I'm an adult?

Legally, yeah, I guess so.

At heart? No, not really...


I mean, if I was given the chance, I would totally transport a good 15 years into the future. By then, I'd have my wife and kids (seriously can't wait to have kids), and my career starting to take off.

 Ya know, just, living the American dream and stuff.

But as far as meaningful adulthood experiences... All I can think of that would fall under this category was going to college at SFA... Which, would typically be considered somewhat an adult thing to do ya know, going off on your own, being all independent and stuff. Even though, some college things seem pretty childish/trivial.

But in reality, going to college has been a humongous change for me: going from my parents home to a dorm full of college freshmen; going from a reasonable amount of responsibility to much more; going from slight independence to almost full independence. But I love it. It feels great. The freedom is remarkable. There's so much work and responsibility, but there's also so much fun to be had - just like later in our adult lives. This is what excites me most for the future.

At my year at SFA I had many big events happen. Some I guess you could say are life-changing.

The only problem with creating a blog post about this, is that I don't really want to disclose any of this kind of information. lol

All I can really say is that I've learned so much at SFA - both real world experience and people experience (and regular ol' education of course).

As much as I wanna be childish and be a kid and all that good stuff, I'd really look forward to the future and true "adulthood".

Pollutions.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit discusses the shifting ways cultures view themselves: "There was a time when smokestacks showed how affluent your society was, but we look at these now almost with disdain. Light, or light pollution, will probably fall in this same category. Where now we equate the wealth of your society with how many lights you can burn at nighttime, ... in the future ... affluent societies ... will still be producing all the necessary light they need for night time use but not so much light that it bleeds off into space and spoils our nighttime sky" (qtd.in City Dark).

 How true... Affluence used to be judged based off of smokestacks/lights, but now humans have begun to realize the side effects of these things. We now determine opulence by the reduction of our "carbon footprint" and how "green" we are. Light and subsequent light pollution is inevitably bound to take the same turn.

 My friend likes to take pictures of the sunset at dusk because of how pretty it can be. Below is one of her pictures. She sometimes comments that she wishes the electricity poles weren't there because they detract from the beauty of the sunset. It was taken on an iPhone so it's not the greatest quality because of how it transferred to a computer, but you can make out some of the poles.

She get's annoyed because poles "pollute" the serenity of the landscape, but she realizes that they're necessary for the human race's modern lifestyle. They're similar to light pollution, in that it's a bit of an eyesore, but it's necessary. 

However, humans as a whole have an eye for aesthetics. And we're advanced enough, so surely we'll be able to find solutions to these problems.

One idea I have is to ground all electrical wires. We have so many pipelines for water, gas, sewage, etc. So we can find a way to implement this strategy to wires. This would prove especially helpful in hurricane-prone areas such as where we live. If a hurricane hits, and our wires are grounded in appropriate pipelines, the loss of electricity in our towns would be reduced drastically. 

I feel like, realistically, this should be implemented sometime in the future. Although I probably don't understand all the pros/cons that go into it...

But this could also be the case for combating light pollution: find a way to reduce the amount of light that radiates into the night sky.

The most realistic sounding strategy seems to be just finding out which lights need to stay on in the night, and which don't; a sort of selective lighting approach. Maybe we just need dimmer lights than what we use now at night, which may help provide aid to issues in melatonin production in those who are still up in the nighttime hours - since drops in melatonin production have been linked to bright lights at night.

Depending on how much awareness is raised, I'm confident that solutions will be found regarding light pollution in the future.

Birds Beware?

Susan Elbin, an ornithologist at the Audubon Society states, "The estimate is that there [are] a billion birds killed across the United States every year by collisions into buildings" (qtd. inCityDark).

That is... that's.. that's uh.. that's a staggering statistic ya got there. It's almost hard to believe...

But holy crap, one billion? As in 1,000,000,000 birds. Per year. From smashing into windows alone. That's mind boggling... And that's pretty devastating too to think of how big of a portion of the bird population that is.

So why exactly are they flying into the windows of buildings? Well, besides the points that The City Dark pointed out about the night sky and city lights and stuff, here's some more reason as to why this is happening:  

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-03/18/bird-collisions-research

 "When in flight, birds may turn their heads to look down, either with the binocular field or with the lateral part of an eye's visual field. This results in certain species being at least temporarily blind in the direction of travel.

As they're not always looking straight ahead, it's hardly surprising that birds collide into man-made structures, regardless of their size.  Furthermore, as Martin is exploring, avian frontal vision is suited for the detection of movement rather than special detail. This means birds are great at hunting smaller animals running along the ground, but less able to see static, if large, objects and more likely to be looking out for moving objects when flying."


 Interesting. So birds rarely look forward and see where they're actually flying... Thus explains the tendency for them to fly into man-made objects.



There are all these efforts and strategies being put into practice to help reduce this number, and many of them work great.

But my question is, what about adaptation?

 In addition to English this semester, I'm taking biology, and in biology, one of the characteristics that defines all living organisms is the ability for all organisms to adapt to environmental changes.

So if according to biology, and all living things share the basic property to adapt, then won't birds eventually evolve to be aware of potential threats in the air while they're flying? It might take some time for this to be put into effect, but after maybe 3-4 generations, birds should be able respond to this problem themselves. However, after a quick google search, the average lifespan of a bird is around 6-10 years (with a common pigeon being around 2-3). So this adaptation may potentially take up to 20-40 years to take effect.

But until then, I'd say we're doing alright in terms of helping birds out.

A Comparison between "Hate Poem" and "Denial"

There is an interesting contrast between these two poems, because they both boil down to a similar theme. The narrators of both poems are both seemingly explaining the very opposite thing of what they are feeling. In "Denial", the narrator states repeatedly that he/she is indeed not hungover. While in "Hate Poem", the narrator repeatedly mentions how she hates "you".



In "Denial", the narrator attempts to explain that he/she is not hungover. Now we begin the debate of what the narrator is really trying to say. Perhaps the narrator is accentuating the fact that he/she is happy that they are not hungover, and thus repeats the same four words over and over. But. The narrator doesn't use any kind of exclamatory punctuation to make it even seem like he/she is happy about this, so it seems that this poem is not likely to be about the joy of the narrator in being "not hungover".

So maybe the narrator is stating this just for the hell of it? With no emotion to it, just, "hey, guess what guys, I'm not hungover. Just thought I'd let you know." Doesn't make much sense at all, but what are we to do?  
 However.
 This poem is published in a collection of poems that was compiled by Former Poet Laureate  of the United States, Billy Collins. If anybody would know their stuff about poems, it would be Collins. So for a poem to be selected by Collins to gain entry into this book, it would have to have some merit to it. With that being known, we must also conclude that the purpose of this poem was not just to simply state that the narrator is not hungover, as that would be too pointless.

Well then, let's look at the title. "Denial". I think that explains much of this. The narrator repeats the same phrase for 14 times - all in different ways. It's with this repetition that we can infer that the narrator is in fact in "denial", and really is hungover. So why would they want to deny this? Perhaps he/she is an alcoholic who has been dry for a long time, and they don't want to think about the idea that they drank last night - which can easily be reasoned within themselves that it was only just a dream; but if they were to be hungover, it would confirm that they did indeed drink alcohol. Maybe the narrator is a teen who had a drunken escapade last night, and they do not want their parents to find out that they are hungover, so he/she is psyching themselves up to act as if they are definitely not hungover.

We will never know for sure.

Either way, he/she is denying the fact that they are hungover for a reason because it obviously causes them some form of stress that we can't even comprehend. 

Poor narrator...





Now, in "Hate Poem", the narrator being in denial is a similar theme. All throughout the poem, the narrator depicts the many ways in which she hates "you" ("you" most likely being a former lover of hers). After several instances of the portrayal of the narrator's hate for "you", we learn that the narrator is actually in denial as well.

"My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough  of you," (Sheehan 24).


Even though the narrator claims that she "hates" this person, she still can't live without him - "can never have enough of [him]."

It's a sort of "hate that you love them" relationship.




We see in both of these poems that despite what is shown on the surface - that the narrator is not hungover, or the narrator "hates" someone - the narrator's are in denial, and the opposite of what is conveyed is actually the paralleled truth.

Reading Hemingway 

This poem really befuddled me at first because of its blatant simpleness. It had me guessing whether it was a poem with a deeper meaning behind the narrator's reading of Ernest Hemingway's literary works, or the narrator just simply stating that he felt this way whenever he read.

It is confusing almost to the point of annoyance. The narrator repeats that Reading Hemingway makes him hungry, but for what exactly..? He claims he's hungry for ham, and cheese, for a dry white wine. But then he's "hungry for the good life, the sun, the fish, the sky: blue air, white water, dinner on the line..."  


 And then later he claims that reading Hemingway makes him "cold. So cold. And very dry."
                                                                                                                                            ...the hell?


Another thing that's coming to mind, is that by "Reading Hemingway," he means literally reading Ernest Hemingway, as a person.

"Reading Hemingway makes some folks angry: 
the hip drinking, the bitter pantomime" 

Meaning, some people are annoyed at Hemingway and his lifestyle? I don't know much, if it all, of any of Hemingway's literary works, but "hip drinking" doesn't seem like something found in any of his books. And pantomime means to tell a story without words, which, would technically rule out being able to literally read the story; so any pantomiming being done would have to be done at the dictate of Hemingway himself.

With that idea, it makes some sort of sense to say that "reading Hemingway" instills hunger in the narrator for the "good life" - full of all those pleasures Hemingway can be seen partaking of.


I don't remember where, but I remember hearing Ernest Hemingway being hailed as the first "Most Interesting Man In The World"


Seems legit.




I was curious to figure what was meant by "I'd knock down Monsieur Stevens, too, if I / drank too much retsina before we dined."

I figured it was some allusion to one of Hemingway's works, but no, I tried googling it and found this:

http://www.kwls.org/littoral/ernest_hemingway_knocked_walla/

Apparently, it's Hemingway's firsthand account of the scuffle between him, and Wallace Stevens - a relatively well known poet.

In the account, it also mentioned "Papa". Not sure who that is, but in the poem, it also references a certain "Papa".

So I'm starting to understand that this poem is really just a big reference to the many stories surrounding Ernest Hemingway; which I suppose would explain why I'm having difficulty matching all this up. lol




My stance now, is that this poem is for those that appreciate Hemingway. The ones who understand the references, they're the ones who can enjoy this poem. And as a side effect, this poem perplexes those who don't know Hemingway, so that an interest may be sparked, and they will research Hemingway, and try to find out more about him and/or read his work.
                                                                                                                                             - I guess.

"What I Want" by George Bilgere

I'll be honest, all throughout my grade school career, I never enjoyed poetry. I  thought they were pointless writings that didn't make anyone the wiser; that we were wasting our time focusing on poetry (especially Shakespearean-esque poetry). It took too much "critical thinking" to find the deeper meaning in some poetry, and I felt like we dwelt on poems for far too long, which caused everyone to get burnt out by it -- which in turn accounts for the general mentality of disdain towards poetry as a whole in the grade school populace.

However. This poem by George Bilgere has really helped me change my mind a bit about poems.

This particular poem, "What I Want", is just that: what the author wants. It's so simple, yet refreshing. There's no real deeper hidden meaning (though several can still be thought up). It remains very poetic in its style, but its content is actually entertaining. And it's simple and easy to read!


Let's look at it...

"I want a good night’s sleep.
I want to get up without feeling
That to waken is to plunge through a trap door."

Alright, cool, he just wants a good night's sleep, and to get up not feeling like it's going to be a terrible day.


"I want to ride my motorcycle
In late spring through the Elysian Fields
Of the Rocky Mountains"

Sound awesome, a nice motorcycle ride through beautiful scenery. Love the mythology allusion.


"And lie once more with Cecelia
In the summer of 1985
On a blanket in the backyard of our house"

Awww... Judging from the epigraph, it sounds like he's longing for the time when his relationship was in its heyday. I know that feel, and I'm sure many others do too.


"In Denver and watch the clouds expand.
And it would be great to see my mother
Alive again, at the stove, frying a pan of noodles"

Awww... How even more sad, he yearns for his mother, and the comfort she brings.

"Into the peculiar carbonized disc that has never been replicated.
I would like for my ex-wife to get leprosy,
Her beauty falling away in little chunks"

Well that's nic- wait, what? "I would like for my ex-wife to get leprosy" 

I thought this poem was going for that "simple and sweet" flavor. Wow, what a shift. Looks like I was wrong about Cecelia...


"To the disgust of everyone in the chic cafe
Where she exercises her gift
For doing absolutely nothing."

I think this^ sums that up.

And then the very next line...

"I want world peace."

This guy's pretty audacious!


"I want to come home one evening
And find Julia, the new assistant professor

In the history department,
Has let herself into my apartment
For the express purpose of lecturing me

On the history of lingerie."


I wonder what Julia would say if she read this... And the fact that this is a published poem makes it plausible that she very well might have...


"I don't ask for much: a good merlot.
An afternoon thunderstorm cooling off

The city as I sit listening to Ella
Sing "Spring is Here," so the air goes lyrical"

That does sound pretty nice.


"And perhaps a stay bolt of lightning

Strikes my ex-wife as she steps from her car,"

That doesn't...


"Setting her on fire, to the unqualified delight
Of the friends she has come to visit,

Who are thoroughly sick of her self-aggrandizing stories."

Well, apparently he's not the only one who hates her?






This pattern goes on for pretty much the rest of the poem.


It's such a simple poem of what the author wants. But it's so absurd too! And that's what makes it great. This poem makes you think the author is a bit nuts at first, but then you see that it's mainly just satirical fun.We don't think he really wishes all those things for his ex-wife (well, who knows what actually happened... Maybe he does...). It's just plain ol' entertaining. That's why I enjoyed this poem. There wasn't really any deeper meaning to it.

Except, this poem does somewhat cause you to reflect on all of your personal and deeper radical desires; maybe that's what Bilgere was also going for...

Thoughts on Stitches

This graphic memoir was really quite impressive. It's just so compelling -- to the point that you have to continue reading; you can't put the book down.

If only all authors could provide such deep and meaningful illustrations to their work like David Small. That'll be the day.



One particular thing that stood out to me in the novel was the shadows/shading. I noticed while I was flipping through the book, that from the beginning to the end, the shading became more prevalent. Panel by panel, everything became progressively a tad darker. I suppose this could be related to the loss of David's innocence - in a sense; the shading was generally light in the first section of the novel when David was just a young boy who was still fresh in the world. As the novel progressed, and as  David's life matured, he realized the state of his life and how dark it really is -- which is what he portrayed with the progressive and gradual shading.

Another example of the shading being used for effect are the dark times in David Small's life. Every time something like that happened, the pages surrounding the event were dark in contrast. This first really started around the time when he visited his grandparent's house. The scenes following their arrival had a very distinct difference in the amount of gray shading used; I feel like this was a way to show that this was in fact a dark time for Small, but at that moment in time when he was only six, he might not have realized how bleak it actually was, because the scenes were told in a less threatening manner.



Another aspect of the story I want to touch on is David's mother.We all know, she treated David like crap most of the time. She was rude and unloving.

 But why was she like this? Why would she treat David like this?


Well, one thought that can be inferred from the story is the idea that his grandmother also treated David's mother terribly. You can see this on page 101, when David is explaining why he's scared of his grandmother and his mother turns around with a frightened look on her face as well whenever she thinks she hears her grandmother nearby. This look on her face of child-like fear told us that she too was scared of her grandmother, which we might infer that she was probably abusive in one way or another.

Which, from pg. 68-72, you can tell from the rough life of David's grandmother that that might've been why his grandmother was possibly abusive/cruel to his mother when she was growing up. This abuse was then transferred over onto David, with this graphic novel as a result.

Another theory of mine, is the frustration and turmoil of David's mother because of her true sexual identity. On page 273, David explains that him eventually finding this out about her was "a moment she must have known was coming her whole life." Before 1974, homosexuality was considered and diagnosed as a mental disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychological Association. Besides this classification, in those decades that David's mother lived and grew up in, homosexuality was a seriously shunned practice. This forced his mother to marry a man she probably did not love, and to raise two kids with him. This pent-up frustration -- I theorize -- might have been another reason as to why David's mother treated him so poorly and "didn't love him."

Creative Energy? I guess you can call it that...

I've been trying to figure out what I really did as a kid and where my "creative energy" went, and I thought about it for a good while. But, I realized, my art was playing games. Or in the theme of Stitches, my "language" was playing games.

Namely: Video games, board games, and sports.


Let's start with sports. As one of those typical kids, I was all over those kids sports (oh, you know, Little League for baseball, YMCA for soccer/basketball, and Upwards for soccer/basketball). I loved sports when I was younger - since I was normally much bigger than my peers around me, I therefore dominated.
One particular time when I was playing in an Upwards soccer match, I remember scoring an awesome goal coming from a free kick that was placed midfield. Statistically speaking, it was a dumb idea to kick straight to the goal when you were midfield, rather than passing the ball to one of the forwards. Regardless, I wound up, kicked it squarely with my toes (another soccer no-no), and saw it sail through the air over everyone's head, just out of reach of the goalies hands.




Basically my reaction, and how the next 30 seconds went:

Fast forward to senior year in high school when I was replaying this particular story to my best friend (we met around sophomore year). He said he remembered this exact game, and the kid who scored a goal from a free kick placed at midfield.

As fate would have it, he was the goalie.

And of course, like any good best friend, I used that opportunity to reinforce the idea that I still beat him at everything, even before we knew each other.

Ah. Good times.


                                                                                                                                                                           



Now, board games.

By this, I mean stuff like Monopoly, Boggle, Risk, etc.

If you recall from my first blog entry, I'm the youngest of six children. Board games were how we passed the time on nights where we were all together. We always loved a good board game. So, playing against much older and wiser players served as a bit of a handicap for myself. However, whether it was clever thinking on my part, or just sheer dumb luck, I fared quite well against my sibling rivals.

One time when I was around 9 or 10, I was playing Monopoly with 3 of my siblings. It started off slow, but progressively I started raking in the properties. After a while, it got to the point where I actually felt sympathy for my siblings once they landed on any of my properties because they were all so poor... I would tell my sister, "It's okay, you don't have to pay me this time. :(" While my brothers are trying to persuade me that I need to play cutthroat-style and make her give me her properties so she would be forced out of the game. But in the mind of my young self, that just felt like such a cruel thing to do to my sister...



A couple hours later, she won.



And that, was the last time I was merciful to any of my siblings while playing a board game...


(Okay it wasn't that bad...)



                                                                                                                                                                           


Video games.

Where do I start with video games...

Well. Crash Bandicoot. That's a good start I suppose. That was the first video game I believe I actually ever played. Specifically, Crash Bandicoot: Warped.  Just looking the cover art brings back so much nostalgia.

I remember the first time I ever picked up a controller. My brother was playing this game, and he couldn't figure out how to beat this one level. But I immediately recognized what to do, and beat what he was trying to get past. He was so amazed that his 4 year old baby brother was able to figure it out.

Haven't put down the controller ever since. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

I love video games. They relax me, they entertain me, they're my escape from reality.



                                                                                                                                                                           




As I think about it, games really have shaped my life quite a bit.

Well, honestly, board games may not have made that much of an impact... (although, it did bring us closer as siblings).

But if it wasn't for playing all four years of high school tennis, my life would be radically different, and probably not in a good way. I have high school tennis to thank for many things in my life.

As far as video games go... I love them and all, but they do suck my time up... I'll have to see where this one takes me.



But ya know, I've always thought about a career in the stock market. I've thought to myself, "Hey. I'm pretty good at games. The stock market is kind of like a game right?"

Here, try this:

http://www.marketwatch.com/game/

It's a game that allows you to set up different kind of rules, and the amount of money you start with, where you can then invest in legit, actual stocks in real-time as their price fluctuates. It's pretty awesome.

 

So who knows, we'll have to see where my affinity for games might actually end me up.

Yeah, it really isn't all that clever...

But oh well.

 

Disneyland Misadventures.

Back when I was around four years old, my family and I took a trip to see some family in California. Whilst on vacation we went to Disneyland! (No exclamation to that sentence was intended, just the word "Disneyland!"  -- like the "I'm going to Disney World!" saying. You just gotta say it with exclamation.)

But while we were there, I got lost.
 

Four times.


In one day.


Now I don't really remember all the details regarding my escapades as a four year old set loose in Disneyland(!). Although, I only remember two particular instances of getting lost:

Once was when I was clinging onto my mother, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw this really sweet looking toy gun. I absolutely had to check this thing out, so I slipped out of my mothers hand. Now that I'm currently thinking about it, I'm not sure how any of my older siblings didn't at least notice me scamper away. (I suppose now would be a good time to explain that I'm the youngest of four boys and two girls. My oldest sister would've been at least 17 or 18, and my oldest brother at least 15.) Although, I recognize that that would still be difficult to manage my parents' six kids in an amusement park with a giant crowd all out and about...


Anyways,




 

as I was asking my mother for clarity on this trip, she mentioned that we were in New Orleans Square particularly when I got lost most of those times. Up until this point, I didn't know the name of the place where a lot of this "getting lost" took place, but after a quick Google search, these pictures I've found are actually really familiar. Looking at it, I remember that it was one of these shops that held that gun I so desperately wanted.

I don't remember getting found from this particular instance...


The last time I became lost -- from what I actually remember in my mind -- it was nighttime, and I was in the middle of a sea of people. I didn't know what was going on, but my family wasn't there, so I was bawling my eyes out. After a little while, a lady guided me towards the building where all the lost and found children go. While there, I played with Tarzan stickers. I was having a grand ol' time in that place. But my family were probably searching frantically and losing their minds over their youngest being lost in a crowd of people, at night. 

After a while, they realized to check the lost and found again, as that's where I've been normally found hiding out that day.

From what I remember, it was a pretty good day at Disneyland(!).

At least for me it was...