This Boy's Life

Coming into college, I had incredibly high hopes for how I thought things were going to pan out during my college career. Socially, I thought I was going to make this huge group of amazing friends who would never leave my side, and they would be the truest friends that I could ever imagine meeting. While I do see some of my friendships going that way, some of the friends that I met at the beginning of the year turned out to be the kind of friends that I wasn’t interested in keeping. I also…

The Breakdown of Family Being a teenager is hard. There is school, and most people do not understand how much work that teenagers do. Teenagers balance sports and homework and church. With school, due dates are all on the same day, and it feels like everything is crammed together. School takes away any time that teenagers might have to have fun. Teenagers also have to deal with their parents. Their parents and family often do not understand all that a teenager has to do. Parents are…

theme that stood out to me this week was that of community and community connections. In this commentary I will first I will talk about the hindrances that face teachers that are not native to small town communities. I will also address the problems of partnering with colleges and universities while being in a rural setting. Last I will address the idea of sharing personal histories helping student connect to each other through their similarities and differences. This week’s topic of community…

one 's confidence and human respect. Introduction to ceaseless dehumanization definitely drives one to be dehumanized, constraining one to fall back on mental, physical, and social adjustment keeping in mind the end goal to hold one 's life and identity. It is in this adjustment that the line isolating good and bad starts to obscure. Even with stark misery and assurance of death, holding one 's mental strength turns into an overwhelming errand. Living in bizarre conditions and being subjected…

Never will words be able to do justice to the torture, sadness, and pure loss of hope experienced within the barbed wire fences of concentration camps. Primo Levi’s recount of his time as a prisoner is the closest anyone on the outside will ever come to truly being able to understand it without experiencing the imprisonment first hand. Human beings were destroyed in these camps; deprived of their humanity and minimized to just a number. The Nazi Regime stripped these people of their past,…

This week was a little difficult not because of school because it is the week before fall break. Last year, did not have fall break due to basketball, but this year I did. (The week of September the twenty- sixth to October the second.) My mind was not on anything school this entire week, but I knew if I wanted my behavior to stick I would have to keep it up. The week was not that bad. All my teacher were taking notes and just getting ready for mid-terms after fall break. Thursday we had project…

Just like how he had to build a fire for this wet feet. To survive he has to warm up before his feet froze. The man wished he had a trail mate so he would not have to be in such tragedies. But he did not have anyone but the dog. As he was trying to build another fire, he notice the dog all curled…

a . . . wing. My um, wing. Silence. It got hurt too. Her mom leaned over and examined it closely. Amazingly, she was trying to act casual, like, oh, okay, you have a wing. No biggie”. I thought this was a very important part of this book because it was the first time a normal human saw the wing like this. She told her to come with her to her work so she can get an x-ray Since she’s a vet. It switches back to Angel’s perspective. The white coats are talking about harvesting her organs and…

Cancer, the dreaded six letter word that will affect almost everyone at some point in their life; whether cancer is their cancer or the cancer of a loved one. What happens when the cancer the doctors said was gone comes back only a year later and this time worse than before? For Mary Williams, this just so happened to be her case. Her malignant melanoma is back and this time an unspoken terminal is present in the diagnosis. As a mother of two young girls, eight and eleven years old, Williams is…

“It’s okay,” Joe said. “I can't imagine not smelling cow shit every morning anyway. It’s soothing.” We started laughing until we were both standing there looking at the other, crying. It was the first time Joe and I had spoken that deeply about being an Albert— what it meant and what it felt like. We crumbled at the same time and sat by the wheelbarrow and wiped at our tears and sweat, the liquids hard to tell apart. I ran my palms over the dry grass in the field like it was water, inviting and…