The Harsh Reality

Hello again! It seems my obsession with The Great Gatsby has taken a rather interesting turn: fan fiction. Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about this one, so I’ll leave you to be the judge of it!   Tom ground his teeth, willing the order of the king, of his father, to be untrue. As the eldest, and only, prince of the kingdom, he had no choice but to obey his king’s latest orders, orders that included an arranged marriage to the perfect, golden girl. To Princess Daisy Fay. Only the best of the best for the best. Beside him, Nick struggled to hold in his laugh. Of course, he was to marry Nick’s cousin. The only problem with this whole arrangement was the stupid courtesan. The young lady who, Nick very well knows, would throw a fit beyond belief if she found out about this new development. This must have been a fitting punishment then for what he’d done with that lady. “Serves you right for the way you’ve treated Lady Myrtle. Now you get the privilege of marrying a woman no o...

Hello! I am once again here to whine about The Great Gatsby, and while I think talking about how rich kids have severe parental issues is cool, I don’t exactly think I have an opinion about that (sorry Annabella).  Let’s be real – if I could grow up filthy rich, with the condition being that I see my parents once a year, I would take it. Instead, I want to talk about Gatsby. I get that, in the story, Gatsby is supposed to be the hero, but I prefer to think of him as a second lead - the one who went from rags to riches, who almost got the girl, then had everything ripped out of his reach. Obviously, this would make Tom the main character of the story and while the man is despicable, I don’t think I would mind too much.   At the end of the story, it’s again Tom who gets Daisy, not Gatsby, despite everything he sacrificed for her. In fact, I was glad that Daisy ended up with Tom. Fitzgerald really emphasized the idea that the past is the past. Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship ...

Ok, let’s talk for a second. I was reading the Great Gatsby on a Saturday night-like most people with any ounce of brain matter do-when I came across a peculiar refence to “the valley of ashes”. The first time I read it, my mind assumed that Nick was mentioning the city of New York, describing it as dark and gloomy. His reference of Doctor TJ Eckleburg’s eyes on a billboard solidified those beliefs. In reality, it turns out that Nick was employing the tool of irony. The nineteenth century was the center of the industrialization movement and the color of ashes-grey-represented the dust from the factories. You could even look at it from a different perspective – a valley is located between two mountains. The mountains, in the case of The Great Gatsby, reference the filthy rich of society including Nick, Daisy, Jordan, Tom, and Gatsby himself. The valley on the other hand represented the working class. The people who worked the factories, and the factories that made it a “valley of ashes”...

As someone who is currently in AP Calculus BC, I completely detest the subject and wish it was never invented. It’s so bad that I wouldn’t even wish it on my worst enemy. Regardless, when your English teacher asks you to rewrite a page of any textbook in informal language, you’ll also find yourself turning to math. Here is a short excerpt (perhaps the only one I understand) from said Calculus textbook. (Calculus: Seventh Edition, Stewart)   Now here’s my ‘informal version’: After that long chapter of how limits happen, let’s talk about ways to solve them, starting with graphing and data tables. The graph in Figure 1 is referenced to as f(x) and its equation is f(x)=x^2-x+2. The data table shows the values that the equation gives for numbers close to 2 – ie. 2.001, 3.001, and 1.999. It is important to note that the equation was never set to 2. This is because, by definition, a limit is a number that is approached from both sides of a graph. So, by observing the output valu...