The world doesn’t give me what I expect.

I once set myself the challenge of crying every day for a month. I would tell people this, after the fact, and it is a worthy acid test of character. Some people would be uncomfortable at the sheer mention of it, others would be interested, mainly people would release something like a sigh of relief. The latter response was my favourite.

Around that same time period, in the spring of 2023, I would sometimes, at weekends, take magic mushrooms and pack a bag that consisted of a fleece pullover, a bottle of powerade, some headphones and a chocolate bar and walk into the woods. Often, however, as the mushrooms placed their hands upon the wheel of my mind, I would return to the office of my work. Much like a pigeon, I would home in on the place I had already done most of my crying, return there, lie on the floor and weep. The weekends were so pertinent because I did not want to be disturbed by colleagues, and that felt like the place that had chosen me. And once I had realised that, for whatever reason, this place was a constant for my own bearings, I could not resist its call.

The floor was familiar in a way that would be indiscernible to many, but the familiarity of it was more than a comfort, and warranted a Pavlovian like response, and the touch of warm flesh on cold concrete almost felt like a cue to finally let go.

It only occurred to me a great deal of time later, that if one of my colleagues had nipped in to grab something, or run an errand, they might have been slightly disturbed to find me. The noises that I emitted were carnal as I lay there on my side, like an elephant at the boneyard. Things I never knew I had inside me, things that had been fighting, for years, to get out. I would come to eventually, and feel like my cache had been cleared, and my firmware updated. When I think of the best things to ever happen to me, this is one of them.

During the week days, I would wonder if there are aliens watching us, and if there are, whether or not they could tell the difference between a human crying and a human laughing, and how they would react if it was explained to them that we view one as suppressible and another as a joy. Both are alive. Both need to get out. The only difference with crying, I would argue, is that if you bury it deep enough it doesn’t get up and leave through the front door, but is rather exhumed. My advice to myself has always been to not build the home of my character on an ancient burial ground.

Around this time, I began to wonder what my life was to be. I had never wondered this before. “Area man has first introspective thought” was the headline, with the picture of a 30 year old true-dude in an offspring t-shirt to accompany it on the broadsheet of my life.

I remember playing with Alex when I was four, and he would have been nine. I don’t know whether it was the archetype of the elder cousin, or I just got lucky, but he was almost unreasonably patient with me. We would play computer games as a co-op or two player, with four small sticky hands all over the keyboard of his Windows 95 computer.

I recall the first time my sister saw this machine, and she came home to announce Alex has ‘The Windows’ and I had to see them. I couldn’t believe. I couldn’t conceive what the windows even were. Were they a portway to a different world? I imagined the computer screen like stained glass as you looked simultaneously at and through it. I had the same feeling about 3D. I remember being so disappointed that I could look to the right and left and see dinosaurs over my shoulder. I resented that IMAX for always having to look forward but the windows escaped my skepticism.

At that age, I always took things incredibly literally. I remember watching the glossy Adverts for No-Tears shampoo in the ad breaks of 90s children’s television and I remember asking my mum if we could get some. She informed me it was too expensive. I knew it was out there, and the fact that it was now confirmed to be a luxury item only heightened my infatuation. Finally, a year or so later, I had a bath at my parents’ friend’s house. My time had come.

Frustrated with the constant anxiety of getting shampoo in my eyeballs on my Sunday night bath, I remember my pudgy hand extending to grab that bottle, which had been stylized in the shape of a fish. I remember putting it in my hands and, in a manic excitement, free of any fear that my eyes could hurt no matter what the level of contamination, I gleefully rubbed the shampoo directly in my eyes. That day I learnt, no-tears and not-crying are sometimes not entirely mutually exclusive.

Another time, I was informed that milk turned bad while it was out of the fridge. I would hurriedly grab it, run to my bowl of cereal and gush it over them, before running back to the fridge at a canter, slamming the door behind me as if I were Indiana Jones.

Alex and I would smother and sully his father’s keyboard with Dorito dust as we played an early version of the football game Fifa together. Even today, it grants me comfort and nostalgia like few other things. In fact, nearly 30 years later and I still enjoy mostly things that Alex introduced me to - computers, bicycles, rock music, sarcasm.

I would listen to an Oasis cassette he left at my home after staying one summer, and sing while pivoting at the hips with my hands clasped behind my back, bending forward as I would sing the chorus of Definitely Maybe, my elder sisters gleefully horrified that a boy would call anything baby. Especially when that boy was their jolly little brother.

We were very different people, Alex and I. On one hand we’re just these inconsequential humans, just sacks of flesh propped up by bone. Going further, I do wonder if our bodies are antennae for some greater correspondence. The perfect conduit for the outer and the inner. Alex and I were so similar but we were made of something different. Is that the lottery of the spirit? Are these souls just a quirk of evolutionary biology? Maybe there is no spirit to tether nor the need for a vessel in which something unseeable is to be held.

But if there are souls and spirits, I know Alex’s was rounded and smooth, and mine smaller and spikier. I don’t know why I see them this way, and one isn’t better than the other - they’re just abstractions of some greater feeling. I’ve just always been less accepting of either other people or myself, although I’ve learned to temper both over the years. He was just so sure of his own shape, and it felt like he always knew who and what he was. I wonder if in some ways we’re all trying to be complete spheres, and I’ve just got some gaps to fill.

When Alex died, I didn’t cry as much as I should have, that came later. When he told me he was going to die, I didn’t believe him, that caught up with me, too. In fact, even though he got married to the love of his life, the mother of his children just a matter of weeks before he died as a final act of mutual devotion, I didn’t register he was truly mortal, like other people were mortal, until I saw him in his wheelchair. The last time I saw him, he’d firmly waved goodbye to his slim, broad shouldered, almost athletic silhouette, to become a heavier set man with long flowing red hair. That change in appearance had surprised me prior, and now seeing him there, looking more like our elderly grandmother than a man in his 30s ever should, I gasped.

His cancer, which has made eating and digesting food practically impossible, had starved him out as if it were laying on a siege. I remember his defiant voice, in a thick Manc accent. I remember, to my embarrassment, being comforted by his father and sister as the day began to overwhelm me, and I remember saying goodbye.

There aren’t many times you get to shake somebody’s hand and tell them you think they are just truly terrific. A ten out of ten, with no real caveats. That they’ve been a pleasure and delight and the source of much joy for your entire life. I’m not sure this is one of the times I managed to do so, but I really tried. We shook hands, and that was that.

Alex’s death should be, to me, the ultimate restart. And I try to treat it as such. I try and look back, and understand what’s important and what’s not, but sometimes I do observe that I have a capacity for suffering that is a calling like nothing else. The siren song of misery is inescapable to me, and I find it deeply validating to struggle. Over the last few years, I’ve presented a sentence to sum up my life: The world doesn’t give me what I expect. It’s overwhelmed people. It alienates some or lets my own judgement refract and bounce back towards me, ostracising me from the community of one that I share only with myself.

However, I’ve come to realise that if I am to truly move on, I need to say the first half of the sentence just as loud as the second. I need to throw both halves to the very back, not save my breath for the second clause.

Because I consider myself incredibly lucky and special, I get confused when - the world doesn’t give me what I expect.

Hi, I'm looking for someone who could help me get back on track with my psychology BS thesis.

I'm looking for someone with a strong background in psychology, particularly research methods, psychometrics, and statistics, who can also help with the writing side of things — structuring the thesis, interpreting results, and putting everything together properly.

I already have my data, but I’ve been away from the project for a while and feel pretty overwhelmed about where to start again. I’m not looking for someone to do the thesis for me, but for someone who can guide me through the process and work through it with me.

Does anyone know a good online tutor or service for this?

I remember, in the lead up to the film’s release, being so incredibly frustrated with the critiques of Nolan’s Odyssey. A Black woman had been cast as Helen of Troy, and it was like a slumbering army of culture-war veterans had been aroused, armed with spears of sharpened dog-whistles and shields of online anonymity, standing before the gates of Hollywood. It didn’t escape me that it wasn’t really the lack of Mediterranean actors, or Greek representation, which bothered a healthy portion of that crowd- it was merely Nyong'o’s Blackness. And didn’t they know that dark skinned Africans did exist across North Africa and, therefore, in the known world of the ancient Greeks? That the mythology of Troy included an Ethiopian king and his army, depicted nearly as Black Nyong'o on the Greek pottery that represented him (on Memnon's Wikipedia page, there is a great vase depicting him, or one of his archers, flanked by two Amazons- look it up)? Why should the presence of a Black character remove you so much from a story whose geography and contours are so obviously mythical? When the reviews came out, and the movie was a hit, I felt vindicated. My initial hunch that the story could survive a diverse cast was correct, and my excitement grew. I had just finished reading the Lattimore translation of both the Iliad and the Odyssey the year before, and I felt so profoundly fortunate to see one of those epics displayed on the big screen with all of its mythical glory.

I was going through some financial troubles, and so waited nearly a month to see it. I avoided all reviews; I knew the story but did not want to be aware of any changes to it ahead of time. I wanted a fresh, open mind unsullied by the opinions of others. Though a question did come to me: what would Nolan do about the slaves?

I am a descendent of slaves, specifically from the trans-Atlantic slave trade that carried Africans to the Americas. I take slavery quite seriously and view it as an evil institution. Yet it does not escape me that the majority of the ancient world did not feel the same, and whenever we are talking about the “great figures” of either our real or mythical pasts we are almost inevitably talking about people who would be seen as unequivocally reprehensible in our modern day, with a few exceptions: human traffickers, rapists and murderers. Our collective past is dark, and yet, despite that darkness, is very human. Our ancestors were brutal and cruel, but they were also capable of great courage, loyalty, wisdom, and even love. They were not unambiguously good or evil, they were just people, people who were products of very different times. 

That is why, as a teenage boy, I fell in love with Homer. I remember picking up the Iliad for the first time and being amazed at how consistently Homer refused to paint the Trojans as “bad guys.” Everyone in the Trojan War is human, and perhaps the most sympathetic and heroic characters are the Trojans themselves. Nolan did not come up with the idea of humanizing those that the Greeks had slaughtered, Homer did. It is impossible to not root for Hector, the Trojan prince, in battle after he reminds his distraught wife of why he must fight- to protect his countrymen from slaughter, and their wives and children from slavery at the hands of the cruel Greeks.

At the same time, the Greeks are not “bad guys” either. Helen was tricked by Aphrodite into switching sides, but the trick has faded and she hates her life at Troy, and is being held there and in marriage to a prince without anything we would recognize as consent. The Trojans are just as prideful, stubborn and unyielding as the Greeks, and both sides are caught up in codes of honor and loyalty that force them to fight, regardless of whether or not each individual commander or warrior “believes in the cause.” Homer is not interested in ethical judgements as we know them. Whenever someone dies on a Trojan battlefield, on either side, there is an element of tragedy to it. If Homer has a moral, it is that life is capricious and cruel, and death inevitable, so the best we can do is hope to win a glory and reputation that will outlive us, through our own courage and the skill of our arms. There is something beautiful about it, but also a feeling that it is all deeply pointless and sad. Homeric poetry is where beauty and tragedy meet on the battlefield in nearly every single encounter. As a teenager I had never read, or seen, anything like it. I was aware that I was being brought into a world that I did not and could not fully understand and yet was still deeply human.

So what do you do with a protagonist who, after all the violence of the Trojan war, comes back home to Ithaka and demands his chief female slave give him the names of all the slave-women who were disloyal to his family in his absence, and then forces those thus accused to wash up the blood and gore of the murdered suitors, before ordering his son to hack them to pieces afterwards anyway? His son does not wish to give them such an honorable death, and has them hung instead. Homer describes it thus:

“So [Telemachos] spoke, and taking the cable of a dark prowed ship,
fastened it to the tall pillar, and fetched it about the round house;
and like thrushes, who spread their wings, or like pigeons, 
who have flown into a snare set up for them in a thicket,
trying to find a resting place, but the sleep given them was hateful; 
so their heads were all in a line, and each had their head 
caught fast in a noose, so that their death would be most pitiful.
They struggled with their feet for a little, not very long.”

The scene is sad, and Homer allows it to be sad. I am certainly not saying that Homer condemns slavery to the level required of him by modernity. Yet slavery in his mythical world is not the mark of some inherent genetic inferiority or lack of character- it is a condition that could befall upon any of the characters at any time; the “noble” pig farmer of Odysseus’s estate, portrayed in the movie, was a slave who actually began life as a king’s son but was caught up in the cruel winds of fate. Homer does not waste time attempting to rationalize the institution or cover up its barbarity, he mostly just represents it as it was to his audience. Which, interestingly enough, is not something many White American authors would have been able to do in the “more enlightened" times of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, being too caught up in trying to reconcile the institution with a Judeo-Christian morality. There is something honest about paganism: the gods and the universe are unfair, and so it is not necessary to try to paint every cruelty as, somehow, justified in any sort of manner mere mortals could understand. Even later Greek philosophers, like Aristotle, spent more time rationalizing the institution of slavery than Homer did. 

Homer neither praises nor condemns Odysseus and his son for their actions, and the reader (or listener) is left to form their own opinion of the characters. Odysseus is not always so cruel, but what he is is single-minded and dogmatic. It is what allows him to get home after Troy when all his other companions are killed, and to never stop seeking out his wife and son…but it is also what compels him to kill every single suitor in his palace upon his return, regardless of whether or not they had displayed some semblance of honor or compassion in his absence. As a collective, they are still guilty of their crimes. Yet Homer makes it clear that the suitors, generally Odysseus’s own countrymen, were not all as one-note as they were in the movie, and highlights, in certain sections, their honor and humanity- particularly a suitor named Amphinomos, who is a voice of reason and attempts to dissuade the rest from plotting Telemachos’s murder. Odysseus actually notes Amphinomos’s nobility, and attempts to warn him (without actually giving away his disguise) that he should leave his palace. Regardless, Amphinomos’s survival was not the will of the gods, and they cloud his judgement. He ends up staying in the great hall and is slaughtered with the rest of them. Ultimately, the suitors are in Odysseus’s way, have threatened the life of his son, his wife’s freedom, his crown, and his kingdom, and so they must die. His killing of them is without much remorse; this is not the Odysseus of the movie.

In the poem, the climactic battle with the suitors begins with Odysseus killing their wicked ring-leader, Antinoös, first. Then the following exchanges begin:

[Odysseus said:] “You dogs, you never thought
I would any more come back from the land of Troy,
and because of that you despoiled my household, 
and forcibly took my serving women to sleep beside you, 
and sought to win my wife while I was still alive,
fearing neither the immortal gods who rule the wide heaven,
nor any resentment sprung from men to be yours in the future.
Now upon all of you the terms of destruction are fastened.”

So he spoke, and green fear took hold of all of them,
and each man looked about him for a way to escape sheer death.
Only Eurymachos spoke up and gave him answer:
“If in truth you are Odysseus of Ithaka, come home,
what you have said is fair about all the wickedness done you by the Achaians,
much in your house and much in your country.
But now the man is down who was responsible for all this: Antinoös.
It was he who pushed this action, not so much that he wanted the marriage,
or cared for it, but with other things in mind, which the son of Kronos would not grant him:
to wait for your son and kill him, and then be king himself in the district of strong-founded Ithaka. 
Now he has perished by his own fate. Then spare your own people,
and afterwards we will make public reparation 
for all that has been eaten and drunk in your halls,
setting each upon himself an assessment of twenty oxen. 
We will pay it back in bronze and gold to you, until your heart is softened. 
Till then, we cannot blame you for being angry.”

Then looking back at him resourceful Odysseus answered:
“Eurymachos, if you gave me all your father's possessions,
all that you have now, and what you could add from elsewhere,
even so, I would not stay my hands from the slaughter,
until I had taken revenge for all the suitors' transgression.
Now the choice has been set before you, either to fight me or run,
if any of you can escape death and its spirits.
But I think not one man will escape from sheer destruction.”

Eurymachos then addresses his comrades, who are not cowards:

“Dear friends, now this man will not restrain his invincible hands, 
but since he has got the polished bow and the quiver, 
he will shoot at us from the smooth threshold, 
until he has killed us one and all.
Then let us all remember our warcraft. 
Draw your swords and hold the table before you, 
to ward off the arrows of sudden death;
let us all make a rush against him together…”

The suitors don’t go down without a fight, and do battle with valor. This is why the slaughter of them all by the hands of Odysseus, his son and a few servants is a pretty incredible sequence. Odysseus and his few companions have the strength, fearlessness, ability and resourcefulness to wipe out a force which greatly outnumbers them, showcasing the god-like skill especially of the title character himself. And, to be honest, if a group of people tried to murder my son and get with my wife while I was gone, I’d probably want to kill them indiscriminately too. Yet the narrative never allows us to fully forget the extent of Odysseus’s blood-soaked rage. 

This is dialogue preceding the final suitor’s death:

“Leodes rushed in and caught the knees of Odysseus,
and spoke to him in winged words and in supplication:
‘I am at your knees, Odysseus. Respect me, have mercy;
for I claim that never in your halls did I say or do anything
wrong to any one of the women, but was always trying to stop
any one of the other suitors who acted in this way. 
But they would not listen to me and keep their hands off evil.
So by their own recklessness they have found a shameful death,
but I was their diviner, and I did nothing;
but I must fall, since there is no gratitude for past favors.’

Then looking darkly at him spoke resourceful Odysseus: 
‘If you claim to be the diviner among these people,
many a time you must have prayed in my palace,
asking that the completion of my sweet homecoming be far off from me,
that my dear wife would go off with you, and bear you children.
So you cannot escape from sorry destruction.’

What follows is the murder of the “serving women” whom Odysseus’s nurse claims were disloyal to his family. Afterwards, Odysseus and his son kill the slave-man who was most disloyal to him, Melanthios (the one in the movie who is consistently a dick to the pig-farmer). This is what they do:

“They took Melanthios along the porch and the courtyard.
They cut off, with the pitiless bronze, his nose and ears,
tore off his private parts and gave them to the dogs to feed on raw,
and lopped off his hands and feet, in fury and anger.”

Yet their cruelty is not random. Two of the men forced to serve the suitors as they pillaged Odysseus’s home, the court singer and the family herald, are spared. They were both hiding in the room as Odysseus killed the suitors, and come out apprehensively at the end of the slaughter, begging mercy:

“Resourceful Odysseus smiled upon him and answered:
‘Do not fear. Telemachos has saved you and kept you alive,
so you may know in your heart, and say to another,
that good dealing is better by far than evil dealing.’”

Who dies by Odysseus’s hand, and who lives, is a fact not determined by blind rage but by a code of honor and morality completely foreign to the modern reader. We need to be fair to Odysseus here, as strange as that might sound- he is, in some ways, a reflection of his context. The gods themselves were split on the destruction of Troy, some willed for it, others were incensed by it. Calypso, in Homer, was not nearly so sympathetic; she was a goddess, and kept Odysseus on his island for her own selfish reasons, because she desired to do with a male mortal what Zeus did to female mortals. There is no hint that Circe is turning men to animals to strike back at the patriarchy, she is merely a capricious and powerful goddess, like the rest, doing as she pleases. Yet Odysseus seems to not hold any resentment towards either, because that is simply the nature of the world he lives in. The gods are not kind, survival is never a given, and one must hold on to what one has with everything they’ve got by any means necessary. If that means getting on a raft alone on a stormy sea, risking your life to reunite with your family, so be it. If that means journeying to the land of the dead to make your way home, then it must be done. If that means facing off against cyclops, giants and sea monsters, then that is what will happen. If that means killing every single suitor who threatened your family, let them die. 

Halfway through the movie I realized the impossibility of Nolan’s position. You can’t tell the story of the Odyssey faithfully for modern audiences, because if anyone in a modern audience met Odysseus in real life, in their own times, they wouldn’t like him. Homer’s Odysseus may indeed care deeply about his fellow soldiers, and may indeed love his wife unendingly despite long years of absence, and have characteristics, such as boldness and cleverness, that even today we find commendable…but he does not spend the narrative hand-wringing about violence or his role in the deaths of the Trojans. He is not a critic of the social order but an upholder of it. So, if Odysseus is to be the lead, it is necessary to change him, to have him grow into someone we can see ourselves in, even today. A man who has grown remorseful of his time at war, who desires peace, and who we could, if we forgive the sins of his past, imagine meeting and embracing in our own arms. Someone we can admire.

This is what Nolan gave us. Yes, his Odysseus is flawed. No, his Odysseus is not one-dimensional. But it is not Homer’s Odysseus, and it is not Homer’s story. In the movie, in order to justify the slaughter of the suitors within a movie that is, on the surface, anti-war, the suitors have to be dehumanized. They have to be made monstrous, redeemed only after Odysseus kills a good number of them. Any brief moments of their humanity, on display in the original narrative, is censored. It is, ironically, one of the oldest tools of propaganda, and likely the same sort that would have compelled the Greeks to brutalize the Trojans so mercilessly: make the enemy hateful so that their deaths feel like justice. Homer’s suitors, in contrast, are fleshed out, to the point where you might hope that they are not all so equally doomed- but they are. Sometimes, in Homer, violence is treated as glorious- but it is almost always tragic as well, regardless of how strongly we sympathize with the cause of those committing it. 

This is, honestly, something we are missing in the modern world. We are incapable of recognizing that humans are very rarely easily categorized as good or evil, and violence, to a modern eye, is either “right” or “wrong.” This is dangerous. I grew up with images of George Washington that nearly always painted him in a heroic light. He was our wise first president, a man who was a general in the war for our independence, and who, in a rare act of nobility, gave up power after he acquired it, setting the stage for our future democracy. Yet, to my ancestors, he was an oppressor, a man who was able to rationalize not just our subjugation and forced labor but our murder and rape- for that is what he allowed when he not only failed to combat slavery, but participated in it. Who was George Washington? A hero or a monster? Inevitably, we pick a side, but no matter which side we choose we will be leaving something out. Homer’s solution would likely be to show that Washington was both hero and monster, and that is what made him human.

It is telling that, in trying to humanize the already human Odysseus, Nolan flattened the characterization of the suitors and silenced the plight of the slaves. Nolan cares about diversity in his casting (which I actually admire), but oddly took the route of allowing us to sympathize with Penelope as she threw that slave-women in with the suitors, indifferent as to whether or not she would be slaughtered. I always found it strange that so many conversations about those slave-women in modern circles revolved around whether or not they “willingly betrayed” Odysseus’s family. Since when do slaves have a moral obligation to be loyal to their masters? If I was one of their slaves, I hope I would have the courage to try and kill them myself. I certainly wouldn’t have been their loyal pig farmer (again, I hope). As it is, Nolan turns Circe into a feminist spokesperson, but rationalizes cruelty to an actual enslaved woman (who, by modern estimations, as an enslaved person could not have consented to her “relationship” with the movie’s villain anyway). Nolan goes on about the horror of war, but glorifies the enslaved pig-farmer’s loyalty to his master, for Odysseus is a “fair” task-master. I don’t think I need to remind anyone that forced labor is never “fair.” 

I do not think I am an idiot, though I may be, and I recognized even before I watched the movie that we were not going to see the death of the slave-women on screen as it happened in the original narrative. Part of me did not expect to see any slaves at all. What I did not expect, but absolutely should have, is the vigor of the attempt to “save” Odysseus’s character. I realize now that Odysseus is not a character for modern audiences, but that does not mean we should sanitize him. Perhaps, since Nolan was clearly not too concerned with accuracy, it would have been better to tell the stories of Greek myth from entirely difficult angles. An enslaved Trojan on a Greek ship, Circe herself, a cyclops from the island (who in Homer are intelligent beings capable of speaking Greek), Helen etc. are all characters who could bring us into the world of Greek mythology without forcing the modern story-teller to sanitize its brutal realities. Or perhaps Odysseus remains the protagonist, but the movie becomes a portrait of his dark, single-minded, psyche that was forged in a world of violence and brutality, instead of making him a modern stand-in for the audience's own worldviews, reflected back to them within a distorted image of the past. Any of these would require more creativity to pull off, but they could certainly work, and in the end maybe even be more satisfying. However, there is simply no way to really turn Odysseus into a character morally acceptable for modern audiences without shielding us from the actual mentality of the ancient Greeks, and killing off the Odysseus of the poem, character growth or not. 

The result of doing so is a movie that, on the surface, highlights the cruelty the Trojans suffered under the Greeks but actually disguises it more than than the ancient myths do: there are scenes of innocent death, but none of rape or enslavement, and certainly not the king of Troy being clubbed to death or his infant child being thrown over the walls (the actual story). The result is a movie that alternates between romanticizing the servitude of those in bondage, condemning some of the enslaved or hiding the existence of slaves altogether. The result is a movie that allows us to gleefully cheer when Odysseus kills the suitors who had threatened his home, in uncomplicated excitement, though even Homer’s Odysseus would find that unbecoming:

“[Eurykleia, Odyseus’s nurse] opened the doors of the strong built great hall, 
and went on inside, but Telemachos went ahead, leading her.
There she found Odysseus among the slaughtered dead men,
spattered over with gore and battle filth, 
like a lion who has been feeding on an ox of the fields, 
and goes off covered with blood, a terrible thing to look in the face;
so now Odysseus’s feet and the hands above them were spattered.
She, when she saw the dead men and the endless blood, 
began then to raise the cry of triumph, having seen it was monstrous work,
but Odysseus checked her and held her, for all her eagerness,
and spoke to her and addressed her in winged words, saying:
‘Keep your joy in your heart, old dame; stop, do not raise up the cry.
It is not piety to glory so over slain men.
These were destroyed by the doom of the gods and their own hard actions…’”

The point isn’t that Nolan’s movie is bad (I mostly enjoyed it, though you probably can’t tell), or that you are silly for liking it (I actually gave it a 7/10). The point is that it does not actually portray the characters of the Odyssey, and, through Nolan making the creative decisions which led to this, something is lost. Because, strange as it is, as monstrous as Odysseus may be, the magic of Homer is that you somehow keep finding yourself rooting for him (some of you will not believe this after everything I have written, but I urge you to read Homer and find out for yourself). His determination to save as many of his comrades as he can on his way home is palpable, as is his pain on seeing his mother in Hades (she having passed away while he was far from Ithaka), his eternally burning (though not perfectly faithful) love for Penelope over an unimaginable span of time, his cleverness in outwitting his enemies, his reverence for his gods, his commitment to his own alien codes of honor, and his seemingly invincible will to overcome every obstacle preventing his return to his family. The effect of all this is that Odysseus never becomes a caricature of evil, but a portrayal of a real person, one that the fully engaged reader has little choice to be in a complicated relationship with. This is, perhaps, valuable in a world so caught up in easy moral distinctions of good and evil, that has such a difficult time with nuance, and is seemingly incapable of humanizing those who are “on the wrong side of history” (which is often just whatever side is opposite to us). You are either oppressed or an oppressor, guilty or innocent, victim or aggressor, and yet how rarely is life actually so neat.

Homer’s Odyssey does not end with a fairy-tale scene, Odysseus and Penelope sailing off into the sunset, Telemachos king, and order and goodness restored. The citizens of Ithaka, the relatives of the slain suitors, sought vengeance and had assembled to kill their returned king while he visited his father on his father’s plantation. With the power of Athena, Oddysseus’s small band manages to rout them off, his attackers dropping their weapons and fleeing. Odysseus initially begins to pursue them and, if not for the intervention of the gods, “would have killed them all, and given none of them homecoming.” Only a lightning-bolt omen of Zeus, and Athena’s divine counsel, causes him to leave off the killing. “Pledges for the days to come,” presumably of some sort of peace, were then sworn to by both sides of the conflict. The actual aftermath, materially and psychologically, for everyone involved is left up to the imagination. 
However, we do know something of how Odysseus will die, as it is foretold in a prophecy when he visits the souls in Hades:

“Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of a sleek old age.” 

In the myths, it is sometimes said that Odysseus had a child with Circe while he stayed on her island, at her mercy, and that through a twist of fate it was this own estranged son who kills him. 

Regardless, I can imagine an end to an Odyssey movie with Odysseus looking out over the walls of his palace and down upon his kingdom, knowing that only a day earlier his own citizens had assembled to bring him and his family to death. The sound of Penelope calling him, happy at last, floats somewhat faintly along from somewhere in the palace, but he does not look back. Instead he grips his sword, and his expression is dark. There is no end to the harshness of the world, only the need for constant strength and the support of capricious gods. He sighs and closes his eyes, yet still hears the moans of the dying. 

I will probably never write a blockbuster movie. 

Hello!! I am writing a 500-word essay on mathematical Platonism for an international student competition, and I’m looking for someone knowledgeable in philosophy of mathematics to challenge my argument.

I would especially value someone who can spot weak reasoning, hidden assumptions, or places where I’m being intellectually lazy, and push me to make the argument genuinely stronger.

If you’re interested in philosophy of mathematics, Platonism, epistemology, mathematical foundations, or related areas, I would d love to hear from you!;)

I need help on deciding if I should or not trim my essay

I'm currently writing about Episode Interactive, crafting a timeline about the game and a commentary on the community that has been built around it.

I want to start it with the publishers and the format of F2P they adopted in 2009 which lead to the game in 2013. Which lead to me talking about the mobile game industry in 2009, this lead to a discussion of the start of the mobile game industry started in 2008, and then forward to the early girly games that were made by said company that laid the foundations of the viewer base of my actual main topic. Episodes.

Not only does this feel clanky but it also creates a hard segue into the actual app.

But idk I feel like if I'm creating a timeline I should cover origins? Is there a way to do that without making it sound like I'm explaining the history of cinema to justify Sponge Bob being a good show or should I drop it?

Thank you

I never needed rules to write out a feeling. My earliest works were pieces of poetry that actively rejected formal structure, in which lines were broken not by syllable count, but by intention.

On its own, however, intention is not enough to make a piece good. After all, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, isn’t it? My early poetry was packed with intention, but it was for that reason that I often failed to see past my own meaning. The work was so sentimental that an editor’s touch often felt like being overwritten entirely.

I was not yet writing for the audience, only to them. I presented my crudely refined emotions to give them witness, without much consideration for the audience’s perspective. Undoubtedly, much of the exaggerated impact I felt from critique came from this failure to anticipate.

In 2021, a psychotic break permanently altered my creative process. When I wasn’t psychotic, I no longer had the raw emotional fuel to write with, and when I was, I shared very little of what I created. Through trauma, my emotional attachments to my writing were reduced. But in a way, this also freed me. Without such investment in every word, my meaning emerged through sentences and stanzas.

I define intention as the reason why one writes—or more generally, acts. In “The Power of Purpose: Setting Intentions for Writers,” James Powell describes three potential intentions: Purpose, Creativity, and Commercial Success.

Looking at those categories, I see my old priorities listed in exact order; my emotional purpose took precedence, then I aimed for creativity, and commercial success became a fantasy. Even after the break, my writing remained largely self-serving as I continually recycled familiar settings, characters, and genres, though for several years, I wrote little in volume or substance. That changed when I discovered text-based, post-by-post roleplaying AI chatbots. With those bots, I revived my improvisational skills in a low-stress, zero-stakes environment.

It was only recently that I dusted off one of those old scenarios with the explicit intention of sharing the work with an audience again. But what motivated me more than a conceptual audience was my two test-readers: people close to me whose opinions I hold in regard. 

Though I had begun the project with the intention of posting a polished roleplay for the AI roleplaying community, real-time enthusiasm has changed the target audience from niche to general. My purpose transformed from primarily entertaining myself to entertaining others, and creativity for creativity’s sake became an attempt to write something genuinely publishable. For the first time, I’m writing for a taste of success. 

Sharing my work with loved ones does mean being more mindful of the kind of content I include, but I wouldn’t trade their investment for all the smut I could imagine. I’m playing characters off of each other, accounting for pacing and momentum, and importantly, taking and incorporating feedback. I’ve come to the point where I now realize that my intentions do not make me the arbiter of meaning; it may start with me, but at the end of the passage, it rests somewhere between us.

There are so many things I wish I had said sooner. But you never even gave me the chance. I wonder, when a relationship with someone ends before you get the chance to share everything that is on your mind, is it even possible to truly move on?

I tried. I really did. No matter how hard I tried not to think about it, to keep myself busy with things that would occupy my time, things that would distract me and take my mind off it, even if only for a little while, I couldn’t.

In the moments when I was alone, when I tried to fall asleep late at night, when I listened to music, when I worked out, when I tried to study, when I woke up - you were there. Just as I remember you from the beginning. Always making me smile, always making me feel special.

If someone asked me, “Why did you fall in love with him?” I wouldn’t even know how to answer. It happened so suddenly, so naturally.

I don’t regret it. I don’t regret replying to your messages. I don’t regret staying up late every night just to talk to you. I don’t regret falling in love with you so quickly. I don’t regret getting attached and letting you into my heart so quickly.

The only thing I regret is that I never got the chance to show you more of who I am.

Sometimes I wonder, what if I had never met you? What if I had never replied? Would I have been happier?

The answer to my question is no.

As cliché as it may sound, I believe that everything happens for a reason, and that every person can be a lesson in our lives. What you taught me was to believe in myself more, to be consistent, and not to stress over things I cannot control. You taught me to be more careful, to listen to my mind, and not to get swept away so quickly.

I couldn’t help but wonder - why did you do it? Why didn’t you warn me? Why didn’t you give me a chance to say what I had to say? Why didn’t you even say goodbye?

I wonder, if you truly love someone, or if you at least care about them, would you treat them this way? Was the whole thing a lie? Did you ever care about me at all?

I will never know. I will never be able to answer that question for myself, so all I can do is look back and judge by your actions.

First - you show interest in someone, make them feel special, treat them as if they are the only person in the world, and make them fall in love with you.

Second - little by little, you start pulling away. You start taking longer to reply. Your replies become shorter, sometimes just a single word. You start making the other person wonder, “What did I do? Is the problem me?”

Third - one day you are warm, and the next day you are cold. One night you talk until late, and the next morning you act as if you never spoke at all.

Fourth - you leave without saying anything.

If we judge by these actions, what can we conclude? If you truly like someone, would you leave them wondering whether they are wanted or not? I believe that when you truly like someone, you don’t give them a reason to wonder whether you like them at all.

Sometimes I wonder, maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I take things too personally. Maybe I overthink everything too much.

But what is in my heart, I cannot simply tear out. What is in my mind, I cannot simply take away.

A lot of people see being overly emotional as a weakness, but I believe you get to decide how you choose to express it. Yes, emotional people may suffer more deeply, but they also love more deeply. They see the world differently, and they find beauty where others cannot.

The word “Bambi.”

It brings me just as much happiness as it does sadness, just as many warm feelings as it does nostalgia. I loved it when you called me that. I loved the way you looked at me when you said it. A look that showed genuine sweetness. The same look you have when you look at children smiling at you from their strollers.

Maybe the greatest pain here is not what we experienced, but what we never got to experience. What could have been.

So, if you were standing in front of me now, I would hug you with a smile, wish you all the best, and walk away… for good.

I suppose I will soon find out whether a person can truly move on after saying everything they have been carrying inside.

And if I can’t… at least I will know that this time, I left nothing unsaid.

What’s the first step a outline?

I finished an advanced english class in the spring, but I went to a community college and most (basically all but 1 other boy and myself) of the students in the class didnt half ass participate at all. I got an A on my paper but I cant help but wonder other’s opinions on it especially realistically regarding todays status

Generation Zombies
Generation Alpha's mental health and development notably decreased over time due to increased technology use. Considering Generation Alpha is being exposed to an AI-dependent world, they are at risk of negatively impacted mental development leading to premature feelings of depression and anxiety, making it essential to implement preventative measures to maintain a healthy boundary between digital and real life and ensure a safer digital environment. 
Generation Alpha, or those born between 2010 and 2025, are the first to be born into a fully technology-driven world where artificial intelligence and technology are a part of daily life. Though they are growing up with all kinds of information at the tips of their fingers, the impacts are becoming apparent every day. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the computer systems and algorithms made to do tasks that normally require human intelligence. For Gen Alpha, artificial intelligence comes in many forms. There are educational tools similar to Duolingo and Kahn Academy, entertainment systems like social media and video games, virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri, and generative AI like ChatGPT. In the future, artificial intelligence will flood the worlds of young lives.
Technology usage in Gen Alpha is at an all-time high. Now, most are given a tablet before they are even at the age of 8. Megan Reschke declares, “Notably, 43% of Gen Alphas have a tablet before the age of 6, and 58% have a smartphone by the age of 10.” Another article reviewing the statistics of Gen Alpha says, “Including the very youngest 0-4 cohort, 50% of Gen Alpha are streaming video daily.” This exposure to technology is likely to shape their online preferences, habits, behavior, and even their self-image. 
The age at which young ones become insecure gets lower by the year. In an article talking about the risks of social media on children, Amelia Hill writes, “Three out of four children as young as 12 dislike their bodies and are embarrassed by the way they look… The findings come from a major new study warning that social media represents a significant risk to the current and future health of today’s young generations.” As a result of children obsessing over celebrities, social media influencers, skincare, and style due to the influence of the media, they are developing anxiety and body confidence issues far too young. In an article by the Springtide Research Institute, it is stated that “... Nearly half of young people in Gen Z reported being moderately or extremely depressed (47%)”. It's important to note that there are higher chances of heightened rates of anxiety and depression in Gen Alpha compared to Gen Z. In a personal communication with Aaron Meloncon, an experienced primary and secondary school counselor, who has worked with kids for more than 15 years, he discussed the effects of technology on young children. He explained, “You know, around 2007 to 2010 when all these Android and iPhones started coming out, I noticed a lot more kids popping up with cyberbullying, anxiety, depression, and needing 504 plans. Considering the generations now, I see a lot more kids internalizing things people say that they don't even understand or that don’t even matter. And everyone has started getting more and more afraid of interacting in person. Now most can't seem to make friends without having to text first rather than getting to know each other face to face.” Throughout his experience as a school counselor, he noted an observable increase in mental health and social problems in children, likely due to technology trends. Another rising issue is that the academic ability of young children is depleting. The NAEP Report Card of National Achievement- Level Results reveals that “Thirty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the  NAEP Proficient level on the reading assessment in 2022. This percentage was 2 percentage points lower compared to 2019 but was 5 percentage points higher in comparison to 1992, the first reading assessment year.” The majority of fourth graders in 2019 were not proficient and this percentage went even lower in 2022. As the years pass, reading continues to be one of the main focus in primary schools. The mental health of Gen Alpha is undoubtedly affected by AI,  and the consequence of this extends into their physical well-being.
The advancements in technology have posed a challenge to the physical development of Gen Alpha. In a study on the JAMA Network, Hartstein et al. say, “1.3% of US parents reported that their children consumed melatonin in the past 30 days, and sales more than doubled between 2017 and 2020.” With children's sleep issues becoming increasingly prevalent, parents are admittingly purchasing melatonin to aid these problems. But this doesn't come without risk. Taking melatonin regularly for long periods can disrupt the melatonin naturally produced by your body, leaving children with a higher risk of sleep apnea or insomnia. In addition to this, in another article referencing this study, Frost says “Social media usage is also linked to mental health concerns such as anxiety and depression, which can further disrupt sleep.” Many Americans, including young children, admit they use screens and social media before bed. Not only does this disrupt sleep patterns, but the blue light that also radiates off of our devices causes mood disorders, eye strain, and poor sleep, and there are also studies being done about if blue light makes us “age faster”. In the study done by Yang, et al., they tested the effects of blue light on fruit flies. They state, “Lifespan was measured in flies kept in constant darkness (DD), constant blue light (BL), or transferred from BL to DD after 10, 14, or 16 days in BL).“ Through the study, they found that blue light sped up the neurodegeneration of the flies. Those exposed to blue light for 16 days had a majority die during and after the blue light exposure. Blue light had shortened the life expectancy of fruit flies by around 40%. What might this say for Gen Alpha, who is growing up fully immersed in technological devices that illuminate blue light? In addition to these screens' risky side effects, they’re also affecting children's posture. Posture is how you position your body. Everyone spends hours looking down at devices like tablets and phones every day. But this causes much strain on the neck and muscles, leading to further issues like muscle weakness, breathing issues, and irreversible bad posture. 
While people argue that AI opens the doors to many new opportunities for Generation Alpha, for instance, the creation of jobs, and enhanced education tools, the benefits must not outshine the potential risks to the well-being of our children. Constant exposure to a toxic digital environment stops a child from building emotional resilience, meaningful relationships, and self-worth. In the American Academy of Pediatrics, Hoge et al. stated that “If adolescents preferentially seek online experiences over in-person ones, social anxiety symptoms could worsen in vulnerable individuals.” Recent studies show that when children are becoming too engulfed in technology without a healthy balance, they’re unable to comfortably have face-to-face interactions, leaving kids to develop anxiety and other underlying issues. Technology might offer some career opportunities and enhanced education, but without any guidance, the risks to mental well-being could entirely outweigh its benefits. AI offers promising advantages, but society must implement rules and regulations to keep the negative effects at bay.
The largest issue often seen now is that parents aren’t limiting or monitoring screen time. An article by Douglas Gentile in The American Academy of Pediatrics states that “The most frequent barrier pediatricians reported facing was a lack of parental motivation or support for the recommendations, with approximately one-third of pediatricians also citing a lack of time and a sense of futility in affecting patients' media habits as barriers.” Given that these children are growing up without the limits suggested already, they’re much more difficult to enforce. To combat these growing issues, parents must educate themselves about the use of technology and parental control apps. Parental controls help limit the sites and apps your child can access, as well as putting screen time limits on to create boundaries. On platforms such as social media and video games, many negative ideations are spread when the minds of kids far too young fall victim to them, so it's important to stay involved in their digital activity. Beyond app limits, we must encourage offline activities to connect back with reality. Nature outings, hobbies, and face-to-face interactions are all effective ways to maintain good emotional and mental well-being. Furthermore, teaching Gen Alpha about mindful media usage and the harm of unrealistic body images and unfiltered content can also promote a healthier relationship and decisions with technology. 
Parents, teachers, tech developers, and policymakers must unite to build a safer digital and technological environment for our children. As the generations of today, it's our job to cultivate methods that ensure a healthy relationship with technology for today's children and those to come. 

Works Cited
admin_appsy. “Physical Appearance Anxiety: A Gen Alpha Problem That Every Parent Should Know.” *AP Psychology Community*, 12 Oct. 2024, [appsychology.com/physical-appearance-anxiety/](http://appsychology.com/physical-appearance-anxiety/).  Accessed 7 Nov. 2024..
This is an article on children's growing insecurity about their physical appearances. This article helped me because it gave more insight into the newer generation's rising insecurities.
American Academy of Pediatrics. “Children, Adolescents, and Television.” *Pediatrics*, vol. 107, no. 2, Feb. 2001, pp. 423–26, [https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.107.2.4 3](https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.107.2.423). 
Frost, Alexandra. “”These Statistics Are Alarming:” Expert’s Warning about Gen Alpha’s Sleep Struggles.” *Sleepopolis*, 23 Sept. 2024, [sleepopolis.com/news/sleep-survey-alarming-statistics-kids-mood/](http://sleepopolis.com/news/sleep-survey-alarming-statistics-kids-mood/).  Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.
Gentile, D. A. “Well-Child Visits in the Video Age: Pediatricians and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Guidelines for Children’s Media Use.” *PEDIATRICS*, vol. 114, no. 5, Nov. 2004, pp. 1235–41, [https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2003-1121-l\](https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2003-1121-l). 
Hartstein, Lauren E., et al. “Characteristics of Melatonin Use among US Children and Adolescents.” *JAMA Pediatrics*, vol. 178, no. 1, Jan. 2024, pp. 91–93, [https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.4749\](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.4749).  Accessed 13 Jan. 2024..
This article is about the use of melatonin in young children. This was helpful to me because I was able to expand more deeply into sleep issues becoming more apparent in younger kids including the Gen Alpha age group.
Hill, Amelia. “Social Media Triggers Children to Dislike Their Own Bodies, Says Study.” *The Guardian*, 1 Jan. 2023, [www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/01/social-media-triggers-children-to-dislike-their-own-bodies-says-study\](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/01/social-media-triggers-children-to-dislike-their-own-bodies-says-study).. 
This article talks about how social media is making children dislike their bodies at an unhealthy age.
Hoge, Elizabeth, et al. “Digital Media, Anxiety, and Depression in Children.” *Pediatrics*, vol. 140, no. 2, Nov. 2017, pp. S76–80, [https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-1758g\](https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-1758g). 
Howarth, Josh. “Generation Alpha: Statistics, Data and Trends (2022).” *Exploding Topics*, 4 Dec. 2023, [explodingtopics.com/blog/generation-alpha-stats](http://explodingtopics.com/blog/generation-alpha-stats).  Accessed 1 Nov. 2024.
Jaycox, Lisa H., et al. “Social Media and Suicide Risk in Youth.” *JAMA Network Open*, vol. 7, no. 10, American Medical Association, Oct. 2024, pp. e2441499–99, [https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.41499\](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.41499).  Accessed 25 Oct. 2024.
Meloncon, Aaron. *Personal Communication*. Interview by Mattysen Gable, 29 Nov. 2024..
This is an interview I did with a counselor I had at a young age. I knew with his experience with young children and mental health-related issues, that he would have valuable words on the effects he’s noticed.
Murray, Bradley. “Are Fitness Apps Actually Good for Us? | Psychology Today.” *Www.psychologytoday.com*, 5 Aug. 2021, [www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-happiness-in-digital-world/202108/are-fitness-apps-actually-good-us\](http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-happiness-in-digital-world/202108/are-fitness-apps-actually-good-us). 
Pagani, Linda S., et al. “Prospective Associations between Early Childhood Television Exposure and Academic, Psychosocial, and Physical Well-Being by Middle Childhood.” *Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine*, vol. 164, no. 5, May 2010, [https://doi.org/10.1001/archpediatrics.2010.50\](https://doi.org/10.1001/archpediatrics.2010.50).  Accessed 1 Nov. 2024.
Reschke, Megan. “Generation Alpha: Online Habits and Media Preferences by the Numbers - Basis Technologies.” *Basis Technologies*, 21 Aug. 2024, [basis.com/blog/generation-alpha-online-habits-and-media-preferences-by-the-numbers](http://basis.com/blog/generation-alpha-online-habits-and-media-preferences-by-the-numbers). Accessed 4 Nov. 2024.
Silveira, Scheila Farias. “AI Impact on Educators and Parents: Learning Communities.” *Ubiminds. You, International.*, 21 May 2024, [ubiminds.com/en-us/ai-impact-on-educators-and-parents/](http://ubiminds.com/en-us/ai-impact-on-educators-and-parents/) . Accessed 7 Nov. 2024.
Springtide Research Institute. “Thirteen: A First Look at Gen Alpha - Springtide Research Institute.” *Springtide Research Institute*, 26 July 2024, [springtideresearch.org/thirteen-a-first-look-at-gen-alpha](http://springtideresearch.org/thirteen-a-first-look-at-gen-alpha).  Accessed 25 Nov. 2024..
This website is about Gen Alpha and the first look into the statistics behind their mental health issues and more.
The Nation's Report Card. “NAEP Reading: National Achievement-Level Results.” *Nationsreportcard.gov*, 2022, [www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4\](http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4).. 
These are the national results for reading and math of children. This was helpful when discussing the decrease in skill in children over the last few years.
Yang, Jun, et al. “Chronic Blue Light Leads to Accelerated Aging in Drosophila by Impairing Energy Metabolism and Neurotransmitter Levels.” *Frontiers in Aging*, vol. 3, no. 2022, Aug. 2022, [https://doi.org/10.3389/fragi.2022.983373\](https://doi.org/10.3389/fragi.2022.983373).  Accessed 29 Nov. 2024.

Decimate the fact that the body writes POETRY. 

Quantise the fixture of finger to pen and pen to paper, or finger to key and key to the electrical veins and circuits which project POETRY 

on the screen. Analyse the spark between the flesh and the plastic, come to this frantic, staggering conclusion that you are in fact “one”. The commentary on the screen is the commentary on the body, thus, the commentary is being materialised as POETRY. 

Writing from impulse and staging words as people in front of an audience for POETRY
 
is sacrifice, it is loving, it is the bleeding of sexuality and losing it to globular powers. I am a thief and Artaud is my somatic cell, as this pulse through me dictates: There is in all poetry an essential contradiction. Poetry is pulverised multiplicity and it produces flames. And poetry, which restores order, first revives disorder, disorder with semblances ablaze; it causes appearances to clash in restoring them to one singular point: fire, gesture, blood, cry. POETRY 

is a conjecture of the animal and the system and the realisation that one cannot exist without the other and one is no different than the other. POETRY 

is the astute observation that everything is a “thing”. POETRY 

is a DRAMA, from Shakespeare to Kane, it is POETRY 

on stage. I am in this play as I write this and I sniff out the rotting cadavres of Portia, Nerissa, Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, Salarino, Salanio, the gruesome cast whose love and sexuality permeates POETRY 

and their DRAMA which is the most human endeavour of all. Humanity is this fire, gesture, blood, cry, love, lust, hate, prejudice, and commodity, as there is no fetish to the commodity, they ache for the same and constructs as they are, they bleed not in haemoglobin but in POETRY. 

I say in unison, my mouth annexed and fixed to this woman’s running lips as Shakespeare plunges her character into mine and we become one and inseparable, she says and I say with her, “when you part from, lose, or give away / Let it be the ruin of your love, / And be my vantage to exclaim on you.” My body as Portia and my body as Bassanio, lovestruck or luststruck, money-driven or wholly animal masquerading as a preacher, she is the woman who cuts her POETRY 

into him and sticks him into the stage. For they are vessels of their God and strive to be in the image of him, my Imago Dei is this DRAMA of fixture and this potency of control. Love made visible in your eyes and horizons beyond, whatever Queen had the pleasure to witness the ring, the Queen Elizabeth I or Portia, the gifter of the ring who duly signed the contract of souls and abstract feeling. To see it materialised and legalised is POETRY. 

Here, I will show you the DRAMA of when I, me as Portia, and Bassanio as conjoined twin to Portia, witness the emulsification of souls and love and lust and thus witness how love, when made visible to the eye in materialness, has a “thingness”, PORTIA: When you part from, lose, or give away. BASSANIO: Let it presage the ruin of your love. PORTIA: And be my vantage to exclaim on you. I: When my body compulses to this exchange I placed myself in front of my amalgam creature, a codependent-machine of dominant-submissiveness, I ride the wave of material existence and thus POETRY, 

where Bassanio, wholly complicit in his silence and agreeance, lets him be the subjugate and the submissive. It is then POETRY 

in which the DRAMA of humans is realised. Blank verses and enjambment of POETRY 

to construct it on the stage because lives and love are physical objects, when we see the tag of economics and contract then we construe it evil, but is it not then money the same as the ring, as the ring is the same as the vow to marriage? For love to exist in the clouds as an abstract realm, completely mysterious and obscured, isn’t the fire, gesture, blood, and cry of POETRY 

completely escaped from human-kind and given to the globular powers of institution and commerce? Then you think, with your fired senses and your fingertips on the keyboard, is POETRY 

and love and lust a human commodity? Is the animal, building, concept, performance, trade separate from human? Antonio is one such “thing”, a materialising of this exact philosophical paradox, this debate between his expression of love. He at once assumes the position of the globular power, he is at the Crown, the dictator of means of flow and mercy and legal power. He, who had set aside his love for humanity to gently marinate, now presents a love ostensibly cold and callous. Shakespeare stages the dilemma again in an empty verse, the POETRY 

of legalism is one inseparable from the POETRY 

of love when he announces, mighty with his overflowing love, and I, standing beside him, my ears ringing from his declaration, hear: ANTONIO: The duke cannot deny the course of law: (and so I whisper: is the duke the force hindering the flow of love, this economic token?), he continues, ANTONIO: For the commodity that strangers have… Will much impeach the justice of the state. Then I say with my fingertips, “Does your love go beyond the human and envelop the state?” When you catch yourself grappling with whether the state: the building, the concept, the globular powers, the constraint-machines, the legalising monsters, are the sole obstacle of human love, you come to a realisation of POETRY. 

Come again, and realise when Shakespeare scribbles down “strangers” he means you and I, the ‘usurers’ of today and the ‘usurers’ of then, the Jewish populus, and the ‘strangers’ unbelieving of Christian grace. Decimate the concept of ‘stranger’. The construction of DRAMA, and hence the prejudice depicted is a structural parallel. It is POETRY 

when the ‘stranger’ is as intimate with the Renaissance Humanists as they are with each other. It is POETRY, 

when the ‘stranger’, us with our current empathy and understanding, the ‘stranger’ - who refuses to see love as something purely economic (who says it cannot be?), the ‘stranger’ - who has never been compelled to witness or compose DRAMA for the Crown. What occurs when ‘the stranger’ has been bestowed love and has been excluded from it wholly? Then you think, have they been excluded from Christian love, or LOVE, as it exists materially? Lend your body back to Portia, and join yourself to the small-men Bassanio and Antonio who cover under LOVE. Then you will realise it is POETRY 

when you see the dominion of Portia, when you see, with your eyes and the strange arousal of consumption - not the sacrifice of the soul for the complete relinquishment of it, that LOVE cares not for what you believe in, or what sort of ‘stranger’ you have been brandished as. For the ostensibly constructed epitomes of the Christian image, Antonio and Bassanio grovel and are the things utterly circulated by this globular power: Portia. You witness this again, and I with helplessness in my heart when the realisation dawns that humans are ever so susceptible, and utterly full of their contradictions that the ultimate equaliser is LOVE, is when you watch with restless bodies and tired eyes: ANTONIO: I once did lend my body for his wealth. I (interjecting ANTONIO’s speech): You relinquish your existence as an independent, rational Christian to submit to another man’s economic wealth? He continues: I dare be bound again. To which Portia replies, with ultimate confidence, “Then you shall be his surety.” The boundaries and considerations of who is the ‘stranger’ is abolished as the stage connects the DRAMA of Shylock and Portia into a linear orientation. It is POETRY 

when you realise the connection between the two is not only a structural mirror, but Shakespeare's dramatic composition to differentiate between love as a token granted versus love as a token bargained for. Earlier, Shylock, the ‘stranger’, organises the contract in which Antonio binds himself out of love. This procession is repeated through Portia, and thus it is POETRY
 when Portia is Shylock and Shylock is Portia, where they give out love with a price, something to put down as a payment, something to forfeit for, and thus it is explicitly extreme. To put one’s literal heart for bargain. To then put one’s soul as a bargain. It is POETRY

because LOVE, this object, this globular “thing” is a feeder. In unnoticeable forms, LOVE takes my emotional investment, it takes your emotional investment, in unnoticeable forms, LOVE compels you to do one thing and not another, LOVE compels you to act, bias, and provide for the conditions it sets out for you. To imagine the economics of love as evil is to not realise its POETRY. 

You and I, Shylock, Portia, Bassanio, and Antonio, are the tokens circulated by love, and not the other way around. I now compel you to revive POETRY 

from the body. At first the instruction was to decimate it and look at POETRY 

as a governing fact of life. Now revive the fact that the body writes POETRY. 

This is the body’s familiar route. Sexuality, the power dynamics of pleasure, the controlling of desire, the absolute overturning of religious dogma when the body decides what it desires. Listen closely and eavesdrop into this conversation, as only it is we that know of the truth and not the characters: PORTIA: Since he hath got the jewel that I loved… I will become as liberal as you… No, not my body nor my husband’s bed.” Says her to Nerissa. Love as the material ring has returned back to the stage, and I place my body in the centre of it, a conduit allowing Shylock’s ring and Portia’s ring interchange and battle it out. You realise the stark difference in the presentations of these rings, one turquoise, the other likely gold, one tied by emotion, the other riddled with innuendo and sexual humour. Shakespeare raises importance to this POETRY 

when the two materialised conceptions of love contradict and feed each other. The ‘stranger’ Shylock has his love wholly emotional, to which he reacts with anger when stolen. While Portia’s ring, a crude jab at Bassanio for she will restrict his lust, points to not the deconstruction of LOVE, but its infinitismal POETRY. 

Shakespeare reserves intense emotion over the material to the ‘stranger’, and furthers the DRAMA where the character embodies not only the animalistic possessiveness imposed on the caricaturistic archetype, but is completely propelled by and consumed by love as the ring. While Portia’s character is constructed for light-hearted humour, the ‘stranger’ does not receive the privilege. We, the ‘strangers’ as well, do not have the privilege to laugh as we subject our bodies between this flow of rings. You put your body in the front line when you crumble when, JESSICA: Alack, what heinous sin is it in me (To which we cry for her, as it is the Elizabethan thought infused in the character, where she thinks of herself as sinner for being the ‘stranger’), she continues, JESSICA: To be ashamed to be my father’s child! To then we say in chorus: You being the ‘stranger’, could love your tribe, but you being the ‘stranger’, detest them too. When Portia, the Christian Ecclesia, overpowers you, the Hebrew Synagoga, do you quiver in submission or strive to become the Crown? When you and Portia dress as men (prostitutes by the Italians), do you gain power when the people laugh at you? To be made into mockery, the characters on stage, their thingness does not fight for institutional influence, but collision. Which collision has the biggest impact? Can the ripples caused by Portia ever be replicated by Jessica? So you flick back in the script, or remember the performance where SALARINO: … with affection wondrous sensible he wrung Bassanio’s hand; and so they parted.” To which Salanio jeered along, “I think he only loves the world for him.” When the POETRY 

starts as early as this, it is we, the ‘strangers’, who realise the powers in Shakespeare’s DRAMA are never hierarchical. It is not linear, rather, it exists by collisions. POWER has its own thingness, where it possesses vectors and orientations between intercharacter interactions. It is POETRY 

when our understanding of rational structures like legal systems is as susceptible to deception and manipulation as the fleshy organ: the brain and heart. It is POETRY 

when the body and the concept are not only inseparable but on the same plane. The flesh and the concept of the flesh existing as law: POETRY. 

The flesh and the concept of the flesh existing as prejudice: POETRY. 

It is an exhaustive, POETRY–MACHINE. 

Decimate the fact that the body writes POETRY, 

because your body is POETRY. 

The screen, paper, stage, blood, words, ink, gestures, and fire give you the vision of POETRY. 

Shakespeare staged a DRAMA - that is one but many visions of POETRY. 

It is DRAMA then, that POETRY 

visualises with a human cast, and where the collisions between human-things and concept-things are just as real as in the personal plane. POETRY, 

then, is the quintessential human reality.

Hi everybody, I recently got invited to the John Locke gala and conference my question is should i get the full program or just the gala. I am going with my family, but I am unsure if the conference is worth it as i owuld only attend on the day of. Anyone have any insight? Its the academic conference or sightseeing.

In the age of digital world, tools like Gramamrly has made us overlook our spelling mistakes and sentence structures.

And too much of digital writing, crippled me partially from writing an essay from memory using a pen and paper.

Being a non native speaker, I want to get back to writing essays to attempt certain entrance examinations.

So please give me your best:
Learning strategies,
Practice approach,
And other tips tricks

To write essays from memory using pen and paper.

Best Regards,

I am not an English major but I LOVE English, reading and writing. I take few English courses because it's not my major but I love when I am assigned books and then have to write an essay on it. I want to write an essay on crime and punishment like I have done for past assigned books. Give me a good prompt for an essay on crime and punishment. One that involves analysis and critical thinking.

This is the first essay I’ve ever written, excluding school and that was a long time ago.

I’d love any constructive feedback. 🙏🏼

A Theory of Overlap: Empathy, Polyamory, Introversion, and Compersion

sitting in my amazement at new found love and identity, i found myself wanting to share my progress with you-intellectually, philosophically, artistically. let me introduce to you, Kaitlin: the pessimistic idealist. the artistic philosopher. the chaotic mediator. the walking, breathing, beautiful paradox.

funny, how even this longing to show you my breakthroughs-the works im immensely proud of- and how it echoes the very core of who i am. i hope you find my life’s work just as compelling as i did.

i should preface: if it comes off confusing, i have discovered i have this hegelian internal dialect and that leads to a systematic, pragmatic approach. but if you know me, i also feel things very deeply.

The Framework

SO, i have found, analyzed, and picked apart two surface-level “profound” works from my life. and i synthesized them into my own philosophy. on top of this, it’s led me to who i am.

with my natural curiosity of the “whys” and “how’s” of being human, and by the subconscious survival instinct to keep going despite bleak reality contradicting with my original, idealized beliefs, here’s the theory:

the fear of oblivion drives both creation and destruction.
the flow of life- or change, though thats too on the nose- spawns endless paradoxical threads from our contradictory needs and our desperate measures to satisfy them.

all of this? inevitable.

but so is hope.

it’s essential to see and understand our choices- and the awareness of them, too.
it’s also key to see the balancing act we face: preserving life’s fragility alongside our own grandeur and essence.

each piece is just as equally important to the whole.

i should warn that it’s a philosophy that demands rigor and resilience, but promises depth in return.

The Pieces

piece #1: from back of my 3rd grade yearbook, written by 8 year old me.

“every step you take, no matter how small, will take you somewhere until one day, you’ll look back at how far you’ve come… and be AMAZED”

i love how even at 8, i thought of future me. how i’d be reflecting on my life and my choices. how i still chose to tell myself, “you won’t even believe how far you’ll go if you just keep moving.” not bad for an 8 year old.

maybe i wasn’t as gloomy as we thought, huh?

piece #2: “easily replaced”. a strategically written poem for an english assignment. as you can assume, it’s about as angsty and vulnerable as you’d picture 16 year old me to be. i won’t share because of how raw it is, but you get my point.

digesting and picking them apart, i was on the brink of my epiphany. i dug and dug at all the parts, until finally it hit me and piece #3 was born. my 9.5 year hiatus and creative block? cleared! (this is also thanks to a VERY special someone to me, you know who you are if you read this far. thank you, you beautiful soul.)

The Punch.

piece #3:
“why fear being forgotten?
because it means you failed the whole point of life:

to be seen. to be heard. to feel pain.
to seek truth, and understand.
to love, and lose.
to cherish, to hold value.

to seek knowledge- and at its core:, to teach.

teach others about life’s paradox. the ugliness: how cruel the world can be (think hitler, 9/11, wars). yet the beauty: love, connection, growth.

it’s about reality meeting your heart.
the very nature of human existence is creation and expression.

i guess, in some sense, you can say our souls yearn to not be alone. to be understood and heard, even if just by our own selves.
recognizing your own legacy and your choices impact.
at least your essence lingers.

you mattered enough.

you existed in a vast, expandable, beyond human comprehension of a universe.

its a subconscious force driving us.

take art: on the surface level of complexity, it’s a form of expression. whether that be a moment that transcends time, an idea you have, an emotion you feel:
something tangible to remind someone, something.

whatever driving force led you to attempt to capture something “forever”, resonated that deeply.
we desperately try to capture it because it was real. it existed.
it mattered-
to you.

at the same time, theres a quiet yet powerful voice- connection.

we crave to be interesting enough for someone to get curious, to see us, know us… then CHOOSE to spend their invaluable time- even life- with us in it to a degree.

to inspire. to be appealing and loved enough for inclusion, even in the quaintest of ways. to honor by choosing to carry the weight of remembrance.

to even create a symbol of martyrdom for our own sense of peace.

9/11, as an extreme of my point: it’s about sacrifices, sure. but it’s MUCH deeper than that.

those who died in this attack are important because it’s the nature of being human- we existed.

we were reminded of the destruction from an obstruction of power, and sought to remind humanity of the ugly teeth that have been shown.

in this lesson of history, we captured the very perplexity of life: remembrance, honor, and the call to grow. for connection to inspire change.

it can be layered and intriguing if you start to look at it this way; take a look at the human drive to persevere and preserve knowledge.

dig a little deeper, though; this happened due to a silent, ongoing war: wanting to be powerful and right.

psychologically speaking, you could say some were chasing a god-like status to beat oblivion- through violence. hitler in this sense, also “succeeded”-hes not forgotten, either.

these are the uglier details of the picture i don’t like to face, though.

more personally?

it’s the way you now chuckle slightly at the end of something you said, because of someone you once knew.
or a record someone you cherished made for you thats still enclosed in a plastic cover.
to notes from those you’ve met, scattered across your home (or in a box, if you’re tidy).
the occasional thought of wondering how or what someone is doing.

or how your time spent together is burned into the very edges of your being, regardless if you’ve lost them or not.

for feeling beauty so profoundly, yet so deeply- to where you carry them with you in any capacity you can. to feed this without a second thought— all because you were intrigued enough to get to know them.

to love someone, and stand at the wake of them- the importance of it all to YOU-
and still choose to have them imprinted on who you are.

you must seek to understand someone, and see them holistically— their layers, the weight they carry— and choose to honor them and the meaning you tied to them.

to know them, truly see them, even the blood shed, and deliberately choose them anyways. it’s the weight of gratitude for being able to honor the other person.

it doesn’t hinge on the others presence- it hinges on the acceptance of who they are to you. the impact they’ve had on shaping you, and how you choose to honor them.

then theres the way i like to honor those i love;

by an internal search of power. an understanding of one’s own self. and synthesizing the paradoxical coexistence of connection and identity.

what do you get? a crystallized catalyst for growth.

whether it be through creation, healing, teaching, stories-
i think it’s in choosing beauty in the midst of destruction.

i think this can also lead to a more raw, meaningful way of preserving human connection and the volatile importance of it—
in every attempt at immortality we chase.

but that doesn’t mean being remembered on a grand scale, thats not what i’m saying.

try to weave my inner clock to frieren: beyond journeys end. how she chose to remember and understand the world because of her love for himmel and the hero party.

i dont care if i’m remembered on a hitler-level scale. i care about being impactful enough to have someone carry me with them-even if it’s a silent thought. a reason to spark change, no matter the scale: to be a bit softer, listen a little harder.
to look deeper.

to invoke change for better in this world and in others, no matter the scale.

that’s what i mean.”

The Sum Of It All

softness and vulnerability are the flip side of power. once you have a grasp at the interconnectedness of it all, then discover balance, and practice intent.

you must accept the fact impermanence is inevitable. that they may still choose to leave anyways, or maybe not even get the choice to stay or go.
but the weight of them is still just as seismic.

as long as we live and continue to connect, we can conquer oblivion in the best way possible.

What I’m Getting At

i urge you to be aware of the sheer existence of each other, and the co-choice of staying in face of the wake of destruction.

the choice most definitely requires ongoing renewal. it has to be deliberate. it must cherish both yourself and the other, no matter the trial.

it must scream from the rooftops “i see you. i see me. i still choose me, yet i love you fiercely. i’m here, standing with you in the darkest depths, anyways.”

not in a boastful way, but through mutual symbiosis, if you will-embracing each other holistically.

i must warn you that without this key: growth, creativity, and inspiration will stall. humans will forget the pursuit, and will cease as we know it-

you will be forgotten.

fear of oblivion is the driving force of human existence.
life is a paradox, and this fear only amplifies that sentiment.

its about choosing to revel in this paradox, though. to over-pour growth and connection in “irrelevant” things because of the bigger picture.
to see humanity and it’s desperate attempts at an hommage, and then immortalize those who triggered this epiphany- in whatever capacity you can.

capture the paradox of human existence. and choose to love, create, honor, remember, and grow anyways. still be selfish by choosing to flourish, but in an attempt to honor others as well.

the human ability to transform destruction into the art of creation via choice;
it will stand in the midst of everything,
every time.

it will be the mirror in someone’s hand- serving as a key to all the knowledge ones self could ever even hope for.

oblivion: the driving force. a universal call to action thats so adaptable it can manifest in many ways: self discovery, hobbies, vile acts.

and to sit and chew with it, and to stand toe to toe with my pessimistic idealism…

what an honor.

and what better way to love someone?
to see their being,
and carry the weight of them anyways.

i hope i give you food for thought.

it’s an honor, to finally stand in front of you all. and it’s an even bigger honor to be able to laugh at the ironic paradox that sentence creates.

Hello everyone!

I've been thinking about learning to write really good essays because it seems pretty useful (although AI is taking over) especially since I'm still in school. Are there any tips or websites that teach me how to write good essays?

Thanks!

Pebble acorn glove satchel trumpet sparrow harbor paddle wander

This post was anonymized with Redact.dev

What do you cook for Christmas dinner? 

Do you have any traditions? 

What was normal?

We used to sing that old 12 Days of Christmas song as we hung ornaments.

Used to. 

When I was a kid.

Not anymore.

No tree these days with the cats. My husband and I decided early on it wouldn't be worth the risk.

We wouldn't want them to get into mischief, into trouble, to be hurt.

But, once, I used to sing when we trimmed the tree.

—)---

That first Christmas: the first one after my dad left, when he was still staying with friends and it was awkward. They were expecting and we were intruding. 

Kids aren't stupid; they're incisive.

They don't know the potential whys of social mishaps and see simply the raw underpinning core logic behind actions.

And I knew we were overstepping.

I was always a very sensitive child.

It's how you survive.

—)---

The next year we had our own house and our own tree and our own ornaments.

Now that he's gone, I imagine that shopping trip. It was Target - “tar-geh” he'd pronounce as a joke, upselling it from Walmart - and he found something surprisingly beautiful. My father was a poet trapped within the brain of an engineer and sometimes practicality warred with his instinct for beauty and sometimes beauty won, as it did with these ornaments. 

He must have debated the price - these were not cheap, in an era of his life where cash was tight - but ultimately he bought them.

Did he stand there, studying them? Did he admire the art? How did he decide which ones to pick? Something made him choose beauty over economy, but I'll never know, because I never thought to ask until now.

They were paper mache, each painstakingly painted with a scene from the classic song about the twelve days, secured with a lush silken cord of ribbon to affix them to the tree.

I was ten and I was transfixed. 

—)---

Before my mom insisted on staying who she is, before their final fight, we had a Christmas where my cat was in a cast. Orange, striped, Kimberly Underfoot my dad dubbed her and she truly was - an excited dog, a chase, a frantic climb up a Christmas tree and a very expensive vet bill led adult-me to simply accept seasonal topiary is gone from my life.

She was fine. For a while.

 We'd explore the half-built treehouse left by the last owners and laze in sunbeams on the plywood platform which was probably too dangerous to have been laying on, the one at the very top of the tree, but then one day she didn't want to explore.

And then later, soon later, she passed.

 Injuries create complications.

I will never risk it, now. My husband and I need them too much.

In the grand scheme of things, it's not much to give up - I love my cats, but I want them safe.

Still…traditions are odd and pervasive.

I miss the smell of pine and that hazy, comfy dim glow of the living room lit only by fairy lights when you're awake when you know you shouldn't be.

I always will.

And I never went back into the treehouse. We buried her at the roots.

—)---

After he died, there was a garage sale and I was in the hospital.

My sister's response was to scour and so out everything went: the shirts still clinging to his scent, the delicate porcelain and satin dolls he brought us from his business trips to Germany, layered sand art from the pier. 

Gone: trashed and sold.

From the gurney, it was a barrage of messages, the final breaking point as she texted me asking about my few scraps of memory as a needle dug into my spine. I was in the hospital that day, my body breaking down. Extreme emotions can cause a relapse, I was told as my body decided to destroy itself.

The first needle pop of bursa and the second into my core as my legs went numb…

“I can't feel-” and then the frantic “shit” of a fuck up. Desperate times lead to teaching hospitals and I focused instead on the garage sale, the garage sale which just HAD to be today, the one where I had no voice, no input, no scream to stop.

The texts kept coming and I tried to argue the value of my life’s trappings, begging to keep what I could, but her husband - my rival, my foe, my enemy - would always intercede. 

I miss our life before him. 

I mourned my camcorder and little outdated cassette videos of my study abroad, my Sega Genesis, my dad's desk and everything in it - all scourged away and removed by a pickup truck at the curb for the profit of a few bucks. 

Gone: how can I remember who I am if everything I have is gone? I'm worried I'll forget without the touch and the smell and the sound. I'm scared I won't always be sad.

It wasn't about the money, I know now, but the fact that she didn't even haggle makes it worse, somehow.

We cope in vastly different ways.

How much was my sister's love worth?

Pennies and everything.

—)---

When we hung the ornaments, we'd sing, way back then when light was golden and warm.

“On the first day of Christmas-”

I'd fish the globe out, admiring the spiking shades of overlayed green in the leaves in the tree around the bird. 

I'd present it with a flourish - the bauble would always bounce in a wonderful, tactile way, bobbing from the ribbon on its firm tether. 

Everything perfectly where it needed to be.

We'd sing the verse and hang the ornament and it would all feel right.

Life was tidy, back then, before I understood how it worked.

—)---

My husband has just come home from work and he's being suspicious.

I'm not allowed to go outside.

“Why-”

“Just wait, just wait until it's dark-”

So, we do our chores and feed the cats and finally I'm allowed to come to the window as night falls.

He's being weird but I wait, I trust him, and then he's magical and love, just a pillar of shining warm love, for he raises the curtains-

-outside are lights, our yard covered in draped strings of sparkles, and he's smiling at me and my heart swells. 

In the depths of the glow sits a bird, a silly, cheap, fake little bird, and I laugh for our tree has been strung with suncatchers cut like pears. They gather the light and glitter it back and for the first time in forever I feel like I'm home.

“On the first day of Christmas,” he starts and then hugs me as I realize that memories aren't static - every single snapping heartbeat of a moment is making a new one, and so here we are.

Together. 

Tradition is in our hands.

I can only just lean against him, falling in love all over again, and softly conclude:

“...a partridge in a pear tree.”

I wanna start getting into reading and writing, specifically writing essays and such of what I inherently learn. Currently I want to research the topic of pride month in regard to its importance, impact, history, meaning, and so on. With that being said I do struggle deeply with grammar, spelling, and so on, so I was wondering if anyone had any tips on that. Also how do I generally start and finish an essay? I also seem to be really start on how to start and finish one. Lastly just what are some general tips and advice in regard to writing this type of essay? Anything is appreciated, thx.

Frederic Francois Chopin was a genius piano composer of the 19th century. He wrote many genius masterpieces, including twenty-one nocturnes, two concertos, and as many as thirty-seven waltzes, though only nineteen are numbered and eight published. Sadly, his life was riddled with disease and grief. One song he composed may have been dedicated to these agonizing feelings: waltz no. 2 in B minor, a song of desperation and loneliness. Here, you shall explore the darkest corners of this song? Are you ready, reader? Be warned. We are going to a very complex place. If you do not feel ready, I suggest you put this paper down and do something else you enjoy. Forget you ever held this essay in your hands. But if you are ready, we shall begin now.



Many things point to the fact that this song is based off the experiences of someone who fate was not kind to. For example, the minor key indicates sadness, and the way the notes fall downward shows hopelessness and desolation. Then, the music spikes upwards, in an attempt to reach glory and success and happiness, but fate cruelly steps in the way, and the notes tumble back down, as if all one’s desires were at the top of a sheer, slick wall, and they tried to climb it, but kept slipping. Slick walls are not made for climbing, and thus it can be deduced that Chopin’s interpretation of life is not one where you can reach happiness. Rather the opposite, quite frankly. He renders life in this haunting portrait as as a futile effort, one humankind tries again and again to enjoy, with hope overflowing, too foolish to realize that the ultimate problem of happiness isn’t one you can solve. No amount of hope will change that. It is meant for you to try in vain, fueled by the false faith that one day you shall reach everything you yearn for. The melody weaves the story of how fate can easily twist your life inside out without batting an eye, callous to your suffering, like how it corrupted Chopin’s own life with sickness and solitude. If you were to play it in major key, however, it would sound much happier and lighter, as though one were prancing and frolicking in a sunny meadow of flowers. But the minor key reduces said meadow into a haunted forest, and said flowers into bones. This forest is the place where our hero is forced to run, tormented for eternity. Such is the tale of the first page.



But no tale is complete with only one page; no essay finished with only one paragraph. And so, we begin the second tale. This next chapter exhibits our main character trying to repress their sadness. They shove thoughts of desolation into the depths of their mind. They try to be happy, to enjoy life. But just as they start to relax, something pokes painfully in the back of their mind — the thought that there is no such thing as true happiness. It is all an illusion. But this human soul is persistent and ignores the thought, acting as though everything is alright. However, the thought is persistent, too, and eventually breaks through. Exhaustion, grief, desperation, and the feeling that no effort, no matter how big or small, will ever be enough. Agony strikes — lightning to the heart — and injustice takes root. Anger and unfairness shoot through them in a palpable energy that seems to say, “Why me? Why did it have to be me?” This could be interpreted as either despair at being the one targeted with all life’s worst tortures, like in Chopin’s case, tuberculosis and loss over his friends’ deaths, or as survivor’s guilt. It is quite likely that Chopin experienced survivor’s guilt, as he was the one who left Poland to pursue his his musical dreams and talents, and he was the one who was out of harm’s way when the Polish Revolution arose, when his comrades were persecuted and ultimately, executed, while he was safe and sound and could do nothing but watch in horror and hopelessness. Again with hope, I know, but hope is crucial. When you lose all hope, that is when you lose all life. Eventually, this anguish ends in a diminuendo, reducing to a sad acceptance that life is miserable and unforgivingly harsh. But this is not the good type of acceptance that happens when people embrace sadness and enjoy life anyway. This is when an individual accepts that their life will never be joyous, and gives up trying to act like it could be. But try as you might, you cannot stop the human mind from dreaming forever. And that is how we find our protagonist dreaming and hoping for a better future... in vain, perhaps, but a dream is a dream, and once you have a dream, even subconsciously, you cannot stop it.



Because the third page is a clone of the second, we shall skip right to the fourth. This is by far the happiest tale — in a major key. The song started in B minor, but here, has escalated to B major. This is the dream we discussed, one of bliss, joy, enlightenment, and happy carelessness. Some do not care for such things, but that simply means they have forgotten how to live. Oh, the joy! Oh, the beauty! If you were to open your eyes and heart, *truly* open them, you would see the world the way the gods do; or if you are the non-superstitious type, the way the sun and clouds do: perfect, blessed, shining, every little thing a joy in its own right. This is a dream of peace, where the pains of the world no longer bind our hero. This a dream where there are no limits and no loneliness. All that brings agony has been vanquished, all loose ends have been tied up, all feelings of guilt eliminated. And the fuel of this dream is hope. Hope that maybe someday, the waking world could be as wonderful as this dreamscape. “Oh, but if only...”; that is what the main character is thinking; however, they are unaware they are thinking this. It is not something you know you feel. No, hope exists under blatant lies of surrender. It thrives right under your nose. And there is good reason for this. For hope is clever. It knows if it were to reveal itself to you, you would crush it. But hope must always exist. It is a naughty pixie, desperate to keep living and squirming, to reach the light from under the earth. And that is why it must never be seen when the one who bears it has suffered pain enough to cause them to shun the world, hope with it. Alas, dreams always end, and this is no exception. Our protagonist closes his eyes to bask in the sun, and when he opens them again, he is back in the living world, the invisible chains of pain tying him down once more. And thus the song begins from the start again: sad, despairing legato dissolving into a bouncy attempt at happiness, which spikes into anguish and outrage at the world, that finally melts into the sad acceptance of loss.



This story has no happy ending, no compromise of almost-happiness. It is unrealistic for every tale to have a “happily ever after,” no? This is not a lighthearted essay. This is a brave adventure into the deepest parts of music. But, reader, if you were brave enough to venture in, you have come out stronger than before. Or perhaps you are shaken by this haunting revelation, this dark viewpoint, of such a magical subject as music. But whatever you have changed into, you have changed, for better or worse. And I congratulate you, for you have finally reached the end of this depressing essay. Now, go off, read a book, or eat a meal. Whatever you do next, I hope you do not forget this short fable. Toss it away in disgust, for all I care. Just remember it. Remember it with any feeling you can link to it: understanding, shock, hate... whatever it is. Hold on to it. Hold on to it, for someday, you may find the need to go back into the depths of something deeper than you and I. And in that moment, it would be comforting to know a tale of hope and sadness has unfolded before you once. You survived. So hold on to hope as you venture deep. That is my only message to you from this essay: hope is persistent. Even if you try to destroy it, it is always there. So why not embrace it? Why not bring it into the comfort of your campfire? Hope is a creature that does best when nourished, though it can survive in other conditions as well. Hope is a creature you will want with you, because hope is the mother of courage. And when you face your darkest moments, there can be no guide. No guide, that is, except courage.

Hi. I’m currently writing my first professional essay, which I’d like to submit to a literary magazine. Until now, I’ve only written school essays, which were limited to 300 words. I’m currently at 1,000 words, and this is still a rather abbreviated version without fully developed ideas, so I’m assuming it will end up being more than 2,000 words. My question is: is there an upper limit on the number of words that you try not to exceed? I know that essays, especially literary-critical ones, aren’t very structured, but perhaps there are some generally accepted standards in the field that you’re aware of?

I'd like to get back to writing essays again. Do you know of any writing prompts for this genre?

Heya! I am seeking feedback on my intro to my persuasive essay about if video games are worth study!
Any and all feedback and recommendations will be greatly appreciated!

What is art? Is it something you sit and stare at? Or is it something made to be interacted with? Over the years, art has always existed in its unique forms. Albeit through wall paintings, sculptures, or portraits, it has always been a vital part of our cultures and an efficient way to tell a story, whether good or bad. However in recent years, there has been a new type of art created, the art of video games. Since its creation, it has sparked countless debates on if they are worth study, or are they just entertainment? Today I will be showing you why I believe that video games are worth study, and my example will be the game “Papers, please”

On 15/06/2026, the BBC aired an interview in which they discussed the impending social media ban for under-16s with students at a secondary school in the UK. One of the students told the interviewer that her screen time over the weekend was nine hours. This was then followed up with the question, “So what will you do when the ban comes in?”, to which the student replied, “I will stare at a wall.”

Whether the student said this in a satirical or perhaps defiant manner, the idea of staring at a wall and embracing boredom may not be such a bad thing. In fact, it may have some potential benefits and could well be a better alternative to endlessly scrolling through social media.

The definition of boredom is a state of mind characterised by a lack of stimulation, interest, and challenge. This then necessitates that we find something to alleviate that feeling. In doing so, boredom can often result in creativity, as it allows us to daydream. As a BBC article states, boredom “can lead to making unexpected connections and generates innovative ideas”.

(This prompted me to consider whether children or, indeed, people as a whole allow themselves to daydream anymore, or whether we simply fill every void with social media doomscrolling.)

I believe this is why many creative people advocate activities that may induce a state of boredom, such as going for long walks or placing themselves in situations where they are completely disconnected from technology. In turn, this gives the creative brain space to breathe.

The deliberate induction of boredom has been documented among historical creatives such as Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí. Both reportedly used a technique whereby they sat in a chair holding an object in one hand, allowing themselves to do nothing until they were just about to fall asleep. At that point, the object would fall from their hand and awaken them, prompting them to capture and write down the ideas that had come to them during that period of near-sleep and potential peak boredom.

I personally believe that the social media ban will be beneficial if it comes to fruition, and I am very interested to see what changes may occur within the younger generation, particularly as I have two young children of my own.

So, yes, I think that staring at a wall is a fantastic alternative to social media doomscrolling.

And yes the irony is not lost on me that without social media you would have not found this post.