Small School, Big Impact

      It's 8 am, and you don't know where you are. After looking around you realize it must be the halls of Lake Mary Prep. Few places have the same smell of pencil shavings and sweaty middle schoolers. You dread first period. First period means math, and math means Mr. Herold who can be the biggest pain in your butt always asking you to integrate and derive- will he ever leave you alone? It takes all of your energy to put up with his boring personality and undying silence in the classroom. The clock ticks by and it feels you haven't; you often feel school does nothing for you at all.

    It's second period and you are finally starting to wake up. You shuffle along with the other monotone students, awkwardly avoiding eye contact because you hate confrontation. You resort to your favorite drug: your phone. Apple products are like cocaine for teenagers- they are constantly sought after, expensive, always getting better, and let you escape reality. You snort your first dose since this morning. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, snapchat- all the same faces, the same posts, yet you cannot stop scrolling.

    You look up and Mr. Chestnut is staring you down. It's time for AP Gov which means unexpected quizzes and political discussions that make everyone cringe at each other's opinions. He caught you on your phone, again, so he decides to give you a new assignment. Oh, and he decides it is due tonight. Doesn't he know you have track and then work until 10? Of course he doesn't care, he is the most unreasonable, irrational person in the school. You accept the assignment with grace because at this point all you have is your pride. Francesca and Guto offer to split it up with you but that would look weak, and appearance is everything in high school.

    You begin your impossible task the next period. You have to write a two page essay about the Articles of Confederation. How could he expect you to do this? After looking up other essays you decide you need a break and head to the school store. You browse the selection but cannot make up your mind. You end up choosing goldfish but immediately regret your decision. After Ms. Carmen scans your finger you again cannot decide if you are grossed out or not by the thousands of fingers that have also touched the scanner. You decide to stop thinking about it and head back to your drug- your phone.

    Right when you look up you see her, the light of your school day: JJ Howard. She cruises down the hall with ease laughing with everyone who passes by. You envy her energy and purpose in life. She has it all figured out with her books and brilliant students. You try to work up the courage to talk with her, maybe about joining her class next year but back out in shame of your lack of writing and sense of humor to keep up with her. Your dream in life is to be in her esteemed AP Lang class, but every time you work up the courage to begin to write, you fail miserably. Maybe one day, things will turn around.

Baby, I Was Born This Way

Imagine not marrying your true love for he was not in the same social rank as you; it is as tragic as if Meredith and Derek were not together only because she was an intern, while he a fellow. Thank God Meredith and Derek worked out, yet the same happiness was almost not true for Anne and Wentworth because Anne’s birth did not mean she was naturally of high class, she had to marry someone who had built up wealth. When Anne first met Wentworth all those years ago, he was perfect except for his class, “Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common”(Austen 15). Even though his name made him sound of high class, he was not, and should not be associated with an Elliot. Anne could not marry him simply because she loved him, her birth into a high class family would not hold power enough for her to stay in such a social circle. Fortunately, since times have changed, Wentworth was able to move up in class and wealth due to his work in the navy, dispute his lesser birthright. He is now eligible for Anne to marry for they both fit each other’s rank and love.

Mr. Elliot is another example of a character who is not born into a high class yet makes his way into one. He is very different from Wentworth however, for he does not work hard to move classe,s he manipulates. Austen introduces Mr. Elliot to display the worst type of people at this time, the ones who take advantage of other people for their own benefit. Austen directly characterizes him as, “a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; whom for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk of his general character” (Austen 201). He marries a woman of money, yet low class, just so he can become wealthy, and the pursues Anne so that he can reassure himself as being high class. Mr. Elliot moves up in class but completely diminishes his true character and loses the respect of most people.

Class is a very important part of Persuasion, yet Austen uses ironic twists and satirical elements to show the odds and ends of people during this time. People are extremely vain, sensible, or devious, yet they all are associated with one another. Anne, the protagonist who falls right in the middle of all the extremes ends up happy with the perfect man. In the end, her love does trump the social rank of her husband although he was respectable enough to gain the approval of her father.

Work Cited

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. e-text. The Replubic of Pemberley. 2015.

Fake It 'Til You Don’t Make It

In the short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, Joyce Carol Oates uses caked on facades and personalities to show how faking who you are, will only hurt you in the end. Connie is an average fifteen year old, who does not have a real sense of herself. Instead of trying to find what she likes, she becomes a new person as soon as she steps foot out of the house. Oates explains that “everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head” (Oates 1). Connie never left the house without a full face of makeup, and an attitude of someone much older just because she knew it would impress boys. Nothing about her was really her.

Similarly, Arnold Friend was presented as a picturesque teenage boy for Connie to fawn over, but it was quickly revealed that he was even more fake than Connie. But was he really? Yes, he made himself appear taller and used slang that was clearly not natural for him, but he wore makeup just like Connie, and talked the way he thought she wanted him to talk just like she did for all her boyfriends. In “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”, Wegs discusses that Friend is actually more truthful than Connie, “What is frightening about Arnold is that he voices, and makes explicit her own sexual desires...Connie’s reaction is one of horror: ‘People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy’” (Wegs 4). The brutal honesty that Friend exposes to Connie is the scariest part about him, not his wig or makeup.

By the end of the story, Arnold Friend has stripped Connie of her happy, beautiful facade and she is left with “just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either” (Oates 9). Connie no longer has a purpose to pretend she is happy, she has no reason to fight for her life; she realizes without her second personality that she uses out of the house she really has no personality at all so is willing to walk away with Arnold Friend. Friend, on the other hand, “is far more than a grotesque portrait of a psychopathic killer masquerading as a teenager; he also has all the traditional sinister traits of that arch-deceiver and source of grotesque terror, the devil” (Wegs 3). Arnold’s real personality is not nonexistent like Connie’s, his is one of pure evil. He knows exactly what he wants. He manipulates girls who have no sense of identity, and who seem so extremely confident that their naivety is their weakest point for not only do they briefly trust strangers, but they trust themselves: this fake personality they have depended on for so long but can be taken away so easily. Connie thought she could withstand any boy, any remark of her mother, any comment by her jealous sister, but Arnold seems to take away her confidence within minutes and she hands herself over.

WAYGWHYB is a story that grotesquely reveals how the common tendency of girls to “fake it til they make it” leaves no real person to rely on. Connie is stripped of her confidence not only because Arnold catches her without her makeup or “out of house” clothes on, but because he does not act like every single other piece of Connie’s predictable life. He catches her off guard and thus finds her weakest point: her family. While she acts like she does not care for her family and that they are just jealous of her because she is pretty, her family is the final straw for Connie to let go of her facade. She normally would have just gone to the mall and planned to go hang out with boys later, but once Arnold leaves Connie with just a soulless body she does not have an answer to where she was going or where she has been.

Works Cited

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 2002. Print.

Wegs, Joyce M.  “’Don’t You Know Who I Am?’: The Grotesque in Oates’s ‘Where Are

You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Journal of Narrative Technique 5, 1995. Print.