Two roads diverged a long time ago,

And I took the one less traveled by.

I thought it was the right one to go,

But I’m not sure if it was, and so,

I still think back and often wonder why.

Since I took my path and went my way,

A lot has happened to me since then.

I walked a little too far away;

Others thought that I had gone astray.

Well this is what happened back when.

I found myself a long ways from home,

And with no one that I even knew,

I feared I would be destined to roam.

Destined to a long life lived alone,

Through this time, would I ever get through?

As I lay my head to rest in the night,

And my eyes closed and all became dark,

I mentally considered my plight.

Would I ever go back home alright?

And then came a bright light, shining stark.

Now I do not understand how I,

Suddenly appeared in my bed,

But I was not going to ask why.

But I thought silently as I sighed:

“What was happening inside my head?”

Dionysus

He walked in, and everything went silent.

The doors creaked open and shut behind him as he stood in the doorway.

His broad figure cast a shadow over the narrow alley, and yet the whole bar seemed to be lit up with a light blue tint.

His blue, glowing eyes were followed by all the other eyes in the bar as he surveyed the bar.

I didn’t quite know why he was there, and whether he was in a good mood, so summoning all of my courage, I shouted:

“COME TO JOIN US, HAVE YOU?!”

The whole bar tensed up as they watched me face my father, Zeus, at the other end of the bar.

You could almost feel the air thicken with the smell of an oncoming storm, disrupting the pleasing smell of wine that had previously occupied the bar.

There were no clocks in the bar, and yet you could hear the seconds pass by.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Suddenly, the thick air seemed to disperse as Zeus smirked at me.

“I couldn’t miss such a big party, now could I?” Zeus remarked.

The whole bar seemed to let out a collective sigh, as the air stopped buzzing. The whole bar seemed to immediately revert to the lively, wild mess it had been a few minutes before. Drinks began being served again, the music started playing, and Zeus and I walked down the alley. As we sat down at the far end of the bar, Zeus ordered himself a beer.

I chose the flashier option; I decided to summon some wine. Being a god of wine, it wasn’t very hard.

Zeus barely raised an eyebrow as he took his bottle and opened it.

With his bare hands.

“So. What brings you here?” I asked.

“Nothing to be concerned about.” He replied. In fact, he practically snapped.

Now being a god, you heard rumors from other gods and minor spirits and whatnot. What I had heard recently was something that happened quite often with gods a lot, especially when they were siblings: Fights.

Here’s the thing: When people fight, they hurt each other, and sometimes the people around them.

When gods fight, it is quite literally the things that they embody that fight against each other, trying to tear each other apart. For example; Ares and Hephaestus have gotten into fights multiple times over Hephaestus’ wife, Aphrodite (that has been quite openly cheating on him with Ares himself). They have gotten into some big fights, but 2 are remembered most of all. When the god of war and the god of tools and machinery try and kill each other, you get World War 1 and World War 2. The same things have happened with other gods as well, with some more frequent than others. Zeus and Poseidon have fought quite a lot. Their biggest fight is known as super typhoon Haiyan.

Now in this situation, it was another sort of fight, and included quite a lot of people. Nobody was quite sure how it started; apparently somebody stole another person’s master weapon or something of that sort, but it put Zeus and Poseidon on one side (with their wives and children on their side as well), and Hades on the other (again, with his wife and children on his side).

The sky and the sea against the underworld and all the dead? Not something people wanted to see. In fact, this was the first time that an argument had arisen between them like this.

Me personally? I was the god of wine. Who hates wine? I rarely get into fights with people, and I probably wouldn’t now.

So I decided to ask more questions.

“What’s been happening lately between you and Hades? I heard that you two were disagreeing.” I prodded.

He didn’t look up at all.

I may or may not have swallowed my tongue.

Then I tried again.

“It seems that you guys have been arguing for some time. Is everything alright?” I asked again.

This time, he looked up with an angry expression on his face. It was more than angry. He seemed furious.

“Ahh.” I nodded sagely.

I decided to let the subject drop. As we continued to speak, though, I started to worry. He seemed calm, but I wondered how angry Zeus really was, and what really happened.

Zeus

I would make him pay.

As the king of the gods, I could do very many things to punish Hades, but I wanted more than to just embarrass him.

I wanted to hurt him.

But without my biggest weapon, how would I do so?

Yes. Hades had destroyed my master lightning bolt. As in the physical manifestation of lightning. Lightning would continue to exist, and I could still summon it, but in any battle of sorts, I could not unleash the skies the way I had for the past few millennia.

If I had it, the first thing I would unleash its full power on would be Hades himself. At the moment, I wasn’t sure what I would do. Poseidon had my back with this argument. He seemed to understand the pain of losing your greatest weapon. After all, it had happened to him before (and I was the one who took it away from him).

Dionysus was something else. I did not expect him to understand war, or the overwhelming anger that overtook someone when another person did them wrong. After all, how could one anger wine?

I decided to focus on the matter at hand; how I would get my revenge on Hades. As I continued to think, I felt a fast gust of wind. Suddenly, at my side stood a tall, lean man with a helmet and winged shoes. Hermes, the messenger god. His face did not look happy, and he seemed quite fearful as I stood up. Dionysus sat drinking wine with a slightly amused expression on his face. Some of the other men and women in the bar began to whisper. After all, it wasn’t always that 3 gods appeared in the same place at once.

“What message do you have, Hermes?” I asked.

“Hades has respectfully invited you and Poseidon to the Underworld.” He replied shakily.

Hermes

As soon as I spoke, thunder boomed outside.

I may have needed new pants.

After a few minutes of seizure inducing lightning booming outside, he finally calmed down. He let out a content sigh before speaking.

“Tell him I accept his invitation. What date has he invited me to come to the Underworld?” Zeus asked.

“He said tonight.” I replied.

Zeus smiled, and I started shaking. I wasn’t ready to see what would happen when the three most powerful beings in the cosmos met up in one place. I also didn’t want to see what happened when they weren’t happy. Zeus sat down without another word, and I stayed for a few seconds before speeding off to my next message recipient: Hades.

I got there in 2 seconds. During that time, I noticed how restless the dead were. They seemed to be catching on to Hades’ current mood, whatever that was. As the gates to his palace opened, I noticed, far away from the rest of the underworld, near Thanatos’ Doors, a massive congregation of armed men had gathered. They seemed to be wandering aimlessly near the exit of the Underworld, which was closed, as always. I decided to take that as a bad sign, but I didn’t say anything.

As I approached Hades’ empty throne, I saw Persephone in her garden. I shot her a greeting glance, and continued to walk forwards. Then I braced myself. I walked closer to his throne, and immediately felt an overwhelming surge of fear. My darkest moments washed over me. Anger, sadness, and fear came over me at the same time. And suddenly, it stopped as Hades appeared in front of me. Clad in heavy armor, with translucent spirits seemingly fitting him, he looked scarier than ever. The only thing missing was his helmet of death, which had appeared at his throne.

I stepped back before I spoke.

“I delivered your message to Poseidon, and then Zeus. They both accepted your request, and will come this evening.”

Hades nodded.

“Good, good. Do you have any idea what time they are coming?”

“Poseidon has stated that he will arrive 1 hour after sunset, and Zeus… could come at any point in time, really.” I replied.

Hades sighed, and as he did so, his clothing changed to what I usually saw him wearing. His armor seemed to melt and turn into black robes. They seemed to glitter with diamonds, but I could not see any.

“I shall go prepare for their visit. Thank you.” He dismissed me.

I flew straight back to Olympus, and took quite a long time to think about how I would keep myself safe during this incoming conflict. Hades had planted a bomb, and Zeus and Poseidon had both lit it. I could only wait until it exploded.

In this post, I’m showing what songs Caliban might listen to if he lived in the modern age. In my opinion, Caliban might not really listen to only one type of music, but rather listen to music with the same sort of message inside. To me, his message would mostly scream ‘angry’, or ‘someone pissed me off‘. Most of these songs would be directed at Prospero, so I tried to find songs that seemed as if the listener could sing along as if they were accusing the person. I also think Caliban has a guilty pleasure for pop songs (because why not), so I tried to add some songs like that as well.

I feel like these songs could explain how Caliban is shown in the book (and maybe some guesses about what he is when nobody’s looking). Most of these songs are angry songs, but really, he’s pretty much always angry during the play, and it would be surprising if he wasn’t. Unlike Ariel, he isn’t getting free any time soon, so him moping around all the time isn’t a surprising action.

Hello. I’m Caliban. I’ve been on the island my whole life. My mother is Sycorax, who was a witch and died leaving me on the island without parents, without knowledge of speech, or anything. I was found on the island by Prospero and his daughter Miranda, who taught me to speak (and swear teeheeheee), and in exchange, I taught them everything I knew about the island. 

I may or may not have made a tiny little mistake by planning to *cough*repopulate*cough*  the island with lots of mini-Calibans, and when I got caught I may or may not have been made a slave by Prospero, but honestly? I think Prospero’s overreacting. That man has anger issues and as much as I want to punch him in the face sometimes, he does this weird thing where he gives me cramps, and I swear it’s the most annoying (and scariest) thing EVER! If I could do to him what he does to me, I would make it so that:

As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed 

With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen 

Drop on him and Miranda. A southwest blow on him

And blister him all o’er!

Phew. That felt good. I guess sometimes its good to LET IT GO, right?

Nobody ever asks me about the stuff I like anymore. Nobody even knows what my favorite song is.

Which is why I’ve chosen to show you my favorite things and what my life looks like. You have no choice but to read it. That’s an order. (*Please?*)

WhatsApp Messages:

Well… I think you’ve seen enough of my personal messages. Now its time for you to see my personal messages. I would get ready, if I were you because I’m already quite popular.

Instagram:

1. “I told him about this mathematician Kurt Gödel, who had this really bad fear of being poisoned, so much so that he couldn’t bring himself to eat food unless it was prepared by his wife. And then one day his wife got sick and had to go to the hospital, so Gödel stopped eating… and so he starved to death… He cohabitated with the demon for seventy-one years, and it got him in the end.” (pg 203.)
I feel like this quote is important because she seems to relate with the person that this happened to. She describes what he did as ‘cohabitating with the demon’, which I take to be quite an interesting sentence. I feel like that sentence coins what she was feeling, though.

2. ““The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”Spirals seem to be the thing that she focuses on the most in this story when describing her anxiety, and this sentence shows us what she thinks about her anxiety-no beginning, no end, just there.

2. ““The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”Spirals seem to be the thing that she focuses on the most in this story when describing her anxiety, and this sentence shows us what she thinks about her anxiety-no beginning, no end, just there.

3. “I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.”

This sentence is actually quite true. I take the fact that she realizes this as a sign of real maturity, and think that it is quite interesting how she realizes all this and has come to peace with it.

4. “It’s turtles all the way ******* down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.”

“Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.” 

This is an important part of the book, because this is what I feel is when Aza ‘understands’ her anxiety, and how it works. I like the way that the author made this moment a slightly funny moment, but didn’t stray from the real topic.

5. “It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem.” (pg 203)

In this quote, Aza explains having anxiety, and how she has to come to accept that she’s ‘crazy’ and can’t do anything about it. This to me is quite scary, because she thinks she’s crazy and doesn’t have the will to do anything about it.

6. “You feeling scared?”

“Kinda.”
“Of what?”
“It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.”

This feels like the best quote there to me because it shows that her anxiety doesn’t have a beginning, but is simply there, which I think is why she uses spirals to describe her anxiety-without a beginning or an end.

7. “Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you’re standing on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn’t have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it.

And then I got in the car.””

This is a great sentence because it shows what she does every time she is anxious, where instead of fighting, at some point, she gives in and ‘gets into the car’.

8. “I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.”

This sentence shows, again, how she cannot stop her thoughts from scaring her. She has to deal with having random, scary thoughts come up, and finds it slightly funny that other people can choose their thoughts that easily.

9. “I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.”

This is one of my favorite lines because it is such a great metaphor. It isn’t something i’ve heard before, because she is basically describing her anxiety as the threat, but also describing the threat as her, basically stating that she cannot solve the problem.

10. “But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”

In this book, Aza has to frequently remind herself that thoughts are just thoughts, and yet those thoughts keep winning and making her anxious and do weird things.

11. “Once I start thinking about splitting the skin apart, I literally cannot not do it. I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape.”

This is an interesting sentence because it shows her way of thinking about things, and how she feels about her anxiety ‘situation’ too. 

12. “I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls “intrusives” but the first time she said it, I heard “invasives,” which I like better, because… these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they speed out of control. Supposedly everyone has them–you look out from over a bridge or whatever and it occurs to you out of nowhere that you could just jump. And then if you’re most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have…”

I like this line because it really shows what she thinks of her thoughts, and I also just like the name that she gives for her thoughts whenever they come. I like imagining the fact that they invade her mind and make her do things she doesn’t want to (like drinking hand sanitizer).

_________________________________________________________________________________

I chose these lines because they mostly relate to Aza’s anxiety and her thoughts about it. The lines all have something to do with what she thinks about and what her thoughts make her do or feel. One of the lines that gives me a sort of sense of what Aza feels is the 8th sentence, which says: 

“I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.”

This sentence, in my opinion, really shows how hard it is for her not to be scared, and how in her opinion, it’s basically futile to even try and deal with her anxiety, but rather submit to it like she does every day with her sanitizer and her finger.

Here is my visual product (memes) to help portray my thoughts:

I feel like this is a nice picture because Aza’s thoughts seem to just appear, like a text. She doesn’t seem to have much of a choice when they come, and her thoughts seem to make the orders.

This meme portrays what I think goes on in Aza’s mind whenever someone asks her about her anxiety, and her disappointment/frustration whenever people don’t understand what she goes through.

This picture here is my favorite because it shows what Aza seemed to describe in the book, where her anxious thoughts come and she is helpless against them, like an ant versus a boot. For her, I feel like sometimes she just feels out of control, and the way the book describes it, she fights for control for a bit, but always fails nonetheless.

1. Do you think Aza’s anxiety is getting worse?

2. Are things going very well for Aza at the moment? Why do you think so?

3. Do you think Aza is getting closer with her mystery?

4. Will solving Davis’s dad’s mystery really help them?

5. Do you think Daisy’s fanfictions correspond to actual people? Why do you think she does this?

6. Why do you think Daisy adds Ayala to her fanfictions and makes her similar to Aza?

7. What do you think of Davis’s blog posts? Discuss.

8. What do you think of Aza’s frantic episodes (panic attacks)?

Answer for Q5: Yes, I feel like some of the characters in Aza’s fanfiction correspond to real people. I feel like Daisy started the fanfictions as a hobby, but then started making them similar to people she knew to help her portray what she thought of them, and maybe even get out any feelings she had for them. I think that her fanfictions were a way for her to both express her creativity and also express what she thinks or feels about the people she knows. 

The first drawing I made was a spiral, which I colored mostly black to symbolize the way that Aza is in the dark whenever she’s anxious. Inside the white parts, I wrote down most of her fears, or any thoughts and actions related to them. The spiral goes on forever (or at least as far as I could draw that).

If I was to do more with this picture, I would probably have added a bit of color to make it look better. I might also have drawn this spiral inside a drawing of Aza’s head, and would have made it look as chaotic as possible, so as to signify how things were not really orderly and neat whenever Aza was anxious, and how she didn’t seem to think straight.

In the second drawing, I simply drew turtles going in a downwards direction. I was not able to finish the coloring and details of this picture, so it looks quite simple.

Originally, I had meant for this picture to have maybe little Earths on the turtles’ backs, or maybe even have each turtle carrying one specific fear on their backs, but I focused more of my time on the first picture, so I ended up not completing the second one as well as I could have. If I had completed it, I would also have colored the background brighter, or maybe colored the turtles really bright and the background really dull and gray, which might symbolize how Aza’s fears take up most of her time and thoughts.

Another thing I thought of later was how the book described the turtles standing on one another, but I had seen a picture like that when I searched up the book, so I decided to take on a different angle when thinking about turtles going ‘all the way down’.

In these first six chapters, the book introduces the characters and immediately gets to Aza’s anxiety issues, like how she needs to put hand sanitizer on her hands otherwise she is afraid she will get sick. The book introduces Daisy as her interesting, ecstatic friend, and soon introduces Davis Pickett Jr., the son of a multimillionaire. The book also introduces Aza’s mom, who helps Aza and is there for her with her anxiety, but doesn’t understand it, like everyone else around Aza. Aza’s therapist is also introduced later on, and she seems to be very professional and listens carefully, but doesn’t seem to give the advice that Aza needs. These chapters introduce how Davis Pickett (adult) has disappeared, and how the reward for him being found has been put out, and how if he dies, his whole life’s earnings will be given to a tuatara – a 500 year old lizard.

This novel is about a girl named Aza who has anxiety. This book is about her experience trying to help her friend find out what happened to his father. The characters in this book are Aza (the main character), Daisy (Aza’s ecstatic best friend), Davis Pickett Jr. (the son of the missing multimillionaire), and Noah (Davis’ brother). My first impression of the book for the first 4 or 5 chapters was that the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere, but it was still interesting. For the first few chapters, the book seemed to be introducing the characters and their personalities and the problem, but nothing much was being done about it. Things were happening, and it was intriguing enough to keep me reading. In the beginning, it introduces Ava’s nervous ticks and her interesting habits with anxiety, like how she describes her thoughts during her more anxious moments like ‘spirals‘. The book then introduces Daisy as her best friend. The book also moves on to introduce Aza’s mom, who seems to be stable and helpful with Aza’s anxiety but doesn’t seem to understand her problem, like everybody else. The book soon introduces the problem; Davis Pickett, the multimillionaire, is missing. Aza and Daisy decide to visit him, or rather, Daisy strings Aza along, using the fact that Ava and Davis were friends when they were kids to get her to agree to come. When they arrive, they find out that Davis and Noah did not see their dad leave, nor know where he went, but they do know that if he dies, his whole life earnings go to a tuatara – a 500-year-old lizard – to study it. Noah takes the news of his dad disappearing much worse than his brother, leaving him distracted and distant most of the story.

While reading Persepolis, I learned a lot more about Iran than I already knew. I knew that people considered Iran an unsafe country and that might have ‘terrorists’, but considering I lived there, I was curious as to what the book would say when the author said that she wanted to show the other side of Iran’s story.

In the book, I learned about how difficult and scarring the war was from the perspective of people in Iran, especially for children like Marjane and her friends, and how the war affected people in negative ways. 

In one part of the book, I see Marji talking about how she smokes a cigarette to signify the end of her childhood and the beginning of her adulthood, which looks bleak at that point.

This part of the book makes me wonder about how war can affect people, and how people can make rash decisions during war. This part of the story shows how much Marji wants to be a grown up, and how much she wants to be treated like a mature adult. Later, she ends up acting quite headstrong to her parents and her teachers, to the point where she goes a bit too far when she gets angry, and ends up being expelled. I feel like I see a lot of this in the earlier stages of the book when Marji is small, and she really wants to understand everything, which makes her read a lot about very many different things. At some point in the book, Marji even says that she read more than she had ever read in her childhood, mostly because of her need to understand everything.

In another part of the book, you get to see the ‘guardians of the revolution’, and how scary they can be. 

In this part of the book, I can imagine how scared I would be, because if a person got caught by the guardians of the revolution, and they thought you were doing something wrong, they could take you to their committee where you could be whipped, and your parents wouldn’t know, but would end up thinking that their child was kidnapped or ran away. In my opinion, the possibility of getting caught by those people is a scary thought.

Later on, Marji’s neighborhood is bombed, and she sees her friend’s severed hand with her bracelet still on it. 

In this part of the book, she is only 14, and it makes me wonder how she handled it, because most people would be scarred for a very long time. She, on the other hand, is recounting the experience by telling the story, and I end up wondering how she is feeling.

In all these 3 parts of the book, something bad or scary happens to Marji, her family, or her friends, and Marji has to be able to try and forget it, and uses some tactic to try and move on from it   to try and cope with adults threatening to whip her for wearing basketball shoes and a Michael Jackson pin, to try and cope with seeing her friends severed, bloodied hand.

This book has shown me the horrors of war and revolutions, but kind of filtered behind the cartoon-ish feel of a graphic novel.

To increase that feel, for my creative part, I’ve made some memes that are related to Marji and what is happening to her.