Freak

Author's Note- This is a poem I wrote as part of my goal for Language Arts (to write 2-3 poems [all different types] and a short fictional piece based off the same theme.  The theme I chose was judging someone by their cover.  Comments are appreciated!

See that girl…

Sitting all alone.

Hair unwashed,

Greasy,

Tangled.

Putrid breath,

Tired eyes.

She keeps her head down

As she roams the halls.

Freak, they call her.

Ugly

Little

Freak.

"What a mess," they say.

You go along with them.

"Does she own a brush

For her hair or teeth?"  they say.

You agree.

They 'accidentally' shove her at the lockers.

You laugh.

What they don't know

Is that she gets enough of that at home.

See that bruise on her wrist?

Klutz, you think.

She probably banged it on something, you think.

She got that from her father.

And the one on her stomach.

And the claw marks on her back.

He's the reason she wears long sleeves.

She reads a book at lunchtime.

She doesn't eat.

Anorexic nut job, you think.

But you don't know

That she's making sure

There's enough in the account

For her little brother to have lunch.

Teacher calls on her.

She doesn't know the answer.

Stupid, you think.

But you don't know

She's too busy worrying about

Where she'll get her next meal

To study.

They don’t know her.

You don't know her.

So why do you judge?

Why do you make fun?

Why do you think this is okay?

You don’t know

That she's a great person.

You don't bother to find out.

Because you see she's ugly

On the outside,

You assume she's the same

On the inside.

You treat her like dirt,

Like scum.

Because she's different.

Because of her appearance. 

But if you keep treating her that way,

Then she's a better person

Than you'll ever be.

Who Are You Betting On?

Author's Note- This is my District Writing Assessment essay, which I wrote on how the poverty Katniss grew up in ended up helping her win the Hunger Games, and how she used it to her advantage.  Please comment!

 

In the bloody, televised battle to the death between 24 teenagers, also commonly known as the Hunger Games, only one can survive.  Only one can win.  So who, out of all of them, would you bet your money on?  Would you choose the violent to the core, iron-muscled, sword-wielding Career from District One, who's been training for this battle since he could walk?  Or the scrawny, misfit girl from dirt-poor District 12, the helpless victim, who hasn't an ounce of meat on her body?  Well, it doesn't really take a rocket-scientist to figure this one out…or does it?  True, the Careers have been training for this their entire life--but technically, haven't the tributes of District 12 been training, too?

Take, for example, Katniss Everdeen, the female District 12 tribute of the 74th Annual Hunger Games.  Her father died in a terrible mining explosion when she was 11 years old, thrusting her family down a cold and lonely path, leaving them practically empty-handed and slowly starving them to death.  Hmm…practically empty handed and starving to death…sounds a whole lot like the Hunger Games to me, don't you think?  Katniss had to pull herself out of her despair so that she could save her family from the imminent death they were heading towards.  She had to be the strong one of the family, be the one who finds the food, who goes to the market and does the bargaining.  She had to take the place of her father, with absolutely no help from her mom.  Alongside Gale, she learned to hunt.  She learned how to make a snare, she learned how to shoot a bow and arrow.  She learned which plants can be eaten and which can kill with but a single bite.  She, more than anyone in the entire arena, knows how to survive.  She's had experience. 

But surprisingly, that's not the only way poverty has aided her.  Although she doesn't have much fat on her body to sustain her should she go hungry, she knows firsthand how to handle hunger pains.  She's not going to be that tribute that starves to death because after a day or two, she can't take the agony and gorges on all her food, then can't find any more.  The ones who grow up with little food know how to make a pack of crackers last a lot longer than the children who drink an elixir that causes them to vomit just so they can eat more.

And her unprepossessing background gives her more advantages still.  It puts her in the position of the underdog. Sometimes, not being one of the Careers is a good thing.  Being a Career makes you the top competitor, the one to beat.  And although all the Careers all have their alliance in the beginning, as they progress further into the competition, they start to turn on each other.  There's always someone trying to beat them.  As the underdog, the farther-out districts have the advantage because they don't pose as a threat, so no one's really hunting for them specifically in the beginning, unless they did something to tick off a Career.  They have the element of surprise--no one really pays attention to them, because they're labeled as a spare, who can be easily taken care of, and then all of a sudden, they've snuck into the top five, and then the top three.  The tributes of the outer districts are simply underestimated.

Although it's a horrible part of our world, even poverty has its silver lining, especially when it comes to the book The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  It gives even the ruffians of District 12 something to hope for--and if they play their cards right and think on their feet, like Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch did, it can reward them with survival in the deadliest battle they've ever fought.  If they know how to use their survival skills and underdog ranking to their abilities, even the weak can emerge victorious.

The Mockingbirds of Maycomb County

Author's Note- This essay was a struggle for me to start writing, but once I got into it, the writing process became a lot easier.  I didn't like it as much in the beginning, but the more I wrote, the better I felt about it.  I'm still a bit iffy on the conclusion, though.  Comments are appreciated!!

Remember the lunchbox days, the firefly-catching days, from what seems like an eternity ago?  Remember that feeling of pure innocence, when you believed in everything?  That's something that we all cherish, something even the talented young country star Taylor Swift wrote about in her beautifully eerie song, Innocent.  The amazing author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, wrote about it, too.  That pure innocence these gifted artists told of is the whole lifestyle of a delicate mockingbird.  A mockingbird represents innocence -- it never does anything wrong.  All they do is sing for us.  That's why killing a mockingbird is a sin.  If you shoot it, you're hurting something that never did anything but spread happiness throughout the world, minding its own business while gracefully and swiftly buzzing around, humming its tune. There are two mockingbirds in Maycomb County: poor Tom Robinson, who was murdered because of the townspeople's racism and closed minds, and Boo Radley, the lucky one of the two birds, who, although didn't necessarily have a peaceful upbringing, still got his second chance.

All the citizens of Maycomb County are completely and unchangeably set in their ways.  They're so blinded by racism and full of prejudice that even when all the evidence points towards Bob Ewell, like the fact that his dominant hand was clearly his left, and the attack on Mayella was obviously lead by a left handed person, but the accused, Tom Robinson, has lost all use of his left hand, all they see is a black man being accused for raping a white girl.  That's enough reason for them to sentence him guilty.  He was completely innocent -- he did nothing wrong.  Yet, because of something as trivial as the color of his skin, he was still sentenced as guilty, which ultimately led him to his untimely death.

Boo Radley, the mockingbird that lived, made a foolish mistake back in his childhood, and because of it, his dad kept him locked up in their dark, creepy house for years and years.  All he does is sit idly by and watch while things happen in the town, and besides the stupid thing he did way back when, he's done nothing wrong.  He wraps Jem and Scout in blankets on their cold night outside and even attempts to stitch up Jem's ripped pants.  In the end, he saves the children's lives by killing Bob Ewell.  The sheriff ultimately rules his death as "an accident", even though he knew it obviously wasn't.  The reason that he didn't put him on trial was because, like Scout said, "well it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?" (276).  He did nothing wrong.  In fact, he ended up saving the lives of two children from a man trying to kill them and saved Mayella Ewell from eventually getting beaten by her father again.  To put him up for trial would be like killing a mockingbird.

Innocence is a gift -- although everyone is born with it, few can keep it in their grasp as the years slowly slide by.  To be able to keep that innocence is like magic- and the most tragic event of all is when someone who has that beautiful gift, that magic, is killed, especially over something as frivolous as their race.  The devastating story of Tom Robinson's death helped the sheriff of Maycomb County realize this, and prevent another innocent mockingbird from being savagely shot down.

Nail Polish on a New Carpet

Author's Note- This is my scene analysis for the novel Speak.  I decided to analyze a scene that helps us discover some interesting things about Heather and Melinda.

One of the scenes that we can truly learn about Heather in is the nail polish scene.  A bottle of nail polish spills on her white carpet in her room.  Not that much of a big deal, you would think, right?  To a normal person it wouldn't be.  But Heather's not exactly something I'd call normal.  As soon as it's spilled, she throws herself on her bed and starts sobbing.  Not just crying- full on sobbing.  And when Melinda tries to help by cleaning it up and ends up making it worse, Heather becomes inconsolable.  Although it might seem like just your average teenage temper tantrum, it serves a greater purpose than that.  It's actually symbolism.  The clean, white carpet represents her reputation.  She's got a fresh start, a clean slate.  She's obviously very excited about this.  Nobody knows about her.  No one knows about the things she may or may not have done at her past school.  She can make a brand new fist impression on everybody.   When the nail polish stains the carpet, it symbolizes a stain on her reputation.  It reminds her of her past mistakes, and the mistakes she most likely will make at this school.  When Melinda tries to help fix it, the negative mark on her reputation only gets worse, kind of like when Melinda tries to help her with the Martha projects she was given, but only ruins centerpieces and pillows instead.  Melinda becomes the nail polish on Heather's brand new carpet.  She becomes the problem, rather than solution, in Heather's social life.

There's an Elephant in the Room

Author's Note- This is my Speak essay.   I wrote it about speaking up.  How Melinda won't because she's afraid of the consequences (both positive and negative) of speaking up.  I included a quote from a poem by Terry Kettering called "Elephant in the Room" to help explain my thoughts, and  compare it to Melinda's predicament.

Everything we say has a consequence.  For every cause, an effect.  Sometimes, those consequences are small.  When you get your food from the cafeteria, if you don't say "please" or "thank you", or at least smile politely, the chef might give you the soggy, floppy chicken nuggets from the bottom of the pile instead of the crispy, fresh ones sitting at the top.  But some things you say can have quite severe consequences.  Sometimes, when speaking up, the outcome will be either really fantastic or really destructive, depending on how your peers take it.  Fourteen-year old Melinda Sordino was afraid of the latter, which is one of the countless reasons why she wouldn't speak up about the traumatizing event that caused her to burrow into a hole and hide, practically mute.

Melinda was so traumatized that she wouldn't speak up -- she was afraid of the consequences, afraid of saying the wrong thing.  She's afraid of talking about That Night, wouldn't speak to anybody about it, because she didn't know how.  She thought no one would listen.  Because that would've made it seem even more real, she's afraid of even verbalizing it..  One of the main reasons she's so afraid of this is because she'd seen it happen.  Almost every time someone in this book spoke up, they were punished.  She had a huge issue, but she just wouldn't talk about it. So similar to Melinda's problem is Terry Kettering's in her poem An Elephant in the Room.

There’s an elephant in the room.

It is large and squatting,

so it is hard to get around it.

Yet we squeeze by with,

“How are you?” and, “I’m fine,”

and a thousand other forms of trivial chatter.

We talk about the weather;

we talk about work;

we talk about everything else—

except the elephant in the room.

There’s an elephant in the room.

We all know it is there.

We are thinking about the elephant

as we talk together.

It is constantly on our minds.

For, you see, it is a very big elephant.

It has hurt us all, but we do not talk about

the elephant in the room.

This related to Melinda because she had an elephant in her room, too.  Andy Evans.   Every girl who's ever dated him, or had been friends with someone who dated him, knew how much of a terrible, perverted person he really was.  In fact, on the walls of the stalls in the girl's bathroom of Melinda's school, there's a list of reasons why he's so horrible, what he's done, and who else just outright hates him.  Melinda thought she has no one, and that's almost true.  She didn't have Heather or her parents to confide in, that's for sure.  But she had these bathroom stall door people who know how disgusting Andy is all around her.  She had Mr. Freeman.  Ivy even tried to reach out to her a few times.  She wasn't alone.  If she started to realize this sooner, maybe she could've saved herself a ton of trouble in the end. 

But alas, she was still too afraid to speak up.

More Alike Than You'd Think...

 Author's Note- This is my Compare and Contrast essay for Fahrenheit 451.  I decided to compare Montag, the protagonist of the story, to Lev, one of the main characters of Unwind by Neal Shusterman.  I tried to work more on my analyzing skills and syntactical patterns.  Comments are appreciated!

What if everything you knew, everything you've ever believed, turned out to be untrue?  What if one day, you find out that you've been raised on lies?  What if everything you were ever taught, everything you ever did was wrong?  Would you be shocked?  Angry?  Horrified?  These and millions of other emotions coursed through the minds of Levi "Lev" Jedediah Calder and Guy Montag when they came to that mind-blowing realization.  Although you may think that a grown man who's occupation requires him to burn books and a 13-year-old kid who must sacrifice himself "for the church" would have nothing in common, Lev and Montag would be sure to prove you wrong.

In both of these popular and thought-provoking dystopian novels, the characters live in a horrible and barbaric society, but neither recognize how violent and terrible it really is until something or someone comes along and changes their mind.  In the novel Fahrenheit 451, the two main factors that open Montag's eyes to the vulgarity of his world are a teenage girl with stories from the past and an active mind full of dangerous thoughts, and a woman who chooses rather to die with her books than live without them.  In Unwind, the man that Lev has looked up to and had unwavering faith in his entire life tells him to run away from everything he's ever known, rather than willingly let himself be sacrificed, as he's been taught to do since the day he was born.

Another similarity between Lev and Montag is that in both books, they flee from a government trying to catch them.  The government was after Lev because he was scheduled to be unwound as a tithe, and he got away.  The reason they tried to pursue Montag was because he framed and killed two different coworkers, hid books, and overall, just started thinking, instead of mindlessly droning on.

The main commonality that unifies these two characters, though, is that they were both a part of something they thought to be the right thing, when in truth, they were unknowingly committing something terrible.  Montag, for example, was a fireman.  He burned books for a living.  He thought he was doing the people whose books he burned a favor.  He thought he was riding them of terrible, confusing things that deserved to be destroyed.  But after trying reading out for the first time himself, he finds himself drawn into a beautiful, horrible world he never even knew existed.  He discovers the magic of books, and why they're so important.  In Unwind, Lev is a tithe.  His family is a highly devoted Christian family, and they believe that 10% goes to the church.  Their beliefs go so far that they had exactly ten children, and they're going to sacrifice their tenth child to be unwound "for the church".  Lev was raised believing that this was a huge honor.  They threw huge parties for him, praising him, and acting so, unimaginably proud of him.  They showered him in gifts, they told him it was his destiny, and he believed it was the right thing.  It took his Pastor, along with the help of Connor and Risa, to show him how barbaric and disgusting it really was.

Although they have tons of similarities, the two characters also have their differences.  Religion is a huge part of Lev's life.  It’s the reason he was slated to become unwound.  It's the reason he begins to question everything he ever learned.  It's all he grew up with- he and his family worshipped God with all their heart and soul.  Meanwhile, religion seems to be an absent aspect in Montag's life, aside from a few bible quotes mentioned here and there throughout the book.

Another difference that sets the characters apart is their ignorance in the beginning of each novel.  They are both ignorant, but in different ways.  Montag is completely ignorant to how the government is controlling them.  He's unaware of the situation in any town but his own, and even unaware of the tragic mental state his wife is in.  He's ignorant because he doesn't understand life, nor does he want to, until a young girl comes and shows him how to live.  Lev's ignorance is shown more through the way he acts towards others.  In the beginning of the book, he genuinely believes that being a tithe makes him much more important than everyone else- his classmates, his siblings, even some of his teachers.  It gives him a sense of higher being.  He thinks his destiny is greater than theirs.  His ignorance is in the fact that he feels he's better than everyone else and doesn't need to know them to know he's superior.

A key divider between the two characters is their impulses and how they control them.  Lev's character is sort of clever, almost conniving, once placed in life or death situations.  He always thinks before speaking and is always plotting ahead.  He's very careful and calculating.  Meanwhile, Montag often times lets his impulse take control, and seldom has an idea of what the next step is.  He loses his temper easily- a prime example of this would be when he's talking with Mildred and her "friends".  The ones who cart their children of to boarding school and plop them in front of the TV for the three days a month they get back.  He really loses his composure when he reads that poem to them and snaps at that horrid lady.

These two characters are quite different.  One acts on his thoughts immediately, throwing caution to the wind, while one carefully plans everything out.  One's life was greatly influenced by God, while the other was barely introduced to the idea of Christianity.  But both show determination, curiosity, and both lived in a terrible place, but had no idea how violent things really were.  These characters are a lot more similar than you'd think, and each of them are able to transform into better people by the end of their separate novels.

Temptation

Author's Note- This is my essay for Life As We Knew It.  We were supposed to take a theme from our group novel and write an essay on that theme.  I kept rewriting this and going over it- I'm not quite sure if I like it or not, still.  I've never written anything like this, so it feels really weird, and I ended up changing my theme three times.  I tried to work on making my introduction more hook-like. 

Hunger. It gnaws at your stomach.  The pain is slow and sharp-- it eats at your insides, gradually, but definitively.  Isolation.  Even worse than hunger.  It eats at your brain, slowly sucking all the sanity from your mind.  Fear.  It starts as a seed, a rumor or superstition planted in your head.  It sneakily spreads throughout your body, racing through your blood and crawling down your spine, causing sweat to cover your brow and paranoia to fill your head, as if something could be lurking around the corner any second.  When you're trying to survive with little food or communication and no knowledge of what's lurking around the corner, all of these things course through your body and mind.  They affect your decisions-- they drive you to insanity.  Things like your beliefs, your friends, or even your family are no longer near as important to you as before.  You will be tempted to do things that hurt them to get what you need.  Sometimes, the temptation will be too strong.  When faced with the chance that our lives could end at any moment, and with others dropping like flies around us, we will be tempted to things to aid our survival without regard to others.

Temptation goes back all the way to the first story of the bible, with Adam and Eve.  The devil, disguised as a slithering snake, comes to Eve and crafts his conniving words, planting them in her head, telling her that eating that delicious-looking apple is totally fine, no matter what God says.  He tempts her to disobey God.  Even though this isn't a situation where lives are at stake, it's still an important lesson.

In the bible story "Tempted in the Wilderness", Satan brought Jesus out into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights with no food, water, or shelter.  Satan tempted Him with these necessities.  He whispers lies into Jesus' ears, trying to lead him away from God.  But Jesus will have none of it.  Jesus knew that worshiping the devil, or even entertaining the devil's thoughts, could only lead to harm.  But still, the devil tried to tempt Jesus.  He even quotes the bible to support his case!  If the devil can cite the Scriptures for his purpose, it can't be harmful, can it?  It's has to be right, doesn't it?  Of course it's not right!  He's just trying to convince Jesus by misusing God's words.  The Nazis quoted the bible to support their case while disposing of "filthy Jews".  That doesn't make them right for doing it.

The theme of temptation in dire situations can also easily be related to the bestselling series Gone by Michael Grant.  This series is about a small town in California called Perdido Beach.  One day, an unbreakable dome, later named The Barrier, forms around the entire town, twenty miles in diameter.  But that's not the only problem…anyone over the age of fifteen that was living in the area that The Barrier now surrounds has also disappeared, just like that, and the second anyone turns fifteen, they disappear as well.  And of course, since there's this unbreakable barrier around the town, there's no way to import food.  But nobody realizes this for the first couple weeks, and without moms and around to tell them what they can and can't eat, naturally, everybody pigs out.  All the frozen hot dogs and pizzas, along with cookies and chips, immediately run out at the grocery store.  And with people too focused on eating unhealthy and non-perishable items, all the healthy, perishable foods, like lean meats, fruits and veggies, go bad right away.  So before they  know it, they have a major food situation on their hands.  People step up and form a rationing system as soon as they realize that the barrier might never disappear and all they're stuck with is whatever food they have left inside of it, but not many of the kids like it, and soon, armed guards are required at the grocery store.  Instead of people caring about their neighbors and friends, they start to fend for themselves, doing whatever it takes for that extra can of soup or nibble or beef jerky.  Some even turn to cannibalism to satisfy their empty stomachs.

And of course, even with parents, kids and teenagers form cliques and groups, where they exclude others for what they wear, their weight or their race, or even their intelligence level.  Now, with the parents gone and no one to guide them, the cliques go to the extreme.  One clique in particular, though.  This clique gets involved in many evil things that could destroy the entire town.  But these people also have a lot of power and charisma.  They can easily tempt people into joining them with not only their amount of influence, but their indifference to death and the pleasure they find in violence. 

But that's not the only temptation going on at Perdido Beach.  Soon, everyone discovers that disappearing at the age of fifteen is not something that just happens.  It's a choice.   At the exact moment fifteen years after their birth, time freezes for everyone except that one person.  They're faced with someone-or something.  He (or it) tries to convince them to leave.  It tells them that their family is waiting on the other side, that they can see them only if they choose to leave.  It tempts them to leave this hell, where kids kill and eat pets and even other kids, where they run rampant and free with guns, where marijuana and scotch are traded to eight year-olds.  It is, of course, lying.  Their parents aren't waiting for them on the other side, and neither is that normal world they once knew.  And the children know this is true.  But they're so desperate to get away that they don't care.  They go anyway.

Another book where this theme is prominent is Life of Pi.  Piscine Patel is a vegetarian boy who has a deep connection with religion.  He's not only Hindu, but Christian and Muslim as well, and he follows the three religions with equal devotion.  But when he's thrust into a lifeboat with a tiger, where his survival is affected deeply by his beliefs, he has to chose between religion and survival.  He is tempted to kill the most sacred animal of his religion just to fill his empty stomach.  He lets temptation take over and abandons his beliefs on everything from turtles to vegetarianism to murder to survive.  He throws away  all that he believes in so he can live another day. 

This is also the case in the popular novel Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer.  Miranda must resist the temptation to gorge herself on all the food her family's saved up, even when she feels like she has no strength left in her entire body.  She has to resist the temptation to indulge so that her family has enough to eat, even though she's slowly dying from hunger.  Miranda has to resist the temptation of guzzling a bottle of water when her throat feels like sandpaper, when it's dry as a desert.  She has to resist the temptation of using more firewood than her mother permits so that she can have one night where she doesn't feel like her toes are on the verge of falling off.  The poor girl even has to resist the urge to kill her poor cat named Horton for food. 

Temptation is a very powerful thing, especially when your survival may depend on whether or not you indulge in that temptation.  Sometimes, you have to choose between your beliefs and survival.  Sometimes, you have to choose between family and survival.  Sometimes, you just have to put faith in whatever higher power you believe in that you can pull through, and let them guide you and help you resist the devil's temptation, no matter how magnificent his lies may sound.  Even though we are tempted to make decisions that will aid only ourselves and not our family and friends, we need to refrain from giving into it.