Song reflection

This song helped me share my stories about moving and how i had to leave things behind. It also showed people how much i value them as friends event though i miss my old ones.

Song "Au Revoir"

Song Lyrics and Anaylisis

'AU REVOIR'
Friends forever
That's what we used to say
New friends were just whatever
Thinking about moving the next day
Hating my parents for not giving me my way.

The ocean was so beautiful through the clouds in the sky
I really wish I never had to say good-bye
My life-long rule is "friendship never ends"
But I have also learned life comes with many twists and bends

CHORUS:
Bonjour Hawaii au revoir to old friends
Hello sandy beaches
I greet you again

Meeting new people
Is not always that easy
You got to be happy and breezy

Living on the mainland was a lot of fun
But im happy to be back living under the shining sun

CHORUS:
Bonjour Hawaii au revoir to old friends
Hello sandy beaches
I greet you again

Four years later
And the time has flown by
I made great friends but thinking about the old ones makes me cry

Moving is a challenge
But it works out in the end
Cuz there are always those letters that you can send

CHORUS:
Bonjour Hawaii au revoir to old friends
Hello sandy beaches
I greet you again

Im glad I moved to this island in the pacific
I miss my old friends
But I made new ones that are terrific

ANAYLISIS

Although I have moved many times before, moving from Maryland to Hawaii was by far my toughest move. My parents kept telling me that everything would be okay, and that I would make new friends easily. Even so, I thought of nothing but leaving my friends and home; tears rolling down my face as our gray Honda Pilot pulled out of our long, stone driveway.

Throughout my life I have moved five times. My first move was from Vermont to Hawaii. Next I moved to Boston, then to Maryland, and finally I moved back to Hawaii. I have found that that the older I get, the stronger bonds I make with my friends, thus making it harder and harder to move. I also have realized that no matter how horrible the move seems at the moment, you will always make new friends and you will always fabricate strong bonds with wonderful people anywhere you go.

This knowledge is what I based my song, "AU REVOIR" on. The move that I picked to recount was the one move that I remember best, the move from Maryland back to Hawaii. I envisioned the world would fall down around me as I sat in my pool of misery on the eleven-hour plane ride. Leaving my best friend was probably one of the hardest things that I have ever done. Even so, there was a small spark of excitement in the back of my mind as I envisioned sandy beaches and swaying palm trees with no hint of a pressing winter.

My first year at my new school was exciting but at the same time petrifying. That is the one thing that I have never learned how to change. The first year at any school for any grade is challenging and guaranteed to be the worst year that you will have at that school. Kids are never extremely nice to new students and it is extremely hard to create strong bonds with anyone in under a year. Also, kids usually have their own cliques and are skeptical to let new people in even in the younger grades. I decided to leave most of the depressing parts of meeting new people and struggling through the first year out of my song. I was going for an angle of happiness and trying show that even though times can be rough you will always make great friends, even if it takes a couple years, you just have to be patient.

I made the move from Maryland about four and a half years ago. I still miss some things about it such as public school, the amazing park in the center of my perfect neighborhood, my old house, and especially my friends, but I am very glad I moved. If I had not moved I would probably never had met the amazing friends that I have now. The bond I have with my friends is special and I could not find that anywhere else. What I am trying to say is, moving is tough but the results can be some of the best things that will ever happen to you. Anyone can make new friends even if they move to an island in the middle of the Pacific.

Sonnet: You are perfect

Boy your eyes do shine blue as ocean seas
calm expression filling my heart with love
that gold hair doth blows in the summer breeze
flying toward the heavens like wild doves

Lips soft and sweet as the plumpest pillows
Stained and tinted a rich cherry red
Smile mysterious as the ancient willow
Your memory rests peacefully in my head

Your kind personality I admire
Your perfect mind filled with amazing thoughts
You’re the perfect package that I desire
Your intellect is what makes you so hot

Forever in my heart you'll remain
Even when you're old and need a cane.

Analysis for Sonnet

While writing this sonnet, Kim and I were thinking about what our perfect guy would be like. The first thing I thought about was what he looked like. First we knew that the guy had to have a big and happy smile that lighted up a room. One of the countless things that makes me think a guy is hot is their eyes, what color they are and if they light up when he smiles. Blue is my favorite eye color, but it has to be the right kind of blue. The eyes can't just be a blank blue color with no expression; they have to be sprinkled with flecks of different shades, like the ocean. Soft and wavy hair is what came to me next. Hair that blows in the wind is always hot on a guy, but it can't be too long and if it is short, it will not blow. I think that using the word doth softens up the sentence and makes it sound like the boy has absolutely gorgeous hair. When I picture a perfect guy, the back round in my mind is of luscious fluffy clouds, sort of like heaven with pure white birds circling around.

Although we first thought of how our perfect guy looks, we smoothly changed our topic to be about how a guy acts and behaves. If you met, in your standards, an amazingly hot guy and they had a boring or bad attitude, you could never love them no matter how good looking they were. Guys that are secretive and mysterious always keep you on edge and never get boring. The perfect guy is also nice and considerate of you and how you act. Getting to know a guys buoyant and wonderful personality can turn an ugly guy into the most gorgeous guy you have ever seen. On top of all this, being smart is also a strong and wanted trait in a guy. Not a guy that is so smart he makes you (the girl) feel dumb. A guy who always argues when he knows he is right is not a positive trait. They can be smart but not rub it in your face. Sharing their thoughts with us is always important as well and we don’t want them to be secretive about everything with us.

The absolutely perfect guy has all of these many traits. These traits all together, are the perfect package. A guy like this would be loved forever even when they are old because there smarts, love, and air of mystery would never die out. Someone who had captured my heart because their personality, and not just their looks, had made them perfect to me would stay in my heart forever, even when they were old and gray.

The Secret Goldfish

There once was a little boy who was called Billy. He loved animals of all sorts, cats and dogs, even pigs and horses. His favorite animals however, were fish. About two years ago, Billy had three fish. Their names were Phoebe, Allie, and Holden. Now, Billy did not have many friends so he enjoyed watching his fish. Day after day he wrote stories about them, their habits and behaviors in their own little world inside a glass bowl. Phoebe was a beautiful angelfish, who, if you asked Billy, was an extraordinarily smart fish. She was fun and athletic and always happy. Allie was Billy's favorite fish; he was a blue tang fish and the prettiest fish of the bunch, with his blue and yellow coloring. Allie was definitely Billy's favorite fish. He was kind and gracious to all the other fish he met. He was smart and funny, but serious when he needed to be. In Billy's world Allie was "the perfect fish" and no fish could ever match up to this wonderful specimen. The eldest of the Fish was Holden. This glistening golden goldfish was a bad student "in Billy's made up school of fish," but he was brilliant in his own way and loved his two fish buddies. He looked up to Billy for food and the comfort of a human boy.

Billy was a very sharing kid and let whoever wanted to see his fish look as much as they pleased. He enjoyed sharing his fish stories with his parents and people that came to the house. He would point at the fish and describe every last detail of their made up lives to any stranger that happened to pass by the house. The people were amazed at Billy's ability to write and always talked to his parents about how he was a budding writer. His parents would just shrug their shoulders and mumble something like, "I guess." All Billy cared about was that his fish were happy and looked after. As long as he trusted the person that was looking after them during the day, he would go to school and play with his little friends, but he always came home excited to watch and observe his beloved fish.

One day after running home and slamming the screen door in his wake, Billy noticed that Allie wasn’t swimming around with a big fishy smile on his face. For Allie, this was a very uncommon event. This cheerful and intelligent fish always made it a point to spread warmth to everyone. Billy quickly ran to his parents screaming at the top of his lungs, "WE NEED A VET, WE NEED A VET!" After calming him down, his parents announced that they would bring Allie to a vet, knowing in their minds that Allie did not have a chance to make it.

At the vet's office, the vet, Dr. Seuss, was very sympathetic and said to Billy. "I will do all that I can to help Allie, but the tiny fish will need to spend the night at the Animal Hospital." Billy urged his parents to let him spend the night with his dearest fish, but his parents insisted that he come home and sleep in his bed saying, "you need to come home and take care of your other two fish."

That night Billy did not sleep a wink. He paced his room back and forth worrying himself about Allie and how the poor helpless little guy was doing. Even though he knew he would not sleep he set his alarm for 7 am, the time that the vet clinic was open to the public. As soon as the alarm went off he sat bolt upright and ran into his parents room. Jumping up and down up and down, screeching at them to wake up, he made his parents very unhappy. His mom and dad mumbled something he could not understand while lazily rolling themselves out of their king sized bed.

Ring Ring, Ring Ring , went the phone in Billy's moms ear as they anxiously waited for some sort of news about Allie. When he heard his mother's voice chatting up the receptionist at the front desk of the clinic, he impatiently tugged on her arm. Then he added a sarcastic eye roll uttering just quiet enough so the person on the other side of the phone couldn't hear… "Mom!!!!" When his mother hung up the phone with a grim expression on her face, he knew that the verdict was not good. This assumption was confirmed with his mother's subtle shake of her head to his father who was also in the kitchen, wearing a mauve bath robe casually leaning on the counter, coffee in hand.

That day Billy didn’t talk to anyone, except his fish. If a person walked into his room he would stand in front of the fish tank and tell the person not to look at them. Suddenly, whenever strangers came over to visit he would make it a point to keep the fish away from them. He kept his stories secret and locked them in a drawer that no one else had the key too. The worst change however was that he absolute refused to go to the school. Before others could watch his fish for the day but now he did not trust anyone to take care of them. He especially did not let anyone look at Holden, he was the only male fish and now he was his favorite. He never dreamed of being a writer anymore he just wanted to stay home and watch his fish. Billy was a sad little boy for a very long time. He tried to hide it and to be cheerful like little boys should be, but everyone could see that something was wrong.

Eventually Billy went to school without protest and played with his friends. He unlocked his drawer with his stories and continued to write them about his two other fish. It took him almost two years for Billy to be completely normal again and to be a cheerful little boy like he should be. People now said, "Remember when that little Billy down the street was in his funk, I have never seen a boy so upset about a fish!" Everyone was happy that Billy was back and that he could share his wonderful fish stories with the world. Billy took this as a sign, he knew that when he grew up he would became a famous writer and share his knowledge with people about the loss of loved ones, he knew he would tell them that everything would eventually be ok.


Analysis

For my paper, I wrote the story, The Secret Goldfish. In the beginning of The Catcher in The Rye, Holden talks very fondly of his brother, DB. Holden says that The Secret Goldfish is about a little boy that is very protective of his goldfish and won't let anyone look at it. I think that DB wrote this story one or two years after Allies death. If he wrote it the way I did, it could symbolize how when Allie died, DB was very protective of Holden "his goldfish." He was scared that Holden would die the same way that Allie did. When Allie died, I think Holden became his favorite and he could not bear to see anything happen to him. I think that in his Hollywood days DB wanted to share with the world that everyone will lose someone at some point in time, and that it may take a while but everything will eventually be ok again, and you may even became happy like you were before. I think that writing this story was a way for DB to let out all of his feelings. When Allie died, Holden and BD became closer. He expressed himself in a way that others could understand and read about. By making it about fish he did not have to stress too much about writing about the actual appearance of Allie and how he was like as a human, which would make his story unbearable for him to write. If I were writing a story about my experiences and myself, I would pick a name that was as far from my personality and name as I could. This way I would not have to look at it as If I am that character. This is why I think that DB would have picked a short little boy name that has no meaning. When I think of DB I think of a smart intellectual guy that is extraordinary in many ways. When I hear Billy, however, I see a picture of a little boy working at a farm in cute little overalls smiling without a care in the world. Maybe by writing this story, DB was letting go of Allie and letting the little "Billy" with the sad and painful memories out, while keeping the good memories in. Holden speaks fondly of his brother's book in The Catcher in the Rye and I think that this is because he feels the same way and he can connect with DB through this story. 

Ann

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you will probably want to know is how it all happened. How it all started in the first place, but I don’t really feel like going into all that right now. To tell the truth it bores me because I've already gone through how it started about 50 times in my head. It all happened when I was 10. Believe it or not, I was a great gymnast and I could do flips, turns and all that fancy crap. Competing against other gymnasts and winning was what I lived for. During that time I was a level four gymnast and I was pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. I think my coaches thought this too because after a big meet they wanted me too skip level five and go straight to level six. When I was told this, my coach, Ann, smiled at me like I was some silly girl that didn’t know anything. She treated us all like that, my teammates and I. Just because we were little doesn’t mean we didn’t have any clue as to what was going on. Ann was our conditioning coach and she made us work our little butts off. When we were all complaining after a workout, she always said "If you want to be better, you have to get stronger." Sympathy was not a word in her vocabulary and although I loved gymnastics and liked to be pushed hard, she went a little to far overboard.


Ann now had an excuse to train me even harder because she could train me for level five and level six. I was now at the gym almost 25 hours a week… that’s when the pain started coming. At first I didn’t tell anyone because I was afraid I would be considered a wimp. After a while though, I couldn't take it anymore, I went to my mom (who is a doctor) and told her about it. Without much empathy, she got me a boot from the hospital that I could work out in. I wore the ugly blue and white ankle support one day to gym. Ann came running up to me telling me to take it off. Supposedly it was going to disrupt my balance on the beam or something. I replied with a hint of annoyance that my mother had gotten it for me and it helped. Of course her picky, tough little mind did not care that my ankle was hurting, and she insisted with a red face, that I could only wear it if some fancy ankle doctor had prescribed it. Now maybe I haven’t described this 20-year-old lady very well. She was a pretty, blond, petit, muscular woman, who could scare the hell out of anyone! With her dazzling smile she could pull on the charm when she needed to, for the other coaches and our parents, but when she got us alone I swear, you could see her eyes roll back and her head spin around as if she was the devil incarnate. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.

Two weeks later, after working like crazy with an agonizingly painful ankle, I knew something was up. Ann was crazy, like I said, and wouldn't give me a break even after I insisted that one was necessary about eight billion times. In a way I respected her, mainly because anyone who didn’t would be sorry. So my teammates and I did whatever she said to do, making faces at her scary back whenever we thought she couldn't see us.

A month went by and my ankle wasn’t getting any better, and Ann was getting tougher. I stood up to her one day, and surprisingly she relented, saying," Ok, you can rest your ankle." I was all happy until she added the unexpected twist, "by working out the same on the trampoline." For weeks I went to work out with unsteady footing, making my ankle strain even harder. Eventually I would come home crying after practice because of the pain. One day my mom took me to the doctor to see what was up. The doctor pronounced that I had Achilles tendonitis; I had pulled the main tendon (Achilles tendon) in my ankle. The worst part was it would not heal until I wore an annoyingly large, cumbersome black boot for quite some time.

As I was driven to my next practice, my mother told me to take it easy and just watch practices for at least a month. I could just see the look on Ann's face, scowling at me uttering, "Take that boot off! You wont be able to flip with it on." The actual event of confronting her, with boot, went something very similar to what I had anticipated. Even after given the doctors note, she still wanted me to keep on going but "a little lighter, so my ankle could rest. " Well, you would think oh, that’s great, she gets to rest but no, a rest for Ann was making up for what I couldn't do with my legs, squats, jumps, flips, and all, by working out my upper body. My thoughts wandered during the lecture she was giving me about a new workout schedule. I saw fellow gym mates flipping and tumbling all around me, some getting scolded while other coaches excitedly announced that their pupils event had been great, perfect even. Randomly jumping back into reality, registering who was speaking to me, a realization spread over me. Looking into her piercing influential eyes, I decided it wasn’t worth it. I figured out that just because she was older than me, and extremely scary, I didn’t need to put my self through any more stress, and I shouldn't risk injuring myself permanently.

The day I decided to tell Ann, I was a mess! I didn’t want to let her down, but I knew I had to quit, or at least take a break so my ankle could recover. Our green Suburban pulled to a halt outside the back entrance of the gym. I went in first to tell Ann, and my mom was going to come in later to "back me up." I raced into the gym, so I could just get it over with. As I ran across the smelly blue carpet with my awkward boot, I tripped on the bowl of chalk dust used for grip on the uneven bars. Chalk whipped by my feet, falling like snow, turning a section of the dark blue carpet the color of a baby boy's blanket. I hit the floor with a bang. When I looked up a scary figure was standing over me, a scowl on her face. I stood up shaking, thinking, "Oh great, now she's mad."

Standing up to Ann was a big event in my not so horrible life. My ankle healed after a month or so and I went back to gymnastics for a while. Through all of this, I learned that it is always better to trust myself, my own instincts, and not just follow whatever someone tells met to do. Ann was surprisingly understanding that day and now I know a lot more about who I am. I am stronger for the experience and can stick up for myself, even against crazy grownups who think they know everything.

CoMiC LiFe