Monday, January 4, 2010

New Years Resolutions...

Well...here we are: 2010. And this year has been a long, and grueling trudge; sometimes you're flying through daisy fields in sunshine, and sometimes you're getting dragged face first across broken glass. But whatever happened, the year is over, and while an old door is shut, a new door opens! I'm looking foreward to a clean, clean, CLEAN slate.

If I could pick anything out of all the obvious ones (get good grades, be a nice person etc.), it would be to get to know my mom and my brother better. I think I've been really out of touch lateley. We see a little bit of eachother here and there, a passing remark thrown over our shoulders as we speed through our lives. Soon, my parent will grow old. She might develop dementia, cancer, or get hit by a bus on the way to the grocery store. And if the last thing I said to my mom was "...yeah, seeya, bye...", I don't think I could live with myself.

And my brother! He and I are the only people we've got in my family after my mom passes away. And if I never develop a relationship with him, and we become distant and move far away from eachother...that would be terrible. I mean, he's my brother!

It all basically works out for the better if I just take a bit more time to hang out with my family, and slow down a bit...


-Keenan

Sunday, January 3, 2010

This post is late because I haven't been allowed to used the computer at all since at least three days (or more) before break started...


Commentary: Animal Farm Project

I decided to write a poem, in all honesty, because I ran out of time. I had planned to make a movie, but schedule conflictions and a resulting lack of time made it impossible to make a quality project. And here we are!

I chose the theme “Power Corrupts” for a couple reasons. Firstly, it was my…“best” theme, because I had paid more attention to it than any of the others. I started to look at all the options, and decided my best chance was with power corrupts. When writing a poem (at least for me), I find it REALLY frustrating when I’m given a creative project, but I have guidelines that leave me no room for…creativity with content, just with word choice. PC is a really open ended theme: It only has two words, a sure sign of…open ended-ness, and because of this, it’s very unspecific. It leaves most of the thinking and planning and structure to the author, and as long as your poem is built around this central idea and it all wraps up at the end, whatever you want to put down will work.
My poem starts off sounding like…any other poem, though not necessarily about power (a few people said it sounded like a poem by an ex-drug addict). It first talks about a “drug” (power), and how it can effect (or is it affect?) you. It then moves on to compare the effects in real life to those on Animal Farm, and how the pigs reacted in comparison with how a person would (theoretically) react.

The final stanza (more of a sentence) reveals what the "drug"is and what, in essence, it does to one who gets a taste of it.

Keenan

POEM BELOW

A heart, cremated in a searing fire,

And drowning in a well of sorrowful tears,

Now feel the icy tendrils of desire,

Which smother the mind in shattered dreams and fears,

And like a drug, one taste is all it takes,

To plant the seed inside your now damned soul,

And then it drives you past the breaking point,

And buries you alive in a self-dug hole,

You wear a mask of cruelty, and this drug made this true,

You notice only things that seem to make life better for you,

You sink to lower levels, to reach a higher place,

A false sense of reality, paints pictures on your face,

And like the pigs on Animal Farm, what you have is never enough,

And you will exploit any and all, to get a bit more of the stuff,

It’s clenched inside your fist now, you take it without a second thought,

You build upon what you already have,

And you thicken the sinister plot,

Of what your life has been so absorbed with since you had your first taste,

Power, it is a corrosive rust upon your heart and soul, it corrupts the morals, and kills the senses, surrounds you with one central goal: Get more.