I Am poem

I am willful and cunning
I wonder why pizza comes in a square box if it's round
I hear my brother playing mario kart next to me
I see a computer screen
I want my brother to turn the volume down
I am willful and cunning

I pretend that my phone isn't ringing at me right now
I feel the air conditioner
I touch my sprite in a styrofoam cup from sonic
I worry that my new shoes are going to give me blisters
I cry when my new shoes give me blisters
I am willful and cunning

I understand that it was my turn to do the laundry last night
I say to my dad "I'm going to do it after I'm done typing this"
I dream that this guy named Toby wants me to eat raw butter
I try to tell him no, because that is gross
I hope that this hang-nail will stop hurting
I am willful and cunning

thINK Assignment # 3 : Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.

To Kill a Mockingbird, for me, was a pleasant surprise. 

It was the first classic I'd cracked open with legitimate determination to see the end to since I'd abandoned Black Beauty in the fifth grade (I suppose I should say I didn't consider Lolita, my ninth grade "banned book", much of a classic). In all honesty, my expectations were low; I prepared myself for page after page of mothballed nostalgia, gruelingly outdated dialogue, and characters and times I would most certainly be unable to relate to.

But, as I said above, I was pleasantly surprised. To Kill a Mockingbird was a true page turner, an engrossing story that handled the darkest issues of the times with wonderful voice - that of a guiltless, however feisty, child. 

I repeatedly picked up the theme the "death/conviction of innocence" — evident throughout the story until the very end, when Boo Radley stepped out to become an unlikely hero. A man condemned as the town's ghost story was the one to rescue Scout and her brother Jem from being killed by Bob Ewell in the end, revealing that everything is not always as it seems. The book closed with Scout wishing she would have thanked Boo Radley for the gifts he'd given her and her brother after she saw him for the first and last time. 

And so though it was not outwardly said, and the character of Boo Radley was without a doubt an enigmatic one, I could not help but see him as the story's second Mockingbird, of a sorts. Certainly, he exhibited no maliciousness, was not guilty of indifference, did not display even a questionable motive — he simply protected a couple of children of whom he was fond. He was not the monster in the closet the town would have him be. To me, he seemed an exemplary man of kind heart and a misunderstood outer shell. It was, after all, his act of heroism that gave Scout faith in her neighbors again. 

Similarly, the humble, hard-working Tom Robinson was sentenced to death for an unforgivable crime on the basis of exactly two pieces of evidence; the illiterate word of a white-trash girl, and the difference in skin color between she and he. The town of Maycomb would not stand to have its ubiquitous law broken — that every black man is guilty until proven innocent, and even then, he is still guilty. And in the process of this debauched trial, a trio of children had their innocence shaken by their firsthand exposure to the hate, discrimination, and injustice of the society in which they live in.