Something Chilly for a Summer Day

I have had so many unforgettable English teachers throughout high school. Each taught me valuable lessons and showed me love.

The first day of my 9th grade year, my English teacher gave each of us a white paper heart. She related to Fahrenheit 451, our summer reading novel, and asked us to imagine a world with no electricity: a world with no entertainment provided by television, radio, or even books.

“What” she inquired, “would you still have with you? What would stay in your heart and mind?”

I spent the whole class period filling my paper heart with poems and stories and songs and verses I had committed to memory.

This is one poem that will stay with me when the lights go out.

The Cold Within

Six humans trapped by happenstance
In bleak and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood
Or so the story’s told.

Their dying fire in need of logs
The first man held his back
For of the faces round the fire
He noticed one was black.

The next man looking ‘cross the way
Saw one not of his church
And couldn’t bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes.
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy shiftless poor.

The black man’s face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight.
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.

The last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.

Their logs held tight in death’s still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They did not die from the cold without
They died from the cold within.

My Thoughts Are Stars I Cannot Fathom Into Constellations

So with all the hype of the movie release of John Green's The Fault In Our Stars, I decided to take the morning to reread that great lagniappe* of a book.

BAH.

BAHHHHHH.

BAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Rereading the book was delightful as I rediscovered the wit, romance, and pain that enchanted me on my first read. I am so excited/anticipatory/pumped/stoked/etc. about the movie release. I bought the soundtrack which is PERFECT. For anyone who doesn't know, there is a chance to a pre-showing of TFIOS on June 5th at select theaters. "The Night Before Our Stars" includes a live screening with actors, directors, and of course, John.

 

"My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations."

This is definitely one of my favorite quotes in the book, because it describes my dilemma with writing perfectly. My mind is full of characters, phrases, and worlds that all have so much potential. Ideas and shadows of dreams fill up notebooks and word documents and margins of notebook paper. What is holding them back from becoming stories? Why won't they connect? I have no trouble forming a coherent essay in school, but without guidelines, I feel trapped in my own imagination.

Sometimes I find that the rules of English and society hinder my writing. I fear a dangling participle as much as a rebuke from an offended reader. I want to talk about Stuff People Don't Talk About, but finding the line between brutal honesty and TMI is really hard sometimes. Plus, it has been drilled in my head for years that a misused comma is bad work, a sentence fragment is meaningless. While I appreciate grammar VERY much, I know it is hurting my writing. I just can’t find the balance.

Many times it seems there just aren’t enough words in human language (at least between the English I know and the bits of Spanish and French I have taken in school). Sometimes I will be writing something that makes perfect sense in my heart, but is nonsense on paper. How will there ever be enough words to describe the torment and ecstasy of a teenage mind? Maybe we should make some new ones.

I feel pity for the ideas in my head that don’t get a voice. I want to give them clarity, but alas, my thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

John Green* encouraged young writers by saying this: “Don’t make stuff because you want to make money, it will never make you enough money. Don’t make stuff because you want to get famous because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts. Maybe they will notice how hard you worked and maybe they won’t, and if they don’t notice, I know it’s frustrating, but ultimately, that doesn’t change anything because your responsibility is not to the people you’re making the gift for but to the gift itself.”

So self, what do you have to give?

 

 

*A terrifically better word for a gift or benefit.

*Side Note: I do love many many authors besides John Green. Just on a bit of a John-high right now with all the excitement and whatnot. (:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, or BTBF as John Green calls it, reminded me of every reason I love literature.

Katherine Boo, an American reporter living in India, spent four years following the happenings of a hardly unusual slum of Mumbai. BTBF is full of the stories and struggles of real people that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

Highlighted characters are: Abdul, a young man who holds his family’s financial well being on his shoulders as he sorts and collects garbage; Asha, a middle-aged woman with high political aspirations who often uses others as pawns in her schemes; Manju, Asha’s kind-hearted daughter and the only college educated girl in the slum; and Sunil, a young scavenger who watches as his friends fall prey to the vicious and apathetic society of impoverished Mumbai.

Abdul’s family begins the book in relative success. Financially, they are better off than many other slum-dwellers. Their plans to move from the slum to a Muslim-friendly country area are undermined by a jealous and enraged neighbor who commits suicide and blames Abdul and his family for her demise. A long and corrupt trial process begins that destroys the family business, but nurtures a new outlook on life for Abdul. His ethics are transformed,and he begins to believe in his own worth. Abdul’s story is a prime example of how a tragedy can revolutionize a person’s values and mindset. Though these changes do not ease the pain of tragedy, they add value to the struggle.

Meanwhile, the presumptuous Asha treats the tragedies of other slum-dwellers as stepping stones to her own ascension of castes by demanding money from the distressed in exchange for her communication with political associates. When Abdul’s mother refuses to pay for her help, she undermines the family’s court proceedings with her political influence. As the story progresses, however, Asha’s dwindling power leaves her feeling poor and empty. Asha’s story exposes the inward and outward destruction of a greedy heart.

Asha’s daughter, Manju, is a bright and kind young lady referred to many times as the “most-everything girl”. Her mother demands vanity and education in order to obtain an advantageous marriage. Manju is pulled in many directions as she teaches a school, studies, maintains the home, and concedes to her mother’s demands. The lack of liberation and wasted potential of Manju’s conclusion is disappointing, yet life often is.

The youngest of the main characters is the observant scavenger, Sunil, whose one desire in life is to grow bigger and taller than his sister. Sunil’s story shows the tragedies of an impoverished community through the eyes of a child. Sunil witnesses the suicides and murders of many friends and acquaintances that go unnoticed by the rest of the world. Sunil’s story reminds the reader that deaths are not a statistic, but the demolition of someone’s world, thoughts, ideas, and dreams.

This nonfiction book is written vividly and readably. It is as easy to read as any fictional novel, but has the enduring effects of an exposed truth. This story’s call to action for me was a commitment to avoid corrupt charity and social work by keeping my own actions pure. I believe BTBF’s greatest worth comes from its ability to illuminate the lives of those with whom we often thoughtlessly share the Earth. How can we apathetically wallow in our luxury when we read the stories of these impoverished Indian slum-dwellers? What makes us more entitled to liberties and justice than them? We are one Earth. We cannot continue to hide the ugliness of our world behind the painted tiles of our imaginary “beautiful forevers”. That is the purpose of literature: to expose the realities of human suffering on our shared Earth.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers meant a lot to me as a reader. Instead of an average nonfiction book that handed me facts and statistics, it gave me people and emotions. I felt pain for Abdul’s family and yearned with Manju. I cried with Sunil as he lost his friends. I was horrified by the apathy and corruption of the rest of their world.

Near the conclusion of the book, Abdul describes how he longs to be ice, the best version of himself, but finds that time turns him to water, a lower being. He claims that reality must do this to all people. However, I am convinced that letting the ice melt is a choice. I refuse to melt.

I recommend to anyone 13+; some language and disturbing material.