I created a student-run internet radio station devoted to showcasing the unique talents and varied tastes of Science Leadership Academy Students. I aired a show each Friday night in May and plan to continue running each Friday night for the remainder of the school year.

I chose this project because I was personally interested in creating a podcast. Unfortunately, there was no support network or platform devoted to audio content for SLA students. SLA prior to this project had Rough Cut for students interested in cinema, The Fourth Floor for those intrigued by visual art or creative writing, and SLA Media for people who wanted to do journalism. I felt that, by creating another platform devoted to podcasts and other audio content, I could widen the variety of opportunities available to students like me.

The most important, and most difficult, thing about creating content is to make something that people like and want to experience. The presentation of that content is crucial to getting people to listen in - and reflecting on what worked and what didn’t is crucial to keeping them coming back.

My capstone can be found at slaradio.tk. I aired new shows every Friday in May at 5 PM.

I can’t remember.

It sounds like an excuse, but it’s always been a serious problem for me. What I can’t remember, I can’t write, talk about, or do. The vivid details that many people love to write about are missing from my mind, which makes it difficult to write anything well.

I can’t picture things in my mind. I don’t remember what a face looked like the second I turn away from it, I don’t remember what a voice sounds like the second I stop listening, I don’t remember what a sensation feels like the second I stop feeling.

I can’t remember my sister’s words and actions and feelings when she was accepted into SLA. I can remember that she did. I can remember that she was excited. But that hardly makes for a good story to say: “She got into SLA. She was excited.”

I can’t remember what it felt like to blow past a deadline last year, or the year before, but at least I can imagine the feeling of dread knowing you need to write, you can write, you have to write, you will write, you don’t write. This feeling is constant.

It’s amazing how literal things can be sometimes. Before I came to SLA, I thought being “under pressure” was just a figure of speech. But since then, I’ve come to be familiar with the vise around the temples that is missed expectations. The pain of not knowing is a splitting headache, one that lets up only when I allow myself to not care. This feeling is constant.

I consider myself to be good at making words line up with punctuation so that they sound nice. Sometimes those words even mean something.

I am not a good writer. I can’t conjure descriptions that instantly bring to mind the feelings my readers and I have in common because I don’t remember what those feelings were like. I can’t conjure descriptions of the canyon I hiked down in 9th grade because I don’t remember what the canyon looked like, what it felt like. I can’t conjure descriptions of what it felt like to be in the hospital thinking I might have to give up one of the only things I love because I don’t remember. I can’t conjure descriptions because I can’t remember.

It’s frustrating trying to remember and not being able to, not being able to write. Frustration is a hot feeling, an angry, bitter feeling, a feeling of disappointment, a feeling of entitlement. I need to remember in order to write, I think, and if I don’t I’ll fail. I should be able to remember, I think, so why can I not? I know the answer, of course, is that I don’t know, and that answer is as frustrating as the question.

I can remember frustration vividly because I am describing it to you, my reader, as it happens.

Some of my earliest memories involve the Atlantic Ocean, swimming in it and laying on its beach in the sun. I remember these things happening. I am sure the water was salty and the sun was hot, these are facts. The sand was gritty, and the jellyfish stung, these are facts. But feelings: how the water tasted, how the sun and sand and felt, how the view looked from the crest of a wave, are missing. I can’t write about those memories, despite cherishing them, despite them being part of the core of my identity, because I know nothing about them that isn’t common knowledge.

I’m talking to my parents. It’s 2014, and I have an english benchmark still to start that was due several days ago. We’re angry at each other because we each feel like the others aren’t listening. They ask why I haven’t started my benchmark. I say I don’t know.

I can’t remember.

It hurts, sometimes. I don’t, or maybe can’t, deal with it very well. The pressure builds, and as it does the familiar feeling of pressure on my head builds with it. I want to do anything else but think, even as I know I need to think, even as I know I need to write, even as I know I need to remember. But I can’t, or maybe don’t, remember.

I switch tabs, and find a comfortable spot, and read about how Joel Embiid is going to save the Sixers, how Chip Kelly ruined Christmas, and how LSV thinks Jace is a format staple. Because being elsewhere is safe. Not thinking doesn’t hurt.

But I can’t not think. Not thinking is dangerous. Not thinking gets me weeks behind with no way to catch up, desperately hoping that next time I think and do my work, so I don’t end up in the same situation, feeling lost and alone and desperate and failure.

A man wakes up in the morning with the nagging feeling that something is wrong. That very day, Earth is destroyed by an interstellar conspiracy. The man only barely escapes with the help of an alien living undercover among and studying humanity. Once they flee aboard a stolen state-of-the-art spaceship, they find themselves at the center of a massive scheme spanning aeons.

That sounds like a short summary of an action-heavy, generic piece of genre fiction. Although perhaps an interesting read if the mechanics of its universe were good, there’s nothing particularly innovative about that plot summary. But yet, the book being described, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is one of the most beloved science fiction stories ever written.

The reason why is pretty simple: the style. Douglas Adams, the book’s writer, wrote the books with a distinctive flourish that includes throwaway jokes that are then followed up on as plot points (or maybe not), abrupt changes in direction in mood and tone, and an overall air of self-indulgent absurdity. Adams’s prose knows that it doesn’t need to make sense, and seems to revel in that fact, producing such wonders as white mice doing experiments on human beings and a spaceship that runs on improbability. The choice Adams made to play science fiction against comedy gives him the ability to write a more surprising, dynamic, and engaging story by ignoring many of the conventions of conservation of detail and plot structure.

One of the things Adams does that could be considered rather unusual for genre fiction is make very heavy use of humorous asides. The tangents Adams goes on throughout the story are very powerful world building tools, and they allow The Hitchhiker’s Guide to give its readers background exposition in ways that would never be acceptable in a work with a more serious tone. For example, one of the most well-known is a set of paragraphs near the beginning explaining exactly why “A towel, [the namesake Hitchhiker’s Guide] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

The entire tangent, which takes up about a page, is one of the parts of the book that is the most culturally entrenched. The hitchhiking slang is often the go-to reference people make when the book comes up in popular conversation. The fact that the main cultural sticking-point of the book (or at least the one people allude to most often) is not even from a section relevant to the plot suggests that the asides resonate very well with readers of the book in a way that demonstrates that those asides are engaging.

Another trademark technique of The Hitchhiker’s Guide’s style of writing is non sequitur. Adams often uses the fact that his story is set in a science-fiction universe to explain plot points in a manner previously completely unalluded to. Of course, Adams uses sensical explanations as well, and often takes both types of explanation to their logical conclusion. As an example, take the sequence describing the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After about four chapters of buildup, the computer solving the problem finally gives an answer: 

”All right,” said Deep Thought. ”The Answer to the Great Question . . . ”

”Yes . . . !”

”Of Life, the Universe and Everything . . . ” said Deep Thought.

”Yes . . . !”

”Is . . . ” said Deep Thought, and paused.

”Yes . . . !”

”Is . . . ”

”Yes . . . !!!. . . ?”

”Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

This quote shows an example of how exactly Adams uses non sequiturs: He uses them to intentionally demonstrate the absurdity of the universe. Of course, the fact that they give him more options and let him carry on the story longer can’t be discounted either. The juxtaposition of serious and absurd reveals makes it difficult for the audience to tell which type each individual detail is going to be, leading to an overall more surprising story.  

Adams also brings one central piece of many comedy routines to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the straight man. Arthur Dent, the main character, fits a dictionary definition of a the straight man as it’s used in comedy: he’s a foil to the absurdity of the galactic world, and he serves to show how a normal person like the reader might react in his situation. Even after leaving earth, he’s still in shock over the loss of Earth, as shown by this quote.

“England no longer existed. He’d got that – somehow he’d got it. He tried

again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.”

The fact that The Hitchhiker’s Guide is so drenched in comedy tropes shows the foundation of the book in, well, comedy. The very fact that the book doesn’t portray itself as serious allows it headway into things that serious genre fiction doesn’t get to do. This added flexibility as opposed to serious science fiction stories makes for a more dynamic experience.

Of course, there’s no way Adams could get away with writing comedy science fiction if he wasn’t very experienced with both genres. Adams had previously written for Doctor Who during that show’s Tom Baker era, just when it was starting to become marketed in the US. He also contributed to the fourth series of notable British comedy show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” one of very few people not members of that show’s troupe to do so. John Scalzi, himself a very good sci-fi-comedy writer, makes a point about how difficult traditional British farce humor is in his writing about Adams.

“The reason more people aren’t doing the same [type of comedy] is not because they don’t know what it is but because is because it is so amazingly hard to do. Any sort of comedy or humor is difficult to write, mind you; it just looks easy (or at the very least is supposed to look easy). But to do a very specific type of humor — in this case British farce — is even harder to do, especially if one is not already a practitioner of the form. Douglas Adams was.”

Scalzi paints Adams as a practitioner of a comedic style that few others can imitate, and his readers are inclined to agree. Adam’s own specific style was one shared by a narrow band of people; and he was the only one to use it in connection with science fiction. This explains both how he was able to combine science fiction and comedy, and why he wanted to.

Adams was altogether a skilled writer who contributed to popular culture in the contexts of science fiction and comedy. The story for which he became famous, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, makes good use of traditional comedy tropes. It also makes use of traditional science fiction ideas. However, what truly make The Hitchhiker’s Guide a dynamic and engaging story that has stood the test of time are the flourishes unique to Adams. The aversion of many science fiction tropes and plot pieces, as well as general fiction sacred cows, is what makes The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the classic that it is.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Scalzi, John. "Who Will Be the Next Douglas Adams? Hopefully, Nobody". Whatever. Wordpress, March 11, 2013. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.

You breathe in.

You breathe out.

You stare at your computer screen for a few seconds. Stunningly, a finished monologue fails to appear. 

You feel apprehensive. You know you have to finish something by tonight. You’ve told your parents time and time again that those projects were already finished; you didn’t have to do anything.

None of it was true. It never is.

The jig is already up. The only thing you’re working for now is to not punt two entire projects in a cloud of early-quarter ennui.

You breathe out.

You breathe in.

(beat)

You’re desperate. You try not to show your panic, but you can feel the goosebumps running down your spine, the familiar chill that overtakes you every time you try to write about yourself.

They said you didn’t have to write about yourself, but you knew better. “All of the best fiction has elements of its writer,” you had thought to yourself. “And besides, my life has so much to write about, and I do so many interesting things. I probably shouldn’t even need to brainstorm!”

You fall into this trap every time. And every time, you are dry of ideas.

And every time, you sit there and think.

And you breathe in.

And you breathe out.

(beat)

Maybe you could write about depression? 

(sigh) You don’t know, the entire topic is so trite and stereotypical; you want your monologue to stand out. You just know they get hundreds of angst-filled rants like that every year; it must sometimes seem as if that’s all that teens can write about.

The voice in the back of your mind speaks. It is the voice that says “This is due in eight hours. You need to do this. You need to get this done.”

It says, “Why not be aware, then?”

You breathe out.

You breathe in.

(beat)

You smile. It’s the smile of a person who knows that they have just narrowly averted a disaster. 

You glance down at the keyboard. For the first time since you started this project, you think you know what you’re doing. Your hands fly over the keyboard as words slowly begin to fill up the page. You don’t need to write a monologue that’s original and self-aware.

(beat)

After all, you’ve already written one.

As you probably already know from either common sense or experience, hurricanes and other severe storms are some of the most destructive things nature can throw at us. As you already know if you've been following my blogs, it can be difficult to find out how to prepare for storms beforehand, and a lot more emphasis is placed on storms while they're happening as opposed to during the beginning of the season, when it's relatively easy to prepare.

I recently interviewed Hurricane Sandy victim Mrs. Parks, proud owner of a house in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. Her tales of how “you could see through the house because the walls were gone” provide a caution for how damaging storms can be even with the proper precautions. It's very difficult to rebuild when you have “to gut the entire house,” while “still waiting for our insurance, we haven't gotten a cent yet.”

Of course, hurricanes aren't the only type of storm that can necessitate gutting a house. A recent blizzard caused a pipe to freeze over burst in my family's house, also in Sea Isle. The resulting damage destroyed all of our appliances and flooring, and most of the walls in the front of the house had to be removed.

The interior of the shorehouse on Pleasure Ave. in Sea Isle, NJ

Now that I've personally experienced storm damage, I can see that sometimes it's not possible to take all necessary precautions. However, that only means it's more important to be aware of the threats faced by storms. The fact that storms that may not be considered “natural disasters” can cause catastrophic damage just as easily as those that are only makes it more important to be ready for storms of all kinds at all points in the year.

One of the easiest parts of preparing for storms of all kinds is to have a disaster supplies kit. However, it can be difficult to keep one ready and organized at all times. For my Agent of Change project, I plan to put together basic supply kits to distribute to residents of a shore town in anticipation of the next storm. Wish me luck!

Annotated bibliography

¡Hola! Me llamo Liam. Tengo 14 años y asisto a SLA. SLA está en Filadelfia. SLA es alta y ocupada. Hacemos cinco pisos y casi 500 estudiantes. Tenemos proyectos, clases de teatro, y computadoras por todo estudiantes. Tenemos equipos de béisbol, básquetbol, robótica, y Scrabble. Yo participo en Scrabble y robótica porque son difícil pero divertido.

En SLA, los estudiantes nuevos tienen las clases de bioquímica, arte, ingeniería, teatro, tecnología, español, historia, y matemáticas. Mis clases favoritas son español y ingeniería porque son super interesantes y divertidos. No me gusta bioquímica porque es increíblemente aburrida. En español, nosotros aprendemos, hablamos español, y cantamos. En ingeniería, nosotros dibujamos y construimos. Es bioquímica, nosotros trabajamos o dormimos. Por todo las clases, necesitamos lápices y hojas de papel. Por español, una carpeta es requerido. En bioquímica, unos cuadernos son importantes. Por ingeniería, tenemos que prestamos atención.

Mi clase tenemos seis profesores en SLA. El Sr. Todd enseña historia. Es el profesor nuevo, y es muy simpático. Su clase es muy interesante. El tiene una hija. El Sr. Lattimer enseña algebra II. Le gusta deportes, especialmente básquetbol. El es cómico y creativo, y su clase es difícil pero divertida.

¡Mi encanta SLA! Me gusta mis clases porque son interesantes. Me fascina las personas porque son cómicos y listos. Lo que más me gusta de SLA es el respeto. Todo los profesores respetan los estudiantes, y los estudiantes respetamos los profesores. Eso es la causa por qué SLA es una escuela excelente.

Hurricane Sandy caused more than 4.6 billion dollars in damage. That’s 217 thousand years of work for somebody making minimum wage and working 8-hour days and weekends. That’s just what FEMA paid out in insurance money and aid to states. That doesn't count the losses in property, medical bills, and productivity from states Vermont to North Carolina having declared states of emergency. All in all, Sandy was one of the three most expensive hurricanes in recorded US history, said CNBC.

It’s okay if hurricanes aren’t exactly on your mind right now.What you might not realize is that Sandy had its 1-year anniversary in late October. And yet, a quick google search yields results mostly for the similarly-named Sandy Hook shooting at time of writing. Why is this so? My personal guess is that while gun control will always be a hot-button issue, no hurricanes have nailed the mid-atlantic in the past year. Despite this, the risk of further hurricanes will only grow as the sea level rises, which poses a hazard for people living from the Caribbean to Cape Cod.

Although there is a storm survival kit available on NOAA subsidiary ready.org, I had not heard of it despite the fact that I’ve been riding out storms in Sea Isle since I was very young. While I can only assume that some people were prompted to collect the things on the list by Sandy’s arrival, many probably did not go through the hassle of collecting all of the items. It also doesn’t help that I had to follow three links in order to get to the list. One must want to know how many people could jump through those hoops to get the list, and how many of those who did actually obtained the contents of the list.

It’s a simple chain. News outlets don’t report on the hurricanes after they’ve happened. People forget about the disasters, and stop being prepared. Then, the next hurricane comes and people have only a few days to prepare. With so few people and properties ready, the hurricane arrives and causes millions of dollars in damage. An amazing fact you may not realize is that 2013 was the first year this decade in which a major hurricane did not hit the mid-atlantic region.

Hurricanes can and have caused billions of dollars in damage all over the Eastern Seaboard. This even though the media don’t report on the phenomenon of extreme storms outside of directly when they’re happening. This, combined with the hassle of getting the recommended items, can cause people to not be ready for the storms. This contributes to the damage storms deal, which makes the media hype up storms more, making them not good stories for later. That is why people aren’t ready for the storms, and why that is a bad thing.