“Brake”

“The car has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond.” ~Edward McDonagh

I’m suddenly going to fast, I can’t control it. The tires race underneath me as they hit the hot asphalt; they, unlike me, have a need for speed. The wind turns from a comforting breeze to a whirlwind of confusion. The scream coming from the passenger seat gets confused with my thoughts. Then there’s a sudden thump. All I can think of is the poor animal that I surely hit, but I’m to afraid to turn around and check. As my dad reached for the wheel I figure out that I didn’t hit anything other than the sidewalk. “Brake!” is all I here from my dad, and I comply with his desires.

Even thou I turned sixteen about five months ago, it wasn’t until last month that my parents got annoyed enough by me and decided to finally teach me how to drive. What I thought of driving, before I actually tried it, was that it was very easy. All you really had to do was turn the wheel when there is a turn, push the break when you want to slow down, and slam on the gas when you want to go really fast.

But I was wrong, deeply and stupidly wrong. As I stepped inside the driver’s seat for the first time, I felt the wheels spinning under me. The power of the engine as it roared when I pushed the gas. I was too afraid to unlock the hand break, because I thought I was going to crash with invisible obstacles. Then there was the added pressure of pressing the clutch and changing gears. All that was running through my mind was how confusing everything was. And to top it all of I had to put with my parents incessant instruction. During those first lessons I felt the urge to buy duct tape and shutting their mouths as long as I was only wheel.

I was ready to quit. As I hit a couple of bumps before getting it right. My only major accident so far was running into a side walk. For most it wouldn’t be much, but since it was my first time driving I was completely terrified. Ever since, I’ve completely avoided side walks, and manage to learn fairly well.

After various lessons I got really good, and this got me thinking. I like being in control, deciding for myself what I wanted to do. As if I was running the world, nothing mattered more than what I wanted, where I wanted to go. That’s how I want to live; I decide what I want to do and how I want to run my life. I want to be able to really put that duct tape over their mouths, and stop listening to what they order me and decide for my self.

My next time behind the wheel, will be the first time I’m by my self. What I hope I can do is show everybody that I can so things my way and nothing is going to happen. The world isn’t going to come crashing down, because a girl who has to go off to college in a year decided to start taking responsibility for herself. Driving has given my courage and a new level of independence that makes me feel unbelievable. Finally I feel like I can tell the world and my parents, what I think and it’s all that matters.

It’s not as easy as it looks

“It’s a lot easier to laugh it all off, than to cry about it.” –Anonymous

“Altho' a tear may be ever so near, that's the time you must keep on trying, smile- what's the use of crying,” –Charlie Chaplin, “Smile”

To a lot of people writing comes easy for them, and for it to be perfect maybe not right away but with little work. Most of the people I know are like that, but I’m not. An essay that I worked on for weeks might read like a night-before essay by someone else, and it’s hard to hear that from a room full of people with perfect or nearly perfect essays. Trying to establish an idea in accordance with my opinion and to make sure that it reflects my emotions without sounding overly sappy is a long daunting task, which most be performed constantly, as every two weeks or so essays are due for my College Writing class.

Most of my classmates would rather tackle a 3-page essay on the development of the language in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Year of Solitude, than something purely scientific or theoretical. Personally, I would much rather write an 18-point resolution on ending world hunger. It’s not that resolution writing is that much easier, but there are a lot fewer factors to consider when writing it. Most of them are very broad. Your country’s point of view and economic feisability are the two most important, with in those parameters you can suggest just about anything. I know some one who might just suggest something like, shooting down the moon with a Cold War technology weapon or taking over cyberspace with hard to decrypt codes and massive amounts of software. The only difference is that you have to verbally back it up with good arguments, but that’s the easy part.

My fear of writing didn’t come up from my inability to write, because I can, if you can call regurgitating in a piece of paper every piece of relevant information the teacher said, writing. It actually originated in Mrs. Hurtado’s 10^th Grade Spanish Class. Basically you have the freedom to think for yourself, and I love the idea. My problem is that I can’t put it on paper. If a teacher doesn’t tell me exactly what they want from my essays, I’m at a lost. It definitely got worse with Dr. Sirias’ Freshman College Composition class, where the subjects are so broad they virtually give you no boundaries.

As time passed, I thought I was getting better, writing the way they wanted with all the detailed examples and gimmicks, but that didn’t seem to work, as I still was lacking something. Then I decided to just be me on paper, that was another epic fail. I just seemed to be missing every hit, until my fear went from seemingly silly to ridiculously irrational.

Now every time I have to write an essay and I close my eyes, I can see it, the L arms with pointy elbows that look so sharp they might cut you at the mere sight. Geeky B converging glasses with a Power of 7.5 Diopters to make sure that the most minimal mistake doesn’t pass by. They make you huddle under the dominant presence of a being thirty times smarter than you. The alphabet monster is out to get me. It projects its menacing blood-red shadow upon my eyes as they slowly get totally blood-shot. I’m filled with panic as I imagine my mother’s disappointment when report cards come home. I hear a voice telling me I just don’t have what it takes to make it. Words come at like perfectly written size 12 Times New Roman text, in the darkest shade of black hole black. He sucks your soul to its inky depths waiting for your brain to be a useless pile of mush.

All in all writing it’s the most terrifying part of academic life I can think of, and the alphabet monster represents that in my brain. But I decided that I wasn’t going to be defeated by a blank word document, or the looming shadow of my keyboard.

As I stare at my fingers trying to come up with new arguments to support my main idea, all I can think about is Dr. Sirias’ advice: leave it alone to marinate, if you can think about it right away go on and take a walk, revising is the key to improving your writing. Maybe just maybe I’ve gained trust not only in my abilities but in the advice other people gave me, unfortunately it took some time. But seeing a loving piece of work mercilessly destroyed definitely drove the point home.

Now I know I can’t just regurgitate ideas onto paper and hope that they came out right, I have to steer them in the right direction. Even thou some of my work might be complete trash there are ones that can be polished into beautiful pieces of art, after long hours of revising and editing.

Writing is more like a perfectly flawless dance routine than a painting. With paint even thou you might not think it’s much or even like it at all, some one will go up to it and say “Wow, that’s beautiful art,” even if it is your parents. For example, a lot of people don’t consider modern art, art at all, but there is a beauty behind a perfectly painted single color wash-canvas, even if it lies merely in contrasting texture. But with dance it takes hours of practice, pain and sweat to be able to show the audience a perfectly polished and flawless piece of artwork, completely formulated with the human body. And only if you can see the emotion in their eyes then you can call yourself an artist.

Good advice I’ve learned comes from the strangest places and oddly enough so does the inspiration for trying to improve. A couple of classmates telling me; you really need to improve your grammar –ASAP– and your last two essays have been not the best, but you can do a lot better, is apparently all I needed. This only made me want to go home a little bit faster so I could start my next essay.

As I wrote this essay, I closed my eyes for a couple of second and I saw the alphabet monster, but this time I wasn’t scared. In my mind, I took a deep breath, as it started laughing, because it thought I was going to run away like in all my other bad thoughts. Instead I looked right at those huge glass-magnified eyes, and said “Bite me.”

To my MUNers…

“This past week I didn’t see a Model of the United Nations, but the United Nations.” Philip Clarke, President of the Environmental Committee THIMUN 2010

Deforestation is a problem that, unlike economics or war, doesn’t discriminate it affects us all despite economic stands or civil unrest. This is why we should all take part on its prevention and reversion.

The delegation of Angola would like to congratulate those countries already taking national action to combat desertification, but if we really wan to make a difference on this issue there is no better way than supporting and expanding the UNCCD and its action programmes.

This is why the delegate of Angola fully supports this fully supports this resolution and encourages all the delegates to vote for this resolution.

Speeches such as this one can make or break the future of a delegation’s plan to better the world, or as it is called formally their1 resolution. They have the ability to convince delegations that maybe your ideas might be the best way to resolve the conflict. Of course if a delegation supports an idea, unlike in many areas of “real world” politics, it must go in accordance with their country’s policies and values. If the world was ran by people such as those attending MUN conferences, it would definitely still have problems, but it would be a lot easier to reach compromises and find a solution.

Philip was right; through the course of the week thousands of high school students stepped out of the regular life to come to come together in the international city of peace and justice, and try to solve the world’s problems. And unlikely enough we did it, through diplomacy and rational we reached consensus and made progress in areas where the world leaders lack the ability to compromise.

Topics such as the lack of fresh drinking water, and the emissions trade procedures where discussed in the Environmental Committee, of which I was a part of. But other topics of international importance such as the melting of the polar camps, the end of the US embargo on Cuba, and the status of child soldiers in the Geneva Convention, where discussed in the other commissions of the massive conference.

Personally, I don’t trust politicians, they’re to corrupt to make a difference anywhere except their pockets, but when I attend conferences such as THIMUN, it gives me hope for the future, as I see that my children unlike me, might live in a better world constructed through international diplomacy and honestly instead of corruption and false ideals. If this is the future of international politics then we can all rest assured that the world tomorrow would definitely be a better place to live in than today.

Gwrteithia Brofi

Although mayor parts of it are already extinct, and the few places that still venerate this culture are seldom and secluded, the Celtic culture is one of the most interesting parts of history to me. It maybe because of their legendary figures and beautiful language, or because some time I’ve wished I lived during that time. But what definitely attracts me the most is their unique relationship with nature, such a devotion led to the development of a strongly naturalistic religion.

Until their Romanization, the Celts believed in the existence of spirits controlling nature as well as the representation of such spirits as fairies or pixies, but like many other cultures they also believed in gods. Most of their believe system was regionally based as the Celtic world was too large for information to spread around it. One of the greatest differences between Celtic religion and other of the time is that they didn’t show their gods in creature form until their contact with the Romans.

I was always attracted to understanding the Celtic religion mainly because of their belief in fairies, as they are my favorite mythological creature. But the rest of the beliefs seemed strange to me, as the talk about feeling the trees breath and the forest id filling them with live. I thought I would never understand this deeply spiritually connection the Celts had with nature, but one day I discovered that you can hear the tress breath.

San Antonio, Texas is probably the last place I would have ever thought that I would find this, but this is a perfect example of why you shouldn’t judge books by their covers. Last year I spent the summer with my grandmother in San Antonio, because I needed a change of scenery. After I’d been there for a couple of weeks already, my parents flew in and my grandmother decided to give them a tour while they were there. Every day we would go to different churches and historic places, and one of them really stood out for me.

Our Lady of Atonement is an outdoor church near Sam Houston Army Base in San Antonio. I’m completely against going to churches as I don’t really like the stuffy, uptight atmosphere inside of them, although I do admire their architectonical beauty. But there was something different about this one. The main chapel was under ground in a caver, hidden in the middle of a huge park. The bigger masses where celebrated in the top part of the cavern that over looked a beautiful patio. The paths connecting the four corners where weathered and old, it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

The trees where the most impressive thing of all. The paths winded around the trees that looked centuries old, as the huge roots winded over the top of the ground and held on very tightly to the soil. They looked old and wise, as if they could tell a million stories, and teach a million lessons. I was merely waiting for one of them to spring to life and start talking to me. In that moment I got close to one of them and whispered as if I was telling someone a secret, “It’s ok I won’t hurt you if you talk to me. I’ll listen and learn from you.” I felt vey silly in that moment but it felt natural like I was supposed to do that.

Then I understood the Celts’ beliefs. The trees, the rocks, the ground itself felt as if it was breathing. The air of the park was so dense with church’s incense that it felt as if the spirits where around me. The experience convinced me that to some degree the Celts where right. Nature is alive and you can feel it.