The Road Less Traveled

Quest...There are a lot of feelings and thoughts that I now relate to that word.  I don't even understand it anymore.  It's going to take me a while to complete this, and so this blog may come in late.

Quest is a story, Quest is a lie, Quest is a tale, Quest is a time.  Quest is a space, Quest is a voice, Quest is a failure, Quest is a choice.

Quest is a veil, Quest is conformity, Quest is challenging, Quest is enormity.  Quest is power, Quest is fake, Quest is perfect, Quest is cake. :)

Quest is corruption, Quest is illegal, Quest is purple, Quest is frugal.  Quest is evil, Quest is good, Quest is savage, Quest is food.

Quest is mind, Quest is soul, Quest is following, Quest is a tool.  Quest is truth, Quest is lie, Quest is something that cannot die.  Quest is death, Quest is life, Quest is projects, Quest is strife.  Quest is waiting, Quest is staying, Quest is looking, fighting, playing.

Quest is coping, Quest is fire, Quest is chains and Quest is higher.  Quest is hypocrites, Quest is great, Quest is wonderful, Quest is hate.

Quest is Quest, Quest will live, Quest is here and will never end.

Quest is everything and nothing at the same time, and I don't know what I'm going to do now.  This whole class was a social experiment, and now that we've been isolated from the rest of the district, we feel differently about things and cannot live separated from community and a group that understands us as individuals.

GAH.  THIS IS HARD.

McCallum has become the embodiment of Quest, and I think that every Quest kid respects him and looks up to him.  If you have never had McCallum, you do not know contradicting things in the same sentence and mind-blowing stuff that makes sense and makes your brain hurt *breath*.  End of run-on sentence.  This is really hard for me because I still don't understand Quest.  I've watched seventh grade Quest students go through their English class, and I see similarities everywhere between all the Quest groups.  I've heard from my mom, who was a substitute teacher for second and third grade Quest students, after warning her, what Quest was like.
"I'm subbing for second and third grade Quest."
"Good luck."
"They're just second and third graders!  I'll be fine."  I rolled my eyes and muttered under my breath:
"Wait and see...."
A few days later...
"I had two kids in my class who, whenever they had the chance to be together, would not stop talking!"
"What class were you subbing for?"
"The Quest class."  I glance across the table at my brother and mutter just loud enough for him to hear:
"And it only gets worse from there."  I see my brother nodding along with me in agreement, and we share a secret smile.

Quest is powerful.  It changes people.  You cannot be in Quest and remain unquestioned, unchanged in how you see the world.  Because you will be questioned, and your life will be hard through middle school.  But there is always the light at the end of the tunnel of Quest, and McCallum's class makes up for it all.

NOT ANY EASIER TO WRITE THIS.

I really enjoyed having McCallum as a mentor, especially for my novel writing.  It is especially pleasing when McCallum asks in class: "who wrote for NaNoWriMo?" and to raise my hand and say "thirty-nine thousand words."  McCallum has given me something to work towards - his appreciation and amazement with my work.  I want to impress him and have him say "great job".  His feedback means that I have something that could change the world, and that I want to publish someday so that the world can feel the power of my words and how they impacted McCallum, my 'beta reader'.  He tested the power of my words, and I want others to feel that power.

STILL NOT ANY EASIER.

OK.  Maybe that was a lie, but this was really difficult to write.  I don't understand my Quest identity - I don't think any Quest student understands who they are in Quest.  They just exist in Quest.  They are.  They are the ones who will change the world.

Writing from the heart is difficult, but McCallum encouraged me, and I will keep him as my mentor through the internet until I publish, and then beyond that.

To the North Star, and then straight on 'til morning!

-bookhouse4

GAH.  I'M DONE WITH THIS.

Goodbye Quest.  See you later, alligator.  More references to things that don't make sense.
One word: Quest.  Confusion.  Two words...
I'll shut up now.

Irish Gaelic: Lifelong Learning

My family is Irish and German.  My mom is almost entirely German, and my dad is half Irish and half German.  I've always been really interested in my heritage, especially the Irish piece of it because my Grandmother is completely Irish and loves to visit Ireland.  She also likes to share interesting things about the people there.  One of her lifelong wishes is to be able to speak Gaelic (Irish), but now she is in her seventies and doesn't think that she will ever be able to learn it.  I found that this project was the perfect time to learn Irish, since I'm already taking German in school.

I also wanted to learn Irish because in one of my latest novels, a main character speaks it as his second language, and it is the only language that can pass the Curse that has bound him since birth, and only because it is ancient and powerful in breaking spells.  Google Translate can only do so much, and so I was using that to find the correct Irish.  I now know that Google Translate is wrong on words about 90% of the time (at least for Irish and other extinct or endangered languages), and so I decided that not only would I learn Irish for my Grandmother and for my book, I would learn it to improve Google Translate for others.

When I started, I started on Duolingo, a free language-learning site with extremely helpful game-like setup that encourages you to learn your words well in order to complete the lesson faster.  The only background knowledge I had was that 'I love you' in Irish was written 'Is breá liom thú' on Google Translate.  Now I know that the translation I was given is incorrect, and 'I love you' is actually 'is aibionn liom tú' - what Google Translate said was right is actually extremely incorrect and needs to be corrected by someone who knows the language.

After a few weeks of Duolingo, I began to put the words and rules that I had learned on the site into a presentation, realizing that I would need to start early in order to put everything important into a condensed presentation.  It was actually really hard to break down a language that was endangered - and didn't have much explanation of terms on Duolingo - into simple pieces.  I worried and deleted things and looked over every slide so many times before I finally decided that I was ready to present - and I still think that the presentation has too many words in it and could be condensed more so that it is not thirty-some slides long.

The presentation took me about fourteen minutes to give, and afterwards I wasn't proud of how I had done, but I did learn a lot about Irish - and now I can use that knowledge to fix Google Translate's errors, write a novel with Irish correctly used in it, and impress my Grandma with my knowledge on the language.

All in all, I think that I really loved learning Irish, and I love the language - it is really beautiful, and even though the words look odd to English speakers, it is the heritage and historical language of the Irish people.

Slán!

-bookhouse4

There's Nothing 'Civil' About a 'Civil War', and No 'Civilization' With Savagery

Being civil in our society is not as valued as it used to be.  Chivalry used to be a big thing, and it was encouraged for young men to be chivalrous to women in order that they my treat their future wife in the same gentle way.  There are two definitions for civil - one means "civil and polite", and the other is "of or relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, as distinct from military matters".

A Civil War is far from Civil - it is the end of civilization and the beginning of vicious, animal savagery.  It is the split of a nation, and breaking democracy and all things that unite, and therefore does not fall under normal citizens and their concerns, because a war is between governments, and their tin soldiers that are no longer human - they become numbers.  All soldiers are numbers once they step onto the battlefield.  Casualty numbers, ranks, coordinates that they are located at...the list goes on.

People in a war are no longer people.  We refer to them as a group - a faceless group who dies off and where people are killed,  but it is just a group.  Civilians are just "civilians" or "civilian casualties".  They aren't specific people.
We put a certain meaning on these things, but the deaths are a passing thing and mean nothing to us.  It's an unreal situation when someone dies - whether in war or someone close to us.  William Golding explains it well - after all the boys kill Simon when Ralph and Piggy are talking: Ralph continued to rock to and fro.  "It was an accident," said Piggy suddenly, "that's what it was.  An accident."  His voice shrilled again.  "Coming in the dark-he had no business crawling like that out of the dark.  He was batty.  He asked for it."..."You didn't see what they did-" (157).

The boys start to convince themselves that they were never in the circle that killed Simon, even though they are just as guilty as all the rest of the boys who have turned savage.  They convince everyone else around them that they were on the outside and didn't take part in the dance.  The thing becomes 'an accident', as Piggy says (Golding 157), and the boys force themselves to believe that it never happened and was all a dream.  Any death takes on a surreal quality - even the death of something as small as the death of a wild animal.  There seems like a sacred line that cannot be crossed unless you are cruel.

I cannot stand blood, though I write about it in my books.  Blood means life, and it also shows the absence of life.  Killing an animal, to me, is crossing the line from civil to savage.  Now, I'm not talking about the meat we eat for food - that is fine with me because I don't see it done and it is done for food.  I'm talking about the brutal killing of something just for sport.  Most people when they hunt, hunt to get venison or meat as well as hides and pictures and antlers.  What I see as savage is poaching.  That is falling into the cold-blooded killing of a being without good reason to kill except for evil black market money.

In Lord of the Flies, the killing of the sow (Golding 135) illustrates this savagery perfectly.  When the boys go hunting, they don't really go hunting for meat.  They could just eat fruit and they would survive just fine without the meat, but instead, they go hunting, and when they find the sow and are ready to strike the killing blow, they torture her and stab her for a long time just to see her blood.  They don't end her pain swiftly as most hunters would do, but purposely try to bring her pain before they kill her.  When they finally do kill her, though, the exhilaration fades quickly and soon they are back to hunting for food and not for sport.  The urge to injure and hurt overpowers them, and the savagery overpowers the civility they might have once had when they might have just killed the pig straight away and not tortured her.  There can be no civility where savagery reigns.

I think that killing pigs is a way for Jack to look superior because he can hunt and Ralph cannot (image), but also because he has a thirst for blood.  He wants to kill because some primal urge in him is pushing him to 'turn to the dark side' and kill only for the exhilaration of killing something (savagery).  This is also what pushes him and the boys to beat Robert: Presently they were all jabbing at Robert who made mock rushes.  Jack shouted.  "Make a ring!"  The circle moved in and around.  Robert squealed in mock terror, then in real pain...the butt end of a spear butt fell on his back as he blundered among them...They got his arms and legs.  Ralph, carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric's spear and jabbed at Robert with it.(Golding 114).

At this point in the story, I thought that Robert would be killed, because the boys then chant "kill him!  Kill him!" and Robert begins to struggle.  What is strange is how the boys, after this point when they realize that they want to kill someone (and almost kill Robert), they go straight to 'that was a good game' as Jack says (Golding 115).  They don't seem to want to admit that they are turning savage, though the evidence of their savagery is everywhere.  They don't care about the conch anymore.

It only has power for Piggy and Ralph, and Jack says that it doesn't work on the side of the island that he controls: "And the conch doesn't count at this end of the island-" (Golding 150).  They want to kill and hunt more, and they even make a 'tribe' where Jack says they will have fun.  They call him Chief, even though they elected Ralph chief, and all are referred to as savages.  They lose their identity and names and become just 'savages'.  They no longer know who they are, and are fully inducted into the savage tribe, where their identity is.  Even their chant betrays their true inner feelings and how swayed they have been by blood and savagery: "Kill the pig!  Cut his throat!  Kill the pig!  Bash him in!" (Golding 114).  Or as seen when they do their dance that kills Simon: "Kill the beast!  Cut his throat!  Spill his blood!" (Golding 152).

Once savagery begins to take root, then civilization ceases to exist and order is replaced by chaos.  It is almost impossible to fix and change back to order again.  Just as it is difficult to move from one end of the good and evil alignment chart (provided here for your benefit), it is hard to move from chaos to order, and from savagery to civilization.


The only thing that is not hard to do is make a good person evil and change a good civilization into a savage one.  The easiest way to do that is to create a 'civil' war as Ralph and Jack did in Lord of the Flies.

-bookhouse4

Sources:

• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The picture on the right -->
• Google definitions