Creativity is something that all children love to have and to express in amazing ways. Creativity is something that gives an extra pizzazz to the project at hand. Creativity, like uniqueness, makes people different and special. Even though practical ways are needed in today’s fast-paced world, the sparks of creativity must not be put out because they may be lost forever. Creativity must exist today.
First, some of the best creative minds in today’s world are those of children. Take Anne from Anne of Green Gables, for example. This young lady is a very spontaneous girl that audaciously does many creative activities. She loves poetry, books, and drama, and she once expressed this artistic creativity by beautifully reciting “The Highwayman” for a crowd of people at a special event. In addition to this formal occasion, Anne also reenacts plays with her friends, such as the time when she pretends to be a dead girl that floats away on a boat in the water. Like the chances that creativity sometimes brings, Anne takes a creative chance when she risks her life while floating on that river. However, creative faith is sometimes needed to bring about good things; in this case, Anne learned that she likes the boy that saves her after she falls into the river. Anne’s creativity makes her a better person with a better character and more pleasant to be around. She definitely brings a lot of happiness to the Cuthbert home and to the community that she lives in. The creativity of children must be put into practice by everybody in today’s world so that the world does not become a boring place, but a friendlier one.
Second, creativity belies technological advancements. It is by creativity that all inventions came to be, therefore, it will be by creativity that the inventions of the future will also be made. True, the world of today is in a big hurry as it uses instant messenger to talk to people thousands of miles away instantly and air planes to take many passengers over thousands of miles in a couple of hours. However, none of these would ever have existed if it was not for creativity. This only makes creativity even more essential in today’s world because without it, the world would seem to spin slower. The more creativity that is used, the more that advances in technology will be made, and the better will an organization be looked at. For example, the Cold War brought much competition between the United States of America and Russia, and creativity in technology was one of the competitive areas. The Russian scientists used their creative minds to launch the first rocket into space, therefore they were ahead in that combative battle because of their unique actions. Knowledge and creativity are what bring success. Creativity is like water to plants, it must remain a part of the world so that the world can continue to grow.
Creativity is an essential part of today’s practical world and needed more than ever. Creativity is what keeps artistic uniqueness in the world. Creativity is what pushes the bar higher and higher to new levels of technology. So, keep the creativity of the children to keep the technology advancing. It is essential that all people are encouraged to continue to be creative, so let the creativity begin!

posted - 10:16 AM



Love manifests itself in countless forms throughout literature including kinship, religious worship, courtly love, and neoplatonic adoration. As it emerged as a prominent theme in medieval romances, love took on a new dynamic as a psychological sickness that could affect the body as well as the mind. Its influence reaching epic proportions, love ensnares its victims in its adamantine clutches. Yet love retained its appeal. Lovers and dreamers revered the holy emotion, setting it and its object on a high pedestal to be worshiped. During the Elizabethan era, poets such as English poet Edmund Spenser returned to this theme, often interlacing it with an anti-love sentiment. In Spenser’s Sonnet 37, the speaker’s neoplatonic description of his feelings for his beloved and their effect on his consciousness illustrate the poem’s portrayal of love as a trap.

Spenser portrays love as nearly an entity unto itself, with malicious characteristics and devious ways not uncommon to man. Its methods are “crafty” (line 7), “guilefull” (lines 1, 10), and “cunning” (line 3), and it works with “sly skill” (line 3), perhaps alluding to the “subtil” serpent that led to the fall of man (King James Bible, Genesis 3.1a); the alliteration of the “s” sound mimics the hissing of a snake in marked onomatopoeia. The poem’s speaker knows and recognizes love’s “cunning” (line 3) methods working in his perception of his beloved, warning “myne eyes” (line 9), which “stare/ henceforth too rashly on that guilefull net” (lines 9-10). The net, which initially referred to the beloved’s “golden tresses” (line 1), expands to encompass love in its meaning. Nevertheless, the narrator loses control of his prodigal organ. He finds himself drawn to his lady love, with a foreknowledge of the fate that awaits him in love’s firm grasp. Ultimately, he bemoans love’s strangulating hold on “any being free” (line 13) who cannot help but “covet fetters though they golden bee” (line 14).

The poem’s interlocking rhyme scheme, typical of a Spenserian sonnet, also reflects the woven quality of a net. Moving away from its predecessor, the Petrarchan sonnet, and diverging from its popular contemporary, the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet, the Spenserian sonnet employs a more complicated and interwoven rhyming pattern. The sonnet begins its first quatrain with an “a” rhyme, followed by a “b” rhyme. The “b” rhyme in turn mimics the motions of weaving by starting the next quatrain and alternating with the “c” rhyme, and so forth, resulting in a sonnet with three quatrains and a couplet of the form abab bcbc cdcd ee. Therefore, “ever ye entrappèd are” (line 11) should rhyme with “are not wel aware” (line 8) and “how ye doe stare” (line 9). In this case, “are” is an eye or sight rhyme of “aware” and “stare,” probably due to shifts in language from Spenser’s throwback to Chaucer’s Middle English to modern English. In Spenser’s poetic language, “are” could have rhymed perfectly with “aware” and “stare” and been pronounced much like “air.” In that case, Spenser could have used “are” as a pun “on “air,” which surrounds “every being free” (line 13) much like love “craftily enfold[s]” (line 7) lovers in its inescapable net.

Love, in the form of a beautiful woman “under a net of gold” (line 2) disrupts the carefully ordered structure of the poem. Although Spenser wrote most of his sonnet in rhymed iambic pentameter, his persona, jarred by the appearance of his beloved, rambles on for one extra syllable twice near the beginning of the poem—the beginning of his obsession and heartache. As the speaker admires her, he exclaims, “What guile is this, that those her golden tresses/ She doth attire under a net of gold/ And with sly skill so cunningly them dresses,/ That which is gold or heare, may scarse be told?” (lines 1-4). In his impassioned appraisal of the lady’s hair, the narrator disregards—at least partially—the rules of iambic pentameter, and as a result, his first and third lines run on for eleven syllables. The diverging lines also exhibit feminine rhyme while the other lines end in masculine rhyme, fitting, considering the subject of those lines. Once enraptured in love’s divine embrace, the speaker can rationally analyze his reaction to love and accept his fate, a change reflected in the poem’s return to regular iambic pentameter.

The break in iambic pentameter on the part of the male speaker emphasizes another theme illustrated in the sonnet; men, who easily fall under love’s spell, cannot control themselves, and are therefore more vulnerable than their supposed “weaker vessels” (King James Bible, 1 Peter 3:7). Although men traditionally personify rationality, their emotions overpower them because “theyr weaker harts … not wel aware” (line 8). Love makes men impulsive and brash, and their senses enchanted, “mens frayle eyes … gaze too bold” (line 5) upon the object of their affection. The narrator admits that he suffers the same symptoms as the rest of his sex, for “myne eyes … ye doe stare/ henceforth too rashly on that guilefull net” (lines 9-10). At the end of line 9, Spenser breaks the pattern of end-stopped lines with a sharp enjambment. This moment reveals a truth the speaker himself would be loath to admit—he is little different from the love-struck men he so ardently criticizes.

Although the sonnet only lasts for the traditional fourteen lines, Spencer includes a motif of a golden snare, which manifests itself in five of those lines. The image of “a net of gold/ … so cunningly … dresse[d]” (lines 2-3) around a woman’s head draws up images of the sun and angels. Love, like the sun, lures its prey, yet the lovers cannot look away. Instead, they “gaze too bold” (line 5) and “stare/ …. too rashly” (lines 9-10), and are thus blinded by love’s overpowering beam. The ring of gold could also allude to the halos that adorned the heads of saints and other holy beings in traditional Christian art. The halo had been used in pagan art prior to the influx of Christianity, but beginning in the forth century, Christian artists referred to a passage from the Bible to justify giving their saints such crowns. In Exodus, when the prophet Moses descended from Mount Sinai, “skin of his face shone; and [the people] were afraid to come nigh him” (King James Bible, Exodus 34.30). That golden nimbus of hair, a synecdoche for the beloved, gives her an aura of goodness, as though it is a reflection of her angelic soul. However, the appearance is deceptive, because her love is a guilefull net” (line 10) so strong that “out of her bands ye be no meanes shall get” (line 12).

The angelic halo appears amidst a slew of biblical allusions that Spenser uses to emphasize his theme of love as trap. Even as his persona stares at his beloved, he struggles to control himself, cautioning “myne eyes” to “take heed (line 9). The warning echoes the sentiments in Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. He preached, “[I]f thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” (King James Bible, Matthew 5.29-30). This emphasizes the theme of sin, a trap that ensnares its victims, and “the wages of sin is death” (King James Bible, Romans 6:23a). Sin is deceptively desirable to the corrupt human flesh, but rejected by the pure spirit, and love makes men “covet fetters” (line 14) so they “ever … entrappèd are” (line 11). Spenser stresses the latter line by alliterating the words “ever” and “entrappèd.” In the Biblical account, the first woman, Eve, led the first man, Adam, to sin (King James Bible, Genesis 3:6), much like the subject of the poem leads the speaker to love and desire, often equated with sin.

Despite its seemingly innocent allure, love is little more than a web from which there is no escape. Because of its basis in the emotional rather than the mental, love is irrational and oftentimes deceptive, but is as inescapable as sin and death. Yet despite it all, Spenser’s persona and other men like him long to be caught in its trap so in a sense, Sonnet 37 could be viewed as a cautionary tale, a morality play in verse. In spite of its flaws and the heartache it brings, love continues to persist and ensnare.

posted - 7:32 AM



Walking the walk of a condemned man
whose final hours wasted away,
unenjoyed
and unreal.
Questioning life,
questioning death,
questioning Him,
questioning fate and faith.
What is waiting on the other side?
After all is lost,
what is gained
for one who had nothing to lose
and whose soul would surely ride
down
down
down.
He already knows he has lost it all
so what can he do?

posted - 8:16 AM



To my older sister, who, well, just turned 21.

My dearest sister, you're turning 21!
There's still time to go out and get tanned by the sun.

After 21 years, it's hard to believe
Your skin's just as yellow as a dry rose's leaf.

And remember that drink can be terribly bad,
Pick a driver that knows all the drinks that he's had.

And when you go clubbing, don't stay out too late,
Though no longer are there any curfews to break.

Oh! Gamble responsibly, watch closely your funds,
or before you may know, all that's left is your ones.Y

You're too old to go play in the ball pit today,
but I don't think you've fit there for years anyway.

Don't think much of all of the things you've outgrown,
Just think about all of the world you now own.

But mostly, remember to just have some fun,
'Cuz now you can party, 'cuz you turned 21!

posted - 11:41 AM

Rejected Love

“Dash [love] from your soul, gather your scattered pride!”

Oh, that I could!

Is it possible to believe that beneath this wooden, practical head lies a soft, romantic heart?
I believed I had heard the delicate harp strains of love, played by an angel. Alas, it was only a man, drumming a keyboard with his toes.

Oh, rejection.

"Conquer the barbarous Hippolytus, who mocks the graces and the power of Venus!"
God Almighty, death and volunteer centers accept all.

Unlike Life, who, akin to a university, rejects, and rather harshly, I must add in personal pique. The great trauma I have undergone, the extreme torture, makes only a small eddy in Its vast ocean.

Mine is a world, not the world.

At seventeen, I am bitter.

I loudly protest the appearance of such flippancies as school dances, at which I cannot make an appearance for fear of humiliating myself.

And yes, yes, I cry out against Girl Date, that loathsome monstrosity, that remnant of a sexist era.

It was in this room, this room that I received my rebuff. May the paint fly off the walls, the couch fling its cushioned behind out the window!

Forgive me for mouthing ejaculations; I do not exaggerate. Acute pain lances every word of this letter, which, by-the-by, is also a flexing of literary muscles long unused.

However, that is beside the point. The point, as I gesticulate wildly and blindly with a pen, must pierce the hearts of my listeners.

At times I can be quite clever.

Here also I stray! Be still, my mind.

My sacred object of devotion, the adored idol of my idolatry, stated in response to my fervent lavishing of love somewhat to the effect that he wished to retain his virginity.

Weeping, I retreated from his bristling chastity.

Or beginning in that particular strain. I cannot recall, so great is my anguish.

Nothing can assuage this miserable suffering, my endless distress. The sea may gulp me into its watery kiss, the earth into is crumbly embrace, but I…I shall never forget.

Never, never initiate what I have begun!

Heed my warning,! Be miserly with your love, friends, careful with your heart!

Most sincerely,
Winnie Khaw in her heart’s last will and testament

Rejected Rejection

“Sir, we feel a need to impart to you our standards--
--None.”

Upon hearing this, I eagerly submitted my work.

“His eyes…oh, the light shining in them, as when fishes thrash their tails in algae-infested waters-”

Twice the re­jec­tion. Twice the refusal. A hundred times the agony.

I simply enjoy relishing the pain of repeating those words. Softly, loudly, then louder still. Ah, that I could drown myself in tears!

I am working myself into a rage. Do not try to pacify me with trifles like logic and reason.
Did the Accolade clasp me to its papery bosom in motherly af­fec­tion? Did it bestow inky kisses upon my bowed head, draw me up to its equal in page length? No!

I was refused again. Rejected.

I cannot speak without sobbing, smearing my letters, writhing in fig­ur­at­ive pain.

I mentally throw up my hands and go my way, meaning out of love’s way, truth’s way, and virtue’s way, while trying to ignore the putrefying state of my once considerable integrity and self-respect.

I ask of you, friends, was it not enough that Girl Date should dash my hopes to the concrete ground? That I should endure so much, for so little in return?
No.

It was decreed that I should receive even this weight patiently, a Christian to bear this burden of woes.

Was I permitted to share my grief, my inner turmoil, with the world? Did this sympathetic world, this loving world…but I will not complain. No, far be it from me to do such a thing! Base, unworthy thing! Fie!

Hope, thou art a most fretful lover! You toss restlessly, ever beside me but ever teasing!

I will doubtless become a marvelous activist for the unloved, which is fortunate because I am a lousy scholar.

I have learned much from this endeavor.

The same is the end of each and every course.

Sadly,
Winnie Khaw's heart from beyond the grave

P.S. A short posthumous note from Winnie's heart: I do plan my final destination to be Heaven, though I may embark on several detours and false leads on the way.

posted - 11:33 AM



On Friday nights, I don’t go out to the movies with my friends. I don’t dance the night away. I don’t even stay up late trying to memorize squares of numbers. (That exciting activity is saved for Saturday nights, baby.) I do something much more exhilarating.

I stay home and watch Friday night cartoons.

Spongebob Squarepants, The Fairly Oddparents, Batman, Teen Titans. I watch them all.
People who don’t watch cartoons must have no soul.

Popular opinion puts cartoons aside, saying they’re solely fit for occupying children on Saturday mornings. Cartoons are so much more than that.

They teach what purpose conjunctions serve in our crazy, mixed
-up language of English, or at least Schoolhouse Rock did. They teach that although teachers may be crazy, they can still show what causes cakes to rise or just how color is related to light, like in The Magic School Bus. They teach important life lessons such as the tolerance of all of Earth’s creatures, blue or not, as evidenced in The Smurfs.

They transport you to wonderful imaginary worlds where a Pokémon will fight for you and become your best friend. Only in cartoons can you, too, become Grand Master of the Cards.
The main characters are usually adorable children that you can’t help but love and hope that your children will grow up like them (although you know that you can never have a Caucasian child because you are Filipino).

Cartoon characters are not real and can never tell you you’re inadequate. They can never reject your invitation to the prom. You can pretend Bart Simpson is your best friend, and no one can ever contradict you.

Best of all, cartoon characters don’t grow up, and ardent fans can fantasize about them forever. Is Peter Parker from Spiderman too old for you? Just wait a few years – you’ll catch up. If Brad Pitt is too old for you, he will always be too old for you. Get over it.
Even though studies from the National Institute of Mental Health show that “children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others” after watching violence on television, violent cartoons such as Tom and Jerry make up a tiny percent of the entire spectrum of cartoons out there. Most cartoons are not so distasteful in their show of brutality.

Cartoons have everything you need in a show—humor, suspense, and a little love interest. To reject their innate charms, you must have gone straight from a fetus in your mother’s womb to an adult. I beg you, let your childhood shine through you to brighten your life. Or maybe you just have a hot date every Friday night, and in that case, I’m jealous.
-30-

posted - 5:23 PM



I generally consider myself to be a person fair in view as well as appearance, and so balanced in judgment as to be very nearly perfect in symmetry—the physical sense included.

One can then imagine the righteous indignation when I conceived of an upsetting of this ideal state. The fingers of my right hand commenced to scrape at my table in a most unbearable way, ostensibly to get my attention, although I privately suspect it was a successful endeavor to irritate me into compliance with its unfeasible demands.

“Yes?” I queried politely to this offending personage, if so it may be called, being one of the more unfortunate parts of myself in its likeness to the body’s constituted character.

“I feel distinctly unappreciated in my present occupation as your right hand,” it began in an infuriatingly condescending tone, none the less aggravating in that it matched my own consciousness for haughtiness.

“Do you?” I replied with becoming dignity, and, I thought fit to add, a bit of a chill in my voice to halt immediately this outrage of propriety.

“Yes.” It tapped thoughtfully against the wooden surface of aforementioned table, while I watched its deliberate performance with impotent annoyance.

“Your left hand possesses far too many privileges, while I, its counterpart and equal, receive nothing but scorn.”

“And well you should,” I retorted, “and as for thinking yourself equal, why, it would not be more ridiculous if a hippo should content in size with an elephant!”

My right hand clenched, knuckles whitening in challenge, then slowly relaxed. “I shall pass over your ungracious comparison and, may I say, injudicious insulting of yourself, to continue in my—”

“—complaint.”

“—observation. I would like to establish certain rules for the future, so that our inevitable relationship, mutually disagreeable as it is, may carry at least a semblance of respectable form.”

“And how do you propose to do this? Or have you already usurped the position of the Brain in your abominable scheming?” A rasping of nails, harsher and, yes, unbelievable though it may seem, more heinous yet than has ever been executed, answered.

I resolved immediately to suppress this insupportable insubordination. Loyal as ever it as had, my left hand hurried to struggle and reason with my right. So must have Jacob strove with the angel, and Michael and his heavenly host against Lucifer and his dark demons of below.

Employing my prerogative as master of my corporeal self, I proceeded to alleviate the irritation by swerving my obedient arm and thereby maneuvering the traitorous growth off my right wrist to the mortification of being sat upon.

In such an arrangement it soon surrendered, but I, not content with this lesson, determined to see the punishment through. I was, perhaps, overzealous in this aim as my hand then expired, and further efforts to revive it proved fruitless.

In some dismay at this development, I nevertheless resolutely decided that all was for the best, and set about my usual duties. These showed themselves to be more difficult to accomplish than previously, when I had the use of both hands.

Notwithstanding, I continued in a determinedly spirited fashion until the reality of things became too apparent to ignore. Accustomed to the idle weight of my right hand to holding down a paper, my elbow now presumed to grind onto a shamelessly writhing, squirming sheet as I untiringly applied ink to its white plane. All of this activity did not leave me unmoved, and suffice to say all involved emerged disordered and the morally worse for the experience.

In the reading of books I have in the past found great pleasure; now, it was to be the supreme trial of self-will. The starch newness of the pages and their maddening proclivity to snap closed frequently tried my patience as my newly single left hand fought valiantly to keep it open.

Needless to say, this state of affairs could not, like a bad soap opera, go on. The regretful arrangement to which I had subjected myself I longed to be rid of, and I yearned to hold once again the prior understanding that had lent to a more successful existence than now.

Providence heard my cries. At that moment, like a Pinocchio mysteriously drowned though made of wood, and then roused to life, my right hand surged to tingling awareness and not a little discomfort as it rediscovered feeling. “Yes! Awake, my child, my real boy! You have come back to me as a prodigal son, and I would welcome you with two arms if you were not already attached to one of them! Ah, my love and forgiveness delve deep as the sea, and never again shall we part, no, not if some villainous knife should cleave us.”

“Because that sort of incident, clearly unpleasant for those affected, would have no greater consequences.” So grumpily returned my right hand, flexing experimentally and wondering anew at the marvelous length of its slim fingers, the pale coral pink of its delicate nails, which wanted but a little paring to render them perfection, and so on in this vein.

But I thrilled to even this uncivilized manner, and felt the happier because my wayward hand had seemingly forgotten of our former dispute, and was content in its proper place.

And so peace returned, harmony restored, I set out to achieve the highest limits of academic excellence.

Presently, my nose began to itch.

posted - 2:42 PM




posted - 2:13 PM