Day at the beach

I've been to the beach a lot. Most often people are surfing or swimming or building a sand castle. Usually people are having fun with their families or sun bathing or are preoccupied with something, anything. This is not the case with Monsieur Meursault. He insists on making the most crass comments about a woman's appearance at the beach, a place where families generally go to have fun, not where a relatively young man goes to publicly display his lack of concern for others. Marie, a misguided girl, is Meursault's partner in crime, french kissing him in the waves where I can only assume at least fifteen people with their small children are feeling very uncomfortable while building their sand castles. To me, it's odd that this mismatched couple even exists, but the fact that they exercise excessive liberty in family settings is odder.

Crew

          I died today. Or last year maybe. I don't know. I got a text from the coach: "2k will kill you. Won't get any homework done tonight. Faithfully yours." That didn't mean anything at the time. Maybe it was last year.
          The boat house is in Marina Del Rey, about 20 miles from Sherman Oaks. I'll take the 2:30 bus and get there at 4:15. That way I can change at home, come dressed for the vigil, and be back in choir the next morning. I asked my teachers for the night off and they couldn't say yes. I had no excuse. And they weren't happy about it. I wanted to try "it's not my decision," but it is, somehow. They were collectively silent. Then I thought I shouldn't have asked at all. After all, I had no reason to slack off. I'm the one who should have prioritized. But I'll probably catch up the day after tomorrow, when I have to return from mourning. For now, it's almost as if I hadn't died. After the funeral though, I can get back to work and everything will be turned in.

Physics

In Kafka's the Metamorphosis Gregor and his father were always pressed to make enough money to pull their family out of a constant struggle to keep paychecks flowing. Unfortunately, Gregor's father's business went bankrupt and Gregor is forced to continuously work at a job that he despises. Him and I are so similar... To me the process of going through high school is just like Gregor's process of performing a job he hates until the family is out of debt, THEN he can finally quit! Unfortunately we all know that Gregor was massively disillusioned, and honestly the race of taking classes that we hate until we get to college THEN we can quit classes like Physics! Unfortunately, for all of us who have to take a core curriculum, we're all just as disillusioned as Gregor was when he was trapped in his own rat race, deceived by his father who had kept a little wealth from previous times. Our parents are keeping nuggets of knowlege that our journey through (what we see as unnecessary) core classes is only half finished.

Freedom and conformity: the complex dynamic between dependence, independence, and conformity

In a setting where a person is given responsibility, their singular option for getting a positive reaction from society is to conform to society's rules. This makes sense because on the whole there's no reason that any person would voluntarily give another person what they want without getting something in return. Examples of this range from relationships to economics. In all of these cases, people expect a consistent (or conformist) pattern of behavior. This dynamic changes once a person is no longer responsible for their own actions. When a person isn't held accountable for their actions, they have no reason to conform to expectations because there are no rewards for that conformity. This is an extremely complex topic and there are many nuances that exist within the accountability/conformity dynamic. Resources that deal with this issue range from biblical, the creation of Adam and Eve, to modern, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. In Metamorphosis as well as in Genesis, both stories explore the consequences and rewards of conformity, and come to the same decisive conclusion that conformity on the whole is more rewarding for individuals and society.

education and conformity

There is a large tendency among poor teachers to let students deny responsibility instead of accept consequences for their actions. Those who teach with with the opposite goal in mind encourage individual growth. The idea that success is defined as earning a high-powered job is something that schools and society are also inserting into the goals of students. If multiple people are inclined to achieve the same goal, and they're encouraged to grow individually, they will tend to grow in the same way. They will all try to be better than the rest in the same fields of study, they will be encouraged to conform while growing as individuals. Those who don't mature in the same way as the rest will fall behind in the quest for the same goal. So to give a person freedom by trusting them with the accountability of their own actions, causes them to conform to the expectations put on them by their society-imposed goal.