Write on for 11.29.05

In the course of your Social Action Plans you may encounter people who have different ideas about equality and social justice than you do. You may have to prove them wrong. Or on the other hand, you may be proven wrong in the course of your study. Your write-on today is on what it feels like to be completely wrong. Write it on your own blog.

Write-on question:
What does it feel like to be wrong or be caught doing something wrong? (Describe either the feeling or an event in which you were wrong.)

My Example:
I bought a Zippo lighter when I was in the eighth grade. It was silver with engraved stripes. I thought that I was so cool flipping it open and closed in my pocket. I loved the clicking noise that it made. I did tricks with it as I showed it off to my brothers. That was my mistake. This move proved to be the wrong move because my mother found out about it. She demanded the lighter. She demanded an explanation. Because I had made at least one wrong move (whether it was showing my brothers, or buying the lighter in the first place, I'm still not sure), I had to give her these things. I did not revel in my wrong-ness, in fact I quite hated it. I hated the feeling of having to explain my actions. I loathed the thought of having to show remorse. I was wrong, yes, but not on purpose.

Write on for 11.14.05

Write On for 11.14.05
What movie, t.v. show, book, or famous quote have you used in normal conversation? Why did you use this quote? What about this quote is better than your own words?

My Quote:
So it goes. -Slaughter House Five (The character says this after anything dies in the book).
I use this quote because I haven't found anything better to say about death. It is so enigmatic and final that this seems like the only thing that can be said. I also like seeming smart by referencing a little known book and movie.

The Blog Requirements

Your absolute bare minimum requirements for your blog this quarter are as follows (In no particular order):
1. A Rant Post
2. A Loved Post
3. A Valuable Post
4. A Stolen Post
5. Comments on other blogs from each of the first two posts.
6. Nominations for all four categories on the main page.
7. Your collage displayed next to your Loved post.
8. An answer for at least one of the seven questions on the main page in a comment on that post.
9. A hand written reflection letter on your experiences with blogging (What did you learn about your writing and yourself through this blogging project, what could have been changed in order to make more learning happen, what experiences did you have that were memorable or significant within your blog? etc.)

Wilkoff Valuable and Stolen Awards

Nominate the best Valuable stories or Stolen poems in the following categories and make sure you tell why you are nominating them, or they will not count. We will have an mini-awards ceremony tomorrow.

1. Strongest words in a post.
2. Most reckless use of the human body.
3. The post that everyone should read.

Stolen Words

As I started to tell you yesterday, your next post will consist of stolen words. You will be (or have been already) seeking out the strongest words, phrases and sentences from other people's blogs. You will pick them out and use them as your own. Then you will explain exactly how these words are so powerful. It will go something like this:

"Every sharp burst of pain you get when you fall down a flight of stairs..."
-The word burst is what gets me. It seems to say that the pain will be intense and unpredictable, but because I will be falling down stairs it will come as a cycle of tumbling.
"She is worth welding my palms together."
-This sentence seems so unlikely that it stands out. Using skin as a metal that melts together is such an eirie thought that I have to try imagining it.
"I was bloody and bruised or scraping myself with shattered glass until I was skinless."
-The image of someone being responsible for their own skinlessness is so graphic and wonderful. I almost wish I had the description of how a skinless person looks with all of his/her intestines hanging out, just so I could visualize it more.
"I will injure you to the point of exhaustion, extinction."
-The statement of "extinction" points out that everything you stand for is dead, and not just you. It is so strong, such a condemning word.
"...the emptiness in your room."
-This image is so personal and intimate. I like it for its purity.
"...run into a million poles untill my head started to bleed."
-I'm not quite sure if this is a row of poles or just one pole hitting her head over and over, but either way it is so nonsensical that it stands out. I wonder how big the poles are, though.
"shave off all my hair and eat it."
-To me, this is the worst offense of all. I can't stand the feeling of hair in my mouth, let alone hair in my stomach. It truly sickens me.

You may also, for extra credit, convert these lines into a fluid poem of your own design. You may only use the words contained in your stolen line (you may not add anything, but you can take stuff away). Here is an example.

Scraping with shattered glass
All of my hair.
Every sharp burst of pain
Welds my wrists together.
The emptiness of your room:
Skinless, Extint.

Pictures to grab for your loved posts.

Your Post #3...

A ransom note creates a value for an invaluable thing (a person, a memorable object). This process of putting a monetary or objective value on a personal thing seems cold and unfeeling, but it is something that is worth exploring. What is your best friend worth? What is the value of your favorite stuffed animal? What would you do to get back your hoodie signed by your favorite band? These are the questions that I would you to answer in your next post. I want you to put a price on emotional connection. Mine would go something like this.

My wife is worth pain. She is worth scraping sandpaper across my face. She is worth the back end of a hammer to my knee. She is worth running until my lungs bleed. She is worth charging at barbed wire with my eyes open. My wife is worth pain.

or

My computer, my pets, my collection of music, all of the cards and letters that I keep in a box in the closet. I will burn all of these things in a fire so hot that not even my dog's whimper would escape. I will punch through walls and trip defenseless little kids. I will do these things to save my songs. That is what they are worth to me.


This is going to be one you will have to think about because putting a worded value on things that are too valuable for words is hard. Try it though, you may realize just how important these things are to you.

The Wilkoff Loved Awards

The process for nominating an outstanding post is similar to our Rant postings. You comment to this post and write which user's post best fits a certain award category, then you must explain why this post deserves to win the specified category. If there is no explanation, the nomination will not be counted. The categories for the Loved posts are:

1. Best facial description in a post.
2. Best portrayal of "Real Life." in a post (showing reality without making it look too good or bad).
3. The Loved Post that everyone should read (The post that leaves you feeling most loved).

Your Next Post

Today I would like to guide the next post on your blog. Our last post was all about anger. This post will be all about love. Before you start to groan, I will state for the record that you are not going to create a post of a lovely memory, or a memory that describes how you fell in love, or how much you just love your parents. We think about our own love way too much already. "I love Fridays." "I love that skirt." "I love skateboarding." We concentrate so much of our lives on the ways in which we love things. This post is going to be of a moment in which someone else showed love to you. However, this moment cannot be ruled by any other emotion. Your moment cannot be of your parents mixing worry with their love when they told you not to stay out too late and it cannot be about both pride/envy and love when your friends helped to win a game or they set you up with a friend. This moment should be of pure love from one other person to you. You may have a lot of trouble coming up with this moment (I was able to find it by brainstorming a list of all of my best friends throughout my life and then thinking about things they had given me or important moments that we have shared), but when you do find it, I want you to describe the loving person's face in detail within your memory. Their face is the key to understanding this moment and figuring out why you still remember and cherish it. Post this description of pure love to your blog. Mine goes like this:

We pulled up, as we often did, to the park that no one knew about. It was far away from the normal crowd of town rats that waited for nighttime to bite them before they could come alive. Chris and I slowly crept into a parking space long forgotten by other cars. Straight ahead of us were thick woods that held the many mysteries of these moments. Chris reached into his backpack and brought out a CD, cradling it in his hands. He said it would change my life. And it did. As the harmonies started to stack in my ears, I saw Chris making sure I heard each distinctly. His fingers tapped gently on the dashboard, and every few songs he would pause the CD, hoping that I had understood the importance of how those notes and words played with each other. Then he would press play again and let his eyes dance along with the infectious beats. I can still see this moment, with Chris' hair long and unwashed, with his cheeks dotted with imperfections, with his inviting smile that said "I just couldn't keep this to myself." Although Chris and I have lost touch, I know that he would remember what he gave me that night. I know he would remember as the dusk faded in and we listened to the 13-minute track about loneliness, that with his eyebrows lifted in anticipation, he had shown me love.

Question #7

Are we all truly created equal?

Question #6

Are we "chosen" for all of the diseases we get throughout our lives?

Question #5

How can we stop living in the shadows of others?
During our lifetime, how do we make a name for ourselves?

Question #4

Why do we worry about what others think of us?
How do we stop worrying about what others think of us?

Question #3

How should we deal with the rude/annoying people in our lives?

Question #2

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Question #1

Why do we become frustrated over current events?

And the winners are:

For The Angriest Rant:
I Love Love

For The Funniest Rant:
PrettyPonies1

For The Rant That Everyone Should Read (The Most Important Rant):
QueenOfCorn

Finding The Big Ideas

These rants (hopefully) have been rather therapeutic. They have let you scream in your writing and get out all of your anger in a fairly harmless way. They have also let you react to things that you don't normally get a chance to. But, I had a grander scheme in mind when I asked you to start writing these rants. I wanted you to start thinking about the many injustices (unfair things in your life) you have had to go through as teenagers. As comments on this post, I would like to have an online discussion about the many things that are unfair or just plain wrong that happen to you in the course of growing up. So, look back at your rant and at the rants of your classmates and come up with a few of the most important or most horrific things that you face on a yearly/daily basis. If this paragraph didn't make any sense to you, think about it like this:

From reading these rants, what are the worst things that you have deal with every day?

Answer this question as a comment to this post.

The Wilkoff Rant Awards

After all blog posting assignments we will have a short awards post. You will be able to nominate your favorite post for this particular assignment in a few different categories. In order to nominate a post/blog you will need to comment to the awards post on our main page. You will write the blogger's user name and why you think that their post (a rant in this case) is the best one for this particular category. Your nomination will not count unless it is accompanied by a good explanation for why the post that you have chosen should win.

The categories for Rants are:

1. The Angriest Rant
2. The Funniest Rant
3. The Rant That Everyone Should Read (The Most Important Rant)

Welcome

You are about to create one of the first communities of memories that deals completely with universal ideas and events. This is the central page on which you will find exact assignments for digging up and writing down Universal Memories. This page will also be linked to all of your individual Blogs, so that we can comment on each Universal Memory as it is posted. Your main goal for this project is to reach deep into your past and pull out relevent stories told with honesty that can cast new light upon your modern day personality and life. You will learn how to write with an eye for sensory details to support your stories. You will comment on each others' experiences in such a way that it create truth for all to see. You will not settle for talking about "your favorite summer vacation" or "the person you hate most." You will see through these moments and try to find the reason for the desisions you have made. Together we will form a true community of writers, who encourage and prolong each others' craft. Each one of you will chisel out his or her own place on the internet, and because of this you will own your writing. You will reveal things, but keep them close to you. You will become concious of the things you try to hide. This is only the place to start from, where you go from here is entirely up to you.
-Mr. Wilkoff