Week 14

After we looked at that website last night, with every possession out on the lawn I think possessions say a lot about a person. I'm looking around my room right now, and looking at everything I own. A whole room full of just possessions, which is in theory just stuff, things that essentially you don't need.
My best friend, Bryn Thomas, once asked me if I could save one thing in my house during a fire (having all pets, and family members safe) what would I save? I told her my car. Bryn said "No Grace, that's not in your house. What would you save in your house?" I had to think about that one of a second. It made me realize that all I have are really just things, that don't mean anything personal. I was about to say pictures, but I realized that all the pictures I want are now on Facebook, which in a sense takes away to the personal aspect of those to. I really didn't know, everything I own is pretty much replaceable. My clothes, although some expensive and some nice, can always be replaced. My books can always be bought again. And I'm not attached to any of my trinkets.
After debate, I decided I would save my stuffed animal Woofer. I've had the ugly little dog since I was 4, and to be quite honest, it's not all that cute. The tail is missing, and the eyes are all scratched up. But it's the one thing in my room you can tell has been loved for a long time.
A possession is just a possession, but really is more the quality and love you put into things you own then the quantity of stuff you possess.

Week 12

These past few months have been insane. I'm not saying a bad insane, or necessarily a good insane, but just crazy all around. I have less then nine months left in Burlingame, and while I stay here I've decided I have to make a few changes.

One, I've decided to get rid of all the poison influences in my life. Most of these are my fault. For example my procrastination habit. I'm done with it, I'm trying my best to break the habit, because in the long run it's better for me. I've stopped waiting for certain things to change, that I know won't, because if I've done my best to change them and there still the same, then it's time to move on. Maybe some of the changes won't make me happy all the time, but in the long run they are what's best for me, and the people I love.

Two, I've decided that there is no time left to be unhappy. Happiness is a choice, and I want to choose to be happy while I'm here. I refuse to argue with anyone, I'm attempting to spend as much time with my friends as possible, I am doing my best not to get sad, angry, or stressed out, but most importantly do things that reflect me. This is something little I do everyday, this week my project is to learn how to play "Fight for Your Right" by the Beastie Boys on Piano. Last I was as I was looking up Hamlet songs online, I got inspired to write an Oedipus rap myself. These are just little things that make me happy, no one else. No one else would find any of this entertaining, but life is too short to be unhappy. And my time left is precious, so why waste it?

Week 11

I stood beneath an orange sky

With my brother standing by

With my brother standing by

I said Brother, you know you know It’s a long road we’ve been walking on

Brother you know it is you know it is

Such a long road we’ve been walking on

-Alexi Murdoch - Orange Sky Lyrics

I've played AYSO soccer since 1996, and I have never injured myself. My last game of my last season of AY, I break my ankle. Irony in it's finest. I've been stuck doing extremely limited activities in my house for the entire weekend, and considering I'm always doing something I've all but gone insane. And the song that I posted above has been put on repeat by my mother all weekend, and is now tattooed in my mind.
So besides being stuck on crutches for homecoming, where does this leave me? I'm trying to be positive by catching up on homework, doing college apps, and reading. But I've spent an extraordinary amount of time with my brother. This all started when I first got home after my accident. Being left without a cast, or crutches, and no one being home I decided that the most practical thing to get from room to room was to army crawl, it worked even if I looked a bit ridiculous. So after doing this for a while, I notice that my younger brother Grant, has been watching me the entire time. I ask "Grant, help me into my room?" Grant looks down at me and goes "Nope, this is better then T.V." Thank you Grant.
The thing is, Grant has always been my best friend (and Gray to, but he's still too small). The pure reason for this is we spend less time together then any of my other friends. When I'm home he's asleep. When he's up I'm out. I go days to a week without seeing my brother, our only middleman being the texting or our parents. We don't fight, because we hardly see each other, and I've been told by friends that we're practically twins (in the way we act). Grant and I couldn't look much more different. While, Gray and I could be twins if he was older. Grant lacks our pink complexion and round faces. He is naturally dark skinned, and sports the famous Italian nose. But in humour, we are identical.

Needless to say, with being so busy, Grant and I haven't had much bonding time. So this weekend, we watched movie after movie, went to church, and actually ate dinner together. It's hard for me to look at him sometimes, him being almost six feet, with his deep voice and the girls call and ask for him. All I can think is this is the kid who wears a Snuggie around the house. But I guess that's what makes siblings close, the fact that you know their mannerisms so well, and you share the bond of blood. So having that working for us, and and through the fact that we listen and have never judged each other, makes my brother my greatest ally in the Goodman household.

Grant has always been the most sensitive of the Goodman three, with Gray being logical, and me just being tough skinned, that meant Grant was left to shoulder Gray's and mine emotional baggage. When our parents fight, Grants the one that freaks out, or when someone gets sick, it's Grant that gets upset. When my Grandma passed away this summer, it was the first death that any of us children had experienced of a close relative. I witnessed Grant being torn from being a "man" and what that entails, to being his normal emotional self. Grant's emotional side gave in, and when we went in the hospital room to say our final goodbyes, he made me come in with him. And while holding my hand, he spoke his goodbyes for both of us. That night neither one of us slept, and with Gray in between us, stayed up in the family room in silence. Grant might be the same as me in humour, but I could never have opened up like that so rawly, and that's where he comes in. I complete him by being tough, and he lets me be emotional through him. One day when Gray is older he will come in to the equation, and complete us even more. But until then, it's just Grant and I, and it's nice to know that my best friend has my back.

Week 10

Well, I have a problem, I need time to stop. Senior year is going so fast, it's already almost Halloween. I've been busy taking senior poll photos, trying to finish college applications, and at the same time remembering to have fun. My friends haven't seen me in weeks, my boyfriend complains he never sees me, and my parents asked me last night to please try and be home for dinner once a week. When things are going so fast, how is it possible to stop and smell the roses?

On top of that my youngest brother, Gray, left for Outdoor Ed this week. I remember when I was packing for that, thinking I was so grown up to finally going out without my parents, and that I was a "big girl" now. Well, the "big girlness" has faded, and all I want to do is be a little kid and have my parents clean up after me. I'm tired, stressed, and the only thing to do is to keep going, because if I stop I might fall behind.

This weekend my girlfriends decided that it was necessary to take a girls night out and go to see Where the Wild Things Are. I went into the movie expecting some silly little film, that I could take my brother to when he got home. The movie surprised me, it taught that above all no one is perfect and all you can do is try. I guess that's all I can do in these next couple months, to try. I can try and meet my parents, friends, and boyfriend's expectations. Or I can try and just be happy, and make myself happy. I think I'm going to go with the later.

Week Nine

I have a best friend who is constantly surprising me. She from the outside looks just like the typically smart senior, she is very private, she gets good grades, she's one of my more "sane" friends, and from the outside she looks normal. The thing is, she's not. When you get her going, she can't stop talking, she is one of the funniest people I know, and when she wants to let her guard down she can opens up in ways only a true friend could.
The point I'm trying to make, is that people are always surprising other people. This same friend once told me that: "you have to think of the other person as emotionally complicated as you are." She was right of course, like always. You cannot as a person to another person, judge. Well of course, you can, but when you do you cheat yourself of the opportunity to truly get to know someone else when you pass judgement.
Literature, is constantly proving this. In book after book, and story after story, characters are constantly breaking the mold. This happens in Antigone because Antigone is a woman, or in The Book Thief, where Leisel breaks the mold because she is German. In literature the author puts characters in situations to prove the reader wrong. People should take this into account for everyday life as well, and realize that a person is full of many suprises.

week seven

Lucius Junius Brutus stabbed his best friend Julius Caesar, emperor of all of Rome. Most people remember him committing one of the largest acts of betrayal of all time, and arguably bringing down one of the most powerful empires. I just know him as Brutus, and he comes in the form of my 1991 Volvo.
My world doesn’t consist of much. All it entails is my group of ten best friends, my family, and Brutus. Looking at him it appears that he doesn’t consist of much either. I like to think that he’s held together by love and runs on hope. The seats stay together with duct tape, the headlight is missing the glass, and if its night time and I need to brake, whoever’s in the back seat is required to hold up the brake light, which is only still attached to the car by a few wires. But he is my car, and I wouldn’t trade him for anything.
Before I got my license, and before I got Brutus, I was stuck as far as the bus would take me or as far as I could walk. When I sat in Brutus for the first time, sure I was cramped by the low ceiling, and the car phone kept bumping my knee, but there was only one thought going through my mind: “I can go anywhere and I can do anything.” Those late nights, early mornings, and long drives with the destination usually unknown made me believe this more and more.
I grew up that first summer I owned Brutus, and every major lesson learned happened while I was sitting in the driver’s seat. I got my first lesson on losing some one I loved while with Brutus, when I got the phone call my grandma wasn’t going to live to see the next week. That summer I went to live with my grandpa in Alamo, to have him get used to not having my grandma around. It was just Brutus and I that took the hour long commute every other day to see him. It was Brutus that took me to deal with funeral arrangements and to the cemetery. And it was Brutus that helped me realize that you should cherish everything you have before it’s too late.
Not all of my memories in Brutus have been sad; no most have been quite the opposite. I learned that no matter where I am AAA can come unlock your car, if your car won’t start how to jump a battery, and that if your car breaks down your going to need a lot of people to push it. Most importantly though I learned that in every one of those situations it’s good to have the friends I have. The friends that no matter where we are, or what predicament Brutus and I have put them in, they will always help me figure it out.
I was once told by a good friend that she knew it had been a good night if she saw Brutus’s tail lights drive away. During that summer my friends and I took countless trips to San Francisco, the beach, and everywhere in between. Usually getting to where ever we were going by piling too many people in a too small Brutus. The sun roof became a group favorite; while I would drive my friends would turn up the music and put their heads out the sun roof while waving to confused pedestrians. There was constant laughing, singing, and dancing on the many trips we took in him. I have never felt closer to a group of people, then when my friends and I had long late talks in the backseat of Brutus. It was there that I realized its okay to trust people and that there are people in this world that really do love and care about me and have my best interest at heart.
I took my first road trip in Brutus, A group of my friends and I decided that it would be a good idea to go camping. We convinced our parents, and the next day we over packed Brutus, and were off. The group of us ended up getting lost, running low on food, and getting scared about raccoons, but we did it all ourselves. The lesson I learned while driving Brutus home that last day was independence. That if I set my mind to it I could accomplish anything I wanted and that eventually I was going to have to, and could, do most things on my own.
My car isn’t much to look at, there is a large dent in the left side that looks like a bull ran into it, and when you brake it makes a bad sound. The speakers are almost completely blown out and the air conditioning doesn’t always work. But to me that car is everything. It represents my independence, my friends, and everything I have learned from having him. He might just be a ’91 Volvo, but he also brought down the Roman Empire.

Week Six

We live in America, the land of freedom, or at least that's what we tell people. There are more laws in America then any other country. Now, I'm not saying that these laws are unjust, or completely unfair, I'm simply saying there are a lot of them.
I grew up in a court room. My father is a public defender, and my mother is a real estate attorney. I've been to prison, I've watched countless security tapes, I'm my mother's receptionist, and when I was a kid on days when I was sick I sat in the back of a courtroom and watched my father do his job. I've seen the law to the fullest extent, and although it might not be perfect it is a constantly changing thing.
My father does one of the most controversial jobs out there. He defends people who have done horrific crimes, things such as murder, drug dealing, and rape. The perpetrators of these crimes are the people he has to defend every single day. So I guess you can say that I've seen the law both ways, I've seen it acted out to put bad people in prison, and I've seen it acted out to keep bad people out of prison. Kind of tricky from my point of view.
Either way, I've come to see the law as the law. It should be executed to the highest degree in the fairest way possible. The law is a ever changing thing, it changed in the 1960's with the black civil rights movement, and it was changing these past couple years with the gay rights movement. The law is something that must be acted out to serve the highest majority of the people, or truthfully it would never work. This might not always be fair, but nothing in life is truly fair.

Week Five

There is a number you can text, 542-542, where you can ask a question and it will send you the answer. For example, you would text the number: What's Gabby Pietro's address? And it would send back: 325 West Poplar. So last night out of boredom, and in an effort to avoid my math homework, I sent in "Who is Grace Goodman." The answer that came back? "There are multiple Grace Goodmans listed, please try and narrow your search." In reality there are probably multiple Grace Goodmans out there in the world, but there is only one of me.
This lead me to the question, who am I really? Yes, I am Grace Goodman, but if there are so many of us out there, what sets me apart? So I came to the to conclusion that you had to have a strong sense of self. I can be any of the other people in the world, but I'm not. I'm me. There has to be a reason for that.
Everyone is put on this planet to do something, to go along a certain path in life. Sopholes writes about fate, and destiny. In each of his stories his characters hear a fate about themselves, and in a effort to avoid their destiny, they end up running head first into it. This helps the characters in his plays develop a very strong sense of self. In Antigone, Antigone goes against the state, because she believes so much in that what she is doing is right. She's is the best example for a strong sense of identity.Antigone knew she was Antigone from the begining, she didn't have to text anyone to figure it out.

Week Four

Death is an ever present thing in everyday life. It's one of those things that's constantly over your head, waiting for the right moment to strike. It may be someone you love or even yourself. I don't mean this in a pessimistic way, I really don't. I've come to the conclusion about death that it's going to happen to everyone, at some point. So why waste time worrying about it?
That doesn't mean I don't worry about death hitting someone I love though. I mean, death is more painful to watch then the action (I'm assuming I've never actually "died") Through the past year I have watched death in the closest sense of the word, and I can honestly say that it doesn't get easier. Now I don't exactly know if this is a bad or a good thing. Good in the sense that this means I'm growing up, or bad in the sense that I've become a cynic.
I will give death this though, he's fair. He agrees that everyone should be treated the same, and receive the same fate. This is more then I can say for anything else in life. Every single person is going to face this penalty unless you find the fountain of youth, or are the reincarnated Jesus Christ.
So what brings me on this topic? The work Oedipus. Throughout the entire story, the tragic hero, Oedipus, is trying to escape the fact of his fate: That he will kill his father and bed his mother. His wife/ mother, Jocasta, does the same thing by trying to kill her newborn son, after hearing the fate that he will kill his parents. Both of these heroes are trying to escape the same over all fate, dying or killing someone, which is in fact causing someones death. These things can't be escaped, and by trying to escape them they both in fact cause their own demise.

Week Three

It's already been three weeks of my senior year in highschool, and time has never flown by so quickly. I guess the saying is right, time flies by faster when your older. Which leaves me leaving every english class, wondering what comes next. Especially this week, with a focus on society and the roles we need, or choose to play out.
I was always brought up in the manner that you do what you do, and as long as you were the best at it, and if you weren't the best you tried hard to be, my parents would be proud. That goes along with being a functioning member of society, get a good education, go to college, get a high paying job, start a family, and into this boring lifestyle that even at age seventeen I know I will never be truely content in. I don't want to grow up and become a Bartleby, where I'm just so boring and uninterested, but on the inside I'm tormented by the want, or some would argue need, to do something productive.
Being stuck in the same job every day, every month, every year, would possibly drive me insane. Actually scratch that, it would completely drive me insane. So is it so wrong of me to want to step outside the box and try something different that society wouldn't expect? It's always the people who did the unexpected that get remembered.
But on the other hand, where would this society be if we didn't have say "cubical workers" and "number crunchers." I mean where would we be? Not everyone has the willingness or wants to step outside their box, and I guess in the long run not everyone can or nothing would get done. So is it wrong or right to want to try something new, or does it just depend on the person?

Week 2

This blog thing? Not really working for me Mr. Burke, I never know what to say. I guess that's the point though? That I'm supposed to create my own guidelines for this blog, and change as a thinker, writer, reader, and so on and so forth. I'm assuming this blog is supposed to show how I've morphed from a highschool student into a college bound young adult. But who knows I could be completely wrong.
I never really understood diary and journal writing as a kid. One time, my second grade teacher assigned us journals to write over the summer, and in return we would get a rootbeer float at the begining of the next school year. So throughout the summer my mom fought and pressured me into writing a journal everyday. I have a clear memory of me hiding from her as she was coming to remind me about my "daily journal entry". I didn't like to write them, I disliked the feeling of reflecting on my day and having it read back on in such a boring tone. If something is funny in the moment, how can I relate that on paper, in a journal entry? To me it just ruined the memory. But none the less, I wrote in that journal everyday, through the kicking and screaming and coaxing from my mother, I wrote in that journal. Best part is? When I got back to school in the fall, I missed the rootbeer float day.

Week One

     A lot of things we focused on this week were our strengths and weaknesses. This has to do in the classroom, with friends (social situations), and in our futures. When we focus on our weaknesses we learn how to channel them and make them our strengths. And when we work on our strengths we learn to channel them and make them stronger then they already are. 

   A Wagner skill that I'm good at is curiosity, I'm always asking questions. This is a strength because I always want to understand and learn new things to understand people better. I think I have a good imagination to, and think outside the box, this helps me look at situations from a new point a view. 

   My weakness is logic, and problem solving. I can't think problems through because I'm so short sided and only see the immediate affects. With problem solving, I don't think of things in reality. There are very situations that can have both sides be happy. I want these situations to be all situations, and it's very hard for me to accept that they aren't.

Painting

I think that the man in the painting has just accomplished something in his life, that is important to him. The cliff he is standing on symbolizes obstacles that he had to overcome to get to where he is. The mist in the painting I think represents the unknown. That although he accomplished this great feat, there is still the future to worry about and many things left to figure out. The man's stance is powerful because by accomplishing this first big goal, he feels ready to overcome upcoming challenges.

Clara Timpe's blog works

-grace goodman