The next adventure

With graduation approaching for most of us, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the rapid changes our lives are going through in the next six months or so. My life is going to be completely different, and it's hard to believe I won't be at Dunbar with all the friends I've spent the past 12 years or so getting to know.

My family is moving out of the house I've lived in for ten years, and I'm moving away to live on my own.
We're graduating. It feels so strange to say and to think that in less than three months, I won't be a high schooler anymore. It is super cliche but very true that this semester has flown by. In two months I have to decide where I will be for the next four years. Some of you may know that I despise decisions and take hours to decide even where I'm going to eat dinner. So this is especially stressful for me.
In August, I'll be 18, able to make my own decisions and even order my own snuggie over the phone.
At least most of my friends are moving out of Lexington. I haven't decided where I'll be next year, but some of my friends have decided they're getting out of here. I don't know what I'll do without you all (Lookin' at you, Sanch) but I just hope we'll all stay friends no matter how far away we are.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about graduation lately, and leaving to live on my own. I decided the most stressful part will be having no one to make food for me. Luckily, that's what meal plans are for. And as sad as I am to leave Dunbar behind, I can't wait to be at college and living on my own. I just wanted to say thank you to all my friends who have made high school, well, still high school, but at least we've had some really unforgettable times and I love you all. :)

An open letter to teenagers on Twitter

Dear teenagers on Twitter,

I'd like to start off by saying that I am one of you. This entire letter is going to be hypocritical, because although I started off with a Twitter to get extra credit in math class, I have 2,500 or so tweets since Freshman year and am guilty of almost every known Twitter atrocity there is. But lately I've been noticing the many, many problems I have with Twitter and the way it makes people interact. Besides, this is my blog, so I'm going to complain about it anyway, because the last few months I have gotten so incredibly sick of Twitter I don't even know why I bother to read it.

My first issue with the Twitter world is how important it is to have a lot of followers. Why do you care? It's not like there's a winner. It's not like you take your Twitter followers, multiply it by 100, and get your salary. More than that, it's not like you're actually friends with half the people who you follow anyway. You can only keep up so many friendships, and if you follow 4,000 people, I'd be willing to bet that you don't even read half their tweets anyway. If you do, I feel sorry for your teachers because you probably don't have time to do any of your homework and they have to try to teach you anyway.

Would it be so hard to check your grammar? I'm not going to get picky about prepositional phrases or dangling modifiers or any of that, but how hard is it to use the right you're/your? I'm not going to elaborate on this one because it would take way too long, but come on people. At least act like you're educated.

It's so tempting to #subtweet everyone, all the time, because there's so much to complain about on Twitter and let's be honest, this is high school, everyone hates everyone anyway. But you know that every single time you subtweet, someone is going to get upset because obviously they'll know it's about them. So just don't start it. Yes, everyone is annoying or stupid or tweets too much or really needs to stop talking about how great their boyfriend is once in awhile. But if you really don't like it, unfollow them and shut up.

I'm almost done, I promise, but one last thing: Hashtags are fun, but let's limit ourselves to like, three per tweet. I think even the worst of us have enough self-control for that. For example,
"So ready for the #weekend! #pumped #party #fun #excitement #friends #goodtimes #memories"
could probably be shortened to
"So ready for the weekend! #friends #fun #goodtimes"
or even just
"So ready for the weekend!"
And then I would hate you less.

So, that was my rant about Twitter, and even though no one on Twitter will ever see this, I needed to get some of that off my chest before I snap. And yes, to anyone reading this, I am probably either unfollowing about 95 people or deleting my Twitter here in a few days. Because I have no faith in the future of America if our follower/following ratio is the most important thing in our lives. So, teenagers, let's step up and mature a little bit, because we're about to go into the real world, and I'm pretty sure no one cares about how many followers you have.

(Oh, and Mr. Mullins, I'm sorry this is so mean, but I tried to base it off the ones on the website you put up and they were worse!)

Sincerely,
Me

Stressed out

So, Mr. Mullins posted a link to this article: 

It's incredibly long, so you don't have to read the whole thing just to understand my blog (I would recommend it though, it's very interesting). I'm just going to focus on a couple of paragraphs:

"Some scholars have suggested that we are all Warriors or Worriers. Those with fast-acting dopamine clearers are the Warriors, ready for threatening environments where maximum performance is required. Those with slow-acting dopamine clearers are the Worriers, capable of more complex planning. Over the course of evolution, both Warriors and Worriers were necessary for human tribes to survive.

In truth, because we all get one COMT gene from our father and one from our mother, about half of all people inherit one of each gene variation, so they have a mix of the enzymes and are somewhere in between the Warriors and the Worriers. About a quarter of people carry Warrior-only genes, and a quarter of people Worrier-only."

Essentially, this is saying that Warriors, or those with a gene that allows them to clear dopamine from their brain faster, can make decisions faster and stress less during tests. Worriers, with a different gene that clears the dopamine less slowly, are better at planning out things but tend to worry and stress much more about tests. 

Obviously, I do not know much about the science behind this, but speaking from personal experience, I would consider myself somewhere in between a Warrior and a Worrier. I don't really mind tests and almost never stress out about them (which would be a Warrior), but I also feel like my brain is working extremely quickly while I take them because I always finish very early, which indicates that I am a Worrier. There is definitely a spectrum between these two, and speaking from personal experience, I would say that magnets (most of my friends, that is) tend to be on the Worrier side (Some more so than others). That could also be due to the fact that most of them actually care about school, which for some reason is atypical. 

Anyway, my point is that seeing this research cleared up a lot of my observations. I've always wondered why some people stress the way they do, because I don't really worry that much, but people who are just as prepared as I am for a test may seem to panic and start pulling out their hair because they think they missed a negative sign... 

If anyone actually reads this blog, which I seriously doubt will happen unless your name is Mr. Mullins, comment: are you a Warrior or a Worrier? 

Written letters

This article, posted by Mr. Mullins, discusses why written letters are important: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-gasda/signed-sealed-delivered_b_2679701.html?utm_hp_ref=books

As well-written as the article is, I would like to respectfully disagree, and add some of my thoughts on the subject.
The first point the author makes is a personal one; he states that he corresponds regularly by snail mail and it is a rewarding, romantic experience. My belief is that, for the most part, this is a generational comfort that comes from a lifetime of e-mail-less letter-writing. It reminds people of the past, and brings in some nostalgia along with the kind words that letters can bring.
The next point he makes is that great writers have long written letters; to their family, their loved ones, and themselves. This might just be me, but I don't understand why this "writing practice" is lost when you write letters in electronic form. It's the same amount of practice with technique and style when you write on the computer as it is when you write on paper. I mean, they'll be typing their books on a computer, most likely, so it's probably better practice anyway.
It could be the fact that writing makes my hand hurt because my pinkie is deformed, but I feel like hand-writing a letter when you could type it out is the equivalent of long dividing huge numbers when you have a calculator sitting RIGHT THERE. It takes forever, it hurts your hand, it's way more work, and seems pointless when you're done.
Also, excessive letter-writing kills trees. 
All that being said, a hand-written or handmade card is much, much better than an e-card or a text. But writing a letter and taking two weeks to get it back just to have idle conversation seems like a ridiculous waste of time to me. So, there is definitely some merit to hand-writing things, and I'm not trying to suggest that paper itself is entirely pointless, but overall I disagree with a lot of what this article said.

Beloved

We've just started to read Beloved, so I guess I don't have that much to say about it, but I wanted to start off by saying I like it SO much better than The Road. I don't know why Toni Morrison's version of Stream of Conscious is less confusing to me than Cormac McCarthy's, because honestly it feels like it should be the other way around, but I think it's actually easier to understand. It's definitely way more complicated, but what I think makes the difference is that with Beloved, you can look back through and find the answers to your questions somewhere, but with The Road, you have to interpret and analyze and infer. The Road's writing is simpler, but I think I understand Beloved a lot better. I like the plot a lot better also, and the characters seem more real to me because they actually describe their emotions. Most of The Road is making assumptions about what the characters are feeling, but Beloved tells you how they feel and what they're thinking. 
A strategy Morrison uses a lot which I think makes Beloved confusing to read at first is reference of events that the characters already know but the readers do not. For example, they have yet to explain to us how Beloved died, which I think will probably unfold later. But they make it clear that Sethe knows exactly what happened, and obviously we know she died violently. It involves an element of suspense which is a little annoying but very interesting. You have to really pay attention to figure out what is going on or you could completely miss important information.

I also wanted to take a second to talk about our student teacher Mr. Scholtz (Sorry if I spelled that wrong!). I usually don't really like student teachers, but he did a really great job today explaining the book and leading our discussion, and I hope he gets to teach us more!

This Is How You Lose Her

Like most of the literature we've read for AP English this year, I probably missed a whole lot of English rhetoric, symbols, and other nonsense in my independent reading book. I seem to be really good at being completely wrong about whether or not something is significant. But regardless of all of that, I really enjoyed my first book on parental love.

My book, This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, was about all kinds of love. Essentially it's a group of stories told by a young Dominican man named Yunior revolving around relationships, love, family, marriages, affairs, and babies. In two hundred short pages, he talks about his many broken relationships, his brother's struggle with cancer, and his endless battle to get over "the ex" who changed him.

A lot of it was very interesting, but what I was trying to focus on was the parent/child relationships. What the book mostly explored was the way parents felt about their children.
Yunior's best friend Elvis has a love child, a son, in the Dominican Republic and a little girl with his wife in America. Elvis is so excited that he has a son that he refuses to see that the child isn't his until Yunior realizes it. Elvis is heartbroken, because he says that while he was fighting in the war, all he wanted was the chance to live so he could have a son.
In another subplot, a law student at Harvard leaves her boyfriend and comes to live with Yunior, claiming that she's pregnant and it's his child. She lives with him throughout her pregnancy, then in the delivery room abruptly shouts that it isn't his baby and never speaks to him again.
Yunior's relationship with his parents is also extremely complex. He loves his mother and wants the best for her, but his brother Rafa treats her horribly, stealing from her and blatantly being rude and disrespectful to her. He doesn't understand why she lets Rafa do this, but I think it's just a way of showing the great love parents have for their children.
What I have concluded from this book is that a parent's love for their child goes beyond logical thought and causes irrational actions. All the parents in the book did things that make absolutely no sense, either in an attempt to protect their children or to give them a better life.

The Road final reflections

We covered a lot of this in today's discussion, but I wanted to reflect a little bit more on The Road.

Supposedly it's one of the greatest pieces of modern literature to come out in awhile, and I kept asking myself while reading it: Why? It's alright, pretty easy to read, there's a lot of rhetorical strategy, but what makes it great?

After reading the entire book, I think what makes The Road good literary fiction is the ambiguity of it. For example, we discussed for a short time how limited and abstract the discussion about religion was. Everything he said was under the surface and easy to look over. It's possible to read the book and not notice that there is a message about religion at all. At the same time, someone else reading the book could draw a lot of conclusions about the boy, Ely, and what the woman says at the end. It could really speak to someone, because it hints at religion but lets the reader draw their own conclusion.

Also, the ambiguity of the situation makes it seem even more real in a sense. McCarthy doesn't specify what happened to the world, anything specific about the setting, or even the names of the two main characters. The no-name strategy has been used a lot, usually to make the characters seem more accesible, like it could be anyone. However, McCarthy takes this to a whole new level by not really giving any information about them at all. To some readers, particularly the English majors and book critics that actually liked this book, this probably seems like great strategy and makes the book even better.

So, I can see where all the people who praise The Road are coming from. And I definitely see why it would be read in an English class. But even after reading the whole book, I wouldn't recommend it to my friends unless they really wanted to be depressed.