A story, a poem, an article and a play

Oh wow that's a lot of writing. I've been quite productive with writing lately. The article is probably the thing I'm most proud of, so I'm linking it here so you can read it first.

https://inkspire.org/post/the-melancholic-poet-a-review-of-john-keats-poetry/-MA3TIjYtXU4wvroufmF

Now here's the story. It's a writer's block metafiction thing.

I sat at my writing desk, opening my notebook to a blank page. 

Okay, time to start.

Yet half an hour later, all I did was sharpen all the pencils I owned until they could probably be used as weapons. 

"There's really no point in having all those ideas if you're never even going to write about them. Is there?" said Jane. Jane was a character I made up some time ago, but I hadn't gotten around to finishing the story she was in yet. She pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose. "I'm sure you'll feel a lot better if you just start. Don't worry about editing for now." She put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. The way I created Jane, she wasn't supposed to be the main character. She was just a therapist, a side character who helps the protagonist.

The protagonist from the story was an angst-ridden teenage girl who sat in the corner all day with her earbuds in listening to music. She had a bad attitude, so I didn't like her. 

"Okay Jane, change in plans. You seem to be the most reasonable one out of all the characters I've created, and I appreciate that. So I'm going to make you the main character instead of a side character," I declared.

"Thanks," said Jane. But she couldn't help but worry. "What about poor Sally over there? Won't she be upset if she's not the main character anymore?"

"Actually," said Sally, pulling out her earbuds, "I don't like being the centre of attention."

"Then why are you always so awkward around people? It draws attention to you," I pointed out. 

"Because unfortunately, I'm based on you!" She snapped. 

Ouch. She sure did know how to answer back in a way that hurt. 

"WRITE SOMETHING!" A Viking smashed an axe onto my desk and almost chopped it in half.

"Yikes!" I yelled, standing up and pointing one of my extra-sharp pencils at him to defend myself. 

"Relax, Balder Gunnarson," Jane said to the Viking. He grumbled something in Old Norse under his long, red beard and walked away. 

"I don't have any time to do research right now. But I promise I'll include you in a great historical novel someday, Balder," I called after him. 

He picked up a horn full of ale and started drinking. 

Some monkeys jumped onto my desk. It was already weak from Balder's axe-slash, and the weight of three monkeys was enough to make it break in half. The monkeys stole all my pencils and ran away. They were from a writing prompt I never finished that I saw on writetheworld.com. The prompt was about writing from the perspective of an animal, and I wanted to write about a group of monkeys. That's when the monkeys appeared in my room and joined all my other characters. They were a real nuisance. 

"Great. Now I don't have a desk. And no pencils. If you guys wanted me to write about you, why are you destroying all my writing supplies?" 

Jane diverted my attention away. "Um... I think you should be worrying about her," she said. 

"Pleeeassssseeee finish my sssssstory," a snake woman hissed. Basically she looked like a mermaid, except her lower body was a snake, not a fish. I made her up for some fantasy genre challenge.

"She's going to lose it. You should really finish her story," Jane warned.

The snake woman slithered up to me. "They ssssstole the idol from the temple! Those thieves musssssst pay!"

"Yes I am aware of the terribly undeveloped plot you're in," I said.

Just then, everyone got angry and started talking over each other. They were all begging me to use them in a story. 

"Everyone, just shut up!" I yelled. "I'll get to you eventually. Just wait." 

Finally, I picked up my notebook and a pencil that a monkey dropped and started writing. I figured out an idea that could incorporate all the characters in the room. 

An INKspire Article I wrote for Black History Month

Read it here

https://inkspire.org/post/fighting-for-the-truth-the-story-of-great-zimbabwe/-M0KIFAaVK_J1AWgv-7J

Read my first INKspire article!

If you're a writer and you're looking for a nonprofit organization to get involved with, I recommend the Canadian youth publishing platform INKspire! Check out an article I wrote for it here:
https://inkspire.org/post/nonbinary-gender-identities-in-various-cultures-and-why-they-matter/-LyRmFTLSnPiil_tDJnU

I'm on the arts writing team of INKspire, which means I have to write one article a month which fits in the arts category. If you're interested in volunteering, you can sign up to be a writer for arts, social issues, or science and techonology. INKspire accepts writers between the ages of 14 and 29 in Canada. They also host creative writing workshops in Toronto. The team at INKspire is great and will host brainstorming sessions and team meetings to help you write better! Most of the submissions are articles but you can submit poetry and prose as well. I really hope some of you will consider joining because it's a lot of fun :) 

I Met them Online: The Phenomenon of "Internet Friends"

A/N: The following is an article I wrote for the Spyglass magazine. 

Here at RHHS, the clubs are almost as diverse as the students themselves. With an eclectic selection ranging from the award-winning debate team, the talented singers of Vocal Fusion, and the future astronomers of RASA, we like to believe that our school has something for everyone. Sadly, this is not the case. Like other schools, RHHS has kids who feel like they don’t belong anywhere. It can be really hard to find friends who share similar interests if your thing happens to be dumpster diving, soap carving, didgeridoo music or some other “niche” hobby. Fortunately, there’s a quick and easy solution for anyone who is tired of not being able to find a community to be a part of: the internet.

Many teens are turning to forums, online chatrooms and social media hoping to fill the void of loneliness they feel. It seems that humans naturally crave love and acceptance, and they will stop at nothing to seek it out. People who watch obscure animes may lurk on fanfiction websites to read scenarios that they imagine their favourite characters in. Sites like DeviantArt with millions of page views a day are full of drawings posted by dedicated consumers of various books, movies, and tv shows. While the idea of a person who has “internet friends” used to conjure up images of a shady loner hunched over a computer in a dimly-lit basement, meeting people online is now becoming more commonplace. In a 2015 study conducted by Pew Research Centre, 57% of teens reported making a new friend on social media. These relationships aren’t even limited to mere friendship. With the rise of dating apps like Tinder, it is estimated that one-fifth of all committed relationships begin online. People who once thought they were “forever alone” now realize that it’s easier to meet “the one” than ever before.  

Yet not all internet communities revolve around making friends or obsessing over fictional characters. Unfortunately, the internet has also given a voice to strange cults and extremist political organizations looking to lure in young and impressionable teens. Today’s youth are more prone than ever to become victims to internet predators, and the main method that predators use to win over their prey’s trust is by making teenagers feel less lonely. The victims are then convinced that without internet friends, they would have no friends at all. This means that if parents are worried about keeping their children safe online, the solution is not to ban internet friends in general. What teenager actually listens to their parents anyway? Instead, it is to provide enough love and affection to their child. By providing a means for adolescents to pursue their hobbies and accept their own flaws, parents will be ensuring that their children won’t have to seek validation from peers or strangers on the internet.

As the world becomes more interconnected, cynics point out all the ill-effects of social media and how they are supposedly leading the world into a dark time. But there’s always a bright side. We must remember that if a person can cheer up a stranger who is having a bad day in a distant country, the world is probably better because of it.

A Brief History of Insanity

Draft of my upcoming Spyglass article
~~~

One of Plato’s most enduring ideas was called the Allegory of the Cave. This story is quite easy to visualize, as it involves people chained inside a cave in such a way that they can only see shadows dancing and flickering across a wall. The shadows are the only entertainment they have ever known and none of them are aware of the world outside the cave. Plato asks us to imagine what would happen if one of them managed the painful and life-changing ascent to sunlight and then returned back to the cave, telling the others that there is much more to life than images on a screen. The cave dwellers would see the one who escaped as insane even though he spoke the truth. Plato believed his own teacher, Socrates, was an enlightened man whom the people of Athens considered crazy because of his wisdom.  The allegory shows the disturbing tendency of our society to label ways of thinking we don’t understand as ‘madness’. Part of the reason why we stigmatize the mentally ill is because we fear that they tell the truth. We often consider them to be less intelligent than us, failing to recognize the unique talents and creative gifts that they can offer the world.

In the book Madness and Civilization, French philosopher Michel Foucault expresses disgust and outrage at the dehumanizing treatment of the mentally ill. Throughout history, they have been subject to all kinds of torture and locked up in asylums. Many endured unethical medical practices like shock therapy or lobotomies. Yet Foucault argues that not all societies of the past were like this and that some were better at accepting differences. There is a lot we can learn from medieval European society for example, in which the wisdom of people we would now label as mad was sought out. They would be allowed to wander free and were often hired as court jesters or entertainers, positions in which they could often get away with questioning the authority of a ruler. Conditions that we now view as disorders, like Williams Syndrome, which causes one to have an excessively trusting personality and view all strangers as close friends, were seen as gifts.  People with Williams often score less than average on standard IQ tests, yet in ancient societies their charming personalities were the inspiration behind mythological elves depicted as helpful and good-natured. Instead of focusing on their strengths, such as communication and empathy, children with Williams are seen as problematic individuals who need to be fixed.

Even Socrates was said to have vivid hallucinations- like the type a schizophrenic would have. Plato and the historian Xenophon considered this to be a ‘sacred illness’ and believed that these visions were from the gods. The lesson here is to embrace diversity, especially different ways of thinking. Far too many creative and talented minds have been shunned by society simply because they didn’t conform to what is considered normal. People who work with the mentally ill seem to view their patients as problems rather than as human beings while the education system aims to make them act like everyone else instead of embracing their own gifts. The truth is that the world would not be worth living in if everyone thought the same way.

Why the Dark Ages weren’t so Dark: Revisiting Medieval Europe

A/N: Alright so in this post I'm going to talk about something that a lot of followers of this blog probably don't like much. Europe. Take it as a lighthearted devil's advocate piece until I can do some research to update this blog with a quality post about indigenous culture. I wrote this for Medium. You can read the article at its original source here. 

Imagine yourself in 13th century Western Europe. You probably see yourself as a serf, tied to the land and suffering under the back-breaking labor that your oppressive feudal lords force you to do. Chances are that you’d also be starving and infected with plague because of the extremely unsanitary conditions of the time. If you’re a woman, say goodbye to all personal liberty. Most of your social interaction is done at church, where priests hold sermons in Latin that you don’t understand a word of because you never learned Latin. You never even learned to read, right?

Why do we oversimplify such a culturally rich epoch of European history? Though historians disagree on the exact start and end date of the Middle Ages, most place it somewhere between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and Columbus’ voyage to the Caribbean in 1492. This period is considered to be a time of isolation for Europe in which not much trade occurred, and progress in science and technology remained stagnant. Yet new research has shed light on the accomplishments of the time. For example, many centers of learning such as Oxford and the University of Paris were established. Though many resources were lost in the pursuit of alchemy, it helped people to discover many new elements that would later be added to the periodic table. As for the suppression of women’s rights, some inspiring female historical figures still managed to emerge such as Joan of Arc who lead the French army to victory, and the German nun Hildegard von Bingen who studied botany and medicine. Their names have echoed throughout time and still evoke our awe today.

I believe we shouldn’t underestimate the impact that the Middle Ages have had on Western thought, for some of the greatest works of literature emerged from this time. Our ideals of courtly love came from the great chivalric romances, such as Amadeus de Gaulle, in which a heroic brave knight saves a princess from a dragon. Some other epic works of literature like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were conceived in this time. The folk songs and fairy tales of today would be nothing without the Middle Ages, for perhaps no other time period in history has captured Western imagination as much. The Dark Ages may not have been the most scientifically advanced or morally enlightened, but they certainly weren’t a dark time for storytelling and singing epic ballads that still endure today.

Another article I wrote for the Spyglass magazine

A/N: Okay so it turns out I'm not just a wannabe historian, I'm a wannabe philosopher too. Here's a random article I wrote for the Spyglass magazine, of which I am the co-editor in chief along with an IRL friend of mine. You may think it reeks of liberalism, but whatever.

The Value of Morality in a World of Lies 

        If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been called a hopeless idealist for simply caring about human rights, I’d have enough money to eradicate poverty in countries that have been systematically pillaged.

I’m very opinionated on indigenous rights, yet even my own family has tried to discourage me from raising my voice on the topic, saying that my ideals were naïve and unattainable. It is a tragedy that the title of ‘social justice warrior’ now brings up negative connotations of teenagers whose intentions may be in the right place but who waste their time by getting into problems they don’t understand and dismissing every opinion they disagree with as discriminatory. With so many critics saying we aspiring activists are insufferably ignorant, while others doubt the power we have to make a difference in the world, one can’t help but wonder if some of the critics actually have a point. I’m here to remind every teenager who has ever longed for a world free of poverty, where different ethnic groups live in harmony and no child is deprived of an education, that their vision is neither unimportant nor unrealistic and that their voice is more powerful than they think. At the same time, we must also listen to some of our criticism as part of the never-ending journey of educating ourselves. We have to admit there are many people in our movement who make a mockery of social justice, and also many intellectuals on the conservative side who are actually fully justified in questioning the value and morality of our struggle. They point out that in order to help the oppressed, one must be willing to sacrifice many of their own comforts in life and that the majority of people would be unwilling to do this. Such an opinion is perfectly valid, and is reminiscent of many great philosophical ideas that have been proposed before, such as Ayn Rand’s individualism in which selfishness is actually a virtue and a just society can only be achieved if there is recognition of the rights of the individual. The individual should not feel pressured by us social justice warriors into giving up any of their money to help the poor, as can be seen in one of Rand’s most famous quotes “the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” It’s a compelling argument, so why do we social justice warriors continue in our quest? I would say it’s because we realize that when human rights are at stake for one group, it’s a threat to every individual’s well-being as well. The individual’s rights are impossible to alienate from the rights of humanity. This world has enough selfish tyrants in it already, and we really can’t fall into the trap of believing that injustice is more profitable to us personally than justice, because that idea is not true. If one group is being oppressed, how can we be sure that their oppressor won’t come after us the next day? The view that doing good for others will in turn do good for ourselves isn’t an irrational belief, nor is it a religious concept like karma, it’s a fact. Benevolent actions are more likely to have a positive outcome for everyone, which means activists are actually being more realistic than those who are skeptical about the morality of their movement.

I encourage all social justice warriors to continue in their courageous fight, but to never forget that change in society starts with the individual. Everyone has a universal moral compass inside them, so being uncompromisingly good, philanthropic, and selfless is as easy as being yourself. Never stop learning and asking questions, and in your busy schedule of public protests and fundraisers, always take some time as Immanuel Kant would say to reflect on the starry heavens above you and the moral law within you.

Your Inner Nomad

Note: The following is an article I wrote for the Spyglass magazine, inspired by the indigenous cultures of Australia. It's not super relevant to the theme of this blog but I still thought my blog followers may be interested in this. Enjoy. 

When I read a good historical tale, I almost feel immortal. It’s as if I’ve been transported to a different world and have been living a thousand different lives among people of various cultures. As silly as it may sound, sometimes I wonder if I was born in the wrong time period. I call myself an aspiring cultural anthropologist, hoping to gain some deep insight into human nature by studying the different ways in which various cultures view the world. I’d like to specialize in the native cultures of Mexico perhaps, but my most recent fixation is on a much older culture. In fact, it’s the oldest continuous culture in the world: the indigenous people of Australia. According to Australian Geographic, genetic studies have revealed that they’re descendants of the first people to leave Africa 75,000 years ago. They’ve also been a historically nomadic people, which means that my ‘armchair travelling’ through adventure stories would never content them. They live to wander.

There is something about these restless adventurers that all of us can learn from. The Australian aboriginals had a powerful oral tradition which included directions that acted as a sort of spoken map, something which anthropologists call the ‘songlines’. Every tribe had different songlines that covered their whole territory. If you memorized the songlines--which mention where to find waterholes, landmarks and food sources--you could have navigated throughout all of Australia. They also had a rite of passage called the Walkabout, in which adolescents would have to prove they could survive in the outback on their own. It is this emphasis on the act of walking in their culture that people find interesting. Sometimes, owning too many material possessions can be exhausting and tie us down. We are drawn to adventure because we want to escape. The desire to wander is one of our most suppressed instincts, and it’s something that has been passed down to us from our earliest nomadic ancestors. Perhaps it can be the explanation for why some people are natural thrill-seekers who search for experiences that can bring them out of their comfort zone, and wilt when faced with a boring routine.

The idea that some people carry this explorer gene certainly is a romantic one, but can it be backed by scientific evidence? The answer may lie in the research of Dr Richard Paul Ebstein, Professor of Psychology at the National University of Singapore, who believes that a gene variant known as DRD4-7R causes more risky behaviour in people. Carriers of DRD4-7R are less sensitive to dopamine, a chemical that controls the brain’s ‘pleasure system’, so they are more likely to seek out extreme pleasurable experiences. This not only includes travel, but also impulsive financial risks like gambling. Further research from the University of California found that the gene variant was more commonly found among migratory cultures than in settled ones. Of course, no gene variant can explain someone’s entire pattern of behaviour, but the idea of a wanderer gene carries an irresistible appeal. Some of us suffer from homesickness, but there are others among us who suffer from quite the opposite and will forever yearn for distant places.