Get Smarter: Read a Book!

You've probably heard a teacher mention at some point, how people who read a lot are better spellers. They're also better writers, better speakers, better at grammar, more open to new things, more creative, and etc.

Reading is nourishment for the mind. Each book you devour takes you on a journey, teaching you, shaping you, persuading you, exposing you to new ideas, developing you, and changing you - if you open your mind. I've seen those kids in class who are -sure that they aren't going to gain anything by reading an assigned book...and they're usually right, while the kids who went ahead and read with their mind open, usually learn something. Imagination is key. Inspiration.

Books can be your life companions. My mother read me The Hobbit when I was six years old. Later, I didn't remember much of it; there was a dragon, and some gold, and a dwarf king who died. But when I was old enough to understand it on my own, I reread it and loved it. Now I reread it every once in a while.

Words are tools. Reading stretches our subconscious, teaching us vocabulary and spelling. Spelling is a neuromuscular skill, meaning that you have to stretch it a lot, which reading does for you. I suspect vocabulary is also a neuromuscular skill. In any case, it's pretty commonly known that people who read more have a larger vocabulary and are better spellers.

Books give us information, especially non-fiction. Even those puffed-up self help books can teach a few things (although they take too many words to say a thing). Kids these days tend to use the internet to do their research. If they have a paper for which they are required to cite a book source, they usually flip through the book, find one relevant quote, and only use that. Heaven forbid that they actually read the book. The problem here is that the internet, while a great place to do research, is also not known for its reliability. It's also way too convenient. Kids get used to just being able to type in what they're looking for and getting thousands of results back. While this isn't a bad thing, they also need to know how to find what they're looking for in a book.

The library is my friend. It's the community's friend. Anyone can go to a library. Lately, budget cuts have put libraries in trouble. Read more about this crisis here, here, and here.

Why The Internet is Awesome

I will be the first to admit that the internet has a negative side. Mind-numbing games, no-brain-cells-required social networking, and easy-to-access TV shows can combine to stupefy the viewer until their liquified brains start dripping out their nose and ears. And of course, there's also the threat of online predators.

But there are also good things about the internet. It can help you keep up on what's going on, it can help you organize your own life, and there's a wealth of information right at your fingertips. The key is in knowing how to utilize it. Here's a list of everything I love about the internet.

1. If you're an avid reader, sites like Shelfari help you organize your books and find new ones. You can search a book by author, subject, popularity, and genre. Your virtual shelf is sorted by three categories: books you've read, books you're reading now, and books you plan to read.

2. How-to sites, like Instructables and Wikihow, teach you new things and allow you to learn from  and interact with a community. I learned how to tat and make mug brownies from Instructables, and Wikihow inspired my mask obsession when it featured an article on making masks out of foil and tape. So useful! I even once found an article of building a secret door behind a bookshelf (not that I've done that, of course...). Youtube is also good for finding how-to videos if you need a visual on something. It's also a good place to find lectures on, say, physics.

3. If there's something you're intensely interested in, it's almost a guarantee that there's a forum somewhere dedicated to it. Forums are a great place to discuss things with other people who are interested in the same things as you.

4. Free music! If you don't have an ipod or can't afford to buy a ton of songs to fill it up with, sites like Pandora and playlist.com can be great. Pandora is sort of like an online radio station in that you don't exactly get to pick what songs are played, but on playlist.com you can put together your own list of songs (unfortunately for me, playlist.com won't work on my dying laptop anymore).

5. Google. Yes, google is taking over the world, but for good reason. It's just so convenient. It's got everything you could possibly ever need: gmail, google calendar, search engines, online books, maps, and of course, blogs! Which leads us to...

6. Blogs! Blogs are awesome. For one thing, you're reading a blog right now. Blogs allow for us to see the world through the eyes of many different people. They allow us to see several sides to an issue, also. I love reading about what other people are doing and looking at the way they think about and analyze a situation.

That's all for now, but I know there must be much more. What do you love about the internet?

What's going on with the world?

This morning, my mother made me scrub a toilet. I wasn't supposed to scrub the toilet, but she made me anyway.

Okay, now you're thinking that I'm being whiny, angsty ager. But there's actually a story behind this. And a point. There's a point to this story, too.

We the children are assigned one chore a day. Theoretically, we do the chore in exchange for our priveleges, like using the internet, the wii, the dvd player, etc. Usually, each person doing one chore a day is enough to maintain our household at a livable level of cleanliness. Today I was supposed to scrub the bathroom floor.

I was in the middle of cleaning out the mop, when my mother, walking by, said, "Clean the toilet, too."

My response (whilst blinking in bewilderment): "But that's not part of scrubbing the floor."  She was technically violating the one-chore-a-day policy. In my defense, I was not challenging her authority. I don't mind doing a little extra work. In fact I usually do some extra cleaning everyday, especially in the kitchen (not that she notices...*sniff*sniff*). I was confused about the requirementsof my job. But...

She snapped at me. "Well I just made if part of it!"

Ouch.

My response was sort of instinctual. I kind of bristled up and thought rebellious, agery thoughts. But I didn't say anything out loud. I kept my mouth shut, like the little goody-goody that I am. And I scrubbed the toilet. I didn't want to be rude.

My mother was rude. I'm used to her being rude, but it still ruffles my feathers, every single time. I rarely bite back. But today it made me think. Some of my "friends" have called me too sensitive when I expressed dissatisfaction with their rudeness to me. Like my "friend" exhibit A who eats my food without asking or being offered it. Not like my friend exhibit B, who will do puppy dog eyes, look hungrily at my food, and then ask, "Uh...can I has some?" Exhibit A punches people when she is annoyed at them. Exhibit B just gives them a look like "Did you seriously just say that?" I kind of like exhibit B better.

Does it make me old-fashioned, that I prefer politeness, friendliness, and consideration over casual rudeness? I've never considered myself old-fashioned. Has society just decayed to the point where it's okay to be rude? What's going on?

Bejeweled Choker

In my post about the tatted mask, I mentioned I'd found a very simple pattern that could be manipulated to go around the eye wires for a new mask. I saw on agasunset's blog a choker that she had made. I liked it, and as she said, it came out looking rather punky. Punky is good, in my book. I zoomed in on her picture so I could figure out the pattern. My thinking was somewhere along the lines of "Hey, I could use a simple, basic pattern that's not too hard. I need to learn something besides really specific stuff, so...here we go?" The pattern was actually easier than I expected. At first I thought I might make it into a wrist cuff or something, but I ended up making another choker. Just a basic, long, rectangle-shaped bit of lace that would fit around my neck.

I thought I would look through the bead box and see what I could find to decorate it with. There wasn't much in the bead box (the bead box is communal property, so most of the good stuff has already been used up). I pawed through my personal craft drawer and found a packet of little silver jewels and glued some of the square ones onto the choker, similar to what agasunet did with pyramid nailheads. My choker looks a bit more sparkly than hers, but it ended up pretty much being the same.

The Many Personas of *I*

I've always loved masks, but I've never really done any research on them or looked into their history. Today I decided to do some. Here's what I found.

There are different types of masks, apparently. I did not know this, but here are all the types of masquerade masks (which are really Venetian masks, because is there really any other kind of masquerade mask?). As far as I can tell from what I read, they're all made out of papier mache and then painted and decorated to look exotic and exciting:

Bauta: a whole face mask which was originally used for concealment. It has a sharp chin line, no mouth, and is typically very gilded. It's also usually white. Picture here.

Moretta: a black, usually velvet, oval-shaped face mask that used to come with a veil (I don't know if it still does). It was held onto the face by a button held in the teeth so that the wearer did not have to talk, but these days it come with a ribbon for tying it on. It was worn by women, and later by men, to hide their identity. Picture here.

Mattacino: a clown type mask which was worn by Italian jesters. Picture here.

Medico Della Peste (The Plague Doctor): masks with long noses that look like beaks. They were developed during the plague for doctors. The nose held a filter of herbs and salts, and there were crystal discs over the eyes. Now the herbs and discs are gone, and the masks are more decorative, sometimes resembling birds or beaked creatures. Picture here.

Columbina: a half mask that is held up by a baton or ribbon. Supposedly it was inspired by an actress who did not want to cover her entire face for a play. I think these are the most common and decorative types of masks. Picture here.

Volto (Larva): similar to the Bauta, this mask is a full-face mask which is typically white. Unlike the Bauta, however, this mask has a rounded chin line and a mouth so that the wearer could talk and eat while still concealing who they were. Larva means ghost. Picture here.

So there you have it: the various types of Venetian masquerade masks and their names. The reason this came up was because I was planning to post pictures of a mask I made and I didn't what to call it. I wasn't even sure it could be called a Venetian mask. Now I can call it a harlequin columbina mask (harlequin just means that it has a pattern of different colored diamonds). It's hard to tell from the pictures, but the white diamonds have piano music on them.

And here's a link to the history of Venetian masks, if you care to read it. 

Note: I do not own any of the pictures, except for the pictures of my mask (the green and white harlequin mask with the feathers).

No Rites of Passage?

The main topic in my english class this summer is Rites of Passage, ceremonies meant to mark one's passage from one stage of life to the next. The author of one of our textbooks, bemoaned the state of youth today because they have no rites of passage. After I read that, I sat there wondering if that's what my problem - I have no connection to past and future generations. Now that I've thought about it, I think that's not my problem. My problem is myself, but that's a whole other issue.

Now that I've thought about it some more, I think the reason I feel more connected to my dad (beside psychological similarities) is because he has passed on more of his legacy to me; it's his fault thanks to him that I'm a fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and other various kinds of nerdy science fiction. My mother has nothing to pass on to me. I inhereited little of her artistic talent, and she has hardly any connections with the rest of her family, so she can't pass on anything from them.

If I am ever a parent, maybe I'll start a tradition to act as a rite of passage; when my children turn eigh , they can get a tattoo to represent themselves. A small tattoo. In a place where it can be hidden. And nothing inappropriate (aaaah, I sound like a parent already). Archaic tribes had rituals of scarification; wouldn't a tattoo at eigh be similar? Or perhaps I could similar drop my children off in the middle of a very large forest and tell them to find their spirit guide.

Finished First Attempt

Remember that mask I mentioned? The one I was tatting? I finished it last week. Today I finally spread it out and took some pictures. There's a piece of wire in the middle for fitting around the nose that I had to flatten out for the pictures.

It didn't come out quite like I had anticipated. I think that all three medallions (those are the round pieces on either side and in the middle) are too large, because they keep getting folded up. And the mask isn't stiff enough. In one of the pictures of me wearing it, you can see that the top piece with the beads keeps flopping over. Also, I wanted it a bit more tightly woven. For example, it keeps bunching up over the nose because the tatting isn't all quite attached.

I'm going to try tatting another mask, this time without instructions. I'll figure it out as I go. I found a simple pattern that I think can be manipulated to go around the eyes.

Blogs/Forums > Facebook

On Sunday or Monday last week - I believe it was Monday - I deactivated my facebook account. I think facebook is a regressive way to network.

When I joined facebook (probably about a year ago), I had the same good intentions all facebook addicts start out with. I was going to keep in touch with all my old friends who were moving away. I was going to keep all my distant relatives up-to-date on what was going on in my life. I was going to coordinate with other students on school work. None of this stuff happened.

Have you ever looked at facebook? It's like a window revealing the same sheep-like idiot to you a thousand times over. It's horrifying. Monstrous. The decay of society in action.

Facebook is built around status updates, which allow for users to let the world know when they are visiting their nieces and nephews, doing their homework, getting their teeth pulled, or going to the bathroom. The updates are meant to be short and simple; they allow no room for thought development (probably because most facebook users don't have any thoughts - no offense to you if you use facebook, I'm sure you're different.) If someone wanted to post something thoughtful and intelligent, say, on the meaning of life, their message would be cut off after three or so lines.

But! If you need space for thought development, you can write a note and post that. Of course, your note is also cut off after a few lines, so people can't read it unless they care enough to follow the link. A few people actually do care enough. However, there's no room for them to respond - they can leave a comment, but it has to be short. Again, no room for thought development.

In truth, though, if you really want to talk about intellectual things on facebook, the formatting won't stop you. There's not an actual word limit on the length of your status updates or comments (although it will be abbreviated by the "read more" button). The real problem is the other people on facebook. Generally, facebook users are not people who think deep thoughts; they are people who would rather feed their virtual pet sea turtle than have a discussion on physics.

This is why I prefer the world of blogs and forums. Blogs are made for thought development; forums are made for discussions. I find that the people in these places (at least the ones that I know) are the types of people I like: independent thinkers with original opinions. They're people who know how to write correctly. They know how to convey an important idea.

So far, I haven't missed facebook a bit.

I'm Back

I have been in Illinois for the last week, which is why I haven't been posting. I am exhausted. I like Illinois - or at least, I like my relatives in Illinois - but the time difference can be harsh, and my teachers loaded me up with the biggest pile of homework you have ever seen before I left. I was working on it all week while on vacation and I still have not caught up. Also, the plane was delayed yesterday, so we ended up getting back at 2am yesterday, instead of the expected midnight. I didn't got to english or math support this morning. I slept in. But I did go to history.
After two weeks of sharing a hotel room with three other people (one of whom - the one I shared a bed with - acts like a two year old all the time), it'll probably take me a couple days to pull myself back together. It's also that time of the year when I have large presentations and finals. I expect this to be a very stressful week.