Category: Junior Literary

Firstly, let me just explain my argument before I get called heartless or insensitive(which I certainly do agree with).  I do like animals in general; what I do not like is the idea of domestication. I think animals are useless as “friends” to humans in households- that’s not why they exist. When I state that I absolutely cannot stand puppies or kittens or toddlers or even the sweet-sticky-cuteness of both of these relatively appreciated creatures, I mean it. Why is that a bad thing? I have reasons to back up my statement, the first being:

• We tend to elevate the aesthetics that come from animals, and we ridicule them to millions of pictures, scratchy outfits, and high-end dog/cat food. We are not able to ask what these animals want, whether or not they hate ear scratches or throwing a ball monotonously back and forth; we cannot speak for these animals (obviously).
• We are allowed to eat cows, chickens, etc., but not dogs or pigeons? Is this not discriminating to the poor animals we have no heart for? That being said, I have nothing against eating animals, but I think that is extremely odd that we condone the mutilation of some animals for food, clothing, etc. and just keep others as pets.
• Secondly, pets are useless besides trying to get away from actual human connection and instead opting for a chill cat or hyperactive Yorkie. I don’t want to be misunderstood, but I think some people grow up to become “cat ladies” just because they despise human connection or feel like no one will accept them as who they are. Does this mean that this “cat lady” has cats that love her? Who can figure this out if pets can’t speak for themselves? Maybe we are hurting animals by domesticating them more that we are helping them.

Side note: (Guys I think pets are okay I just really have no other reasons for hating “cute” pets besides me just thinking they are grotesque.)

My next confession is on children- those disgusting, annoying, absolutely nasty little heathens we take pride in calling our own. I cannot stand small babies because I don’t like the idea of two people having the responsibilityto fill a newborns’ head with whatever kind of education, ideaologies, mantras, etc. they choose. This is how serial killers are formed. Don’t get me wrong, some parents do a great job of aising their child to be a responsible citizen in a community; others raise their kids to be sexist, etc. and when the child grows older that’s  all that kid will know.

Also, have you ever realized how insanely dirty children are? Toddlers eat anything that will fit into their mouth, from stale popcorn on the floor to Legos. That’s terrifying- I think that they are just warming up to learn how to eat people.

Guys, I really enjoy you all’s work. No story or poem is like the last and I truly enjoy the difference in the voices of you all. I love the diversity and the number of auras and personalities there are in the writing. I’m literally reading the work of different authors and falling in love with all of their work every day! You all are an inspiration to my work and I draw energy from each and every one of you. You all have a gift, which in essence is the same, but under the surface, you serve different purposes. I’m truly grateful to have been gifted with such a beautiful people who are all gifted individually. I even enjoy the quirks of each and every one of you. No Junior Literary is like the last and as a unit, we all live in harmony. ღ

I really want to be an artist.  I want to be a creator of worlds that are indistinguishable from our own.  I want to push storytelling to its limits and twist it with the real world in ways so that it might as well be reality because when something is indistinguishable from reality, what stops it from being reality.  We use our perception of the world to determine what is real, so when our perception cannot distinguish fact from fiction, the two cease to have meaning because each term only exists to distinguish itself from what falls under the other.  I, of course, am not the first person to want to bring fiction into reality through art, but I was surprised to find one place where this has been attempted.  Professional wrestling is an art form that typically attempts to stay as believable as reality.  Within wrestling there is a code called Kayfabe.  It basically means that if two wrestlers have an onscreen rivalry, that rivalry has to be artificially extended into the real world.  The two people cannot be seen having lunch together because that would break the illusion.  They are understood to be playing characters, but the separation between a performer and their character is much looser in the world of wrestling.  Often times a character is just an exaggerated version of the person that is playing that character, and they can even share a name in a lot of situations.  This makes their real world selves into a part of the art that’s being created through their characters.  I would love to make art that is this intimately bonded with the real world that the two are on equal levels.  A master of this was Andy Kaufman.  He built up a persona for himself as a wrestler that only wrestled women and was “the world’s greatest inter-sex wrestler”.  He maintained this persona in all interviews and convinced a majority of people that this was actually who he was, but it was really all just for the sake of comedy.  Most of the women he “wrestled” were in on the joke and weren’t actually hurt, but the audience did not know this.  Reality is determined by what the audience is allowed to know.  Another example of twisting reality and fiction comes with the book series, “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.  The series is credited to Lemony Snicket though the author’s real name is Daniel Handler.   Lemony Snicket is a character within the world of the series, and this character is expanded upon in other books.  Within the world of the series, the character Lemony Snicket wrote the books that chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, and so the readers are introduced to the books as having been written by this fictional author.  This allows the reader to further buy into the story and the world being created whereas they’d be taken out of it if they saw that the books that the character Lemony Snicket claimed to write had the name Daniel Handler printed on the cover.  All of these examples are somewhat dishonest, but they all serve a purpose of convincing the audience of the stories they are experiencing.  Usually, when experiencing a story, there are certain walls that are clearly marked and never crossed in terms of what is real and what is not, and in books that line is usually drawn somewhere close to the book’s cover sleeve.  When these expectations of truth are taken advantage of, entirely new levels of immersion can be reached without the audience ever even realizing that they’re being tricked into being more invested.

I talk a lot in Spanish class. Usually during the morning, when the room maybe has about five people or less, considering I get there at least fifteen minutes earlier than most. My ritual goes as follows, I walk in, set my stuff down, and then go sit by my friend. Who I have had the privilege of sharing a class with. When I get to her desk, I like to sit on the ground beside her, 99% of the time there is a seat opened right next to her but I prefer sitting on the ground anyway because to me it’s more comfortable that way. Sometimes I’ll just sit an scroll through my various social media apps and she would do the same. Until the days I want to talk, which is all word spew, in no particular order, way, shape, or form. I just talk to my heart’s content and she would listen without any complaints. Now recently, I’ve had the most peculiar thoughts and I have shared them with her. On days like this, she likes to record me and document my words on snap chat. So, ill give you all the rundown of my latest conversation that my Spanish class had caused. I’ll call this the Butterfly conspiracy. I was sitting in class, zoning out from lack of sleep when my mind traveled back to the time I watched that one sponge bob episode with the butterfly. The one where they zoomed in on the butterflies face. Which at the time was the worst thing I have ever seen. While I was thinking about this I said, while muttering to myself, “Butterflies are evil”. MY friend heard this, her immediate repose was to ask “Why?” like any other person would. I said something along the lines of “Their creepy, weird and eat people”. At the time that came out of my mouth, I didn’t even register half of the words I just said. My friend, of course, was curious and prompted me to explain further. So, I explained to her my thought process about said sponge bob episode, She told me that wasn’t enough to hate butterflies. So wanting her to see my side of the story, I made a conspiracy theory involving, whales, butterflies, and dolphins. I picked those three because I hate whales, I’m terrified of dolphins and I consider butterflies too nice looking to rule them out as evil. The main point was, dolphins and butterflies feeding whales human skin to make them grow bigger so one day when they were big enough, they can fly out of the ocean and take over the world. How could the whale fly out of the ocean? Simple, the butterflies would grab hold of the whale and lift it out of the ocean. Now hear me out, I am fully aware that the chance of any of that happening is extremely low, I get that, but we should never rule that possibility out. Anything could happen, and now you know if you see a whale a butterfly and a dolphin together. Run.

I want to discus something that the people of the south don’t really appreciate my opinion on: gun control. Now, here’s where I hear that I’m young and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Another argument I get often is that I’ll regret not having a gun when the wars start or when someone comes knocking on my door in the middle of the night. News flash: war will not be fought with guns or men, we will all be dead in a moment by the mass nuclear weapons that other countries have in their possession. They will not need men and women to do the dirty work of killing each other. They will merely press the big red button and poof, we’re carrion.

I debated writing on this subject because of the different opinions that people have on it. But, as one of my former posts stated, artists’ freedom and all that. So here goes nothing.

My mind has always been adrift when thinking about gun control. I live in a very conservative household and my opinions are very often outnumbered, but seeing as my family will not be reading this, I’ll give my opinion.

There is no excuse for the Las Vegas massacre. None at all. Being 16 and on multiple occasions seeing the headline “Biggest U.S Shooting in History” is outrageous. Why are more people not angry about the lives being lost to senseless murder that can, and should, be controlled. I often here the excuse of the 2nd Amendment, but that was created when guns only held 1 bullet, not 300. More people are endangered now. It’s not a single person having to stop and reload every time they find a target, its 1,800 bullets a minute. 1,800 for a single portable machine gun.

Why do people think they need guns so badly? If they have no reason to own them than to hunt game, then they are unnecessary. People are scared of boogeymen that are not actually there, or wouldn’t be if men and women were not allowed to needlessly own killing machines.

There’s the other argument in the case that  it isn’t the gun doing the killing, but the person behind the trigger….

I truly wonder how we have managed to survive so long as a nation with such a closed mindset. If the gun is not doing the killing then what is? If the killer did not have the gun then would they have still found a way to murder so many people? Possibly.  But how can we know this without proof?  We can’t.

The people that do the killing are sent to  jail, if they’re caught, but what about their weapons of destruction? Is it  kept in police jurisdiction until it’s deemed useless to the case and then sold back out into the world? In some cases, yes.

My point is: I’m angry. And I’m sad. So terrifically sad that something like this could keep happening and nothing is done. Things need, no, have to change for this country to grow.

I really miss the thrill of being at a concert. Of standing up for hours that it makes my knees ache as if I had been running for a number of days, but not even noticing the presence of that pain. I miss adrenaline pumping through my veins like gasoline in a high-powered vehicle. Of waking up at five in the morning, staying fully awake for the nearly eight-hour drive to another state and remaining awake until about midnight the same night. (And not to mention, only sleeping about three to four hours the previous night because I’m so freaking excited.)

This summer, I went to a concert and saw two of my favorite bands playing at the same time in Houston, Texas – Avenged Sevenfold and Metallica. It was the best night of my life, and the entire day was filled with anticipation, extreme excitement and impatience for the long drive up there and the wait once we arrived at our hotel. I went with my dad because he is the one to blame for my particular taste in music; while other kids grew up with The Wiggles and Dora the Explorer, I grew up with Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and many, many others. So when my dad suggested we go see Metallica – my number one favorite band – this summer, I legitimately thought my heart had skipped a beat.

Once we got to the venue – about an hour or two before the doors opened, might I add – I thought that I was dreaming and that my heart was going to burst out of my chest from the excitement I was feeling. We stood outside, in the blazing Texas heat for about an hour before people were allowed into the gates. And I am not fond of warm weather, much less hot, trust me. But I was standing out there, happy as ever, waiting for our chance to have our tickets scanned so we could go inside. And of course, once we got up there, and our tickets were scanned, the small device the guy was using to scan them started making this repeated beeping sound that means the ticket is not valid. Not on my own, just on my dad’s. Let me tell you – I was freaking out. As soon as I heard those four beeps, the only thing I felt was the sensation that I was going to cry.

Well, after about fifteen to twenty minutes of walking around, being lead from here, to here, no, over there, we finally got inside and sat in our seats – and the anticipation continued.

Now, I’d been to two other concerts prior to this one, and never have I ever been so happy to be surrounded by thousands of other people, screaming, singing, and completely forgetting about their problems for the moment. And I absolutely hate crowds, but this was different. I was with people who enjoyed what I enjoyed, loved the music, the band, and we could all just be one, no matter who we were or what our background looks like – the Metallica family was one that night. And James Hetfield (Metallica’s lead singer) said something that I will never forget in my life. He said, “Metallica doesn’t give a shit. We don’t care what you look like, who you are, where you’re from, what skin color you are, what you do or don’t eat. We are all family here; we are all the Metallica family.” And that is the best thing I have ever heard a celebrity say to those that idolize them and also one of the many reasons that was the best day I have ever had in sixteen years.

ready to start // arcade fire

i always wanted to leave the suburbs.

or at least, i wanted to feel something more.

sure, i love the town i grew up in. i love the friends i made and the person it helped me become. i love knowing every nook and cranny of its streets. i love being able to walk into la siesta and have every waiter know exactly what my family is ordering the moment we sit down.

but i was outgrowing the suburbs.

i was outgrowing the friends who never felt quite like family. i was outgrowing the nooks and crannies like an old t-shirt that just didn’t fit right anymore. i wanted something more substantial than living in the same town with the same people and never going anywhere.

people say, “grow where you’re planted,” but i didn’t want to stick my roots in the same place forever. i wanted to blossom, i wanted to send seeds across city limits and state lines. i wanted to bloom past what i’d always known and grow somewhere else.

i wanted to crack concrete and move houses from their foundations and unsettle all the settlement that everyone else had let overcome them.

but i was the kudzu that consumes our state. i was foreign, sullying everything in my path with invasive green. it covered trees that had grown for generations and sucked the life from their roots.

but my green wasn’t tree green, it was new green. it was the green of fresh faces in new places. it was entering a community that had locked the gates to interwoven groves of family trees long before i could even fathom breaking the chains.

i knew my vines were cutting of the life of trees that had grown where ancestors planted them when it was still called jefferson, before hernando desoto found a river and changed its namesake forever. my vines were suffocating a community i never truly belonged in, so i withdrew my sprouting entanglement with this new home and potted myself, confined to my own clay solitude in the suburbs.

i wanted so badly to finally plant myself and grow, but my roots never truly found purchase.

so i spent my life in the suburbs waiting. i waited for someone to come along and see me outgrowing that clay pot and shatter it. i waited for someone to see that i was ready to grow past the town and take over the world.

1. I sat outside of our school. The breeze nice and warm. You stood across the foyer, watching- waiting for the right moment to introduce yourself. Corbin, a mutual friend, approached me and you saw your chance. You came over loudly and clumsily almost knocking over Corbin and I. I blushed when you played with my stray curls. I complained and apologized about the mess my hair had become. You disagreed and said you liked the mess.
2. You called me late one night- at 2:39 a.m. When I asked you why you called, you said you just wanted to hear my voice. And so we stayed up for 4 more hours talking about our parents, our friends, our dreams for the future.
3. Joseph was a friend of mine. A friend who did not know the boundaries but a friend all the same. His lips pressed against my forehead once and you caused an uproar that lasted days on end.
4. You skipped class a lot. Skipped the bus to Votech way too often. Instead of catching the bus to our sister school to learn about which welding position you preferred, you sat outside of my JROTC class and waited for me.
5. You broke your phone- threw it at a wall or punched it. We had no way of communicating when not in the same class. But you found a way- borrowed your cousins’ phones, tablets, computers.
6. Nightmares plagued my sleep. I didn’t want to bother you but one night, I called you crying. You told me to call you if I ever woke up like that again. You told me that you would be there for me.
7. There was an art school that I wanted to attend but attending would imply more distance between us. I told you about my hesitation to apply. You shared with me your fears but encouraged me to apply anyways saying, “We’ll handle that when we get there.” I got in. I am attending. And it is because of you.
8. Right now. This very moment. And every moment before and after. I Love You.

the suburbs // arcade fire

i spent seven years of my life in the suburbs. in a town where everyone knew everyone’s name and your classmate’s mom was probably your first grade teacher. but i didn’t know everyone’s names, and my teachers were never my friends’ moms.

i grew up in the suburbs, but i didn’t grow up in suburbia.

to me, suburbia is a feeling. something you have to grow up in to actually feel. in my town, suburbia is the kids who have memberships to the country club. they’re the kids who actually throw parties when their parents aren’t home. they’re the kids who will wake up at ungodly hours of the morning to go hunting on weekends. they’re the kids who ride their bikes around town and get milkshakes at velvet cream on friday nights.

these are the kids who lived next door to each other all their lives. these are the kids who knew each other all their lives, grew up together like family.

but i didn’t know anybody. i never had the pool parties or the friends to bike around town with or to go to velvet cream with. i didn’t even learn how to ride a bike until i moved to the suburbs because the gentrified small-town pavements were finally safer than the cracked concrete of my old town.

one time in my old house in my old town, my brother and i made friends with some kids who lived in the apartments behind our house. my parents built a fence and we never saw them again.

but even in this new town where i thought i could finally be a kid, i couldn’t walk around my neighborhood unless my brother went with me, which he never wanted to do. i didn’t know anyone to play outside with, and i didn’t know how to find them. i always wanted to find a home in the suburbs. i wanted the pool parties and the bike rides and the familiarity of people who felt like family, but i didn’t have that feeling everyone else grew up with.

there was one girl in this new neighborhood that was my age; she was the first friend i made in this new town. in fourth and fifth grade, i would go over to her house after school, and we would ride our bikes around the neighborhood. with her, i thought i was finally starting to feel suburbia seeping into my bones.

one day, she stopped answering the door. i haven’t ridden a bicycle since.

 

Everyone has a certain group of people they identify with because everyone has their own personal traits, background, and interests.  This means, that everyone is entitled to their own opinions.

In my opinion, the best thing I ever read is “8 Confessions of My Tounge”.  This poem tells a piece of me and my life through another’s mouth.

The poem is told in list form.  “One.  False comfort as you try your best to speak a tongue you don’t quite grasp.  There is always a count down as you realize I am not fluent in Spanish.  You expected the waterfall, the spit that crossed the ocean; the syllable-suffocating dance and it is a dance,” Noel Quiñones says. “This moving, weaving, searching, turning your back on what you can never keep up with. I contain so much sad, brown mouth that I can’t even pronounce Quiñones without a stranger examining the air it took to learn it.”  I relate so closely to this because speaking a language you don’t know to someone who knows it so well is the most vulnerable feeling.  You’re constantly waiting for them to laugh, spit, or bluntly point out your false identity.  You always feel you’re being judged for not knowing something you were never taught.  Especially if you were never exposed to it.

Quiñones goes on to list the second confession.  “Two.  The little lie we tell ourselves as we memorize Spanish songs without knowing the meaning.  But I’m always the last one to yell ‘Wepa, forever late to my own identity.”  I myself am guilty of memorizing Spanish songs without knowing the meaning, or even correct words.

People often assume I speak Spanish due to my darker skin and higher cheekbones.

“Three.  Experiencing the negativity from fellow Latinxs who do speak Spanish.”

So many times have I experienced the pitiful “No habla?”–parties, quinceaneras, and any other social situations.   “They whisper of my fraud on the block and in the classroom,” Quiñones laments. “But all I have are these two false skins stitched into a name.”  Even my own boyfriend points out the fact I don’t speak Spanish.  Then when I attempt, underlined are my mistakes and American accent.  And because I do not speak Spanish, this means my ethnicity is false.  They assume I know nothing of the culture.  This is how foreigners feel.  This is humiliation.  As is this relatable statement, “Four.  That feeling when you rely on Google Translate to prove yourself.”

“Five.  There’s always a despairing feeling when you fake your “mother tongue.”  This is true to me and many others who live the life of ‘no habla’.  “This means I am not as fluent as my poems: they are imagined in Latinidad.”

“Where I touch the shore and it accepts me,” Quiñones says. “Where my grandmother wasn’t spit on every day for not knowing English.”  Over the years, the issue of being discriminated against for not speaking English has not been eliminated.  However, being ridiculed for not knowing the language of your family has become more prominent.

“Six. The feeling of desperately trying to teach yourself using words you hear from friends and family even though they never taught you.”  Desperately you try to pick up the language yet no one will cut you slack.  They make jokes behind your back.  If only they knew how hard you were trying.  “Mimic whatever words I stole to make myself a more Latin thing,”  Quiñones confesses.  When he uses the word ‘stole’.  He really does mean stole.  The feeling of guilt possesses you every time you speak those mentioned words.  It feels wrong no matter how much you remind yourself that you’re just trying to make them proud.  You feel like no matter your course of action, the pit of quicksand that is shame pulls you in.

“My skin, always mistaken for home.  My name, an invitation to strangers who say, ‘Your parents should have taught you.’ But my parents say it’s my fault,” Quiñones spills.  In desperation, you try to understand, but you never do.  The blame–always on you.