2016 Election

Today in class, we watched the Republican debate.  Before last year, I knew nearly nothing about politics, but now that I'm 18 and will be able to vote in the next presidential election, I feel that it is my obligation to follow the presidential campaigns and develop a greater sense of politics.  I have been intending on watching each debate, but they were all scheduled at inconvenient times and I have not found the time to watch them.  Prior to today's class, just about all of what I knew about the election came from the media, which I knew I couldn't completely trust because it is usually biased in some way.  I probably will not have much time to watch many of the future debates until AP exams happen, as my schoolwork will significantly decrease at that point, so watching the debate in class today was important to me because it showed me first hand what to expect to see when my schoolwork lessens.  I do not have much experience watching politics, but I know a few things about general etiquette, so I was amazed by how some of the republicans acted towards each other.  The one candidate that stands out from the rest in the area of offensiveness is Donald Trump.  I know that he is an outlier and does not represent the Republican candidates well, but it is amazing how he can tell other candidates that they are stupid and that their ideas will never work.  Donald Trump reached an all time low when the crowd started to boo him, and he reacted by telling the crowd that they support terrorism.  Also, Trump proposed that the United States should kill the family members of terrorist, which is absurd, and is, as Rand Paul states, against the Geneva Convention.  So, what I learned from today's class is that Donald Trump is as bad as the media says, and that the Republican debate can be very funny.  Hopefully the Democratic  debates end up just as funny the the Republican ones.

White Christmas

As we are approaching Christmas time, it feels as though the weather is getting warmer and warmer.  Although it is not rare for it to not snow at this point in the year, it feels wrong to go skiing in a tshirt in almost the middle of December.  Personally, I would not mind if this trend of not-so-cold weather stayed for a while, as it means less shoveling and that I do not have to do track workouts in the field house.  However, according to accuweather, the high for December 25th is 52 degrees, which would bring a strangely warm Christmas.  As much as I want warmer weather for the winter time, the feeling of comfort from being inside a warm house within a bitter cold environment is a huge part of the greatness of Christmas and we need snow to cover the leafless trees so that New England can be pretty again.  Then again, we should enjoy being able to go outside without a winter jacket, because in the middle of February, when it gets below zero degrees, many will be wishing that spring comes as soon as possible.

Phones

Today, my stats class started off the day by analyzing the statistics of phone usage.  According to the data, increased phone usage correlated with less sleep, lower GPAs and higher depression.  Although correlation does not mean causation, it is easy to tell how increased phone usage can lead to such bad effects.  For example, many people use their phones so much that they constantly expect to get a notification, so when they go to bed it is harder to fall asleep because they still expect something from their phone, and (according to Skehan) even when they finally fall asleep, it takes longer for them to fall into a solid REM cycle because their subconcious is expecting a notification from the phone.  

There is only a correlation between phone usage and these adverse effects, so by no means does it mean that you will become depressed or develop sleep apnea because you use your phone too much.  However, it is important to learn how to use a phone and to get the best out of it.  As technology increases, we get introduced to more and more distractions, and because of the pleasure principal, our brains would much rather play candy crush than study for calculus, so it easier than ever for us to procrastinate and slack off at school.  If we did not have these distractions, we would perform better in many aspects of life, but just because we are addicted to our phones does not mean we are doomed.  If there was anything I was convinced of today, it was that phones are amazing inventions, but many people use them in a way that could promote adverse effects.  

Seasons

As each week passes by, the temperature gets lower and lower and we get closer and closer to winter.  Within a few weeks, the ground will be covered by snow, and everybody will be wondering how our bodies are able to maintain homeostasis in such a cold environment.  Many people hate winter and migrate to warmer climates, while others enjoy every minute of the cold season.  Although I would not want to live in a winter wonderland for the rest of my life, I am grateful for growing up in an area that has harsh winters and am looking forward to the cold days to come.

Just like every other season, I love winter because it changes how you live.  The frigid temperatures and large amounts of snow force you to wear insulative apparel and cause long days of shoveling, however the snow brings fun activities, such as skiing, snowboarding, sledding, and skating and the cold makes you more appreciative of hot showers, hot chocolate, and overall coziness.  On top of that, the change in season brings great change within school activities.  Many drama kids move onto other plays for the winter, many kids that play sports move onto their next sport, etc.  I can't wait to move from running up and down a field to running in circles around a track and from hiking up mountains to skiing down them.  How do you feel about winter?

Stoic Optimism

This week, we wrapped up the psychonalalytic criticism unit by submitting our final essays on Winesburg, Ohio and began the unit on feminist criticism.  To sum up what I learned about life from the psychoanalytic criticism unit, I would say that life can be pretty awful.  With the exception of two stories in Winesburg, Ohio, every single chapter in the book was a sad story about society.  The transformation from psychoanalytic criticism to feminist criticism brought a slightly happier mood, but history is drenched with mysogyny, so feminist criticism is not quite the happiest unit.  Amidst these depressing units, I stumbled upon a philosophy that I found intriguing, and counters the sadness from these two units.

I do not know much about this philosophy, as I just briefly stumbled upon it while watching youtube, but the few ideas that I found about stoicism were fascinating.  Since I do not know much about this philosophy, I will not go into detail about it because I would not be able to give a just explanation as to exactly what it is, but one of the concepts that grabbed me goes along the lines of accepting that bad things will happen in life, so when they do, you will not be upset because you have already accepted that bad things will happen, and that you should think off all of the bad things that happen as learning experience and be grateful for them because they give you the opportunity to become a better person.  I am intrigued by this idea because it ties into both the feminist unit and psychoanalysis unit.  Accepting bad experiences and using them to make yourself a better person because of those experiences fits perfectly within the definition of sublimation, the most mature defense mechanism.  The feminist unit outlines the concept of privilege, which is when society gives you advantages that you did not earn.  For example, I am a white, middle-class, christian male living in the Northeast, so my demographics allow me to have many privileges.  I can't speak for people that have less privilege than I do, but in theory you could apply this stoic idea of becoming a better individual from unwanted experiences to lack of privilege.  An example of this could be Ben Carson, who grew up in a bad part of Detroit with a poor family, but later in life became the world's top neurosurgeon, and the first person to successfully to complete a hemispherectomy and to separate a pair of conjoined twins.

Beginning of the End

Within a matter of months, we will get accepted into college, graduate high school and then leave the town that many of us have lived in for the entirety our lives.  This time period will prove to be a pivotal part of our lives, as the transition from high school to college marks the end of our childhood and the beginning of our lives as adults.  In the time between now and when we leave college, there will be many moments where we will do an activity for the last, with the knowledge that we may never be able to return to that atmosphere again.  We are not even one-third of the way through our senior year, but a trend of ending has already started to occur.   

The activities that I have been most involved in throughout my years at RMHS have been sports.  I have been on the soccer team since I was a freshman, so four the past four seasons I have devoted an extraordinary amount of time playing soccer and hanging out with my team.  Within the past few years, I have generated an enormous collection of wonderful memories associated with the soccer team, and it has shaped me into who I am today.  With the start of the postseason, my soccer career at RMHS could come to an end at any moment.  For many seniors on the team, the last game of the season could be the last time they play an organized game of soccer.  Other seniors will continue to play soccer throughout the rest of the year and into college, but they will never be able to represent RMHS on the pitch, which leaves an unsettling feeling.  Whether you are a part of a team, band, drama, a club, or have enjoyed anything unique about your time at RMHS, you will need to give something up before you graduate.

During the week, we wrapped up Winesburg, Ohio by reading the final stories of the novel.  To my surprise, the ending of the book was relatively happy, as this novel, which almost entirely consists of depressing stories, ends as the beginning of George's journey towards manhood.  Within the story, Sophistication, George meets Helen for the first time in a while when she comes home for the weekend from her college in Cleveland, and they go for a walk down to the edges of the fair ground, where they sit on a decayed grandstand as night settles in.  They kiss briefly, but that impulse gives away to a sudden desire to run about in the darkness, regressing to the level of children at play.  Without the society pressuring the couple to act a certain way, they are able to regress and find themselves while in the moment of playtime.  When the two return from the their privacy, they walk back to town with a dignified fashion, very satisfied with how they spent the night.

By using George's and Helen's regression to innocence as a means of finding themselves as mature adults, Anderson is demonstrating a valuable lesson that adulthood does not always need to be serious. I find this to be a very important lesson because living with the right ratio of seriousness to silliness is a crucial factor to the wellbeing of most people. As high school is nearing an end, we are beginning to prepare ourselves for our lives as adults in the real world, where you need to work hard to be successful and where you are forced to endure social pressures to act a certain way. Many people obesess over these two aspects of adulthood and run themselves into the ground. Although it is important to work hard and act in the right manner, it is essential to not take everything so seriously and assign a certain amount of time to relax and enjoy life, so that life is more entertaining and less stressful.

Enoch Anderson

During the past couple weeks in class, we have been reading and analyzing the book, Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.  Within this book, Anderson uses many stories to describe the feelings and thoughts of characters that are ugly in a way that represents society's ugliness.  A few days ago, we were assigned to read the chapter, "Loneliness," in which Enoch Robinson, the main character of the chapter, describes the story of his life, which results in complete isolation and loneliness.  As a young man, Enoch leaves Winesburg for New York City, where he studies to become and painter and joins a circle of artists.  However, he can not tolerate people and decides it is better to just interact with imaginary people, who always agree with him and never threaten his self-image.  Enoch ends up marrying a woman, and has two children, but he faces the same problem with his family as with the circle of artists, and ends up leaving them to live in his old apartment, where he generates more imaginary friends.  Again, Enoch meets a woman in his apartment and she comes over to visit him.  After telling her about the people who live in the room with him, and she seems to understand, however when she leaves, the imaginary people follow her out the door and never return.  Enoch Robinson then moves to Winesburg and has been alone ever since.

This story is very interesting to me because Enoch Robinson seems to parallel Sherwood Anderson, the author of the novel.  The most obvious similarity between Robinson and Anderson is that they both left their wives and children so that they could play with the ideas in their heads.  I find it shocking that Anderson would include a grotesque that walks away from his wife and kids, as those details must have been extremely painful to include into one of his greatest works.  As someone who does not have a degree in psycology, I cannot fully explain why Anderson would include such a detail, but I know it can explain a lot about his personality.  One possibility that I found interesting was that Anderson included the story of Enoch Robinson as a defense mechanism to cope with the fact that he actually left his family behind.  Another idea that is interesting is that Anderson could be explaining why he left his family.  In the story, Enoch is described as a "boy-man" because children are more sensitive and imaginative than adults.  The woman who drove Enoch back to Winesburg is described as being very grown up,the personification of adulthoood, and took all of his imaginary friends away.  By implying that regression can improve imagination, Anderson could be justifying the abandonment of his family because it would have improved his imagination.

Grotesque

For the psychoanalytic unit, we have been reading the book Winesburg, Ohio.  Written by Sherwood Anderson in the 1919, this book portrays certain figures from his unusual life.  Growing up in a small rural town, the Anderson family was began well off financially, but the father began drinking and they were forced to move from town to town.  The family finally settled in Clyde, Ohio, the town which Winesburg is based off of, where Sherwood Anderson left school at age 14 to take on odd jobs so he could help his family.  After returning to school and finishing his education, Anderson became a traveling salesman and married the daughter of a wealthy businessman.  The couple had three kids together before Anderson experienced a nervous breakdown and eventually walked away from his family and everything he had known to become a novelist.  Anderson utilized experiences from his unique life to write stories using Freudian theory describing the stories behind grotesques, characters that are ugly in a way that represent society's ugliness.

Each grotesque displays is characterized by a truth, which is the flaw that troubles the grotesque.  In Hands, the grotesque, Wing Biddlebaum, is a man that lives on the outside of town and is well known for his exceptional berry picking skills.  Wing Biddlebaum lives in Winesburg for 20 years in isolation for an incident that scarred him forever.  Before he moved to Winesburg, Wing was a school teacher in a town in Pennsylvania, who went by the name Adolph Myers.  Described as a man who "was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth," Adolph Myers was beloved by all of his students for his gentle and loving charisma.  After school, Adolph would caress his touch his students so that he could manifest dreams inside of them.  One night, a student had a nightmare where the teacher did "unspeakable things" to the student, and the town evantually formed a mob against the teacher.  Adolph Myers managed to escape the mob, however, when he came to Winesburg, he formed a complete disassociation with his hands.  For the next twenty years, Adolph Myers lived in isolation in Winesburg and was afraid out his hands.  At the end of the story, Adolph eats a few bread crumbs in a manner that could be mistaken for someone praying the rosary.  This implies that he feels like he has sinned and has subconscious guilt for the wrong reason.  From his traumatic experience, Adolph Myers forms a truth of the idea that trying to foster the learning of others is somehow wrong, and that drives him to isolation from society.

Which Defense Mechanisms Do You Use?

During the past week, we dove deep into each other's mind by starting the psychoanalysis unit.  To start the unit, we learned about the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who specialized in hysteria and hypnosis, and eventually began his own practice in hysteria.  As a pioneer in his field, Freud created the theory of the three levels in the mind.  In this theory, the mind is broken into the id (primal drives), the ego (sense of personality) and the superego (morality).  These three levels of the mind are in a constant battle with eachother, but they work together to produce defense mechanisms, which determine how one functions in society.  In 1977, these defense mechanisms were classified into four categories: pathological, immature, neurotic and mature.  The defense mechanisms are ranked from functionability in society and they were so interesting that it took us nearly two classes to go over the four mechanisms

The first mechanism, pathological, has attributes that would make life miserable.  The traits of the pathological category include: delusional projection, conversion/hysteria, denial, and distortion.  All of these traits seem miserable to possess and I am glad that I do not have to live with them.  The second mechanism, immature, makes it difficult to get around in society, but still possible.  An immature person would display traits such as: idealization, passive aggression, projection, and somatization.  Although they are better than pathological traits, they still seem horrible to possess.  The third mechanism is neurotic, which will allow somebody to funtion, however they will seem a little bit odd.  Traits in this category include: displacement, dossociation, intellectualization, rationalization, regression and repression.  It is better not to have these traits, but I think we all show these traits every once in a while.  The final mechanism is mature, which is the ideal to live by.  People who show mature traits display: humility, mindfulness, acceptance, gratitude, altruism, mercy, humor, thought suppression, self regulation and sublimation.  These are the traits that I hope I live by.

Learning about these traits was very interesting, but it spawned the question, "Under what category do I fall in?"  I strive to fulfill the qualities of the mature defense mechanisms, but I'm sure immature and neurotic mechanisms can show up, especially the traits that isolate the subconscious.  As the schoolyear progesses, I will take more notice upon how I act and try even harder to fall under the mature category, and I will try to find some defense mechanism traits in my friends, and see what category they might fit in.

English is Entering my Dreams

        While dreaming the other night, I found myself in a city where I could change any aspect of the environment at my will.  Much like Adradne, I took full advantage of this privilege and rearranged the entire architecture of the city.  In response to the change of environment, the inhabitants of the dream began to get mad at me and eventually killed me before I was satisfied with the environment of the dream.  Hopefully I will have another chance to enter a similar dream, where I can spend more time exploring, but it better not not involve modernist attributes, such as those found in Inception, because I would spend too much time during the day confusing myself about my subconscious.

        The modernistic traits that I would be most concerned about seeing in my dream would be impressionism and ambiguous endings.  All day, I would be breaking my dream into every little detail that I could imagine, and trying to find the deeper meaning of what these details mean.  The search for the meaning of the non-transparency and impressionism would be driven by an insatiable ambiguous ending, such as the ending of Inception, when you do not know whether the top will fall or keep spinning, would become a daunting task.  I am certain that the constant search for the inner meanings of my dreams would drive me to insanity, and I am thankful that I am not plagued with such a curse.  

        Although Inception is tied to modernism, it made me excite to start the psychoanaliytic criticism unit.  Modernism explains the symbolism and themes behind Inception, which is good to know, but I want to know the psychology behind Inception so I can better understand what is going on and how certain characters are driven to act.  Also, it would be interesting to connect these two units because they seem to have much in common.

Trust Issues with Modernism

Trust Issues with Modernism

          Coming out of last school year, I was a naive and unexperienced reader excited for another fruitful dive into the adventures of the romantic and victorian ages.  Little did I know, I would experience a whole new genre of literature and emerge into the summer with more excitement than I could handle when I began reading Tender is the Night.  Throughout my summer reading journey, I focused on the finest details of each book and thought long and hard about the significance and deeper meaning of every word.  In the deep trance of euphoria that I experienced when reading the summer texts, I thought I understood all the details available, but I realized I was wrong when I learned how to truly fondle details.

        Going into the first day of senior year english class, we were assigned the task to read Nabokov's essay, "Good Readers and Good Writers."  This taught us the techniques of understanding and producing good literature.  One of the most striking notes on becoming a better reader from this essay was the importance of rereading and looking over every detail just as you would if you were to read a book.  This comparison of appreciating and observing a book just as you would with a painting was game changing in the development of my reading skills, and I was eager to test this new skill out.  During the next class, we were given a set of modernist stories to read and reread.  As an honest and dedicated student, I read and reread the stories and found a startling amount of answered questions after the rereads.  When we reviewed the stories in class, we learned about major characteristics of modernist literature and carefully fondled many details in the stories.  While fondling the details, we discovered that many phrases or details that could appear insignificant actually have multiple meanings and levels that require careful observations and rereading to pick out.  Learning about the non-transparent language, along with the impressionism, experimentation of form, tightening of form and ambiguous endings has taught me to never the words that appear infront of me, as before I interpret them for exactly how they are, I must take the time and effort to fondle them and truly understand what I am reading.