Isabelle's Inquisitions

I've learned a lot from high school, but one lesson I thought was interesting that I've only recently realized was the value in telling things as they are. When I put it that way, it sounds like this is an admonishment against gossip. It is not. It's more about no longer feeling the burden to filter my thoughts and words to fit a certain image I hold of myself, or aspire to have of myself. I've always overthought everything, which leads me to having a lot of different opinions on varied topics. So, when I express these opinions — either by running them over in my head or talking about it aloud — I feel some kind of need to tell only a certain side of these thoughts. In my head, I justified this because if I tried to express all the angles with which I saw something, I'd confuse myself. It's easier to prescribe to a single belief, instead of many, because the narrative/storyline/character arc I've crafted for myself in my head would feel more linear, and thus

Fiction 1. Normal People - Sally Rooney Sally Rooney! Known for breaking readers' hearts due to rampant miscommunication between her novels' love interests, I tried reading  Normal People  a few years ago. Unfortunately, I quickly lost patience with her aggressively straightforward writing style. However, I want to try my hand at this again in the hopes that reading about these characters' doomed relationship will help me avoid what led to their downfall in future relationships. 2. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin I don't really know much about this book, but I've never read something by Baldwin, so I'd love to do that. Plus, I've always dreamed of living in Paris. I know the Paris he depicts in this is probably very different (1950s and gay bars), but I love reading about relationships and I guess there's no better place to read about it then here. 3. A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara This has been on my list for a long time. I've heard so much

Whenever I feel lost, which has been feeling like a lot nowadays, one of my favorite songs to listen to is "White Ferrari" by Frank Ocean, so I chose it today for my "Experiencing Poetry." This is the song: White Ferrari Frank Ocean Bad luck to talk on these rides Mind on the road, your dilated eyes Watch the clouds float, white Ferrari Had a good time (Sweet 16, how was I supposed to know anything?) I let you out at Central I didn't care to state the plain Kept my mouth closed We're both so familiar White Ferrari, good times Stick by me, close by me You were fine You were fine here That's just a slow body You left when I forgot to speak So I text to speech, lesser speeds Texas speed, yes Basic takes its toll on me, Eventually, eventually, yes Ah, on me eventually, eventually, yes I care for you still and I will forever That was my part of the deal, honest We got so familiar Spending each day of the year, White Ferrari Good times In this life, life In th

Something that stuck out to me from this week that Mrs. Feldkamp said was how being a parent is like "having your heart outside of your body." Even though I'm obviously not a parent, I feel like this rings true in how I view my relationship with my two younger siblings. In an attempt to relate this to the poetry unit we're on right now, I guess I'll say that both being an older sister and engaging with poetry — whether it be listening, reading, or writing it — both feel like reducing life to its basic elements. The feeling of being an older sister, while can never replicate the experience of being a parent, is like constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure that your siblings don't make the same mistakes you did in similar situations. We're bound by blood, and if not, we're bound by having grown up in similar environments, so the chances are likely that my siblings will make the same mistakes I did. In this sense, not only am I concerned for my

I think I grew a lot as a writer this semester. For one, I wrote a lot more compared to eleventh grade. However, I think what was more crucial to my development as a writer was that I viewed essays as more of an opportunity to explore the ideas floating around in my head as opposed to a way to practice how closely I can follow a certain structure (which was how I approached essay-writing last year, even though the year before I had not done so in tenth grade). Even though it wasn't fun to write essays last year because of this mindset, being able to go back to viewing essays as "fun" this year (as fun as writing essays can be) after feeling like it was something restrictive reaffirmed the importance of essay-writing for me as a way to deepen my personal understanding of a work beyond the understanding I had of it had I not had to create some kind of meaningful commentary on it under time pressure (which I think allows a lot of ideas I would've never considered come th

In her research paper “‘A Failure of the Imagination’? The Fiction vs. Nonfiction Debate,” Sophie Cunningham quotes Richard Ford in his statement of how “‘the realm of the imagination eludes readers more and more. In fact it irritates them. They want facts, and when they do read fiction they try and pin down the ‘real’ facts that underlie the novel.’” A phenomenon that has grown increasingly prevalent in recent years, Cunningham relates this observation back to her argument of how the push in the last decade to consume more nonfiction, at the expense of fiction, is a “failure of the wider, cultural imagination” and the societal emphasis on consuming work that directly benefit the reader by supplying them with applicable, real-world knowledge (this is common among readers of self-help books, for instance) — instead of stories that simply mindlessly entertain. I prescribed to this notion for much of middle school after I discovered that nonfiction was more than simply bullet-pointed fact