too cool for school

       How much of our lives are predestined, and how much of it is in our control? If everything is fate, does that mean our whole lives have been mapped out, and now we're just the pawns in our own stories? Does making a "wrong" decision in our lives mess with our fate, or is that mess-up what ultimately leads us to our right paths?     I always thought about these things, and when this overall theme came up in our new studies of  Oedipus, I was reminded of my curiosities. If we say our whole lives are planned out, then can't people just give up because of their life circumstances, and blame it on destiny? To what extent can fate control our lives? When I think of fate, my mind immediately goes back to 9th grade when we read Romeo and Juliet, and in the Prologue we were told, "a pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life"  (Shakespeare). We knew their fate right from the beginning, but we didn't know what led up to that moment- the freewill of the

      Do we write for the forsaken embrace on the desire to express, or for the unmistakable grade? Do words have meaning, or are they just a product of the minds fabrication, waiting to be undertaken?     I distinctly remember in second grade, our teacher was scolding the class because we didn't write enough on our assignments. This was the first time I ever wrote a full paragraph, and I was mad. She held up one of my peers work, and said that she was the only one that wrote enough, but I didn't understand. She barely wrote anything, she just wrote really big so it looked like a lot! I had maybe written double, but just really small, and for that I was scolded for. After overcoming this (a decade later in that), I now look back and think, what makes a piece of writing good? I've had some teachers in the past where how "good" an essay was, was directly correlated to the quantity of work, but I feel that this is wrong.  My first instance of learning that writing is