Brag Sheet

I don't mean to brag but...

• I have kept above a 3.0 GPA since Junior HighSchool
• In my Sophomore year I kept a 4.0 GPA 
• I have played two water polo seasons on the Righetti water polo team
• I swam for two swim seasons on the Righetti swim team
• I have earned a black belt in Taekwondo as well as practiced jiu jitsu, Haganah, and aikido 
• At age 13 I participated in a trapshooting competition between twenty people and came in second place
• I am currently an Explorer Corporal with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department
• Last summer I went through a law enforcement academy for the Explorers put on by the Sheriff Department along with 31 other recruits
• While attending the academy I was put through rough physical training and even pepper sprayed too
• In the academy I was taught how to operate all weapons in the Sheriff's arsenal as well as how to dismantle them and put them back together again
• I had to memorize most if not all of the Radio codes, Vehicle codes, Health and Safety codes, Penal codes, Phonetic alphabet, Unit Designators, and Station Identifiers
• I graduated the academy with two awards: the "Top Gun" award for being the most accurate shooter out of all of the recruits, and the "Valedictorian" award for graduating at the top of my class
• 6 people failed this academy because the training was either too difficult or they failed one of the multiple tests
• Almost every weekend I go on full shifts with the Sheriff Department and work with them all day long, everything from riding on patrol in the car to helping at the station
• During the academy's range day I was able to go to Vandenburg Air Force Base and fire M240 Bravo Light Machine Gun as well as participate in virtual reality training on base

Best of American Literature

As I think back on the school year in this class. Which was only a semester since the first half of the year was spent in Ms. Bronkey's class. I think that I did best on my writing. I don't know why but whenever the teacher would say that you would have to write an essay that was due at the end of the period I almost became excited. I don't know what it is about writing but if it is a topic that I am in to, my pen just starts flowing and I wake up five minutes later with an essay in hand wondering "how did that happen?" I really liked this class and I am seriously thinking about taking the AP English class here next year.

Derby Reportage

Sorry Dr. Preston but for some reason the article refuses to load on my computer. I don't know how to really fix this. Any suggestions?



This is the image that I get on my screen.

Johnny Cyberpunk

It seems as though the story is about a man who had information implanted into his head. Important information that many people want to get their hands on. For that reason, he is being hunted and must now fight for himself. That is why he is carrying the shotgun in his bag and he is meeting so many strange characters who are powerful and mysterious.

Future Me

I sent the email finally. For some reason the website was trying to get me to download something before but now it is finally working.

It is definitely a weird feeling. Although I am glad to be able to get this opportunity to talk to my future self. I think I was able to leave an important message for myself.


Here is the receipt thing for proof.

My Post Modernism Project

For my project I wrote a story because I couldn't think of anything better to do.

       Your alarm clock goes off early in the morning. You go through your daily routine, waking up, getting dressed, eating breakfast (if there is any time), and leaving for school. Same old same old. After arriving at school you head to your locker, meet and talk with friends, and frantically finish last night's homework that you had put off until the last second. Summer grows seemingly farther out of reach as you trudge on through the day. Exciting isn't it?

The first period bell rings. You arrive at room 608 for Dr. Preston's english class to start off another day of the same thing that you did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. After you write your journal, *feeling a bit sleepy*, you are given a project on post modernism. You think "crap! what is post modernism really?" After the class argues with Dr. Preston for about 10 minutes asking to expand the deadline he permits it. "Awesome, now this gives me a chance to work longer on my project!"Is what you should say. Instead your brain says this, "Awesome, now this gives me a chance to screw around more and put off my project until the night before!".

After first period you go through the rest of your exciting day thinking about how the hell you are going describe post modernism, let alone put it into a project. You have to be able to give an idea tomorrow to the class. You come up with some really quick lame idea that gives you enough time to attempt to understand post modernism. Eventually, lunch comes and goes. Fifth and sixth go by just like any other day. Before too soon you hear the final bell that frees you from this prison where you are condemned to write things all day long. You pack your things and leave the ineffective gates of Righetti behind you.

Once you arrive at your house, you find yourself extremely exhausted and in need of a nap. You skip your homework and go to bed, setting your alarm to wake you later. Just as you are getting relaxed you are immediately shaken out of bed and you find yourself in the back of a fire truck racing down the street. Scared, you begin to look around for answers. In the front seat you see two firemen chatting vigorously on the radio. You hear something about books being talked about on the radio but before you can say anything the fire truck comes to a stop in front of a house. The firemen poor out onto the sidewalk. Trying to figure out what is going on, the firemen immediately pull out flame throwers and begin to burn the house down."WTF" you say to yourself. After the burning is complete you hear a quarrel out on the lawn of the burning house. You look out the window and all there is too see is a smoldering pile of ashes that used to be the 2 firefighters and something else that looked like a mechanical dog. The person who did this suddenly looks at you and with a bewildered expression on his face he pulls the trigger on the flame thrower and everything goes black. So it goes.

Suddenly, you are jolted to life again but this time on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere. You begin trying to figure out why these scenes are so familiar to you. "Where the hell am I now?". With no sense of direction you begin to walk down the street to look for anyone who might help you to know where this strangely familiar place is. Eventually you spot a building off in the distance and you go towards it, as it grows closer you recognize it as a shop, a sort of repair shop for cars. As you enter the shop a man comes out. "Hi, my name is Wilson, what can I help you with?". After asking him for help on how to get to Santa Maria, he became a little confused. Overhearing the conversation, his wife came out and insisted that she should stop a car and ask for directions for you. Before you could stop her she had already walked out to the road and was waving down a yellow car when WHAM! the car hit her head on. So it goes. The police arrived shortly and everything began to fade to black again.

You are now jolted awake by the sounds of mortars and gunfire. As you look around you World War 2 is being waged as the Allies exchange fire with German troops. After much fighting you find yourself lost behind enemy lines with three other soldiers. One is wearing the same uniform as you and tells you that you are a scout just like him. Another is gunner in the artillery platoon. The fourth soldier did not look like a soldier at all but just a raggedy civilian. And he was a Chaplain's assistant. After days of evading the German patrols and being slowed down by the chaplain's assistant due to his weak stature, you and the other other scout decide to leave the gunner and chaplain's assistant behind. A day after leaving them behind the other scout with you is suddenly hit by a bullet, he is killed instantly by a German sniper. So it goes. Before you are able to get to cover you are also shot and everything fades to black. So it goes.

You jump back awake for real this time. Although this time you are in Dr. Preston's class. He begins announcing that there will be a post modernism project due the next day. "What?", you say to yourself. Thinking that the time that you went back home and slept was all a part of this dream you have been having and that you had actually fell asleep in his class after writing the journal topic. You immediately know what your project is going to be about.

My Slaughterhouse

Writing, or typing in this case, an essay about post modernism and Slaughterhouse 5 is pretty much just writing about the same thing. Kurt Vonnegut was so in tune with post modernism that it could have been vomiting it straight from the book onto your face while reading. Everything so far that I know about post modernism was taught to me by reading this book and studying the elements of it. Post-modernism is a school of thought or a tendency in contemporary culture which rejects modernism. It is characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book in which one is not permitted to laugh and yet still kept the book sad but without tears. One of the biggest elements of post modernism seen in this book is time travel. One moment you are on Earth in the middle of WW2 and then next you are on a brand new world named Trafalmadore. Other such things as being able to see in the fourth dimension where death and life mean nothing and being put in a zoo by extraterrestrial beings to be observed describe what post modernism is.

In the story, Kurt Vonnegut writes out the life of a man and Optometrist named Billy Pilgrim and his struggles in WW2 where he experiences German prison camps and the bombing of Dresden that wipes out the whole town. While being told his story you are also being teleported back in time, then to the future, then back and forth and on and on. Billy experiences everything from being in war, to going to another planet, and even being killed. So it goes.

So far post modernism has been a big rush for me, it flew by and I believe that the whole class is still trying to figure out what it really is. It can be described as a "no rules" type of policy that applies to many of today's modern literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, cultures, and literary criticism. Post modernism is most common today and you can see it virtually anywhere that you go from Facebook to high school.

Post modernism and Slaughterhouse 5 go hand in hand because Slaughterhouse 5 uses all of the core elements of post modernism and applies them in a unique way. Kurt Vonnegut had engineered a masterpiece when he had finished the book. Billy Pilgrim experiences this world first hand in this book about time travel, WW2, the bombing of Dresden, Optometry, and an alien planet where beings can see in the fourth dimension.

SCHLACHTOF SIEBEN

Quote: "All of the real soldiers are dead".
This quote was interesting to me because it shows that REAL soldiers are the ones that will put down their own life for their country and the residents that sometimes detest them.

Active reading notes:

Twenty-five years after the bombing of Dresden, Billy boards an airplane in Ilium, New York, chartered to carry him, his father-in-law, Lionel Merble, and nearly thirty other optometrists to a convention in Montreal, Canada. Billy knows the airplane will crash, but he says nothing.

When the plane crashes into Sugarbush Mountain, Vermont, everyone is killed — except Billy and the copilot. First to arrive at the wreckage are Austrian ski instructors from the Sugarbush Ski School. Speaking in German, the ski instructors move quickly from body to body. As one of the ski instructors bends over Billy to hear his dying words, Billy whispers, "Schlachthof-funf." Taken to a small hospital, where a brain surgeon operates on him, he lies unconscious for two days, experiencing a multiplicity of dreams. 
~this sent shivers down my spine~

Billy finds himself in 1945 Dresden. He and Edgar Derby, sent to fetch supper for their fellow prisoners, are guarded by 16-year-old Werner Gluck. Leading the way to a building that he thinks is the kitchen, Gluck discovers a dressing room and a communal shower. Inside are 30 teen-age girls — refugees from the city of Breslau who have just arrived in Dresden. Standing in the nude, the girls find themselves under the examining eyes of the teenage Werner Gluck, the tired, old Edgar Derby, and the clownish Billy Pilgrim. The girls scream and cover themselves with their hands as best they can. Neither Gluck nor Billy has ever seen a naked woman before. They eventually locate the kitchen.

During their stay in the converted slaughterhouse, the prisoners are assigned a variety of daily duties. They wash windows, sweep floors, and clean toilets in a factory that makes malt syrup enriched with vitamins and minerals for pregnant women. They also pack jars of the malt syrup in boxes.

Throughout the day many of the workers filch spoonfuls of the syrup. Spoons are hidden all over the plant. On his second day, Billy discovers a spoon. He uses the spoon to taste the syrup, then passes the syrup-covered spoon to Derby, who is standing outside a window watching Billy. Derby bursts into tears.
~why does he cry?~

SCHLACHTOF (what's German for 6?)

Billy wakes up in the prison camp hospital. Both Paul Lazzaro and Edgar Derby are nearby. Lazzaro explains that he holds Billy responsible for the death of Roland Weary. He also divulges a promise he made to Weary — he will kill Billy.

Billy has seen his death many times and has described it on a tape recorder he keeps in a safe deposit box. The tape recorder's message is: "I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976."

 As he lectures to the large crowd, he predicts his death — within an hour — revealing Lazzaro's promise to kill him. He closes his speech with a message that death is not eternal. As Billy leaves the stage, a sniper fires at him from the press box. Billy Pilgrim is dead.

Billy time travels to 1945 Germany. Having left the POW hospital, he listens as an English officer lectures the Americans on personal hygiene.

The trip to Dresden takes only two hours. A magnificent city, the loveliest the Americans have ever seen, Dresden is the only large German city exempt from Allied bombing.

When the Americans climb down, the guards' apprehensions vanish and they begin to laugh. They have nothing to fear: The Americans are nothing more than disabled buffoons like themselves.

His mind is elsewhere: His memory of the future reminds him that the city will be bombed in about a month, and that most of the people watching this parade of American prisoners will be killed.

The men are taken to a cement-block building formerly used to house hogs. Inside, they find bunks, stoves, and a water tap. Outside, there is a makeshift latrine. Over the door a number has been painted: number five. A guard tells them to memorize their new address in case they get lost: Schlachthof-funf —Slaughterhouse-Five.

SCHLACHTOF FUNF

Still in the boxcar, Billy travels across Germany. The train stops at various prison camps to drop off POWs. On the ninth day of traveling, Roland Weary dies.

Roland Weary yearns to be avenged, and again and again in his delirium, he divulges the name of the person who killed him: Billy Pilgrim.

On the tenth night, the train arrives at a prison camp, and guards force the prisoners out of the boxcars. 

The narrator describes two of the prisoners: Edgar Derby, a former high school teacher in Indianapolis, and Paul Lazzaro, who was in the same boxcar with Weary and promised him that he would make Billy pay for Weary's death.

The orange-and-black tent used for Barbara's wedding ceremony recalls the orange-and-black banners on the train transporting the POWs.

On the trip to Tralfamadore, Billy asks for something to read. After reading the only Earthling novel onboard, he is given some Tralfamadorian books. Unable to read the alien language, he is surprised that the books' tiny text is laid out in brief knots of symbols separated by stars. He is told that the clumps of symbols are like telegrams — short, urgent messages. Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other; there is no beginning, no middle, no end. There are no causes, no effects.

As the saucer enters a time warp, Billy is hurled back into his childhood: He is twelve years old. With his father and mother, he is visiting the Grand Canyon. 

Suddenly, he finds himself back in 1945 Germany. He and his fellow POWs are marched to a shed, where a one-armed, one-eyed corporal writes their names and serial numbers in a ledger. Now the prisoners are legally alive — moments before, they were missing in action.

That night in the Englishmen's compound, the English officers perform a musical version of Cinderella. Watching it, Billy begins to laugh hysterically, and then he begins to shriek. He continues shrieking until he is carried out of the shed to the hospital, where he is tied down in bed and given a shot of morphine.

The morphine triggers another time trip, this time to spring 1948. Billy finds himself in a New York veterans' hospital.

Billy meets a former infantry captain named Eliot Rosewater who introduces him to Science Fiction Novels by Kilgore Trout.

In a split second, Billy is flung back to 1945 before being hurled ahead once more to the veterans' hospital. Billy's mother is visiting him; when she leaves, Valencia Merble, Billy's fiancée, sits with him. 

Billy time trips again, and this time he travels to the Tralfamadore zoo, where he is confined in a geodesic dome.

The Tralfamadorians furnish Billy with a mate named Montana Wildhack, a pornographic motion picture star on Earth. He makes no attempts to entice her affections, but within a week she asks him to sleep with her. After Billy makes love to Montana, he travels through time and space back to his home in Ilium.

SCHLACHTOF DREI & SCHLACHTOF VEIR

Assigned the duty of rounding up lost or wounded Americans, the German soldiers who capture Billy and Weary include two boys in their early teens, two tattered, old men, and a middle-aged corporal who has been wounded four times and is sick of war.

Billy's attention is drawn to the corporal's boots. Polished and pure looking, they remind Billy of the innocence and purity of Adam and Eve.

The two scouts who abandoned Billy and Weary have been discovered by other German soldiers and are shot. Their blood was the color of raspberry sherbet.

Time traveling once again, Billy finds himself in his Ilium optometry office in 1967. He has trouble treating his patients, and he worries about his mental condition in general.

Billy closes his eyes and briefly returns to 1944 Luxembourg. He is being photographed by a German war correspondent, who will use the snapshot as propaganda, showing how poorly equipped the American army is.

Billy comes unstuck in time and again trips ahead to 1967. On a hot August day, he is driving to a Lions Club luncheon in Ilium. The speaker at the luncheon, a Marine Corps major, implores the audience to keep supporting the war in Vietnam until a victory is won.

now he is again back in Luxembourg, and it is the winter wind that brings tears to his eyes. Billy and his fellow American prisoners are forcibly marched into Germany, a march that Billy unexpectedly finds exciting.

they reach a railroad yard with rows of waiting boxcars; sorted according to rank, they are crammed inside.

On Christmas Eve, the train gets underway at last and begins to creep eastward. That night, Billy comes unstuck in time and travels to the night when he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians.

Schlachtof Zwei

Chapter 2 active reading notes:

Billy is drafted into the military and becomes a Chaplain's Assistant.

Once Billy gets word that his father had died in a hunting accident, he is able to return home briefly to attend the funeral.

After the funeral Billy is sent overseas to replace a Chaplain's assistant who had been killed in action.

After the confusion of battle, Billy is left wandering behind enemy lines with two scouts and Roland Weary who is an anti-tank gunner.

When Billy becomes unstuck in time and Weary tries to help him. The two scouts leave them behind.

Billy is suddenly the president of the Lions Club in New York.

When time shifts again, Billy and Weary are captured by the Germans.

This is Absurd

Something absurd to me would be something that was just so ridiculous you could not even comprehend it and instead it just makes you laugh. Like this for example:

enjoy.

Gatsby Essay

       In the book "The Great Gatsby" you experience the adventure through the eyes of Nick Carraway. A business man who has just moved to West Egg and through him you learn of Jay Gatsby and many other unique characters that have their own problems and characteristics that separates them from everyone else.

       One of the qualities of Nick Carraway is that he is not very judgmental of the characters in the story, or at least not out in the open about it, so he is able to make friends with everyone so that you can see what they are like through Nick's eyes. The eyes of a friend. He made friends right off the bat with Gatsby and this slowly reveals Gatsby's past and secrets as they become closer friends.

       Nick's presence allows for Gatsby to set up meetings with Daisy because he would ask Nick to invite Daisy over for tea and surprise, Gatsby happened to show up too. Nick becomes a character that Gatsby and others are able to confide their secrets too without exposing themselves to the other characters in the story. To Gatsby I believe that Nick is just a way of meeting Daisy on a regular basis because she knows him.

       Throughout the book you meet so many interesting and diverse characters that I feel as though Nick is the medium point or considered "normal" so that you can base all of the other characters off of, kind of using him as contrast too see the differences between each person. An example of this could be that Nick is a business man who is not very wealthy and then you have Gatsby who fought in the war as a decorated officer and is currently very wealthy. The book would have been much different if you took Carraway out of it because it would just be taking out a character that had made an impact of bringing all of the characters together as a link.

       In the end although Nick had his own way of being important to everybody. He did not really accomplish any major feats or deeply affect too many of the characters. Although if Nick never would have showed up to link Gatsby and Daisy, Myrtle and Gatsby might have never been killed in the end of the book. Things were definitely changed by Carraway's presence but not much was accomplished in the time span of the story itself.

The Great Gatsby weekend project

For my weekend project I decided to do a poem since I think it would fit best with the book. Some of this poem was made already but I added in my own parts too:

Daisy and Tom look at each other for a moment in silence.
They say Tom's got some woman in New YorkBut you shouldn't believe everything you hear.She smiles slowly andwalking through her husband as if he is a ghostshakes hands with Tomlooking him flush in the eye.Wilson thinks she goes to see her sister in New York.Tom's the first sweetie she ever had.They stand face to faceDiscussing in impassioned voicesWhether Mrs. Wilson has any rightTo mention Daisy's name.Daisy!Daisy!Daisy!Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan breaks her nose with his open hand.Daisy glances up and holds out her handHer eyes fasten with an awed expression on her little finger;The knuckle is black and blue.A brute of a manA greatBigHulkingPhysical specimen of a—You must know Gatsby.The officer looked at DaisyIn a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time.His name was Jay Gatsby.It's a strange coincidence.But it's not a coincidence at all.He wants her to see his house.He's afraid, he's waited so long.He's waited five years.The exhilarating ripple of her voice is a wild tonic in the rain.We haven't met for many years.Five years.You can't repeat the past.He kissed her.She blossomed for him like a flowerOne autumn nightFive years ago.You can't repeat the past.Daisy and Tom sit opposite each other at the kitchen table.They're not happyAnd yet they're not unhappy.No telephone message arrivedGatsby didn't believe it would come.He no longer cares.He has paid a high priceFor living too long with a single dream.Five years next November.Mr. Gatsby is dead.

The End of Gatsby

In the end of the book I was a little stunned at how Gatsby does end up dying. Although I still don't really understand the book, I think I will have to reread it to understand the real meaning but I still have trouble with it.

It was an interesting book but it feels like it had ended too abruptly, almost like I was missing something that I couldn't quite find.

Chapter 8 Active Reading Notes

So far, everyone, especially Wilson are in shock that his wife had died but nobody except Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy know how she died.

Nick meets with Gatsby and Gatsby tells him how he and Daisy met a while back while he was still and Officer in the Army. Nick learns about how Daisy found Gatsby interesting because he new different things than her because of the difference between their lifestyles.

Meanwhile, Wilson admits that he has a way of finding things out and he goes looking for the owner of the yellow car that didn't stop for Myrtle and asks directions to Gatsby's house.

Gatsby tells his staff that the car is not to be brought out under any circumstances and although it was Daisy's fault for killing Myrtle he would take the blame.

The ending of the chapter really confused me: Nick and Gatsby's staff go looking for Gatsby and they talk about a red ring in the pool as well as a mattress in the pool and then suddenly they are talking about Wilson's body and the ending of the holocaust?

Chapter 7 Active Reading Notes

Daisy, Tom, Nick, and Gatsby are all having tea at Gatsby's house during the hot weather.

Daisy starts asking everyone if they want to go into town for a drink so after a little more talking they all decide to go.

As they are all about to leave for town, Daisy says that she wants to ride in the coupe with Gatsby instead of the other car with Tom.

Tom stops for gas on the way down into town and feels a little guilty for ruining the gas station owner's life by having an affair with his wife.

At the end of the chapter all of the guests are in a room that they rented and are about to make mint juleps when everything explodes and Gatsby argues with Tom that he loves Daisy and that Daisy never loved Tom.

Chapter 6 Active Reading Notes

Gatsby had invited Daisy and Tom over for a party and Nick arrives as well. This is the first time Tom meets Gatsby face to face.

Eventually Gatsby and Daisy begin dancing while Tom walks around the party and talks to other women.

During this time Nick is sitting at a table with some guests that are "tipsy" as he calls them and he listens to their conversation.

Later on in the party Gatsby asks Nick to stay and he tells him about how it used to be with Daisy and that he wants it to be that way again.

Chapter 5 active reading notes

I couldn't find the outline on how to do these so I am going to just go with the flow.

When Daisy comes over to the house to have tea with Nick and Gatsby, I don't really understand why Gatsby says that it was a bad idea to set up the meeting, that is what he wanted wasn't it?

It seems as though Gatsby is trying to impress Daisy by showing off his house and all of his nice clothes along with his swimming pool and hydroplane.

Lastly, I hope we can discuss the ending of this chapter, it seems that Gatsby and Daisy forgot that Nick was there yet Daisy knew but Nick left them alone in the house together and walked back out into the rain alone.