Directions Directions Directions

            Directions are meant to be read. If you have a question, re-read directions. If you don’t understand something, re-read directions. If you were doing a project with a packet full of directions, why on earth wouldn’t you read and re-read it?

            For instance, Mizzay gave us a giant packet breaking down what exactly we had to do for our portfolio. There was a list of what we needed to include, questions we needed to answer for each commentary, and examples of the sticky notes. Our first assignment was to read through the packet of directions before we even started our portfolio. Obviously, some people didn’t do this. Sure, some people will have some questions after reading it, but they would be clarifications. When a teacher asks her students if they understand the task at hand, she does not expect to be bombarded with “I don’t get it” and “this packet is confusing.” It’s not only aggravating to the teacher, but it is also annoying to the students who actually read the directions and thus they understand what they are supposed to do.

            Let’s be smart students. If we are told to read directions, do it. Before you start you homework, read directions. Before you begin a test, read directions. Before you do anything that you should screw up, read the directions! Before you ask a stupid question to someone else, ask yourself, “did I read the directions? Did I utilize the resources put out for me and engage my brain? Am I being smart and proactive or annoying and ditzy?”

            I will say it one last time. Please read directions. If you do not want to seem annoying to the entire rest of your class, do your work. Think before you speak please. (293 words)

My Thought on Blogs Part 2

You say that we can write about anything we like, but this doesn't work for me. The only time I want to write about something is when I'm stressed and want to write about personal things. I can't write about this for three reasons: First, I don't want to put my feelings on display in the internet for anyone and everyone to see. I'm not that kind of person and that could lead to some bad things. Second, you told us that if we can't use their names, we shouldn't post it, which totally makes sense to me. Third, whenever I'm stressed or angry or confused, I write a letter by hand. There's just something about physically writing my feelings down that is therapeutic to me. Also, a letter isn't really a blog and I like to tuck it away into a spot that only I know about. If it was on display on the internet, that would defeat the purpose of a personal letter that you want to write, but not send. If I do find something to write about, I never want to finish it. I write about a sentence or two during class and then save it for later because I can't work when there are any noises or distractions around. By the time I get home though, I'm totally bored by the topic and don't want to write the blog. I justify not writing it by telling myself that I have time to write completely new ones. This sucks because this cycle keeps going until I have to cram a bunch of crappy blogs in at the last second. And when I do this, I just get disappointed with myself.

I plan on trying harder to be self-sufficient in second term, but it's really hard for me. The stress of junior year is literally three times as much as sophomore year. I'm very sorry that you have had to experience mediocre Rachel so far this year, Mizzay. I hope that you are able to see the straight A student that I really am by the end of the term. I also regret being distracted by my grandfather's illness and death the first month of school, but I couldn't avoid, prevent, or help that situation. This year really snuck up on me and I am paying for it right now. Catch-up is the worst game to have to play and I will try my best to NEVER have to play it again. (415 words)

All State Babay: Results

After we returned to the gym, I took a nap. I changed back into my sweats and set up a bed in the bleachers. It was not very comfortable at all, but I managed to sleep on and off for a bit. I cuddled up with my blanket decorated with kitty ballerinas and my comfy pillow, and I closed my eyes and convinced myself that the noisy gym full of singing high school students was actually a lullaby for me to go to sleep to.

When I woke up, it was time for lunch! I had pizza with my friends and fellow choir nerds and we talked about a lot of choir and non-choir related things. It was really fun. I then occupied my time watching youtube videos, teaching a dance to my friends in front of everyone, and going back and forth to the cafeteria to eat and kill time. The first list was supposed to be posted at three. This didn’t happen. The recall list was posted though. That is a lost of people that the judges want to hear by themselves in order to figure out if they made the choir or not. I was not on that list so it meant I either made it, or didn’t make it.

One of my alto friends and I were in the cafeteria when it happened. We were munching on cookies and talking about girl stuff when I got called. My friend told me to get my but up to the gym and wouldn’t tell me why. I kind of knew then that I made it. On my way there, though, we passed my old choir teacher. He congratulated me. We then sprinted to the gym and that’s when I saw it. My name was posted up on a giant orange list on the gym wall.

I felt so fantastic! I called my entire family within five minutes of finding out. It was outrageous. Once the entire process was done, it was about eight o’clock. The day was scheduled to end at around 5:30. Kennedy got seventeen singers in. That’s a school record. Linn Mar got sixteen singers and one alternate in. Kennedy was victorious!! We got the most singers in out of all of the Cedar Rapids and surrounding schools! It was an awesome day! When I got home, I went to Pei’s to eat a celebratory dinner. A terrific ending to a terrific day. J (407 words)After we returned to the gym, I took a nap.

All State Babay: Audition Time

I think it is a very good thing that I had my freak out at five in the morning, because if it was any later, it might have messed up my audition a great deal.

Once everyone was at Kennedy, we started to warm up. This got my mind off the actual audition and I started to focus on the singing part. Warming up really helped me calm down. Also, people were freaking out about a tenor being late, which took my mind off of things. This was a big deal because a few days before, our director made it very clear to us that if you arrived late to Kennedy and missed the bus, we weren’t going to wait for you. You would have to find your own transportation to the auditions. We then loaded up onto the bus with our sack breakfasts, pillows, blankets, and music, and started our two-hour bus ride to the audition. I shared a seat with one of my fellow sopranos, and we talked the whole way there. Normally I wouldn’t talk so much that early in the morning, but I didn’t want to sleep, I wanted to warm up my voice, and I liked the distraction of conversation.

When we finally go there, it was go time. We all huddled up in the gym around the portable keyboard and marked our music and sang through the audition selections. If you aren’t familiar with the All State audition process, it goes like this: Everyone learns about full songs that are really hard and get them as close to perfect while singing with 3 other people on different voice parts than you acapella. Then, once you arrive at the audition place, you are told what portion of the song you are singing. For the audition, you sing not even an eighth of the giant song you had to learn and you don’t even sing all of the songs. You have no way of knowing what you will have to sing for the auditions so you have to prepare the entire song and hope you are lucky enough to get a portion you are good at.

After we warmed up for the second time together, we were on our own. Because my group had to audition around 9:45, I immediately changed into my nice clothes, did my makeup, and revamped my hair. I stood around and talked for about fifteen minutes and then my group and I started to rehearse the audition on our own. After we finished practicing, our directors came over and it was time for us to head to our actual timed “warm up.” We walked around the maze of a school and finally arrived at a little home ec room with a kitchen, a piano, and a table. When we were singing, I got kind of scared. I was going kind of sharp on pitch and our group’s adrenalin was affecting our singing.

After a scary warm up, me, my group mates, and our directors headed down to the room where we would be singing for a judge. While we were waiting, I saw my old choir teacher from last year! He wished us good luck, and it made me want to do really well for him. My group and I took a big deep breath, and then headed in for our dreaded audition.

The lady judging us was really nice (well, at least nice-looking). She was a small woman with a pleasant smile. When we started singing, I forgot she was even there. For the first few songs I was focused on singing well and wasn’t even concerned about the judge. Then I started to notice her writing things down. This made me nervous. I couldn’t tell whom she was writing about. There was a specific column for the tenor, bass, alto, and soprano, but she didn’t seem to be writing in mine. This freaked me out because I thought she stopped listening to me. As a judge, you listen for specific parts in a song. If the singer messes up, then you decide they automatically didn’t make the choir and you stop listening to them. I was so scared that this was the case for me. I was also really concerned because there is a very hard part with close harmonies that the judges picked for an audition. I felt really sad because there was a clash between the soprano and alto that I nailed during warm up, but it sounded iffy during the audition and it was my fault.

Anyway, we finally finished our seven-minute audition that lasted forever, and returned to the gym to wait for hours for the results. (782 words)

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Maguire, Gregory. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. New York: HarperCollins World, 2000. Print. (252/368 pages)

            Gregory Maguire takes a classic fairytale and adds an interesting twist in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. He creates a background story to let the reader get to know the classic characters of “Cinderella” and look inside of what they are like behind the façade of their usual portrayals. I believe that his modifications to a fairytale everyone already knows and loves brings it new life and intrigue.

            I have very much enjoyed reading Maguire’s book thus far. Aside from the beginning, he has kept the book very interesting to read. He shows the characters with completely different attitudes that I even questioned if this was an extension of a fairytale. He steers clear of all of the stereotypes of the characters and gives them new personalities that make his book seem like an entirely different story for the first half. In his book, you are able to see the events that made the characters what they are. You can see the evolution of the stepmother becoming nasty and Cinderella becoming a quiet maid. Maguire’s use of the attentive stepsister, Iris, as the narrator is very skilful. She is able to observe the happenings of the house, show the reader her opinion, and give the reader hints as to others’ opinions as well.

            This book is a hard read because of its use of old English. He uses were uncommon words during his narration and the characters talk in a way that is quite different to the way we speak now. I have had to look up multiple words throughout my reading of this book and read several passages more than once. There have been times when I thought I knew what a character was thinking, but then I looked up the word they used and it turned out to be very different then I perceived. I also have to go through some parts very slowly and read passages more than once because they were too hard to comprehend by just reading it once. The book is very readable, but sometimes I needed to move slower to get all of the meaning.

            The beginning of this book was also very hard to follow. It started in the middle of action which confused me. It also was written in the old English which I wasn’t used to yet. Starting this book was very hard and I actually tried it more than once before I was hooked on this story. Aside from that, this book is a very interesting story with an intriguing plotline that I would recommend to just about anyone.(445 words)

Mercy

Picoult, Jodi. Mercy. New York: Washington Square, 2001. Print. (400 pages)

            Jodi Picoult is a fantastic writer. She does such a good job of capturing her reader and making it impossible for them to set the book down. This is one of many Picoult books I’ve read and it definitely lived up to its author’s legacy. Picoult is known for taking risks in her writing and exploring subjects that are sometimes avoided by most writers. Before reading this book, I had a very black and white understanding of murder, but this book showed me a whole bunch of gray area that I never thought about.

            Picoult’s strategy of organizing the book into multiple narrators adds a very nice effect to the reader’s experience. In most books, the reader only gets to view inside the main character’s thoughts, but Picoult’s style allows you to look inside each person’s mind. Because of this, the reader has multiple opinions throughout the book. You can like a character during one chapter, then find out on another that they are actually very selfish and cowardly and decide to hate them. You could also hear about a husband killing his wife and think he was a monster, but then as the story went one and facts and thought processes were revealed, you would change you r mind and think he was innocent.

            Parts of the book that were a little hard to follow were the flashbacks, the murder alibi, and the opinions of the main character, Cam. There wasn’t a very big change between the behavior of the characters between the present and the past in this book which made flashbacks confusing. Sometimes I would start reading a section and then get really confused because I didn’t know why this event was happening. For instance, if the main married couple just had a fight and then the book immediately went into a memory about fishing, that would be hard to follow. The murderer’s alibi was hard to follow because it was incomplete for the entire first three quarters of the book. Events of that night were also revealed at different times throughout the story which sort of jumbled-up the alibi in my mind. The most difficult part, however, was keeping track of Cam’s thoughts. He went back and forth throughout the entire book either sympathizing with the murderer, or completely hating him. I guess this makes sense in real life, but when his though process was written down, it was a little hard to follow. Plus, before each section there was a hand written note to mark the beginning of it. These were confusing because it was clear that they were written by Cam to someone else, but the “someone else” was hard to decode. IT also seemed like these notes were from the future, which caused even more confusion. To avoid this, I normally read the note, but didn’t dwell on it too long.

            Picoult did a wonderful job in Mercy providing the reader with an intriguing and dual sided story to a very complicated subject. I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to read about a subject that tests the boundaries set by our societies today.(533 words)

Do You Believe in Love at First Sight?

I was reading a magazine the other day and the topic of "love at first sight" came up. I've thought about this idea from time to time, but not really. Some people are so focused on love that they lose track of themselves. Some don't open themselves up to it at all. Most everyone has a warped vision of love in their minds due to all of the television, celebrities and movies out there. Sometimes you get the message of perfect love, sometimes love filled with conflict, and sometimes you see people get married just to get money out of it... **cough kim kardashian cough**

I do believe in love at first sight, but I think that there are many misconceptions about it. Most of the time when people think that they are experiencing love at first sight, they really are just experiencing attraction to a person’s beauty. I believe that when you experience love at first sight, you feel an emotion that you have never been able to feel before. The world stops and this person is all you think about. Even so, this doesn’t mean that you need to hop in a car and find the nearest wedding chapel. Marriage is a big commitment that takes time to know you are ready to make. You need to take some time to find out all of the little quirks that make you love this person even more, the sacrifices you will have to make, an all of the characteristics of this person you’re going to have to learn to live with. Love at first sight is very realistic, but it doesn’t happen everyday. When it does, don’t stop your life to be with them, just spend time with them. I believe that there is a perfect match for everyone out there, but we don’t always find him or her. (311 words)