I Believe...

I believe in reading.
I believe in reading books,
Blogs,
The nutrition facts label,
Friend’s papers,
And posters.
But, I do not believe in reading instructions.

I believe in reading fire extinguisher warnings,
Soap ingredients,
Sustainability propaganda,
And road signs.
But, I do not believe in reading instructions.

I believe in reading the sides of cereal boxes,
Biology textbooks,
The bulletin,
And the newspaper.
But I do not believe in reading instructions.

I do not believe in reading instructions because I am my own person. Reading instructions irritates me. You open a box filled with pieces of a toy. There lie the instructions. Filled with millions of words telling you how to put together the object. Why do you even need all the words when there’s a picture with arrows on the box telling you where to put everything? It’s redundant, It’s redundant. There are just too many words to read and it takes way too long. I do not believe in reading instructions because I am my own person. Reading instructions is like having someone (that you don’t know) tell you what to do and exactly how to do it. It’s like communism. You have no rights and you are pushed into this forced listening (or reading in this case) to some random person who works at some dirty factory who doesn’t have a very high education and occasionally spells words wrong. Putting things together yourself helps work your brain and lets you have more freedom.

When you read instructions, it feels like you have no control over what you are doing, like someone is controlling you and you are a robot. “Put this here, put the nail in here…” It’s like, what if you DON’T want to put the sticker on the top, because you think it looks better on the bottom! The instructions make it like there is only one option of where to put your stickers or the parts of the toy.

Reading is something that should be enjoyed and not something ruined by reading instructions. Reading books is fun because of the stories and the pictures that invade your imagination. Reading the soap ingredients is fun because you get to learn words such as “cocamidolpropyl betaine” and “ammonium xylenesulfonate” and is where I have learned the longest words I’ve ever encountered. Posters are fun because of all the colorful pictures and information that you gain from them. But is reading instructions FUN? No, it’s just a bunch of words giving you instructions that you don’t need because people can figure out information based on pictures. The pictures even have arrows to say where to put the long nails versus the short ones!

I do not believe in reading instructions because I am my own person. I do not need anyone telling me what to do and how to do it, especially if I already know. I don’t necessarily like to follow in the footsteps of someone else because it seems like I am not living my life. I have not and never will read the instructions on any toy or object probably for as long as I live.

I do not believe in reading instructions because I am my own person.

Balloon

Bright yellow balloon is such a contrast,
Such a contrast to the black and white fir,
Dancing fluidly in the wind so fast,
Familiar changes yet to occur,

Pulled to summon the beginning of June,
To share with the world a small piece of her,
Selfish winds soon coveted the balloon,
Her yellow balloon soon was a small blur,

A boy half way around the world looked up,
To see what was the little girl’s balloon,
The balloon had started to come close up,
Until it lay down upon a small dune.

Cognitive balloon extinction is strange,
But flies away with arrival of change.

The Balloon
Catcher in the Rye inspired my sonnet. My take on that book is that it is all about losing your childhood innocence. In the sonnet, it talks about how this little girl has a yellow balloon and contrast, and the contrast is the difference between childhood and adulthood in the world. When you are a child, the world is so new, and no one is your enemy. Life is simple and happy, yet fragile, like a balloon. I chose a yellow balloon because it symbolized hope and it was fun like most children’s personalities are. I wanted to make the sonnet about something flying away, not tangible but still visible. I wanted it to be like, people wanted to have this privilege, but they somehow couldn’t acquire it. The poem is also about losing something that you never knew you had. It’s about taking things for granted, and in the future, regretting it but still moving on, to try and keep the childhood “golden days” locked deep in your heart, but still there.
The first stanza is talking mostly about the contrast and how different the joyful, hopeful, happy childhood balloon is from the rest of the black and white cynical, critical world. In the lines “Bright yellow balloon is such a contrast, Such a contrast to the black and white fir,” I was imagining the little girl walking along a street with the balloon tied to her wrist and if you just looked at the balloon, then it would be bouncing along happily behind her like a puppy. I was going for that image of Rufus Wainwright’s YouTube video on Across the Universe. In the video, Dakota Fanning was holding a red balloon while walking through allies while the balloon follows her. The “fir” represents the trees around her, which is like life, and how everything is either “right” or “wrong” (or “black” and “white”) and the balloon contrasts the thoughts of growing up. The next lines in the stanza “Dancing fluidly in the wind so fast, Familiar changes yet to occur,” represents the teenage life of the girl, where she is letting go of the childhood innocence, but the balloon sort of slips out of her hand while her friends are busying her. “Familiar changes” is sort of an oxymoron because changes aren’t familiar. The changes that she is going through are confusing and hard to understand when she is in this stage in life. The balloon wants to stay with her, but she has let it go, she traded hope and carefree happiness for knowledge of the world around her. She has suddenly blended in with the rest of the world and the balloon moves on.
The second stanza is more about how the balloon of childhood innocence was silently stolen by the world. I think of it as more like the world tricked her, and made her think that knowledge of the world was ultimately a good thing, and it is, but it also takes away the innocence of childhood. “Pulled to summon the beginning of June, To share with the world a small piece of her,” “Pulled to summon the beginning of June” is the beginning of all changes. June is the beginning of summer; or when the seasons transfer from spring and happiness to summer where the temperatures are different, and there’s no school but everything else is the same. Which is just like her world, if you just look at her, you wouldn’t suspect that any huge transformation happened like letting go of her childhood. The girl thought that she was going to benefit the world by giving up her childhood innocence for knowledge, but they sort of stole her innocence and didn’t give her anything good in return. The next two lines are, “Selfish winds soon coveted the balloon, Her yellow balloon soon was a small blur,” about her seeing the last of her childhood, possibly by one simple act that totally eclipsed the innocence. After she gave up the innocence, the world scooped it up, and made it disappear, possibly trying to hide it from the girl.
The third stanza is about how one boy sees or remembers what the little girl was like when she was a child, and thinks about it, but doesn’t make a move to bring it back because he doesn’t think it is important. “A boy half way around the world looked up, To see what was the little girl’s balloon,” He only saw a glimpse of the balloon, and didn’t think much of it, until it was too late and it flew away, out of his grasp. “The balloon had started to come close up, Until it lay down upon a small dune.” This states that the balloon started to come towards the boy, but then turned and landed in some other desert-like place where there were no people. There were no people to recognize the balloon as anyone’s innocence, and there it lay, slowly releasing its helium.
The last two lines “Cognitive balloon extinction is strange, But flies away with arrival of change.” Shows that the girl grew up and forgot about her childhood innocence, and went on to change her life. The first line says that there will always be childhood innocence but because people don’t notice it, it simply leaves. But the first line also suggests that the knowledge and the perspective of a child could be so powerful and have so much influence on people, it would be dangerous, yet she didn’t realize that, so she just gave up her balloon. The balloon could have had the potential of becoming huge enough to carry the girl over the heads of others, in other words, she would be so powerful through insight, she would be like a God. But everyone moves on, and lets go of their yellow balloons someday, whether they like it or not.

Snapshots;

Snapshots



Sitting on the floor alone,
With a worn photo album
On my lap,
Remembering.
Flip, flip, flip.

The quiet, gentle piano music flowing
In the background
Brings back memories of high-school years.

Flip, flip, flip,
Three girls, arms linked, and jumping
on the warm sand of the beach
at twilight, the sun falling off the edge of the photo;
Summer: 1999

Flip, flip, flip,
A dark haired girl
And boy
Smiling hugely,
While blowing big balloons
For a party;
Lacey’s 16th birthday, me and Adam: 2000

Flip, flip, flip,
Family and friends
All in black,
As if the photo were covered in a shadow;
Car crash, parents, November 8: 2002






Flip, flip, flip,
New family and friends,
Me in white,
Him in black,
Waiting for me at the altar with a huge smile and warming eyes;
Wedding, April 15: 2005






Sitting on the floor alone,
With a photo album
On my lap,
Remembering.
Flip, flip, flip.

Reflection:
I was thinking about what college I would be going to and about spring break and summer time and I thought to write about when I would be in college and thinking about high school. I would remember those events that mean so much right now and would seem silly after a while. I would remember my favorite moments with my friends during spring break and summer. The car crash thing didn’t really happen, but the energy I was getting from the poem kind of needed a huge thing to happen, so I decided to put something sad in to make it dramatic. I think it’s important to remember the sad moments of life as well as the happy ones, which is why I decided to add the part about the parents dying. That sort of symbolizes the sad things in life that we can’t change, but have changed us. In college, I think the only thing that will keep me alive is the memories from high school and before. I don’t want to forget anything that happened in high school, and my way of documenting that is through photography. You can capture a perfect moment and sort of re-live it, or just remember it later with pictures.

Dreams from my Father

The theme of my book (Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama) so far has all been about
Race.
The book, Dreams from my Father starts out when Barack Obama is 21 and living in a shabby apartment in New York. “A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan” (pg. 3) When he gets the news that his father had died, the book changes into a sort of picture book of his past and the stories he’s been told.
The first stories are about Barack’s father, Barack Obama Sr., from Kenya. Barack was brought up by his mother and her parents to be honest and that segregation was a bad thing. One of the stories Barack had been told was of when his father was in a bar sitting next to a white man, and the white man said he shouldn’t have to drink good liquor “next to a nigger”. After that, Barack’s father gave the man a long lecture on human rights and the Constitution. The man felt so bad about it after, he gave him $100 for his forgiveness.
His father never was a huge part of Barack’s life, seeing that he left Barack and his mother when he was two years old, but this book is about how Barack finds out more about his father, and what impact he has had on him.
As the book goes into stories about his mother and her parents, there are had many instances where their morals have been tested. When his grandparents lived in Texas, his grandmother was talking to a janitor of her building and she called him “Mr. Reed”. One of the secretaries of her office came over and told Barack’s grandmother that she should never “call no nigger ‘Mister’” (32) After that, she saw Mr. Reed crying and he asked her, “What have we ever done to be treated so mean?” She didn’t have anything to say to that question, but later at home, Barack’s grandparents decided that she would continue to call Mr. Reed “Mr. Reed” because they thought that everyone should be treated fairly.
Once Barack’s grandparents move to Hawaii however, everything changes. There are so many different racial groups that no one really cares what color one’s skin is. Everyone gets along and helps each other out when they need a hand. Everything is so different in Hawaii than on the mainland, “[he] expresses wry amusement at the fact that ‘Caucasians’ in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice.” (26) Everyone’s race in Hawaii gets teased at some point or another, we just let it go and laugh about it because we accept that everyone’s different, but that everyone’s the same also, so the issue of race doesn’t separate people.
I know it’s cliché, but Hawaii is like a mixed plate. A different kind of food (or people in this case) all put together into one plate (or island). We accept each other, help each other, and love each other. Hawaii is relaxed; everyone is your Aunty, or Uncle, your family. Hawaii is one of the only places in America where racism isn’t a huge issue. Hawaii is the place where Barack Obama’s grandparents found was most comfortable for their life style, and where I find mine. Sure, the mainland’s not that bad, I even want to go there for college, but I will, for sure, come back to live here. I know that my race is teased, and put down, and there are many stereotypes against my race on the mainland. There are those same stereotypes here in Hawaii, but no one “holds them to you” or expects you to be anything except what you are. I’ve been brought up in Hawaii, and have learned to accept everyone, as they are, not because of what they look like.
Humans want comfort, and familiarity. I think that segregation started because the whites were afraid of the blacks, and because of their accelerated intelligence of the world in which they live, the had the power to overrule the blacks. They had the power to conquer and rule America and make certain people work for them. I think that they were scared. Scared that THEY would be taken out of their comfort zone, and in protecting themselves, they put others in danger and hurt them in ways that can never be forgiven.
America as a whole has to accept their mixed plate, eat it, and then we can all have dessert together, as a family.

If Everyone Shared and Swallowed Their Pride

If everyone shared and swallowed their pride

While listening to the song “If everyone cared” by Nickelback, sitting in the soft red chair of the air-conditioned Luke Auditorium, the realization hits me. There are people on the same Earth as me, who are losing everything. Everything they’ve ever had is slowly leaving them, until they feel like they are alone in the world.

“If everyone cared, and nobody cried, if everyone loved, and nobody lied, if everyone shared and swallowed their pride, then we’d see the day when nobody died.” The words danced around me as if trying to get me to understand the real meaning behind the actual lyrics. The movie we were watching was created by an entrepreneur and originally focused on entrepreneurship. Entrepreneur in the dictionary means “a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.” From this meaning, it seems as if entrepreneurship is not only about taking financial risks, but taking financial risks to better the lives of those around you, and those so very far away who need a lot of help.

This song along with the support of the pictures of the people around the world helping others inspired me to go out to try and make a difference in someone’s life. In seventh grade, I’d heard about this organization, HUGS. HUGS stands for Help, Understanding, and Group Support. HUGS supports families with children suffering from illnesses. This sparked my interest because it doesn’t just help the child with the illness, but their parents and siblings also. The volunteering at HUGS worked mostly with respites. The children are dropped off at the HUGS house by their parents for the respites, and each child gets a volunteer to look after them. This past week I went to HUGS and took care of a girl named Annika who suffers from some kind of cancer and she and her brother Arman come to respites quite often.

I followed around Annika who is pushing a stroller and I gazed around at all the children, and was amazed at how they can still be children after what they’ve been through. There were children running around laughing and playing baseball with their friends, children swinging on the swings, and children sliding down the slide. These children are happy just to be living and playing with others. Just looking at the glowing faces of the HUGS children will surely bring a smile to yours. Starting HUGS showed me how to love, just being alive, and to live every moment like it's your last. The children there are always smiling and having fun. The HUGS children always amaze me at how much they understand about their illness and others around them. They will grow up to be non-judgmental people because of the environment that they were brought up in. The children have been through so much, yet they still have time to smile and throw in a little laugh here and there.

They are stronger now, than I ever will be, and that I shall always remember about my time at HUGS. The lyrics that guided me to this service are as follows:

If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day when nobody died.
–“If Everyone Cared” Nickelback

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