For my Capstone project, I decided to write a short album. I tried to write one song each month which tied into my experience throughout senior year and my High School experience in general. It was fun to work on, and I’m proud of the final product.

I wrote a whole bunch of music, but, as time went on, I tried to slim it down to the seven songs I felt were best suited to the project. I spent a lot of time writing, bits and pieces here and there, and towards the end I started to flesh out a lot of the parts I had written, and trimming many bits I didn’t think made sense. I spent a lot of time recording it through the equipment I have at home in GarageBand. It took a while, but I feel like the recordings themselves turned out well.

The songs are on a broad range of topics, from my experiences throughout my time at SLA, both in school and out, people I’ve met, things I’ve learned, and more. For better or worse, I’ve tried to condense my time here as much as possible.

I’ve posted the music online publicly, and I’m attaching a link to this post. Check it out if you want to.

No Country For Old Men

I loved No Country For Old Men. It was tense, well-written, the performances were phenomenal. There was nothing about the movie I can think of which didn’t floor me. However, after looking at the movie in relation to the Bechdel (And Mako Mori) Tests, I found that it definitely fell short.

I’ll start with the Mako Mori test, because holding the Mako Mori test to this movie is a joke. There are a small handful of women in the movie, most of them unnamed, who serve solely as plot devices for the leading roles, all of which are male. Carla Jean, the wife of Llewelyn Moss, one of the leads, barely speaks throughout the movie, presenting a shallow, very two-dimensional character. And she’s the closest to a strong female character in the whole movie. So, the Mako Mori Test? Hard fail.

As for the Bechdel Test: Initially, I assumed it failed hard as well. However, after doing some research, I found there was a scene in which Carla Jean speaks to her mother about medication. It’s barely a conversation, and there is also some contention as to whether or not it passes the first part of the Bechdel Test: There being two named female characters. In the translation from Cormac Mccarthy’s novel of the same name, a few characters were watered down to condense it to a film format. Carla Jean’s mother, Agnes Kracik, who was named in the novel, was never referred to in the movie with a name, save for a split-second scene in which her name is written. The movie technically passes the test, but so slightly that a fail is entirely debateable.

Ultimately, it’s clearly not the type of movie the creators of the Bechdel Test had in mind as an ideal. It is a story by men, about men, for men, and the fact that the movie had to be scoured for a pass makes it questionable. I loved the movie, but it’s definitely not a feminist piece.

The R/Niceguy Test

A Niceguy (Or Niceguy™) is a term for men who claim to be nice, and believe that being nice entitles them to women. Popularized by the reddit.com subreddit, r/NiceGuys, these men will often become abruptly hostile when rejected or ignored, proving that, despite the term, they are not really nice guys.

A common theme among said Niceguys, is the idea that they would be better partners to people they are romantically, or sexually, interested in than their current partners. Since I found this subreddit, I’ve been looking closer at different forms of media, and I’ve found a striking number of books, movies, songs, shows, etc. which have an empathized character who believes that they are the right choice for someone, better than others. So I came up with the R/Niceguy test.

A media piece fails the test if any of the following happen:

• A protagonist is persistently interested in someone either uninvolved or uninterested.

• A protagonist openly resents another character for not being romantically or sexually interested in them.

• A character openly resents the significant other of a character they are romantically or sexually interested in.

• A character leaves their significant other for the protagonist.

The last rule might seem a little too intense. We all know the story where the two leads are truly made for each other, but each tied down by their own commitments. They struggle to be with one another, struggling with both their surroundings and themselves, but, ultimately, make the right choice in the end, and walk, hand in hand, into the sunset. We all know this story. And that’s the problem.

This teaches people that they should pursue people, be persistent, don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, because, ultimately, the people they like will come around and make the ‘right’ choice. This leads to characteristic Niceguy behavior. Which leads to much worse things. So, I decided to hold one of my favorite movies to this standard: Fight Club.

Fight Club

Once again, a movie based on a book. And once again, I loved this movie. I’ve always struggled with how to perceive this movie from a gender-based perspective: The movie delves heavily into topics of masculinity, misogyny, gender roles in society, and there is great contention as to what is satire and what is not. The unnamed protagonist lives a boring, corporate life. He spends his time working, or furnishing his apartment, which he, himself, admits is worthless. He befriends a man named Tyler Durden, who lives an entirely opposite life from the narrator: Tyler rejects capitalism. He rejects what he perceives as the societal emasculation and castration of men, as society drifts further and further from hunter-gatherer societies. The movie explores what it means to be a man, settling on some very skewed beliefs and practices: One being the titular Fight Club, a club for men only where they beat each other senseless just to feel like men. The movie never really expresses which form of existence is better, and the story has inspired many young boys to delve into very toxic masculinity. However, that’s a different debate. I want to talk about Marla Singer, and her love triangle with the Narrator and Tyler Durden.

The narrator first meets Marla Singer in a support group for people with testicular cancer. A very fitting setting given the material. Neither the Narrator nor Marla have testicular cancer, but they both find thrill in attending the support groups. They talk briefly about why they attend support groups for diseases they don’t have, exchange numbers, and don’t see each other for a long time. Then, the Narrator meets Tyler Durden.

Marla calls the Narrator further into the story, asking to see him, and the Narrator is dismissive. Not wanting to be involved in her life, he decides not to see her, and leaves, but finds out later that Tyler Durden picked up the phone which he had left unhooked, and went to see her instead. They begin to develop a sexual relationship, which the Narrator quickly becomes jealous of. While it is unclear whether the Narrator is jealous of Tyler for his relationship or of Marla for Tyler’s attention, the Narrator is clearly resenting another character’s significant other.

I’d like to talk about the plot twist of the movie, so this is a spoiler warning.

It is revealed at the end of the story that Tyler Durden and the Narrator were the same person the whole time. This complicates the love triangle a bit, being that the Narrator resents himself for being the significant other of the person he is interested in, or maybe resents Marla for being the significant other of himself. Ultimately, however, the story presents the Narrator and Tyler durden as two seperate people, so I’m inclined to count it as a fail, because the message is still there.

“I am by nature warlike. To attack is among my instincts,” Said Friedrich Nietzsche. Combat has been a staple throughout human history in many different forms. From the earliest raids between groups of hunter-gatherers, to modern occupation, conflict, and everything in between. Whether we are playing football with friends, or piloting drones gunning down foreigners, does warlike nature apply only to Nietzsche? Or are we all composed of the same aggressive building blocks?

In ancient hunter-gatherer societies, humans lived in groups or tribes. Communities were very closely knit, prompting a very us-vs.-them mentality to rise through evolution. Those ancient people looked after their own. However, some groups would attack others for resources, as sometimes it was the easier way to find food. These raids were very different from the wars of today: Small groups of warriors would attack when they were unsuspected, killing other communities and taking what they needed. For a long time, this was the primary form of conflict.

However, as time went on, raids grew more elaborate, and tribes, based in raiding began to excel. Some even speculate that agriculture began, in part, due to the dangers of raids. One of the best defenses against a raid is to gather people together in a group. Along with the resource benefits of agricultural settlements, this brought in a new age of living.

Fast forward thousands of years. Politics have evolved with the human race, and oligarchic societies have become the norm. Democratic or otherwise, a small group sets laws to be followed by the populace, and countries gained individual power. This means war. War evolved, becoming increasingly politically driven, and so politics became the second reason for war.

The era of colonialism is a poster child for resource wars. Small countries, such as England and Portugal, who possessed advanced technologies, especially concerning weaponry, began to reach outward, conquering surrounding countries, and draining them of resources. Whether food, materials, or even humans, colonialism was a resource war on a massive scale.

On the other hand, looking at a revolution, such as the American Revolution, which came about primarily due to the idea of ‘taxation without representation,’ it is clear that most revolutions are almost entirely politically driven. As people rise against a political regime, conflict becomes inevitable. Force is inevitable. Politics rose from disagreement, as did conflict. While politics were most likely introduced as an alternative to fighting, they have not only coexisted, but have become intertwined.

Scilla Elworthy, founder of the Oxford Research Group whose goal was to avoid conflict through dialogue in the case of nuclear warfare, did her best to create a conflict-free world. Elworthy realized that at the base of all political warfare is anger. In her words, “Wherever there is injustice, there is anger. But anger is like gasoline, and if you spray it around, and someone lights a match, you’ve got an inferno.” Citizens often find themselves becoming frustrated with an oligarchy. Frustration leads to anger, and all it takes is a match to set ablaze the flame of war.

All my life, I’d been told not to fight. Not to hit, kick, punch, pinch, bite. Not to wrestle, not to box. Playing football, I was instructed to tap people on both shoulders. That’s how the game worked. A polite word: “Excuse me, sir.” “I apologize, but I can’t let you carry the ball any further.” That was the literacy of my life. I used my words, and not my fists. A bonafide zen master: Champion of my own emotions.

Yet, in that moment, I wondered how I’d hit that point, standing on the beach, my feet carved up, bleeding into the sand. The smell of sweat, sea, and a tinge of iron. A packing sensation in my chest every so often, as one of his fists would connect. Or my arm. My stomach. Everything moving a little too quickly, as we ran around each other. My jaw bruised, my cheeks cut from the inside. I was alive.

Was I a failure? A manic mass of testosterone? With these questions running around my head, we walked back towards the street, our breath ragged, cigarettes hanging from our lips. The strangest serenity set over me, and very suddenly, I realized that I’d been lied to all my life; that maybe there was a place for fighting.

How do I define literacy? I define literacy as the way we interact with one another, and it’s shrinking. We’ve become accustomed to the ways that those in charge have restricted our interactions, and told us the way we should behave. We’ve conceded to the ways that people tell us to interact, and, like fighting, the ways that many consider to be unhealthy, and uncultured.

Literacy has become uniform, as we coddle ourselves from reality. Many people speak about individuality, but expect all people to think the same things. We have no room for opinion anymore, and, in the words of Mike Rose, “The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is.” If a large enough majority decides that, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” then it must be true, for the powers-that-be have spoken!

I’d say ‘the sword’ has always spoken louder to me. Whether it’s a fist to the face, or an arm around my neck, a bear hug or a soft touch, the ambiguity of physicality leaves so much room for meaning. Yet, for reasons of safety and what we consider to be uniform comfort, we’ve choked it. We’ve organized competition to reduce the number of casualties. Soccer, tennis, baseball. Even football, where we strap six inch layers of padding to ourselves before we charge at each other head-first. Or, even worse, when we stick flags to ourselves. All you have to do is run. All you have to do is carry a ball.

Many people in Horsham Clinic were there for what people had labeled as 'unreasonable aggression,' which usually translated to getting into a fight. Almost as if fighting was an illness that could be cured with a strict regimen of xanax and adderall.

We learn complacency. We learn to read, and write, and do basic math. We learn to sit down and shut up. Mike Rose, in his article, I Just Want to be Average, illustrates the unwritten rules of being human in the 21st century.

“the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;

the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;

the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;

the teacher chooses the program content, and the students adapt to it;

the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.”

I know nothing. I’ve been disciplined. I’ve complied. I’ve been an object. Everyone lives in an illusion of freedom, in blissful ignorance of the uniform grip that we’ve placed on one another, a grip that, as Mike Rose says, is "necrophilic; nourished by a love of death, not life.” We don't value one another's existence, we value the uniformity and compliance. Things I would say are akin to the death of a person.

Five days in and all I wanted was a cigarette. From tense visits with my family, to talk about drugs and suicide. The tense moment before a fight breaks out. The steady flow of patients. The fifteen minutes between the constant nightly check-ins: The loud creak of the door. Footsteps. A light in my face, checking for breaths. One, two, and gone. I had fifteen minutes to fall asleep before it happened again. I was exhausted. Six days in without music. Seven days away from my friends. Eight days in and they still wouldn’t tell me if and when I was leaving.

I didn’t leave Horsham for twelve days. I hated it. It was easily one of the most miserable experiences I’ve ever had. Horsham was cramped, understaffed, low budget, and yet, as my parents assured me, it was the best in the area. I finally was released, having learned nothing, having been put on meds that made me miserable, and leaving my family with almost no money. However, I did take away an experience from it that not many people have: Sitting in a room full of people who have all truly hit rock bottom.

The patients were split almost down the middle between people with aggression issues, and people with depressive issues, among other, more specific mental illnesses. Many were like me, having made attempts on their life. The rest were kids who had gotten into serious fights with their friends and family. There were kids with Obsessive Compulsive Disorders that caused their minds to construct memories. Some kids with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder would become catatonic at any loud noise. Others starved themselves. Some heard voices.

Turns out no one really understands this stuff. There’s no off switch. I’ve talked to plenty of people about medication and therapy, and it seems to me that the people who advocate them the most are the people who haven’t experienced either. I have rarely talked to a person who genuinely thought that their antidepressants helped them. I remember being miserable on all medications that I tried. I never felt that therapy was incredibly helpful either.

It seems that these kids were getting swept under the rug. Horsham was grotty, gross, unsafe in certain parts. The food was mediocre at best, and there was very little space. Horsham Clinic is a crisis center, meaning that the average stay is three days to a week. The goal is to get most people stabilized before they can be either sent back into the world, or moved to another facility; swept under an even bigger rug.

There were special needs kids who had been in the facility for months, while the management desperately tried to figure them out. Attempt after attempt was made before finally having them transferred to a long-term facility: The equivalent of a mental asylum. The saddest part? It would be permanent. This is the system. If they can’t fix you, they’ll put you away. These are the people who are deemed “unsafe.” Bouncing from place to place between each failed attempt on their life. Uprooted and tossed around. Why? It’s easier to put them away than to address the issue. Moving kids to “long-term clinics” for eating disorders, more like prisons than hospitals. Doors that lock from the outside. Sedative injections. Straight jackets. It’s still hard for me to believe that these things are still in use.

I wonder, though, is there a way to truly fix it? Is the system the only system we have? I don’t know. Therapy and medication can help to a degree, but sometimes there’s really not much one can do to help. There are many bad reviews of Horsham Clinic on the internet, but I have yet to see anyone offer a solution. It begs the question: Is it better to lock these kids up to stop them from killing themselves?

There is no such thing as objective responsibility. Despite our social biology, the very nature of our existence leads us only to pursue things that directly affect us in positive ways. Though we live in an illusion of empathy and selflessness, there is no such thing as a truly selfless action. Every action we take is entirely self-serving in some form or another, and the only responsibilities the “strong” have to take care of the “weak” are those that we give ourselves in a self-absorbed sense of superiority.

This becomes apparent in Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, as they introduce the character Piggy. Piggy is a fat, asthmatic boy, who can barely see without his glasses. Ultimately, in a survival setting, he is a detriment to the boys survival. As he says, “My Auntie told me not to run… on account of my asthma.” However, he has one thing that the boys need: His glasses. This gives the boys a reason to take care of him, and they do. They keep him alive for a long time. However, as soon as he outlives his usefulness, they take his glasses, and they kill him.

So, what is responsibility? Well, taking a step back, this ultimately boils down to subjectivity versus objectivity. As conscious creatures, humans do not live in an objective world. Conscious beings see the world through the senses, and see the world through their own perceptions, and cannot see the objective world. Now, what does this mean for responsibility? Well, this means that responsibilities exist only as the ones created by living, sentient beings. So, what responsibility do the strong have to take care of the weak? Well, the strong only have the responsibility that they create for themselves. However, sometimes this paves the way for people to pretend to create their own responsibilities as a way to mask an ulterior motive.

This was seemingly the case in the USA’s invasion of afghanistan following the September 11th attacks. By the end of September, 2001, the Bush Administration had its troops on the offensive in the Middle East. Only a few months had passed before President George W. Bush said the following in the State of the Union: “In four short months, our nation has… captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.” Saved people from starvation. These were the things he was proud of accomplishing in the four months that United States troops occupied Afghanistan. Now, this seems good, but, ultimately, it was not the purpose of the invasion.

The occupation was a direct response to the attacks on September 11th. However, people in Afghanistan were suffering starvation and brutal oppression before the invasion and the attacks. Helping the people was not the intention of the administration. It was not the intention of the troops deployed. It seems that the people helped by the troops were simply in the right place at the right time, and it gave Bush a chance to pat himself on the back for his efforts helping the ‘weak.’ The invasion came from a place of vengeance, and while it helped many people, it was entirely coincidental, and did not reflect the United State’s efforts to end world hunger.

Imagine Piggy is Afghanistan, and the rest of the boys are the Bush Administration. The boys could have said that they take care of Piggy because they have a responsibility to. Being stuck on the island, they could have said that they have a responsibility to take care of their own, and that since Piggy was their friend, they were responsible for his wellbeing. However, this wasn’t true. They kept Piggy alive because his glasses were the boys’ only way of starting a fire. His glasses kept him alive for a long time. However, as the boys gave in to their reality, and fell farther away from civilization, realizing that they weren’t actually responsible for Piggy, they realized that they could steal Piggy’s glasses, and then, having done so, they killed him, as they no longer needed him. Just as boys killed Piggy as soon as they didn’t need him, the United States killed many civilians in the Middle East once they had gotten recognition for helping them.

While there is a fair bit of controversy surrounding this issue, there is a fair amount of evidence to back up the claims that United States soldiers killed Iraqi civilians. One incident, known as the Al Ishaqi Massacre, was the accused deliberate murder of eleven Iraqi civilians, before blowing up their home. While it was written off by the Pentagon as an action against Al Qaeda militants, five out of the eleven people were children, the youngest of whom was said to be only five months old. However, these were not the stories we were told. Rather, we were told about the soldier’s heroic acts helping and saving civilians, by none other than President Bush in the State of the Union.

Our society speaks a great deal about responsibilities, and in America, being a world superpower, many speak about helping the third world quite a bit as well. However, it seems that people rarely practice what they preach, just like many who talk about their objective responsibilities. Ultimately, humans are not required by any law of nature to do anything. They can create their own responsibilities, but can also do things for other people because they want to, or because others want them to, without locking themselves into objectivity.

Works Cited:

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies

New York. Penguin, 2003

"President Delivers State of the Union Address." President Delivers State of the Union Address. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.

Yeah, the needle hurts a bit. You’ll get used to it. Don’t worry about it, it’s your first time. Here, let me do it for you. Bite down on the belt, okay? Sweet. You got it. Alright, close your eyes. And, there. You’re done. Does it feel like you’re flying? That’s what it felt like for me. Yeah, don’t worry about it. Just relax. Flow with it.

I barely remember my first time. It was pretty great, though. I was fucking soaring. Just riding the moment, you know? You just hit the switch and every day’s a good day. Everything’s beautiful.

Well, define ‘problem.’ Everyone’s addicted to something. That’s my motto. Take a stockbroker: take away their money and they’ll withdraw, just like a priest if you take his faith. Everyone has something that they can’t live without. All we have to do is make sure we don’t run out of it.

You’ll learn to love it, though. I know it hurts the first time, but you’ll get over it. Some people even get addicted to the sting. Can you imagine? I wonder if they can get their fill just by sticking themselves with a needle. That would be much easier, huh? Yeah, just lie down, I’ll be there in a second. Do you remember when we were fifteen, and none of this had happened yet? When the worst thing we’d done was a little weed and some cigarettes? We used to get drunk together, and it meant the world. Man, that was a long, long time ago, huh? I felt so old.

Do you ever feel like the world is so far away? Like, time is just a thing, or something like that. You ever feel so quiet, so gone that everything just moves around you, and you’re frozen? Stuck to the moment? Can you hear me? Wow, you’re gone. Have a nice trip! *chuckles* Gimme a second… I’ll be there soon.