Hobbits and Mermaids and Such.

      J.R.R. Tolkien was probably just sitting at home one night chilling with a cup of coffee and out of the blue he decided to invent hobbits. I mean...how does that happen? I'm glad it happened, of course; Lord of the Rings is probably the greatest thing that has ever happened to paper, ink, and, let's all be nerds and face it,  the entire cinematic industry.
     I don't quite get it though. When I really start to think about it, I have no idea how authors come up with things - what it is in their minds that just lets them invent and invent and invent while I'm just sitting there at my desk reading a thesaurus like it's the Bible because a decent vocabulary is all that my short story about talking vegetables is going to have going for it? Even worse, talking vegetables have already been invented by multiple authors, so it's not like I'm being original there or anything. I wish I could be like Tolkien or Rowling and have the genius to come up with a whole other world that people could obsess over and make trivia games about. Not just because I would enjoy being filthy rich, but because it must be so liberating to have that freedom of creation and possibility in writing. I absolutely hate writing, and honestly...it's mainly because of the writers block and my insane lack of innovation and creativity. What is it that makes certain people so full of ideas and then other people, like me, so devoid of them?

Most Dangerous Game

    It's always interesting to read something that you have read a few years prior all over again. I feel that each time, you find something new in the story that you weren't quite able to grasp before...whether it's underlying symbolism, motifs, or even just themes that the author was trying to emphasize. The first time that I read The Most Dangerous Game was in the seventh grade. What I remembered of the plot was just that it was dark and dangerous; a fun read, especially compared to all of the other boring stuff that they throw into anthologies for middle school English classes. I read the novel yet a second time my freshman year of high school at Lafayette. Again, the events of the plot were all that the teacher really chose to focus on in the class discussion. My third reading of Connell's classic short story took place about 4 days ago. I'm a senior in high school now, so my thought process during reading has changed a little bit since the good old days of Advanced English 1. 
   What I found in the novel during this third read was Connell's underlying idea of the hunter being the hunted and how the role reversal was able to show Rainsford the empathy towards life that, through his hunting career, he had lacked. In his desperation to evade General Zaroff and his hounds, the protagonist was thrown into a hell-ish situation of fear and desperation to stay alive. This same situation could be mirrored with Rainsford as the General and the game that he hunted just for the fun of it. Zaroff, on the other hand, had completely lost any empathy for life at all; he was so obsessed with his sport that it's value, and his love of the challenges that it could pose, made him completely lose his sense of humanity. There was also a certain sense of hypocracy that I noticed; It was completely okay for Rainsford to run around senselessly killing game that he didn't really need for food or survival just for kicks and giggles. However, it was not okay for the same to be done with him as the victim. However, I do understand that most people would not accept this theme, being that we tend to believe human lives are much more important than those of beasts. The fusion of this short story between a literary and a commerical read, with it's disturbing plot twists and dark elements, made it very fun to read while still giving the reader a lot to grasp underlying the plot itself. I enjoyed being able to see the classic in a new and more complex manner whilst reading it this time around.