currently searching for the deeper meaning...

Recently, a student at Very Good High School has wowed the district with an early acceptance to Stanford University, despite having a record braking GPA of 0.2. With the lowest GPA the entire district has ever seen, Sammy Smarts has surpassed all expectations with admission into one of the most selective schools in the country. Perhaps the only one more surprised by this is Dorothy Dum, the district's highest achieving student of all time and class valedictorian. Dum boasts the highest GPA in district history with a cumulative GPA of 6.4, achieved by taking 12 times the number of required courses. Dum is also a model citizen, volunteering over 12 hours a week to knit sweaters for endangered orangutans. She has also managed to find a cure for alzheimer's at the age of 12. Smarts on the other hand boasts the singular achievement of having played soccer for 1 year before being cut from the team due to absence from all practices. Yet what sets these two students apart is their indi...

"Aap kya English-vinglish bolre?" roughly translates to "stop speaking in English and embrace your mother tongue, you insolent child". Maybe thats not exactly what it means, but Urdu can't really be translated perfectly into English anyways. Growing up, I was exposed to both languages nearly equally, but I adopted a more advanced understanding of English due to learning it in school as well. My parents both speak English and Urdu fluently, but they still wanted me to grow up as perfectly bilingual as possible. Because of this, I speak decent English (in my humble opinion) and a self-created Urdu fusion language that is composed of 40% English. I often rely on a sad combination of both languages to communicate in Urdu in general, but I can understand the language perfectly. Just like that, Urdu became one of my Englishes- it's a blend of my understanding of both languages and the individual cultures they represent. The phrase "English Vinglish" is ...

Over the course of the semester, my writing skills have improved immensely. I started the year with an unsure understanding of many advanced writing mechanisms that I needed to use in this class. I changed my understanding of good writing from the ground up by reevaluating all the places my writing seemed to be lacking in. My thesis statements were vanilla, my introductions too broad, and my analysis never connected back to a deeper meaning (hence the name of my blog...). My writing now is not flawless, but months of actively working to reform my work has definitely made an impact. I went from doing incredibly poorly on in-class essays and short responses to getting nearly perfect scores on almost all of the recent ones. I'm proud of this, considering how long it took for me to understand exactly where I was going wrong. In fact, it became awfully frustrating at times as well. I didn't understand why I was still receiving a poor mark even after fixing what I thought went wrong....

Since its publication, Mark Twain's world famous novel has been under scrutiny for its abhorrently frustrating ending. Many have said it ruins the entire work in itself and is not worthy of such a book. After all, how could Huck seem to build such a beautiful, fruitful relationship with Jim only to turn around on him like that? His lack of progress or development makes no sense. My argument is not for the merits of the ending but rather its unique ability to let us imagine the future. Per Twain's notice in the start of the book, no motive or meaning is meant to be found from a 13 year old boy on a raft. Yet the ending does leave space for the readers to imagine Huck and Tom arriving in the "territories" of the Western US, ready for adventure. As written by Robert Coover in "Huck out West", Huck finds himself exactly in the place Twain may have intended- the wild, wild west before and after the Civil War. Huck and Tom now have Jim in tow, and plan to work...

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner is a heartbreaking story set in a country on its way to complete destruction. While I haven't even reached the half-way point of the book, I can already begin to draw stark comparisons between my upbringing and Amir and Hassan's. The differences in my culture and lifestyle versus theirs made me reconsider what a human being's freedom truly means. Is freedom simply the allowance to carry out our lives in whatever way we see fit? Or is it the following of incredibly strict laws and rules that end up keeping us safe from harm? In the United States, we're lucky enough to have fairly understandable and basic restrictions to our lifestyle (for the most part). We are ticketed for speeding because it puts others in harms way. We are thrown in jail for murder because we're deemed a threat to society and are isolated from the general population with their wellbeing in mind. Yet it's almost odd to think that countries with people just ...

Most of us don't actively try to gossip. Sometimes, our friends can annoy us or a petty argument can lead to a snide comment behind their back; even the best of us are guilty of it. In nearly all settings throughout life, drama and gossip prevail- but what causes some of us to thrive off of it? We all seem to have that one friend who always seems to know everybody's business all the time. They have "the tea" are sipping "the tea" and spilling "the tea"- an overly used moniker for drama . It's like other people's personal lives are their lifeblood. Perhaps they're just a chatty person, or they have too much free time. But chances are that whoever this person is in your life is NOT a 17th century puritan caught in the middle of a witch hunt. This may seem like an odd comparison, but your gossip loving friend and this ancient puritan probably have more in common than you think. We've currently only reached the end of Act 1 of The ...