Taken

I have watched her a long time

And now she seems mature and prime.
At dawn, I decided to have her and struck,
Grabbing and placing her in the back of my truck.
I thanked the dealer for the sale
And then drove out into the strong gale.
Tears streamed from her eyes like a broken faucet
Despite my vocal instructions to stop it.
Finally the vehicle pulled into the house
I could not wait to show the puppy to my spouse.

                Recently, as a leading member of a planning committee, I helped organize a forum at the Cleveland City Club about human trafficking.  Many people know of this crime’s propagation across the globe, especially in third-world countries.  However, many individuals do not know of its domestic pervasiveness.  Currently, the city of Toledo, Ohio serves as the premier hubbub of human trafficking, or “modern slavery,” in the United States.  In my poem, I wanted to throw the reader off guard and contemplate this harsh topic before they reached the poem’s conclusion.  I utilized words like “dealer” and “sale” to construct a harsh and sympathetic tone (4, 2).  The description of buying a potential human being arouses extreme discomfort from persons living in relative security.  Additionally, I decided to build a somber mood by comparing the tears of the puppy to a “broken faucet” (7).  The image of a busted faucet conjures to mind a seemingly endless streaming of tears, which tugs at the heartstrings of the reader and pushes the implication of future pain or torture.  Most of all, the opening line of the poem, “I have watched her a long time,” begins the story with a sense of horror (1).  The ominous tone of “watched her” has a disturbing connotation and portrays the speaker as a stalker.  Human trafficking can arise in nearly any environment and flourishes on the ignorance of the uninvolved.   Hopefully, my uncomfortable poem spurs the reader to do some research on their own.  Humans need a medium like film, journalism, or poetry to espouse the empathy required to take action.

Common Sense

Dear Eleven Year Old Self,

     I apologize for the extenuated period since I last wrote.  I have attempted to rebuff your presence, but it seems I can do so no longer.  Years of forced repression tend to do that to willpower.  Anyways, I am writing this letter as a source of forthright advice—some may call it criticism—to help you.  Think of it as a free how-to-succeed-in-life manual, but with snarky comments and a lack of positive reinforcement.  I believe John Holmes once stated, “There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.”  Therefore, by bringing you down, I am logically exercising my mind (a far more useful organ than the heart).  First order of business, lose the infantile and eccentric hobbies.  Owning a magic kit does not make you Houdini.  Spending your time practicing magic tricks equates to heightened awkwardness and the delusion that “everything will magically be okay.”  Furthermore, please discard the massive piles of rocks in your room.  What would someone intentionally spend money on rocks?  A geology degree does not wait in your near future, and I am fairly certain owning “pet rocks” represents significant psychological issues.  And speaking of rocks, I cannot even begin to comprehend your reasoning behind owning a rocket launcher—I think you know the solution to that dilemma.  Second, drink up on milk.  Hopefully, this will spur your osteoblasts to ossify what you need most: a backbone.  Harboring fear for darkness, for heights, for not doing a homework assignment…things need to change.   Doing one wrong thing, like breaking the law, skipping school, or forgetting your lunchbox, will not bring about the end of the world.  Getting anxious about minute problems makes you hauntingly shallow.  Grow up, crybaby.   Lastly, please—I beg you—purchase a real haircut.   The bowl-cut you “rocked” for eleven years needs to hit the road.   If you had any shred of self-awareness, you would realize you live as a modern day kid in twenty-first century United States, not a reclusive farmer in sixth century China.  In conclusion, if you heed my words of infinite wisdom, you will find little difficulty in the coming six years.   You might even ascend from the status of “unique” to “almost normal.”  What an accomplishment.

Yours Truly,

A Better You      

A Story to Tell

             Tears streamed down Maya’s face as she vigorously pumped her legs and ran down the street.  Running seemed the only rational action to calm her chaotic thoughts.

            “This—this cannot be happening,” heaved Maya.    Thump, thump.  Her feet rhythmically pounded against the solid pavement.  Each stride only confirmed the reality of the world around her.  Maya quickened her pace, desperately trying to defy her sense of perception.  The mental walls protecting her from harm, from the truth, began to deteriorate.  She needed to escape.

            The second hand bookstore stood at the intersection of Main and Worthington.  A dilapidated building that had seen more corrosion than customers, the bookstore exuded an aura of mystery.  Its apartness from the surrounding stores attracted the tired Maya.  She hurriedly wiped her face and entered the disheveled building.

            Shelves of misshapen books lined the small space from wall to wall.  A musty smell permeated the air.  From her peripheral vision, Maya could see myriad colors and sizes of books.  Not one seemed similar to another.

            An old man with large round rimmed glasses sat at an oak counter, reading a crumpled book with copious ink stains.  “You have quite the collection of books, sir,” said Maya, trying to steady her voice.  “Do you get many customers?”  She could not remember a single customer leaving with a purchase.

            “Bah,” exclaimed the old man. “I only keep this place running for my wife; she’s a schoolteacher.  She could never let this place go.  It’s too special to her.”

            “My mother is a schoolteacher too!  She always presses me t—” Maya cut herself off.  She had temporarily forgotten.   “She was a schoolteacher.”  Maya finished softly.

            The old man took off his glasses, exposing wrinkled, yet compassionate eyes.  “You know, stories are not confined to books.  Stories told through words, that are passed on to friends and children, are just as immortalized as text on paper.  The carriers of books, those that bring them to this store, have stories as well.”

            He beckoned to a padded chair beside him. “Come, this is a place where stories are remembered.”      

My Daily Pi

Pacing back and forth, I glance at the dining room table. Stacks of large volumes of text lay scattered on its surface.  Peering at one of the open pages, my eyes take in the haunting image of thousands of characters and symbols.  I know that I need to do this.  The time has come to begin my math homework—a three step process.  First, I pull out the calculator from my pencil pouch.   Before I can actually use the gadget’s software, I have to solve a series of twelve mathematical algorithms on the calculator.  If I do not complete these twelve problems within five minutes, a chip embedded in the calculator’s computing system automatically explodes.  From personal experience, a few of my friends unfortunately bit the dust due to slow reaction times.  The Chagrin Falls Math Department describes this pruning process as “natural selection.”  Second, I select a specially crafted mathematics pencil.  The eraser tip of the pencil has a coating of sulfuric acid.    Erasing errors on paper scorches the skin, which teaches the user to never make written mistakes.  Truly, no other mode of learning works more effectively than classical conditioning.  Third, I start solving the assigned 1,000 problems, which span over 16 textbooks written in four languages, including Swahili.  The first 500 questions inquire the basics: differential equations, integration, and world hunger.  After problem 500, things get a bit dicey.  The subject matter shifts to astrophysics.   Questions range from “How many stars exist in the sky?” to “Determine the flight path of Earth in 168 years.”  To reduce the incidence of mistakes, for every wrong answer, a random bone in the body breaks.  Luckily, the human skeletal system has 206 bones.  I can usually endure ten wrong problems before I have to go to the hospital.  If I am lucky, I finish within the 12 hour limit.   If not, I lose the privilege to see my family for two months.  Isolation from relatives reinforces work ethic and the cost of failure.  After a routine night of math homework, I will then treat any chemical or physical damage.  Optimally, I sustain the ability to walk and move my facial muscles.  After I put away my math binder, I assemble a machete and a pair of nunchucks for the more difficult task ahead.  English homework. 

 

Final ADDition to My Blog

            A new year represents rebirth, recovery, and restoration.  Meaning, the previous year has gone to rest and new horizons and excitement have arisen.  Family and friends, aroused by this concept of limitless opportunities, tell us to make resolutions, or long term goals to improve happiness.  Losing weight, becoming richer, gaining popularity—these ambitions encompass only a fraction of possibilities.  Unfortunately, in order to successfully follow through one of these admirable resolutions, one needs something called dedication.  Merriam Webster dictionary construes dedication as “self-sacrificing devotion.”  Notice the imperative stipulations of “sacrifice” and “devotion.”  Hard work and focus, not fairy dust and rainbows, will make a goal materialize into reality.  Looking back at my previous resolutions, I can only remember failure and shame.  How depressing.  I relate my resolutional shortcomings to my miniscule level of focus.  I hypothesize that starting at age six, the development of my ability to fixate on one subject stunted.  My parents identify me as having a large, tumultuous imagination paired with the attention span of a gnat.  Honestly, to write these blogs, or any writing assignment for that matter, I have to continuously slap my face, talk to myself, walk around, watch television, and read a book in order to write down just twenty words on a piece of paper.  Truly, blogs serve as a serious calorie-burning activity for me.  Coincidentally, my favorite blog I wrote this semester, “The New Times of Romans,” pays tribute to my rudimentary concentration capacity.  I discuss how Times New Roman acts as a barricade to my creativity, and exacerbates my now notorious infantile focus level.  Watching myself type a blocky, trite font on the computer deeply disenchants me.  Readers of this blog will probably come to one of two possible conclusions: one, Times New Roman does indeed inhibit the writing process; or two, this kid needs a psychiatrist.  Following this theme of plausible insanity, I would choose “Spaghetti and Meatbrawls: A King Family Specialty” as my most interesting piece.  For the first time in media history, external observers got an inside look into the King family.  Ironically, while I wrote about my family’s opinion of the most "interesting" people of 2012, I find my family structure even more interesting.  I utilized accurate characterizations of my discordant family members to help portray my typical dinner experience—inexplicable topics meet manic personalities.  Speaking of incongruity, my favorite blog comment came from Claire Kampman, on my blog titled “What Not to Say in Class Discussion."  After reading of the "mini-me", Claire juxtaposed our childhood selves.  Claire radiated happiness, worked to please her teachers, and frequently acted on her curiosity.  I emanated cynicism, judged my classmates, and got caught up in numerous thoughts.  Amazingly, despite these obvious differences, we somehow have a strong friendship.  Realizing the number of supposed impossibilities I have overcome in my life, I am content with myself even though I have failed every New Year resolution to date.  The small achievements—like getting along with family, gaining friends, or even finishing a blog—give life its defining sense of fulfillment.     

Comfort in Comparison

            Tonight marked my last Holiday Concert.  Since the fifth grade, I have proudly performed in the school band every December.  Dressing up in nice clothes, playing winter-themed music, conversing with others on the grand stage—these types of activities surfaced year after year.  To ensure I never forgot my childhood, my mother made sure to meticulously scrapbook pictures of the annual affair.  Before the performance, I glanced through the images and felt a strangeness coalesce in the pit of my stomach.  I felt anxious—an emotion I rarely, if ever, felt before the show.  I had realized that every year during the Winter Concert, I had always had the fear of messing up and embarrassing myself, but I never had let it bother me.  I knew I would have the next year to do better or to fix my mistakes.  However, now no “next year” exists.  Somehow, I have already put in my eight years as a concert alto saxophonist.   I shudder to think that this time next year I will have already embarked on a new chapter of my life.  With these facts in mind, when I ascended the stage for the Concert, I can only describe myself as disoriented.  All of the previous Concerts had led up to this point--my final hoorah.  Playing the final note of the closing song, I closed my eyes and remembered a young boy who jumped up and down when his mother purchased him his own instrument.  His face radiated excitement.  At that moment, visualizing the boy’s blatant happiness, my appreciation for the world of music grew exponentially.  Music had shaped me.  It allowed me to express myself as an artist, but in a greater sense, express myself as a person.  In tribute to the ending of weekly blog assignments, and my concluding relationship with music, I reflect on some similarities.  Music has sculpted my perspective of writing. I consider them both as art forms.  When one crafts a piece of writing, selectively choosing words and their placement and purpose, he reflects the process of composing arranged notes in music.  A statement by the poet Oscar Wild, whom my father frequently quotes, comes to mind: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”   Creating that perfect, concise work of art requires considerable effort.  Yet, writing, like music, also does not have a formal rule book.   They both have many forms and genres.  With the framework of an introduction, body and conclusion, writing has structure, but at the same time has infinite possibilities.  Further, one song may have its own arrangement of notes and dynamics, but the reader has limitless options for interpretation.  Dynamics, tempo, timbre, and articulation can all receive alteration in order to imbue an emotion or theme into music.  The characteristics of location, meaning, and individuality manifest in writing.  And so, it only seems fitting that after a day with musicality, I end the night with its twin, writing.

Spaghetti and Meatbrawls: A King Family Specialty

          Tonight’s family dinner followed the normal routine—small talk followed by silence followed by heated debate.  Let me briefly explain.  While observers of the King clan may not call us cohesive, the word “intriguing” frequently emerges.   Unlike the typical family, mine does not share much similarity.  A good descriptor for my family?   Contradictory.  We all look different.  We act differently.  But because of this variance, others take interest in my family life.  Although I do not personally see it, my friends describe interactions among my family members as entertaining, like watching the show “Untamed and Uncut” on Animal Planet.  Evidently, some type of enjoyment must come from watching incongruous organisms interact with one other.  By now, I am sure I have illustrated the difficulty my family faces in finding common ground. Anyways, back to the dinner.  This particular night, my younger sister shattered the silence.  She brought up Barbara Walters’ special on the most fascinating people of 2012.  Naturally, everyone in my family had something to say.  The fighting match had started.  Round One:  Younger sister versus elder brother. My younger sister went on to talk about One Direction, the saccharine boy band, and their rise to fame.  “They really deserve the media attention,” proclaimed the obsessive fan.  I countered with the fact they produce one-dimensional, formulaic music.  Think Beach Boys, Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, the Jonas Brothers.  Most fascinating?  More like mass-produced.  Round two:  Mother versus father.  The former opened with a passionate speech about the young Gabby Douglas, a gold medalist at the London Olympics.  Her sparkling personality, combined with her stunning athleticism, deserved recognition.  In response, my father mentioned E.L. James, author of the erotic book series Fifty Shades of Grey…too awkward, Dad.  Round three:  Mother versus son.  Trying to keep her momentum, my mother pushed the Cinderella story of Gabby, how she overcame poverty to earn international acclaim.  Put off by this solid logic, I knew my refutation needed creativity.  I stated that none of the invited guests on Barbara Walters’ show deserve the title of “Most Fascinating.”  The selection process reflects appearance on television and news print, rather than impact or uniqueness.  My mother’s face wilted—a knock-out blow.  I had won this round.   Sweating and panting from the oratorical altercation, my family all gleamed red with exhaustion.  Just your typical Wednesday night.   Reflecting on this nightly cycle of debate, however weird, I find a diamond in the rough.  Because of my family, I have become accustomed to disagreement, dissimilarity, and discord.  This learned familiarity proves advantageous in the AP English classroom.  Sitting in my desk, I am sitting at the dinner table.  Whenever discussion escalates to argumentation, or someone provides a strange view on an essay prompt, or even when an awkward silence pervades the room, I feel as though I am in my element.  I feel at home.