It's Literature Time

Throughout this next year, this blog will start to take shape to center around my next AP English course, AP English Literature and Composition. This is supposed to be the more difficult brother of the AP English classes. I'm proud to say that I'm going to be taking both in my high school years. Yeah, I'm taking other AP classes, but who gives a shit about those?

This is an English blog, after all. AP Lit is a notoriously difficult class in many high schools because of the absurd amount of reading you're required to do (and effective reading, at that). You're required to read a good amount of fiction novels, plays, and poems from various time periods with varying degrees of difficulty and style + craft. And no, they're not those "fun" type of books like Harry Potter and The Summer I Turned Pretty. The books you actually read are fairly challenging books that have complex themes and many literary elements, neatly packaged with that classic, confusing language. 

I'm not going to sugar coat it---reading Shakespeare is hard and takes a lot of patience. However, I think the reason we read a ton of Shakespeare is to become proficient at looking at complex text quickly to write an essay about it on the test. In reality, merely looking at the text isn't going help you write a good essay; rather, it's analyzing it and looking at it closely for a good, defensible interpretation of whatever the prompt is asking. If you can get good at understanding the basic meaning quickly, though, you have more time to read it closer and process your thoughts in planning the essay.

 If you thought AP Lang had a tight timer, then you may be even more surprised to know that AP Literature's timer is worse. This time, you only get 2 hours to do all 3 essays, instead of 2 hours and 15 minutes. This is likely because you don't need to read a bunch of sources, but you still have to read a work of poetry and a work of prose. If the poetry is complicated, good luck trying to read it fast and strip it for meaning in 40 minutes. Then, be ready to do that again for the prose essay. By the way, this is assuming that you split up your time evenly.

Of course, there are multiple choice questions, this time 55 for some reason. It's just another gauntlet you'll have to endure, but honestly I expect that now.

I received a guide book from my teacher that goes over strategies and tips for writing the essays, so I'll be sure to refer to that and report what I found helpful here. Get ready for a lot of  posts about a particular book or about a poem.

                                                                                                                     

Watching Dominator's "Making Breakfast" part 1, potato scene

 About 3 weeks ago, my friend posted 3 videos of him cooking breakfast on his YouTube channel. Today, I wanted to talk about the first scene of the first video.

 

From the first video, it appears as though he's using his phone to record everything, as evident by the lack of his two hands appearing in the frame at the same time. This makes sense, as he is alone throughout the videos and does not have expensive equipment that would allow him to attach a camera to his body. 

 

In the first part of Video 1, Dominic appears to be cutting some potatoes that were skinned off camera. He performs a cutting motion with a large kitchen knife and jump cuts to a frame of the potatoes cut in half. This was presumably done to save time on the video and because of a need for 2 hands. After this, the video cuts to him putting some avocado oil to grease the pan. It is unclear if the stove is on. In the next shot, he is placing the halved potatoes through a vegetable dicer with a clamshell-type mechanism. It is white and green. He continues to put potatoes through this tool to dice the potatoes, but eventually one of the potatoes gets stuck in the dicer because the bottom tank was filled. Initially, he tries to push the potato through, but it fails to move through. However, because he already applied force, it becomes wedged between the blades. Instead of emptying the potatoes into the pan to create more space, he forces it further. This makes the potato more stuck. Finally, he gives up and places the potatoes into the pan to create more space. Interestingly, instead of reattempting to push the potato through the blades with the empty container, he says to the camera "It got stuck..." and tries to pry it out with his hands. He claims that he "didn't think this through at all" and that you can "add it to the hot take of bloopers, wow". He gets it out with relative ease and cuts the potato by hand. 

 What's intriguing about this particular scene is the fact that he does not realize that the dicer is full, despite already cutting many potatoes beforehand. Also, it's strange that he didn't just put the potato back through the machine, especially since it was already 25% of the way through the blades. It's hard to tell from the video, but perhaps he didn't because potato became mangled from the blade or not in tact enough to go through the tool. It's funny, and should definitely be added to the bloopers.