My life in the present and the past

My name is Katey Lee Crystal. I was born in Burbank, California in April of 1986. My parents Sharon and Harry met at work and are still together today, happily married for 26 years. I was raised in La Crescenta and all my life I thought anything outside California to be foreign. I was comfortable under the protection of my parents and a culture where my beliefs were affirmed and accepted.
All that is past possesses our present. In Classical Literature there are hundreds of stories that can easily be related to life today. By looking at ones’ own life many events can easily be compared to stories written thousands of years ago. This goes to show that humanity is a body of people with the same concerns and interests. Whether someone is living in 4 AD or 2007 AD, many ideologies in each society are the same because they are based upon ideas that have been built upon over thousands of years.
Growing up I read many stories about different places in the United States and the world at all times in human history. After reading many stories I began to see similarities to current events in the news as well as in my own life that sounded similar to stories of the past. When I got to college my whole world got thrown upside down. I met people from all parts of the country and couldn’t find another Californian no matter where I looked. These people had very different upbringings and I was able to connect more and more of the past with an array of stories I heard in the present.
When I visit the place of my roots it feels more and more foreign to me every time I return. People on the West Coast simply cannot see my desire to live in such a desolate place. I tell them they don’t know what they are missing and high tail my way back to Montana as fast as my 1992 S-10 Blazer or jet airplane can take me.
I feel like Bacchus. He tells everybody he is a god and many fail to believe him. He punishes the skeptics. Although people might denounce my lifestyle and believe the acts I find interesting hard to believe I will not go to great lengths to inflict pain on those who don’t understand. Bacchus or Dionysus is the god of wine and the promoter of civilization, a lawgiver, and lover of peace which are all things that I can apply to myself.
I am also similar to Athena because I’m a daddy’s girl. Athena was Zeus’s favorite child whom he gave birth to from his own head. My dad definitely gives me the benefit of the doubt whenever a dispute is at hand. Athena is the goddess of civilization, wisdom, weaving, crafts and the more disciplined side of war.
I am sure my mother feels like Demeter. Montana is Hades and I am Persephone. Demeter is the mother of Persephone and the story told of them is a story of their love which has been disrupted. After being swept off my feet by going to a foreign land, my mother became quite sad to lose her youngest daughter. My mother, like Demeter “pulled her vail over her face and sat in quiet sorrow…just pining for her daughter (Ruden 9). Her job of feeding and clothing me was over. However she still has the liberty to see me at certain points in the year just as Demeter gets to see Persephone two thirds of the year.
My decision to leave my mother was a choice I made, and I was not taken away against my will by the devil. I am just like Persephone who “still hoped to the tribes of gods again, and her dear mother, and this hope soothed her brave mind in anguish” (Ruden 4).
If I had to relate a story to my father it would be the rape of Europa. I was an unsuspecting junior in high school looking for colleges to attend. When Europa first gazed at Zeus disguised as a bull she thought “he is so shapely, so unthreatening…she is afraid to touch him…at a certain point Europa dares to sit down upon his back” (Ovid 72). I decided that I needed to get out of California so I applied to schools in a few states beside my own. I visited Montana and fell deeply in love. I came here and cannot go back no matter how I try. My father misses me so much just as Europa’s father ¬¬¬¬¬¬Agenor does in The Metamorphoses. There is nothing that will bring me back to California. Now that I am out in the world I see how great it is never to return-permanently.
After graduation I plan on becoming a teacher and a freelance writer on the side. By telling stories to the children I teach I’ll be able to make them brighter and more ambitious. They will see the world and talk about it in order to ensure that their own story and impact on the world be maintained. It is all a repetitious cycle in life. One is born and has life experiences while they are educated. Then they tell their life stories, die, and are remembered.
By documenting events in ones’ lifetime correlations with the past are much easier to recognize. George Steiner says that “men and women re-enact, more or less consciously, the major gestures, the exemplary symbolic motions, set before them by antique imaginings and formulations. Our realities, as it were, mime the canonic possibilities first expressed in classical art and feeling” (Steiner 108). As far as journalism goes I want people all over the country and possibly the world to read the stories I write and become inspired. After reading my work I hope people get out and try the things I’ve talked about. Hopefully after enjoying that experience that they might not have tried otherwise they will remember me forever as a muse.
As Diotima says in her speech in The Symposium, Homer, Hesiod, and the other good poets have left behind stories that make them immortal. When one writes down their beliefs they are ensuring their identity for the rest of time. Art is the most important way for events to be remembered forever.