Still Moving Forward

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On August 26th, 2012, I made a post called Keep Moving Forward. In it, I talked about my hopes, fears, and expectations for my senior year of high school.

Well, as of 6:14 a.m., May 25th 2013, I am graduated from high school.

*fistpump*YES!*fistpump*

So, I wanted to make another post following up on the one I made at he beginning of the school year.

This year, I read a lot of amazing books, learned about a lot of depressing eras of history, wrote many papers, recited WAY too many poems, and took another art class at the local college.

I did not get accepted to NET, but I was asked to reapply. I got a 27 on my ACT, but I'm currently not planning to attend college anywhere. My current prospects are: I have a very amazing art teacher who is willing to help me pursue art education without necessarily going through a four year college program, I have a resume in at the local newspaper, and I am going to begin writing a play for a community theater this week.

Although its tiresome to have tons of people constantly telling me what THEY think I should do, I'm excited for my future. I'm excited for where my life will go from this point on. I worked hard in school for 12 long years, and now, finally, I'm graduated.

I'm not by any means done LEARNING. I never want to stop learning. This world is very big and complicated, and I have only seen a small portion of it. I'm only 18 years old; there could be a great deal ahead of me that I can only imagine.

Once again, I have a sense that I am in a good place. Even though waiting and uncertainty are hard, they are building up my character and my strength for what I will do next. I am confident that I can and will do incredible things that no one can anticipate.

And I'm still moving forward.

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Composition Final Assignment, Senior Year

For one of my last assignments for composition, I had to write about what I think my 'writing voice' sounds like. So here is what I came up with after going back and rereading several things I've written over three years. My feelings are not hurt if you don't understand all of it...this was free-writing, so I wasn't even worried if things were spelled wrong. Imaginary Friend, Dust, The Tower Princess, Rapunzel Rapunzel, Cheesepuff, and Hot Air Balloon are all titles of things I've written, either poems, short stories, or novels. Maybe enjoy...if not, just know this is like an inside look at my brain.

Task 9.2

Something I definitely notice about my writing is REPETITION. From the repetition of phrases (Imaginary Friend, Dust, The Tower Princess [at the beginning]) to repetition of themes, such as curses, family problems, deep-rooted desires, popular older brothers you can’t compete with (My first two NaNo stories could have been morphed together without any issue)...stuff like that. I have things on my heart that stick, and so everything I write ends up having the same feelings, themes, ideas. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. Maybe it means I’m just a one-hit wonder and once I get it perfect I’ll have to quit.

My writing voice sounds like the books I read (particular Gordon Korman, oddly enough. I’m thinking about Schooled, and I definitely see things there.), movies I watch (if dialogue inspires me I adapt it), conversations I have with people (mostly family). It all sounds so WANNABE. Its not particularly unique, but it does sound like me. I have more than one voice, but I’m not sure how many. I always have this angsty feel to what I write. Rapunzel, Rapunzel was an angst-fest. But that was one of my earliest books. I wish I could find my REALLY old novels that were basically Eragon knock-offs, just to see how far I’ve come.

My writing voice has changed by becoming more refined. I write things correctly, without five exclamation points or ALL CAPS WITH WORDS WRITTEN LIKE THIIIIISSSSSS TO ADD EMPHASIS WHERE NONE IS REALLY NEEDED ANYWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Gosh, I feel like I’m reading Cheesepuff when I look at that sentence!

Since I don’t really know what my writing voice IS, its hard for me to say what parts ‘don’t sound like me’. Any part that’s really steamy or romantic often comes off cliche because I’m trying to write things I’ve never experienced, without consulting anyone who has. Movies are the LAST place to look for reality, that’s one thing I definitely know. I can’t access my Hot Air Balloon story right now, but I feel like that might be the best place to find ‘my voice’. Anyway....I know I use too many adverbs (anyone else notice how many times I use the word definitely in this?), not enough adjectives that actually work, and I rely too much on straight out TELLING the reader what is happening. I can show with words, but its best to use as few words as possible. I also struggle with making verbs work the way that they’re supposed to. I misuse them.

I know I’ve written to please an audience, and it just sounds pained. It’s like a dying whale gasping for breath even though it knows its a goner. I am only successful at writing when I have something to say, I know roughly what I WILL say, and I have time and resources to help me say it as clearly as possible. 

Reasons I shift into another voice? I hate the one I'm using. I will scrap pages of something if my main character starts off whiney I hate whiney main characters. I myself, the main character of my life, am pretty darn whiney, so they get it honestly. 

Oh, I also say 'I Think' and 'I Believe' more than should be legal in one essay.

Composition Pondering: Can Language Convey Reality & Hemingway vs. Joyce

Just some fast thoughts I typed out prompted by my Composition assignments of the past couple weeks. I was imitating Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce and was asked which I preferred, and also whether or not I feel language can successfully convey reality. Nothing formal, so this is what I came up with Enjoy!

Can language ever do reality justice? Is it better to be Hemingway, the clear, the concise, or Joyce, the flowery, the metaphorical? I think language shapes reality; what we do and say, think and feel, all work together to make up reality, and language is how we retell reality. Can language always convey reality, capture it, reproduce it? 
No, of course not. Most of the time language fails miserable to do what we ask of it. Most of the time language is nothing but words, words, words, and they fall into place all wrong so that when we mean to say something meaningful, it comes out being funny, or vice versa. 
If I say that today I went shopping at Wal-Mart and bought seven things for under $35, does that convey reality? Yes, but it doesn’t convey anything but some of the facts. 
Reality is multifaceted, and the thing that makes language so magical, yet so maddeningly limited, is that it is not as multifaceted as life is. It takes us more time to describe a flower than it did for us to see the flower, smell the flower, touch the flower, smile at the flower, pick the flower, and put the flower in a vase. 
Language is limited, but that is where human beings come in. We all choose what is most important to us and use the language we have to express that importance. 
One person might simply say ‘the flower was a lily’, and another might have no idea what kind of flower it is and slowly and accurately describe a lily, and so well that anyone who has seen a lily before thinks, “Oh, it’s a lily!” 
So, back to that one question: Whose style captures ‘reality’, better: Hemingway’s or Joyce’s? Personally, I think the best way to capture reality is to use a mixture of both the stark fact of Hemingway and the romantic depth and confusion of Joyce. One alone lacks something that we experience in reality; the multifaceted beauty and experience within life itself.

The Man Who Was Thursday, Final Paper Assignment

Hello everyone! I owe this blog a post. It is now Holy Week...we are days away from Easter! Yay!

Yesterday I finally finished my last assignment for G. K. Chesterton's short novel, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. It took me a really long time to figure out my paper topic, and now that it is complete, I'm very proud of it and wanted to share it with you. Enjoy!

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3/26/13

Literature Qtr 3 Week 7 Paper

G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, is the story of seven anarchists who are not really anarchists. The driving force behind the action, terror, mystery and drama of the story is the giant, mysterious gentleman called Sunday. However, we never really know what or who Sunday is. We know he is the leader of the famed and feared Seven Days Council and gathers the heroic detectives who represent the days of the week, making them believe each of the others is a murderous anarchist. At the same time, Sunday is the wise and kind “man in the dark” who called each of the detectives into the police force. Because Sunday is the one thing we never have answers about but the thing we desire most to understand, I believe that Chesterton means what he says in subtitling the story A Nightmare, and that Sunday’s role lies in his possession of the truly nightmarish essence of the tale.

At the end of The Man Who Was Thursday, all seven men are gathered together and dressed in beautiful robes that represent the day of Creation they stand for. Sunday is the Sabbath, the day God rested. He tells the detectives that he is “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.” When his back is turned, he seems terrifying, and evil. Face to face, he is still terrifying because of his massiveness, but there is something about his face that makes all of the detectives think of the good. Because Sunday seems to mirror the incomprehensible vastness of God, many people believed that his role in the story is that of a Deity. But Chesterton, in an article published in the Illustrated London News, explained that this was not the truth. “It was a very melodramatic sort of moonshine, but it had a kind of notion in it; and the point is that it described, first a band of the last champions of order fighting against what appeared to be a world of anarchy, and then the discovery that the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf who had appeared to be rather too like a pantomime ogre.  This line of logic, or lunacy, led many to infer that this equivocal being was meant for a serious description of the Deity; and my work even enjoyed a temporary respect among those who like the Deity to be so described. But this error was entirely due to the fact that they had read the book but had not read the title page. The book was called The Man Who Was Thursday:  A Nightmare.”

That is not to say that the story has no meaning, though Chesterton wrote it to have the discordance and confusion of a nightmare. Throughout The Man Who Was Thursday, the main characters are repeatedly faced with what at first seems to be true evil. But every time, they find there is just a clever trick or a simple misunderstanding that reveals that what they thought was evil is really good. Many people might believe that, by this, Chesterton means to say that evil does not exist; it is only a mask that good sometimes wears. But this is not the case. What Chesterton illustrates in this is that the power of evil means nothing. It would not matter if all but a few good men were left in the world; the greatest power of evil is weaker than the weakest power of good. This partially explains the role of Sunday; he’s supposed to scare us, confuse us, surprise us, and then leave us guessing. Although he could manipulate the detectives, we see that he had no power to harm them. Evil is real, and it can be corruptive and harmful, but evil has no power over us until we welcome it.

In conclusion, The Man Who Was Thursday only makes sense when we look at it as a nightmare. It is a fantastic and funny tale, with heroism and courage and wonderful characters. But Chesterton did not write it to be a funny mystery story. The story is not a good dream; it is a nightmare. Chesterton said of this perplexing masterpiece of his, “It was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.” Sunday is, therefore, the embodiment of this ‘wild doubt and despair’ with ‘just a gleam of hope’, the vehicle for Chesterton’s intentions in writing such an imaginative story.

My wonderful weekend

This past weekend I interviewed with NET Ministries, because I feel that God is calling me to serve His Kingdom by ministering to youth who are in need of His love.

This weekend was absolutely fantastic. There were moments of great pain where the Devil tried to steal my peace in God's plan for me, but my Blessed Mother came to my rescue and her prayers helped me to trust again. I had so much fun, I grew closer to Christ, and I made some unbelievably awesome friends who I hope to keep for years, no matter who gets accepted this year.

One of my new friends, a magnificent young lady named Melina, I have actually been able to keep in touch with right away via e-mail, and I learned that she is a singer-songwriter slowly trying to work her way into the Christian music industry. Her videos are fantastic, and I wanted to share with all of you the one video that is my favorite so far. Please watch her videos and like them if you have a Youtube account (I do not)! She's trying to get 500 views this year, and she has a really beautiful voice :)

Melina is such a beautiful witness to God's unfailing love. I am honored to call her my friend. We're really different; she's confident and accomplished, I'm kind of goofy and procrastinating. But we share a common desire for Christ and His will above anything else. No one can take our Lord from us, no matter how we suffer or struggle in this life.

Please keep Melina, myself, and about 55 other young men and women who applied for NET this past weekend. We all desire to serve God in this way, and it is a journey that will take faith and strength, accepted or not.

In other news, my younger sister got back from Rome the Friday I was gone at my NET interview, and she bought me a gorgeous scarf and a big pile of Italian candy (I LOVE YOU MEG!!). I am starting my second semester of senior year. And that's about it!

God bless, and take care!

ACT prep

I finally got logged in to start practicing for the ACT online, and the first thing I looked at was the basic overview of what the MATH portion of the ACT looks like.

Unfortunately, all it made me do was cry.

I am horrible at algebra, because I can never remember what the first step to solving a problem is, and I can never correctly rewrite a problem. I didn't get it the three years I took it in high school, and if anything, its gotten worse now. I just have no clue.

I never took geometry, trigonometry  or even advanced algebra. I did intermediate algebra for two years, and I still didn't get all the way through the book.

So, I'm kind of depressed, not because I was planning on becoming a Biologist and all my hopes and dreams have been crushed or anything. No. It's because I want to do my best, but I feel like even my best will result in a total mathematical flop.

That's just kind of hard, you know? I didn't try hard enough when I had to do algebra, I barely met the requirements to graduate, and now it's going to bite me in the butt when I'm actually confronted by algebra in real life. I have never even fully memorized the multiplication tables. I didn't care, so I didn't try.

I know what I'll have to do; make my best guess on all the problems. Who knows? Maybe I'll get a few of them right. That might be good enough, but I hate being mediocre. I wanted to do better than good enough...I want to be able to sit down and understand how to do an algebra problem from start to finish, and I can't.

I'm just really angry with myself, because I could have done so much better, and I didn't.

Keep Moving Forward

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Tomorrow, I start my senior year of high school. Every time the summer ends I feel this distinct loss of something really good and beautiful, and this year is even worse. Several good friends of mine are starting college. I hardly ever saw them, but now I won't see them at all. 

But c'est la vie. 

I remember reading  a poem in third or fourth grade about how everything comes to an end. Everything changes. "This, too, shall pass." 

Our lives are constantly changing, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. This year, like every year, I got excited collecting the mundane little school supplies even we homeschoolers need to get things done; floral mechanical pencils, a monkey-shaped blue eraser, a purple Ticonderoga eraser, a new pink pencil sharpener, paper, fruit-scented highlighters, and sticky notes with owls on them. 

But my life is changing. I'm getting older, and I might finally be moving on from being a little girl. I'm getting smarter. I'm learning more and more who I am and how God made me. No matter what stays the same, I have undeniably changed this summer. And things will begin changing even more as I go through my senior year. I'm applying for mission work in the fall, and taking the ACT to open up my options for college. 

I know I'm in a good place right now. I'm ready. As ready as I'll ever be. School is hard work, and sometimes it's A LOT of work. For instance; first day of school? Well to ease me right in, I get to read, memorize, and recite Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. Wow. And I'm still working part time, so I have 10 hours of work along with five days of school my first week alone. 

This is an incredible adventure. My whole life has been an adventure. The more you move forward, the more adventures you can have. The more you can see. The more people you can meet. The more you can learn. The more you can grow. 

Changing, always changing. I know I'm probably going to face a lot of failure, uncertainty, and loneliness this year. But I plan to keep moving forward, to become the best version of the woman I was made to be, to follow God's will, and do my part to make this world better. 

Bring it on, Senior Year.

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