Paradise; An Escape from Reality

Last night I was flipping through pages in my family’s picture album and came across the most adorable pictures of me when I was young. I noticed that in all the pictures I was smiling. I miss being so carefree and innocent and when the biggest decision you had to make was what flavor of ice cream to get. But weren’t we all like this at one point? Didn’t we all have big dreams and gummy smiles? “What happened?”

I have recently been listening to a song called “Paradise” by Coldplay. It’s about a girl like any other who had big dreams when she was young. “She expected the world but it flew away from her reach.” It’s like she expected the world to come to her…except when she grows up reality strikes her. “Life goes on, it gets so heavy, and the wheels break the butterfly, every tear a waterfall.” I really love the metaphors used in this stanza and “every tear a water fall” shows how big even the tiny problems and challenges she has to face seem. To escape her reality, this girl dreams of paradise. It seems like she really loved this perfect, imaginary world she created in her mind that she kept going back to it…it seems like she got addicted to it. When you become addicted to something, you tend to block out reality so I’m thinking that she started to block out her friends and family because she wanted to be in paradise more than anywhere else. “I know the sun must set to rise.” She is stuck in this world waiting for sunset to rise—I see this as a metaphor saying that she is waiting for the pain to end and to get over her addiction in her world before she can truly be happy in the real world. She wants to be able to cry but since she’s held it in for such a long time it’s like all she wants is to be in paradise like she was when she was younger.

I think the message here is that it’s okay to take a break from your life and escape reality for a while—just remember that there’s a difference between escaping reality and blocking the truth.

I feel like everyone can relate to this song because weather we realize it or not, we all have places we go to escape reality. For the girl in the song it’s paradise…an imaginary place she has created in her mind. For me, it’s through writing poetry. I express my feelings using metaphors similar to the ones in this song. When I’m at my country house in France in the summer I escape reality a different way—I walk alone in the forests and then stop at this one special spot I go to on the mountain when I’m feeling sad, alone, and worthless. Looking across the country as far as the eye can see is something that gives me hope. It’s a special place where I can clear my mind completely and let my tears pour down like a waterfall.

Where do you go when you need an escape from reality?

Disabled Athletes

link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/sports/disabled-athletes-suit-up-raising-questions-of-logistics-and-fairness.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

In the article “Forging Path to Starting Line for Younger Disabled Athletes” by Mary Pilon, is mainly about weather disabled body athletes—such as an athlete without a leg, blind, or deaf—should be able to compete competitively with able body athletes. Federal laws have long provided guidance on what students with disabilities are legally entitled to during the school day. But what exactly is reasonable accommodation in sports? Also, if you're in a wheelchair does it really mean you have an "advantage"??

Mary Pion definitely wants the reader to look at this topic from her perspective so she includes many stories of disabled athletes. She wants to show the reader how unfair it is to discriminate against disabled athletes and that disabled athletes don’t always have thing to their “advantage.” For example, Kiara Chapple—a tennis played deaf since birth—relied on an interpreter on the sideline to show the score and communicate what Kiara couldn’t to her doubles partner and opponent. ‘Chapple said she was surprised when, at a doubles tournament in her sophomore year in 2009, her interpreter was removed after complaints from a coach for the opposing team.’ I find this shocking and incredibly unfair especially after reading what Chapple had said. ““I thought it was unfair,” Chapple said. “They were discriminating, and I have rights to an interpreter. I felt sad. We lost the match, and I couldn’t communicate with anyone.” Mary Pilon also tells the story of Mary Callahan who began swimming when she was 6 and wanted to join her high school team but she got a rare disease and could not use her legs. She was told that she could not compete in any statewide competitions. “I really wanted to have a true swim meet,” Callahan said. “I wanted to compete against the best. Swimming is part of my high school experience.” Lisa Madigan took on Callahan’s case as a co-counsel and helped win a settlement in September that allowed her to swim at the state meet, along with at least six other high school girls with disabilities. “We didn’t change much,” Renee Miller, Callahan’s swim coach, said of how the team accommodated Callahan in the pool. “We made sure we had a bus to accommodate a wheelchair so she could travel with us and made sure that schools we traveled to could accommodate her.” This made me really hopeful and confident that in the not too far future disabled athletes will be able to participate competitively and that they won’t have to fight to get there.

This is an issue that I have been thinking a lot about recently. I think about what would happen if I had an accident and lost a leg…how would I run track? I probably wouldn’t be able to play softball or tennis. Now that I’m thinking about it, sports are a major part of my life and I wouldn’t be able to live without them. I feel like what Callahan was able to do worked because she had a team that was probably very supportive of her. If I were to lose a leg, I feel like my team would go through the pain with me—we would all be in it together. But what about tennis? How could I run? If I got one of those metal running devices would people discriminate against me because they’d think I have an “advantage”? I like to run but running competitively and in a real race is not only a lot more fun, but it really pushes me to excel. I think there are ways disabled athletes can participate in competitive sports and it’s not always to their advantage…

Writing about What Haunts Us

Orner, Peter. "Writing about What Haunts Us." New York Times 12 Jan. 2013. Opinion. 15 Jan. 2013
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/writing-about-what-haunts-us/?ref=opinion.


I just recently read “Writing about What Haunts Us” by Peter Orner. One reason why I got hooked into this article was because it started with a sort of anecdote that I could relate to. Peter writes fiction and often feels like he is “dressing up” the truth. He tells a story about his father who got these new lambskin leather gloves and how a week later Peter stole the gloves from his father. “I learned for the first time how easy it is to just grab something.” Peter hid the gloves for a while and then took them with him everywhere he went—but he never once put them on. This is because Peter didn’t steal the gloves because he actually wanted them…he stole them because he was afraid of his father and since they had so little in common, the gloves seemed like a part of his father that Peter could hold on to. Although it seemed like Peter was trying to contort his theft in a made-up story, I also got the feeling that he was trying to convey an important message: That “well-made things eventually deteriorate.” Peter describes the gloves as “no longer baby soft” because “all the handless years had dried them up” and then compares it to his father—“pulling on the beautiful gloves with a rare stillness in his face and a kind of hopeful calm.” Peter now thinks to himself, “Was this what I wanted to steal?”

By comparing the gloves that eventually got dull and lost its softness to his father who was still hopeful and full of free spirit, Peter definitely wants the reader to remember the elements in our lives that don’t deteriorate. Peter also writes in his article, “Our imaginations sometimes fail us for a reason. Not because it is cathartic to tell the truth but because coming clean may also be a better, if smaller, story.” I found this line really deep and thought provoking. I think it’s telling us that writing fiction and disguising the truth isn’t always a bad thing to do, but sometimes you have to just face the pure truth to move on.

I think this is a really important message because often times we tend to ignore our fears or the ugly truths and push them farther away, pretending they don’t exist. Over the last year I have started to write a lot of poetry to express myself and my feelings. Sort of like how Peter contorts his fears through made-up stories, I find it much easier to disguise my fears beneath the symbolism and depth in my poems.