My Sister's Keeper

"And if your parents have your for a reason, than that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you." (page 8, My Sister's Keeper)

I just started My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. I'm only on page thirty but I already know that this book will make me cry and think. Just from the beginning Anna's (main character and little sister) situation is double sided and horrible. How would anyone like to be told that she was born so that her sister may live? That, even though she is loved, she was hand picked for her genetic similarities to her sister? The other side is, how could Anna allow her sister (Kate, the one with acute promyelocytic leukemia) die just because she didn't get a choice to choose whether she wanted to give Kate blood cells, bone marrow, and eventually her kidney?

All I can think about is my sister and I and what I would do if I was in Anna's situation. How would I handle being born to harvest parts for someone else? Would I ever choose to allow my sister to die just because I had never gotten a choice in the matter? At this point I can't imagine not giving up everything to allow my sister to live, but I wasn't born for my sister. It is hard to imagine.

So far it's a really good book, I'm already addicted and I've barely started. I can't wait to see what Anna decides and how it is decided.

People are not fish....

"Even a fish wouldn't get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut."  ~Author Unknown

It's true, as soon as we open our mouths we are putting ourselves in the position to say a wrong thing and get into trouble.  But is trouble such a bad thing?

I have a large mouth when I feel like something unfair and not right is happening to me or those around me. But if something isn't said then, yes, nobody would get in trouble but also nothing would change. What if Rosa Parks would have shut her mouth and moved from her seat? I am not at all comparing myself to Rosa Parks. All I am saying is, my entire life I have gotten in trouble for the arguments I get into. I know by now that I may get fired from jobs and I may lose the respect of my bosses and peers but is it really a bad thing if something changes in the long run? I guess the key is to learn to pick our battles, something I haven't quite mastered yet. :)

The Kite Runner

I just finished The Kite Runner. If you haven't read it, you should. It was a fantastic book with a great ending that atoned for sins in a good way. Even though the novel's setting and content was so far from anything in my life, I still felt like I connected to the novel in a few ways.

Amir (the main character) lost his best friend (Hassan). I know that we have probably all felt the loss of a friend but what really ticked me off about Amir was that he didn't even attempt to reconcile his friendship, in fact he did the opposite and tried harder to break the ties between Hassan and him. Being a person who speaks my mind too much, I find this extremely annoying in a character. It was hard for me to continue to read about somebody whom I saw as a coward and dishonest. However, the longer I read the novel the more I saw similarities between me and the character that annoyed me, Amir. I realized that I too was allowing a friend to be lost because of situations (much different from Amir and Hassan's) and even though I tried in the beginning, I gave up. I was annoyed at Amir's cowardliness until I discovered that I was doing the same thing, less obviously, and also couldn't manage to stop, just like Amir.

It's extremely hard to see our mistakes in life. I think that is why I love reading so much. I connect or don't connect with certain characters and I usually have no idea why until the end of the book when I all of a sudden understand that I am just like them in a certain way. Amir made me understand the cowardliness we all have in certain situations.

We're not alive.

"Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive." -Mel Brooks


When reading this quote, all I can think is, "We are not alive". We sit in desks all day. We ask to go pee. We are escorted to class when tardy. How is this living by Mel Brooks’s definition? When we jump around and flap our arms we are thought to be crazy hooligans with no manners.


Other than only not having the freedom to be hyper every once in awhile, we also don't even have the freedom to make our own decisions and think for ourselves. Apparently, when an assignment doesn't involve a textbook then it isn't an assignment. When we are forced to think outside of our small school and look at our whole community or world, then we are just wasting time. When our thoughts don't agree with others, than we are wrong. At least that's what I hear...


Well maybe that is how High School has to be...for some. Those who can't handle the maturity of a decision on their own may need a textbook to guide them. But for me, I need a lesson which will help get me to "real" life. I need to learn to make big girl decisions so that when I truly get to be alive, I will know how to live. I would think all High School students need that push into society, that guidance into our own goals and projects, but maybe I'm wrong...

The End!

I'm a little undecided about what to write about this week. English seems to be the furthest away from my mind right now, even though I have 100ish pages to read before class tomorrow in The Stand and I'm behind in Crime and Punishment. Mostly I've been thinking about the end of...everything and "where to now?" Seniors jumped through the senior sign at our game on Friday, our last home game. It made me feel like it was all over, even though this is only the halfway point.

So, back to English and still speaking about endings. I'm coming to the end of The Stand. By this point, I'm pretty certain that all the characters are present and all I'm waiting for is the big shebang. We have good vs evil and who will when? Most importantly what characters will switch sides? Even though I feel certain that good will win (doesn't good always win?), how it will win is a question I can't/won't even guess on. I only wish I knew.

This seems to be the time for endings. Like any good ending, we never know what may happen.

www.creativewritingprompts.com

Let's see,

In first period I watch as a friend is brought down
In second period I learn to how to shade with dots
In third period I drown
In fourth period I want to scream a lot.

In fifth period I try to get ahead
In sixth period I'm the only one who works
In seventh period I'm ready for bed
In eighth period I usually get hurt.

It's usually the same
routine every day
I wish high school wasn't lame
wouldn't that be the day?

I wish someone told me
But would it have made a difference to know
that high school was not all it's cracked up to be
Instead I have homework, like a waterfall flows,
pouring out of my eyeballs and creating an inch of scorn on my bedroom floor every night when I arrive home then laying eggs all over the floor so that the load grows. *

This bucket of distaste
is what feeds me everyday
It is such a waste
to live for a GPA

I deserve a break
but here we go again
drinking our cups of restraint
and living for the beginning of the end.



---By the way, I hate poetry but occasionally it's fun to rhyme (it makes me feel like a kid again). Also, www.creativewritingprompts.com has some really fun ideas (some are used in this blog), so try it some time.!!!---

                                                                 ---Sara

*Yup, I know it doesn't rhyme!

Good vs. Evil. Is it that simple?

"Leo?"
"What."
"This is very important to me. Because I like [him]...and don't like him. I feel two ways about him. Have you ever felt two ways about a person?"
"I only feel one way about him."
"How?"
"Scared." (The Stand, page 682)

Leo, a young boy who only recently replaced grunts and yells with words, knew exactly how he felt about this other character. While Larry, a 20-something-year-old man, was still confused and conflicted about how he thought about this same character. Is the ideas of good vs evil over-complicated by older people? Leo got a gut feeling about this certain situation and acted on it, while Larry didn't want to make any fast assumptions.

The Stand is full of characters who are constantly having to make that super important decision between the good and the evil. However, very few of them are able to see the evil in their own ranks. Evil people linger with the good people and not many see how evil they can potentially be, even though they see the obvious difference between good and evil. They may not like the evil people but they still don't recognize their pure evilness.

Is this a good quality? Forgiveness, turning the other check, the idea of not judging and only seeing the good in people. Those are all good qualities, right? When present in The Stand, they don't seem that great. All of the sudden, the bad guys seem worse and the good guys aren't standing up for themselves enough.

This, to me, is where the good and evil become tangled. How do we protect our innocence without turning evil. To turn a person, who is seemingly evil, out of their good society, they would be doing an evil act. But the longer the evil person stays, the more people affected and maybe turned evil.

Leo may see the evilness in a person before others but does that make the distinction between good and evil simpler? Or does it just prove that even though we may know good vs. evil we can't successfully do anything about it?

Another installment from Stephen King

"The wrist that he had broken when he leaped the railing of the stairway bolted to the Cheery Oil tank had not healed right, and that wrist was a grotesque lump wrapped in a dirty, unraveling Ace bandage. All the bones in the fingers of that hand had pulled up somehow, turning the hand into a Quasimodo claw. His left arm was a slowly healing mass of burn tissue from elbow to shoulder. It no longer smelled bad and suppurated, but the new flesh was hairless and pink, like the skin of a cheap doll." (Page 563, The Stand)

Every character created and introduced by Stephen King makes me second guess all my orignal assumptions. I think that maybe the characters are just gonna die or the normal will happen but then Mr. King switches things up on me. Occasionally he puts in a couple of creepers. Some are obvious creepers like Trashcan Man (dude mentioned above) and some are completly unobvious until the creepy moment. I'm really loving these books that have a lot of thought put into them.

I really want to say a whole lot more about this man but I don't want to give away any part of the book (for those of you that might actually read it). So yeah, he is creepy and I really want to know what will happen with him.

"...But it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed..."
- Paul Simon

"As the man stepped into the glow of the flickering fluorescents, Stu saw that there was only a cold black shadow where his face should have been, a blackness punched by two soulless red eyes. No soul but a sense of humor. There was that; a kind of dancing, lunatic glee." page 338

I'm currently on page 339 of a 1,141 page book, The Stand. I have so many questions like, "Who is this man with 'lunatic glee'?", "Are all this characters going to eventually meet?" and "Why is it called The Stand?". 

However, I have a extreme respect for an author who can write a novel with more than a thousand pages and way to many characters for me to keep up with and still make it interesting. I never found that "dry part" everybody talked about which seemed to have no purpose. Instead, I see every character, every chapter as an important part of the plot and if I pay close attention maybe, just maybe, I'll actually get what's going on. I fear I'll read all 1,141 pages and still be confused and clueless. Even if I still am, I feel I will have read a really interesting and long book and therefore be accomplished.

Until that point, I'll continue to flip back to past chapters to revisit an old character and remember what happened to them. Then I'll try to figure out why Stephen King put this character in the paragraph next to the last character I read about and I'll attempt to connect the extremely scattered dots which make up his plot. Then at the end of the day, I'll tape a piece of notebook paper over the picture of Mr. Creepy King himself on the back cover, calculate the next 27 pages that I have to read for the next day and cough with fear of the "superflu".

"Outside the street's on fire
In a real death waltz
Between what's flesh and fantasy
And the poets down here
Don't write nothin at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night
They reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded
Not even dead
Tonight in Jungle Land"
-Bruce Springsteen

Maybe that's why its called The Stand?

Why all the rules?

I will never cease being surprised by the stories in our literature book. Every time I start I can't help but think of them as required reading but soon I'm rereading them not for clarity but in amazement.

This week my "amazing" story was Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. I was confused at first, not exactly sure what was going on but I soon saw the sarcasm in her words, which said, "Why all the rules?" This story was placed very nicely in our Beford texts, considering we are a bunch of rebellious, authority hating teenagers. Some of the rules enforced on us don't even have a real reason for them, just "because I told you so!" The no-hat rule? Shaving a 5-o-clock shadow? Both of these incidents can be taking to an extreme by students, but we were never given the chance to prove that we wouldn't. So why all the rules?

I also, relate to this story because she's a girl. I feel, even with the changing of times, we are all being groomed to get our "Mrs." title. Our MRS degree. We learn how to take care of our man and our homes. Like the girl in Girl it can feel kind of overwhelming. I don't think it's as bad as it used to be, mainly just a small joke and a silent truth which we all try to ignore.

TiTAnIc

"Who does not love the Titanic?
If they sold passage tomorrow for that same crossing,
who would not buy?

To go down...We all go down, mostly
alone. But with crowds of people, friends, servants,
well fed, with music, with lights! Ah!

And the world, shocked, mourns, as it ought to do
and almost never does. There will be the books and movies
to remind our grandchildren who we were
and how we died, and give them a good cry.

Not so bad, after all. The cold
water is anesthetic and very quick.
The cries on all sides must be a comfort.

We all go: only a few, first-class."

I've never heard of the Titanic deaths as "not so bad" but the guy does have a point in a way. We all die so why not die in style? I can't imagine it being "a comfort" but its got to better than some ways of dying. Now all those people are remembered and how often does the average Joe get that much recognition for their deaths?

To me, its saddest that we worry about dying alone. Our fears can be so great that we fill our houses with pets and live on hope that someone will find us soon after we die so that our pets wont eat us. What kind of society do we live in that we are so close together but so far apart? Used to, grandparents would automatically live with family after they got to be older. Now, they get shoved into nursing homes where they don't know anybody and strangers are getting more personal then family.

David, the poet, calls the Titanic victims "first-class". That would be like the millionaires to have a dying party. "By invitation only!"

Tree Climbing...Blog Post #3

I live surrounded by woods on three sides of my house. When I was a kid, 3rd grade and up, my playground was those woods. I don't think my parents agreed but I couldn't be stopped. I would sneak out of my house in the middle of the day and imagine I was a soldier on a secret mission(yes, I'm a girl) or just read in a tree. One day I stopped hiding out in the woods. I guess I realized it was childish or just stopped enjoying getting dirty like a boy.

Years later, my sister and I were exploring in these same woods. I was taking her to all the places I used to hide out and play. I was telling her how it looked years before and how used to, "I could race through these woods sooo fast!" She was giving me the, "Okay, little sister" look so I stopped and we went exploring further and further into the woods. There was a spot were the rocks were so numerous and placed just right, to look like a graveyard. Then there was a very interesting looking tree which just happened to be perfect for tree climbing.

Leah and I climbed up this tree, laughing and struggling until we finally made it to the perfect sitting position. We sat there for a few minutes just chillaxing and listening to the complete silence and utter loudness of the woods. I jumped out of the tree first, being the younger and more impatient one. I looked back and Leah looked scared. "What's wrong?" I asked because she wasn't getting down but she wasn't talking either. "I'm scared, I don't think I can jump, Sara!" "Leah, It's okay! Look, it's only like four feet. Just grab my hand and jump. You'll be okay." She looked at me. She looked at the ground. She started crying. She grabbed my hand and then she jumped. 

She was still holding on to me as we both stood on the ground. Standing a foot or two higher than me but looking at me with a look so different from the "Okay, little sister" look from before. Then we both started laughing. "Wow, that really was only 4 feet. What was I thinking? Thanks..." "Haha, it's okay." 

We walked back to our house laughing and talking. I couldn't help but wonder if there would ever be a time when I wasn't viewed as the little sister, ever. It was a stupid wish, but I wanted to be older, more mature and on the same level as my sister who is three years older than me. I honestly can't say my wish has changed much over the years. Leah is a lot to look up to.   

Anything: Blog Post # 2

I really liked "The Story of an Hour" because of how many different interpretations there could have been about Louise's, the main character, death and strange feelings.

On one hand, she could have been a very uncaring character who was selfish enough to praise her husbands death so she could be "free".

Or she could have been having a really rough marriage and knew there was no way out so she was content until she realized she didn't have to be content anymore becuase her husband was dead and she was now free.

Or....

As our class discussion on the short story shows, there are so many different ways to interpretate what happened to Louise. We all got a chance to have our own opinions about the story because there was no "right" answer. We all got to decide what really happened.

I love stories like that.

What is storytelling?

Storytelling expresses life.

Humans have always expressed their lives and the lives of those around them in whichever way they are most comfortable with. It can be verbal like a campfire story, written like a book or a note to a friend, sang like a rap about lost love, or expressed through pictures. These are all stories we need to tell.

Storytelling is the pictures which we were not present to see. It is a snapshot in time which we just happened to miss. A perfect sunset described in detail in a story or poem can seem almost as realistic as staring at it. 

Storytelling can be the way out of an situation. Until a person discovers a way to express themselves and their problems through their own way of storytelling, then they have no way to escape and fix their problems. When their story is released, then they will feel better and may even find a solution.

Storytelling, in a more practical way, is the record of our history. From the beginning of time, humans have recorded their history, in written or picture form, which is one of the ways we are now able to see and understand the world how it once was. 

Storytelling is the way we communicate as a race. Most of our speech is a story and most of our writing is a story. So without storytelling we wouldn't have much of a written or spoken language.