Tagged: relationships
18 Truths I Learned By 18 Years Old
1. You don’t understand someone’s struggle until it has happened to you.
Even then, all you have is one personal account. One page of writing, a roll of film, a 7:21 video, even a blog post isn’t sufficient to explain the experience. You could fill a book with thoughts.
2. Some life pursuits are stumps.
They don’t grow, they just get soggy with all of the water you sprinkle.
As long as I live, I will never find meaning in drawing. I can draw, but that’s about it, it will never be anything but an activity to me. We don’t rip the stump out of the ground, but we don’t contribute anything meaningful to it.
3. Peer pressure operates in small ways.
Guest Post: Departure
It feels like just days ago I was a timid little kid,
fresh, green, young, inexperienced,
taking my first steps through these unfamiliar halls,
cowering in the shadows of the seasoned veterans.
These gates seemed so high and imposing,
walls like a prison, thick, sturdy, inescapable.
The faces I saw and voices I heard as I trudged along
grew dull and monotonous, blurred together
like raindrops running down the smooth glass
of the great window that was my life:
fragile, bland, unblemished, clear.
Simple.
Continue reading
7 Reasons Why We Love Summer
Summer is the absolute best season. I know it, you know it, heck, even your teachers know it! But why? Can it be explained chemically? When the thermometer hits 80 degrees, do our bodies go into happy mode? Maybe.
Check out the belated version of this post, 5 Reasons to Love Summer!
1. El Sol
Yes, the sun is a great start. As a symbol of light, it makes us feel as though we no longer face the pressures that we feel during the school year. The days grow longer and the nights get shorter. We have a (slight) tendency to wake up earlier, but we also are tempted to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. And that’s where our self control kicks in.
I think that everyone likes when it’s sunny out. It’s just a fact of life. Especially for young people. Continue reading
My Top 7 Most Viewed Blog Posts, and My Hypotheses for Why
Preview for an upcoming post? Here it is!
This one is popular because it’s short and funny! There’s a picture of a cute duck, and most of the viewers found this through a writing challenge that I did online, in which I left a link back to my blog. Not much more to say about this post, there’s not really an underlying meaning, except I suppose to question the legitimacy of eggs, but I don’t mind eating eggs and I’m not really disgusted about where it comes from, but hey, that’s just me.
This guest post finally addresses one of the biggest themes that blogs rant about, that I have yet to acknowledge: love. Specifically, teenage love. I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about it because I know I’ll get lots of questions and pesterings from the people that know me personally, so I suppose for now the only time you’ll hear about love on this blog is when anonymous people submit their writing to me. Perhaps later, I’ll feel confident enough to state my opinion on teenage love, but for now, I think I’ll refrain from it.
This post is popular because I advertise it a lot. I slip it into a lot of other posts whenever writing is relevant, and that’s one of the best methods to get more hits on your blog. I think my teachers probably appreciate this one the most because it shows that I’ve learned something from my eleven years of English class. I made this one general and applicable to anyone on purpose; I knew people would be able to relate to it, and I guess that shows, through the amount of times it has been read.
I know why this one is so popular. For starters, it is the first “This Kid I Know” post I wrote, so no one was expecting me to be so straight up about the people that I know and respect. Secondly, I posted this on his Facebook wall on his birthday, so that definitely generated a lot of views. Perhaps Holmes liked the post so much that he shared it with a lot of friends? I haven’t asked, so I guess I’ll never know for sure. The post was short, sweet, and to the point. I know that high school kids definitely appreciate this kind of post. And they’re eager to find out who exactly this Holmes kid is. (He’s world-famous, by the way.)
Perhaps this one was pretty popular because I wrote it in a different style than I normally do. It was unconventional for me; it was more of a shot at creative writing. I wanted to test and exercise the way I could depict details, so that the reader could imagine themselves in my closet through my words. This post was a work in progress for MONTHS but one night I finally finished it after sitting in my closet for an hour or two, rifling through my special box.
I’m genuinely surprised that this wasn’t #1! Whenever I find new blogs, I always look at their About page to find out whether or not we have anything in common, and whether or not I think I’d be interested in reading their blog. An About page is basically a mini autobiography in which the writer can write anything they want, in whatever form they want to. This is their moment to hook in potential loyal followers by preaching to them what exactly it is that they write about, and why exactly the follower should make like a follower, and…follow. I edit this page a lot because I always want to get the best message across to people who stumble upon my blog.
I suppose this one has been the most popular because I posted the links on my Gchat account, and on my Facebook page, and a great portion of my friends on both social networking sites ARE debaters, so when they saw a post about something that was relevant to them, they just had to read it. This post was one of the first I had planned to write, but I didn’t get around to actually writing it until a few weeks later. At that point, we were a little ways into the debate season, and so I would be able to pull examples and concepts from the tournaments that I’d gone to for inspiration to write about in my post, as well as the seven weeks of debate camp I also attended over the summer. I think this post was popular because it’s policy debate is something that I genuinely care about, but also because debaters have a tendency to link things to each other in a flash, so perhaps it traveled quickly?
Post inspired by the Weekly Writing Challenge at Daily Post, here.
Catherine Zhang 