Book of knowledge

At West Point, the cows (juniors) will be hazing the plebes (freshmen) a lot... There are lots of different methods of hazing us. They range from restrictions on how to eat my food, who I'm allowed to date, and even how much sleep I get. The most infamous method of hazing, though, is the book of knowledge. The book of knowledge is (you guessed it) just a book filled with facts and songs and poems etc. It's about the size of The Stranger, and we have to memorize everything inside of it. This includes how many lights are in the lunch hall, how many lights were in the lunch hall 20 years ago, word for word and letter for letter the preamble to the constitution. If I'm ever asked certain questions like "How is the cow, plebe Murray?" my answer has to be, "Sergeant, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk; the lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the Nth degree!" That's a little ridiculous isn't it!?!?!?!?!?
That's just memorizing stuff, the hard part is when I can't answer. If I ever answer a question wrong or don't know an answer, I have to accept whatever punnishment that cow wants to give me. It might be 20 push-ups, it might be 70 push-ups, it might be two minutes of plank. Whatever it is, it's bound to suck... I'm terrible at memorizing things so I better get in really good shape soon ^^

my pre-college checklist

These are things that I need/want all my friends to help me finish before I go to college.

1. Reach my fitness goals
2. Make sure that everyone I care about knows that I care about them
3. Write a will
4. Have a hell of a lot of fun at prom
5. Learn how to surf
6. Learn how to dance
7. FTT
8. Play a baseball game
9. Go hiking a lot
10. Figure out  how to ask my mother to let me go to war.

my bucket list

Lemme start by sayin that if I had to die tomorrow that I wouldn't have any regrets. These aren't things I have to do before I die, just things I want to do before I die.

1. Climb a mountain
2. Go camping in the arctic tundra
3. Get married
4. Have kids
5. Make something happen with my mind
6. Drag race a car on a dry salt-bed
7. Stay up all night watching a meteor shower
8. Visit Death Valley while it's in bloom
9. Go to Canada, Russia, Chile, Egypt, Brazil, the Vatican, Greece, Mecca, Japan, Australia, Mongolia, India, China, South Africa, Alaska, Ireland, Madrid
10. Go on an epic, All-American road trip through the rockies, the great plains, and the deep south
11. Spend a day chillin with the monkey herds in the plateaus of Ethiopia
12. Go spelunking in kokoweif mountain
13. Hang out with Ravi way more

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.