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?