Dead Week

One more week. Just one more week. This is the week of hell if there ever was one. We The People is on Saturday. The hopes I have for my team are so low. We're so screwed. There's no way that we can beat the other schools in our district competition. So, that's disheartening. Then, finals are next week. I'm not too worried about that. They should be pretty easy. Next week should be even better than this week, to be honest. I can invoke my finals tradition of studying until 8:30 and then relaxing for the rest of the evening. I have a whole week to make it through before that, though. Homework and finishing plays and answering long objective questions is not something I look forward to (not to mention Christmas shopping...).

I honestly just can't wait until We The People is over. I feel like my team is solid, two of our testimonies are really good. We have what we need to be able to rock this competition. The other groups on my team are another matter. Some of them have their stuff together, just like my group. Some of them do not. I honestly cannot see us knocking out one of the top three other schools and making it to the state competition. Those schools have established teachers, established programs, and they have something that works. They have a pretty long history of making it to nationals. I just don't see us making it. Not with where we're at.

I'm trying to be positive for this last week. If I just give in to this week being awful, I could certainly make it worse than it might be.

"It's Christmas! Let's be glad! Even if your life's been bad, there are presents to be had!"

It's Christmas 1st!

In an attempt to get out of the November funk, I've been making myself listen to Christmas music. Christmas music always helps me to get into the mood of the season. This year I have expanded my horizons past my families normal Christmas music to something that's more to my liking. My first recommendation to you all is Relient K's holiday album "Let It Snow, Let it Raindeer" (have I mentioned that I love puns?). It features typical songs such as "The 12 days of Christmas", "Sleigh Ride" and what not, but it also has quite a few of their own songs. One of my favorites is "I Hate Christmas Parties" The next album that I would like to mention is "Songs for Christmas" by Sufjan Stevens. This also offers classic Christmas songs, but a few of his own. I really enjoy this album because he takes a very folksy approach to all of these songs. I am especially identifying with his song "It's Christmas! Let's Be Glad!". He also has another album that weeves in and out of holiday favorites, too absurd songs like "Mr. Frost" and "Christmas Unicorn". I highly recommend that you guys give those a look.

Thoughts on Ferguson

I do not want to talk about the Michael Brown case in this post. I feel as if I do not have nearly enough information to be able to discuss it at all, outside of the racial injustice piece. Even then it might be best for me not to speak on it, as I am white. However, I do want to talk about the protests going on because of it.

Thinking about this whole thing brings me such immense pain. I hate the idea of how much people of color are hurting right now. It pains me to realize that we are still living in a world of racism. But I think this issue brings such an important reminder that this is still going on. As a white individuals, we do not have to even think about racial injustice. It doesn't happen to us. But that is absolutely no excuse to pretend that it doesn't exist. This issue is still very much alive. As unbelievable as it sounds, the KKK are still active. African Americans are arrested at six times the rate that whites are. We are among China, Brazil, and Mexico who are fighting against corrupt governments. America is held up to be one of the greatest nations in the world. Can you really still say that?

Is he really crazy?

It was very strange to me to be confronted with Hamlet's madness this week. Inside the text, I feel that Hamlet's words and actions are entirely justified. While many of them are not right, they are at least justified. All of his witty comebacks seem to be simply coming from a very intelligent mind that resents having to associate with lower beings. Perhaps even the real hurt and betrayal he feels towards his uncle and mother. But Hamlet's actions towards Ophelia right before the play, are ones that I simply cannot account for outside of madness. They are unfounded and the exact opposite of what he has told her in every other encounter they have had. I cannot make sense of it.

However this madness is suggested in every enactment of the play I have seen. It is startling to see the interpretation that this man is truly mad throughout. When we watched the film version with David Tennant, it was the first real enactment I had seen. While he performed it incredibly well in my opinion, it was just jarring for me. I'm not sure how to proceed with this revelation, especially as he seems to be slipping more into madness by the scene. We shall just have to see.

Family.

It is becoming more and more apparent to me that I have a very unique relationship with my family. As we trudge on through november, it seems that even parents have been on edge. It might just be in response to frustrated students, but I'm inclined to believe otherwise. I've been the quiet listener to quite a few rants regarding parents this week. I heard about numerous silly arguments that have boiled down to "I'm your parent, I get to decide. That's final."

I feel very blessed that I have a relationship with my parents (well at least my mother) that they are willing to sit down and have a reasonable discussion with me. It seems that other people don't have this relationship with their parents. It feels as though many teens don't have a mutual respect established with their parent. It is just very odd to me that the stereotypical teenager/parent relationship is very much a real thing, and that it is actually very prevalent. Just some food for thought this week.

A Play Within a Play? How Meta!

I would like to take a moment this week and talk about the play within a play contained in Hamlet. I think that Shakespeare employed a great plot device. It was tremendously clever, and I've seen it used so many other places. It's nice to know where all of these things come from. Especially the "The lady doth protest to much me thinks". That was also great. I would also like to take a moment to trumpet Adventure Time for having so many literature parallels. They employ a wonderful reference in the episode "Ignition Point".

In this episode, Finn and Jake venture off to the Flame Kingdom in order to retrieve Flame Princess' scented candles. While they are there, they get mixed up in in a plot to kill Flame King. They decide to take over the night's play and go on stage pretending to be the king's assassins. They watch the audience to try and discover who the real assassins are. However, before they manage to find them, the King has them captured. Finn and Jake then tell him that they overheard the assassins and their plot. It is then revealed that the guards holding the boys are the actual assassins,
and they are the King's nephews. They swear revenge on the Flame King for killing their father and taking the thrown.

It has been so enjoyable to find all of these older literature ideas represented in contemporary entertainment. It really solidifies the idea that it's hard to come up with new ideas nowadays. This frustrates me, but it also encourages me in that as long as you can spin something a new way creatively enough, that it doesn't really seem to matter that you're using and old idea.

Skills USA leadership

I was chosen to represent my school at the Fall Leadership Conference for Skills USA Nevada this weekend. I usually enjoy attending these conferences. They're a lot of fun. I get to meet new people, get some helpful information on how to be a better leader. But this year's conference felt like a mess.

One issue I had with the conference was how they decided to run workshops. These workshops split the large group into many smaller groups and offer short lessons on things like how to effectively run social media for a group, or even how to give better directions. However, instead of signing up for workshops ahead of time, you simply showed up at a workshop. This posed a problem, considering there were 300 of us. Each workshop had a limited amount of people that could attend, and once capacity was met, you were out of luck. That left a few people wandering around, trying to find a workshop when many of them were already full. We were never even given descriptions on what these sessions were about. We simply had to pick based off of the Disney song title that each session was given (the theme for the week was Disney. Leaders land, disneyland, get it?). I have an issue with this because as this is a conference intended to make us better leaders in our Skills Chapters and in our communities, I think that I should be able to attend the workshop that would most benefit me. It felt as though they treated these sessions as a time filler that just needed to be accomplished rather than something helpful that they were offering us. This was particularly frustrating, considering that they did take up a considerable amount of time, and it was entirely possible to get stuck in a boring session that didn't apply to you.

In years past this conference had been well organized and overall helpful to me as a leader. This year really fell short of the bar for me. It was disappointing, considering that it was the last one I would be able to attend. I hope that in future years they can get themselves together, because I truly believe that this kind of event can be a great benefit to students.