Metacognition: I'm stubborn

 
In general, anytime I write something, the two most prominent emotions that arise seem to be stubbornness and doubt. Usually when I write I'll come up with an idea very quickly, and then become so attached to it that I can think of nothing else. This is probably one of the greatest downfalls of my writing, because it doesn't allow me to take constructive criticism very well. I become like a horse with blinders on, obtuse to everything around me, only able to see the bigger picture straight ahead. The problem is that I get so invested in what I'm writing that I don't think anyone else's suggestion could help it be even better. I'll make up some excuse that they don't understand the point or they can't see where I'm coming from, but really I'm just incredibly stubborn.

Usually, the next step in my writing process is a slow decline into hatred for whatever it is I have created. Most of the time I start out completely enthralled with my idea and where I've taken it, but then gradually I run out of steam. I start to lose interest in the story and my brain seems to turn to mush, I don't think I've ever written something that I was totally happy with in the end.

Part of this is my refusal to accept advice from people. I won't take their suggestions into account and then when I hit a wall I start to doubt what I have written. I’ll scrutinize every little detail and soon I won’t be able to think of anything because everything just seems so… stupid. This was my biggest struggle when writing my short story. I started off so strong, with a concept I found interesting and I was excited to write about, but then I became fed-up with the story because it wasn’t going where I wanted it to go. The most frustrating part was that in my head, it all made sense, the story seemed great, but when I tried to put it on paper, something just wasn’t translating. My words were muddled and the message was lost somewhere that I couldn’t determine. I had sought help on my story but decided to only follow part of the advice because I didn’t want to compromise its integrity. In the end though, I was left wondering if accepting someone else’s thoughts would have stopped me from ending up with a story that left me content, but not completely satisfied.

Someday I would like to not be so stubborn; part of me understands that I don’t know everything, but the other part of me in crushing that part. And while I am proud of myself for standing up for the things I believe in, I wish that I could just accept what others have to say and not turn everything into an argument with myself that will probably just leave me frustrated in the end.

An inconvenient truth: Love is weird and everything is Romeo and Juliet

In reality, the movie Once is just Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Two people fall in love but the guy used to be in love with another woman and the woman is either married or engaged to be married to another man, the only difference is that instead of dying in the end, our irish Romeo gets on a plane, while Juliet gets a piano... that she then plays for her husband. Basically, it's just a story of star crossed lovers who weren't meant to find each other, but they did, and then couldn't be together in the end because of odd circumstances. The resounding them in both productions is about them being uncomfortable and trying to figure how they fit together but not really succeeding because they are just too damn awkward. Romeo and Juliet are so bumbling when they first meet that they just touch hands and stare at each other, this sense of being clumsy and inept continues throughout the book with them always sort of rushing into things unplanned and then mis-communicating with each other so things get messed up (ie their deaths).The two main characters in Once never really have a smooth conversation, everything is coarse and weird, even the way they look at each other makes the audience feel uncomfortable.But I guess that these qualities are supposed to be endearing and give the characters a sense of reality, because "love" is supposed to weird and icky, just ask any ten year old. 

Another example of this is The Cathedral by Raymond Carver, which is quite possibly one of THE most uncomfortable things I have ever read. But through the clumsy encounters of a man, his wife, and his wife's blind friend, we are supposed to see how much they really care about each other. You could argue that this short story also has hints of Romeo and Juliet sprinkled in it, the blind man and his deceased wife Beulah, or the man and his wife, or the wife and the blind man, or even the blind man and the husband. They all have an element of not really knowing how to react around a person that by some stroke of luck has fallen into your life to change the path you were previously travelling on. Furthermore, all of these Romeo and Juliet like scenarios have this theme of finding someone who is equally as bizarre as you are, and then preceding to be bizarre with them.  

So, I guess, this means that love is weird and therefore every love story should technically have elements of Romeo and Juliet. This makes logical sense if you think about it, seeing as how we've already proven that Shakespeare's famous play was all about being awkward and love is supposedly supremely awkward. If this is true though, it would mean that you could never write a love story that isn't a cliche because they would all just be Romeo and Juliet, a hefty implication indeed. But really, we must admit that love is pretty cliched itself and ridiculously over used most of the time. In conclusion, Once and The Cathedral are just copies of an old love tale, with somewhat modern twists. 

Captured Thought: Dueling Societies

Just start off this blog on a rather random note, the picture to the left is the image I have in my head of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.  Now, I know that Kurtz is supposed to be incredibly thin and sickly, but anytime I picture him, this is all I can see. I have no idea why. 

Alright, now on to the actual blog. This week in class we have been discussing the book Heart of Darkness and one of the main topics brought up was the idea of restraint. It seemed to me, that the majority of the class was of the state of mind that while the African people were considered savage by the Europeans, it was really the Africans who demonstrated a restraint typically associated with a western lifestyle and the so called civilized Europeans were the ones who acted savagely. It seemed like they highly praised African society and just completely bashed on the Europeans. While I agree with them that the Europeans did in fact act with an unnecessary ferocity, it does not mean that we should write of their life style completely. Neither society is perfect and they both have their faults, simply the societies are just different. Furthermore, the people in both societies show restraint, just in different ways. There are so many things that European people had to deal with that the Africans didn't, and vice versa. The Europeans didn't have to hunt through the jungle in search of game, but the Africans didn't have to labor in factories or struggle with an incredibly strict and oppressive social structure. Both societies we're a challenge to live through and you can't really say one was better than the other because they both had their challenges, and their rewards. 

One of the biggest themes in the book is savagery vs. society and how those two are interwoven. Heart of Darkness, in my opinion, does an incredible job of clearly showing your conscious the weaknesses of both societies, while simultaneously allowing your subconscious to realize their strengths. It enables you to draw your own opinion of the savagery and restraint  both societies display, and therefor deepens your understanding of society at large, and what it means to be "civilized". 

Blogging Around

Emily Horvath wrote a blog about her experience writing the multiple drafts of her poem. In it she expressed her perception shift as she went from hating the assignment to genuinely enjoying it in the end. I replied with:

I just want to start of by saying that I love your writing style and your gifs made me laugh, a lot. After reading your blog I feel as though we sort of went on opposite journeys during this assignment. I started out loving poetry and so excited to write my own that I began writing it that day in class. But then with each draft that I turned in and every revision, I started to hate my poem. I started to feel less and less creative as my poem grew longer, because I just didn't know how to fix what I had already written, so I instead just kept adding stanzas. Whereas you started out apprehensive and then were able to condense and enjoy each new draft you handed in.

I think that our journeys differed so much because of our attitudes when we started. I enjoy poetry and was so happy with the second draft of my poem that I became stubborn. I didn't want to change what I thought was good writing just because someone else didn't like it, but after awhile it got hard revising something I desperately wanted to keep the same and in the end I ended up just getting angry and frustrated. However, you came into this project with an open mind and were able to take criticism and mold it into a a better, more concise poem. You were able to succeed where I pretty much failed, and I have to give you props for that because I know it was no easy task. 
Jordan Arrigo wrote a blog about organizing her makeup drawer. In it she talked about how neat her drawer now was, while the rest of her room stayed messy. She expressed how rewarding it was to have even just a little thing be so tidy, but how terrifying it can be to have to organize the rest of your life. I replied with: 

I'm in the same situation. My makeup drawer is in perfect order, but the rest of my room is a disaster. It's just never really bothered me that my room is a mess though, because at least it's my mess. I've always felt like it shouldn't matter if your things are organized as long as you know where everything is and are happy with it, because really, at the end of the day, who is going to be meticulously going through your stuff? 
It bothers me so much when my mom tells me to clean my room, because I think to myself, "The door is always closed, you only ever go in there about once a week, why does it matter?" The last time I checked my mother wasn't giving tours of my room to the neighborhood, so I really just don't see why it has to be PERFECT.

At the end of your blog you talked about how scary it is to organize your whole life, but I don't really see why that is necessary. Order isn't always what's best for people and if everything in your life is immaculate I feel like you would just get stuck in a rut. So before you attempted to revamp and reorganize everything, I wanted to tell you that little chaos is a good thing and it can go a long way.

Metacognition: Poetry

For the past few weeks we have been writing, and then rewriting, and then rewriting again, original poems. My first poem, I will admit, was absolutely terrible. It was cliched, boring, and arbitrary, in reality it was just kind of stupid. I didn't like it when I turned it in, I felt uncomfortable, I felt like I was abandoning a toddler in the middle of the desert and expecting it to survive even though it was completely inept. The only reason that I reluctantly turned it in was because I had read it to my mother and she told she really liked, so I trusted her opinion and followed through. This probably wasn't the best decision, but it was a decision none the less, and it was one I had to stand by. 

Needless to say the poem wasn't graded very well. So, when it was time for level two, I decided to scrap my first one and write an entirely new poem. My second poem, same as he first one, was written over the course of a school day with a little bit being written in each class, a stanza at a time, whenever something would come to my mind. The second poem, however, unlike the first, was about something very personal to me, it was about my brother.

The first time I wrote my second poem, I loved it. I was so proud of my poem and the way it moved, but it wasn't received very well. So we had to write it again, and then again, and after awhile I just got tired. I got tired of talking about my brother and I started to hate the poem so much that I dreaded working on it. I didn't want to change anything about it or add a stanza here or there because I was so tired of dealing with this issue. I hate that I feel like my brother and my parent's divorce are the only two things I ever write about, but that's what I know. And in the end, that's really all writing comes down to, describing an emotion, idea, or moment that you know best, but I feel like the things I know best aren't very interesting. I feel boring and my writing feels boring. I'm proud of all the work I have done on my poem, but I'm not proud of what it's about and I'm not proud that I know it's probably the best I could do, and it's still not very good.

Get Organized: Room Cleaning

This past week, my uncle, cousin, and her two children came to stay with us for Thanksgiving, which of course meant that I had to give up my room. This is how it's always been, whenever we have house guests they stay in my room because I am the only one out of my two siblings who has their own bathroom. Unfortunately, this also means that whenever company is coming, it puts me into a mad dash to clean my room. For someone who keeps almost all other aspects in their life in complete order, I've never understood why I allow my room to get so out of hand. But I do, and it's always a mess, but at least it's my mess. There is always order within the disorder that is my room and I have a constant general sense of where exactly everything is. I've found that when I do attempt to organize my room, I often end up outsmarting my self and putting things in logical, smart places, but then later forget where those places were. So as I was cleaning my room, a good three hour task, I got to look at all the ways that my past self was smarter than my current self, and all they ways that it was less intelligent as well. 

I'm usually apprehensive before starting an organizational project because I know it will lead to frustration and eat up a good deal of time, but I always end up really enjoying myself because I actually love to sort things. I enjoy putting things in places and making them look nice , and afterwards I constantly have a sense of accomplishment because I know that everything is where it should be. Then that sense of accomplishment turns into anger as I frantically search to find things I've hidden away from judgmental house guest eyes. Sometimes  I just don't understand why I do the things I do. I have no idea why I there is a tub full of every paper and handout I received last school year sitting under my desk, but there it is, quietly mocking me. Nor do I know why I have a drawer full of dance stuff when I always forget that I put my dance things in there and then end up having a panic attack before performances because I can't find any of it, even though it's all neatly stored away. It's amazing how rational and idiotic I can be at the exact same time.

One of the things I realized while cleaning was that I hold onto things for far longer than I should. This is probably one of my worst habits, because it just leads to excess clutter and my room being filled with bizarre things I haven't touched in ages. It's so hard for me to throw things away because I always get that terrifying, nagging question, "but what if I need it?"I constantly seem to come up with the most absurd justifications for keeping things I shouldn't, and then just end up feeling claustrophobic in my prison full of junk.  I need to learn to let things go and stop living my life in hypothetical "What if's". There is a time and a place for everything, and  a good majority of the things I own have lost their time, so therefore they must now lose their place. 

In conclusion, cleaning my room has shown me that I need to be more logical and less, for lack of a better word, stupid. Probably in all aspects of life, but especially in the state of my room.
 

Metacognition: Writing for fun

This year, thus far, has been a year of trial and error. It is always challenging to start a new class with a new teacher because you have to learn the teachers style and adapt your writing to suit their criteria. Different instructors look for different things and especially in high school, it always feels like you need to write more for a grade than for yourself. Which sounds odd, because of course you would want an A on an assignment but often times I feel like personal discovery is lost in school writing. I know that personally I have written many papers that I was very proud of and excited to turn in but never got very good grades on, and then there were assignments where I didn't believe a single thing I had written and hated every arbitrary word of the paper, but I would get a great grade on them.

However, this year feels different. I have never written a blog before this year in English and when we were first told about the assignment I wasn't so sure about it. I figured that it would just be another tedious project that added more stress and work to my life, but I was wrong. I've found that with every blog I write, I begin to enjoy writing more and more. I had forgotten was it was like to write for me and not my teacher. Especially now that we are older and understand, or at least are starting to understand, how to write well, we can start to play with the rules. Writing is fun and we need to remember that, not everything has to be a 20 page thesis research essay, and not everything has to be dry and boring. Mr. Allen reminded us that we can start a sentence with "but" and we can use "and" more than once because writing is all about craft. We can enjoy the things we write and craft them the way we want because that's the point of writing, to put into words our personal discoveries in a way that keeps them in their truest form. 

From the beginning of the school year until now I have remembered what it feels like to write for me, and not a teacher. Even though these blogs are technically for a grade, it doesn't feel like it because we get to write about, with some parameters, whatever we want. They allow us to write about what we find interesting and what we enjoy, which in turn allows us to enjoy that which we have written. I get excited now when we are assigned a blog post because I know it means that I will get to write for personal gain and exploration. Honestly, I feel like I have had more mental breakthroughs this year, than any other year before, because I am getting the chance to fully explore my thoughts. Of course this could be a dangerous thing if taken to the extreme and writing becomes all fun and no substance, so it is important to find a balance. But nonetheless, I fully intend to carry this lesson with me as I go through life, writing is fun and should be something that brings you joy, not stress.