Monday, June 20, 2011
the first european update
there is something incredible and disgusting about times i turn on my ipod and what it automatically shuffles to. sometimes it´s just so perfect that i want to die but i don´t. i just listen and wonder how my ipod knows that the song describes my situation or how my ipod knows that the song is exactly what i need. music is beautiful like that. it´s just there and it´s perfect sometimes and amazing sometimes. i love it.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
whitewhine
There are some things that I wish I could do justice in describing, but I can't. I wish I could write a poem about this, but I can't. I wish I was (were? English subjunctive tense is hard) poetic or eloquent or something.
Last Summer when I was at Kent I had the rare opportunity to meet someone from the Gaza strip, which has been illegally blocked off from the rest of the planet by Israel for several years. The kid was around 11 and his name was Daoud. He was brought here because he had been nearly fatally injured by an Israeli rocket in the attacks on Gaza in December 2008. Daoud was brought here by an organization called the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (they have a website- google it.) and the director of PCRF talked to us for awhile and told us about the organization.
Daoud had been living in the US for at least a year when we met him and is now back in Gaza with his family. Before we left Daoud, our whole class decided to get a picture with him. We all kind of just stood there in normal picture-taking pose until Daoud held two of his fingers up in a peace sign. The rest of the class followed suit. I realized that for us a peace sign means nothing. A peace sign is something we make in a picture to show that we're cool, or that we're progressive, or that we want peace but are probably not actively trying to make it. Peace signs mean nothing to us here, but to Daoud, that peace sign means everything. However trivial it may have felt for him to be putting it up in that picture, peace is not something trivial to Daoud, and shouldn't be so trivial for us either.
Sometimes putting a peace sign in a picture seems tacky and overdone. I don't really know if it is or not. Maybe that's the difference between my life and Daoud's. I don't have to think about survival. I don't have to consider the scars on my head from the shrapnel that was an inch from killing me. Sometimes I think my days go as trivially and uselessly as a peace sign.
Last Summer when I was at Kent I had the rare opportunity to meet someone from the Gaza strip, which has been illegally blocked off from the rest of the planet by Israel for several years. The kid was around 11 and his name was Daoud. He was brought here because he had been nearly fatally injured by an Israeli rocket in the attacks on Gaza in December 2008. Daoud was brought here by an organization called the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (they have a website- google it.) and the director of PCRF talked to us for awhile and told us about the organization.
Daoud had been living in the US for at least a year when we met him and is now back in Gaza with his family. Before we left Daoud, our whole class decided to get a picture with him. We all kind of just stood there in normal picture-taking pose until Daoud held two of his fingers up in a peace sign. The rest of the class followed suit. I realized that for us a peace sign means nothing. A peace sign is something we make in a picture to show that we're cool, or that we're progressive, or that we want peace but are probably not actively trying to make it. Peace signs mean nothing to us here, but to Daoud, that peace sign means everything. However trivial it may have felt for him to be putting it up in that picture, peace is not something trivial to Daoud, and shouldn't be so trivial for us either.
Sometimes putting a peace sign in a picture seems tacky and overdone. I don't really know if it is or not. Maybe that's the difference between my life and Daoud's. I don't have to think about survival. I don't have to consider the scars on my head from the shrapnel that was an inch from killing me. Sometimes I think my days go as trivially and uselessly as a peace sign.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
the last sentence I will ever write for Mrs. Neville was this:
(it's about the Great Gatsby fyi.)
so the whole theme of Nick questioning society and everything is the quintessential crappy teenage novel plot line: Nick joins the cool kids but realizes he doesn't like them and then he goes back to his old lunch table where his best friends Pudge and Mina sit, who loved him all along.
...
(it's about the Great Gatsby fyi.)
so the whole theme of Nick questioning society and everything is the quintessential crappy teenage novel plot line: Nick joins the cool kids but realizes he doesn't like them and then he goes back to his old lunch table where his best friends Pudge and Mina sit, who loved him all along.
...
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