allegory of a cave -- sonnet

Cold, rusted chains wrapped around the two.

Their company is stone.

Nothing to say, nothing to do,

together they're alone.

Shadows dance on the cave wall;

the only thing they know.

Some walk, some are still and some crawl

as something behind them glows.

The chains drop and they're free at last,

looking suddenly behind

to the place from which the shadows were cast.

"Could this all have been a lie?"

They look at the people and look at the flames,

until they feel the world's greatest pain.

tools that change the way we think

To me, there are two ways to see this:
1. Technology can disarm us from thought. Instead of somebody going through the process of figuring something out, they search it on the internet and suddenly thinking becomes an inconvenience. We learn indirectly and it shines a different lights on knowledge as a whole. To quote Good Will Hunting: "If I asked you about art you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo; you know a lot about him... but you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling."
That applies to our generation, where people think they know something because they have the information about it. Someone may know how tall the Eiffel Tower is when it was built and how long it took, but they don't know what it feels like too see Paris from 1,063 feet.

2. Technology is ultimately improving how people learn and communicate and find information about things, etc. Blah blah blah.

what i think about act iii

yeah, Hamlet is fucking crazy. I called it.

In act three, he puts on the play to watch the king's reaction, but doesn't observe silently. He loudly interjects during the play and asks the king and queen's opinion in the middle of it. Hamlet isn't subtle about his suspicions that the king killed his father at all. His insane actions even break up the play. After that, he yells at his friends and spills ALL THE BEANS too his mother and accidentally kills Polonius but doesn't seem to really care.

green eggs & hamlet

a) when it comes to what i know about hamlet as a story? i've been lead to believe that it's lengthy and treacherous. when it comes to what i know about hamlet as a character? nothing, but i'm happy to read and find out.

b) from romeo and juliet, i know that shakespeare is witty and renowned. a lot of high schoolers live in fear of shakespeare, but i find his plays to be more entertaining and less like loads of work.

c) to many high schoolers, shakespeare means endless translations and old english. also, iambic pentameters are kinda scary.

d) just point out the neat little things that make shakespeare awesome.

a belated scholarship hunt

today, i spent about two hours hunting down scholarships. so far, i've applied for:

• Cappex "A GPA Isn't Everything!" ($1000)
• Degreed "Pursue Your Passion" ($1000) -- had to write a short, 100-word paragraph about how getting this scholarship would help me to pursue my passion.

when i apply for more, this post will be updated

canterbury tales #1

• I still really like the depth of the characters that Chaucer used. Characterization is really important to me in a story, usually more important than the storyline itself. This is a reason most of the books I like are defined as "coming of age."
• To me, the Monk is the most interesting character, and I like him being compared to "a fish out of water, flapping on the pier."
• I feel like the Monk has a certain philosophy or experience to justify his consumption of meat and his wardrobe of elaborate furs. 
• Also, I feel like it would be much easier to understand the text if we knew in-depth facts about the culture of Chaucer's time period. 
• Chaucer describes the Friar as a cheery and happy person, always earning money and being carefree, never shedding a tear. As the description goes on, the impression is also given that the Friar is just a lonely beggar. 

netvibes (and symbaloo)

When Netvibes was presented to the class, I was unsure about it. It looks too busy for me, so I first used Symbaloo.

I like Symbaloo for its visual simplicity and it's simplistic approach. On the dashboard of Google Chrome, it's already set up similarly. When I open the browser, I see my most visited pages (Facebook, Tumblr, Bigcartel, Dr. Prestons English Literature & Composition blog). Seeing it that way in general is helpful because my homework and academic priorities are literally staring at me in the face. Symbaloo, on the other hand, automatically adds pages like the New York times in addition to Facebook and other popular social networking sites.

With dashboards that go this in-depth and have so many options, I'll definitely need to spend a lot more time with Symbaloo before I can use it to its full ability.