Pencils and Erasers

  Egos write in pen. Their lines are bold, sharp, and definitely permanent. It's almost as if the world can't find a way to smudge them. Well, that was me this Friday, heading into English class with the first vocabulary quiz right ahead of me. I walked in, just spewing confidence in every thought. I pictured my 100 written in ink before I'd even picked up my pencil to answer the questions. I literally told the teacher I would get 100. Fast forward fifteen minutes though, just to hear, "Anthony, I'm disappointed in you." Within the split of a second, my own pen marks, which I had thought were permanent, didn't look so lasting anymore.  This might sound weird or nerdy, but the thing about pencils is that they're more honest. They admit mistakes, unlike pens. They always leave plenty of room for erasers to come in and rework some of the lines that need to be edited. This quiz wasn't about vocabulary, it was about remembering that pride needs an eras...

A lot of times, people breeze through life just like the way we use pencils in class, with our head down, scribbling through blue college ruled lines, not genuinely thinking about what we're writing. Our pages fill up with grocery lists, annoying tasks, complaints, and piling homework, but we barely stop to see the story we're actually telling. Our routine becomes feel so natural, automatic, robotic, and even invisible. Now that's exactly what David Wallace warns us about in his speech This is Water , the danger of cruising through life on "default," becoming blind to the environment we swim in every day of our lives. The thing is, pencils aren't permanent, they always come with erasers. Wallace's lesson is fairly simple but truly life changing: you have the power to choose. All you have to do is look up from the scribbles and notice the water all around you, the frustrations of traffic, checkout lines, long days, and flip the story so that you can make it...

 Wars are mostly written in pen. They're bold, they're static, and they're permanent. The Vietnam War though, feels more like a pencil, kind of smudged and messy, leaving faint marks after attempts were made to erase it. It was an extremely controversial topic in American history, literally costing the lives of over 58,000 US troops, that caused scars no amount of text could encapsulate.      To keep the important lives of soldiers from getting forgotten in the war, they were given the Vietnam Veterans Memorial which is placed in Washington, D.C., in the year of 1982. When you first lay your eyes on it, the memorial's structure doesn't exactly look familiar like any other you may expect. This memorial doesn't have any marble generals or flying angles, it's actually just a long black wall made from granite that has soldiers names engraved into it, in the order of the date that they died in Vietnam. When visiting this historical work of art, people will never ...