Happy Birthday, Anthony! Brief Roleplay History?

Hi, all.

I know I haven't posted in a while.  School started and I've been pretty busy ever since.  I've been trying to find something to post about, and today is a special occasion.  On this day, Anthony James Rousseaux (the namesake of this blog) turns twenty-three.  He was born on September 9th, 1992.  (Hence my username.)  He is by far the best and most developed character I've ever created, and I just...I mean...he's cool.  He's pretty cool.

look at these cool cards, guys.  I own these.  yeah.

In honor of his birthday, I thought this would be a good opportunity to tell you all more about the roleplay.

Some of this will be recap.  Here I'm not rereading and adding on to my old posts about it, but instead, starting fresh.

The roleplay (sometimes known as "Divided") is a project my friends and I started in late fall, 2012.  It was meant to be a silly writing project, just for fun.  We each created our own characters, initially just one for each writer, but since then, things have grown.  This may not be perfect, seeing how at the moment people keep changing their ideas, but as far as I know, the author-character chart looks like this.

Author Siri Reilly:
 - Lizzie Tyler
 - Hank Jacobs
 - Meg Richards

Author Sara Williams:
 - Shade Grey
 - Darel Jones
 - Nate Jones

Author Bailey Giauque:
 - Bea Holmes
 - Jade Young
 - Lea Vindico
 - Oliver Vindico?

Author Alix Kintner:
 - Shizuka Maki
 - Demon?

Author Madison DeCamp:
 - Tyler Noel
 - Cassie Reed
 - Skyler Mills
 - Scarlett Mills-Noel

Author Allie Hedderly-Smith (me):
 - Anthony Rousseaux
 - Raven Black

(We occasionally write one-shots including other characters, but overall, the rights to each belong to their respective authors.)

I typically have trouble staying interested in more than two characters.  If we ever start writing again, I may try my hand in the supporting cast.  (We don't have a lot of that.)

But anyways, we started it in 2012 (eighth grade) just for fun.  One person would write a paragraph or so from their character's point of view (a post), and another would write a response paragraph from their character's point of view (another post).  The responses were, for the most part, quick and interesting, and our story soon progressed into a gallop.  At times, it got in the way of our school and homework habits; cranking out posts like we were born for it.  As is the case with all great amounts of output, the new and sudden experience caused our writing styles to change dramatically.  (Zen Pencils, anyone?)  And I'm not kidding when I say "great amounts;" we ended up with three different Google docs because each doc only allows a around three-hundred and fifty pages.  That's about one-thousand pages of writing.  Sure, most of it was fluff that didn't progress the story, but still.

We all tried a few other roleplays (zombie apocalypse-themed, dystopian society-themed), but none of them lasted long.  I think the reason this one was so successful was the appeal of the fantasy and freedom of our characters, but also mostly just that it was the first one, the one we all really got to know each other through.  If the roleplay hadn't started, I likely wouldn't have the friends I have now.

But so, after three docs, summer vacation finally came and we got distracted.  We've tried to start it again a couple of times, but haven't quite succeeded.  And we've been toying with the idea of turning it into a book for a while - like a year.  I think my co-authors would rather nobody posts any direct excerpts right now, but if we make any real progress, I'll let you know.

But so anyways, school has started, and September 9th has come.  Happy birthday, Anthony!  Someday I'll start writing about you seriously again, and you'll be back where you came from.

Talk to you all later.
- Allie H-S

P.S: Salt Lake Comic Con was exhausting; I didn't realize the Salt Palace was so big.  (The vendor's room from last year was used this year for just the entrance.)  I got ten cool little pins from some place called Akumu Ink, a fancy fascinator hat, and a black parasol umbrella.  Now I'm completely broke.  And that's really all there is to say on the matter.

P.P.S: I always feel like I need to leave a second signature to conclude my post-scripts.  But I don't.  So that's a little frustrating.

Artifact Reflection 5

Hi, all.

Watch The Dream is Now.  It's a documentary.  It's on Netflix.  It's only thirty minutes long.  It's very important.

It's also very frustrating.

The Dream is Now follows a group of youthful immigrants as they try and fail to achieve citizenship and their respective dreams.  And after watching it, I have a request - a completely genuine request, believe me.  Could someone please explain to me why we don't want to grant people citizenship?  I ask this question constantly, but no one's ever been able to give me a straight answer.  If these people were citizens, they would pay taxes.  They would go to college.  They would become successful, would be doctors and lawyers and psychologists and teachers and social workers and politicians and they'd join the armed forces and they'd do important, valuable things.  Yes, they'd take up jobs, but they'd do amazing things with those jobs, just as well as - and sometimes even better than - a natural-born citizen ever could, because these people have the drive to achieve their dreams.

And don't tell me our population would rise, because it's already risen.  They're already here.  I just want to know why the kids who know perfect English and take all the hard classes and graduate high school on high honor roll and want to be damn rocket scientists can't just go ahead and do that because no one would give the a social security number.

I hadn't realized it was this bad.

This really bothers me, if you couldn't already tell.  In The Distance Between Us, Reyna doesn't have this problem because she gets a Green Card.  But these people can't; they're as good a proof as any that we need a better system.

Anyway, that's my fifth and final artifact reflection.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Grumble grumble grumble....

-Allie H-S

P.S: School starts tomorrow and the nerves are breaking me apart.  I have never been this anxious before, but apparently all my friends are feeling it, too.  I don't even have a specific thing I'm stressing over.  It's not because I'm going to a new school, like everyone suggests; I've moved up in schools twice before, and I was totally fine.  I think it's just because the last two years of school sucked, honestly.  Treasure Mountain causes lots of social issues - the administration seems to think this is because of bullying, but I've never directly encountered that.  I've only encountered angst and depression and exhaustion.  I mostly blame the building.

Artifact Reflection 4

Hi, all.

It's missing a couple parts.  I apologize.

My fourth artifact is a small LEGO helicopter.  It's orange with black propellers, maybe six inches long. It has lights to shine down (with your imagination, that is) and a grappling hook that can come down from one side.  I chose this as my fourth artifact because I wanted to talk about the scene in The Distance Between Us where Reyna and her family are attempting to cross the border for the third time, their last chance.  Their first two attempts failed because of Reyna, and if they don't make it this time, she and her siblings will be sent back to their paternal grandmother's house in Iguala, a home where they will never find the love Reyna's been looking for so desperately throughout the story.

This scene was important not only for the purposes of plot, but for those of understanding.  Before reading this book, I'd never realized how drastically divided - and ultimately, broken - families can become in the process of immigration.  I'd never really thought about the possibility of them not being able to take their entire family across the border.  In America, there are so many horrible jokes about how many illegals can fit into a car, so I'd always just assumed that they all came over at once.  In fact, when Reyna's mother left in the beginning of the story, I was a bit confused; why didn't her father just send for all of them?  Were it not for the border crossing scene, I still wouldn't fully understand.

Illegally migrating is damn hard.

Like I said, this is their third try.  The first time, Reyna got a tooth ache and couldn't walk on her own, so her father had to carry her.  They couldn't move quickly enough that way, and border control caught them.  The second time, they stopped to rest and Reyna wandered off, stumbling on the body of a man lying in the bushes.  She screamed loudly, and again, border patrol found them quickly.

The third time, they traveled across the border by night.  About halfway through their trip, a helicopter flew low overhead, searching.  They ran for shelter.  Reyna's brother, Carlos, tripped and they nearly left him behind.  When the searchlight came down, it caught Reyna's shoe, and she yanked it under the brush.  It was a miracle that they hadn't been seen.

So in short, the reason Reyna's father hadn't sent for all of them the first time was because three children, ages four to eight, couldn't have made it.  I think this is also applicable to our current migratory situations (as mentioned in the last three posts and the next one, too) because it sucks that, while people try so desperately hard to get into the United States, and have close to nothing to go back to, when we find them, we just deport them anyway.

We need to fix this somehow.

-Allie H-S

Artifact Reflection 3

Hi, all.

Thank you for reading my slightly preachy artifacts even though you totally don't have to.  (Unless you're my new English teacher, in which case you absolutely have to because you assigned it.  This is your doing.)  My third artifact is another article (to be found here).

This is an article posted by USA Today about how deporting everybody won't stop people from coming over.  No matter how many children they catch mid-trip and send back to their country, it won't stop those children from trying again and again and again, because no matter how much money they have to pay cartels to help them across, it will never be worse than going back to their home in Central America, where they can't go to school for fear of being recruited by gangs and they can't eat dinner because there is never food on the table.  The last line of the article is a quote from a fourteen-year-old boy from Hoduras named Brian.  "'We've suffered a lot to try to make our lives better,' he says. 'If they knew what we've been through, they'd let us in.'"

I've never been particularly well-versed in political intricacies, even and especially those relating to border patrol, but I've always sort of viewed the deportation of illegal immigrants as treating the symptom.  Maybe this is because I live in Park City, Utah and have never experienced the full and direct flow of these immigrant children I keep hearing about, but I struggle to believe that deportation can fix all of our problems for us.  I figure, if you truly want to stop this unending flow of people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, maybe you should make some sort of plan to help Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.  I know that won't be easy - there is no magic button - but there are also many, many people who, given the means, would love to help.  I also know it'll take a while - most important things take a while - but in the end, it'll be well worth it.

At the very least, I think they should work to move all these kids out of California and Texas.  Just, you know, diffuse them into the midwest, where we can better handle them.

Maybe I'm just some stupid rich white girl, but...it makes sense to me.

-Allie H-S

P.S: I just realized, this is my fiftieth post!  Yaaaaaay milestone!  Woooooo!

Artifact Reflection 2

Hi, all.

I'm running a bit low on time, so let's cut to the chase for these next few posts.  This post says I have my second artifact.

Behold, a sneaker in all of its glory.

This artifact is a pair of beat up kid's sneakers.  I actually bought these sneakers at a thrift store in Salt Lake about a year ago just 'cause I thought they were cute and I wanted to draw them.  They're a pair of child's size-seven Converse knock-offs (a brand called "Eastside").  The fabric that was once bright red is faded and dirtied.  The laces have no aglets and are loopy and frayed, at parts only hanging by threads through the nicked silver eyelets.  The soles have been worn thin, and the once-white toecaps are the color of long-neglected paperbacks due to an uncertain combination of dirt and age.  Though they're obviously too small for me to wear, I wanted them from the moment I saw them because they look loved; they look well-worn; they look like the epitome of an American eight-year-old's childhood well-spent.

They're my second artifact because while they could have been a part of my lovely American childhood, they never could have entered that of a young Mexican Reyna's.  Throughout the first part of the book, and even into the beginning of the second, Reyna points out constantly how she and her siblings and every other child in Iguala are almost always barefoot, except for on rare occasions like her cousin Elida's quinceanera and one time when their parents in the United States send her shoes that don't even fit.

I realize this is a very small and simple thing, but it really didn't occur to me that they wouldn't have shoes.  I mean, I've paid enough attention to know that not everybody has shoes - Africa doesn't have shoes.  I doubt China has shoes.  God knows if North Korea has shoes.  But Mexico borders us; they probably make half of our shoes.  I know things suck in Mexico, but the fact that it's such a popular tourist destination always helps to mask the fact that things suck that much.

I should retake AP World Geography at some point.  That was quite a valuable class.

Anyways, I guess this artifact is really "children's shoes or lack thereof."  It makes me wonder why we focus all our charity efforts on Africa and the United States, when really, people also need help in nearly every country on nearly every continent.  I mean, it's true that nowhere is perfect and nowhere can be (there are no utopias), but we still have to try to make the world as good as we can possibly make it, and we still need to help everyone we can help.

Let's help people.

That's all for now.
-Allie H-S

A Short Post About an Important Book

Hello, all.

I just read a The Little Prince (or Le Petit Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  I realize that this is a children's book, and typically a semi-formal review post like this should probably be about some three-hundred page YA fiction or something, or maybe something even more legitimate - like maybe I should be reviewing Pride and Prejudice for you - but there'll be time for that later, and maybe that's even the point.  Just because this isn't some hefty novel doesn't mean the book isn't important.

This book is very important.

I actually didn't know The Little Prince existed until fairly recently, and I only read it now because rumour has it that I'll be reading it this year in French IV.  (We half-assedly read the first chapter or so in the last few weeks of French III, and I was very lost, so I think having read the English translation first will help.)  But now I know it exists.  And now you know, too.

(courtesy of: classicalcybelle.wordpress.com)

The Little Prince is about adults, and everything you lose when you outgrow your childhood.  It's about numbers and jobs and how we always rush about, and how everything we think has value - a big house, a career, doing everything quickly and efficiently, spending all our time finding new ways just to save some - muddles up everything that's really important, things like love and friendship and true satisfaction.  It's written in a formal, solemn tone, and the narrator says that he doesn't want his book to be taken lightly, which sounds pretentious - and hey, maybe it is a bit pretentious - but the way it's written is beautiful and poetic, if a bit abstract (remember, it's a children's book; it's full of space travel and talking flowers).

Earlier this summer, during that silly Creative Writing class I took, I read Tuesdays With Morrie, which was similar to this, if a bit more straightforward in expressing its themes.  It was also similar because they're both sad.

I've said this before, but I think most good books are sad.  But this was also very sweet.

I think it would be nice to do an audio reading of this, so I'll look into that.  In the meantime, it's 83 pages long, with large text and lots of pictures.  You can easily read it in a day, so if you can get your hands on a copy, I urge you to do so.  I think you'll enjoy it.

That's all.
-Allie H-S

Artifact Reflection 1 - And Also Happy Esther Day!

Happy Esther Day, everybody!  

This post has a very specific purpose, so I'll try and keep it short, but for those of you who don't know, Esther Earl was a really amazing person who died of cancer when she was sixteen.  Partly because I never actually knew Esther and partly because this post is meant to be for school, I don't think I can explain Esther Day well enough and in few enough words to keep it from dominating the post, and I certainly can't do it as well as this vlogbrothers video and the rest of the playlist it's been added to.  Hank doesn't explain Esther Day until about two minutes in, but I think the entire video is very important, so I urge you to watch all of it.  (It's three minutes and thirty-eight seconds long; I think you can handle it.)  In short, Esther Day - August third - is a day to tell your friends and family and everybody who's important to you that you love them, and not just assume that they know.  Last year, my friends and I held a party, but this year, circumstances wouldn't allow it.  So I'm spreading the word this way, because the internet it powerful, and maybe somebody will read this who doesn't already know about it.  Let's hope, I guess.

Right, so, to the school part of this post.  I stumbled upon my first artifact for The Distance Between Us this morning!  It's a newspaper article.  (I am so original.)  I found it in my actual physical newspaper, but that's a little harder to link to, so I have it online here.  In it, Roxana Orellana talks about her recent trip to Honduras, the country she grew up in, but no longer recognizes.  Like Reyna Grande, Orellana's mother moved to the United States and promised to come back for her children once she got settled.  Five years later, her mother returned for her.  Honduras was poor then, but not life-threatening.  After Orellana moved to the United States, crime in Honduras increased dramatically, crimes such as murder happening regularly in broad daylight.  "It’s different now, a place that forces kids to make adult decisions and trek in terrifying conditions hoping for better. The violence of drug traffickers and gangs has poisoned the culture, leaving wreckage that sometimes seems beyond repair."

In The Distance Between Us, Reyna returns to her hometown of Iguala, Mexico during her senior year of high school.  The government has privatized the railroad since she left, and trains no longer come there.  As a result, Iguala has plummeted even deeper into poverty.  Like Roxana Orellana, Reyna goes to stay with her maternal grandmother, and she finds it hard to ignore the poverty that surrounds her, while as a child, it was all she knew.  (At this same point in the book, I find it hard to ignore what a shallow, two-faced monster her older sister has become, while it's all that Reyna ever knew, but I figure that's a post for another day.)

In my last post, I ranted about how horrible and depressing The Distance Between Us was.  I actually finished it yesterday though, and it had the happy ending it so desperately needed.  And it occurs to me that those first three hundred pages of unbelievable misfortune made the last twelve pages of hope so much better.  Because honestly, we would never care that Reyna graduated from college if we hadn't seen everything that had stood in her way, and we wouldn't care that she'd put her family back together if we hadn't seen everything that had torn it apart.  To likely misquote Batman Begins (because that's just my style), "it takes dramatic examples to pull these people out of their apathy."  As a fifteen-year-old white girl in a middle-class family, living full time in Park City, Utah, a resort town and one of the nicest cities in America, I find it is really fucking easy to spend all my time on the internet and connected with the world, and yet remain blind to all that goes on in it.

That said, I think I'm gonna read the newspaper more often.  Ignorance is bliss if there's a spider in your bedroom, but when I look at the world at large, I think I'd like to know the true state of it.  Maybe then I'll know how to do something of value and help it.

-Allie H-S

I HATE IT

I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE THIS I HATE THIS I HATE IT

I meant to post earlier than this.  Sorry about that.  Honestly, I'm only posting right now because I really, really need to just...just...christ.  Jesus effing christ.

IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE LOOKING FOR THREE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO PAGES OF PURE, UNADULTERATED SADNESS, MISFORTUNE, AND PESSIMISM, I IMPLORE YOU TO READ THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US BY REYNA GRANDE.  YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.

HOWEVER, IF YOU - LIKE ME - JUST NEED TO READ AND ANNOTATE FOR SOPHOMORE HONORS ENGLISH PURPOSES, YOU WILL BE VERY.  VERY.  DISAPPOINTED.

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK IS DISAPPOINTING.

"HOW DO WE ESCAPE THIS LABYRINTH OF SUFFERING?"

IS A QUESTION THIS BOOK SHOULD ASK

INSTEAD OF IMPLYING EVERY CHANCE IT GETS

THAT THERE IS NO ESCAPE

EVER.

I WAS GOING TO FINISH IT TODAY, BUT I JUST...I JUST...CAN'T.  TOO MUCH.  I THINK I MIGHT CRY.

I NEVER CRY.

I FEEL SO HELPLESS.

I'm at page 275 right now, which is to say, very close to the end.  I do not have very many chapters to go.  But I just..can't...I mean...why...I HATE THIS.

The bio on the back cover reads:
Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years in this "compelling . . . unvarnished, resonant" (BookPage) story of a childhood spent torn between two parents and two countries. As her parents make the dangerous trek across the Mexican border to "El Otro Lado" (The Other Side) in pursuit of the American dream, Reyna and her siblings are forced into the already overburdened household of their stern grandmother. When their mother at last returns, Reyna prepares for her own journey to "El Otro Lado" to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father.
Funny, heartbreaking, and lyrical, The Distance Between Us poignantly captures the confusion and contradictions of childhood, reminding us that the joys and sorrows we experience are imprinted on the heart forever, calling out to us of those places we first called home.

That is inaccurate.  That is not what this book is about.  This book is abandoned child after abandoned child.  It is "scam artist" boys, who love you long enough for a good makeout session and never look at you again.  It's a mother who leaves and leaves and leaves, and a father who is both always and never present.  It's about always trying to please those whom you love, but whom refuse to be pleased.  It's a constant state of seeing everything you've ever wanted just beyond your fingertips, but the moment you reach out and touch it, it slips completely away.  This book is never being able to repair what is broken, but always trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing.  This book is dropping out of college to marry the girl of your dreams, only so that eighteen months, two new jobs and a baby boy later, you can get divorced again, completely and irrevocably robbed of your ambitions.  This book is constant betrayal, and endless loss.  This book is lost hope and broken dreams.

This book is fucking depressing.

I know I should just read it today and get it over with (and maybe finish annotating and start looking for artifacts?) but I recently restarted Homestuck, and I'm close to beating Paper Mario, and my room needs cleaning, and my posters need hanging, and I have movies from the library to watch, and books from my girlfriend to read, and I managed to buy Landline by Rainbow Rowell too, which promises to be much more upbeat than this because she's who wrote Attachments and Eleanor & Park, and fuck it all, I mean, "rainbow" is in her name, isn't it?  So I have other things to do.

Let's do those things.

And also, it's raining, so that's good.

-Allie

Summertime: Fruitless Classes and Extra Books

Hi, all.

Not that there are likely many of you out there, it being July and all.  But if there are, then damn, what're you doing here?  I haven't posted since May!

I have sort of been doing stuff with my summer, though.  For the past two years, I've taken a class at the University of Utah ("the U") called Seize the Story.  The first year, it was just amazing.  It was a week of really intensive writing projects - but nothing too overwhelming - and local authors came and talked to us, and we got free food at the student union building, and we each made like twelve new writer friends, which was absolutely great.  The second year was decidedly less great in comparison, seeing how we had a different instructor and no TA (we'd also had this really cool TA, Kate Coursey).  We didn't really learn anything that year, and there was lots of the instructor just rambling about nothing, and no author visited.  But we still made a bunch of new writer friends, and still wished that that class could just be what school was like, because sitting around working with this huge group of other dedicated writers is so refreshing that you'll never forget it.

This summer, however, I made a mistake.

I didn't sign up for Seize the Story this year.  It had the bad instructor again, and none of my friends would be taking it with me.  And there was this other class, "Intensive Creative Writing," which was four weeks long instead of just one, and costed a hundred dollars less.  It even offered a 0.5 high school English credit, if I wanted it.  It started only a few days after the last day of school, which sort of sucked, but I did it anyway.

And wasted the first month of my summer on it.

If I'd thought the Seize the Story instructor was useless, this instructor may not have even been there.  But then she got mad at us when we didn't pay perfect attention.  She got sick of us after the first two weeks.  (I feel so sorry for those poor Granite School District kids who get her for the whole year.)  Even though she got tired, she was still mostly nice, but because the class offered a high school credit, she had to follow the Utah Common Core in what she taught us.  For those of you who don't know, the Common Core is basically an outline of what the state of Utah deems necessary for a school to teach us.  So this class was wasted on bullshitting our way through everything to simple sentence structure ("what is a noun, everybody?") to essays (she didn't give us an actual type of essay, but I wrote what she called a "humorous argumentative" on why local coffee chains are better than Starbucks - maybe I'll post it someday) to poetry units wasted on soulless "I Am" poems, which she said she hated herself, but saw no problem in assigning to us anyway.

This is an "I Am" poem.
(courtesy of: docstoc.com)

The other shitty thing about this class offering a credit was that nearly all the kids in there were only taking it to get one.  The instructor's daughter came in at one point to give us a brief overview on how journalism works, and she asked how many of us wanted to pursue a writing-related career.  While at Seize the Story it would have been the entire class of sixteen minus maybe one, here in a class of eighteen, there were only four kids (including me).  One was a super-introvert and the other was generally pretty rude, (and the third was my girlfriend - God knows if she'll ever revisit her blog though), so unfortunately, no new writer friends were made.

The one good thing that came of this class was a free-verse poem called Meliorism that I wrote the night before the last day because I knew we'd be having a class-wide poetry reading, and then a party.  (Scratch that, there were two good things; at the party, I learned to play poker.)  The poem sort of needs to be read aloud though, so I'll post that soon.

Wow.  Superlong posts are sort of my forte, aren't they?  But I have one more subject to cover before I go.

This blog will only be mostly dormant this summer!  That is because of my lovely new reading assignment.  Okay, it's not really new; it's been a couple months.  But it's new to you!  Andbutso, this summer, I'm supposed to be reading and annotating The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, and I need to collect five "artifacts."  Artifacts are basically real-world things I've noticed (news stories, advertisements, all that jazz) that relate to the ideas of the book.  I'll need to blog about them here.  So, now that you know about my new project, and seeing how I'm already over a third of the way through summer, I'd better get to that.  I'll see you guys later.

Thanks,
- Allie H-S