Spring Break!

Hey all--leaving on spring break to FL on Friday at six am so it'll be a while before my next post...hope you all are having a great time wherever you are! And even more I hope I get a tan! Yeah, yeah, shallow I know...lol, ttyl

My Honors Essay

Hey guys, know it's been a few days since I updated. Sorry 'bout that. I was away for the weekend. Actually, I was at some YMCA camp in Wisconsin scrapbooking w/ my mom and my sister...how very domestic of us. Anyway, I'm getting sick so I ended up sleeping most of the time and taking lots of medicine (not fun--does anyone else hate that advil puts that sugary junk on the outside...it's gross). Anyway, I just wrote my essay for the application to get into the Honors program at UW-Madison. I'm posting it below b/c I think it's semi-interesting and b/c if anyone of you is really good w/ grammar or whatever, you can email me corrections!!!

The assignment was to pretend you were the editor of a national newsmagazine in the year 2020 and write the cover story for January 1st...also to explain why and all that.

Katie

Essay Option #2

If I were the editor of a major newsmagazine on the eve of 2020, I’d pick philosophy over action January 1st issue. With the New Year, there’s a magical, momentary absence of the all-too-common fear of change, and people are more receptive to new ideas. Unfortunately, I didn’t make this idea up. This is the direction I see society moving in—and it scares me.

The Self-Help Generation

On this, the first day of the year 2020, we turn to examine ourselves and the society we live in. In this global community, this world without walls, philosophers and everyday people alike are looking more closely at walls of a different kind—those within ourselves.

In the last twenty years we’ve managed to solve the preeminent problems that existed two decades ago. We drive cars that run on almost nothing. We’ve set up lasting colonies on Mars. There is one world currency. Child labor laws exist worldwide. With organic food and exercise, we’re living to be over 100 years old. We’re more educated, more efficient, more organized, and healthier than any group of people in the history of the world.

But somewhere along the way, among the bookshelves filled with advice on how to know oneself, fix oneself, and accept oneself, this generation has begun to make a discovery. One by one, we’re looking up and realizing that we’re alone—that in this society without walls, we’ve created a different kind of barrier.

One person reads Camus’ The Stranger—“But everybody knows life isn’t worth living.”—and doesn’t want to believe it. He looks up, wanting someone to tell him this can’t be true and sees no one there.

Another person realizes that despite all the self-help books, she still has doubts, fears, and afflictions. She abandons her book, The Idiot’s Guide to Overcoming Disillusionment, needing a shoulder to cry on. Then realizes she doesn’t know whom to call.

Lao-Tzu said, “Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing yourself is enlightenment.” As individuals we’ve worked all of our lives to live up to such quotations. What we’ve achieved is a society made up of people who are nothing but individuals.
Everywhere are people talking on cellular units and families are bigger than they where twenty years ago. But look closer and you’ll see the lie behind the image. That woman on her cellular unit is talking to her boss about work. With the divorce rate at 85 percent, that family is really just a temporary living unit.

Then you ask yourself why. Among advancement, civil rights, discussions of politics and philosophy, and all the college educations, where have we gone wrong? I don’t have that answer. Somehow we began placing things above relationships, power above compassion, and electronic static above really listening. Society suffers from a kind of self-inflicted mass neurosis—we’ve forgotten how to have relationships. I can’t tell you how to find those long-neglected interpersonal skills. That’s part of the experience. I’m going to start by looking outside myself.

email me @ compulsivwriter6@airpost.net if you got this far! LOL
Later all, Katie