Madness

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. When I look at my past self, I see a stranger, reeking with the purity and ignorance of youth. She worried little, and laughed often. Her heart was fragile and her ego was huge. She exists still, but only in memory.

This world ended and a new one began. A world, in which purity, stupidity, and weakness got you killed. Or worse. This once happy-go-lucky, clueless girl was forced to open her eyes, and see the world that had been left to her.

First came the drought. For two years, not a drop of rain fell on the earth. People fought over the water that remained. Once that was gone, we started losing all of our other resources. Many plants and animals died off because of dehydration, and many more were taken by the wild fires.

Food shortages made rationing necessary for the countries that were structured enough to enforce it. And for those that couldn’t, civil war, anarchy, and chaos followed. Hundreds of millions died all over the world.

Then came the epidemic. A plague unlike anything I’d ever seen. It came quick and silent, taking thousands in the first night alone. It would start with a fever that would last a few hours. Then your veins would turn black, and blood would run from most of your orifices. By that point, it would only be a few minutes before the body shut down and you stopped breathing. Boarders shut down, and quarantineand curfews were enforced. I came to understand that people don’t like to be caged, even for aims of safety. Violence ensued as more and more people got sick.

By this point, in America, most government leaders had abandoned their posts and sought solitary refuge in their private underground bunkers. The military came in and essentially took control. They told us that the President was giving orders from a remote location, but no one actually knew if that was true. All we knew was that the world as we’d known it was dead.

Now, all I could do was close my eyes and think back to how simple my life had been before the madness. How, in the morning, I would wake up and eat breakfast with my sister and our parents, then go to school. I missed school. I missed my friends. I missed my car and my puppy and even Mrs. Paulson. Who knew what happened to her?

I closed my eyes, head dropping, like a person drunk for so long she no longer knows she's drunk, and then, drunk, awoke to the world which lay before me.

Famous First/Last Lines

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

This is the opening line of The Go-Between, published in 1953 by L. P. Hartley, who was born on December 30, 1895 in Whittlesey, UK and died on December 13, 1972 in London. The story follows Leo Colston, who finds an old diary he wrote as an adolescent. As he reads through the diary, he begins remembering events which took place in the summer of 1900 when he stayed with his school friend, Marcus Maudsley. He realizes how these events affected the rest of his life.

This book comes highly recommended. "The excellence of the writing alone warrants reading of the book. But what makes the novel so engrossing is the drama and suspense of the plot" (Joe Shallet). I have never read a book set in the early 1900s-50s, so I wouldn't have much to compare it to. Leo seems to be a man of many faces, a hardened shell of a man living in a boy's mind.


"I closed my eyes, head dropping, like a person drunk for so long she no longer knows she's drunk, and then, drunk, awoke to the world which lay before me."

 Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, published in 1986, closed with this line. Acker was born on April 18, 1947 in New York City and died November 30, 1997. She was a postmodernist, sex-positive feminist writer. Naturally, much for her writing was influenced by this. This novel is about a women who travels through time. She journeys through American history to the final days of the Nixon administration, passing on the way through a New York reminiscent of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and a brutally defamiliarized contemporary London. Here transvestites who might play at being Nazis and beautiful she-males enact the rituals of courtly love.

This plot just kind of goes over my head. I can't see myself reading a book like this, not because of the content, but because the tools the author uses to get her point across make no sense to me. It seems like more of an abstract essay than a novel.

Writers as Readers

I can read pretty much anywhere. I read in quite places, loud places, small spaces, and big spaces. I read on the go in planes, cars, boats, and trains. I read alone, in my room, under a pile of pillows and blankets. I read during the day, and at night. As long as the book is good, I can tune in under any circumstances.

When I was in the 2^nd grade, we were expected to make the transition from picture books to novels. I struggled with this and fell behind in reading. I was considered a below average reader and couldn’t seem to catch up with my classmates. My teacher made me feel me feel inferior and it became one of my biggest insecurities. My parents made me read Warton and the King of the Skies, a book about two frog brothers working together to fly their hot air balloon. After reading this book a few times, I began reading more advanced books. Eventually, I surpassed my fellow classmates and became an above average reader. Thanks Warton.

I have read a lot of book series. My first, like many others, was Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I became so enthralled in the series that I read the first four books in the span of a week. At the time, the fifth and last book hadn't been release and I had to wait a whole three months before I could finish! During this waiting period, I made my mom buy me the various posters, extras, and even the "Demigod Files"- a complete guide to the world of Percy Jackson. I was a regular fan girl. My friends and I would discuss the characters at recess and would sometimes pretend that we were at Camp Halfblood and run around fighting monsters and completing quests.
I also read the Hunger Games series (multiple times). I related to Katniss at the time, and the idea of rebellions and fighting oppression and the closeness of- and sometimes the lack of- family were all common themes in my life. Also, the relationship with her sister seemed to parallel my own with my younger sister. Katniss had to step up and be a parent to her sister when neither of hers could. Prim was the most important person in her life, like Sydney is in mine. When she got hurt after the third book and stopped talking for a while, I related with her confusion and feeling of brokenness.

Newspaper inspired: The Daily Life of a Broke College Socialite

"I swear I have a coupon in here somewhere," Beth said as she dug around hurriedly through her giant, messy purse. She felt really bad, but her paycheck wouldn’t come through until Monday. She was living off nickels and dime, and it was only Friday night.

“Your total is $9.54, Miss.” The cashier was getting noticeably agitated as he gazed at the long line behind Beth. He’d probably had to deal with people like her all day, but that’s what he got for working so close to campus.

“Ahhh ha!” She yanked out the stack of coupons she’d cut from the newspaper and sorted through them until she found the buy one-get one free she’d been looking for. She triumphantly handed over the paper, along with a handful of change. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Beth, like your average college student, was broke. She hadn’t yet gotten the hang of managing her money and she liked going out with her friends too much to care. But now, it was catching up with her. She was shoulders deep in library fines, bills, and student loan debt, and had nowhere to run.

She laughed to herself as she walked out of the store.

Memorable Passage: TFIOS

Yes, yes. I know what you're thinking. "Not another post about The Fault In Our flipping Stars," and I completely understand as every time I turn around, I see someone sporting a "TFIOS" t-shirt or yelling "okay" down the hall to their friends in reply to their previously stated "okay." Everyone read the story about two star-crossed lovers, destined to die at the hands of disease and the anguish of being the one that lived. I love that story as much as the next girl, but I hope I can expose the often overlooked side of this marvelous book.

Augustus Waters was obsessed with leaving his mark on the world. He wanted everyone to remember him and sing songs about him and write long novels concerning his various good deeds. His biggest fear was oblivion.  Hazel, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less. She tread lightly on the earth, careful not to leave big of a “scar.” She didn’t care about heroism and fame. She just wanted to love and be loved.  

"'There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does.'"

This quote reminds me of those posters you often see posted in science classes. “You are here,” with an arrow pointing to a tiny speck in the universe. This is very contradictory to what we have been raised to believe.  Humans are supposed to be at the center of the universe. Everything we do is groundbreaking, breathtaking, or just plain life changing. Everything we said or do or make is going to last forever and ever and ever. But it’s not. John Green forces us to except our mortality. We are just a speck. We are insignificant to the grand scheme. Life is so much bigger than us.

While this may be uncomfortable for someone like Augustus to think about, for Hazel, it’s comforting. She finds solace in the idea that she doesn’t matter. She’s a casualty of cancer, but everyone else is a casualty of oblivion and forgotten hopes and dreams.