Madegeorge Blog

This song is one that I would listen to when I am calm. The reason this song has significance to me is that whenever my dad and I are driving around this song usually comes on. It is a that my dad and I like and we usually listen to more of the band’s songs but this one is my favorite.

This is my go-to happy and or hype song because of the upbeat tune and how catchy it is. There is no true significance to this song besides I like it a lot. This is one of my favorite songs that I have on my phone.

This is one of my favorite songs because of how funny it is to me. I remember listening to this song about every day during the summer with my friends while we scream the lyrics at the top of our lungs. It also just brings up my mood whenever I listen to it.

This song is from my favorite band Gorrilaz and one of my favorite songs to listen to. This is one of the few songs I know how to play on bass before I stopped playing so much but the catchy bass riff has always stuck in my head. It is the only one I remember how to play so it holds a special place in my heart.

This song is from one of my favorite bands and the one I have been listening to the most recently. twenty-one pilots is also one of my favorite bands and one of the few bands I went to see live. I don’t really have any emotions that bubble up when I listen to this song I just think that it sounds good so I listen to it often.

 

Grasping at straws trying to think of a subject

Not coming up with anything what could this mean

Should I do more or get a hobby to give some sort of substance to this writing

Like finding a needle in a haystack that isn’t there making me frustrated, pulling out my hair

 

Maybe I’m not trying hard enough to think of something or maybe I actually have absolutely nothing

Maybe if I wait here I will think of something soon

Like a flower during spring about to bloom and then suddenly BOOM

but until I think of something I’m stuck in this classroom thinking about nothing

 

From Meh to Not So Meh

I heard a crack and quickly became terrified, badly hurt, and didn’t know what to do. This was the summer of 2016 June 8th, it was nice outside, just cool enough to wear a coat because it rained the day before and there were scattered clouds throughout the sky. A friend named Rand and I decided to go to Millstreet, a school that had a park we played on often. It started with running around, jumping, ducking, and diving all over the park. We started to make some obstacle courses that we had to run through faster than the other. Usually, something like run to the slide, climb up it and then run to the other side of the park and other stuff like that. Eventually, we got to a point where we kept on amping up the courses more and more to have more fun and make it more dangerous to do. The final course we did start with jumping off of a 7-foot rock wall then running up some stairs, climb a latter and then climb off the side of the park. Rand went first and did it with ease making it look easier than it seemed and soon enough it was my turn. I climbed up the rock wall and got to the platform on top and started to get ready to jump off. I ran forward and right before I jumped I slipped on some water that was there from the night before and dove headfirst towards the ground. While I was air-born I put my arm in front of me to try and not hit the ground with my head and cushion the fall with my arm. I landed on the woodchips and heard a loud crack and in my daze and confusion got up and checked to see if I was fine. I looked at my arm and realized that it was bent it a funny way. Both of the bones in my forearm were broken and were at an unnatural angle. I screamed obscenities and cried when the pain finally caught up with my injury. Rand grabbed my phone out of my pocket and called my mom telling her that I had just broken my arm. 30 Minutes later she arrived at the park with my sister while I laid down in agony. I walked to the car trying to carefully hold my arm to not cause any more pain but nothing helped. I got to the car and the ride to the hospital was very bumpy from all the potholes making my arms move more and more. After staying the night the bones were back in place and my arm was casted.

I spent the rest of the summer mostly alone and depressed that I could not do anything. In substitute to friends, I coped with food and kept on eating whenever I was bored or for any other excuse I could make up to eat more. This went on for the entire summer because I decided that I had nothing else to do and that nobody would want to do anything with me because I was semi-immobile. Soon enough this ended up becoming a habit, eating whenever I felt like it because that was all I did for the summer. After my arm eventually healed I was a lot weaker because of muscle atrophy. I had become a lazy mess at this point by never doing anything physically active, and eating in all my spare time and not giving any attempt to break the habit. At the beginning of the summer, I was one hundred and thirty pounds and ended up gaining forty more. The next two years were not any better, I stayed with the whole lazy thing and spiraled into a terrible diet consisting of nothing but junk food like chips and soda. When 2018 came around, I was 200 pounds and miserable without truly realizing it because I had been like this for so long. I started to become more self-conscious, always wearing a jacket because it made me feel less fat and wearing very large cloths so it would not touch my stomach as often. This was the worst I have felt in my entire life and wanted to change it but didn’t have the ambition to try anything.

It was sophomore year of high school, second semester and a friend, Joey invited me to sit with him during lunch so I went and sat with him and the strangers he was with. He started telling me about how I should join boys gymnastics and that it would make me lose weight and become fit. He had been apart of it from freshman year and wanted to recruit more people to join in with him. I thought about it and eventually started going to the open gyms before the season started to decide if I wanted to or not. There was equipment in the gymnastics room I have never heard of or seen before and buckets of chalk with a faint fog of it when people started to do stuff. Everyone there had a six-pack and was very good at what they did while I just stood around in this place that I have never been in before trying to figure out what to do. I tried out random things with the help of the people there but I could barely hold myself up for more than 5 seconds. At this point, it finally hit me that I needed to change what I have become, I wanted to lose weight, I wanted to do a push-up, I wanted to do a pull-up, heck I even wanted a six-pack but I was nowhere close to the shape I needed to be to do anything. I decided to join thinking it will be easy to reach all of my goals but man was I wrong. Right off the bat, I was the worst on the team and even had to not participate in the first two meets because I could not do anything. Conditioning was the worst part of it for me because you would have to do everything in sync with the rest of the team to finish it. You would go on the large blue springboard like in the middle of the room and spread out, the coach would say do 10 pushups and other workouts and everyone will do them except me because I did not have the strength to do it. This lasted throughout all of the seasons and while I had lost 20 pounds by the end of the semester I still had a lot of work to do if I wanted to do better next season.

It was the summer of 2019 and Planet fitness gave out a free membership for the entire summer for teens. I decided to take action and got the membership and convinced two of my friends Rand and Blake to join me. I was weak but determined to do 10 pullups by the end of the summer. This was a very big thing for me because I could barely hold my bodyweight for 10 seconds let alone do a pullup. The first few times we went, the place was alien to me, barbells, dumbells, machines, and all other kinds of stuff that I knew nothing about. I ended up asking my dad for help because I had no idea where to start so he helped me make a workout plan for every week. So every day I would go to Planet Fitness and lift and put back down heavy things is different positions in the hope of becoming fit. On the first day when we went into the place, it had a faint smell of rubber and there was always the noise of metal hitting metal and the grunts of the people who used the machines. Every day was a struggle and I felt pain and soreness in random parts of my body all the time but if this is what had to be done to get stronger then I did it. We went through the entire summer working out from about one to three every weekday. Progress was slowly being made and I was also losing weight. The end of the summer was coming close I was was only able to do 3 pullups so the rest was spent in a wild effort to do 10 pullups. it was toward the end of summer and we all went into the gym and I went to the pull-up bar and was about to try to get ten pullups. The first 5 were fine but then after that, I flopped like a fish out of water. I was kicking and swinging my legs and slowly going up for six then seven eventually I was finally able to do it. I have finally reached my goal.

Right now as I am writing this I lost 55 pounds and gained everything I wanted only short of a six-pack and am ready for the next season of gymnastics to start. I now know that to be happy I have to take care of myself and not let the bad times take over what would eventually be the good times.

This is from when I broke my arm (2016) to now (2019)

 

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien the chapter  Speaking Of Courage is about a man Norman Bowker who wrote to O’Brien about how after the war he could not transition from the war to a normal life. He wrote about how he has nowhere to go as he drove around a lake he went to before the war in a car. He went in circles around the lake thinking about how his father is proud that he got medals but Norman thinks that he missed his chance to get a silver medal but blew it. He then wrote about how in Vietnam they set up camp on top of a sewage pile and when the mortars started to strike Kiowa started to sink into the sewage and tried to escape by grabbing Normans boot but Norman saved himself instead of Kiowa. Norman wants to tell this to someone like his dad but he doesn’t and keeps it to himself. He hopes that if he were to tell his father this that he will console him and tell him that he is proud of the medals he did win. He parks his car and then goes into the lake and watches the fireworks on the fourth of July.

In this chapter Norman Bowker is hesitating on whether he should tell people about how Kiowa died. He thinks that he does not deserve the medals because of his lack of bravery in that one instance with Kiowa. This brings up the question is Norman sympathetic or pathetic. Sympathetic is felling, showing, or expressing sympathy and pathetic is arousing pity through vulnerability or sadness. I think that Norman is more pathetic than sympathetic because he never tells anyone about his guilt he has and what is troubling him in his head, he keeps it all to himself letting it boil over till he eventually kills himself in the YMCA. Instead of being sympathetic and showing his emotion or telling anyone what is troubling him he only thinks about doing it as he drove around the lake reminiscing about all the things that he wished he could have done rather than what he has done. To him, by not getting the silver medal he is not good enough despite being able to bring seven other medals when he came back from the war. It is hard to tell if he is pathetic or sympathetic because he never lets anyone except O’Brien know what he is thinking about but in the letter, he seems pathetic.

Norman writes about how he could have done better and made it seem pathetic that he writes about what he wants to do but never actually puts any effort to share his guilt. He just writes to O’Brien as the only way of coping with what he is going through and revels in his own failures instead of what he did do and how he has done good too in Vietnam. This patheticness also stops him from re-entering society as many others have and he lives off of his parents and constantly gets new jobs till his eventual end never being able to get past what happened in Vietnam Because he never expreses what he feels to anyone.

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Rat Kiley tells the story of how he was part of a small medical detachment in Vietnam and Mark Fossie one of the soldiers stationed there was able to get his girlfriend there through a supply drop. He tells how when she first arrived in Vietnam she was a beautiful, bubbly and everyone there liked having her around. She started to take curiosity about what happens in Vietnam and pestered her boyfriend to teach her everything. Slowly after that, she started to become more rugged and hardened to what Vietnam is truly like and started going on ambush missions with the greenies. She was slowly growing mad because of the way she was able to become numb to all the horrors there and eventually she broke up with Mark Fossie and became one with the jungle. Instead of wearing jewelry and the feminine things she once wore turned into a crewed necklace of human tounges and camouflage then vanished into the mountains.

This was all told from the perspective of Rat Kiley who is known to tell stories and blow them out of proportion making it a lot more than what actually happened. The question is do I believe the story told by Rat Kiley, and to be honest I’m not sure because it is told by a non-trustworthy person but it all seems so real and crazy that it would be hard to blow it out of proportion. I think that the essence of what he said is true but the entire story is not. I believe that there was a girl who went to Vietnam to see her boyfriend but ended up becoming corrupted by the horrors of the war. It definitely is kind of hard to believe that this very feminine, beautiful girl turned into a crazed savage within the short time of being in Vietnam but with what the people there had to go through I think that this is entirely possible.

The story is hard to believe but I don’t think that the lack of believability makes it any less compelling of a story. I think that the lack of believability makes it even more of a compelling story because if it was another run of the mill war story where she went there to see her boyfriend and then left as the same person then they got happily married is too good to be true. She ended up going insane and became one with Vietnam leaving behind everything and everyone she ever knew. I think that because this story is so crazy it grabs your attention and does not let go making you wonder what happened to her and can this really happen to people who are part of the war. The lack of believability helps make this story more compelling to read and makes you more interested in it than if it were believable.

I think that people exaggerate the truth in stories not to deceive people but to make them feel what the narrator felt when it happened. The thing about her having six human tongues on copper wire for a necklace is crazy and may have not happened but if it was not added then we will not fully understand just how far gone she is and how animalistic and mad she has become during her stay in Vietnam. The exaggeration of the truth makes you feel more for what is going on and makes you understand the meaning of the story more than if it were told to you cut and dry.

These are pictures of war and what comes with war can come friendship, teamwork, and just visual explosions that catch the eye showing the beauty in war.

Are You A Coward?

Bravery is something that allows people to do things even though it could be dangerous or scary for them. The opposite of that is cowardice and it could also make people do things but not cause they want to, but because of the pressure, they have that forces them to do it.

For this blog I have been given the question can a person enter the war as an act of cowardice and I think the answer is yes. In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Tim is drafted to go into the Vietnam war but he does not want to because he does not believe in the war. He thinks that he is too young and has so much ahead of him that he can’t go. Tim drives the edge of the border between America and Canada and stays at a lodge with an old man. While he is there he is conflicted about whether he should go to the war or he should leave the country and all the people he cares about. He ends up choosing to go to the war because he does not want to be looked at as a coward, but by going to the war he is proving that he is a coward. Tim ended up folding into the social pressure of going to the war, making him more of a coward because he did not have the bravery to stand up for what he believes in and go to Canada.

This is just one example of a man going to war but not wanting too out of an act of cowardice, but what is cowardice. The Dictionary’s definition of cowardice is a lack of bravery but this can be used in a variety of situations like being too afraid to go into a haunted house. Something that is very often put together is a soldier and them being brave for risking their lives to defend their country. If the soldier wanted to go to war and fought for what they believe in I would consider that a brave and noble act, but what about being drafted to go into war. When people are drafted to go into the war they are not supposed to have a choice and have to go, but they can let’s say go to Canada and avoid the draft. In most cases, this would be considered cowardice because they are not willing to fight for their country but crossing the border can also be an act of bravery. By the person refusing to follow the rest and not go to the war, there is a lot of social pressure to go and this in most cases would make the person head off to war. Not going and standing up to the pressure of going could make them brave because they are not afraid to go against what people believe and follow what they believe instead of following the others.

This is a draft card that would have been used during Vietnam and 60,000 men dodged the draft while 2,700,000 went to the war http://www.uswardogs.org/vietnam-statistics/

Sometimes being considered a coward is braver than just following others blindly. ignoring what others say and doing what you believe in instead of doing what others believe in takes a lot of guts. So I agree that people can join a war out of an act of cowardice.

I’m going to write about myself for 500-1000 words. I’m not sure where to start so I’ll start from the very beginning I was born May 5th, 2003 and went to BeeBee Elementary school which was not an amazing school, to say the least. I was born with a heart condition called SVT which basically makes my heart beat fast and took very long to stop. Something I remember about it before it was treated was that one day at BeeBee during recess my heart started to beat fast and when I went to a teacher they ignored me. So that was how good that school was to me throughout the few years I went there. After that, I went to Jefferson Middle School and it was kind of a blur because nothing happened during my time there. After that, I went and am still going to Naperville North Highschool which so far is a better experience than both of the other schools.

So Far Highschool is pretty good but some of my best memories here came from when a friend told me to join gymnastics Sophmore year. Something to note is that I was overweight/obese most of my life up until this point. He told me that joining would be good for me to get more fit so I decided to join in an effort to try and get slimmer than the egg shape I was. Throughout all of the time there everyone was very nice to me despite the fact that I was the worst on the team because I could not move my own body weight. The first two meets that we had I had to sit out because I was not able to participate in any of the events making me ineligible to participate in the meets. After a while of sitting out, I started to try out the pommel horse event and was not good at it but gave it all I had even though I still ended up getting very low scores like around 1.8 or lower. This is not good because the other people were getting scores of 4-8 but even going through all of that I didn’t quit. I decided that when the season ended and summer would set in I would do my best to finally get in shape and try to do better next season.

 

When summer came I worked out every weekday with a few friends and went on a calorie-restricted diet. I started out the summer not being able to do a push-up or anything even close to athletic. At the beginning of summer, my mom told me about how planet fitness was having a thing were for the entire summer if you were 15-18 years old it was free. Good thing for me I was 16 and willing to participate in that deal and proceeded to go with two of my friends to try to get fit. I had one goal in mind by the end of the summer I wanted to be able to do 10 full pull-ups because I have never done them before and to me, they seemed the peak of fitness. After working out every weekday about halfway through the summer I was able to do my first pull-up. Keep in mind that it was just me getting my chin above the bar once flopping around like a fish trying to get over the bar one more time. eventually by the end of the summer, I was able to not only do the 10 pull-ups I wanted to but also lost 50 pounds and went from 200 to 150 over one summer.

Now that summer is done with and I am in my third year of Highschool as a junior. I joined strength and performance to try and get stronger because even though I did a lot over the summer I am still relatively weak. Right now I am going to set a goal to do a muscle-up by the end of this school year. Hopefully, when gymnastics comes back in season I can participate and do better. I have to wait until it is the second semester of this year to get back into it but right now all I can do train to get better for the next season. I think that is about it so far but I might add more when the second semester comes around until then I gotta train.