Pencil, Pixels and all that stuff

As I was reading Pencils to Pixels, I was somewhat intrigued by the idea of rejecting a pencil as too technological. It was also interesting to learn about the ways some people prefer type, some pencil, some pen. I began to think about what I prefer.

There's no doubt that when I'm writing something of considerable length, I prefer to use a computer. I can type much, much faster than I can write, and it's also easier to go back and edit my type. I prefer to type almost anything that anyone else is going to see, as well. My horrid handwriting prevents others from reading what I've written or scribbled as notes. This is sometimes good because then people are deterred from reading things I don't want them to see. However, it sometimes is bad because occasionally I can't even read my own writing. I used to hate writing when I was younger because my teachers always assumed I was no good at it because of my poor handwriting. Now that I can use a machine as media for my ideas, I can convey them neatly and in an easily readable fashion.

There are sometimes that I would prefer to use pen or pencil. When doing math or science homework and having limited space to show my work, I prefer a pencil to go back and erase and correct mistakes. However, over this past summer, I've discovered that whenever I write something, I prefer to do it in pen. I used to be the type to write with heavy pencil in a spiral notebook. Now my preferred media is a legal pad with a ball point pen. The ball point pen flows easier than graphite and doesn't blot like plain ink does. The other reason I prefer pens to write with is so that I can write faster. Often, if I go back and try to erase something, I forget what I wanted to say next. With pen, I just but a strike through unwanted text and continue writing. The resolve and permanency of pen means that even if I change what I've written, it's still on the paper. My more personal writing is done in pen rather than in type. Poems and short pieces or letters to people are often first drafted with pen on a legal pad and later typed. The pen is so much more personal.

It's strange that I've gone from hardcore pencil enthusiast to a pen lover. I never even used to carry pens at school. Now I only use pencil for tests. This summer I got a free Ripon College pen at Badger Boys State and when it ran out of ink early this schoolyear, I felt sad inside. It was my favorite pen and I had written some fun stuff with it. Although it was just a plain ballpoint, I had a difficult time adjusting to a new pen. Habits in writing form quickly, apparently.

College Thoughts

I'm glad that we did the college essays in class last week because it got me rolling on my applications. I had just started to do my Personal Statement the weekend prior and I probably wouldn't have touched it until now had we not done it in class.

Now that I'm off and running with essays and applications, the weight of what needs to be done is really starting to become obvious. It seems like the application process is only going to be half the battle. By the time my whole process is over, I will have written something like four different types of personal statements because of the different requirements for each application on top of any other essays.

The Common App pretty much is saving my life right now. That someone finally thought to provide one application for some 300 schools is a relief to high school seniors nationwide. Of course, it doesn't make it easier that many of these schools still require a supplement for admission. For some of these schools, the supplement is no more than an additional sheet for scholarship and financial aid application. For others, such as the University of Chicago, there are two or three additional essays to be written.

There is even great difference in those schools that require supplements. Some are the generic:
"Why do you want to attend X University?" While others, again using UChicago as an example, are insightful and require a great deal of creativity. One of the possible prompt choices for Chicago this year is "How did you get caught? (Or not caught, as the case may be)."

It's amazing how many different essays one might write to get into college. From a student's perspective, this is both reassuring and daunting. I don't want to write a ton of different essays to apply to a few colleges, but on the other hand I also don't want to have my admission dictated by only one essay like the Common Application Personal Statement.

Some colleges, such as Marquette University (Advantage application) and Loyola University-Chicago, require only that a student submits a writing sample. This can be almost anything a student has previously written. Creighton University also accepts a previously graded essay from a class for their Quick Application, but this must be under 400 words. Getting under 400 words for a graded assignment is awfully difficult. Creighton also accepts a personal statement on their Quick Application, but this too has to be under 400 words. I don't know that I can express myself properly in 400 words! Marquette and Creighton both also take the common application, but they offer free application if you use the Advantage or Quick Applications that they offer to some students.

Some schools, including most public universities do not accept the Common App and require their own essays that can be some difficult topics. The University of Wisconsin-Madison requires two essays. The first asks the applicant how he or she will "enrich" the campus, and the second asks about the applicants goals and plans for the future.

At face value these seem, to me at least, to be fairly daunting. For one thing my goals are all over the place and I feel like writing about them would be difficult. In regards to the first essay, I really wonder how I would provide diversity and enrichment on a campus of tens of thousands of students as a white, middle-class, Christian male. After putting some thought into it though, I did find that these essays are not as difficult as I thought at first.

So now you've read me venting about my college applications process. I want to hear some other opinions-comment about your experiences or provide a link to a post about it below.

My Biggest Fear

Everyday, I have to face my fear at 8:00 AM. I gather up the courage to pull myself away from a table with all my friends in the cafeteria and walk up the stairs with a trembling in my chest that makes it difficult for me to talk in a level voice to anyone. After reaching the second floor, my anticipation of the fear is overcome by such a rush of adrenaline that my body functions at a higher level than any other time. My heart races at just over 80 beats per minute; my veins stick out of my arms like small pieces of hosing popping from a wall; my pupils dialate to take in enough light to fight whatever foe I might encounter; my muscles swell with blood and water; my ears close out all the white noise and hear only the unusual sounds.

This ecstatic, intense feeling continues as I enter room 213 and see that evil instructor of the English language dwelling in his studious lair and listening to the twangs of bluegrass music to pull in the unsuspecting music enthusiast. This man is the Kunkle. He trains to terrorize high school students day and night all year round. His foul methods of instruction slowly inject one with knowledge that is unwanted.

My fear of this monster began in my freshman year. Every morning I would make the same journey to the Kunkave that I do now as a senior. I have grown no less fearful. Some say that facing a fear is the best way to overcome it. I disagree. Daily, I continue to make myself trek to that lowly room where he waits in inglorious sea of poetry and rhetoric. Waiting to teach, but I resist the knowledge. Wanting to inspire, but I remain complacent.

The fear I have was created during the Mythology unit in English 9. Learning of gods and titans, muses and fates, I realized that there was something horrid about this man. He continued to attempt to poison my fellow freshman and me with a daily poem that was the appetizer for his gruessome feast of language and composition. A banquet filled with the sour taste of grammar. The horrors continued daily as we moved into Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. One would have expected such a classic novel to be palable. However, the story of love offered no love of any kind under the harsh regime of the Kunkle. I am lucky to have survived to take the class in which I am currently enrolled.

It is my hope that by conditioning myself gradually to this man's mad approach to instruction I may overcome my fear. By exposing myself to his methods for an hour and a half each day, I hope to either reverse his terribly tyrannical type of teaching or to become so atuned to it that I no longer am fearful.

On "Seeking"

"Seeking" was the article that Melissa chose to share with our class for her Choice Essay presentation. I read it last night and was absolutely taken away by it.

The article basically told about how our brains get a great deal of pleasure by searching or hunting for things. In fact, they receive more pleasure from the chase for something than actually getting it. This explained to me so many things in life in so many different areas. This explains a lot about love and sensual excitement learning, eating, and all sorts of things.

I love to learn and I figured out why it's so rewarding for me: it's an ongoing search and there is no final goal or ending point at which I am let down some by the final high. Dopamine is the stimulant that gets one excited in the chase, while opiates are what is released when the reward is reached. Dopamine is a stimulating high and opiates are a relaxing high. So basically, when I'm learning it's like having a high without ever having the let down. The same part of the brain is stimulated by sexual excitement. I won't go into the physiology of sex too far, you can read that on your own...but if you think about it, sex brain chemistry can relate to lots of things in life.

I found myself relating to the article at every point: personal experiences were ubiquitously connected. In fact, I was connecting what I was doing at the time with the article. While reading the article, I was multitasking by reading, Facebooking, and chatting. The article spoke about conditioning and Pavlov's dog and how people become excited when they get a new message, or their phone rings. I got a sense of expectation everytime my Skype account dinged that I had a new instant message from someone or everytime the little red box of Facebook notifications popped up. It's clear that Facebooking has become a source of dopamine for me. That's probably not a good thing either. When I get bored with doing homework I go on Facebook or Youtube, even if I know there's nothing to see.

The fact that seeking for information online is becoming like a drug addiction is well-founded. We must be careful about how much we are googling or twittering, etc. I don't think that these things are as dangerous as the author says, but we must exercise discretion in how we use them. Searching for information is a good thing; it's just important that we do it at the right time in the right way.

External links: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr

On "The Courthouse Ring"

Malcom Gladwell made some pretty awesome connections in his article about Southern Liberalism and To Kill a Mockingbird. I must admit, like everyone else, I never read into TKAM that much. I took it for an assigned reading in English 9. I enjoyed it, but never read into it.

The connection to Jim Folsom and other Southern Liberals was excellently founded. Throughout the 1800s, one could have said that Northern moderates and liberals fell into the same category. For instance, the Free-Soil Party which later evolved into the Republican party are examples that are similar.

The Free-Soil Party didn't necessarily fight for the abolition of slavery, only for the constraint of it. The party was willing to take action to prevent the spread of the institution, but were willing to allow it to continue where it was, with the hopes that enough sentiment against it would soon follow. This is like Jim Folsom and Atticus Finch because all of these parties are willing to put their foot down to prevent further injury but will not take measures to directly reverse adverse effects.

The Republican Party formed from the Free-Soilers and other parties. As it was created in our country's darkest hour on the eve of the Civil War, it was somewhat more radical than its predecessors. The Republican Party had the same free-soil policy, but as some Republicans began to take their ideals further, they began to call for more immediate aboltion.

Abraham Lincoln was the Republican Party's second presidential candidate. He is very much and Atticus Finch. Lincoln's initial goals were to keep the union together. Originally, he planned to bring the South back to the Union, institute free-soil policies and continue slavery as it was and watch it wane away. However, following Gettysburg, he realized that the war was no longer going to be solely a battle over the Union or secession. The war became idealogical as well and that was solidified with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. That action, too, though is also a very Atticus Finch-esque one. For being as famous as it is, the Emancipation Proclamation did effectively nothing. It was just a statement of ideology rather than a true ultimatum of any sort.

In late 1863, when Lincoln gave his famed address to dedicate Gettysburg National Cemetery, he began by saying, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." That sentence has been immortalized in history. The tale that Lincoln wrote his address on an envelope on the train to Gettysburg is a myth. He planned this carefully. It was finally then that he had moved away from being a bystander liberal and became a fully active crusader. If we didn't mean to truly find equality, he wouldn't have said "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." That phrase is not just rhetorical flourish to make a citizen feel better about the Union. It is a statement of principal, morality, and a call to uphold that principal.

How I Write

A lot of Romano's words hold true for me. He talked about getting comfortable when writing and finding the places and things that make you want to write.

My best writing is probably done when I'm alone in my room. I'll either sit on my bed and write in a notebook and just write my thoughts or poems and short things, or I'll bring my laptop to my room and type away on my desk until I need a break. I used to do most of my writing in my family's living room area where our desktop computer is, but lately that has been getting too distracting unless I'm alone and it's late at night. It doesn't matter for me much where I am as long as I'm in a comfortable seat, and feel safe in my environment without distractions.

When I was on vacation in Upper Michigan, I went and sat by a lake for two hours just thinking, listening to music and writing so fast and with so much feeling and emotion that I don't know if I would ever feel comfortable publicly displaying some of the things I wrote then. I could tell that that writing was very driven by passion because I went back to look at it just recently and noticed that it took on a very different style than most of my writing. The sentences were short but descriptive. I also didn't do much to break things into paragraphs because when it came out, I was just putting my thoughts almost directly onto a page. Only when I typed these things up the other day did I actually put things into paragraphs.

Stylistically, I often write in fairly long sentences. They are not as long as Mary Wollestonecraft, but compound sentences that have many appositives and often multiple, descriptive adjectives to describe one or more subjects or objects. When I go back and proof-read, I'm very hesitant to change my style at all. Occaisonally I'll but a sentence backwards or change two sentences around because it sounds better or makes more sense to someone reading it. Most of the time, though, I like the words I used the first time and the order they first appeared for me.

At times I feel like my writing is not accesible to readers because I'm afraid I am writing like a textbook or even a politician of the 1700s. I often fear that my thoughts get too strung out, that I tangent too much, and the style and language I use is too heavy. Sometimes I think that I wouldn't even want to read my own writing except for the fact that when I go back to read things, they are clearly things I'm interested in. My writing ends up being okay. I don't like all of it, obviously, but it is readable in the end. I've sometimes gone back to old papers and marked them up and said things differently to see how I've improved from my writing in middle school or even as a freshman.

When Dr. Romano talked about proofing a draft, he emphasized using wide margins and double spacing to make the paper easy to read and accesible to comments. I like to have the same. As much as I believe in conserving paper, I don't like to proof without having a hard copy to write on. That's why I've begun to use the mark-up tool on Microsoft Word when I'm revising papers and don't want to waste ink or paper.

As far as the main theme, Dr. Romano is trying to get across, I feel that I'm doing a better job everytime I write of trusting my language. In the past, every sentence I wrote would take a minute or more of deliberation. I would think, "Is this what I want to say? Does this have some wit to it? Is this serious enough?" Now, I feel like I'm slowly getting better at just writing what I think and having it come out in such a way that it does work. Unfortunately, my thoughts aren't always organized enough for this to work.

Finally, the tone with which I write varies often from piece to piece. In most pieces I've written, one will find a satirical or sarcastical sense of humor evident. Sometimes it will be a very childish or ironic remark in the midst of a fairly serious subject. This is me being me in my writing. However, at times, I leave the humor out because I just get so caught up with something that I don't allow my little wits and jokes to spice-up my writing. On the other hand, there have been papers that I go into intending to be funny to keep the mood light and the reader poisoned with laughter.