Jeffrey Cassel

Significant

            I want to be a writer. The people, media, and ideas that have influenced my writing style and comprehension of language are not limited to my previous education or the numerous books I’ve read. Influential people in my life have been my mother and my teachers. I’ve read many ideas on writing and how to be effective in communication.  Finally, when discussing the types of media and the slough of movies I’ve watched, books I’ve read, and music I’ve listened to, the list is extensive.

            I quit high school when I was a senior. That day has been one of the most influential and heartbreaking days of my life. I remember clearly my mother finding me asleep in my room when I should have been in school. I believe it was only October and I had already missed more than ten days of school. She was angry. Before leaving for work she said in a tone of frustration, “If you are going to quit school, then you’re going to need to move out. You have a job. You can find an apartment. I’m not going to help you fail.” She left shortly after, and I had not responded. I quickly ran to the computer and started searching apartments near my job at the time. I grew frantic. Slowly, the pressure of living on my own, not finishing high school, and no longer having a safety net was sending me into a panic attack. I picked up the house phone and dialed my mother at work. She answered with a sharp tone that I can only imagine is how one is greeted upon being ushered onto the boat on the river Styx. I frantically and in tears, “Don’t you know? Don’t you know why I don’t want to go back? You’re supposed to know me! You’re supposed to be the one that understands. Isn’t that what you always say, that you know me so well? I hate it. I hate going there. I hate being hated.” Being gay in high school wasn’t easy, to say the least. Anti-bullying programs and advocates had not yet come into fashion. My mother left work immediately. She came through the door, blue eyes red and inflamed with tears, and began to apologize and ask what I wanted. We sat and had a conversation that seemed at the time to last a century. Over the previous summer I had quit my job at Hershey Park for having my locker vandalized with cruel words of the uneducated. Literally, the words were spelled wrong. That was not the way I wanted to come out to my parents. This single event sparked a new era in my life.

            My mother had always been a big proponent of language. “You use words to describe your feelings. You use words to ask for what you want,” she would instruct. When I was seven or eight years old she taught me how to type. I learned to type on a typewriter and later we upgraded to the word processor. The orange letters on the brown screen is still a memory we laugh about. She also read to me all the time. I’ve always had a bookshelf full of books. Initially the books were Disney Classics full of pictures of princesses and magical creatures. To this day, my mother has never seen the movie Cinderella, but knows the story in detail. The first memories I have of reading and writing were those Disney stories and learning to type one letter at a time while staying on the “home keys” on an electric typewriter. From then until I was a senior in high school not much changed. I began to read on my own. The literature for my age was including Harry Potter, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and all the traditional assignments of English classes. Reading The Sound and the Fury, Romeo and Juliet, and The Scarlet Letter, were not pieces of literature I found exciting at the time. After quitting high school, I immediately started college. My parents pushed, with the help of my high school teachers and many students, and I was allowed to complete my high school degree while attending HACC. My early interest in reading, and later writing, would be developed from this point forward. As an adolescent I was unaware of my emotions and therefore could not interpret them or “work through” any of the emotionally damaging events that had occurred. I do not find it necessary to go into much detail about what happened in high school, but I will provide a short list: 1) Beaten and spit on while riding the school bus, 2) Locker slammed on my head in gym-class, 3) Choked in the hallway during spirit week. The third event was enough to force me out for good.

            The most influential educators to my writing and reading were present at the school board meeting to share their concerns about my decision to quit school. I was a straight- A student, albeit absent often, and was in accelerated learning classes. Theresa Bowley, my French teacher, Juma Maser, my History teacher, and Kelly Ardary my English teacher, were present and outraged at that meeting. Truly my greatest influence from education has come from these three women. Theresa Bowley showed me language, in all its beauty. She teaches with passion and tells stories of her own experience to connect with her class. When reading Tristan et Yseut, or Tristan and Isolde in English, we learned about the meaning of the circle. This love story includes a bracelet made by Yseut for Tristan as a sign of her affection and commitment to him. One may question how the story of the circle is so important or fascinating, but Mrs. Bowley taught it well. She asked, with the sly smile of excitement, “What is significant about the circle? Can anyone tell me when we use a circle and to what significance?” The wedding ring is the most significant circle. She took off her wedding ring and passed it around the class as she told the story of how she met her husband Joe. She was working in Germany, and met Joe in an office building. Her eyes, bright green behind her wire rimmed glasses, lit up as she told the story. It was his eyes that attracted her. The sun gleamed in from the windows and shone on the brightest and bluest eyes she had ever seen. That story is one of many, but was most impactful because she detailed an emotion I had never before witnessed. She told the story of love. She told the story of true love. This wasn’t a story from a movie, TV show, or book. This was real, and you could hear and see it with every breath she took. That moment will forever be the moment when I understood there was something greater in the world. To an adolescent, understanding that there is something else in the world that is more important than one’s self is jarring.

            Juma Maser showed me the world. The first class I had in high school was World History, with Mrs. Maser. We covered civilizations and time periods I had only briefly learned of on television. She is of Indian descent. She extended my world beyond the reach of the state lines of Pennsylvania. Suddenly, the world seemed impossibly large and was full of wonder. I wasn’t able to grasp all that she taught until a few years later while working at Disney World. She showed us a video of her wedding. She had a traditional wedding with her American husband, and she chuckled when before she showed us the film and said, “Just watch his face.” His expressions were priceless, and to my surprise, the whole class was enthralled with what we were seeing. In Indian culture it isn’t common practice to sit silently as the wedding ceremony takes place. Most people were sitting on the floor on colorful pillows watching and laughing, talking and eating. In this video was a message that had nothing to do with Mrs. Maser’s wedding. To me the ceremony showed a world I where I knew very little.

            Kelly Ardary was my English teacher. She is a genius. Literally, she has been tested and given the title of “Genius.” The influential moment with Mrs. Ardary, was not something she said or showed, but was an assignment she gave. The assignment was to read, interpret, and present a poem. The assignment was simple, the outcome was amazing. I prepared a power-point presentation with light acoustic music in the background. Standing in front of the class, I took questions about the poem after reciting it. There were a few questions and some back and forth from Mrs. Ardary. I was the only person to which everyone responded with applause. The moment I knew English and literature were going to be my future was when Mrs. Ardary asked matter-of-factly, “Who here thinks Jeffrey is a natural teacher?” To which the entire class responded with their hand in the air.

            My mother and teachers showed me something of the world early in my life. I understood that I was in a world full of different people, places, and forms of communication. I want to be able to communicate with everyone. I have since made it my life’s goal to be able to communicate with everyone on the planet. I don’t want to make my mother cry because I couldn’t tell her what I was feeling and why I was making certain decisions. I want to be able to tell a story that affects someone in such a positive way as Theresa Bowley did for me. I want to see the world and know that the unintelligent people that speak words of hate are truly ignorant, because I have seen different. I want to write and communicate a message to many effectively and clearly. These are the motivations and influences that they have given me.

            The literary references that have been impactful are many. Specifically there are a few that stand out, as I can easily recall them. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, was marvelous. I love Russian authors. Dostoevsky created a world full of different characters. There has been no other author that has shown me how to effectively describe someone and their state of mind. This early paragraph from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is what allowed his character to come to life in my mind’s eye.

            “He soon plunged into deep thought, or rather, into a kind of oblivion. He walked on without noticing his environment, without wanting to notice it. Every so often he would mutter something to himself. It was that propensity for monologues he had already acknowledged as a peculiarity of his. At that moment, he knew his thoughts were confused. He knew he was very weak. For the second day now, he had scarcely touched food.” (Dostoevsky 2)

            I would not usually include such a long excerpt from a novel, but all of the words in this paragraph are significant to me. This description of the main character Raskolnikov, is strikingly similar to how I am while walking. I walk everywhere. Raskolnikov is in a state of oblivion which is what I love about walking, and the fear I have about driving. That state is not good to enter while behind the wheel of the car. I was stunned when I first read this paragraph. Someone captured what I had never been able to describe to my friends and family that didn’t understand why I refused to drive. The incredible description of his state of mind is something I hope to one day be able to do with words.

            Quoting Ayn Rand seems like a cliché today. I’m an eternal optimist, so too perhaps it seems odd. Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s most notable work, is not the book I read. She also wrote, The Virtue of Selfishness, a small book of collective articles she wrote on the topic of selfishness that was published in the New York Times. In this book she details her opinions on what is effective and necessary when communicating with others. Her belief is that one must always be honest. It is inappropriate and damaging to lie. This may seem a simple concept, but in fact she takes it a step further. “If one witnesses something that has not been deemed appropriate by society, for they are all our rules we’ve agreed upon, than it is within one’s rights to say so. By not doing so at the moment it is witnessed, one has failed their own morals and society’s.” (Rand 145) This quote from Ayn Rand effectively illustrates how I believe journalistic integrity should be conducted. At one time in my life I wanted to pursue a career in journalism. The lack of truth, appropriate questions, and significance of stories were enough to turn me away. I am referencing national broadcast news stations and certain newspapers in the previous statement, as local broadcast news networks still operate in a way to relate all of the facts with regard to events in an area. Truth is necessary to maintain society and to uphold that which is appropriate. Ayn Rand gave me the backbone to choose the uncommon opinion and defend it as it is my right and duty to maintain my own moral integrity.

            Television and movies and I have a love/hate relationship. They love when I watch them and go online to look up interesting facts, and I hate how most events portrayed in movies do not occur in real life. The letdown can be significantly depressing. There are however, times when television and movies can be inspirational, if not life changing. While I spent the better part of my high school education at my part-time job, I engrossed myself in television and movies in my spare time. I cried when Sam performed As Time Goes By, in Casablanca. I was mesmerized by John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in, Pulp Fiction. When Rose died and went back to Jack in Titanic, I applauded. These famous scenes were entertaining, but not influential to my writing career. There are speeches, or monologues, that have been given in movies and television shows that have compelled me to further become a writer. Notably, V for Vendetta introduced me to the monologue that would allow me to notice them in any movie I will see. Comparisons cannot be made to the “V” filled monologue given by the protagonist at the beginning of this dystopian United Kingdom setting. “Voila! In view a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate …” The first line of this monologue shows the recurring use of the letter “V” that continues throughout. Amazed, at how seamlessly the words melded together to create the perfect introduction, I was hooked on trying to do the same. Alas, I have not yet conquered such a feat, but that has not deterred me from trying. The main point I have taken away from this monologue, is not the words themselves and their meaning, but instead the arrangement of the words and their use. My aspiration would be to write something so creative and beautiful with such an eloquent twist as to leave some in awe.

            There are two moments in television that quickly define both, what I want to create from a writing career and how I would like to end my writing career. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was written by Joss Whedon. He is now, and will always be, an inspiration because of his amazing technique to blend story canon, pop-culture references, and poignant exposition. The first tattoo I will get after college graduation will be words written by Joss Whedon. In the first episode of the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the last scene is shows the villains from the previous seasons discussing their ultimate doomsday plans. They are cursing her attempt at trying to do what’s right in the world. The latest evil is cursing the previous villains for trying to do what was wrong. The last line of the monologue is, “… It’s not about right. It’s not about wrong. It’s about power.” I can recite from memory the entirety of this speech because it was so influential. Those will be the lines I have inked permanently to my body. There is a truth in those words that is simple, and done with simple sentence construction. Sometimes, it is the method of, “Keep It Simple Stupid,” that works so beautifully. Here is this grand master of evil. A bad guy in the final season that is painted as the original evil to walk the planet, and his most menacing and powerful statement for his plan is summed in three very simple lines of dialogue. Those words in that situation were powerful enough for me to adopt a similar likeness in my plans for writing. There are times where it may seem counterintuitive to work for people that don’t share the same morality as I, in order to make more money. The point Joss Whedon makes with this dialogue is that there are times when it isn’t about what’s right or wrong. Instead, it is in fact about power and used appropriately can have further reaching effects. Being morally flexible with the intent to progress one’s self is sometimes necessary. These lines are the simplest of words with strongest message.

            Lastly, the title of this essay is Significant. I chose this for the title because that’s what I want my writing to be. I want to be significant by using my abilities with writing to influence change and help as many people as possible. There are significant events in my life that have led me to this path. There is a line in the popular show House of Cards, where Claire Underwood, at the time the Vice-President’s wife is discussing her childhood and what she wanted to be as an adult. She says very plainly and distinctly, “I never wanted wealth or power. I don’t want to be famous. I want to be significant.” In a short line of dialogue she both disregarded the idea of the American Dream of success and outlined her own proclamation for her life. It was her life’s goal to be significant. I’m not interested in wealth or control. I want to be significant.

            Throughout my life I have learned what writing and language means to me. I understand that words can be used for terrible causes. Words are often mistreated and used to teardown. I want to be in opposition to this use of words and language. I want my influence to be far reaching with effective communication. I want to be understood distinctly. My writing level to-date, I would consider to be at an intermediate level. There is a lot to learn. Certainly, my mother will continue to be an influence, educators will be numerous, and I don’t think books will stop being published, television produced, or movies made anytime soon. I have had many influences come into my life, and there are going to be many more. To me, these influences will always be significant.

 

Works Cited

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Part One. Crime and Punishment. New York: New American Library, 1968. 2. Print. Signet Classics.

Rand, Ayn, and Nathaniel Branden. "The Virtue of Selfishness." The Virtue of Selfishnes

N/A. "V for Vendetta (2005)." IMDb. IMDb.com, 17 Mar. 2006. Web. 19 Sept. 2014.s. New York: New American Library, 1965. 145. Print

            “Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.”

N/A. ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Lessons." IMDb. IMDb.com, 2002. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

            “Warren Meers: [as The First] Of course she won't understand, Sparky. I'm beyond her understanding. She's a girl with sugar and spice and everything useless, unless you're baking. I'm more than that. More than flesh...

Glory: [as The First] More than blood. I'm- you know, I honestly don't think there's a human word fabulous enough for me. Oh, my name will be on everyone's lips. Assuming their lips haven't been torn off. But not just yet. That's alright, though.

Adam: [as The First] I can be patient. Everything is well within parameters. She's exactly where I want her to be. And so are you, Number 17. You're right where you belong.

Mayor Richard Wilkins: [as The First] So what'd ya thing? You'd get your soul back and everything'd be Jim-dandy? Soul's slippery than a greased weasel. Why do you think I sold mine? Well, you probably thought that you'd be your own man, and I respect that.

Drusilla: [as The First] But you never will. You'll always be mine. You'll always be in the dark with me. Singing our little songs. You like our little songs, don't you? You've always liked them. Right from the beginning. And that's where we're going.

The Master: [as The First] Right back to the beginning. Not the bang, not the word, the true beginning. The next few months are going to be quite a ride. And I think we're all going to learn something about ourselves in the process. You'll learn you're a pathetic schmuck, if it hasn't sunk in already. Look at you, trying to do what's right. Just like her. You still don't get it. It's not about right. Not about wrong.

Buffy Summers: [as The First] It's about power.”