Frindle's blog

There’s nothing quite like meandering through a city. Not knowing where you’re going to go next, or what you’re going to see. As one of my friends had said only the day before, “It’s all an adventure in guesswork.” And it is. My group wandered around, doing some shopping here, checking out the used bookstore there. Every time I turned my head I saw something different, something exciting: A dog walker, a street blocked off by police cars, an old building next to a shiny new one. A group of forty rollerbladers racing through the streets, the leader yelling “RIGHT TURN RIGHT TURN” and as one the group makes the turn, some slowing down, some going backwards, but all of them making it. Except for one, the man with his head down, the man going to fast to notice anything around him. As he skated ahead, he was being left behind.

I noticed a lot of adults walking the same way the rollerblader skated. I noticed it because I often do the same thing: head down, shoulders slightly hunched, quick steps. It means business, it means stress, it means you have a place to be and you’re going to get there on time and that means no looking around, no small smiles to passerby, no muttered hellos, no noticing anything. No time for anyone.

Last year in my A.P. Government class, my teacher told me that on each quiz or test we would have a question on the news from that week. I decided to make BBC my computer's homepage, thinking it would force me to read the news. I soon realized how much I enjoyed reading the news, how much I valued knowing what was going on in the world. I used to spend an hour each day just reading the news: political, health, technology...basically anything but sports. I soon found how important it was to have a wide range of news to read: much better than only reading about one spectrucm. To know what is happening in the world, people need a well-rounded view, not a singular view. For this reason, I think people will continue to value non-customized news. They will prefer to be surprised about what is showing up on their computers, as opposed to knowing what they'll learn about today: the same thing they learned yesterday, and the day before. People appriciate variery. Newspapers give it to them.

I’m a traveler, born ready to explore every city in the world. I’ve been to many countries over the years, visiting many cities. And I’ve noticed that the cities in America are very different from the cities in other places I’ve visited. America is made up of people from different cultures. When people immigrated to America, they came to the cities. I can’t go ten feet in New York without hearing someone speak in a different language, or see a small mom-and-pop diner that guarantees food straight from one homeland or another. At the same time, everywhere I look in Silicon Valley there’s an Indian woman walking in her sari or an Asian mom speaking rapidly to her children in Korean before dropping them off at school. In America, the cities are inherently diverse communities, in terms of nationality as well as culture, values, and language.

The cities in Europe, however, are very different. They were created in a different time, when people mostly stayed where they were born. The people in many European cities are very similar: they look the same, dress the same, speak the same language. They don’t have the same obvious diversity that can be found in American cities. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t cities. It’s simply a different experience.

When I was growing up, my favorite hobby was reading. Now that I've "grown up," my favorite hobby is still reading. I suppose in that regard, I haven't changed much. Or at all. I've always believed that while a picture is worth a thousand words, a thousand words is worth a thousand worlds, because that's where those words can take you. To one thousand different places. 

Literature has already done what ever other field of study is trying to do. It has brought us to the past and to the future. It has created new creatures, peoples, vaccines, technology, languages, methods of transportation. Indeed, it has discovered the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. How could anything else hope to compare?

Because I believe so much in the power of words, I chose my avatar only after I had created my username (or pen name, if you will). For those of you who don't know, Frindle is a children's book about a fifth-grade boy who decides to start calling pens "frindles" instead. The other children in his school begin to use the term as well, and soon the nation joins in, to the point that twenty or thirty years later it is an officially recognized word in the dictionary. This showcases how important words are to a community, and how a word means only what the general population believes it means.

Also I enjoy puns, and a pen name in which the name meant "pen" was just too good an opportunity to pass up.