Andy Jiang AP Lit (It doesn't rhyme anymore)

One could even describe this research project as Kafkaesque, as we were all dealt with a project that relies on our ability to read, interpret, and use previously scary and unknown scholarly resources like literary criticisms in order to achieve our goal. I think my perspective of the literary world is completely flipped around, much like the worlds of K. or Gregor Samsa. I’ve always been a math and science guy, interested in pursuing a career in STEM, and doing such extensive research in things that previously I had absolutely no knowledge or interest in was really new to me. But unlike the fates of K. or Samsa, I think my experiences trying to do this project benefited me. I learned a lot about academia and the research process on a higher level, and figuring out how to use things like the library, or understand scholarly texts like the criticisms that I worked with. Although I don’t want to be an English teacher or a literary critic now, I’ve actually grown a liking to rhetoric, semiotics, and other similar disciplines. They’re just so universally applicable, and after working on a project like this one, it’s kind of hard to not see their influences in the world around me. Yes, writing this paper was very Kafkaesque in terms of how it seemed to me at the start, and how the process deteriorated me into a shrivel of my former self, similarly to K., but unlike many of Kafka’s works, this project at least has a somewhat happy ending for me.

SPOILER ALERT DON’T READ ON IF YOU DON’T WANT ME TO SPOIL THE END.

The End to The Trial was very sudden. I think two different factors contribute to this. One, the book was actually incomplete, so there might be some parts missing. Although this is true, I still think this ending was supposed to be intentionally abrupt and sudden. K. is sitting alone, expecting someone, when two men come in and take K. away. They end up at a quarry, where K. seems to know his death is here, and contemplates killing himself right there, but in the end the two men plunge a knife though his chest, and the book ends.

The way Kafka describes the various courts and court offices that K has go to to in really interesting, as I think the setting plays a big deal in not only the plot, but what Kafka wants to say. One would expect the courts and offices to be held in high regard, large regal buildings, very clean looking, in busy, affluent areas, kind of like this

The Flogger is a single chapter in the book, only eight pages, about the flogger. One night, K finds the two guards who arrested him that very first day, getting flogged by a higher up in a closet in K’s bank. The two guards beg K to bribe them free, but the flogger won’t accept, saying that he was “hired to flog, so flog I will”. The next day, K finds the two guards back in the closet, getting flogged once more, and the chapter ends with K telling his assistant to clean out the closet tomorrow.

One thing that stood out to me was the response by the flogger, a response that parallels the infamous defense by Nazi officials at the Nurenburg trials, “I was only following orders”. I guess Kafka was a little ahead of his time as this book was written about 30 years prior to those trials. Kafka still brings up that same question of morals vs responsibilities. 

Another part about this chapter is how on its own and bizarre it was. Every other chapter so far has been directly connected to at least one other chapter, but this chapter, the shortest one, stands alone. I’ve been growing to think that Kafka’s writing style is just kind of... bizarre. Another one of his most famous books, The Metamorphosis, is about a guy who randomly turns into a giant cockroach. 

Ideas about women were not something I expected going into the book at all. being a book focused around the accusation of K and well, the trial. But as I’ve been reading, its pretty clear that the women play a significant role so far in the book. 70 some pages in, K has interacted with three different women, Frau Gruabach, Fraulein Burstener, and the unnamed wife of the court usher.

They very beginning of The Trial by Franz Kafka plunges you right into the plot. I mean the very first line goes, “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested”. The very abrupt start of the book had me trying to quickly catch up to the fast pace of the book, a feeling I think Kafka was going for.  

The first few chapters of the book got me very antiquated with the character of Josef K, or just K as the narrator refers to him as. K is a pretty well-off man, a high ranking officer at a large bank. When he first hears of his arrest, he seems very unfazed, as if it means nothing. At first I wasn’t sure if that was because the nature of the arrest, or because of K’s personality, but as I continued to read, I was sure it was because his personality.

K comes off as an extremely confident man. He’s very well-off and obviously pretty educated, and as he interacts with other people and responds to his arrest, he comes off as more and more confident, reaching levels of arrogance and cockiness. This is shown even more as during his first interrogation, he basically denounces the systems of court and law, and tells the examining magistrate that he’s above them. 

Adam Gongol aka The Gongolian could potray K very well I think. Both are well-spoken, educated, confident, and think very highly of themselves.

2:22 - 7th hour ends and 13 Avondale swimmers sulk their way to the pool, included me. We’re all dreading another day of mid-season practice.

2:30 - The whole team’s in the locker room. Half the team is asleep on the benches, the other half of the team is in line for the single stall because the swimming locker room bathrooms are easily the nicest and cleanest in the school.

2:40 - Emil is being chased around by Justin Van Acker who has a water bottle filled with soap. The typical Emil shriek is heard as everyone has to wake up.

2:41 - Richard Fawaz brings the voice of justice as Justin and Emil “SHUT THE F*** UP”.

2:50 - “We should probably get on deck” I say as the whole team finally puts on their suits in solemn silence.

2:52 - As soon as we get on deck, and we have all come back from the dead. Ashton goes back to not speaking English, Richard and Justin throw Emil’s flip flops into the pool. Everyone else fills their water bottles and takes another nap.

2:53 - Stretch

2:59 - Finish Stretching. I jump into Lane 5. Between Stone, Kendall, Justin and I, we use lanes 4 and 5. They bounce in between lanes every day, but I don’t. Lane 5 is my lane. N

400 Warm-up - nobody bothers to actually count their laps and just rely on finishing when someone else finishes. We end up doing 100 more than we were supposed, and honestly it’s a miracle we even stopped.

6x100 IM on the 1:30 - Another day, another fast IM set, and this one is the most boring.

200 Kick - I make sure to not get the board with “Kimberly Bryan” on it, because the other side has some mysterious stain.

8x75 Free on the :55 - Kill me now. Easily the worst set of every day.

200 Easy - I spend the whole time worrying about what the main set is going to be. Richard and Joey are drowning Justin, and Emil is as silence during practice as ever.

8x50 Freestyle, Descending 1-4, 5-8 on the 1:00 - Oh my god it’s Wednesday. Wednesday is test set day, and especially if we’re starting with these, we know we’re in for a doozy.

2x Yellow Jackets on the 30 - Thank god for the legend Brian Williams. I actually really like these.

            Main Set: 30x100’s, Broken into 12,6,6 and 6.

1-12 of 30x100s, pulling on the 1:35 - If you’re Justin Van Acker you love this. If you’re me, you lag behind because you can’t pull to save yourself, because I can’t keep my hands outside of my shoulders like I should be.

13-18 of 30x100s on the 1:25 - These aren’t too bad. Actually they are bad, but child’s play compared to what we know we are going to do afterwards

19-24 of 30x100s on the 1:20 - If you didn’t get a song stuck in your head by now, you’re probably going insane. The song I’ve been singing today is “The Cops” by K.Flay.

6x100s on the 1:15 - At this point we’re all exhausted, too tired to even sing that song in our heads. We just count down the laps one by one until we’re done.

300 Easy - I can’t move my arms, and I don’t really want to.

5:00 - We all climb out of the pool and walk into the showers. Kendall and I end up sharing our UltraSwim with the entire team because it’s almost magically how well it removes the chlorine from our hairs.

5:01 - Shower Captain Richard leads the way in the typical shenanigans. Daniel Wang continues to meme.

5:04 - The water turns cold and we start dreading the 5ish minutes of cold water that comes before it heats up again.

5:09 - Right on time the water is warm again, and I sit in the water contemplating life.

5:20 - Nobody actually showers, we just like sitting in the hot water.

5:25 - We finally get out and we change like normal. CJR Hostile puts more deodorant on. Dominic is in the stall again. Daniel Wang is still Daniel Wang. Everything is okay, until we have to come back tomorrow.

7:30 - Aston Donaghy sends another roast of the day. Today it’s another lil’ Richard roast.

                                                            FIN

If you read that entire thing I applaud you. It’s really personal and I had a lot of fun writing it. As much as I hate swimming, I wouldn’t do anything else, and I will genuinely miss it. Nothing is a stranger feeling than sitting in the locker room at the state meet after your final event, on the verge of crying because after four long years, you’re finally done. My place in this tribe has changed over the years, and so have the people who have come and go, but somethings will never change, the practices, the memories, the relationships, and the showers.

A lot of people say their querencia is their room, or their desk, and I suppose I would say the same thing, but there's one real reason why I would say that and that's because of Teamspeak. Really simply put, TeamSpeak is an application where you can create a server where anyone who has the address and password can join. Inside a server, there are a multitude of channels where people can join, voice chat with everyone else, or talk through text within the channel or server.  It's pretty much like a group chat or a Google+ hangout that’s constantly online.

Belonging to the sense of peace and comfortableness, and that's exactly what I feel like in the server.  Whether it's peace and quiet with just me, or the typical me, Adam, and Alex, or fully busy with two or three channels going and 10+ people in the server, I never feel out of place. There's never an awkward place I could put myself in. The Teamspeak is a home for me. It's very personalized, and each channel name, description, and advertisement hold something of meaning or sentiment to me. It's a place where I can discuss anything. I can play LoL or CS with Adam, Alex, Ashton, Kendall, or whoever else. I can watch streams of LCS or basketball or football games with other people. I can work on homework alone in the homework channel, or I can discuss it with whoever is there. Even if I want to discuss things from Twitter, Reddit or whatever else online, I can just throw a link in the chat for everyone else to see. It also makes making real life plans a lot faster and easier.

Stratification 

When you were scrolling you probably were wondering why I posted a picture of a rock. The Handmaids and the rest of the female groups in Gileadean society work much of the same way as the different minerals did in forming this rock. The society stratified the women, each set separate based on their role in society. Unlike normal stratification, the order of these female groups is unclear, but one thing is, these women are all placed underneath men. The stratification of the women is another control mechanism, used to derive women of their power as women by giving each a specific role, and nothing more. Much how like assembly-line and unskilled work was used to unseat skilled workers during the Industrial Revolution of the mid to late 1800′s in America. Big business owners looked to reduce the powers the workers had over them. They didn’t need to rely on skilled workers, because they split each job into very simple, easy tasked that anyone could do. Because of this the workers lost their voices.