Candles Flame

Here's a little poem I wrote at 4am when I couldn't sleep. The funny part is that I was almost asleep and then the first two lines hit me. I decided I better write them down just in case I'd forget them in the morning. I ended up writing the whole poem and wasting another 30 mins after that trying to get to sleep! Feel free to help me edit it if you think a line could be better!

Candles Flame
It billows to and fro they say
Lighting the paths of others way
The fires flicker, dance, and play
Burning swiftly, steadfast til day


Even knowing of certain end
Makes the best from which wax can lend
Does not question, want, nor pretend
Contently to it duties it tends


When darkness falls and end has came
When fires sputter and ash go lame
Bares no burdens of waste or shame
Laments no suffrage, casts no blame


A meaningful life for those who seek to live like candles flame.

Lunch at Maxine's

This review was an assignment for my Creative Writing class but I thought it would be a great thing to put on my blog for those around my area that check it from time to time. I would ask of those willing to be critical of the review and how I presented it if they'd like to. Either message me, email me, or leave a comment. The assignment requires the review to be no longer than 750 words, which mine is exactly. Anyway, if you don't want to critique me then feel free to just read for your own information and use the review to decide if you'd like to try the place out!

Also important to note: I paid lunch prices. The dinner prices are higher but it looks like they have live music being played and a very upscale environment in the evenings. Here's their website if you'd like to see what they serve and how much it costs. http://www.maxines521.com/

Lunch at Maxine's

            “I’ll have the usual.” It would take me a good while to recount all the times I’ve heard this phrase on a movie or television show.  A fool and his money are easily parted but not many people are willing to be so foolish when it comes to the money they spend on the food they eat. This is my best guest at why having the usual is something that we see so often in entertainment or even in person. While I am just as guilty as the next tight fisted fellow, I was afforded the opportunity to venture out of my comfort zone and try a new place that I had seen many times but just didn’t want to chance one of my precious and few nights out on a potential bad experience. I just had lunch at Maxine’s and I’d like to tell you all about it.

            In uptown Michigan City, the 500 block of Franklin Street to be precise, there is a dainty yet inviting blue sign that hangs above the restaurants’ front door.  “Maxine’s” it reads in scripted font. I have to start off by saying that my expectations of this restaurant were exceedingly low. I expected a run of the mills Midwest Ma’ and Pa’ owned diner in what is a shrinking part of a growing city. Armed with a $20 dollar bill and an unhealthy portion of preconceived negative opinions, I opened the door. In the vestibule I was greeted with the sweet scent of coconut and a surprisingly classy look. Even so, I anticipated Pa’ Podunk behind a cash register billowing a hillbilly holler towards the back at Ma’ Podunk to herald my arrival.

            It’s great to be wrong sometimes. Before I stepped over the threshold of the interior door I was taken a vast by the scene my eyes met with.  Polished wood columns with floral arrangements mid way made a dotted line down the middle of the restaurant. A baby grand piano sits at the immediate right of the interior entrance with brochures lying on it, outlining the things to do in Michigan City and other events such as Ballroom and Latin dancing classes.  On the left, a small bar like something you’d see in a movie. I didn’t guess by its size that it was very used even outside of the time of day. At 3pm while having my early dinner/late lunch the bar sat very quiet and quaint, lonely looking with only one fellow and the bar keep providing company.

            I took it all in so quickly that the shock of reality didn’t hit me right away. This was no Podunk diner. This was a NICE restaurant. Business men and women in suits and ties were scattered around at tables behind the gorgeous dark and assorted drapery that divided the smoking and bar section from the non-smoking portion.  I have $20 dollars. Uh oh! After answering, “Booth, Nonsmoking, please” I noted a beautiful hand painted mural that ran the entire length of the wall from the front to back of the restaurant with ritzy fancy folk covered in furs and tuxedos congregating with a man in a top hat that I can only akin to the Monopoly Man.  I prayed that there was something light on the menu I could get away with and conceded that at worst case I could afford a salad.

            For the food network fans out there, Gordon Ramsey would approve of at least the aesthetics so far. I bring up Chef Ramsey because I immediately thought of him once I was handed a single page, double sided, laminated menu with little fluff on it. A final shock to my expectations came when I viewed their lunch prices. Reasonable is the term that comes to mind when I consider them with soups for 4-5 dollars, Salads for 7-8, and entrée’s from as low as 9.99 to 14 dollars. I ordered the black mushroom soup and a braised lamb shank with a cheesecake dessert.  The food tasted as good as the place looked.

            I did end up running over 20 dollars after a tip but admittedly I ordered the most expensive entrée knowing I had plastic in my wallet to back up President Jackson in the event I needed to. I’m glad I stepped out of the comfort zone on this. I’m glad my expectations were thwarted and wrong.  I found a new place to eat and a diamond in the rough of Michigan City.

Public Daycare... Oops, I Mean School.

I've been wanting to rant about my opinion of our public school system for a while now. Since I cut class today I figured it was a good time to sit down and have at it since I'd be missing one of my weekly writing exercises in class.  It seems like it can really be difficult at times to find time to lollygag and have fun expressing your ideas on paper so that's why one of my favorite things about my Creative Writing course is that I have time set aside every week to write SOMETHING at least a couple times.

At any rate, some of my readers know that I am an English major. Not many of them know that I aspire to be a teacher, specifically, a teacher abroad. I'll blog about that another time but I felt mentioning it it was relevant to the topic and might give you some sort of an idea of where I'm coming from here or why I even care. I'm very disturbed about the lack of actual education that our system provides to date and I think it's going to have a very strong impact on the world of the next generation.

Grade school is public daycare. I dare you to argue that, in fact, I triple dog dare you to - comments are enabled so feel free to challenge it. Anyone with a high school education knows that outside reading and arithmetic, grade school learning is busy work to bide time for mommy and daddy to finish their shift at work. There are 3 major contributors to the reason to back that claim.

A. Staying Current - In college, we buy a new book every semester. It's annoying and probably not as needed as every 6 months but with every edition there comes new information that updates the texts that we learn from so that we aren't learning inaccurate or incomplete facts. I remember in grade school, going to the book shelf in the room and picking a book to use for the year. A half dozen names or so inscribed in the front. 6 to 10 years of children learning the same information without amendments for new truths and discoveries of old fallacies. I shutter when I think of the nonsense they tried to teach me in "Health Class" and how I now everyday read articles on Yahoo! or Reddit that illustrate how science has proved this or that fact wrong in the past or not as relevant as we learned it was. Public schools don't have the funding to stay current. I guess that it doesn't matter that much when we're not teaching from text books because we're too busy teaching from test books. More on that in another blog maybe.

B. Censorship - There are a great deal of reasons for censorship ranging from religious conflicts to being just too complex for a young person to understand and even just too gruesome or dire of an event to be taught in classrooms. Grade school History is a complete and utter waste of time. You spend most of your time in High school history classes unlearning or correctly learning everything you thought you already learned in grade school. Then in college, you learn that there are even more cracks to fill and that in all reality even the History we learn isn't accurate because it's all just interpretation of events of the benefactors of the historical events. 

In my opinion this is a HUGE problem and should be rectified immediately. While more and more people are going to college there are still more and more kids not finishing High school. That means more and more people are running around with a cursory knowledge of things which are completely/mostly inaccurate or just not at all completed as an actual fact. How many American's do you suppose would say that Christopher Colombus was the first man to discover America? I don't have any hard facts here but I'd be willing to bet that you'd be very shocked at how many actually do think that. Too many people don't finish their education, or don't continue into secondary education for us to allow as much Censorship in the topics we are teaching at school.

C. Applicability - As tragic as it is that we can't provide the funding we need to stay current, as depressing as it is to know people go through life with confidence in false or partial teachings, I have to admit that the worst of it all is the fact that we just don't learn things we need to know. By and large, the majority of education up to college and even some there within secondary education is just wasted time and resources. There is no applicable use for a grade school students knowledge of the Boston Tea Party or even the details of the Revolutionary and Civil war. As important as that is to our society to preserve and propagate our history, a child is just never going to apply anything he knows of those things to his present or immediate future life. If you don't use it, you'll lose it.

There's a reason why the only thing my parents can remember from school is how to read and perform basic math functions. They are smart people and it's not beyond them to learn and use more complex things in life but the fact of the matter is that their life doesn't require more complex things and likely never will. They have no applicability for any knowledge past basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Here's another sad reality: Most people don't. Most people are in the same boat. Most people pick a single trade or skill and learn it, master it, and use it every day to make the money they need. A general education isn't useful to them, sad as that may seem, it's not by their choice but by the reality of society and how it works.

I'd like to think that one day our young people can be in a class room that teaches them literacy and problem solving skills but moreover increases awareness *and interest* in the variety of skills and trades the world needs today. I'd like to picture a school system that you send your kids to in order to get ready for life on their own and the ability to make decisions towards their chosen professions instead of being looked after while you go to work. I sincerely hope we begin offering an education in life, how it works and how to navigate yourself through it to get where you want to be, rather than a general cursory knowledge of a conglomerate of random facts taught only for the purpose or retaining the funds needed to keep the doors open. Above all else though, I hope for a system that teachers can be apart of that helps them make the difference they wanted to make when they decided to be teachers. We have to stop letting the people with the money teach, and start letting the people with the desire to teach teach.

Hello, Alaska!

Nothing serious here, but I just stumbled upon the "audience" section in my editing panel and I noticed I have several hits from Alaska. I'm not sure how this works but I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone from Alaska.

/wave

Catching Benjamin

Today, I present you an original work of Justin Shepperson. I've decided since my blog is about nothing specific that I'm going to add a short story that I will write as a result of a sad dream I had last night. I don't want to spoil too much here in the introduction but the dream had significance to me and I'm hoping its story form will give you some appreciation through it's dire events as it did for me. I rarely remember my dreams, but this one was burnt into my consciousness through the haze of waking up. Anyway, without any further adieu I present you:

Catching Benjamin 

by Justin Shepperson

The leather like flesh of the tree clung desperately to the remaining portion of the old branch - the only thing separating Benjamin from life and his now impending certain death plung from the top of Witchwood Oak. Though he hang still without pulling or thrashing about, the bark slowly caved its will to gravity. Inch by inch it peeled back giving way each time to another quick jerk from the weight of small boy dangling at it's end. I watched Benjamin move his head back and forth, up and down, slowly, precisely, trying his hardest to calculate a way out. All the while he kept it tucked like a pig skin and grasped it just as tightly as if it were and he were making the dash for the last score of the game proclaiming he and his friends victorious. Even in the most dire of straits, staring death in the eyes, it was more important to him to keep it safe than it was for him to use that arm to help himself up and delay his final moments on earth.

Everyday on our way home from school, Benjamin and I would walk along the long ornate wrought iron fence clanging a stick, or pencil, or even our hands on the bars one by one. The constant, steady yet empty iron wane of each bar being struck drowned out by the laughter of nonsense made by children without concern or the time for concern of such dimly lite events such as dying. Still, everyday we passed it. The place where Benjamin, my brother, would fight for his life and I, his younger sister, would watch helplessly hopeful. 

Everyday for 3 years we would look over the fence at the solemn old dying tree we called Witchwood Oak. We called it Witchwood because the old lady who inherited the land and the small yet still qualifying mansion despised children. She went out of her way to ensure we knew it too. That's why we'd bang on her fence everyday. Why we called it an oak I'll never know. It was an apple tree though admittedly it was likely the world's largest apple tree and it seemed as though it required a panoramic action from your neck to view it tip to tip.

Witchwood was most certainly dead. In all the years we walked past I couldn't recall a single day where leaves or fruit were visible. That is, except for the one and only time which sparked such an enthusiastic response from me that it caused Benjamin, my hero and champion of a brother, to pursue the retrieval of it's yield. That day, a single apple appeared at the highest branch I could see. An apple on the world's largest and deadest tree. I was plagued with hunger. Since father passed away mother had tried her very hardest but there were still days that my brother and I had to share a school lunch consisting of a swing of milk and half of a Peanut Butter and Jelly. We could share the other half when we got home. Mother was very stern about how much we ate and how often because if we ate too much early off we'd have to spend the whole day starving after it and it made her feel horrible to watch her kids starve.

"So, you hungry for an apple?" he smirked as he flipped his backpack over the iron fence. I wish I had said no. I wish I had told him it's okay and I didn't want it but I was hungry for an apple. I was hungry for anything. To this day I can still remember as I watched him hop from branch to branch, scaling the wooden giant, thinking of how good it would taste. I thought of my teeth fixing themselves in position over the shiny red skin before gnashing deeply into the fruity flesh. I felt the juicy tang of the sweet tart juice pouring over my tongue and splashing against the back of my severely neglected and on it's way to malnourished throat. I hadn't even actually had the apple yet but in my mind I feasted on it and the more I did the less I thought about the safety of my brother. I wish I had said no. I wish more, that I wasn't hungry.

I was so lost in my thoughts of the delicious apple I was about to devour as a pack of wolves would a caribou that it took the thundering crack of splintering wood to snap me back into the moment. My eyes were unfocused and I forgot where I was standing. I next heard a great thud followed by more splintering and finally I was able to regain my full and focused attention on the world around me. Fear struck my heart after my mind put the sounds together but I was relieved to find a large branch shattered on the ground where the thud came from. It wasn't a very long second of peace that I had experienced because it only took a moment for my eyes to pan up where I could see my dearest friend and brother, Benjamin, hanging by the mostly dead bark of an old tree. The next thud I heard, would be the fear that gripped my heart a mere instance ago.

I had no words. I could think nothing. I could do nothing. I was too short to even climb the fence in a timely fashion though I began to try. The time it took to convince my arms to pull hard enough on the points of the ornate iron seemed like forever but I was persistent and eventually was able to conjure enough strength to slide myself over the top. I wasn't even able to feel the cuts it made on me. My cuts didn't matter. All that mattered was catching Benjamin.

"Get out of the way, I'll just crush you!" he yelled from high above me. I managed to get under him but it seems he was thinking more clearly than I was in this situation. What could a 11 year old wet-paper-bag-weighing little girl do to stop a fall by a 13 year old growing-into-a-man boy from that height? I raced to the trunk of the tree and began leaping and swiping at the lowest branch. It was pointless but I continued. Benjamin was over 6 inches taller than me and made climbing this tree look easy. I couldn't even hardly touch the low hanging limbs of the giant wood.

"Just stop, you're making me nervous and I'll get down, don't worry!" was the last thing he said to me while he was on that tree. He didn't want me on those branches, risking getting myself into a similar position. As usual, Benjamin was right. I decided to sit helplessly hopeful while he scanned the tree around him for a way down safely.

Imagine your zipper being made of bark from a tree. Imagine opening the zipper quickly. That's the next sound I heard. As the skin of the tree tore from its flesh with a crackling whip I saw my brother now in free fall without a single branch between him and the hard ground. Dashing towards him I had resolved to attempt a catch against both of our better judgments. I'd rather be crushed trying to save him than to tell everyone I just sat there. Try as I might though, it seems as though gravity is better at applying force than my scrawny underfed legs and Benjamin landed on his back solid as a lead brick dropped in a fish tank just a foot in front of me. The force of his body assaulting the ground so hard for a moment I could feel my feet leave the ground as it shook back in retaliation of the blow.

There he lay now, hand still grasping at his harvest. As the life slipped from Benjamin his hand opened revealing a single apple blossom. There was never any fruit at all and the last thing my brother said to me using his dying breath was this: "You can have my half... from now on."

~Fin~

Don't Judge Me, Bro.

Why can't I be less bad at doing things I want to do before I have to do them? I've been considering a blog for probably close to a year now but I just never bring myself to starting it up. Now, I'm in Creative Writing and I find out I have to have a blog because it's a weekly assignment. Lovely. No, really, it's lovely. I decided to say lovely because I believe it's the only word capable of being as sarcastic as it is sincere at the same time. While I'm relishing in the reality of being so unmotivated of a person that I have to be forced into starting things even I want to do of my own volition, I also get to stew over the fact that if, I mean when, this blog takes off and I'm making a bagillionity dollars a day from my fame and the advertising power of my name... I get to give all the credit to Professor White who forced me to do it. Well, that's not going to actually happen BUT if it did I would be sour about it. On the sincere side, I am actually doing something I've always wanted to do.

Okay, well that didn't have much to do with judging people I suppose. As off topic as it appears it is somewhat relevant. You see, I find introducing myself as an English major to be a bit awkward at times. This is the primary source of reluctance for starting a blog. "BLAH BLAH BLURGY BLAG BLUR YOU NEEDS THE MATHES TO BE SMERT DURP!" You need more than that chief. I prefer free thinking and creativity. I prefer entertaining and being entertained. If you think you're smarter than me because you memorized all the steps on how to calculate complex mathematical problems then I can honestly say you're quite the contrary. You can't judge the intellect of a person off their major, no matter how paid or underpaid the resulting profession is. I'm certain I could memorize those things, too. The difference between you and I is that I don't want to. You'll be paid more but that's fine - you're worth more to those making the money. This is what I want to do. I don't care about having a 6 digit income or retiring early. Who wants to retiring from doing the things that they love? Do you have to be paid for you to want to take a vacation? The world needs "THE MATHES" just as much as it needs its authors, poets, and free thinkers and vice versa. I am culture. You are technology. One without the other is useless. Technology needs culture to create problems to solve for us to advance. Culture needs technology to facilitate easier living so that we can nit pick life, finding all the little problems we need solved. They are separate parts of the same machine of life, we work together or we don't work at all.

Well, indeed a wonderful waste of time. The start of a beautiful friendship. I think it will suit me to make more posts soon. I think next time I'll explain the origin of the name Novakane to you.

TTFN