Hope for us yet?

I've been hooked on tea lately. It's a curiosity-- as soon as I lose the floss I have been carting around for a few months, I switch to tea. I hope this doesn't mean that I will stop flossing my teeth entirely.

This week has been all sorts of panic attacks. The debate over the HOPE GPA raise to 3.7 will happen this Wednesday. It's sad. Our entire academic career has been based around the guarantee of a free education, and now at the point when we need it most, the rug is being ripped out from under us. The other day I found myself writing a letter to our dear Nathan Deal (who probably doesn't care because he has to meet budget demands) about the drastic changes. Take GPA from a 3.0 to a 3.5 and I understand, but a 3.7! Now to be clear, I didn't think this would affect me at all. Worked hard, good grades, challenging classes. Done. But now, in the face of an endless summer stuck in two part-time jobs, I am really too lazy to handle the burden. Why should I have to, considering I held up my end of the deal?

To lawmakers the change seems like business. But there are seriously kids out there who need the extra 10%, around 1,200 dollars, for books and a decent computer. I wouldn't have had a problem with these changes until I realized that the way to calculate hope gpa is less than fair. Take all of your core classes, subtract honors and ap points, add .5 points back for ap classes. Now, don't be fooled, sure the .5 may sound reasonable, but it is compensating for the fact that any B is a 3.0. Take an ap calc class and -gasp- earn an 86-- a decent grade, and maybe you even earned a 5 on the exam. But really that grade is a 3.5, less than the 3.7 needed for hope. Take your 3.5s and average them with the 4.0s (a 4.5 doesn't exist) and you will find that your A's actually do not balance out your B's. The system does not reward for A's, but really, punishes you for B's, or (horror) C's. It doesn't seem fair. There is a disparity between the way national AP curriculum is structured (in which you need to be challenged in order to learn) and the cracked way the state determines your academic worthiness.

I honestly yearn for socialized education. At least there is some guarantee in that.

Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard

There is a reason I go to the library, and it is not to read books that have any relevance to my life. I go in to be surprised. And lucky me, I came out with the best book I have read in ages. Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard isn't just what the title states-- The mysterious world of mushrooms, molds, and mycologists --but really an analysis on human curiosity and discovery.

I never for once thought that mushrooms could be so exciting (and I miss the non-fiction novel, I should really read Stiff one more time). Bloomfield tells a story about how one of his colleagues left him a mushroom to identify. Well, Mr. Bloomfield had an appetite, so he cooked it into a stew and ate it for dinner. The colleague returned and asked him if he had identified the Boletus satanus, Satan's bolete, that he had left on Bloomfield's desk. "Amazed at my evident health, he walked away shaking his head. Satan's bolete cannot kill a mule, but it can make people shit themselves senseless...however, before swearing of all mushrooms, it is useful to acknowledge that products as innocent as Wonder bread probably have some detractors." I cannot explain my love for Mr. Bloomfield, just as I cannot explain my love for Ken Jennings's blog.

In the first chapter Mr. Bloomfield explains the nature of an oddly phallic like mushroom called the Stinkhorn. He recounts the story Charles Darwin's daughter, "For Victorians in England, sufficiently obsessed with sex to become excited by table legs, their appearance was too much to bear. As a mature woman, Charles Darwin's daughter Etty so despised stinkhorns that she mounted an anti-fungal jihad with the aid of gloves and a pointed stick. She burned the collections in secret, thereby protecting the purity of thought among her female servants." It is surprising that a mycologist could be so eccentric as to make me enjoy the study of mushrooms, as he says, "Even high school students are familiar with the warty, black zygospores of zygomycetes, although they spend far more time defiling textbook diagrams of human anatomy than understanding fungi." Haha

Wow, that was one big block quote, but still, Mr. Bloomfield is awesome :)
On a better note, this week I read Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose." It was sad, ironic, and painful. Sardonically beautiful.

(And I've also realized that Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" advocates women to shut-up and look pretty)

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Exhausted, scratching at brain, hoping something will come off like dandruff (gross!) Go to library, research ideas for a story, end up checking out a book on funny looking mushrooms. Go to work, gossip about co-workers, come home, sleep, wake up, play violin, take a moody shower. And that's about it.

I am a little disappointed in the outlines. I am worried that formatting might be going a little too far. Last semester's annotated bibliographies dragged down my average because my header wasn't positioned at the right place on the pages. Grammar, grammar, structure, structure! Not that I can blame you Ms. Marcy, I understand how atrocious these papers can be, but I just want to say that I hope it isn't like this in college. Nothing is better than writing a rough outline and then feeling my way through a paper while watching it magically develop (I guess that is why we are now being subjected to this torture).

Also, my paper isn't on Invisible Man, it's on Song of Solomon. I don't want an even compare/contrast between the two. I want it to be 60/40 or even 65/35 because I feel as though my audience (that is, you) has a background on Invisible Man and doesn't need a walk through of every allusion. The focus, I feel, is not proving that Invisible Man is about individualism, it is about proving that Song of Solomon is not about individualism. So I want to treat the elements in Invisible Man more like assumptions because, I feel, that will make a more sophisticated paper.


I am excited to discuss more existentialism in class. Nothing is better than thought-provoking debates. The only thing I ask is that everyone keeps an open mind and remembers the Little Prince! :D