Common App Prompt #1- Scouting

Most people have that generic view of what a Scout is, someone who helps old ladies cross the street while carrying the groceries for her, and wearing a buttoned up uniform that barely fits over their body with a cleanly pressed neckerchief and those green shorts with a belt buckle. In reality, that’s only sometimes the case. The background of it all is encompassed in the scout slogan, “Do a Good Turn Daily.” Helping people is a huge aspect of scouting, from participating in a drive for the local food bank to creating new trails for people to walk on in the woods or even just simply helping park cars at an event, a Good Turn is more than simple good manners. It is a special act of kindness, and a Scout is kind no matter the situation they find themselves in.
I have yet to help an old lady cross the street, I have seen it happen and will attest to the fact that it is possibly the sweetest thing anyone could ever do. I have not been given the honor of attaining the rank of Eagle Scout yet, although the ground work for that has already been laid. And I have not been put into a situation where I could use the skills that I have learned to save someone’s life.

But none of that really matters to me, because I know that if I am presented with an elderly woman, or man, or anyone for that matter, who needs assistance, I will help them, because a scout is friendly and courteous. I know that in order to attain the rank of Eagle that I will need to walk a road that is traveled by only a select few. I know that if there is someone who without me could die, I will not be a bystander, I will use all of the skills that I have learned through scouting to save them, because a scout is prepared, both mentally and physically for any situation that they may find themselves in.
Some may argue that you do not know what you will do in a given situation until it actually happens to you. While in some cases that may be true, I know that if I am placed into a situation where I have the ability to help or make a difference, that I will do my best to make that difference and help those in need. 
Scouting has played an enormous role in who I am today. When I first started scouting I was in first grade, care free and it was just me having fun with my friends. Only back then I did not realize how much of an impact it was going to have on my life. Throughout my 10 years of scouting, I have learned a lot about how I should live my life, always doing my best to help others when they need it and how doing one small thing can help so many people in ways I will probably never fully realize.

            

Failure

Most people do not like to embrace the fact that we are all merely human, and as humans we have all been known to fuck up every now and again. It's the truth, people make mistakes, and in the words of one of our generations greatest musicians, "Everybody makes mistakes, everybody has those days" and yes, I wrote that from memory. But seriously, mistakes are what make us who we are, and without them, we would all go on living our lives as though we were the most perfect creatures living on earth, with no flaws, which is just simply not the truth.

Now onto my own personal experience with failure. Lets go back to 7th grade. I know many of us would simply like to forget such dark times, but I don't care in the slightest. now as many of you know, I am in the school band, and in the middle school the band teacher was a man by the name of Charles Seymour. This guy was probably the best teacher that the middle school had. In any case, in band there are not usually any tests, but on one particular day, Mr. Seymour was sick and not in school to teach us, so he decided to let us watch a video and "take notes" on its content. What this really was, was a test. We went along, helping one another out if someone missed an answer because the sub wouldn't go back in the video, and we got through it. No harm, no foul. Then the next class, it all went to hell. Apparently the sub told him what we had done, and he was not happy. If you can imagine how Mr. Bartlett would react to news like that, then you know just how Mr. Seymour acted on that day. He was royally pissed, at each and every one of us. So, in order to make up for this, he made us take another test, no help, no video, all based on our knowledge of music. And this is where the failure comes into play. I got a 45 on it. A 45 out of 100. When he handed me the test back, I felt my heart sink so deep into my chest, I just sat there and thought to myself "Well crap, there goes my future." It was the worst grade that I had ever gotten on anything. I just didn't know what to do. I had failed, and failure was not something that I had experienced in school before then, I was lost. Looking back on it, it was one test, that meant less than nothing to me, but back then, it meant everything.

I went home, and as usual my parents asked me how my day was, I told them the terrible, life-shattering news and their reaction really surprised me. My dad asked me "did you try your best?" I replied with a solom but sound "yes" and he told me "that is all that matters, even if you do not succeed, as long as you try your best, you will never truely fail." Ever since then, I have not been afraid to fail, because failure is as natural to us as swimming is to a fish. It is bound to happen, and the question is not whether or not you have failed, it is how you react to the failure and that you have the ability to shrug it off because life goes on, and if you get stuck on the little things that you have messed up, you will never be able to see the big picture.

This one is supposed to be a free write I guess... To be honest I hate free writing. Having a set of parameters, an outline of what I'm supposed to do is what has kept me going through all of school, creativity isn't really my thing I guess, at least not in writing.

So I'll tell you all a story, and given my scouting background, it might as well be about that. The year was 2013, and it was Mitchell Rigano, Nathan Kerpez, Tyler Benenati, and myself. We were just 15 years old and we went to the National Scouting Jamboree in West Virgina. The facility that we were at was brand new, only used once before for a trail run for the Jamboree, so it was a great place but I guess during the years of construction, they never realized that the location it was built on was the catalyst for horrific thunderstorms.

Now the facility was very environmentally friendly, the water that was used for the bathrooms was recycled from the shower, and the showers were ambient. If you have ever taken an ambient shower I applaud you because they are extremly cold. So on the first day our guide person told us about the showers and said that a good way to get past them being so cold is so sing while taking one, so naturally every time we would take showers we would wait until all six of us were in our separate showers, then we would all sing. Our main song was "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye. By the end of it all we knew the entire song, word for word, note for note. We had our haters, mainly other kids yelling at us for our terrible singing, but we got compliments as well.

The Jamboree was a 10 day experience. All was going well until around the fourth day when things started to get muddy. The sub-camp that we were in was located at the lowest elevation, meaning that when the rain came, which it did, we got the bud of it all. The irrigation systems in place consisted of triangular, 5ft deep 3ft wide at the top channels to provide a pathway for the water to flow out and away from the campsites. Well at one point, there was so much rain water, that the channel was only a few inches away from overflowing and completely flooding our campsite. Every day we were forced to stop all of our activities due to someone hearing thunder, but more than half the time we didn't hear the thunder. So after a few days of this happening in a row we started joking that some jerkwad out in another part of the country heard thunder so they called the camp to tell them to shut it all down. It got very annoying very quickly.

All in all it was a great time. Yeah, that's just some of our good times at Jambo. Also if you want to see what it was like for us there, below is a video that Mitchell took of us eating dinner during one of the less terrible storms. We were all screaming, thats how loud it was. Sorry for me flipping you off.

My Happy Place Thing

Alright, I don't exactly have the prompt with me so I'm just going to go off of memory with this one...
So, a place of comfort for me? I think//
Since I have to come up with something, I'm going to go with my car. Well technically it's my moms car but still. At this point I've had my junior license for just about a year, which really isn't that much time in respect to my life as a whole, but I have come to learn a lot about myself through the experience. For me, driving, whether it be to the store to get groceries or going over to a friends house is not a chore, it's an adventure.

I love to drive, that is partially driven by the fact that I am the youngest of three. I was forced to sit in the backseat while my brother drove for the first time in the Highschool parking lot and while my sister would come to a complete stop, then wait about 10 seconds at every single stop sign.
All of the years where my brother and sister were both able to drive and I was not, it led me to envy them and I could not wait until I turned 16 so that I could get my learners permit.
That all leads me to where I am today, 17 years old with a junior license and a car(ish), making me able to drive with no supervision between like 5am and 9pm. You could go pretty far in that amount of time if you really wanted to. Now I've never actually come around to making a bucket list, I have thought about it a few times and without a doubt there are two things that I would put on it with regards to driving. The first of which being to just drive. No directions, no maps, just get in a car and drive for as long as I want. The second of the two being to go someplace relatively flat where I can drive as fast as I can for as long as I want with no legal repercussions. Seeing as it's frowned upon to do that on most roads near New Paltz, idk when that will actually happen.

When I drive I'm not like one of your average teenage male drivers that drastically increases everyone's insurance rates. I try not to speed, I drive carefully, except for the fact that like most other guys I do jam out to T-Swift on the radio. All of this allows me to simply enjoy the ride. Somehow when I'm going 55mph down rt 208 in a 2 ton box of metal and combustible gas, I feel safe. This is because I know that I am in total control of my situation and while in reality I know that there are an abundance of outside factors that could lead me to an accident, when I'm driving those thoughts leave my mind and it allows me to focus on simply enjoying the ride. The one bad thing about not having my own car, is the fact that I have to use my moms. Every single time that I drive someone home or really anywhere for that matter, the first thing that they do is comment on the seat covers. Being my moms car, she has added some "special" details onto it, which include black seat covers with two pink hearts(actually the worst), wind chimes and a little purple turtle that bobs his head every time we go over a bump in the road. Driving is a great way for me to clear my head whether it be because of an agrument with my parents or just being bored, it allows me to reflect on my life and the constant changes of the world around me. So yeah, being in a car driving just about anywhere, except for school because it's just too early to actually enjoy it, is when/where I feel the most comfortable.

Check out the video that my sister just showed me... it's a keeper.

Childhood Memory?

Well, seeing as I have yet to do the first blog post, I figure I'll get that one out of the way. Better late then never. Childhood memory, its an interesting task to recount just one memory from my childhood but since Tozzi said so I might as well put something down on this blog.

When I was younger, every summer my grandparents would give all of the parents in the family a week off from their pesky little brats, we'd all go up to their house in Vermont, spend the week camping out in tents and it became known as Camp O'Donnell (their last name is O'Donnell).

Now, their house sits on the top of a mountain where they own 70 some-odd acres of land, so camping out for a week was always a great time for us all, so many places to explore. My grandfather, who we call Papa, would load all of the supplies into his truck, drive it into the woods where we would all unpack the gear and start setting up camp. This included everything from pitching the tents to diggin out a hole for us to put wood into to make a fire. That was ususally all that we did on the first day, because this all took us few hours, so afterwards we'd get into our sleeping bags and call it a night.

The rest of the days we did so many fun things, from playing kick-the-can and sardines, to driving about 30min to go and play mini-golf, the drive there was always an adventure in and of itself trying to fit all seven grandkids plus two grandparents into one car. All of the meals were cooked over an open fire, and just about every night ended with us all huddled around the fire cooking marshmellows and making smores. I remember a few times when I woke up in the morning, Papa would ask me if I heard the bears last night, and every time he asked I would say no, because I never knew what bears sounded like, so he would make the sound, which would always sound just like an owl because he would try to scare me into thinking that bears were in abundance near his house, which they weren't (in my 17+ years of life, I have not seen a single sign of a bear near that house). All in all his plan worked, I was terrified and never walked anywhere at night or even when it was somewhat dark in fear that a bear would come along and eat me.

Anywho, my overall favorite memory of Camp O'Donnell was the lake. Now I'm not talking about some huge body of water, it is a modest size with a small dock on one side and in the middle there is an extremly small island that we call Turtle Island. The name of which I never really understood, but it is about a 1x1 foot island near the middle of the lake. Now depending on the amount of rain, sometimes the island would be under water which was awesome for the younger me because then I could stand on it and it from the shore it would look like I was standing on water. To get out to this island we woulod take the row boat that my grandparents had, and in the back there was this plug so that we could drain out all of the water. So naturally, my brother Connor, came up with the most fun thing that I had ever done at the time, and that was to take out the plug while we were on the lake, allowing the boat to fill up with water, and we would see how long we could keep it above the water
by scooping out the water that rapidly filled the boat. We never lasted very long, but it never stopped being fun. Then all that was left was to swim the boat back to shore, drain all of the water, and go back out there to do it all over again.  

So yeah, childhood memory accomplished. Hope you all enjoyed reading this... Peace out.
Also, I somewhat remember Tozzi saying I needed to add a photo to this post, and while I could have added in a beautiful picture of my grandparents house, but I couldn't find it so here is one of our very own LLP :)

AP Lit Life