The Journey Beyond Vacansopapurosophobia: An ELI on poetry and the terrors of writing

It's one of those nights when with every key I type, one more drop of motivation runs from my fingers, flows among my words, and drowns out all sense of meaning. It's when the glaring numbers of the clock are watching me, and questioning me, and measuring just how much longer I'll be able to stay awake. It knows that my ELI on poetry has been pushed back on a dusty shelf in the parlor of my mind with no hope of reappearance until at least the weekend. Its glare is similar to the Wissner stare that floods your brain with guilt and then suddenly motivates you and you don't in fact blow everything off and stare out the window in hope of seeing a completed blog entry fly by.

Here is a list of things I would like to be doing right now in order of priority:

1. sleeping

2. catching up on YouTube

3. listening to really loud music while eating chocolate and reflecting on the meaning of life

4. watching slam poetry online and pretending that I have written just as good a poem lately

5-136. doing some variation of the above pastimes

137. eating a cucumber

138. writing this blog entry

139. writing a poem

Oh, the irony.

To put it simply, writing is really hard and I don't really know what I'm doing. For a while I had the illusion that by the end of the semester this wouldn't be true, like there would finally come a time when there wouldn't be 138 other things I would probably choose to be doing instead. This misconceived notion was murdered in the first thirty seconds of my mentor meeting.

Robert Wrigley is well-known poet. He's won all the awards you're supposed to win when you're a well-known poet. This was proof enough to me that this guy was a pro and writing was a breeze, however he decided to kick off the conversation by saying the following monumental and dream-crushing line:

"Writing is hard."

[Dramatic sigh]. I will admit this resulted in meltdown within the confines of my skull, but as the hour progressed so did the re-congelation of my cerebral solids. Though Mr. Wrigley never let up on his topic sentence, he did illuminate the way to hope (and did so in the most poetic and metaphorical language I have ever heard used in speech).

First of all, “writing is the easiest thing in the world to not do.” For this reason, having a somewhat systematic approach to the process can help make it far less daunting and facilitate a more consistent output of products. Some poets and authors have a specific place and time that they sit down and write at each day. Others simply vow to write for half an hour at some point during the day. Given the inconsistent nature of a high-school schedule, I have found that going on writing sprees on weekends is the best fit for me.

Another way to decrease fear of the blank page is to develop the mindset of “I am doing this for myself.” This piece of advice was bestowed to me by poetry professor Ron McFarland. This concept is still applicable despite the fact that the majority of us do not write beyond the horizons of our English essays. Though we are writing for a grade, we are also ultimately writing to learn to effectively express ourselves in the written word. For this reason, it follows that internalizing the attitude that writing is an act of self-exploration will result in better writing with less frustration.

Once when preparing a choir solo in the 5th grade, my conductor told me to pretend I was Hannah Montana. This was because distancing myself from the solo would allow it to exist with less insecurity. The same is true in writing. Third person narration, for example, largely excludes the author’s voice allowing room for those of the characters to surface. Alexandra Teague, also a professor of poetry at the University of Idaho, recently published a book of poetry written from the perspectives of historical figures. She says that this allowed her to have more freedom in her writing and to look beyond her immediate self.

There are still 138 things and counting that I think to do before I write a poem. I still rate writing as the single hardest activity that I engage in. However, what has changed over the semester is that its prospect is not quite as daunting as it was at the outset. Vacansopapurosophobia is the fear of a blank page. Though I still share the common sentiment that “writing is hard,” and though I know that this is something that I will never surpass, it is possible to develop the skills needed to not let writing turn you away, but to instead embrace it as the ultimate challenge of expression.

~Luisa

How Different Are We?

That’s it, the million dollar question. Are humans that much different from other animals? How did we come to be the dominant species on the planet? Because, fundamentally, we’re not that different. We’re just another species of animal.  Our closest ancestor, chimpanzees, share 99% of our genes. If we are, genetically, 99% the same, what is in that one percent that has changed our behavior so much? And how is it that we, a relatively young species, has become the most dominant species on the planet? Even though I am studying animal behavior this semester, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of our behaviors compared to those of other animal species.

There have been many instances where someone comes up with a new definition that sets humans apart from other animal species. First, it was tool use. Well, many other species, even species that aren’t closely related to us, can do just that, use tools. There have been studies that look at this very behavior in crows. Crows can not only figure out how to use tools, but they can also make tools out of objects that are given to them. Next, there was an idea that only we can see objects in two dimensions and translate them into three dimensional image in our brain. But, as it turns out, dolphins can do this, too. A group of dolphins and trainers can even communicate through a language of hand signals that has its own grammar. Also, dolphins and elephants can see themselves in a mirror and know that it is them. They have a self-awareness that was first thought only to be present in humans. Like it or not, we are actually very similar in many ways to the animals that surround us.

Even though some of our behaviors are not exactly the same as those that we see in other species, many of them are close. As I started doing some research on social dominance in groups of animals, I met with my mentor, a professor at the University of Idaho. He then brought up the point that humans have our own form of social dominance that actually appears quite often in teenagers; bullying. Bullying is just a teenager’s way of showing dominance over another. This happens incredibly often in other animal species, as well. One individual will rise to dominance over another because of a number a factors, but once there, this individual will use its newfound power to get at the best resources or mates, often at the expense of the lower ranking members of the group.

This is one of the reasons that I, personally, find studying animal behavior so interesting. It makes me think. It doesn’t just make me think like a hard math problem makes me think; it makes me think about what it truly means to be human. It causes those who study it to compare ourselves to animals in ways that most people typically avoid doing. We just want to feel that we are superior and don’t like anything that tells us otherwise. In a way, studying animal behavior makes me feel less human, less civilized. But I also feel connected. It helps me to understand that we really are just animals with the same desires and needs that every other species of animal has. We want to stay alive so we can reproduce and pass along our genes on to the next generation.

-Rachel C.

Planning on attending college?

All college-bound students are at one point or another going to need to apply to the colleges of their interest. The acceptance rates of universities in America have drastically decreased in the last decade or so, meaning that it is more difficult than ever to earn admittance into college (and particularly into one that is highly esteemed or prestigious). For anyone with high aspirations, applying to college creates ridiculous amounts of stress and possibly even prompts re-evaluation of self-worth. I realize that it is so important to send the best applications possible, but also to keep at least a sliver of sanity during my senior year, so I have decided to research the best methods of applying to college, and to share, firsthand, my experiences with college applications.

I dream of attending Stanford University. To me, it is, hands-down, the best university in the world and is the best match for me. The problem, however, is that they accept only 5% of their applicants, all of which are incredibly gifted academically, athletically, musically and/or in many other areas. My competition is tough, but I’m still giving it a shot. Here’s the path for my journey.

I need to write one essay that perfectly sums up who I am, showing my personality, my dreams, my story, and everything that I will contribute in college. Don’t forget that it needs to be incredibly interesting with impeccable voice and a powerful storyline… admissions readers will read hundreds or thousands of these essays each year so somehow I have to make it memorable. I’ll also need to write it to one of the five provided prompts on the Common Application and keep it all under 650 words.Sound easy? No. Especially not for a perfectionist like myself who sees my entire future banking on this one assignment.

Now,  I might be exaggerating a little bit.. this one essay isn’t everything. I’ll have the glorious opportunity to write countless supplemental responses and short essays as well! There are about 15 of them, all ranging between the word limits of 50 and 250. Each and every piece of writing needs to be polished and perfected. Think that I’ll finish that in one night? Uh no, how about five or six. After finishing all of these, I’ll proceed to detail my top ten involvements, activities, awards and community service, with “completely accurate” hour counts and short descriptions. Then, I’ll fill out hundreds of monotonous details of personal information; my parents, where they went to college, for how many years, at what schools, what degrees, phone numbers, email addresses, and addresses. Everything that I could possibly know about myself, my family, and my mailman is somehow included in the forms.

Combine that application with the 3-4 letters of recommendations that I have asked for, reminded of, pestered for, and reminded of again, and I’m just one step closer to completion. I just need to forward (at the price of $11.25 per school) SAT scores from The College Board to the school, release my transcript, and submit my application with a small little fee of $90. And then I celebrate! Because I’m done with one school. Wait what? One school. Yep, more to go.

If I have already decided which schools to apply to, I will be able to forego the hours and hours of research, phone calls, visits, and school analysis that is needed to decide where to apply to. Unfortunately, I haven’t, so I will spend all of that time, losing plenty of tears and sweat in the process. Why is it that no one mentions how many schools there are to choose from??

After picking my schools, I will need to apply to each one of them. If they use the common app, I will be spared the need to write another big essay and the need to fill out all of the forms. All that those schools will require are their own short applications of 15ish questions (just 5-6 more nights spent on each application, no big deal). If the schools are not using the common app, then I will start my process all over again and do my very best on each of the essays, even though  I have already exhausted so much energy on my first applications.  Then, I’ll just forward all of the SAT scores (100 bucks later) and submit my applications (around 500 bucks laters) and I’m ready to sit and wait for months until I hear back about my admittance.

Oh and one last thing that I forgot to mention. Somehow I’ll need to keep up my 4.0 during senior year while taking Calculus, AP Spanish, AP Literature, and all of the other classes that I selected to keep my transcript up to par. I’ll just need to find a perfect and wonderful balance between homework and applications.. and maybe I’ll even work in sleep and a social life into my schedule if I have the time.  

I’m obviously still searching for the way to keep college applications stress-free and manageable, but I’ll keep looking, and I’ll tell the world the answer if and when I figure it out.

~Heather

Focusing on Photojournalism

For my ELI I’ve chosen to delve into the world of photography. As I researched more and more, I became interested specifically in photojournalism. This type of photography is so important because it shows events, places, and people in truest form. News articles can never retain the whole truth, but in a picture we can actually see what is happening at the event or to whatever is being documented. As I’ve researched this topic, I’ve asked myself these questions: How can I get as much of a story into a picture as possible? How can I become a photojournalist? How do great pictures of events help shape how people perceive and react to them? And lastly, how can I tell a story that is important to me?

This semester I have chosen to focus on three goals: investigate different jobs in the photography industry, improve my picture techniques and composition skills, and complete a project that shows and explains a story that I want to tell through the use of photography and text. I have bought an SLR camera and will start into these goals more once it arrives.

Photojournalism allows us to see the emotions and scale of events that have happened.  Pictures of the holocaust victims and images of the bodies of Tutsis from the Rwandan genocide motivate society to make a change. But photojournalism isn’t all about death and genocide. It can also portray the great things that have happened to society, such as an Olympian going for the gold or smiling children running down the street to their father who survived a car crash. A photojournalist captures the largest possible truth. I’m very excited to go further with this project and can’t wait to learn to tell my own stories!

Emma L. C.

Why Terror?

No matter which theory of creation one believes, it is evident that with the birth of man, terror was also born, but as man’s invisible attribute. Sure, it can be concluded that with man came beauty in the form of medicine, education, theology, and love. But, man was born with desires as well: desires for territory, desires for followers, and desires for power. This is where terrorism was able to grow, similarly to how bacteria expands in a petri-dish. Man needed to find ways to reign victorious, and terrorism became a justifiable solution.

Possibly the most frightening characteristic of terrorism is the fact that every man passionately devoted to a cause is utterly convinced of the rightness of his actions. According to Arnaud Blin and Gerard Chaliand, the renowned authors of The History of Terrorism, “There is no judge higher than the cause for which the terrorist has sacrificed himself.” Whether it be in the name of God, in the name of the State, or for a matter of vengeance, terrorism is justified by terrorists. Children who are killed in a car-bombing while running on a dusty road in Iraq will be seen as collateral damage. Men who rape and torture Shia women will be forgiven because of the overall cause for which they fight. And, thousands of innocent and unsuspecting people who board a plane and go to work one morning will be defined as a necessary sacrifice to convey a point. But, this may all seem too gory or too extreme. How could one person commit an entire existence to the terror of another’s?

Just like every person alive to this day, terrorists have a story. In his article, “I.S. = Invasive Species,” Thomas L. Friedman, a famous Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, provides an anecdote to illustrate how an ISIS extremist came to be. “Think about the life of a 50-year-old Iraqi Sunni male from Mosul. He first got drafted to fight in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988. Then he had to fight in the Persian Gulf War I after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Then he lived under a decade of U.N. sanctions that broke Iraq’s middle class. Then he had to endure the years of chaos that followed the U.S. invasion, which ended with a corrupt, brutal, pro-Iranian Shiite regime in Baghdad led by Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that did all it could to keep Sunnis poor and powerless.” If this anecdote does indeed portray the life of the average Iraqi Sunni, terrorism almost seems just. Many Sunnis have spent their entire lives wallowing in the poverty and oppression that they were dealt at birth. After reading the story of the man from Mosul, is it wrong to feel sympathy? To feel regret for being born in the United States, the hegemonic state that was so crucial in his oppression? Is it wrong to applaud this man for fighting against his oppressors?

To use another quote by Arnaud Blind and Gerard Chaliand, “Terrorism beats out guerrilla warfare as the preferred and practically exclusive weapon of the weak against the strong.” For those who are not familiar with guerilla warfare, it can be described as small groups of rebels who utilize their small numbers and mobility to combat a larger enemy. However, terrorism is more successful because terrorists are able to use extremist tactics to appear bigger than they actually are. Terrorism is fully psychological, and although terrorists may seem evil to the core, their “primary target is the mind” (Blin and Chaliand). Terrorism can thus be defined as a type of psychological warfare. In fact, the most common psychological tactic used in terrorism is called “Propaganda of the Deed.” In short, Propaganda of the Deed is a means that terrorists utilize to make their forces seem larger. Terrorist organizations are always opposing a body that is either more populous or more powerful than they are, and they must use Propaganda of the Deed to incite a greater shock value. For example, the terrorist attack of 9/11 was an instance when al-Qaeda utilized Propaganda of the Deed. They had to exploit mass casualties to establish themselves as a threat and as an opposing body that could not be dealt with privately.

ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Assassins, the Zealots, and the PKK are all terrorist organizations. Some are old and some new, but they all have one recurring and common goal. They want their leaders, their oppressors, their opposers, and their enemies to understand that they are a force who will not be extinguished nor concealed without a fight. According to Arnaud Blund and Gerard Chaliand, “The use of terror to govern began at the very birth of organized society as a means of dissuasion or punishment.” These people are simply people, born with the desires that every man is born with. Many may view their intentions and goals as radical, but they certainly do not. Every person that they kill is just one more body critical in their rise to dominance. Every life taken is justified. They have a history, they have a family, and they have rights. Terrorists resort to terror when their livelihood is impeded on again and again. Many will see what they are doing as evil, but if you were oppressed your entire life, how would you fight back?  

~Lura

Works Cited

Chaliand, Gérard, Arnaud Blin, Edward D. Schneider, Kathryn Pulver, and Jesse Browner. The       History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda. Berkeley: U of California, 2007. Print.

Friedman, Thomas L. "I.S. = Invasive Species." The New York Times. The New York Times, 11 Oct. 2014. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.

It’s Not Just a Hair Thing

What’s up with your hair? How did you do that to your hair? These were just some of the questions I found myself faced with a lot after I first went natural, which seem like ridiculous questions to ask. I mean it’s my hair, this is what it does, it grows up and out. I don’t need to do something to it in order to make it this way. Even my own family seemed wary of me when I first showed up to the dinner table wearing my fro. As if they expected me to shout “black power” and declare myself a Pan-African activist. The compliments I received were along the lines of: you look soulful; you look like one of them nubian queens; and I bet you’re really deep. Which made me wonder, how come black hair is met with so much mystery and politics? Why is black hair important, and why should people be aware of it? To answer this, let me start by telling a story.

Imagine that from the moment you’re born, sunglasses are placed over your eyes, giving the world an off, pink tint. You live your entire life like this and you have absolutely no idea why. All you know is that everyone else does it, so why not you? The only times you have ever truly seen the world is when you needed to replace your lenses. But even this is done indoors, in a dim room, while the world lies just beyond the walls. This seems ridiculous, right? A person may just say, why not take off the glasses? You clearly don’t need them, they don’t do any good or bad. This was me with my hair. I had spent years perming it, and...for what? It wasn’t until my mom suggested I stop perming my hair that I realized this idea was alien to me. All I had ever known was my chemically straightened hair. The same way if you had lived your entire life with tinted glasses, the world as you see it, is what it literally is for you.

I had no idea what to expect when I stopped perming my hair. It didn’t even occur to me that by just taking a look at the top of my dad’s or brother’s head, I would get a clear view of what my hair was really like. I know for a fact that I’m not the only black girl in America who realized they had no idea what their hair is like. This is because blacks have spent so many years suppressing this part of their culture and in return being oppressed. What astonishes me is that the American media is so ready to embrace many aspects of black culture from hip hop to jazz to dance styles and clothing. Yet, the very thing that grows on top of a black person’s head is something the media has met with resistance. This is why I am doing an ELI on the politics and culture of black hair, and this is why it is important.

All of this is about culture. It’s about discovering black identity and trying to muddle through where it all went wrong. If America is this big melting pot that we all claim it is, why was it not until the 21st century that there was even a slim chance of seeing a black person with a fro in the media who wasn’t tied to some radical movement? Why is it that if you were to flip through a high end beauty and fashion magazine, the only blacks featured in it would have straight hair? Why is that black women as a demographic spend almost half a trillion dollars on hair care and weaves per year? How can you not want to know the answer to these questions?

My ELI goes beyond the racial, political, and social aspects tied to hair. I’m seeking identity. Somewhere along the path through slavery, civil rights, the black power movement, to now, our identity has been misplaced. It seems as if blacks are teetering between standards put forward by the media for White America to gobble up and the pain and oppression that saturate our past.

I’m going to be looking at the history of beauty standards and the residual effects on black hair culture. This means I’m going to be hitting on a lot of raw, unspoken subjects from colorism to the lily complex. It’s going to be all laid out. I’ll also be covering the black power movement and the politicization of the afro during this time period. Finally, I plan to tackle good hair vs. bad hair, an ideology that seems prevalent in many minority groups. I don’t know how this journey will end, but I do know that it is one that has been long overdue.

~Ivonne

Do animal species appreciate music?

Did Disney Get it Right the First Time?

A Study of Musicology within Other Members of the Kingdom Animalia

The focus of my research is to give evidence to the hypothesis that some animals appreciate aesthetics. Though the idea is not original, it has been given a fairly poor amount of study. Back in the 1920’s, German scientists subjected monkeys to human music, hoping to accomplish just what I have proposed. They played both classical music and heavy metal for monkeys, and the monkeys were shown to prefer classical music to heavy metal. However, in further studies, it was shown that the same monkeys prefered silence to the same classical music. After concluding the hypothesis that monkey’s didn’t like music, period, little was done to follow up on the research. Then a study conducted by one Charles Snowden working for WU-Madison came about. In these studies (back in 2009) featuring Tamarins, serious evidence was presented that provided a very reasonable explanation for the monkey’s “lack of taste.” When played music that based its major scale around their vocal range, a tempo around their normal metabolic tempo, and note lengths and chromatic directions (higher or lower pitch) based on their own “language,” the monkeys showed a definite preference to the music composed for them than to human music, or even silence. Simultaneously, an adjunct Professor of Musicology and Semiotics at Helsinki University began to publish several papers and a couple of books dedicated to the study of this unnamed field in an effort to get the scientific community to begin to research the subject. He dubbed the field “zoomusicology,” a term coined from F. B. Mâche’s Music, Myth, Nature by Peter Szöke in 1992.

The reason this study is relevant is because it provides a greater  understanding of the psychology of  life itself. Since Tamarins have already been studied in my proposed manner, I have proposed a test subject species based on acquirability and on their basic psychology: Rattus rattus (rats). Rattus rattus’s hearing range is approximately  200 kHz to 7600 kHz, with a heart rate between 330-480 beats per minute. Modifying Snowmen’s original experiment to account for differences acr ss species, I should be able to compose species-specific music that said subject should show a great appreciation for (hopefully).

My hypothesis is: if animals are capable of appreciating music, and cannot learn to appreciate human music because it falls outside of things relatable in their day-to-day lives, and if I play music composed for them and human music or silence simultaneously at different places around their living spaces, then said animals will spend more time in areas where music composed for them is playing opposed  to areas with human music and silence.

~Bryant