The Girl Who Lived

You guys. I’m a bit freaked out right now???

Okay so I was cleaning out old, random files on my laptop since the clutter is getting ridiculous, and I found some old sound effects that I used to make the video for my AP lang project. Of course that got me distracted, so I decided to search it up and see how it was doing, two years later.

I DIDN’T EXPECT THIS OH MY GOD.

To quote my 16-year-old self from the reflection I did on the success of this thing, “As for the feedback I’ve gotten on YouTube itself, my video has 176 views, with 2 likes and a dislike (woohoo!). My account even got a subscriber, although I don’t know who it is.”

And now. This is... absolutely insane. And super confusing, since I rewatched the video and it was the type of thing that would strike gold in cringe compilations.

The comments have actually appeared consistently and as recent as two days ago (!!!), so I did some scrolling to see what people were saying. It seems that I have attracted the pre-teen/early teen audience, which was actually my intended audience, so that’s pretty awesome. I found it pretty hilarious that a good amount of these comments were nothing more than pre-teen angst - you know, the usual “I HATE my life UGHHH !!1!11!” - but there was actually some valuable stuff in there, too. It was especially cool that people were using the comments to share stories about their situations at home (since the video was about parent-child relationships), and creating long chains of comments where the commenters all replied to each other and helped one another out.

So yeah. I’m shocked that people reacted so much to a random 16-year-old girl’s roughly-made school project. Extremely shocked, weirdly impressed, but really happy that my video is actually somehow helping people. Kinda wish this had happened two years ago, though, haha.

(To whoever may or may not be reading this and made it through the entire thing, here’s the video link. Feel free to watch it and laugh/cringe all you want. I sure did.)

Wow, I haven’t blogged in ages, but today I was highkey missing my days in AP Lang and Lit and was reminded of just how real and relevant my past two years of English classes were.

Long story short, I walked into my engineering lab this morning expecting to just follow the usual protocol, test some cells for protein expression and all that, and be on my merry way. And then all of that changed when my eye just happened to glance over what my professor had written on his master protocol sheet. Which was how I found out the cells we were working with were HeLa cells. (And those pictures above are ones that my team took after these things multiplied like crazy.)

People around me kept working like it was no big deal, since these were just normal old cells, right? And here I was, knowing this whole story and whole other side to what we were doing that they had no idea about, silently getting distracted by the tiny ethical crisis that was going through my head. It was weird. Kinda surreal. But also really cool to see what we’d talked about in an 11th grade English classroom find its way into what’s eventually going to be my career.

I’m unflunkable! Finally!!

Oh my god, it feels so good to be done with this general intro. Like, it may not be perfect or anything, but that’s totally cool since the hard part’s all done. Now all that’s left to do is get this thing proofread by the gentle instructor and make the necessary tweaks, but that will be so much better compared to the actual writing of the first draft. 

Okay why is this so hard to write. 

So I’m at this point where I have a clear idea of where I want to go with the intro and what conversations I want to have. Like, I know exactly what I want to say, and I have everything written down in a nice little outline that I’m happy with. The problem I’m having here is with organization; I’ve literally rewritten what little I have so far over and over again and I’m still not satisfied with it because there are so many ideas coming together here. And, like, the things I want to talk about do make sense since they’re all connected and tie together, but I’m just having trouble with smoothing out the flow between those connections, know what I mean?

So the three background sources that I’m doing for my book are the Colombian war called La Violencia, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (which my author read), and the author’s own grandmother. At first I thought I was going to combine The Metamorphosis and his grandmother into one “source” since they both combined to influence his magical realist style, but then I read something that said that his grandmother eventually went blind and became really weak - and that pretty much broke the author’s heart, since he’d always looked up to her and knew what a powerful woman she was.

It just so happens that there’s a character in the book, the main female protagonist, who is super powerful, pretty much represents the glue that holds everything together for almost 100 years, and also happens to go blind. But, instead of the blindness weakening her, she grows so much stronger, with her instinct and all of her other senses heightening so much so that nobody else in the book even knows she’s blind in the first place. So clearly this character was influenced by his grandmother, which is really amazing since the author in the end found a way to show his grandmother’s true power when physically she wasn’t able to anymore.

I wrote my last post exactly a week ago, and since then I’ve honestly started to feel a lot better about this.

I’m actually on track for once (yay)! I’ve got the lit crit stuff pretty much set to go (though I may make some minor edits in the future), gotten whatever Eli stuff I was able to do finished, and finally managed to work through the annotations and the introductions (which I may likely still edit in the future, but at this point I have something that I’m happy about and can work with). I know we can’t expect it often, but I really liked the workdays we got; they not only gave me 3 extra hours to get my stuff done but also took a significant amount of stress off of me, since I knew I had some time before the next lesson to finish what we were currently working on. Which highly differs from when we were doing the lesson-a-day thing, which was practically a lose-lose for my stress levels - I had this mental urge to get everything done before we moved on (which was, like, every day), because if I didn’t, it felt like I had way too much to handle at the same time. So it was really nice to slow down, for a change.

That’s how much time we have left to get this done. Okay, so maybe more like 12, but still. What?? When did that happen???

There’s that voice nagging me in the back of my mind that yikes, there are so many things to be done (in both AP lit and outside of it) and so little time to do it, and not to mention I have to redraft my drafts because there’s things I need to fix at the same time that I have to keep plunging forward with the new material. It’s stressful stuff, and I’m really getting a bit overwhelmed at the pace we’re going here.

Dang, I’m getting really frustrated right now.

So I’ve been sitting here rewriting and rewriting my body for the criticisms I don’t agree with, and I’m seriously struggling with trying to be fair about this. It’s really hard, just because the arguments the criticisms are making are just so pointless - essentially saying that “oh, if the author finds a way to represent this thing that happens in real life, that means that he totally accepts that this thing is happening just because he doesn’t directly say otherwise”, because that makes total sense - and I am just so opposed to them and can disprove everything that’s said by the people making these claims with specific evidence I can point out from the book and...

So this doesn’t have to do with criticisms or anything, but here’s a list of cool extra stuff I found about the book:

-   The little part after the ending of the book, with a brief history of Márquez’s life and how he came to write the book. Stuff I found particularly interesting was the fact that his inspiration for the magical realism that he uses throughout the book came from mainly two places: one was his grandmother, who would always tell him stories about the wildest things with a stale face and serious voice, and whose tone made Márquez believe in the fantastical things he was told and later want to replicate the feelings of wonder and just all-around “whoa” he got when he heard her stories growing up. The other was his reading of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, which is totally crazy because that’s one of the four choices I originally wanted to read for this project. I had absolutely no idea about the connection between the two, so I just found that super cool.

-   This bio of Márquez (http://www.biography.com/people/gabriel-garcia-marquez-189132#synopsis), that I mentioned in post 4. It pretty much gave some brief background information about him, and was the source that led me to find out about La Violencia.

-   This information about La Violencia (http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/colombia/la-violencia.htm), also referenced in post 4. Long story short, La Violencia was a Colombian war that happened while Márquez was writing the book - which coincidentally includes a huge amount of referencing to a war and preaching of beliefs that sound kind of exactly like the stuff that was happening during La Violencia. Huh.

-   This article (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-was-unfilmable-its-writer-gabriel-garcia-m-rquez-said-so-9292532.html) about how Márquez never agreed to selling the filming rights to make a movie of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I found while trying to see if said movie existed (It doesn’t. Sigh. It would be really cool if it did). Apparently Márquez told the two directors who originally approached him to ask for the rights that, if they wanted to make the movie, they “must film the entire book, but only release one chapter – two minutes long – each year, for 100 years”. Honestly, the guy’s got a cruel sense of humor; while I find stuff like that and the particular comment he made pretty funny, I’ve also experienced the total flipside of that, the more using-irony-so-cruel-it’s-almost-funny side (@ the end of the book), so I kind of have mixed feelings.

NO. THAT ENDING.

NO.

This book started out so playful and lighthearted and magical but then all of a sudden there was this drastic increase in tension that kept getting worse until oh my god. I don’t even know what to do right now.

So I’ve been going on and on about the “history repeats itself” stuff, right? And how, if we remember the past, it serves as an alarm bell and helps prevent the negative stuff from happening again? And how if we don’t, well… we’re all pretty much in danger? See, Márquez has proven this over and over again, but the last sentence of the book has got to be the absolute harshest way he’s done it.

How crueler to send that message than to make those mysterious coded documents that the Buendías have been trying to decipher for 100 years, in the end turn out to be exactly 100 years’ worth of predictions (based on the events of the past and written by this wise gypsy man) about the family - the entirety of the events of the book, from the very start to the very finish - that are absolutely spot on, with the very last sentence of the documents reading that “the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”.

I know everyone talks about the ending to Gatsby and all, but after all this book has taken me through, this has, hands down, got to be the MOST chilling and impactful last sentence of a book I’ve ever read. I’m not even joking. I just sat there for a second reading and rereading that, just going through this huge mental “oh my god no way OH MY GOD” moment.

The thing is, as the Buendías have been trying to decipher the documents, they learned from the spirit of the guy who wrote them that, although they may be able to slowly chip away at the pieces needed to decipher the papers (like discovering they’re written in Sanskrit and written in two different alternating codes), all the pieces will not fit into place to properly figure out what the documents are saying until 100 years have passed. And then 100 years passes, only for the documents to say, “Yeah, so basically I knew exactly what was going to happen this entire time, down to the last detail. And you could have, too, if only you hadn’t been caught up in just another cycle of solitude, where you isolate yourself in the present-day by forgetting the past. I’ve seen it all happen before, and you’re all going to die right now, just as you finish making the realization that history repeats itself, because, well, you know how it is; it’s only when it’s too late that you make the breakthrough about that crucial thing that could have so easily saved your life.”

OHYoS: Post #5

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

You guys I’m having a crisis right now. 

Five of the main characters just died in rapid progression, and I swear, this book is seriously getting more and more depressing; all the characters - and I mean pretty much ALL of them, except for a couple here and there - that were so full of life before are now locking themselves in various rooms of the house until they die all alone. From generation to generation in this family, it’s the same thing happening over and over and over again.

And, yes, I know I’ve already talked about the whole “history repeats itself” thing and “distortion of time” thing before, but this particular section of the book had some quotes that I thought perfectly embodied the 360 pages that I’ve read so far:

“It’s as if the world were repeating itself.” (298)

“She shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing...but that it was turning in a circle.” (335; this sentence came after Ursula, who’s 120 years old at this point, just had the exact word-for-word same conversation with her great-grandson that she did all those years ago with her son)

“She mixed up the past with the present in such a way that no one knew for certain whether she was speaking about what she felt or what she remembered.” (341)

“The voracity of oblivion was little by little undermining memories in a pitiless way.” (344)

It’s like these quotes were foreshadowing what was going to happen soon in Macondo; there was this one incident where this massacre happened, killing thousands of people with one lone survivor (from those who were at the place where it happened), and somehow every single person in the village completely wiped the massacre from their memories as if it had never happened. They truly, honestly, believed it didn’t even happen. And thought the one survivor who insisted it did - so much so that his very last words were to his grandson, saying to “not forget that 3000 people died and they were thrown into the sea” - was absolutely crazy.

And then, after 360 pages of such crazy fast-paced events, and the stories of character after character after character, all of a sudden the events that were taking place in the book were exactly the same as the ones I had read about in the very first chapter. The first thing that happened in the book was that gypsies came to present their inventions to the people of Macondo, and now once more the gypsies have returned with the exact same inventions they presented hundreds of years ago, the same magnets and ice and whatever, which these ignorant people who forgot the history of their own town now think of as super magical just like the characters at the very beginning did. It’s the SAME. It’s as if the book is starting over again, except with a new set of characters who aren’t even that different from the old ones, both in name and behavior. It’s like those 360 pages I just read didn’t even matter at all.

Which is really scary, honestly. At one point the book talks about how the massacre was described in history textbooks as “a calm, peaceful situation where everyone present went home safely”, and I can’t help but see the direct connection to what we do in reality. We often feel like it’s a good idea to simply not talk about the bad stuff that happened, in history textbooks and in conversation, but that is the EXACT THING that can cause the bad stuff to happen again. We NEVER LEARN.

This is so frustrating. I’m sitting here right now staring blankly at my book and just blinking over and over again, because if things are starting right back over again then what about all the stuff I just read about?? Oh my god SO MUCH has happened and I formed connections with every one of the characters and sympathized with them and felt terrible for them through everything that happened and totally watched the entire progression of everyone slowly spiraling downwards and you can’t just pretend all of that - ALL OF THAT - didn’t even exist at all.

290 pages in! We’re getting there!

In all honesty this book is getting harder to read the further I get; it just feels like there’s this endless repetition of death and sorrow, and the second one exciting event happens it gets put down by another Buendía’s death and the spiral of solitude continues on and on. The book’s also lost so much of the magic that was so heavily present toward the beginning; instead of characters exploring these new thoughts and ideas and inventions that could potentially change the face of humankind, they’re all locking themselves in their rooms and ignoring the fact that the world exists at all. So yeah, I could say the book is starting to get boring, but at the same time I’m trying to look for some meaning in this, because it’s pretty clear to me that Márquez is giving off all these messages left and right and wouldn’t make the story progress the way it does if not for a reason.

In this case, I’m feeling a strong theme of innocence and how it’s being corrupted; the village of Macondo itself, during the days of its founding filled with the innocence of an almost-childlike curiosity and its solitary geography leaving it free from the influences of the rest of the world, is now almost unrecognizable due to the arrival of modern-day ideas, the more modernized outsiders coming to the village and all the new fancy stuff they bring with them completely taking over and overpowering the sense of innocent simplicity that existed before. And these characters, not knowing how to react in the face of all this fast-paced modernization (or, really, what it is is another version of colonization, pretty much), just sort of freeze up. There’s a particularly interesting character, Remedios the Beauty, who somehow manages to be the only one who maintains an innocently simplistic outlook on life and doesn’t let herself be brought down by the ideas of the new arrivals or strict guidelines for femininity that the newcomers have influenced, but in the end her innocence is mistaken for ignorance and she’s such an outsider in society that even the gods recognize it, and she is literally lifted back into heaven since an innocence like hers no longer belongs in Macondo like it used to. Which is sad.

Another thing that is talked about so much and definitely corrupts innocence is the whole concept of war, as seen by the once intellectually sharp Colonel Aureliano hardened by the war and reduced to a man who desperately tries to keep his mind off the war by making golden fish only to melt them down, locking himself in his workshop for decades and only coming out to pee on the lawn before heading back in. When I looked up stuff about the author (referencing this page http://www.biography.com/people/gabriel-garcia-marquez-189132#synopsis), just to get some sort of a “speaker” background, I read that he was from Colombia and had written this book during a time of war that was happening in Colombia at the time, called La Violencia.

So, naturally, the name of that period being the vaguest thing ever as it’s pretty much called “the violence” in Spanish (whoa, wars are violent?), I wanted to know more about that whole deal considering it may have had an influence on Márquez’s mindset, and by reading http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/colombia/la-violencia.htm I found that it exactly matches the war that’s described in the book. Like, “the war” that I’ve read so much about in this book is La Violencia, even though that name was never once stated. And so now I’m thinking that, by referencing this real-life event in the book and having one of the book’s central characters play such a major part as a Liberal colonel in the war, Márquez is doing a couple of things:

For one, he may be voicing his own opinion about the war, using the book to promote a Liberal standpoint. And he does it by using the voice of a Liberal character who comes from a Conservative town, mimicking but flipping the background of the Conservative president at the time who had power amongst an entirely Liberal Congress, which is pretty interesting. But then at the same time, by pointing out all the sad stuff that happened to Aureliano after the war, Márquez is probably just saying that, yeah, he supports this Liberal stuff, but in the end war is war and people die or, if not, are scarred for the rest of their lives, and it’s all just totally not worth it. War corrupts and ruins innocence, and there’s just no getting that back when it’s gone.