Caitlyn's Corner

Quote from Neil Gaiman The graphic that caught my eye from this past week was this quote from Neil Gaiman.  I have been so engrossed in his book  Norse Mythology  and seeing a quote from him in the announcements got me excited. It is an awesome quote, too.  Imagination is so incredibly important. I really loved this video What Makes A Hero? from Matthew Winkler.  It would have been awesome if I had found this earlier in the semester to help write my stories, but I guess I will just have to continue writing for fun!

Wow, Dead Week is coming to an end and finals are about to begin.  I cannot believe that this semester has gone by so fast.  It seems like only yesterday I was stressing over the first day of lectures for this semester.  I am filled with a huge mixture of emotions as I go into my final days of this semester.  I am sad that several of my friends are graduating and moving off to far away places.  My best friend, whom I have known for my entire life, is moving to Washington state in just a few weeks.  My brother graduates from OU's Medical School in two weeks and then he and his wife are moving to Alabama for his residency.  I am also incredibly happy for them, but I am going to miss them so much.  Relief is probably the emotion I am looking forward to the most.  Come Wednesday at 6pm, I will be free for summer and I am looking forward to it.  For now, I still have two classes to finish assignments for and a few final papers to turn in....

This week, I did the Happiness Jar.  Everyday, I wrote down on a sticky note something that makes me happy and then I placed it in a mug (I didn't have a jar).  By the end of the week, my mug was filled with notes of happy thoughts.  I woke up feeling stressed about finals week starting in just a few days, so I started reading my little notes.  It seriously cheered me up.  Yeah, finals suck, but not every second of life does.  Journal I keep a journal and my New Year's resolution this year was to write down at least one positive thing in each of my entries.  I have kept to that and I even started highlighting all the positives in my entries.  Now, when I look back through my journal when I am feeling low, I can see that parts of my life are great and not every second is bad. I liked this jar idea, because it was a much more visual effect seeing all the happiness in my life.

Try Everything  by Shakira is not only an awesome song.  It has great Growth Mindset messages in it! She talks about how nothing is easy.  We all have to fail and fall a few times before we get it right.  It's something that we need to remember.  We have failed and are going to fail again in the future.  But that is okay.  Because one day, we will get it right.

Ragnarok For this last section of reading, I finished up Norse Mythology  by Neil Gaiman.  This was Chapters 16 and 17: Th Last days of Loki and Ragnarok.  Ragnarok was such an awesome read.  I just watched the Thor Ragnarok movie the other day, so it was really interesting hearing characters names that I remember from parts in the movie.  I feel like the movie definitely had a much more light-hearted feel to it than the original story.  This story is just filled with epic events, battles, and deaths.  I really loved reading it. I loved every minute of this book.  It made me fall in love with Gaiman's writing and also Norse Mythology.  I will definitely be reading more of both in the future.  I am so glad I was able to read this book for this class.  I definitely would not have taken as big of an interest in researching different parts of it if I had just read it for pleasure.

Thor's Fight with the Giants From reading so much Norse Mythology lately, I decided to read more about  Thor  in the Wikipedia article.  I really love Marvel Comics and that is what got me into Norse Mythology.  I was totally that girl in high school who was hardcore crushing on Marvel's Thor, Chris Hemsworth. It was very interesting reading Gaiman's book and also this wiki article to learn more about the mythology character that the comic is based on.  I remember Gaiman mentioned that Thursday was named after Thor, so I read the article until I found a bit about it.  Sure enough, in English,  Thursday  is named for Thor's Day.  I went to the article on Thursday and discovered here that Thursday is named for the Roman god Jupiter in most romance languages.  I am more familiar with Greek mythology, so I clicked the link for Jupiter to find out which one he is.  At the end of this article, in the See Also section, was a link to ...

For the sixth part of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology , I read chapters 14 & 15: Hymir and Thor's Fishing Expedition and The Death of Balder. The story of Thor's fishing trip was a really awesome tale.  It is one of those mythology stories that is larger than life, literally.  Thor is fishing with a giant, using a whole ox head as bait, and the entire scale of everything is ridiculous.  When Thor first reaches Hymir's home, a large giantess is preparing food.  Gaiman describes the scene as she is cutting "onions the size of boulders and cabbages the size of boats"  I really loved reading this story.  It is such a classic tale and is often found in art from the Norse.  I loved Gaiman's version of it too.  He blended together the telling from a few different sources and the result is wonderful.  This story is just so good. I think it would be really fun to tweak this into a story of my own and find images depicting the original.  I h...

For part five of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, I read chapters 12 & 13: The Apples of Immortality and The Story of Gerd and Frey. Apple In the story about Thor's journey to the giants, Gaiman ended it with Thor thinking about how even he couldn't defeat old age.  In the next story, The Apples of Immortality, we hear a story of when Loki led Idunn, the keeper of the Apples of Immortality, to her kidnapping.  When she is taken, the gods no longer have their immortality and began to age.  This story is really interesting and I really want to work with it for a story this week.  I also really like how Gaiman has all the stories leading into each other so the book reads like a novel and less like a collection of random tales.