Bossypants by Tina Fey

                Bossypants, the wonderfully creative and hilarious biography by Tina Fey jokingly tells the story of Tina’s life from young woman to the present. Often Tina jokes about how this book will teach you “to learn how to raise an achievement-oriented, drug-free, adult virgin” as she was raised. Silly jokes like these often come up, but I think it’s true. Through her autobiography we get to see how she was raised, and how her choices influenced her life now.

                Tina grew up in a normal town, where during her summers she attended a theater camp highly populated by, in her opinion, closeted teens and flamboyantly gay men. “That summer I got to know four families in which half the children were gay. In case you’re interested from a sociological point of view, they were always Catholic and there were always four kids, two of whom were gay. What Wales is to crooners, my hometown may be to homosexuals- meaning there seems to be a disproportionate number of them and they are the best in the world!” Out of her theater camp, Tina also became best friends with Karen and Sharon, who “had been a couple at some unspecified time in the past but were now just friends with asymmetrical haircuts.” Tina grew up in a home that was accepting and supportive of different peoples sexual orientation and while she isn’t an avid gay rights activist she does strongly support their movement and doesn’t believe there should be any discrimination towards them.

                For a while she worked at a Chicago theater company in which they specialized in improvisational acting. Tina loved it there, but one of her major problems with it was that they discriminated against women. “Each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. ‘You can’t do that. There won’t be enough parts to go around. There won’t be enough for the girls.” To Tina, and as I am sure many other women, this statement seemed as if the directors and producers were frantic to put in an equal number for gender equality, and instead used a thinly veiled excuse for not enforcing women’s rights. Tina Fey never stood for any of that though, and instead went on to become the third woman in the Second City group, as well as head writer of SNL and star of 30 Rock.

                Many of Tina Fey’s lifestyle choices have influenced her in the way she represents herself in the media, the way she has such a funny outtake on life, and just in general the way she chooses to live. She jokes about how her wholesome childhood is how you can raise such an obedient kid, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think that Tina Fey shows us that by having a good childhood, and gaining perspective in meaningful human rights Tina shows us that we can be influential as long as we broaden and expand our horizons.

The Fault In Our Stars Revised Post ***SPOILERS!

The book, The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green is about seventeen year old, cancer ridden teenager named Hazel. Hazel’s life has always had a clear ending to it. But with a new medicine buying her a few extra years, Hazel’s got chance to live a little bit more.  In spite of this, Hazel continues to sit in her room reading her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, because most of her friends have abandoned her. The friends she manages to keep, she distances from so as not to hurt them when the time does come… That is until she begrudgingly goes to one of her support group meetings. Enter Augustus Waters, the most gorgeous, compelling boy Hazel’s ever met. Something about him draws her in and makes her want to open up. Augustus teaches Hazel, as well as the readers, that life is short, so we should make it meaningful and live it to the fullest. Through Hazel and Augustus’s adventures we learn about the bond between leaving your mark and leaving scars, and just how impossibly intertwined the two ideas are.

 At the first meeting that Augustus goes to, having been dragged there by his friend Isaac who is blind in one eye, Augustus explains that he had osteosarcoma about a year and a half ago, but for now he’s in remission. Augustus or Gus is asked to share what he fears most to which he replies bluntly oblivion. When Augustus replies that he fears oblivion, the support group leader, Patrick asks if anyone else can relate to Gus’s fear. To which Hazel, who never raises her hand, says, “There will come a time, when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe this time is coming soon, and maybe its millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows everyone else does.” When I first read this monologue Hazel says to her support group, there was just something about it that hit home. If you just read it once through you might think, “Oh, its deep”. And it is deep, there’s something haunting about picturing a barren world, where our existence is gone. But as Hazel says, the inevitability of human oblivion will come, and at some point we have to just accept it. People, events, places, none of it matter in the end. Life will end; life will go on without you. And nobody dares to pay enough attention because they’re too self-involved or scared to face the reality.

 One of Hazel’s biggest fears in The Fault in Our Stars is that when she dies she’ll hurt everyone. Hazel refers to herself as a ticking bomb. She fears that when she dies she will go off like a bomb, and all that will be left are the shrapnel, and other little remains. And quite frankly, Hazel doesn’t think that her life is worth the hurt, so she’s reclusive. Hazel only has a certain number of friends she talks to, and tries to only limit her interactions to her family. While Hazel may think this is a good idea, I would have to disagree. I don’t think it’s worth it to limit your time with people because, as Gus says in his goodbye letter, “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.” We can’t limit ourselves to new experiences and new people because we’re afraid of the aftermath when we’re gone. We don’t get to choose if we die, when we die, or if we get hurt while living, but we can shape our lives to have the best possible people in them, and the best possible experiences. And Hazel may be a ticking bomb, and so may many other people, but we can choose to have them in our lives for the short time we get, because life wouldn’t be worth it without them.

Throughout the book, there’s this unspoken constant urgency to make their (Hazel and Augustus’s) short lives memorable. But at the same time, there is a constant debate between being memorable and “leaving a scar”. You see, I suppose the biggest questions of the book are is it worth it to be remembered, if the memories are fake? Or is it worth it to be remembered it all that memories do are leave painful scars? During the development of The Fault in Our Stars there seems to be a fine line you can dance between, scaring people, and leaving a mark. Augustus is a perfect example. While Augustus wants to be remembered, (as I said before his biggest fear is oblivion) he also admires the heroicness of leaving people alone the way Hazel tries to. In Augustus’s death letter he asks his former favorite author to write Hazel a eulogy because Van Houten can actually put thoughts together successfully. “Here’s the one thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark.” “Hazel is different. She walk’s lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that real heroism?”  Even at the end of Gus’s life he hasn’t fully crossed onto either lines side. No matter how great a person we are, there’s still something so appealing about being remembered. But at the same time, there’s something so heartbreaking at leaving people behind. For some people the line that Hazel and Gus dance between is simple, but for many, especially Gus, it’s hard.

As we watch Hazel and Augustus suffer through their last days, we get to experience the way each character deals with what the aftermath of what their deaths will be. Hazel tries to limit the amount of people she spends time with; therefor limiting the amount of people she hurts. Augustus searches for ways to find himself worthy of the life he’s lived, and leave his mark as someone other than the cancer ride teen who lived a ‘heroic’ life. Watching both characters suffer through the possibilities makes me wonder if there can be a happy middle. Can we leave our mark without hurting people? Is it worth it to hurt people? Before I read The Fault in Our Stars, in all honesty, I felt the same way Gus did. Now afterwards, I’m confused. Maybe it’s good to be confused; it means I’ll go more into depth about it. I don’t know. I’m only thirteen; I still have time to think.  One thing’s for sure, I’m really glad I read The Fault in Our Stars, on top of it being humorous, and compelling, depressing, and even sometimes gut wrenching, it also made me stop and think for a couple minutes.

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