BLoGGiNG aRouND DoS

Steph wrote about the difficulty in editing a poem, sometimes having to omit things you initially really liked:

love this post, steph... When I first wrote my poem, i had so many great ideas and it all just, came together SO WELL and i thought it would be perfect... needless to say I was SHOCKED when i found out it wasn't an A+ poem. So I got rid of the stuff i wasn't ABSOLUTELY in love with and replaced it with even better stuff. When I still didn't get my A+ i had to take a few steps back and realize that my opinion wasn't the ONLY one that matters in a poem... but it's still really tough to give up what you love about a poem to please someone else.

Mitch also wrote about editing his poem (am i the ONLY one who didn't?)... and how it's trick to avoid fixating on just one little phrase at a time:

There may be a better way for you, but for some people, this could be the best way. Or maybe there is no best way. It's so hard to know when you've got something "right" in your poem, especially after rewriting it so many times. Editing a particular phrase in a poem can be very difficult to do without messing up something else. There's a delicate balance to keep. Good Luck!

Metacognition: Me in 12 Years (Spanish)

For a project in Spanish, we had to make an outline of what we would do in the next 12 years... When I started, i had NO IDEA which direction i could POSSIBLY be going in... What job would i have? What would I major in? Not like I can even really think about that yet, because I don't even know what colleges I want to apply for yet. Okay, I'm overthinking this... right? So I took a little break, and when I came back... I decided just to write our what I wanted to do. Maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't, maybe only some of it will. Who knows? I came up with a good goal to keep in mind, anyways. Finally, I decided that, in the next 12 years, I would:
-Graduate from high school
-Graduate from college (no idea which one yet) with a double-major in Musical Theatre and Philosophy
-Teach preschoolers (build up an awesome immune system!)
-Live in Italy. Learn to speak Italian the hard way. Live with relatives, find a job there, for a while, at least.
-Come back to the States, and act, sing, (mayyybe dance, if i have to) professionally,.
-Have a family. Get married, have kids, but STILL work!
After i wrote this all (in Spanish, of course), i STILL wasn't sure if this is what I really wanted to do in the next twelve years.. but I kept it anyways. I realized that I'll probably never have it all planned out, and the uncertainty is scary. But I'll learn to be okay with it. Thinking positively: Anything can happen, so maybe it will turn out perfectly =].

BEst of Week: Lear vs Edgar

WHen Lear encountered Edgar in the forest, Edgar was disguised as poor Tom, and acted like a crazy beggar. In response, Lear showed Tom comfort and appeared to be the more sane and stable figure in the scene. However, in scenes with other characters (not in disguise) Lear seemed like a mad old man. What was the significance? TomEdgar showed the extreme of insanity, but he was not actually crazy, and in the scene with LEar, he showed foreshadowing of what Lear could become, but when Lear took him under his wing, it showed that he hadn't yet completely lost it, but there was still much more left for LEar to suffer.

Connection: King LEar's Family and Food

-inspired by the depressingly empty kitchen in my house-

KING LEAR is a tall glass of milk. Healthy, delicious, strengthening. But it takes a loooooong time for the whole glass to be drunk, and eventually the milk goes bad, it looks awful, tastes awful, and would give you an upset stomach. But let's say your mother told you to drink the whole glass and you have to put up with it anyways. Just like King Lear, even though everyone knew he was no longer an effective leader, was still being tolerated by his court.

Regan and Goneril are Twinkies. All sweet fluffy and golden on the outside. And filled with delightful sugary cream on the inside.. or at least that's what you think... Then someone tells you that the nice whipped cream, the love for their father that fills them up, is actually animal fat, nasty... makes you feel good at first... but it's really just perniciously filling up your arteries bite after bite until the twinkie takes you down.. and all you see is the pretty Hostess sign... Buy more delicious Twinkies!

Cordelia is a healthy onion with a really pretty-colored peel. At first, King Lear sees her standing out and thinks of her as his favorite. Then he asks her, "how much do you love me?" He peels a layer off the onion to discover more. And Cordelia the onion is real and true to him but still angers him greatly... like a natural healthy onion makes you cry. As much as you hate having to know the real tear-jerking onion, she's actually really good for you... but you have to digest what she said.

TED PRESENTATIONS... dun dun dunnn

Well, my group's (El Sistema: Changing Lives Through Music) presentation went pretty well. We got all our points across, no one talked like a computer, AND we finished RIGHT on time... :) !! I may be a little biased, but I think my group presented the best. So I don't have a lot to say about the final day about TED besides that... and "thank God it's over."

However, you'll hear a lot more about the preparation process right now... I always tend to leave stuff till the last minute (I work well under pressure), but it seemed like no one else in my group really did. Communication was not great. It was too new and foreign to use the google sites discussion board easily. To me, nothing beats talking face-to-face, and we only got to do that once before presentation day. We needed more times to meet with our whole group in class.
Also, to keep people from managing time poorly, a timeline/deadlines should have given this product more structure, because we really only had the intro to the project, ambiguous "TED work time" to do who-knows-what, and P-day. If we had concrete deadlines within the project, such as "Turn in a bibliography of the sources you tentatively will have used by the time TED is over" or "Have at least one task finished by (date)," I probably would have taken this project wayyy more seriously than i did.
Also, as awesome as the freshies in MY group were, it seemed as though the other groups' missed the point, so cutting out the two freshmen in each group (and having them watch the presentations to know what they'd be doing next year) would probably help. PLUS, with two fewer people, it's easier to work in a little group.

Clearly, TED isn't the best-planned-out project that's been done in academy, and it really is sorta annoying to be the guinea pig group, but it definitely has potential, with change. In otherwords, I REFUSE to go through that exact same thing again! :)

Captured Thought: Sleep Deprivation

Sorry I've kinda been mentioning sleep a lot lately... but that's what's been an issue with me lately... meh...
So anyways... I always wondered how I could get 5 or 6 hours of sleep one night and feel utterly exhausted the whole next day, but I could sleep 2 or 3 hours in a night and feel very alert and awake. Obviosly, nothing beats 10 hours of sleep, but that happens too rarely, so I'll focus on the smaller quantities of rest. I had always just assumed that when i felt so chipper after pulling a near-all-nighter it was because I was loopy and delusional from sleep deprivation because I couldn't think of anything else to explain it.
On a normal school day, I wake up at about 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. However, this weekend was Homecoming weekend, so after a busy Saturday, some of the girls (myself included) ended up staying until about that time... WE knew we had to get up by 9:20 to go to breakfast. SO I probably got about 2 and a half hours of sleep, and I felt just fine through breakfast, and I still feel okay. I also thought to myself... today still feels like a Saturday. Then it hit me. My body still thought it was Saturday. I didn;t get enough sleeo to officially transition myself from one day to the next. Those hours of sleep were just like a nap that I took before I went on with the rest of my mentally-48-hour Saturday. Now I get it. Let's hope that it doesn't become a 72-hour Saturday now...

What If?: We all ran on our own schedules

Some people have no problems waking up before 7 in the morning, being ready for school plenty early, staying alert all through school, participating in their extracurriculars, finishing their homework up, and going to bed early enough to repeat this process the next day. And on top of this they still can make time for their friends.
Then there are the people like me, who always seem a few hours behind on EVERYTHING. I always oversleep, rush to school, put in huge effort to stay alert during classes, run to make it on time to club meetings, and then go home and somehow manage to spend three times too many hours on homework, finally getting to bed in the early hours of the next Also, there are some people who just run completely differently. For instance, they do their homework right after school or early in the morning before school. They eat meals really early... really late. But it works for them.
If we were all allowed to function on our own schedules instead of those set and ruled by school, work, and others, some people just wouldn't change. I would probably stop seeing some people whom i run into only because theatre happens to be at that time, or because we are in the same choir. Maybe I would meet tons of new people whom i never knew existed because we've been forced to live on different schedules. Friends could grow apart, new ones could be made. Who knows? I'm not quite sure what my schedule would be if i had complete control, but it would definitely involve getting 10+ hours of sleep.

BLogging Around

Leanne wrote about short sentences, and how it it may be difficult to fit tons of meaning into 6 or 7 words rather than 20. She commented on experimenting with rhythms and techniques:

YAY short sentences!
not that I have anything against a string of beautiful, eloquent, LONG sentences, but readers (or at least me reading) tend to get lost trying to follow a mile-long idea. Plus, nobody (that I know) actually TALKS like that. they say "Hey, what's up?" rather than "Salutations, my loyal, loving companion. I can see in the way the light dances across your eyes that some entity of this universe sings discordantly with your life's individual tune." I don't really know what that means... which i guess proves the point. While it can be ineresting to read something longand articulate, people tend to remember the pithy and to-the-point stuff more. Mostly because its easier to remember. And understand.
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Lauren wrote about the Glenbrook Musical (so far one of the more memorable experiences of my life) and its pros and cons in all aspects, costs, casting, pulling from a big pool of talent, leaving people out, bias, transportation. It was interesting seeing another perspective on the event other than my own.

hey lauren,
I like the topic of your post. The pros of splitting costs and meeting new people and mixing talent are absolutely true, but combining the musical means that twice as many people will want to see it, and fewer people will be conflicted if North and South both had two musicals around the same time. Musical is a greaat experience, but the confusions of scheduling, and transporation take away from it slightly. I have to disagree with you on your suggestion that your chances improve based on which school it's being held at. I'll admit favoritism is definitely present in casting, but teachers from both schools come to auditions, and sometimes a director or choreographer from neither school is involved. Ultimately, I think it's based on who shines in auditions (sometimes talented people get too nervous to show it). Anyways, I couldn't help but comment on this topic, and I enjoyed your post.

360 Degrees: Chocolate

Chocolate: it has a ton of different varieties, and most of them are deeelicious. That's it... to me, at least...
Why do some people not like chocolate? it has tooth-rotting sugar. It's packed with calories. It even has a little bit of lead in it. Eww. Some people just don't like the taste.
Can chocolate possibly benefit your health? I guess so. Everyone talks about how wonderful it is, it's gotta have something actually good for you in it. Antioxidants?
What if no one ever discovered how to make chocolate candy and it was forever known as "xocolatl," bitter water? Well, there would probably be a few less cavities in the world, maybe mankind could be a few pounds lighter, but there would be a huge worldwide industry missing on earth. What would people give boxes of on Valentine's Day, candy corn? Buy a vanilla bar from the vending machine? What would you call that pretty shade of brown, tree bark? My pet bog is a brown lab; that just sounds wrong.
What if chocolate had some huge health benefit that hasn't even been discovered yet?
I'm curious about how chocolate is affecting the world. Really. Someone who stole millions of dollars might have started out by sneaking a Hershey Bar out of Walgreen's one day.
How does chocolate affect people. Well, everyone I know has heard of it, and just knowing what it is means it has an influence. But even people who have never heard of it could have some unknown connection. They could pick up a piece of paper that was recycled from a chocolate wrapper. Maybe they met someone who smelled like chocolate and they wondered of what the scent was. I know it's a stretch, but you know it could be possible. Chocolate is everywhere.

Metacognition: Evidence Plan

I decided on my essay topic, the importance to Amir that THE KITE RUNNER is written as his own memoir, because I had a TON of opinions, thoughts, and speculations as to why this was. I essentially thought it was because Amir needed to come clean about all the things he had been hiding and all his regrets: not being good enough for Baba, not being there when Hassan needed him, not being honest with Soraya, or not being good enough for Sohrab. When i started flipping through the pages of my book, i thought, "How am i ever gonna find TE to support this? I picked a way too 'big-idea-ish' thesis, and now there's nothing in the book that can solidly support that." That went on for a good 15 minutes. Then I realized that there WAS SOOO MUCH to support my idea. Amir told us everything. He told us, the readers, everything: the things he confessed to the people in his life, but more importantly, the things he didn't. I got it. Amir redeems Baba's pride in him, is there for Hassan by saving his son, confesses his dark past to Soraya, and never gives up on Sohrab. But there are still things he hasn't told a person in his life. And even though he fixed so many of his wrongs, he needed the memoir to fully heal his flawed being. All the little things he tells us but not even his closest loved one. There's my TE.

Best of Week

One of my favorite observations made in discussion was Eli's suggestion that Amir was not a hero but really just a selfish coward. I agree with him to some extent, that Amir does not fit the stereotypical cookie-cutter standard of a literary hero. He is not perfect at all, and he knows it. He repeatedly writes that he is a coward, sometimes contemplates if it is a bad thing, but knows that cowardice is not a good thing. Amir knows he's far from perfect, which makes him such a believable character, but I as a reader actually like Amir, not because he IS a coward and DOES run away and do what's best for himself at the expense of others, but because he has been through hell in his life, and he still tries to blame himself for all the things that go wrong. He is a person for whom i keep reading about so in hopes that something good happens to him. Hosseini breaks all the rules for writing a "hero" for his story, but he made a really powerful character as a result.

Change of Mind: Kite Runner

Before discussing the reason Khaled Hosseini wrote the fictional piece "Kite Runner" in memoir format, i thought it was just to make it seem more realistic. That's why i thought "Life of Pi" was written as a memoir, because for about 2/3 of the time it took me to read "Life of Pi" i thought it was a true story, or at least based off of a true story. Then i looked at the back cover one day and it said "FICTION" in bright white letters in the lower right-hand corner.

I also always had this though deep in my head that said "People who write memoirs want the whole world to know that what happened to them 'that fateful day...' because everyone should think that it was important, too" *note sarcasm* In otherwords, I never really thought that a memoir had much importance to the authors life other than to get attention and hopefully some money, as well.

After more discussion and thought about the reason "Kite Runner" was written as a memoir, i learned that the memoir form had a thematic relationship to the actual story: Amir is telling us what he could not just go ahead and say to anyone else. It lifts a huge weight off his shoulders, because for his whole life he had been too scared to confess the dishonorable things he had done in the past. He also says outright, even to himself, that he is a flawed person, and he finally accepts himself by sharing his past. This analysis can apply to even non-fiction memoirs. The writer feels secure, not pompous, enough to share deep, dark secrets with a reader who could be anybody.

Memoirs are not stories about heroes written in the first person. They are confessions of ordinary people who are strong enough to accept their imperfections.

First Post!

yep, that pretty much says it all...
i still don't really get what im supposed to be doing with this blog, but I'll get it eventually i'm sure... i hope...