Atticus

For my English Independent Study Project, which I believe a lot of people are either finishing up or preparing their presentations around this time of the year, I had wanted to compare The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things with The Child Called 'It' by Dave Pelzer and write an essay on different aspects concerning child abuse. I had it all planned out, I was going to compare the tones in each book as they were written through a child's perspective and contrast the character developments throughout the novels. There were a lot of ideas in my mind and I had almost had it written out...

But my teacher wouldn't let me use those two books. She said the vocabulary and writing styles were too simple.

I ended up having to compare To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee with Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. They had SparkNotes on them, but they weren't entirely helpful. I also figured they had movies, so I could watch them for inspiration. I couldn't get through five minutes of To Kill A Mockingbird. Of course, that's to be expected because I didn't enjoy the book at all and I'd had to read it a million times over, select quotes to support my arguments, pick out specific examples to compare and contrast with the other novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. I had watched that movie many years ago, but opted out this time because it really wasn't worth watching again. I was dying to switch novels, but by then, it was already too late. My essay focused on racial discrimination in both eras and against different races in the US.


My dad gave me these pens, but I'm not sure where or why he had them. It might have been a bonus with the purchase of a bottle of Hennesy XO Cognac, which is what seems to be printed in silver on the inside of the cover. The pens don't even write very well and they're also too big and heavy for my preference.

The problem with the English curriculum throughout high school is the rigid rules on writing a "proper essay." The student must not deviate from the robotic fill-in-the-blanks format and reiterate but paraphrase the thesis at the end of every paragraph. Each paragraph had to have a specific argument and it had to end with a sentence that connected the topic of that paragraph with the thesis and attempt to make it flow into the next. One thesis. Three arguments. Done.


I don't remember what I did with my essay that ended up being something like twenty pages long or so, double-spaced, but I remember my teacher simply wrote "Beautifully written. 40/40." I don't know why the students of the year before mine were making such a big fuss over it, causing fear in the hearts of all the younger students in each year after them. It may have just been the excessive amount of time that we were given to write it.


I can't remember how much, but this essay was worth a lot in the calculation of the final mark for university. There were many simple components to this project in an attempt to allow the student to redeem him/herself, such as the essay outline, which was also worth a fair amount of marks. After the essay was completed, each student was also required to do a presentation, preferably in some creative manner.

I decided to present my project in the form of a court case as Atticus, a lawyer and the father of Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird. I dressed in black suit, put on a Southern accent, slicked and tied my hair back and strode in with a file folder, transparencies with quotes, notes on index cards, notebook, a case of pens, my Emporio Armani watch, and the thin glasses in the photograph above. It was a bit of a reverse order, because I walked in with the glasses and promptly took them off as I began my presentation, because I have 20/20 vision and I could not see clearly through them, whereas they're supposed to be reading glasses. The two cartons of cupcakes I had baked the night before to be distributed as a part of my Southern hospitality were already under the desk. I think I had made something like sixty cupcakes of both "black" (chocolate) and "white/yellow" (lemon) varieties to represent racial harmony. It hadn't gone as well as I had hoped because I was very flustered, nervous, and experiencing a serious case of social anxiety.

To think, the year before I was the alienated Joan d'Arc, pleading for my innocence in a French accent with the occasional French word, while wearing the heavy steel armour my friend had made for her Classics project, aluminum foil thigh and arm pieces, black pants under knee-high black leather boots, standing on a chair, tied to a Roman pillar, and had pieces of fire made from construction paper on little stands around me. I had to get someone else to cue the background music for me from my MP3 player and a pair of speakers because the school didn't have enough CD players to go around. Of course, it was the track I use for almost all my presentations of this nature: "Cleansing" from the Resident Evil soundtrack and, while it contained no lyrics, its score was written by Marilyn Manson. I think that was probably my best presentation throughout high school.

As always, I'm off topic again. The real focus of this post was on the pen that I've been meaning to describe, the one on the black notebook and on my laptop in a previous post. I saw this advertisement in a free magazine that I picked up at a subway station on my early trip back from DECA.



I cut that page out of the magazine and stuck it to the inside of my locker with a magnet for the rest of the year and its corner has gotten a little bit damaged. No fear, for I have made a copy on thick, high quality, glossy photo paper, encased in a page protector. It's sitting on the top of the shelf to the left of my desk.

I believe Julianne Moore also supported this ad campaign for the "Entertainment Industry Foundation and Montblanc to help children develop their most valuable asset: imagination."

I wish I had taken more magazines with me, but I was in a rush to catch the subway and get home as soon as possible. I still have that page from the magazine on the shelf wall of my other desk and I look at the slogan everyday "Time is Precious. Use it Wisely." It doesn't really motivate me to study hard or anything though.

I had a whole bunch of useless "coaster" CDs and I didn't know what to do with them and nobody else seemed to have any brilliant plans either. I came up with a simple one, where I threaded a rope through two discs stacked on top of each other and hung it from the magazine rack on the top of the shelf attached to the desk on my right. It allows for papers and notes to be gently clamped between the two discs without damaging them and they don't fall out too easily either. Johnny Depp has been there since I created the contraption and he is still firmly in place. In short, I'm sitting between two identical pictures of Johnny Depp; although the one on my left is mixed in with a stack of university packages and notifications.

It's a strange feeling to have been staring at the same stack of brochures and pamphlets on being accepted to university and other packages of information for about a full year now, while I am now receiving a new batch in the mail. I'm not sure if I should throw it out just yet, but I will have to eventually, because it really is quite a collection. That first set was the one I was supposed to have made good use of. If you had asked me at the time that I had been receiving those notifications how sure I would be that I would be student of the University of Waterloo in September '06 I would have said 99.9% certain, because nothing is ever absolutely for certain in life. Who would have known that I would be opening those packages at 4AM, lying crippled in bed at Markham-Stouffville Hospital in September, when I should have been sleeping in an apartment-style suite with two or three other girls in Mackenzie King Village in Kitchener-Waterloo?

That 0.1% of uncertainty was what happened to me.