School Assignment-essay on Robinson Jeffers

For a link to Robinson Jeffers' poem "Shine, Perishing Republic", go to http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Robinson-Jeffers/3011

In Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Shine, Perishing Republic”, readers view Jeffers’ grim verdict upon America and its humanity—a molten mass of corruption, with its way of society, directions and tendencies twisted from the original “flower” to become the hideously monstrous “insufferable master”.

The theme of Robinson Jeffers’ poem remains true today. Though the “monster” threatening today’s American humanity may be less grimly expressed and not nearly so much heralds of doom, there is still a monster, and one that has not yet been defeated. Today this monster is America’s wastefulness and arrogance.

In the beginning we were the explorers rather than the destroyers. Now we are consuming enormous amounts of processed food mass-made for frequently overweight American citizens. The image of the farmer’s homemade, wholesome breakfast of perpetually growing heaps of pancakes is replaced by a Coke or a coffee.

We process food until the wholesomeness is replaced by a wrapper, and sell the food to clamoring crowds of America’s grown-up children, who have been corrupted by the ages. We do not bother to throw the wrapper into the plastic garbage bag crafted by another country, but we leave it on the ground for another to pick up.

Not only do we squander resources in our stubborn profligacy, we have squandered lives; the Iraq War was the spawn of—at least somewhat—our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. In many cases, we misuse the powers in technology we have discovered; cars have come to represent our needless destruction of the environment.

Our arrogance has also led us to our downfall. We refuse to negotiate with countries that do not bend to our will or ally with us; America is generally considered the most spoilt of nations. We persist in arguing for causes merely conjecture; we must sulk in the corner or whine on the stage if our desires are not fulfilled.

Though Jeffers’ view is stark, it is one that has lived on through the ages before us, and will no doubt live on to plague the generations after us on and on and on.

School Assignment

Today we were learning about words with origins from other countries. Each one of these paragraphs uses words originating from France, India, and Spain/Mexico.

FRENCH: She was, they said, too gaudy for her own good, the prodigal daughter, who flaunted her faux fur with a smile upon lipstick-ravaged lips, and strode about the Eiffel Tower as if it were her own. The cafés welcomed her with encores aplenty, eyeing her false leather purse so well-stocked with hopes for coins. Paris fitted her, they said, with sparkling lights and romantic nights and the cries of "Bon Appetit" heralding banquets of snails. And still her dreams and hopes were lost in the depths of ennui, gone like a puff of smoke from the notoriously ever-present French cigarette.

HINDI: Ganesh's pajamas were finely made. They were made of gold silk from China embroidered in red with pictures of Shiva the Destroyer. He preferred the more benign apperance of his old sleepwear, plain cotton embroidered with an image of the slightly overweight elephant deity Ganesh. Though his home, a bungalow of mud brick and grass, was small, every gap in the barely-chinked wall was an entrance for nightmares.

Spanish: Jove was the envy of all the boys in San Diego. A macho figure, he claimed the muscles jutting sharply from his arms were the results of one of the many grisly murders he had committed over the years. He also bragged about defeating a vicious armadillo, wrestling the large and intimidating anonymous figure who lurked in the school courtyard, and knocking down a more innocent plum tree. All of these, he thought, were quite machismo acts. Lifted by this feeling, he swaggered through his favorite alcove, tucked in the garden of the "Forbidden Pub," and did not notice two police cars approaching.

Okay, I admit it.



I've been having a pretty fun time in New York. From escapades in Central Park to appearing on the Big Idea (CNBC) to a round-up of the day at the classy restaurant "Moda" (at Flatotel New York), it hasn't been too bad at all.

Just now we came back from a carriage ride in New York. A majestic steed, white with a dappled back (named Whitey), deigned to pull us through the picteresque (though somewhat rutted) paths of Central Park as my mom yakked away with the driver.

Tomorrow I'm going on another lark at the New York Book Expo. I'm also doing an article for the Time For Kids Reporter's Talent Contest about the Expo, which required a lengthy outline (which I did on casually decorated Flatotel notepads).

I'll deign to post the article on the blog as soon as it's strained, tamed, and maimed to the same standards as any intellectual's treatise. I haven't even begun--you'll excuse me, because the Book Expo hasn't, either.

Speaking of media, etc., I appeared on CNBC's Big Idea show just this morning. It's airing Thursday night, starting ten pm Eastern Time, so if any of you guys have a networth of at least--okay, I'm kidding. I henceforth command you lowly peons to WATCH IT!

That is, if you have cable.

I don't.

Thrice-Told Tales of the Big Apple

Having sadly neglected my blogging duty, I again take keyboard in hand and proceed to tell this audience of today's events.

I was invited to the "Big Idea" program on CNBC recently. Today we boarded the plane at a pitiful seven AM to charge through the clouds at New York City. This is my fourth time in the Big Apple and I must admit, I hope to no offense, that I did not anticipate the plane journey with much happiness. Neither did I feel particularly reasured when we took off, leaving bloomingly bright Seattle-Tacoma Airport behind us.

It is currently, I believe, seventy something degrees in the humid weather, but no hot weather is pleasant with the sound of a suburb sprinkler replaced by honking horns, the smell of a summer's freshly cut grass forfeited for the exhaust of a limo. And, of course, overshadowing all of these petty complaints, no summer day, not even one bedecked in cookies and cream, silks and satins, could be as pleasant without my sister, and my dad alongside us.

Speaking of Adrianna, my older sister, I came up with this the other day (believe it was Monday)--

"The woodpecker is to tree as Adrianna is to me."

This quite accurately represents sibling rivalry, although how do you like this one:

"The woodpecker is to tree as Republicans are to democracy."

Okay, a little bit offensive, and probably not true (in some cases.) But what else rhymes with "tree"?

In any case, back to business. Speaking of which, we're in the business room in our "cosmopolitan and contemporary" NYC hotel, Flatotel. My mom pronounces it "Flotel". While it's seven nineteen PM right now, it's four nineteen in Seattle, I think.

More updates later.

ADORA

The war in Iraq was a mindless invasion.

George Bush cited "weapons of mass destruction" as a major reason for invading Iraq. However, India, China, Pakistan, and North Korea all harbor weapons of mass destruction, and, while we might sometimes act less than chivalrous to the leaders of these nations, I don't recall an invasion (not that we should invade yet another country, of course.) As it turned out, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at all.

Soldiers have been dying in Iraq at an alarming rate. Lives are being lost for a war that was begun on the magic carpet of a president's suspicion. According to an Associated Press count, of Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007, at least 3,431 members of the U.S. military have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war in March 2003.

The war has costed us $400 billion, not mentioning fallen soldiers and the civilians killed in suicide bombings. This number is bound to grow as we continue along the winding, seemingly never-ending path of the Iraq War. A gravelly road. The Bush Administration implied Saddam Hussein, former ruler of Iraq, had ties to al-Qaeda, and that overthrowing him and his administration would lead to democratic rule in the Middle East, decreasing terrorist attacks and terrorism over all. However, CIA and US State Department reports didn't find anything to support an operation connection between Hussein and al-Qaeda.

I believe the war has been a combined catastrophe of hopelessness and hurdles, mindlessness and mistakes. Everyday the radio blares another casualty of war, another son or sister, father, mother. People all around the world look at America as the prodigal country, the gambler of blood, so that the term "Mission Accomplished" is, alas, "Mission Gone Wrong."

I do love "dw" words immensely, though, at the moment, I can only think of two, "dwelling" and "dwindling", both of which I use quite a bit. The word "dwelling" seems to conjure in mind an image of a a moss-covered cottage, hidden by the thorns of long-long ago, and "dwindling"--well, dwindling food supplies, perhaps, and a warehouse riddled by a trillionaire's greed. Speaking of conjured images, today we did a project in class focusing on writing about a time in which we imagined ourseves as something else when we looked at something. I looked at a map and immediately imagined myself as a cartographer shut up in a tower drawing with a feather pen on a sheet of vellum. (As a cartographer, this is rather heavy on animal products. Adrianna would cringe.) I copied and pasted mine into here (by the way, it's third person. "She" is myself):
She looked at the map inquisitively and an image came into her mind, a sage of sorts bent over a sheet of fine vellum like that of the days of the lore of gods, a sheet like that from the days when maps were drawn by hand by sages in sepulchers. She was the sage, in a robe crinkled with the use of an eon, layered in a film of dust like sand on a mussel’s shell. She wielded a pen of ink from a river of thought, thoughts so sharp that a sword of Hephaestus’s make could not compare. Slowly the Mongols crept across the wrinkled vellum border; slowly the ink filtered through so Luxembourg, Andorra, lived; the blue Danube waltzed its way across in ink of blue jay-blue; the pilgrims inched across to Plymouth Rock, and slowly, Lewis and Clark made their way past the prairie dogs. New Lands of centuries; deserts of millenniums; names upon the sepia vellum in a spidery script. The map was spread across the table, the table’s wood fine but insignificant to the wise, with jaded minds; all the lands and all the men that maps had turned to mimes. The map progressed like a sage’s action, not so quick as thought, and, quick as a sage’s action, the sage turned to face a weather-beaten table marked by a day of scratches, faces she knew to be of no recent renown, and the map upon the wall that had conjured the magic.

We forced our teacher to write one as well. Hers was quite funny; the image sprouted from a flawless flower planter, exploring a world of TV microwaved popcorn dinners and stark banality. In class, I won the Review Quiz for the third time in the row. At the moment we are studying the Civil War and its many characters. My favorite, so far, is General Winfield Scott, otherwise known (my preferred title for the man) as Fuss n' Feathers. His name is of much debate in our classroom. We are unsure of whether it is spelled Winifred or Winfield, having seen it spelled both ways. We went on a walk today after dinner, with our mom, dad, and Adrianna, and played a merry game of Tag in the "safer" boundaries of Nike Park (namely, the playground). Adrianna, disobedient soul she is, brought her bike despite protests, and was forced to lug it back down (mostly rocky terrain, and too dark for pleasant riding). It was sunset, beautiful in its piercing red (though as we trudged back, grinning soldiers from a warfield looking forward to rewards, it was much later, dusk), red like the strawberry popsicles we licked triumphantly back home. Sadly, the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train, a slow journey through picteresque landscape on train, will soon be closed down ("why doesn't King County buy it and make it a commuter train?" our dad says, pounding his fist upon the table in a fit of intellectual rage), to make way for a highway. In any case, it's ten thirty seven PM.

The weather is getting somewhat better. The clouds, in the morning, broke up to reveal a beautifully bright sky of velvety shimmers that seemed as fragile as dandelion seeds in the wind. Thankfully, the blue sky held. After eating a lunch of pasta, salmon, and black cherry juice, we set off on an expedition for the awe-inspiring, ballad-worthy, Nike Park. A fearsome place full of rough bushes and thorns, we found ourselves soon in the midst of a hopeless labyrinth deep in the tangles of the forest chasm looking onto multiple layers of rapidly--too rapidly for us poor travelers’ tastes--falling onto the ground below. We hiked about a bit, and, after finding our legs substantially stung, our faces whipped and weather-beaten (as much weather-beaten as faces could get under the canopies of trees), we found ourselves at a fence with barbed wire set in a jaunty pattern atop the wiring. Adrianna made dark suggestions we ought to go back, while our mother obstinately pushed forth. Finally, a combination of both led us out into a neighborhood we recognized for trick-or-treating, and, shamefully, we realized we were only a little bit away from Nike Park. The fearsome forest had not been so large as we thought. Ah! My dreams of glory in the ballads of old, floating away like a battered newspaper in a gale. Oh, I suppose it would not be pleasant for some spelunkers in a new civilization to find our bones, the forgotten fodder of a cold case, lost in some forest.
I grudgingly suppose.
Now, I enter, no doubt this word shall strike dread into the hearts of some-- Technology. Recently I have installed the "Microsoft One Note" software on my computer. A most wondrous thing, one can write on it, rather like the application "Paint" but with templates and notebook lines. And as to my new email, the reason I give for this seemingly wanton charge into the fiery depths of new email accounts, good Marshal of the Joust, is that my old account has one thousand two hundred and fifty three emails in it (mostly Doctor Dictionary "words of the day"), and the new email gives me a lot--a lot--of storage space. Most irritating, however, one must receive permissions this and permissions that from adults, every single time you try to sign in, so attempting to send the urgent "yeah, maybe, no, I don't recall, okay," message isn't going to work unless you have your parents' permission and their credit card number, Mr. President. Not only did this indignity make sore my already ruffled mind, I was approached with the ever-present, never-comforting dilemma of breaking internet connections. Internet connection is difficult with a wireless card--one must choose from the unencrypted Linksys, the mysterious Edward, or the unreliable pack-of-numbers connection nobody on the planet has--or ever shall--care to remember, except the makers themselves. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...this is the way of the earth in some ways, perhaps, and there is no escaping it.
In any case, enough of tales of heroism in the depths of fearsome forests. I have a compulsive feeling in my stomach I need some ice cream. And my mother, no doubt, has a compulsive feeling I need to get to bed.

The Larabar

Ah--the blanket of paradise-like plastic adorned beautifully with anticipation falls to the "oohs" and "aaaahs" of the assembled audience, followed by awed silence like that in a cathedral. The Holy Grail of sweet tooths, the treasure chest of health advocates, the gourmet chef's dream. The snack for the sweaty commute across inner city, the outdoor lunch on a backyard equestrian dream. Play-doh for the babies not yet graduated from incoherent goos and gahs; wholesome broth for the graybeards.

LARABAR.

Go to www.larabar.com to see more of my reviews and info about Larabar.
To learn more about the nine-year-old author of this review, go to www.adorasvitak.com .

A Chronicling of Events Including Technology

We have been having a very good time. This morning we went to Nike Park again. Our mother was griping about us going down the woody hills, as she didn't want us to get lost again (ah! how sad! my heart bleeds! If only that bounty of treasure-hunting were open without the roadblock of motherly instincts!). In any case, we ended up going down and coming up directly afterwards, obviously finding ourselves with little other choice.

Today we also went to Theno's Dairy. The very name inspires awe and hope in our hearts for the taste of delicious ice cream. Lodged between a church and a construction site, Theno's Dairy is painted a bright red, with a faded, hand-painted sign bearing "Theno's Dairy" in brobdingnagian letters at the front. There is a friendly plastic cow in the front. Theno's Dairy smells of cookies and is pleasantly warm, though the ice cream is chillingly delicious.

Our teacher, who we call Beastie for her growling tendencies , was sick for two days. We have taught meanwhile. Today Adrianna taught a small segment about the history of yoga to our classmate Katie and I. Before she went, I taught Katie and Adrianna how to use Microsoft OneNote and Google Sketch-Up. One Note is basically a notebook on the computer, and Sketchup lets you create buildings by drawing rectangles on the computer, and adding vegetation, pulling it up, etc.

Tomorrow (Saturday) Adrianna rises early for her SYSO (Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras). She and her friend and fellow symphony member Hattie, who lives quite near us, carpool every morning. Even though I'm on strict orders--or at least I'm not supposed to--wake up when Adrianna leaves, I can't help shouting "Goodbye" and waving out the window. Waving is always quite satisfying in my opinion, although disappointing if no one waves back.

A "Letter to Jamie"

The following is part of our Civil War role playing game. Our family is Confederate middle class in Augusta County, Virginia. "Ezra", my older brother, is played by my sister Adrianna. My character, Caroline-Edwina Lillian Emerson (Carrie), is writing a letter to Jamie, our dashing oldest brother who is a Confederate soldier.

Dear Jamie,

I am doing very well. It is very hot and I know the blood of battle must make it even harder, but the glory is refreshing. I envy you. If I were a boy I would go to fight and drive the Yankees out too.

Father wanted us to donate all of our animals to the war effort. Aunt Alice sent Ezra and me to take the animals to the military post. Ezra likes the pigs, and I like Thunder, the black stallion with the white mane. Ezra, in any case, took action to save the pigs from the soldiers' pot.

Do you remember the abandoned house down in town? Ezra pushed the pigs in through the window of the house. The heaviest we put in a shed. I wished to save Thunder, so we had Robert guard Thunder at a post and then we went off to the military post. It is lodged in a grim old Georgian manor with dark shutters, a dusty interior that smells of dust and solemnity, and it looks like a funeral parlor. Surrounded by the dust and filth of the town it stands out as an immense structure and makes us insignificant humans feel small in comparison. It is not a good feeling.

I would in reality pick Thunder up from the post after coming back from the manor, but I would tell Aunt Alice they had diagnosed him with a leg problem, although he had been at the post all along.

The lieutenant was not a very respectable figure and quite portly. His wife was a sour lady, and wore such a number of pins on her dress that she would have sunken a ship. We handed the horses over.

When we came back out, Robert, a lazy fellow, had, of course, gone to sleep under a tree, as though guarding Thunder had been the least important thing in the world. And, of course, Thunder was nowhere to be seen when we returned from the garrison. A rebellious servant is already an annoyance, but a lazy one is a hindrance. There are a great number of lazy fellows in the world. I wished I could have scolded Robert well but we were forced to be polite to him instead. Ezra's doing. Ezra is so polite I wish I could choke him sometimes; he insists on nodding and bowing in a most sickening way to every single person, even my bosom enemy, Arachina Morton. The girls are gathered around him like leeches on one's skin, and it makes him a perfectly despicable little man. Have you met any pleasant ladies, Jamie? I do think you should devote most of your love to the war.

Again, I cordially command you to defeat Billy Yank!

Your wish-she-were-a-boy sister,

CARRIE

"Happy News" Questionnaire

Google Docs & Spreadsheets
"Happy News" Questionnaire

ADORA SVITAK

-When did you get involved in writing and reading?

I started my writing journey at the age of four, writing longhand with help from my mom. My mom bought me a black Dell laptop when I was six. The secondhand, somewhat weather-battered computer allowed me to organize my thoughts effectively in stories and poems, compared to time-consuming longhand writing, as I was able to learn how to type very quickly. My dad read to me and my older (eleven-year-old) sister, Adrianna, at bedtime when we were little, and we loved reading from an early age. When I began reading, I often read "advanced" books that were in "higher" grade levels.

-Why do you enjoy reading and writing so much?

I believe writing is a great way to express your thoughts to other people. Writing also gives us the chance to communicate and understand each other, making a better, less conflict-ravaged world possible. I also like writing because it gives me the chance to organize my thoughts and "empty my mind", making it easy to remember things of the past (for instance, a memorable vacation) while still having enough "brain space" to observe the present carefully. Writing also gives me the chance to have fun while utilizing learning skills. Writing is really an enjoyable, interesting experience because I actually live with my characters; it's a break from everyday life. I love reading because this gives me the chance to understand other people and get different perspectives on issues, different views. This gives me the chance to learn more about the world and other people. Reading also gives me the ability to learn while enjoying myself, and reading allows me to "live with the characters" while still being surprised at unexpected twists and turns. Reading brings me to different places while I'm still comfortably propped up against an infinite number of fluffy pillows. I'm able to meet thousands of new people, make millions of friends, live a countless number of lives. Reading can give me experience, knowledge, and personal enjoyment.

-What do you like about each one?

Note: Included in previous question's answer.

-Why do you feel it is important for people, specifically younger people to read and write?

I believe it's extremely important to bring reading and writing into the household, and introduce reading and writing to children at an early age. It's never "too early" for learning. Babies in the womb, according to studies, are observing sounds, etc., even before delivery. Children continue to observe and learn through childhood--even some 'older' children, after all! Reading and writing helps enhance this learning experience and opens eyes to thousands of perspectives on countless issues, while, through writing, providing effective ways to share one's own perspectives with a wider audience. Reading and writing are useful tools in the learning journey, and provide enjoyable ways to learn new information (reading), while providing ways to express opinions and use skills learned (writing).

-What would you say to someone who is young that says he or she doesn’t like to read?

I would list my own reasons for liking reasons to the particular individual. Reading gives me the chance to explore faraway and fantasy places and meet people we would be very likely unable to meet in real life--after all, we hear about people like Queen Elizabeth I, George Washington, and JK Rowling all the time; reading gives us the chance to actually see these people in front of us with our own eyes, not on the TV screen. Reading adds to my store of knowledge; I learn new words effortlessly through reading; instead of toiling away at blunt, continuous lists of words and words, I'm able to quickly look words up on my computer/in a dictionary. I'm also able to learn new facts and see matters from different perspectives, helping me learn more about people. For the normal public school student "struggling in social circles", reading provides an easy way to advance on the school popularity ladder, impressing friends to the envy of enemies with interesting knowledge. Last, but certainly not least, and a great way to sum up all these reasons-- reading is FUN!

-How would you go about inspiring them to read?

Note: Included in previous question's answer.

-What types of writing do you do? How many books have you written?

I have written over four hundred stories, but I've only published one book, Flying Fingers. Three more books are currently in the works (already written but being fine-tuned) and I write poems avidly (one hundred to two hundred poems so far). I occasionally write historical fiction (an example might be "Agymah and the Amulet", a short story, located in Flying Fingers), but fantasy tends to be my most widely-explored genre, as I'm able to use my imagination for creative names while still using my knowledge of history and human nature to create my own worlds.

-What other interests do you have outside of reading and writing?

I really love cooking with my eleven-year-old sister, Adrianna. My mom and dad are both very supportive of our culinary pursuits (despite stunning evidence of gross negligence regarding the urge to clean up after oneself, supposed to be morally inserted in our conscience), and, while I must admit our products (healthy snacks like strawberry-yogurt-with-apple-chunk muffins, extravagantly unhealthy "decadent chocolate" butter-filled brownies, and more "typical dinner fare" like cheese-with-don't-know-what-the-heck-that-healthy-veggie-is pizza) do taste good, I'm still--gratefully--amazed our parents continue to consent to let us enter the kitchen. Other than cooking I love drawing. I hope this does not sound like a bragging attempt, but I have advanced somewhat in what I call "imaginative portraiture" (portraits of stiff-faced, regal people from my imagination). While I call this stuff imaginative I do sometimes use real models--I placed a no doubt disgruntled but younger George Washington, very respectfully, in Bank of America headquarters (whatever Bank of America looks like) accompanied by a gold box of snuff and those ever-present "Bank Lollipops" (free for the picking). Another samples of these types of drawings of mine would be a Queen-Elizabeth-the-First-like-character, disapproving expression on face, in front of our own living room window. The window looks out onto our neighbor's house, and the towering trees beside it, which looks unintentionally like some sort of ski resort lodge. As I am an innocent, perfect little nine-year-old doll, I shall maliciously bog you down with technical descriptions of my sadly unprofessional equipment--a "Dark Wash", thick, very, very black pencil, which I use for outlines and roughs, and a somewhat-sharpened normal pencil with a flat eraser, for facial details and delicate parts. I use what I can to erase, most often a blackened, worn-down eraser, sometimes a mutilated eraser from a broken pencil, and, while many "erasing skids" are clearly displayed, this system gets along pretty well. Drawing makes up perhaps fifty percent of my time? maybe less, maybe more, on different days. A lot of my audience ask about me regarding sports. I love ice skating (although I don't get the chance to do it much, the nearest ice skating rink is thirty minutes to an hour away from here, and we've been too lazy to make the drive). I also love swimming, although, again, between my mom's vicious health concerns and Seattle's vicious weather, I don't get the chance to do it that much. Last summer I (finally!) learned to jump off the diving board (I can't really dive well, with the arm over head thing, but I can do a cannonball and a twist in the air and all that), and I swim in the deep end, etc. I don't swim particularly fast, but I don't tire very quickly, and I go underwater easily, and I don't mind opening my eyes underwater, either, although I know I probably shouldn't. More sports--I love biking. I have a shiny-new dark purple Magna bike, bedecked in an infinite number of glittering "Stardust" stickers. Perhaps it's not classified as new anymore--when I first got it, it had training wheels, but now I'm comfortably out of that training sphere. Unfortunately I have a tendency to veer too sharply, knocking me off my bike, and sometimes when I ride I do zigzags and I have difficulty keeping to the path, sometimes riding into soaked grass, mud, stones, and City Hall shrubbery. And while "playing outside" can't really be considered a valid hobby, perhaps mud-making is? Adrianna and I produced a large vat of mud for future use in the summer (we made it in the winter with rain accumulation and slug-infested dirt). We have a club in the backyard which was formerly called the D.A.M. club (most of us are so thickened with age we can't remember what it stands for), and Adrianna and I formally changed the name of the club to the "Ontario Club", a name I proudly picked myself. It sounds like it's by the Great Lakes or something. Also, I like photography and blogging. For Christmas my mom bought me a digital camera (in return for my promise to continue writing poems and blogs faithfully.)

-Why is it important for girls to not be portrayed in negative light?

Women are an essential force in today's society, and have been essential forces in the world throughout history. Women today serve in many prestigious roles with great skill and capability, like politics, the media, business, science, etc., while many women continue to provide a gigantic helping hand at home. Women have for centuries shouldered duties men were incapable--or too lazy--to do, and continue to shoulder many of these duties. In some countries women continue to manage family finances. Women have influenced the course of history and gained power through their own merits; this is why it is important for the modern-day individual to respect this rich history and realize women are capable in many fields, not cut out just for housekeeping and childbearing, and deserve to be treated like any other citizen of this world. Unfortunately companies like Disney treat women as helpless damsels in distress. While some despicable women in history have been specimens like these, overall women are strong, intelligent, and resourceful. The kind of "damsel in distress" Disney puts forward as models for another generation of women are anything but beacons of light in darkness--do we want to be raising wailing Cinderellas waiting for the fairy godmother without a thought of her own? Is this generation of parents going to be comforted by their fairytale princesses being swept off golden unicorns into reality and Sadly Ever After endings? This is why women should be portrayed in a more realistic light than at present, as determined, clever human beings instead of shallow damsels in distress.

-What is your goal with having the Web site, writing books and giving presentations? Are you sending a specific message? What would that be?

My goal is to spread a message of worldwide literacy. I believe it's never to early to learn, and this is another one of the messages I wholeheartedly believe which many of my presentations spread. I also show viewers how technology like Microsoft Word and the World Wide Web can be used positively to enhance students' educational experiences. I believe technology is a great help in education, a tool which should be made available to every student. In my presentations, I inspire my audience (mainly public school children) to read and write; I help children express their ideas with clarity and fine tune existing writing skills. In some of my presentations I also teach vocabulary. I wrote and published the book Flying Fingers because, 1) I just wanted to get my thoughts out and express my feelings clearly so other people (namely my family and friends) could understand me better, and 2) I published the book because I wanted my writing to reach a wider audience, to both help other people understand me and my life, and to spread a message I realized was relevant and neccessary in today's world. My website, www.adorasvitak.com, is a way for people to understand me and my message better; it has some of my early drawings (I don't draw nearly so bad now!), poetry, etc.

-How many places have you given presentations too? What states, countries have you been to?

My presentations have taken me across the U.S., from Redmond, Washington (where I live), to Orlando, Florida, from NY, NY, to London, England. I've given presentations to mainly often low-income public schools, but I've also participated in events like the Verizon Family Literacy Conference, the Keller Williams Inspirational Breakfast, etc. I also presented at Stony Brook University's Charles B. Wang Center in Long Island. Every time I learn new and interesting techniques which allow me to improve my future speeches.

-What are some famous people you have met, and what talk shows have you been on?

The most prestigious talk shows I've been on include Montel Williams, Good Morning America, and Oprah (video clip). I was also featured on NBC's Making a Difference, a major TV network in the U.K., "Sky"; I was on the BBC (radio) in the U.K., and Voices of America as well. I've been on a number of major newspapers and other publications, including U.K.'s popular "Daily Mirror". As for famous people I've met--Montel Williams, Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones, and Tom Vilsack.

-How did you like the TLC series on the Discovery Channel on kids that you were on?

I really thought BBC America's "My Life as a Child" series was very excellently designed and organized. This show gave Discovery/TLC viewers a chance to see the lives of twenty very different children, with footage from the points of view of the children themselves. Videocameras in the children's power followed their families' every action, giving an accurate view of life to eager viewers. You could feel the anxiety of going to that first major performance, whoop along with delighted--and excited--children, etc. While some scenes were stormy, it was all family-friendly, and definitely an educational experience for the TV audience. Personally I had a great time filming for "My Life as a Child". The videocamera was small and easy to transport to destinations like Europe and New York, and while there were some blows (mistaking a tape cleaner for a tape and losing an hour's worth of footage to a useless piece of plastic), etc., it was an overall great experience for the entire family.