Donut Identify Me With My Weird Blog Theme

I have always heard that high school is a good time to find your identity. However, similarly to Hester's situation, a high schooler does not simply find his or her own identity, but is instead branded with one. I’ve noticed that many times, people are known more by an activity that they participate in or an event that impacted their life than their name. Unfortunately, I am a hypocrite in this case.

        I don’t go to football games. Maybe it’s because I’m scared of that mono-infested donkey head or whatever animal it is, or maybe because I can’t see over anyone’s head in the student section of the bleachers. I am possibly the most ignorant student in all of Troy High when it comes to football; I can only faintly tell you how it works and what its objective is. In a school of 1.4 thousand people, it is easy for me to be completely unfamiliar with Troy High’s football and the people involved in it, while still maintaining a (pitiful) social life. Someone could give me name of a football player, and I’d just blink and stare back. However, if he or she said “Number 99? Neon-pink-spandex-shorts-for-spirit-week dude?” I’d automatically be able to envision the face of the person—forever pink spandex football dude number 99 instead of his name, Austin Mahoney. There is so much more to Mr. Mahoney that I will never know about, but he will never be able to escape the identity that I hypothetically branded him with.

        Maybe Mr. Mahoney will one day go to college in Austria and create a new path for himself, but he must not forget that high school is just a microcosm of the “real world”. Unless he beats society to its own game, the cycle will repeat, and Mr. Mahoney will be branded once again.

You do you, Austin Mahoney. 

“Donut Stereotype: They’re All Demeaning and Offensive”

As the daughter of two Asian immigrant parents, I am no stranger to stereotypes. I've probably heard them all--short, bad driver, smarter than average. For years, I've told myself that I would defy these stereotypes—maybe not the short part, but “I will be a wonderful driver, thank you very much.” However, the more that I think about it, the more that I realize that I am not ashamed to fall into every single Asian stereotype. 

(I don't know martial arts, but I wish I did).

Stereotypes were not created out of thin air—they are stereotypes because they are common. Do all Canadians have a fiery passion for hockey? No, but a lot of them do. Are all Caucasian girls clad in a long Northface parka and Uggs in the winter time? No, but a lot of them are. We create our own stereotypes—people did not originally jump to conclusions about a certain group of people to shame them, but instead to speak what they know and what they have observed. I’m not saying that it is acceptable to stereotype. However, I am saying that it is inevitable. Everybody does, and everybody will, the difference in it being conscious or subconscious. How the certain groups of people react to the stereotypes are what causes the dramatics. It is not uncommon to see these kinds of posts that joke about the actions of the “basic white girl”. Conversely, if an article was posted about the actions of the “basic black girl”, the “basic Indian girl”, etc., the internet would explode. One article is classified as a list of humorous stereotypes, but the others are classified as just flat-out racist. If a filmmaker portrays a new Asian immigrant with broken English and a bowl of rice for lunch, it is considered an offensive and racist stereotype. However, if the filmmaker instead portrays the new immigrant with perfect English and a slice of lasagna for lunch, it is still considered offensive and racist because the filmmaker tried so hard to defy the stereotypes that he made it seem like the Asian culture is inferior. All in all, there is no way to win with stereotypes, but there is also no way to avoid it. 

Donut think too hard: Is Your Reality a Lie?

Where does the fine line between truth and fiction fall? 

The answer is no where. There is no line between truth and fiction.

With the power of technology, language, and anonymity, rumors and lies now hold a powerful place in everyone's daily lives. How can one tell if an article holds the whole truth? If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many of those words are untrue? Take for example, the story of Zilla van den Born. This Buzzfeed article tells her story of how she was able to trick all her friends and family that she was on a vacation in East Asia for six weeks just with the power of Photoshop. Describing this experiment as "the ultimate fakecation", the article reveals the pictures she used to pretend as if she was interacting with the people and the activities of East Asia.

However, even an articles that "reveals the truth" can hold its own white lies. Another article contradicts the Buzzfeed article by actually mentioning the motive of van den Born. She did not do it as just a joke to fool her friends and family, but instead to prove "how easily reality gets distorted". It isn't difficult to find the irony in this situation.

In Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, O'Brien utilizes the power of verisimilitude. After chapters followed by chapters of intense passion and exhaustive imagery and detail, he suddenly reveals that his book is not a memoir. Later, I learned that the book isn't just interlaced with fiction; it was 90% fiction. He even applied metafiction (basically the fancy word for fiction-ception), which, personally, made me put the book down to rethink my priorities. But why did TTTC's reveal of the untruth of his novel boggle the reader so much? What makes the novel any more convincing than any other realistic-fiction story? 

O'Brien's trick was to utilize the overlap between fiction and truth. He looked for elements that could exist at both ends in the spectrum, and the big factor was emotion. 

The world has many barriers: mountains, the ocean, language, culture, to list a few. However, emotion is universal. Sadness from a young American girl will cause the same ache as the sadness from an old Tibetan monk. Fiction contains the events of imagination but the emotions of truth. O'Brien took advantage of this knowledge and extracted empathy from the reader, something that readers do not usually encounter in regular works of fiction.

So, knowing that fiction can easily cross over to reality, can reality cross over to fiction? The scary conclusion is that reality and truth are based off perspective. What one perceives to be truth may be different from what another perceives it as. In this situation, parts of one's everyday life is a lie.

It's hard not to over-think life after realizing that our every day lives are paradoxes. What more do I not know about my existence? If I can't control my own truth, does that mean I can't also control my own fate? Are we simply the virtual simulations of human life in a more powerful force's game of Sims 24? 

As of now, thinking too hard will do no good. As long as one perceives themselves as truthful, he/she will be able to live in the bliss of fiction.