Traditional or Online Schooling? A Scholarship Essay

Both traditional schooling and online schooling have their benefits, but I believe traditional schooling is more beneficial. Although online school offers at-home convenience, attending a traditional school gives way to a more hands-on learning environment and social connections. For example, in seventh grade, I had a friend who left the school we went to and enrolled in cyber school. Her grades slumped a little the first year due to the adjustment and she found some concepts hard to grasp without physical examples or one-on-one connections with instructors.

Traditional schooling offers more learning opportunities; help sessions were often offered after hours at my high school, and most teachers were flexible with scheduling one-on-one appointments. Advocates for online schooling may argue that a quick e-mail to an instructor may do the same job, but that’s simply not true. Having a connection with a teacher in person allows the teacher to understand your struggles on a personal level; in traditional school, it’s less likely that you’ll be seen as just another e-mail in an inbox.

In addition to academic reasons, traditional school is more beneficial in the social way of things. Traditional schooling encourages involvement in clubs and activities, or at the very least, friendships. Friendships carry through when you fail a test or pass with flying colors; friendships sit with you at lunch every day and walk home from the bus stop after school. Online connections can also be made in cyber school, but tangible connection is also important, especially early on in education. Social interaction helps students develop communication skills and relationships that cannot be duplicated through the Internet. 

broken bits

I'm tired of saying the same things. 

I feel myself pulling away and holding on, my shoulders snapping out of place and my fingers turning red and white on your arms. I'm coping with the death of our togetherness, relearning how it was before--cold under a hundred blankets, my skin moving independently of my limbs and my mind is here to everyone else. 

To myself, I am broken into parts and these parts of me don't work together, don't congeal like my blood is supposed to (though even my blood is moving differently, slow in my fingers and too eager to fill my scrapes). And before I know it, I'm carved away and snapped apart and my hands are gripping your wrists while my body bleeds like a rewinding sponge and I can't remember how many fingers stem from each of my palms. 

I think you're reading my lifelines, tracing the wrinkles with the same fingertips that touched my nose and folded into the shape of my back as we'd walk along the sidewalk before my atoms separated. 

I'm afraid my parts are shuffled jigsaw pieces, flipped and misprinted and swept into the dustpan when I clean the house. I'll need your help to put myself back together, so please, lend me my hands and I'll screw them back into place and our knees will brush under the coffee table as we right-side the pieces and match up the colors again. 

counting to nineteen

all that's in my head is leaving songs
our feet tangled in each other
because neither of us wants to step away

as we lay in our quiet eye
the storm whispering behind the door,
scratching like a thirsty cat,
I try not to love you
so it stings a little less, you see

I fix on our opposite breathing-
you push in my stomach while I breathe it in
and shy away from my skin as I breathe out-

but every nineteen breaths
our lungs fall into rhythm
our breathing in tune
and all that's in my head is this leaving song
and for a moment I don't mind the stinging,

but it's starting to rain a little harder
so let's count to nineteen a little faster
and hum this part a little louder

july 19, 2012

I feel the same way I feel everyday.
Again I thought about taking a roundabout route home, through Boston or San Fransisco. Again I though about running a red light and again I felt the urge to tell someone a truth that would get me fired in an instant.

My fingers are not pretty. They're gnarled and awkward like snakeskin hanging from a wall, lumpy and scaly. They're bleeding. My fingers are bleeding and the blood tastes nothing like copper. It just tastes like the inside of a body would taste.

july 18, 2012

they tell me I worry too much,
that my heart will skip and shrivel too early,
that I'm losing sleep and sanity
and I worry they are right
my arms float out in front of me,
dead as sunken ships
barnacles sucking blood from my wooden body
stiff and rotting, anxious even in death
about the sponges and the sea they soak in--




Sometimes I drive and I think about driving past the place I'm going. Two miles after your house and I'd be a mile closer to the interstate, within reach of any state on the east coast. I could drive until any exit, even- or odd-numbered, or I could drive until I reached the end of the road.

But I hate pumping gas.

july 13, 2012

I am not magnificent. I am simple with warts for kneecaps, a tawny frog hopping along the wet streets and dodging the skin of bare tires screeching to avoid me. I am not magnificent. I am not an artist with a paintbrush between my teeth, pondering the yellows of a sunset or a bowl of fruit, the curves of a dream I had or of a lover's face. I am holding my head close to my chest, listening for a heartbeat. 

limes

you spoke to me in cinnamon tones

your tongue cottoned with just a teaspoon of the stuff

boiling over like a kettle of stick tea

your voice sprinkled in sugar and shaken

you looked at me with lime in your eyes

veins and green and flesh white rinds

speckled sweet and acidic

sparking sour and wrinkling my nose

your teeth clinking like the jar of cherries

shivering against the olives in the refrigerator door

your words plump and drowning in red syrup

sticky on our fingers and knotted stems

you said to me in black pepper

serious and tickled and cracked

you said to me “i love you too”

and sneezed

elbows and knees

on the sixth day, God folded paper cranes

He strung them up with the stars

admired how their wings caught the glimmer of the moon

they bumped against the night as inky rain dripped on their beaks

and their feathers whispered with the slightest breath of wind

but their hearts were paperweights

magnifying the constellations they perched between

pulling each little fledgling closer to the roaring of the sea

the sea nipped at the feet of the cranes

sharpening its claws against the rocky cliffs

their hearts settled like stones in their chests

surely they would grow too heavy and sink into the sea

melting to pulp in the waves

they waited for the wind and snapped their wings

the tethers broke and they fell toward the water

their bodies unfurled and they rode the night

ink blotting them in freckles and dimples

and when they landed on the shore

they found themselves human

with creases in their arms and legs

with paperweight hearts drumming in their chests

half-eaten tomatoes

juice pooling at the bottom of the bowl

seeds sliming in crimson against the porcelain sides like

ragged children creeping out of bed

lazy and delirious

until they reach the bottom

the juices touch their stunted-seed bodies and

they float on their backs with their brothers

wildly happy to be found un-alone

one-bedroom apartment

sometimes the mail is addressed to you

the foreign swoop and dive of the alphabet

someone just jumbled the envelopes and here you are again

lounging in the mailbox with the termites

their golden bodies sneaking across the black

and reading the postcards,

skimming the curves of a lost soul’s pen--

Greetings From Far Aways and

I’ll Be Seeing Yous

today the air is thin and cold

the old man on the porch across the way

sits with his knees too far apart

as he sucks the end of an old cigar

and the smell of spitty cardboard and wet matches

lands on my tongue, creeps up my throat until

it meets the smell of rain-tainted moss,

so today is a pumpkin-rotting October night

instead of a flowering May evening

a shiver runs beneath my skin,

skin peppered in sun’s laughter

but white in the slant of this wan light

and i walk to the mailbox, hoping to see your name

scrawled on a letter, probably from an insurance company

BETTER RATES, APPLY NOW

or some postal lie assuming your clothes still hang here

but instead it’s only my familiar alphabet

so i shuff through junk and return to senders

and wish for a whisper from you

breakfast

the grapefruit clamped between your teeth oozes

pulpy liquid, pooling in the wormy lines of your chin

your pinkish tongue dancing and careful

to catch every droplet before it swims to the corners

of your pursed lips, stinging with citrus

the saccharine paths clear in the morning sun

filtering through the white curtains

crystalline drops lingering on your face,

your paleness quiet and impossible

the blood beneath your skin blue like stormy ocean

the juice beads like pearls, tracing the veins in your neck,

ebbing with each concentrated swallow

dribbling down your cheeks and creeping into your collarbone

where your white skin congeals in puddles,

rippling with each splip of bittersweet nectar

it collects in your palm like water in stone

and reads your fortune, rolling in fat drops

through the maze of your lines

plinking over the side and coloring your wrists rosy

sappy sweet in the crook of your elbow

you slip your tongue around your mouth

you rub your pinky over those too-crowded teeth

your young voice is tinny like pennies in a soup can

and you say you can feel that filmy acid eating away at your enamel

you grimace at the taste 

the dew, drying sticky on your face and fingers,

drips from your slight smile and splatters onto your knee

like the first raindrops on white sidewalk,

crawling into the crevice of your crossed legs, steady and daring

i am not shading you in pink and red

not sketching you in sugar water
i am looking at your oceanstorm eyes and hoping they will look back

instead you watch the windows and draw juice from the fruit

i chew on my thumb until it bleeds cherry

dreams where i am stretched into the sky

When I watch the world, I try to feel it spinning beneath me. I try to be the most alert I've ever been, my fingers and toes splayed, eyes wide and squinting, attempting to see everything I want to focus on. My back is straight and fragile so the wind can nudge it, the way it blows around me. I stop breathing even. I slow my pulse and listen for the frequency of the earth. I listen to the subtle cracking of the soil beneath the pacing feet. I can smell the lava scalding the core and I see it sparking in the fault lines and worry lines of the world. I touch the smoke of the clouds and rake my fingers through them, streaking the atmosphere in weightless condensation. I feel the earth; I know it is alive. But I think it may have stopped spinning, just to feel a different pulse traveling along its skin. And maybe as I try to feel its rotation, it is relishing my heartbeat and my absence of vertigo.

averted vision

Things we wish would fade quickly often take longer, mostly because we are accustomed to staring straight at them. They fade, but we are watching them disappear pixel by pixel.

Someone told me averted vision opens your eyes to the things you cannot see when you stare into the brightness of something. But it's the same with darkness. Staring at your hand in campsite blackness, simply because you can feel it pressing against the air, does not make it easier to see. Sometimes you have to look at the dim glimmers of light in the water, the bioluminescence of the soft creatures, edgeless beneath the ebbing waves. When your pupils open to let in these shreds of light, you can catch your thumb waggling in the darkness, a sign of life amidst the black.

Sometimes we must look away in order to see what is in front of us.

you handed me a wordless rose, clipped from a letterless bush grown in a sentenceless garden and I was unbearably silent in return. you uttered a grunt, your tongue in your hand and you wanted to tell me something. but you found yourself caught in a whirlwind, with bloody hands to write with and no words to write, and empty mouth to speak with and brain full of ghosts of the words we decided not to say. the blood dribbled from your mouth in cherry strokes and the petals fell from my flower to the ground of our silent world.

my body is a bag

my body is a bag of marbles, shifting in your fingers as you toy with my shapes and inspect the swirls of my intestines.

my body is a bag of stones to be cast in the ocean with a splash and a sprinkle of stinging water.

my body is a bag with a fish, wide-eyed and frightened, lurking inside.

my body is a bag of bodies, diced and muddled so the coroner needs a moment to count the arms and legs wrapped in each other.

my body is a bag of rubbish to be tossed into a dump truck and to be split down the side, putrid cocktails beading on my skin and dripping onto the other bags crowded around me.

foggy places

your eyes are like honey oozing from the hives, like chocolate I lick from my fingertips, sparking on my tongue, golden and warm and fattening; a drop of ink pooling in the midst of the sickly sweet concoction God sculpted your face into out of the sides of the riverbank. the ebony of your pupils bleeds into the color, if you can even call it such; a color the painters cannot bottle, a color with a fabricated name stamped onto my brain, onto a little place enshrouded in fog where I’d call you my own, look into the depths of those eyes (try to look at both of them until my own colors cross and I fall into your chest) and forget my own face until I see a dusty reflection of it in those discolored black holes. and then I would be an Adam-ish Eve and find the names for your hues under rocks with the centipedes and their black mud; in the leaves when the sun filters through and tattoos a shadow onto my skin, so pale and spotted against yours. 

untitled

You asked me to write something for you. How do you say anything to someone who robs you of breath and of speech?

There are no words yet to describe you. All of the words in all of the books in all of the languages of the world hold no perfect weight. When I am with you, something inside me grows quiet and listens for your own soul’s hush. I can feel the faint buzz of human electricity circuiting through the air when we lay perfectly still. When we stare into the sky on clear or cloudy nights, I can almost hear the hum of your heart. I think the constellations hide behind the clouds because they want the people who truly yearn to see them seek them out.

When you look at me, I know that you see me. It’s terrifying, to be so exposed simply by holding a glance for a fraction of a second longer than we are used to. I do not know what you see when you look that way, and I think I’ll never know.

When I look at you, I like to take a moment to see you. And I love what I see. It’s a beauty I’ve always dreamed of but never expected to find. It is a canvas of peeling paint. So many coats the canvas sags on its wooden frame and the layers peel back to reveal colors that are only imagined outside of you. You have colored my world with pigments that exist only in your soul. I try to be gentle and peel away the thick slabs of paint, each layer more complicated and dimensional and beautiful than the last. When I think I’ve scattered the last of them onto the black and white of my world, I find new chipped layers beneath my fingernails. And certain flecks of my gray and white match the colors of you. I see you now. And when I see you, I realize you’re seeing me, peeling back my paint, coloring your world with my shades, and my terror is palpable. Never has such tenderness touched my skin, slowly shedding my layers of painted-on until my soul is naked in front of you and I stand pale in a world of the brightest browns—the muddling of our colors. I see you seeing me and I have to close my eyes for fear of falling in love with the portrait we’ve painted

and as my fear multiplies, I am coloring my soul again, scribbling furious red and aquas and ebonies. And as soon as I finish, you peel it away with such grace and I realize you have always seen me.

And I realize there is no point in tattooing myself in crimson and yellow, because you’ll simply take the murals I paint and break them apart and show me how to build without fear. We are building a city of broken bits and we are finding wholeness in each other.

When I see the constellations between phases of clouds, I hope that whoever is seeking them sees them, too, because no better feeling exists than seeing things you’ve always hoped to see the instant you planned on turning away.

Untitled

we watch the train pass in front of us
the aluminum bell hammering against the air, the train cars
speeding past, shaking pine needles from the trees
the red lights winking back and forth,
dim in the afternoon sunlight, the candy-striped arm vibrating

rippling along the rails like a horse tearing through a racetrack
and I can feel the blue of your eyes pressing into the flush of my cheeks,
the palm of my hand a child’s in your grip, white knuckles and scarred knuckles

it passes still
the moment is so fragile and I do not want you to speak
so I hold my breath behind my teeth and hope you understand my cues

something else passes in front of our clasped hands and our worn shoes
it rises into the air above us
it is the shape of our shared dream

your eyes are aphids devouring me
your thumbs press into my skin
and I can feel your fingerprints encrypting codes,
embedding your touch into my external hard drive
and I do not think you will be forgotten

and I think the people watching us pass will recognize our colors
and they will watch our bright eyes blinking in the brightness of our joy
they will wait to cross our path until our arms are raised above our pigeon-toed tracks and
we run along the voltage rails like stallions

april isn't as cruel as we suspect

"that secret that we know

that we don't know how to tell

i'm in love with your honor

i'm in love with your cheeks"

~"Blood Bank," Bon Iver

funny how timing works

I've been pursuing SCAD to major in writing.

I just got in to NYU to major in education.

Hm.

dreaming of my sister colleen

when she thinks everybody’s eyes are closed
tired of focusing on the disaster she has become
when she thinks our parents are sleeping post-sex
beads of sweat clinging to their scalps
trickling down skin that heaves over gasping lungs
when she thinks I am dreaming
she slips the covers from our shared bed

but I am not asleep
I am never asleep
I do not dream and I do not have sex
instead I watch her silhouette
(a pale navy in these hours)
I watch her behind my lashes
step from her too-short pajama pants
and slip her spindly arms through the sleeves
of her too-long shirt—
VBS 2005

into her cutoffs
the tattered hem worming up her thigh
her quiet grunts as the button struggles to clasp
on she snaps a bra and a tanktop
a quick shimmy and her breasts are existent

a spritz of stolen perfume
(you tell anyone I took this, you’re wasted, you hear me?)
and she smells years older, almost legal

she twists the frayed laces of her boots around her fingers
strangling her ankles
her back tenses and I see her shoulders contract
her shoulder blades like wings struggling to stay furled
fighting against the nature of things

the window creaks against her fingers
and she brushes the paint chips onto the curtains
I hear them falling to the floor
she slides through and is gone

I used to close my eyes and pretend I was my sister
sweet Colleen how you’ve grown so
how you sparkle in the gentle sunlight
how you snicker at the lovers on the benches
how you sketch the faces of your siblings with such tenderness

sweet Colleen how you’ve changed so
how you strip in the implacable darkness
how you slink between the windowsills
how you sip that drink and seduce those men

the hours tick past my fluttering eyes
and she is brushing against me
the saliva of unshaven men greasing her neck and thighs
the coarse friction of their beards tormenting her skin
like poison ivy on my summer arms
I can hear her scratching

she slips off her clothes
soaked in alcohol and semen
and her inebriated body wobbles
as she twists to kiss me on the cheek
(never be this way) she says
she thinks I am asleep and sinks into the mattress
as if she’d been there all the time

but I am not asleep
I am never asleep
I am dreaming of the shadow she forgot
misplaced between the parties
and the stallion grip of faceless men
I am dreaming of my sister Colleen

i am a poet

I am dactylic
I am stressed
unstressed unstressed
but mostly stressed

I am dimeter
two feet to guide me
I march a narrow line
I walk a short plank

I am feminine
full lips and slightly broken
my hands often cold, I create friction
I rhyme two syllables
and read controversial fiction

I am dark and slow
I am iambs and anapests
I rise and fall like ocean tides

I am four dimensions
I am experience and knowledge
I am imagination and I am
…forgetful

I am a poet

thankyoumoreplease

I only opened my eyes for a second
And I saw our shadows kissing
Gray moonlight cradling our valentine figures
The curve of your spine
The crooks of my knees and
Arc of my calves
The muted whir of human electricity
Chocolate hearts melting between us
The roses swooning in my hand

a thought

prom dress shopping = how many times can I go into a dressing room and lean awkwardly against the wall to take off my shoes and step into some froofy dress that smells like money?/how many times can I get out of my car only to get back into it empty-handed?/how many times can I find a beautiful dress that is more money than I make in two weeks?

jeans =perfect.

happy to be going with you, though.

staring into the mouths of fish

(I've been thinking. Of course I have writers' block. To be a writer, you have to experience things. And I haven't been experiencing anything lately.

I've been waiting for life to find me, but isn't that the opposite of what we're supposed to do? Aren't we supposed to make life recognize that we exist, and not the other way around? Life shouldn't be written on our faces in frowns and smiles. We should make our marks on life, scribbling captions under the snapshots of all the things we've been doing.

Music's been good to me lately. So has sweet baby Jesus, as we affectionately call Him. I think we call Him that because it makes Him less daunting and makes our mistakes feel less like mistakes and more like human)

***

grass grows over dead things

grass grows over my insides

it tickles so i laugh but then it

isn't so funny anymore

and i feel the seed of a watermelon

sprouting in my stomach

the roots of a gum tree

technicolored (they told me

just to spit it out but boy was i

am i

stubborn)

staring into the mouths of fish

their milk eyes like moonlight

their hands waving like our faces

plunged into the depths

are planning on going up for air

but joke's on them

(on us)

because this is a staring contest

grass grows over dead things

dead hands waving like our faces

do underwater

like the ocean is tipsy

crashing into the shore and falling back

warping our smiles and frowns

our milk eyes like the moonlight

but joke's on us

because we're blind

lists and crumpled lists

It's funny.

While everyone else is applying for colleges, I'm asking God for some sort of direction. And while everyone else is getting answers back, I'm still waiting and wading in a shallow pool of self-doubt. Maybe everybody else has the right idea: pursue an education and get sweet jobs and benefits and houses on hills. But then this other part of me flares up in defiance, like some sweaty boxing trainer wiping the blood from my cheeks, and spits in my face that I can do this. This, that, the other, the smallest, the biggest. I think that trainer is God in disguise, mostly because the me that I'm in a rut of being isn't nearly strong enough to stand up to my own doubts and proclaim with wild abandon that I am, in fact, not a screw-up.

The larger, meeker part of me sees everyone heading off down their perfectly straight, decided paths and I look at all the gravel poking through my worn shoes and the sky like lead in front of me. I have no idea where I'm going next. The small, poetic part searches for the beauty in this situation with a flashlight, but the beam just ricochets off that quasi-Commie iron curtain and blinds the meek me like the flash of a camera when I'm not ready to be photographed.

Then again, maybe that's the point. Maybe I was wired to walk through walls and face whatever demon or angel is on the other side. Lately, though, it feels like my circuits are shorting and I'm still going to be spouting all my pipe dreams when I'm wrought with frown wrinkles and surrounded by all the lists I've been making recently, both they and I strewn about in crumpled heaps.

Still a smaller part of me is banging against my ribs and begging for me to quit worrying about the future when I can't change it. And to trust my gut. Sometimes I can see myself wandering the planet alone for the rest of my life, knocking on closed doors and breaking in sealed windows and hoping some opportunity searchlight will graze over me and freeze for at least an instant.

I say I want all these things, yet that's all I'm doing. Saying things. Listing the books I want to read and the places I want to go and the things I want to do before I expire like milk on the shelf. I feel limited and like the tightrope I've been balancing on for a while now is tangling itself around my ankles and like I can't walk a straight line anymore. I'd probably just walk into that lead horizon anyway

but there's always a chance I am able to walk through it.

I've been reading about how to read poetry and I think maybe I'm not good enough

I still don't like coffee

My admiration for Coldplay, however seventh-grade it sounds, will never wane. Something about it is like sipping on some hot generic beverage, the way it permeates and calms everything down to a dull roar instead of those incessant, blaring sirens that ring through me and draw me to the rocks.

I've been making too many lists lately. I wonder if I'm on someone's list. List of things to learn to love, list of things to get rid of, New Years Resolutions (however breakable). Perhaps somebody is carving a list on that ominous skyline and it has great things in store for me. Perhaps I just have to keep walking blindly and trusting whatever hand is on the back of my neck, guiding me through the crowd I can't see.

Lord, I don't know which way I am going
Which way the river gonna flow
It's just seems that upstream, I keep rowing
Still got such a long way to go
Still got such a long way to go

Then that light hits your eye
I know, I swear,
We'll find somewhere the streets are paved with gold
Bullets fly, split the sky
But that's all right, sometimes,

sunlight comes streaming through the holes
-Coldplay, U.F.O

pinky promises don't mean much to alcoholics

but you did come tonight

you crouched beneath your hat and beard

i saw you there, between the bodies

and a smile stretched my face

i thought i tasted blood between my teeth

my mouth clamped shut for so long

you walked, that familiar clack echoing

and something swelled inside me

my kidney or appendix

my eyes flashed uncontrollably

scrambling to inscribe you on my brain

my liver flipped and remembered you

thanked you for that alcohol

we stood between the shadows

our shadows touching in ways we didn't want them to

the rain squelching beneath our feet

hooded girl and hatted boy

you told me you'd painted these walls

the lines so straight i expected blood to bead

as i touched them

i tried to remember everything you'd ever said

the neon sky above us humming

like uncertain laughter during a eulogy

told my brain i could never forget

because to forget your words was to forget

you

you touched my hand

i said i was so sad

and the air felt colder

your heart was muffled beneath your jacket

but it pulsed in your thumb

beating in stereo through my fingers and ears

the fog snaked in and out of light behind you

you stuttered a goodbye but i didn't tease

your eyes were the bluest i've seen them

the instant before you turned away

your hands jammed into your pockets

elbows out like broken wings

the raindrops fell from rooftops

and plucked the reflections of neon strings

floating slack in puddles

i swallowed the urge to call your name

but it went down the wrong pipe

and i sputtered inside

i watched your body grow small and blurry

careful not to blink