Autobiographies: Part Dos.

This is going to be a short blurb, because I have a paper to write, and a test to study for.
So what I was thinking today is how do you end an autobiography? It isn't the end of your life, so what do you say? This is where I am now? This is what I learned so far? What if you haven't learned anything? Though, if you haven't learned anything, what's the point of even writing an autobiography.

On the Good News side, all my Christmas shopping is done. AAAAAnd it's "Making a Difference Monday," inspired by the blog [carrotspeak]. My good deed for "Making a Difference Monday" was donating blood this afternoon. YAY! Oh, and for next post, remind me to talk about Salem streets. This is more for me than you, but if you talk to me.. yeah. Bye now!

Morbid Post: Don't Read If You're Squeamish

So, I don't know what inspired this, but I was thinking about death this morning, and how it IS in fact possible to die from a broken heart (not necessarily because of a break up, but maybe because Gram died early one morning). And it isn't just if you kill yourself, out of depression and despair. I was thinking, as my tear ducts decided to activate as I rode down the derby track this morning, that it is possible to die of a broken heart but only if you are outside in beyond freezing cold weather. This also has a lot to do with the images above (which, define where I am, one of the VERY FEW times I post things like that), how the Chicken Fountain froze each little drop that fell upon the rocks implanted in the fountain, slowly building on each frozen bit, amalgamating five or six inches of straight ice. Now, imagine your orifices are the fountain openings. You start to cry when you get the undefined terrible news. The tears trail down your face as far as they can go before they freeze to your face, and they keep coming, building one on top of the other, making your face a formation of ice, and eventually freezing your eyeballs. And of course, your nose is running, so the liquid snot would freeze on your face, possibly over the opening that is your mouth, and the rest would freeze in your nose, making it impossible to breathe through your nose. Finally, if your snot didn't freeze over your mouth, you will try to breathe through your mouth, and it just wont happen, because all of the saliva has frozen over. Now, if someone finds you, you would be rushed to the hospital, but it only takes so long to suffocate.

This post is really morbid. I'm going to end it now..

Fractured Fairy Tales

What a klutz, that Fairy Tale.

She tripped one day,

Her feet got in her way when she was mountain climbing.

She tumbled,

Rolling down the hill,

Destroying all the progress she had made;

Twisting her plot,

Breaking both her characters,

Fracturing her ending.

Essentially shattering everything,

Things that had grown in her since she was born from her author.

Fairy Tale's bones are broken,

She lays there

Fractured, fragmented Fairy Tale.

She's in a wheel chair now,

Never fully recovered after her fall,

Looking up to her growing baby sister,

Expecting so much,

But knowing her sister's identical destiny,

Knowing she will amount to so little,

Yet encouraging the small girl's big dreams.

 

 

Insights from my Theatre History class.

H.M.’s Brain and Soapbox Races

Today is historical. The brain of H. M. is being cut into slices. For those of you who don't know who H. M. is, he is a famous psychological case study. He had epilepsy to start out with, and in the 1950's, they didn't exactly have the best idea about how to treat disorders like epilepsy, or depression for that matter (for instance, lobotomies). Anyway, because H. M. was an epilepsy patient, doctors and psychologists decided the best treatment would be to remove his amygdala. However, in the process of removing H. M.'s amygdala, the surgeons also took out parts of H. M.'s hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus. Now, the hippocampus and amygdala are the main parts of memory. So, you can guess what happened. Ever since his "treatment," H. M.'s epilepsy was controlled, but he had problems with his long-term memory. He still had access to his working memory (short term, could remember lists of words, up to six or seven words long), and access to his procedural memory (long-term memory of skills, according to Wikipedia). But his long-term memory and encoding of events into his long term memory was impaired severely. Think 50 First Dates, but a guy, and not dating.

Anyway, the neuroscientists at UCSD (University of California, San Diego) are in the process of cutting H. M.'s brain into paper thin slices and putting the slices between glass to preserve them. It's pretty disgusting to watch, actually.

Anyway, onto another random thought: I was riding down the soapbox derby, thinking about physics. Yes, physics. I was riding down the derby thinking that soapbox racing was so very corrupt. The kid whose soapbox weighs the most, or the kid who weighs the most, or the parent who cheats and puts bricks in the child's soapbox always wins, because the way you know if something is going to go fast down the hill is not how big the wheels are, but how much wait is on them, because, as I learned in my physics class, the weight is what propels the car down the hill. I just looked at the rules online, and the rules say that there is a weight restriction for the child, and a weight restriction for the car with the child in it. But it didn't say anything about weighting the car down to the maximum weight possible. K. S. says that's cheating, but I think it's just a means of finding a loophole, and making the system work for you.

Autobiographies

So, I actually got the idea for this blog post the other day while I was watching scenes in my acting class. In one of them, there are two people who are on a date on Valentine's Day, and the problem is that one person, who is an origami expert, and knows everything about the other person, an origami expert to a lesser degree, who has detailed his life in the written word and made it available to the public. Anyway the first origami expert knows all these personal things about the other origami expert because she read his book, so it is made increasingly clear that the man cannot hide anything from the person he's on a date with, and cannot swing anything bad that has happened to him in his own favor. This situation made me realize that by doing this, by writing an autobiography, you can't hide anything. People read your book. They know all about you. The only time this would do more good than harm would be in the case that you're a celebrity, be it a social or political celebrity, where your life is speculated about all the time anyway. Like Hillary Clinton, or Taylor Swift.

Writing an autobiography puts the author at a disadvantage to the rest of the world because in writing an autobiography, the author is bearing his or her soul to the rest of the world. After writing an autobiography, you have no secrets.

Aside from this blog, I don't think I would write and autobiography. A.) I don't think anyone would read it, and B.) if someone did read it, well, if it was a best seller (this is a blog, I can dream big), I would have to be dating someone that I really trusted and have friends that I really trusted (because people would judge me for the things I have to say), or publish under a pseudonym because the world would know all my secrets, and it would be impossible to spin anything the way I wanted it to be seen. Besides, if I wrote an autobiography, I would want it to be about something that mattered in my life, like Summit, but to a larger extent. I would want it to inspire people to do something bigger with their lives, even if they didn't believe in God the same way I do, even if they were Satanists, or Buddhists, or Hindi. The world needs more of selfless acts of kindness. I use selfless because random implies that the acts are done only every so often, and does not exclude that the acts could be done for one's own personal gain. There are so many people out there who give to charities to make themselves feel good, or so they can tell other people that they give to This Charity, and That Charity.

Obama says in his book,

"An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here. At the very least, an autobiography implies a summing up, a certain closure, that hardly suits someone of my years, still busy charting his way through the world."

When Obama's autobiography was published, he was 34 years old. I am 20, starting my 22^nd year in May. Not nearly old enough or having enough experience to write an autobiography. Besides, with all the shit that's happened to me (which is not nearly as much as could have happened, and not nearly nothing to complain about (meaning "a lot" is a relative phrase)), I think I would send my audience the wrong idea about myself. With all the things that have happened to me, it would make sense for me to be a very negative person, but I'm not. So I sit with Obama's quote: Nothing extraordinary has happened to me to merit an autobiography. I have not had a conversation with a famous person, I haven't held a central role in an important event, I have no feats worth recording. Just thoughts.

Some People Sing, I Think About Weird Stuff

So, I met a Satanist the other day. Haha, what a weird way to start out a conversation with myself. "Hey Self, I met a Satanist the other day!" Anyway, I met a Satanist the other day. Weird beliefs, those ones have, or different ones, anyway. Different than my own. I looked Satanism up on Wikipedia and got a general idea. Basically, there's theistic Satanism, and atheistic Satanism. In theistic Satanism, they believe that Satan is a "supernatural deity" and they actively worship him. In atheistic Satanism, the people believe that they themselves are God of their own universe.

I was actually thinking about this while I was in the shower the other morning, which is a weird thing to do in the shower, but hey, some people sing, I think about odd things. And I was thinking mainly about atheistic Satanism. I was thinking, if we were all the God's of our own universe, and as this person that I met, let's call him Z, as Z says, "I allow you to exist." So, how does that religion work? You get a lot of people in one room who are all Satanists, let's say a Satanist's Convention, and they all believe that they are the God's of their universe, but their universes are overlapping, who is allowing whom to exist? And how do Satanist's account for all the other people in the world? If they are the deity, how did they create someone they don't even know, their name and everything, across the world? Why would you keep the bad people in the world? Why would you allow someone you don't like to continue existing? How would you explain learning?

Secrets: Everyone Has Them

So, today I have many things that fill my head, but there will be one post for each of them eventually. Right now, and only because I have time, I want to focus on this video that I was sent from the PostSecret community. Everyone has a secret, and I think that is something that makes us human. The ability to feel emotions, and let our emotions judge who we're going to share our hearts and minds with. I have a secret... I was raped. I only say this now, because before, when it happened, I was silenced by someone telling me that I was just being overly promiscuous. And I believed that person. I know now (after taking a women and gender class) that just because I convinced him to wear a condom, the fact that I was unwilling still made it rape. I'm still confused about a lot of it, so please don't ask questions. I'll work through it. Wow, I definitely did not mean for this to be a "mysecret" day.
What I meant to say originally, was that the girl who speaks starting at 3:29 reminds me a lot of my old self. The self that MZ and AK knew. She says, "I'm a lot better before you really know me." That was true for me. MZ and AK knew me deeply, they knew my soul, my being. And others, outsiders, knew my shell. Others thought I was so great. MZ and AK knew better. And now, after them, I've grown. Naomi Nye puts it so well in one of her poems: "I grew another head/with better ideas/inside my old head." This is what happened to me, and I hope something similar happens to the girl in the video. Now, I find that her secret is the exact opposite of mine: I am a lot better after you really know me.
Secrets. Some of them are funny. Some are deep. Some are scary, and some are so very private. But we all have them. And it's a beautiful thing. And PostSecret is so necessary because of the way so many people relate to the secrets that are posted. Sometimes, I wish Frank would post more than twenty. Sometimes, I wish he would post them all. And all the time, I wish I had his email so I could communicate to the people who send their secrets in that they are not alone, that I wish so much that they could know that I have the same secrets, and that I feel the same way. Maybe that will be my next postcard.
Also, quick shout out to my first (official) follower. Thanks for reading.

P.S. Sorry about the width of the video. I tried to make it fit, but it wouldn't.