Look

Look at you. Look at you. LOOK AT YOU.

With your bloodshot eyes and tipsy strut.

You tell me to face reality, and yet you

would try to escape all your fears, problems

and insecurities in a bottle. In a girl. In

a boy. In a picture. In a party. In a 

depressing bit of rationalization that

none of it matters at the end of the day.

It is not the universe that is bizarre, it

is our own minds that are. We twist

every word until it is what we want to hear.

We skip over the part where Jesus confirms

that he is the Son of God and call him only

a great moralist. For that matter, we skip

over morals and call them subjective, and then

are angered by the person who cheats us 

five dollars the following day. It is not

evil men who we must fear. It is men who remove 

the words good and evil from their vocabulary.

As for me, I will face this world. i must.

I will face the problems I will have. The sins

I commit I know will be forgiven. The crimes

I've commited have already been pardoned. Who

am I? I am no one, and yet I've been bought at

a price so high it'd be madness to name it.

How can we know? How can I know? How can I 

know what I know is true? How can I believe

that there is another beginning beyond

the grave? What sense let me feel

that the beauty in the clouds was only

a hint at a heaven I will see one day, that this

world is only a phantom compared to

the world we will one day inhabit?

How can I believe that a Creator was

here and took my sins and nailed them to

a tree? Who made me? Who made me? WHO MADE ME?

Am I not flesh and blood, and at a lower level

a few chemicals? How do I even raise these questions?

How do I even speculate and focus on one idea?

Random interactions in my brain form clear thought

and somehow form what we call conscience. How do

we control it? Reason says it should not be. Reason

says we should not exist. But does it really?

Does Reason not say that to love is better than to hate?

Why? Because somehow evolution saw that it was fit?

Why not hate? Why not an endless cycle of violence that 

allows only the strong to survive? Why not 

cowardice be rewarded and not bravery? No one

is hurt in a war full of people who run away from 

the chance of danger. It is bravery and a sense of

righteousness that causes wars. Why did evolution 

let them exist? Reason says something else put those

morals there. Reason says we are bent to do bad things

at birth. Why? Why be bent towards the wrong things?

Why is the moral sense there and not there? 

The Psychologist

 Dark rooms painted in deep reds hide horrors beheld by eyes who have faced worlds

we have not yet dreamed. Hands have clenched dark leather chairs, afraid to let go lest their fears beset them as a man with a cold stare hangs on to his every word. What do we treat? Is it the mind, or the spirit? Are our tools of this world or the next? Inside our mind lies dormant truths we will never fully comprehend, places we may never see, and voices that are not our own. And beyond this? Beyond this cold room, where a man leans back in his chair and sighs to himself as if to release the weight of a thousand souls who have entered his chambers and left even more confused.

The Difference

As I began the interview my old high school teacher, I realized this would be no normal paper. She had spoken calmly, but every idea I had about what a teacher was supposed to do was quickly crushed. How does this compare to English in college? I'm not sure you can compare them at all, actually. 

     "What is your philosophy for teaching?" We asked our english teacher, standing outside her classroom while her students did their bellwork. It was definitely an unorthodox interview, and we didn't expect to get an interview at all that day. "It used to be to inspire my students to get a degree in English, now I think it is to inspire them not to." I grinned and looked at Ashley, who was my partner in this interview, and who was also grinning. This was going to be interesting. 

      High school first off is extremely different from college in that it has all the kids who are never going to apply themselves or go to college, so teachers have the added challenge of trying to teach them everything they need to know before the "real world."  I believe this adds a little more pressure on the teacher, and can sometimes make a good teacher cynical. On the other hand, college is where people go to further themselves, to get something that will be a key to their career in life. Even though it may not have anything to do with english, they apply themselves more to get that degree. Self-motivation is definitely a key factor in the students' success, which I realize now, after the interview.

      Still, I was pretty disappointed to hear this from my old english teacher. We all hope that our high school teachers aren't really evil, but now that the truth is known, it will be hard not telling other kids in my old high school. Compared to her philosophy, college english is a dream. 

     We ran over a few more questions with her, all adding to our shock at her cynicism.

on katrina in katrina

The hurricane hit, in a melancholy way, involving family bickering, and the move down the road to my old school. Cinderblock for the win.

   I say it hit, well, it did, but early in the morning, while I was sleeping. I say early, but the lights had gone out and we weren't sure of the time. I will assume it was around eight in the morning, after a night of getting online, talking with friends, and playing scattegories with friends, that I found the hurricane striking in full force.

   I said the building(s) we were in were cinderblock, and this is true, minus the roof. We watched the neighboring roofs get blown away; it wasn't the whole thing, but enough to let water in. Our roof managed to stay intact.

   A strange occurence happened now. A loud noise, howling, moved over us, and off went the A/C unit from the roof, or rather rolled across it. We decided by the trees that had been mangled that a tornado may have passed by us.  But, nevertheless, the roof begins to come off our building after this, and we decide it's time to move to the large church across the way. It's too much time to describe the set-up now, I am writing by flashlight.

   We cross the way, and then... Now I am writing by flashlight. Well, we make it and get our supplies, stock, etc. Funny as I was walking to the vehicle, my glasses flew off my face. They always seem to fall off at the most inopportune moments. Back to flashlight. I played pokemon leafgreen during most of this., and then I use my ipod some. Oh yeah, and when I opened the car door the wind almost took it off its hinges. Anyway, the storms continued into the day, and I drowned myself into pokemon to ease the tension. Funny thing, pokemon becomes so much more dramatic in a hurricane. But only in the most surreal sense. I could still feel a gnawing worry in the back of mymind(or was it my stomach?).

   When I came away from pokemon, I napped. That is about all you can really do, to pass the time: sleep. Sleep early, sleep in, tsake a nap. No electricity sucks. New Orleans is a nightmare right now. No one has call the few remaining radio stations from Slidell. In fact, no one has reported from Slidell. A woman is stuck in her attic with an 8  month old baby and a 5 year old. Fools for not listening to a mandatory evacuation, but you still pity them. Looting. People walking their dogs. Levees breached. Thousands of people in the superdome, cramped up, holes in the roof. Hurricane Katrina has struck.

   Later today it cleared up.  Seems the wind had pulled a door off the hinges on the west side of the church, the glass shattered, carried by the winds in about a 30 yard radius.

   I see quite a few trees missing from the line to the left of us.

   The roads were finally partially able to be gotten on. We went to check on our house. On the way we see friends, and take them to their house. Trees are down everywhere. Tin as well. We have to carefully druve under powerlines and branches hanging over the road. Oaks have been pulled up by the roots. We make it to our house.

   3 branches on the lawn. This is the damage. Across the street a brick house has a large oak through it. On the intersection another oak, larger and taller, is leaning down, suspended by piowerlines.

   This is the same mess everywhere we pass. God. is. Good.

a night by the beach

The air was brisk under the moon's watchful gaze as he hurried along the weaving path below him. Dark clouds and even darker skies were the answer to his heart cry to be made free as the emptiness that drifted between his mind and heart seemed to grow wider the more he pressed on. Crows lingered in the distance, their noise a reminder of where dark paths lead, stirring the night sky with familiar fear. Would he ever return this way again? Was he doomed to search for the undefinable, that which cannot be seen? Would he find it, and in finding it find it wasn't worth his search? Who holds the keys to the rooms in his soul, where hidden inside is the light of a new song that could shake the dawn and cast light where never before could be seen the image of the sun rising in the East to the sound of a billion songbirds enraptured in the beauty of the Almightytearing through the firmament in the only way left to Him to get our attention. Surely we are blessed