For my capstone, I along with Nick Reed, another senior, created five murals in the SLA commons representing the five core values. The first four core values, inquiry, research, collaboration, and presentation, are represented on the four support columns and designed in collaboration with freshmen in the mini-course we ran. Reflection was designed and painted, primarily by me, on the wall alongside the steps leading up to the rest of the SLA building. Unlike the others reflection is intended to be continued by every future senior class. In order to complete this project Nick and I spent the first half of the year researching. We pitched to Braskem and received full funding. We ran a quarter-long mini-course. We spent the last quarter of the year completing what we began during the mini-course with a dedicated team of freshmen and a handful of volunteers. Through this project, I thought myself how to make murals and teach an art class two things I had never done before. I learned how to work very closely with someone equally passionate but with different ideas about what we were doing and how we should do it. I learned that even after the chaos of my high school experience I can still make a positive change to my community, and more importantly I taught the next generation of SLA students the same.

Kiki’s Delivery Service: My parents, my mom in particular, have a distrust of Disney and Disney movies so they didn’t let me watch them when I was younger. Instead, I grew up on Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli movies. The ones I watched most were my neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Kiki’s Delivery Service is about a young witch who is sent off into the city to find her way. I don’t remember much of the plot because it’s been about a decade since I last watched it. Kiki makes some friends, starts having trouble with her magic, and then a blimp explodes. I really liked watching a young girl just run around and figure things out. People were just nice to her and helped her figure things out, and that was a very reassuring image of how the world worked. For example, when she’s trying to find boarding, a baker just offers her a house in exchange for delivering things on her broomstick. It’s not a particularly coherent movie. Most Miyazaki films aren’t. They’re more about the feelings than the actual plot, which may be why my understanding of the plot is “Girl in blue dress / cat / geeky boy / blimp / artist / baker.”

Brave: I know I just said my parents don’t trust Disney, but Brave is technically Pixar and their ban became more lax as Disney’s princesses became more feminist. All that to say we Saw Brave when it came out in the theaters and Merida has been my favorite princess ever since. Brave is this Scottish tomboy princess who takes after her father and won’t fit the mold her mother wants. She loves riding and climbing and being in the woods and archery, and refuses to be a lady like her mother wants. Mostly I love her because I relate to her. We’re both Scottish, we both have curly hair, and we both have a complicated relationship with controlling mothers. However, for better or worse my life includes significantly less magic, archery, and bears. Brave continues the theme of young women figuring themselves out by running around, but Merida does so at odds with her family rather than being explicitly sent to a foreign place to do so. My parents banned Barbies for similar reasons to their ban on Disney movies, but similarly they made an exception for Brave. I had a Merida Barbie who I made clothes for out of knotted fabric scraps.

Hunger Games: There was a camp called Girl On Fire at my local arboretum when I was about 10. It was a hunger games themed wilderness survival skills day camp. It seemed really fun and I wanted to go, so my mom signed me up. The one problem was I had never read the hunger games. Gregor The Overlander, another series by suzanne collins, was one of my favorite series growing up, and I read it to the point where I’ve memorized parts of it. However my mom wouldn’t let me read the hunger games yet because “it was too dark.” but here I was about to got to this two week long camp with no knowledge of the source material. So the night before she and I watched the entire first movie together. That was the first time in my life I watched a movie adaptation of a book before I read the book it was based on. When I finally did read the book my imagination of the world felt more vivid and grounded because I was basing it on the movie. Most of the time when I’m reading, I struggle to visualize it, or my mental images have little relation to the descriptions of the characters. The hunger games is now one of my favorite series and I’ve never finished the movies.

Steven Universe The Movie: Steven Universe was my favorite tv show for a very long time. It is a cartoon about a young boy who has inherited a gem and powers from his supernatural mother and is being raised by three supernatural ladies (who are also gems) in a temple. It shaped a lot of my understanding of relationships and what it means to be family. Steven runs around for five seasons just fixing people’s relationship problems. He’s a fourteen year old who looks like a ten year old, and he just fixes the adults’ problems for most of his life. It also gave me my love for gay cartoons. Steven Universe the movie was my favorite movie for a year or two just by default because Steven Universe was my favorite tv show. Steven Universe the show has many original songs and Steven Universe the movie is a full scale musical. I watched it for the first time at a friend’s house who was also into Steven Universe and had cable tv. I hyped myself up for a week before it aired and I came dressed up as my favorite character. The movie itself is a doomsday movie that explores characters identity and traumas and what it means to change and heal. It’s a good movie but it doesn’t really represent me anymore, and that’s a little bit cool and a little bit sad.

Inside: I think the film that best captures the experience of quarantine during COVID is Inside by Bo Burnham. My first experience of Bo Burnham was Inside, but I now know that he is a musical comedian who made his way from YouTube to comedy shows and spent his quarantine filming a one-man movie in a single room. This film effectively explores the isolation of quarantine, but also the technological discovery and social justice upheaval of 2020 to 2021. The film can’t be said to have any particular plot aside from an increasing sense of isolation and futility. It is more a collection of bits about social commentary, many of which come in song form. A few of my favorites are “Welcome to the Internet,” about the predatory nature of social media, “How the World Works,” a conversation between a corporate-controlled kids’ show host and a Marxist sock puppet, and “Content,” which opens the movie by setting it in the frame of a content creator publishing something to his audience. However, taken together, these vignettes form a complete impression of isolation and inescapability. It is fitting that this movie was released as quarantine was lifting because otherwise I don’t know how its relatability would have been bearable to the general public. I sincerely hope Bo Burnham is okay and I doubt it.

There are no names in the road. The two main characters are simply referred to by their age and gender, the child, the boy, the man, and sometimes their relationship to each other, papa. This invites us to think about them less as individuals and more as archetypes existing in relation to each other and the world around them. It is interesting that the boy is sometimes referred to as the child. Both are young, both are innocent, but a child is more innocent, more full of possibility and wonder than a boy. A boy will eventually become a man. Unlike a child, a boy’s path is laid out. His innocence is finite because one day he will outgrow it. One of the first times the man’s relationship to his traveling companion is described McCarthy writes: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (5). He man views the child as having some quality of divinity that must be preserved. The man must survive so he can make sure the child and his naive absolute goodness servive. This is what gives both of them hope, “The child had his own fantasies. How things would be in the south. Other children.” (32). Their goal is the south and so their goal is to find a place where innocent morality can thrive. The point of survival is to reach a place where they can no longer worry about surviving. However, this innocence is shown to give the child morality and kindness which the man is often at odds with. “Cant we help him? Papa? No. We cant help him. The boy kept pulling at his coat. Papa? he said. Stop it.” (27). The man is trying to keep the child alive, but in making the choices necessary to keep both of them alive the man is killing the morality of nievity by teaching him what is necessary to survive. That brings the child closer to the man which makes him a boy. This change reaches a turning point where the man starts to listen to the boy’s advise. This change begins after they raid an apple orchard. Biblically apples are the fruit of knowledge. The timing of this shift reinforced the idea that knowledge and goodness are antithetical. This chang marks the moment the child becomes a boy. If a boy must become a man then a man must become an old man. This gives an interesting context to the man’s conversation with Ely. “There is no God and we are his prophets. I dont understand how you’re still alive. How do you eat? I dont know. You dont know? People give you things. People give you things. Yes. To eat. To eat. Yes. No they dont. You did. No I didnt. The boy did.” (170). The man believes in god to motivate his own survival. The old man, if he is to be believed, does not care about goodness but benefits from it anyway. What does it mean that he names them both prophets of a none existent god? It is because would not share what they have. They are not kind. They follow the teachings of survival. God is humans better nature that does more than survive.