it’s come from our disconnect with our inner selves. The emotional plane has become a taboo space in western culture. It’s seen as a distraction and untruthful so it’s ignored, and this ignorance over time has made us lose knowledge and understanding of our emotions. Poetry IS emotions, and because we’ve lost touch with our emotions, we’ve lost touch with poetry. Ok so uhhh that was really short but that’s the best way I could put it. Here’s a haiku in the meantime that I wrote just now; The cry of the finch Is the cricket's morning song, A beautiful doom.
The Hero's Journey- a Personal Take “The hero's journey” is something I find myself thinking about a lot in a personal sense. The stories we consume about the hero’s journey contain great escapades, mighty stakes, and heroic protagonists. Even if these stories seem unrealistic, personal meaning can still be drawn from them. A prime example of the hero’s journey is Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha . When reading the novel, especially part one, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between it and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit , specifically the movie because it’s been a while since I read the book and it’s too long for me to feasibly reread any time soon. The similarity between the two in this case comes from the heroes themselves. Siddhartha, in Siddhartha , is a young religious man who is destined for greatness. His community holds him in high regard due to his father being a Brahmin and due to his own religious achievements. Siddhartha is dissatisfied with this li...
12 AP 1st Semester Reflection- The Stranger The first semester of 12 AP English was one I have to say I enjoyed. The readings were intellectually stimulating and the discussions were engaging. However, one novel I really did not enjoy when I initially read it during this semester was Albert Camus’s The Stranger . I disliked it so much, in fact, that I wrote a highly critical blog post about it. After reading it, however, it lingered in my mind, and over time my feelings towards it have changed. It is now one of my favorite selections that I have read thus far. What originally turned me off from the novel was its absurdity. It’s main focus IS absurdism and all of its elements follow suit. The writing style and narrative structure originally made me want to claw my eyes out from boredom, and the ending really made me question all the hours I had spent reading the book, as I had thought they would have been better off spent staring at my popcorn ceiling at that point. As time went o...