It was the hour of a profound human change

In less than a year, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" will make its appearance on the big screen again. There is a thrill, yet nervousness, that has been building inside me since hearing of this news. For one, I'll get to see another director's point of view on this tale, yet on the other hand I will have to battle with my attachment to pictures built between book and screen.

I first encountered Gatsby during my freshman year of high school. It was an American Literature class and we were slowly working our way up to the present day. Yet out of all the books we read, this one stuck with me.

The character Gatsby is the most beautiful symbol of everlasting yearning and desire to go back to something good and whole. While it was written during The Jazz Age of the 1920's, one cannot forget that just years before the world was engaged in a bloody and terrible war. So while the secondary characters are out getting ridiculously drunk and grabbing for more wealth, Gatsby stands at that dock, staring at the blinking green light that is his only connection to Daisy.

I am just worried about how they will portray key symbols to the novel that drive me to go back and read it again. Symbolism is one of the main workings of this book, and if you miss the symbols you miss out on major elements to the entire story. Note how Fitzgerald, in the opening poem to Gatsby, uses a poem that emphasizes the importance of gold. Then notice in a major moment of the book how everything, from the car to the buttons on Daisy's dress, are yellow. These aren't accidents. Fitzgerald is trying to make the reader realize something. If the movie misses it, I know that a crushing feeling will grip my chest.

"The Great Gastby" is one of the most important and fulfilling books I have ever read. It has become a part of me. Whenever meeting someone and begin a relationship with he or she, I tend to lend them this book. It is the best way of understanding who I am. This novel began my change in mind to begin thinking critically and deeply about the things that surround my world. It has become the point that if you can understand Gatsby, you can learn to understand me.

Reading is the most important aspect of my life. It is my solace. Some people have music, some people have art, some people have education, love, relationships, or traveling. Reading is mine.

As some of you may know, I'm a student at the University of Pittsburgh. So if you know that, you now must know about the 70, and quite possibly growing, bomb threats that have been on campus. It has escalated to reports in the national news, something I wouldn't have Pitt to do unless it was related to athletics or massive academic achievement. Unfortunately, the bad will always outweigh the good.

And with these constant threats, my life has become a whirlwind of utter stress. As an English Lit major, I am expected to do my fair share of writing and research, usually moreso than the average student. With five Lit classes this semester, just multiply everything by that number and you get the utter chaos of just a basic academic week.

Now with my classes being constantly disrupted, relocated, and some even moved online, my workload has nearly doubled the normal amount for the semester. Since we cannot be in class to participate and show that we have done the work, my fellow classmates and I have been forced to lengthen our papers and do multiple Blackboard and Class Blog posts in order to get anything done.

Right now I have abandoned any segment of my social life and plunged head first into my work. When the library is not evacuated, I spend countless hours with multiple windows up. Just this Tuesday I was working on three papers at once, writing a blog, and completing a discussion board post. And once my afternoon classes were done, I headed straight home to read criticism after criticism, and finish reading The Bluest Eye and The Remains of the Day. My workload has gone into over time and frankly, I'm exhausted.

The only thing I can say about these threats is that it has somehow brought the Pitt community closer together. I'm spending time sitting on benches, talking with unknown students about what is going on, asking about what classes were disrupted or if they had to evacuate their dorm at 4am. Despite the annoyance of the situation, people are still keeping their head up and pushing on. I even had the delight to have my suggestion of holding my Children's Lit class in the Carnegie Library put into use. And upon the moment our class walked into the Children's Section, a wonderful librarian asked us if we needed anything for our class. She simply reached out to help us in any way.

It is just lovely to know that despite the bad, a lot of good can happen through it.

Hail to Pitt.

While I may not have had a lot of luck with other things in life, I certainly consider myself lucky for the jobs I've been able to acquire over the years.

The past couple of months I've been working at a bakery just a few short blocks from where I live. While I won't be baking any pastries any time soon, I'm learning more about different cultural delicacies and how to function in a much more high paced environment than what I was used to.

Working for a small family business is something important to me. Both of my parents worked together to start and bring up a children's clothing company, and they still work in the small business realm by running a successful inn. It is something I value and something that I've grown up in. Having a previous background in a corporate setting, I had none of this. Questions had to be relayed through a handful of managers, everything was done by the book and not by efficiency, and I could not stand that god awful swag and polyester bowling shirt I had to wear. Instead of being proud of my hard work, I abhorred it. One can only live in a world of corporate, Made in China rock-and-roll for so long. We were constantly told "Dare to be an individual!" Just make sure you fall in line with everyone else.

If I could create a Venn Diagram for the things I love and the things I hate, running would be in the overlapping middle.

There is something so difficult about the beginning of a run. Your body is not yet in tune with all of its parts. The legs don't coordinate with the heart, arms are not in sync with your breathing. Your core is just beginning to twist and turn its way. But after the awkward, uncoordinated flailing of different limbs, something inside just clicks. Everything falls into place.

I choose to run without any sort of electronics. There are no phones or iPods to distract me. No whir of a belt on a sedentary machine, facing dozens of television screens and surrounded by other individuals who cannot help glancing back from their machine to yours, adding up the calories and time in their heads as if it was a competition.

All that I have is the outdoors surrounding me, and after those first awkward minutes, a sort of meditation takes over my body. The constant slap slap slap of feet against the pavement becomes a metronome, keeping in time with my heart and lungs. Everything revolves around the slap slap slap. Natural patters begin to emerge, the birds chirp in time and car horns sound just over the cemetery wall, until I am surrounded by an urban orchestra.

This is the moment where the Venn Diagram shifts and everything falls into place, like a toddler fitting plastic rings on a stake. The discovery occurs. The world is understood.

The Fault In Our Stars

I am usually at a loss when it comes to speaking about literature. When it comes to poetry or prose, there are two outcomes: it absolutely bores me to death and I trudge through it in order to say I finish it, or I read with intensity until my eyes are red rimmed and my fingers numb from writing notes between the margins.

I had a three hour gap today between classes at school and finally purchased "The Fault In Our Stars" by John Green the night before. My thoughts were to get a good chunk of reading done and finish it when I got home today. However, within those three hours I finished the book.

Although it did come out in January, I am glad I didn't purchase and read it until now. I don't think it would have moved me the same way.

Hazel's mind is filled with anecdotes and memorizations of long-dead writers of the past, and writers who truly move me.

At one point, she finds her companion at a pinnacle point of hopelessness and dying. While waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she speaks to him "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams.

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

besides the white
chickens.

When reading this portion of the novel, I almost burst to tears sitting in an uncomfortable library chair. Not so much of the situation of the novel, but the situation I am in now, and the situation in which I first read Williams. I first saw and read his works on the morning after a friend's death, and after that class last spring I broke down in front of my professor as I explained to her the situation. Since then, I have always associated Williams with a sense of loss, and here in the novel Hazel was dealing with a slow realization that some things cannot be lived through.

The novel is rife with other things as well, such as "Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, even Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. All things that I am invested in and have meaning to my life, whether literary or my disagreements with psychology.


This post really must have no significance to anyone who so dares to read my ramblings, but it means something to me. Ever since I could read, my life has been invested in the words of others. It is through reading that I have been able to discover who I am as a person, the things that matter most to me, and philosophies on life. Without literature, without books, I would cease to exist as a person. My life would be lived as a soulless robot, mechanically drifting through the phases of life with an emotionless nature.

What is forever really? Forever seems to last an eternity simply because the definition of the meaning is just that. But forever can mean an instant, a fleeting moment, that you look back on and seems to be only a fraction of time.

The same thing can be said for the meaning of instant. What is that really? A few seconds? Yet those few seconds can seem to drag on forever.


Lately I have been feeling that not my emotions or feelings, but thoughts have been bottled up. I construct scenarios in my mind of how I can tell these thoughts to others without hurting them or without being too forward. I have no intention of hurting myself. I just desire straight, black and white and to the point answers to the questions I have. A land of "maybes" is something I cannot dwell in for long. There is an uncertainty of my ability to go forward in such a gray area, and I have been feeling at a standstill for much too long.