Metacognition: Writing a Poem

Hello children of the planet earth as well as numerous other planets that according to the string theory and my dad, exist with people with the same DNA makeup as us.
Today I'll be discussing how I wrote my poem for english classe.

I don't know about the rest of the classes poem, but my poem was pretty much based on my life. I wrote my first draft of the poem probably one or two months ago. I started out knowing exactly how I wanted my poem to be. I wanted it to be about a girl who is asocial, like myself (because the poem is like I said, based on my life.). She basically hides behind the computer screen and lives her life on the internet instead of with her real-life friends.

After conferencing with my english teacher, we decided that I needed a more finite moment or event in my poem. In this edit of the poem  something about it seemed really off to me. I didn't like how the poem was turning out.

I conferenced with him a second time when we got our graded draft back. I wasn't happy with my poem, and I wanted to figure out how I could change it and get the poem back on the track where I wanted it.
As we were talking, we realized that "the character" liked the fact that she was able to control everything on the internet, whereas in real life, her friends are unpredictable and hard to control.

I wrote the final draft blindly. I wrote what came to my mind, it was a completely different poem. Pretty risky considering it's an important part of my grade :/ For some reason, I thought that band-aid would make a good metaphor for how the main character was feeling when her friends found out about her internet life. Thus came the name of the title.

I think I learned a lot about myself while I was writing this poem. 1. I'm an anti-social 2.I need to be in control 3. I would rather be at home then out of my house 4. Sometimes I like my computer more than I like my friends.
To be honest, these things kind of scare me. :( I think I've done a lot of soul searching this year, a lot of which is documented on this blog. I think I like that, but sometimes it makes me frustrated  because I never do anything to change myself.

Anyways, back to my poem.
I feel like writing this poem was a lot more enjoyable than I thought. I found a topic I wanted to write about, and the words just flowed from my fingers. I wasn't expecting to like writing my own poem, but I really enjoyed it, I think because I connected soooo heavily with the main character. I think I'll try my hand at poetry again sometime :)

Check out this poetry blog! I love her stuff :) -> http://letting-this-all-go.tumblr.com/

Get Organized 12-26-12

Hello all.

For today's blog, we were assigned the task of organizing something in our lives, and then addressing some points that relate the the task.

What I organized:
 I took on the task of organizing my makeup drawer. After coming back from a trip which involved throwing randoms bits of makeup in a bag, and then throwing it all back in a drawer when I returned, the drawer was looking less then satisfactory. I decided to clean and tidy the whole drawer up.

~

While I was cleaning my drawer, I felt in control, It didn't take me very long because I knew where everything needed to go. Everything has a place, and it should always be in it's place. Things like this little shred of obsessive compulsive. Why? My room is a disaster area. I'm not kidding. Whatever signs they're putting up in NY because of Sandy, they should put one on my bedroom door. But when it come's to small places like my makeup drawer or my backpack, they have to be perfect. Not a pen out of place, all my notebooks have to be in order from biggest to smallest. I wish I could apply this obsession to my entire room. :/

After completing the project, I feel slightly more in check. Although I don't feel completely relieved, because after all, it was only one drawer out of my entire room, I do feel better because It's one more thing I can tick off my list. I know it sounds weird  but I  like being able to see my makeup drawer spick and span, not an eyeshadow out of place because it's the one thing in my life that I can count on being organized.

I fell like through this project I've learned that I'm slightly more obsessive compulsive than I expected, but still the messy Jordan that we all know and love. I really wish I could become an organized person, but I don't know if I could do it. Trust me, I've tried. Numerous times. There's just something extremely daunting about trying to organize your whole life. Oh well. Baby steps.

-Jordan

Metacognition: Am I too closed minded?

     This year in academy, we've done a lot of thinking about ideas that we see frequently in literature and the world around us. I've noticed as we discuss these topics in class, that I'm not one to look at other peoples opinions. I'm very closed-minded. For some reason, I can't stand poetry. This is likely due to the fact that I am closed minded. People keep telling me that maybe if I looked at the poem in another way or try to look at it from the poets perspective, but for some reason I can't.
    I really wish that I could open up my mind a little bit more because I feel bad and sometimes even stupid because I can't understand where people get their ideas or opinions from.
    As you can imagine, this tends to cause problems. Being closed-minded this year and in general has made it a lot harder to learn and understand people's opinions. I think that if I learn to be less closed-minded, that I can get a lot more out of this year.
   I'm wondering if being closed minded is the same as being pessimistic? I don't see myself as a pessimistic person, but could that be the base of my problems? If I learned to see the glass as half full instead of half empty, maybe seeing other perspectives would come easier as well. I think that my life in general would improve if I started to become more optimistic, and out of all of my classes.
    I haven't noticed my closed mindedness before, so I'm wondering if it's something that I've started to "have" recently. If so, I really wonder what caused me to not accept other ideas. Like I said, I've always seen myself as a fairly optimistic person, so I'm really wondering what brought this on.

   In order to try and stray away from this, I'm going to try and look at everyone's opinions evenly, no mater how much it pains me. ;)  I really want to look at everything with open eyes and be able to view the world like everyone else does. It bothers me when I can't see where people get their ideas, so if I try and open up my thinking a little bit more, I think that my life will be a lot happier and easier.

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Blogging Around: 10-28-12

Blogging Around.

Here are some comments that I've made on some of my friends blogs this week!Be sure to go read the full posts!

This is the first blog post I read Emily's Post

Her post was about the over/misuse of the word or idea of depression.

Here's the next Comment and Post: Kira's Post

I also read posts from these blogs:
Nikki's Blog
Toby's Blog
Anna B's Blog

-jordan

An Inconvenient Truth: Poetry is Deep

If you've talked to me recently, you know that I am not the biggest fan of poetry. I don't mind some poems, usually ones involving the description of the seasons, but love poems, critical poems, "deep" poems, no. I can't stand them. I can't stand reading them, I can't stand thinking about them, I can't stand analyzing them. Okay I can't stand analyzing any poem. Most people say that when you analyze a poem it adds a deeper meaning. I completely disagree with that. I think that when you analyze a poem it sucks the life out of it. I don't think that all poetry was written to be analyzed. For example: 

Rose are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

and so are you.

Arguably, this is a poem. here is what bother me most:

when they're saying sugar is sweet and so are you, it expresses the unconditional love that they have for a person. You can infer, that this means the person who wrote the poem is obsessed with the person it was written for etc.

I cannot stand this. I think that poetry can be taken literally. Some poems may have even been written with that pretense, that people will take them literally. Like I said before, It's like squeezing the life out of it. You know the saying "you can't squeeze water out of a turnip" well some poems are turnips. You can't analyze them because there's nothing to analyze!!!! I really wish that we could all just take a look at poetry literally and not try and beat a dead horse. I think it we'd actually get more out of it!

With some forcing of the brain, I can see whee some people are coming from with the analyzing. I guess some people are just more inquisitive and that's why they want to look deeper into the poems. (correct me if I'm wrong in the comments down below) It blows my mind though, I don't understand it. 

This kind of reveals to you that I am a bit of a closed minded person. I'm not one to open up to other peoples opinions, much like a very protective dog.

I personally apologize for this extremely ranty/rambly blog post.

and now back to your previously scheduled programing.

-jordan 

iMedia: Ted Rives: A story of mixed emoticons

Today in class we watched Ted Rives perform his poem about mocking birds.

This sparked me to find another poem performance of his. The one I found, I thought, was quite relatable and funny as well. 

     The poem is very different from other poems that we've read in class this week and last. In order to truly understand this poem, one must watch the little slideshow that goes along with it. I think that this brings a whole new perspective to what we as high schoolers perceive poetry to be. We recognize poetry, in general to be very boring, confusing, and a lot of the time, unrelatable. The way Ted Rives presents this poem makes it a lot more interesting and easier to comprehend. Being an extremely visual thinker myself, having the ability to see the poem really helps make it easier to swallow.

     Another thing that makes this poem extremely different is the fact that all of the visual aids/pictures are emoticons. Emoticons have become increasingly popular with the emergence of the countless emoticons released with the iPhone. He uses the emoticons almost in a mocking way with his poem. At the beginning, he shows the mass of symbols which look like gibberish, but when he tells the story along with it, it somehow grows to make complete sense. You can't help but laugh when reading this poem. It becomes more and more almost sarcastic when you look at it. They way he almost pokes fun at the overuse of emoticons without actually cracking jokes is right up my alley.

     I think that this poem or whatever you would call it is important, not just in general, but important to the high school age group. I think this because like I said, it shows a completely different side of poetry, one that is not usually seen. I also think that this is important to society because it's starting the transition  of poetry from lovely dovey sonnets by Shakespeare and love notes from Emily Dickinson, to the critical and almost satirical literature of todays time.

I really want to find some more of Ted Rives' Poetry. From the two that i've now seen, I'm intrigued  I really like the way he wites. The way he recites his poems has a very obvious rhythm. The rhythm of the poems gives it almost a musical ring the the poem. I think I like this type of poetry, but i'm not quite sure yet. I don't think I've read quite enough poetry to form that opinion yet.

~jordan

Best of The Week: Gender Vs. Sex

Throughout last week in class, we had a very interesting and, at times, heated discussion regarding the difference between Sex and Gender, and what differentiates each one.

I think the conversation started when we were discussing Viginia's Woolf's writing in chapter 3. We were trying to understand why she turned orlando into a girl. As we were flipping through the pages, we saw the passage that discusses that Orlando hasn't changed, but her sex has. This sparked quite the discussion.

At the beginning of the discussion, I thought that sex and gender were the same things. Sex is if you're guy or a girl, that's what gender is too. After trying to fight out the discrepancy we looked the two words up in the dictionary. Sex is someones genetic makeup of XX or XY. Gender is the state of being male or female with reference to cultural or social differences rather than biological ones.

Like I said, before we looked up the definitions, I thought that Gender and sex were the same. I feel that if your genetic makeup says your a guy, then your sex or gender is male. That doesn't mean that you don't/ can't have feminine mannerisms, or be gay, it's just different from your gender or sex.

Based on the definition of gender :->

I think that it is safe to say that your environment definitely effects your gender. I think it was Nish who brought up the "letting the child pick their gender," but I think that it's really impossible to pick your gender, because the way that you are raised, and the people around you definitely effect how you act, no matter if your biologically male or female.

While we were discussing this, it made me think of how we as humans are so easily categorized. We're categorized by what activities we're envolved in, our gender, our sex, our income, our race, where we live, etc. I think that this is a product of our world today. It's naive to think that it wasn't always like this, because it most likely was. It's natural to place people in categories. It probably wasn't as bad 200 years ago, but there's always been segregation of people in one way or another.

~jordan

Captured Thought: Wizards, Vampires, and Werewolves, Oh My!

Okay I'm just going to say it flat out, and then explain myself. Try not to judge me too much though.

I sincerely believe that there is a possibility that Wizards and vampires are currently coexisting with us right now. (I only say this because I am a vampire haha just kidding ;)

Okay, Now I'm going to backtrack and explain to you why I believe this.
       In Harry Potter, Harry has no idea that there is such a thing as wizards until he finds out he is one. The entire world has no idea that there are such things as wizards, unless they are one. So in my mind, this tells me that there is possibly a whole civilization of wizards living out there that we don't know about just because we aren't wizards.

     Now on to vampires and Werewolves. In Twilight, Bella has absolutely no idea that there is such a thing as werewolves. Even when chaos starts to ensue, no one else finds out about the vampires. Also, we don't live on the olympic peninsula of Washington, so how do we know that this isn't actually happening there?

     I know i don't have very solid evidence, if any, but having these childish or even irrational thoughts kind of makes me laugh at myself. I think the thing that may have given me these ideas is how developed the civilizations are in the books. Even though they probably aren't real, the authors created a  whole other world where these things do happen.

You may still think I'm crazy, but my theory is, how can you disbelieve something that you can't prove right or wrong?

~jordan