Journal 5

Last weekend I attended something called District Honor Band, which is basically a bunch of band student who get together and play hard music together. This year Surrel decided that it was time for me to join the ranks of devoted and talented upperclassmen. So Friday morning I woke up at five to get ready for my long day ahead. Upon arriving at school I quickly found my seat buddy, Marshall, he pulled out his laptop and we watched Moulin Rouge on the way to rock springs. The first day of practice consisted of 8 hours of intensive practice. I play the alto saxophone, and was stationed as a second alto. The music was amazing: we played Pilatus Mountain of Dragons, and Flight of the Paisa, and a few other songs that don't deserve mention. I was seated between two saxes who just happened to be cousins. One was didn't know how to play the saxophone and the other much rather be with the boyfriend she was texting so frantically. The next day the movie of choice was V for Vendetta. The concert overall was a success, except for one horrendous honk by one of the cousins in Pilatus. We got to watch the choir, although Marshall fell asleep and I would be found guilty of chatting away with a saxophone from Dubois that I just happen to know from a summer camp I attended 4 years ago. I returned home suffering from ataxia and with an inspiration to work on my tone.

Journal 4

Skiing or snowboarding, that is the question (continued.) The thing is I'm a bit of a speed demon. The faster I can go the happier I’ll be. Skiing I can get going pretty good, just tuck, keep your feet together, and balance! But with snowboarding your feet are stuck together, so you concentrate on balance. If you get slightly off balance one of your edges might catch, which usually ends in landing hard on your butt/back or your knees/ forearms. The third time I ever went snowboarding I was learning how to use my toe edge, and I didn't know a certain slope was icy. My toe edge caught on the ice and I was sent cart wheeling through the air, landing hard on my right knee. I lied there short of breath for five minutes; it hurt too much to breathe deeply. Eventually I pulled myself up and slowly made my way down the slope. When I got to the lodge I took off my snow pant to ice my knee, it was already swollen twice its original size. I've been more carful since then. It's easier to fall skiing, but I fall harder snowboarding. I almost like snowboarding more; it feels like I’m flying down the slopes. You can pay more attention to the scenery and your path down the mountain rather than keeping your feet together and whets going on in terms of muscles and such. While skiing if you stop paying attention to what's going on and you hit a bump, you either crash or flail wildly.

Journal 3

Downhill skiing or snowboarding, that is the question. I grew up on skies but about 4 years ago I tried snowboarding and loved it. Skiing was pretty hard to learn compared to snowboarding. I’ve crashed a lot on skies, I always seem to get tangled around myself and end up with a runaway ski. I'm also a bit of a speed demon, when I fall, I fall hard. A few years ago I was attempting a really hard hill (the step above a black diamond, I can't remember what it's called) Pretty soon I was speeding down this icy slope totally out of control when I noticed that at the speed and direction I was going, soon I would either hit a tree or this orange plastic thing that resembled something you would find at a construction site. Thinking fast, I swerved toward the plastic thing thinking it would hurt less than the tree. Somehow I missed it and fell, rolling through the ice, losing both my skies. Finally, 40 feet later, I stopped moving. I laid there for a few minutes, trying to figure out what happened. Eventually I decided it as a bad idea to lie in the middle of the slope, so I got up and slowly made my way down to my skies.

Rain Poncho

We were going to be in the woods for 32 days. That's 32 days without a shower, 32 days of water with pieces of who knows what in it, 32 days of being at the mercy of the elements. After 29 days on that NOLS course my now-close friends and I had survived rock climbing, staying up all night in lightning position, summiting new heights, various injuries, getting lost, and now we were ready. Our instructors split the nine of us into two groups, and had each group choose their leader, and then they were going to send us out and we were going to be alone for three days, we would meet our instructors a few miles away from where we would be picked up.

Saying quick fair-wells to the other group, I led my group off trail until we came to a small spring where we decided to have our lunch of trail snacks. Harry, our small toned ginger, decided he wanted to take a swim so we all sprawled on the warm banks and absorbed vitamin D. Kallie and I put the finishing touches on our list of things to buy when we got back to civilization, which included: cheesecake, Oreos, chocolate sauce, and various other deserts that would satisfy our raging sweet tooth. We decided it was time to leave when Harry started suffering from the effects of the bag of thunder chili he had consumed the night before. After consulting our map we continued our off trail adventure. Not long after that we stopped to make camp in an open meadow surrounded by trees. The boys, the ginger boy Harry, our southern boy from Tennessee Preston, and the tall shy awkward Scott, set up their tent and started on dinner while Kallie and I found a secluded spot to erect our tent.

The games started before dinner. First, wrestling! Next thing I know I had little Kallie running at me, surprisingly she knocked me over and had me pinned in 30 seconds. Rematch- when she ran at me I lunged to the side, which caused a chorus of "ohs" from our audience, but it ended the same way. We had several matches, until finally one ended in a cow pie fight. We had a dinner of mac and cheese, and then Kallie attempted to make a cake (she used yeast since we didn't have baking powder, so it tasted like sweet bread.) Preston had trouble putting the cap back on the white gas; he spilled a bunch on his rain pants. It looked dry, so you could imagine our surprise when I lit the stove and Preston's pants lit too. His crotchal region and his upper thigh area were alive with fire as he ran away from us yelling "I'm on fire you Jack A**!" Someone yelled "Stop Drop and Roll!!!" Which Preston did, and then he was out. We all laughed nervously as Preston walked cautiously back to us, as if he was worried that his pants would burst back into flames if he moved wrong. After closely examining his rain pants, which appeared to never have been on fire, he spilt more white gas on himself and we lit him on fire. YAY for stupid kids playing with fire in the middle of the woods. Luckily nothing bad happened, and after playing a few tricks on each other we turned in for the night.

The next day we summited our last peak, which was about a thousand vertical feet. We stopped at the top for a few hours and talked. We looked back to where we had come from, and then looked to where we were going. We talked about our memories of our month together, all the adventures we had had, all the challenges we had worked through. Then one by one we pulled our packs on and with heavy hearts we turned to the future and made our way down the peak, toward civilization. Little did we know our adventures hadn't ended quite yet.

That evening we stopped in a beautiful little clearing not seven miles away from our meet up point. After exploring the area for awhile, looming thunder clouds racing towards us made our instincts scream to set up camp. We had experienced quite a few storms, but this one continues to stand out in my memory. After double checking that our tents were properly staked down we started dinner. Kallie pulled out the food we had saved for this night; soon the aroma from the juicy fried onions and sausage filled the air as Preston stirred. I kneaded dough for cinnamon sticks, which was the second part of our three course meal. The second the onions and sausage had been served the cinnamon sticks were frying in the leftover grease. Our group moved as a unified force; cooking had become second nature, as had reading each others body language. Finally, as we started cooking the brownies, rain hit the rocks making the pitter patter we were highly accustomed to. Scott covered the bubbling chocolate with the dented lid we had been rationed with. Always hungry eyes were locked on the water evaporating off the lid as we salivated intently, with only one thing on our minds; the moment gooey chocolate would explode on our taste buds. A flash of lightning, we all froze in our tracks, counting, one, two th- three was cut off  from a crash of thunder from above, "LIGHTNING POSITION!!!" The boys rushed to their tent, but Kallie and I took shelter in a small cave not too far away from our kitchen site. Soon the lightning past and Scott came to report that Harry had hypothermia, again. We sent him back to the tent with a pile of burnt brownies, and a nalgene filled with hot water, with the order to come back if Harry got any worse. Kallie and I then started singing "Umbrella" by Rhianna. This angered the gods, for they sent down more lightning. Scrambling back into our cave, we changed the lyrics to "under my rain poncho," which was not followed by lightning. With the gods pleased it was now time to lustfully devour our long desired brownies. When the last of the  chocolaty goodness was gone, we let rain water pour into the pan and then after stirring a bit, drank something to the affect of chocolate milk, without the milk. Soon the rain started to let up. We looked across the green misty meadow, and it seemed as if the world was holding its breath. Absolute calm blanketed us in a sense of placid harmonious contentment.

There was something marvelous about sitting in that cave, succumbing to the will of larger forces, with our pan of brownies. While examining that memory a kind of awe overtakes me, makes me understand how small people are. To ourselves we are the world, but to the world we are a grain of sand in the Sahara desert. We have so little control over what happens around us, the only thing we can control is ourselves.

 

Ligeia

I think that Ligeia did, in fact, exist in one point in the narrators life. We have come to the conclusion that the narrator is unreliable. He's and opium addict, therefore he may not be able to remember certain things that happened in his life. The narrator states "And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that i have never known the paternal name of her who was Ligeia?" I think that the narrator realizes that he has holes in his memory and as a defense mechanism is making up things, such as never knowing his true loves paternal name. The narrator tells us he can't remember things, "...in our endeavors to recall tho memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember." One of his favorite things about Ligeia was her eyes, "Those eyes! those large, those shining those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and i to them devoutest of astrologers." At this point he remembers her dieing, and he remarried to the lady of Tremaine. I believe that in his drugged up stupor he poisoned his new wife, "Having found the wine... I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid." I think that a subconscious part of him thought that it was unfair for the lady of Tremaine to live while Ligeia was dead, so he killed the lady. As we come to the end of the story, I also come to the conclusion that he killed the lady Ligeia. When the lady of Tremaine died she turned into the lady Ligeia, I think he was so drugged up that he couldn't tell the difference between their deaths.

Weekly Response 6

    Transcendentalism was a movement that individualized certain ideals in the 1830s and 1840s. Transcendentalism was defined as "ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition." It focused mainly on Literature, Religion, Culture, Social Reform, and Philosophy. The two most important individuals behind transcendentalism were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Some major writers were Emily Dickonson and Nathanial Hawthorne, although Hawthorne was more of a critic, he was affected by transcendentalism. Edgar Allan Poe was another critic. Emerson and Thoreau founded a club called "the Hedge Club." They started two communal living projects, one near Boston and another near Harvard. The plan for the community was to bring together all kinds of artists to work together to build more financial security than they could get on their own. They believed that artists drew inspiration from a divine source. In the communities they followed a system was made by the French socialist Charles Fourier, who believed that in a properly organized society, people could accomplish all necessary social work by doing only what they were naturally inclined to do. Both these community failed.

    Most members of the group were active in other movements such as universal suffrage, antisabbatarianism, and anti slavery. They helped with the underground railroad, so obviously there were more transcendentalists in the north than in the south. The group published a journal called "the Dial." They also supported Feminism. The feminist, social reformer, and author Margaret Fuller was also a big part of the group. The transcendentalism ideals emerged from Unitarianism, which is a "liberal-Christian" church. German idealism also had an effect on the group. They had a tendency toward individualism, a belief in the importance of literature, and an interest in moral reform. They believed that god gave them ideas, so every thought was inspiration from God. The ideals of Transcendentalists were similar to those of Romantics.

Journal 2

    Assumptions. We all make them, and we all experience the affects of assuming things we don't know for certain. If you smile at someone and they look away with a certain look, you assume that they have something against you while in reality they're just having a bad day. Witnesses at a crime scene all report things slightly different, details stick out to certain people while the same details avoid other people's attention like they have the plague. Another thing to think about is when people talk they are never talking about the same thing. People have different backgrounds and have experienced different things so when someone talks about a "dog" one person may visualize a golden retriever while the other visualizes a Jack Russel Terrier. It made me laugh a little bit when a movie comes out that was originally a book, some people complain that it wasn't like the book at all. Sometimes they complain about how a character looks, which I find funny because I don't think it's very reasonable to get mad at the actor (director, etc., whoever you want to blame) just because they don't look the way you imagined they would or should.