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.