calvin and hobbes college essay

Calvin & Hobbes, Gary Clark Jr., and the Authentic Narrative of Your College Essay Posted on Wed, - 15:15 It's that time of year. Sam Bigelow, Associate Director of College Counselor at Middlesex School, joins us today to talk college essays. This is a piece about some things that are very important to me—music, Calvin and Hobbes and your college essays. Taking my dog for a post-lunch, afternoon walk through Estabrook Woods behind the Middlesex School campus recently, I was listening to the new Gary Clark Jr. live album and appreciating the wonderful authenticity of this young Texas blues hero’s singing and guitar playing. He’s taken on the mantle of today's “it” blues guy, and I think I know why. When he sings, you believe every word and note he let’s leave his body. When he rips into a guitar solo midway through a song, there’s intensity, there’s insistence, and there’s soul. He is, as we like to say, “the real deal.” There are plenty of guitarists out there that can play faster, plenty of singers that have more impressive vocal range, but if you can’t sing or play with real feeling like he does, you likely won’t resonate with an audience in the same way. I always tried with my own music to dial back the fireworks and play piano and sing more simply and more authentically in my own voice. I am certainly not saying I was successful in that venture, but I always tried to do that. Van Gogh's Shoes, Martin Heidegger and My Little Pony: Embracing the Essay Posted on Fri, - 09:40 Mark Moody, Co-Director of College Counseling at Colorado Academy, joins us again today with some fantastic guidance on the college essay. There is so much good stuff here, we don't even know where to begin to describe how helpful this will be to rising seniors as they begin their essays -- hopefully this summer. Moody's vivid explanations of Show, Don't Tell,  the concept.
“Childhood is short and maturity lasts forever.” This is one of my favorite “Calvin and Hobbes” quotes. It's not especially profound, funny, or clever, but it's true. It's something kids and teenagers tend to forget. I love reading “Calvin and Hobbes” because it reminds me that I'm still a kid. I have spent hours reading these books over and over. I cannot be stumped by a “Calvin and Hobbes” quote. Give me a random piece of dialogue from any comic, and I will finish the strip. Guaranteed. I love that “Calvin and Hobbes” comics are simple, heartfelt, real, and just plain funny. They tell the story of a mischievous, disobedient, and big-hearted six-year-old boy who goes on fantastic adventures with his stuffed tiger, who comes to life when no one else is around. He doesn't care that kids make fun of him because he's different. He appreciates life, takes the time to be a kid, and lets his imagination run wild. Calvin may be flunking first grade, but he has taught me a lot about life through his crazy adventures and active imagination. Reading “Calvin and Hobbes” has taught me the importance of play. I have learned not to take the world too seriously. I have learned not to let my peers influence who I want to be. I have learned that while getting good grades and taking difficult classes is important, it's not all that matters in life. I believe the world would be a better place if everyone had an imagination like Calvin and if no one were ashamed to play with stuffed animals. Of course, I will technically grow up eventually. “Calvin and Hobbes,” though, reminds me that I will always be a kid at heart. Calvin and Hobbes are never going to grow up no matter how many times I read the comic, and the part of me that loves them will never grow up either. The last “Calvin and Hobbes” ever published is my favorite. It's a Sunday comic, so it's bigger than just a simple strip.
Anybody who has a message that they care about communicating should pay attention to the great lesson taught by Calvin and Hobbes: The lesson is that not every message can be communicated in every medium. Yes, I mean Bill Watterson’s comic strip about the tiger and his boy, not the theologian and the philosopher. The confusion between the cartoon and the thinkers is excusable, because the strip was named after the thinkers, of course. Watterson has said that the title was “an inside joke for poli-sci majors.” Watterson was himself a political science major in college, and like every other poli-sci major must have been assigned Richard Hofstadter’s book The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It, which begins with the sentences: “Long ago Horace White observed that the Constitution of the United States ‘is based upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. It assumes that the natural state of mankind is a state of war, and that the carnal mind is at enmity with God.’” But it’s the famous strip, not the famous thinkers, which has the important lesson to which we should pay close attention. Bill Watterson’s strip ran in papers from 1985 to 1995, an amazing ten-year arc that set a new, higher standard for newspaper cartooning. Calvin and Hobbes jumped to the top of the charts, hovered there for years, and then stopped suddenly as its creator retired from cartooning before age 40. Like Seinfeld and Gary Larson’s The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes went out while it was on top. Its disappearance from the papers left a huge audience doing a thunderous standing ovation, demanding more. But there was no encore. There’s no more Calvin and Hobbes coming, because Watterson declared that he was done, and one of the few things we know for certain about this cartoonist is that he means what he says. The first time Watterson showed that he was a man of.
PARADOXES OF THE IMAGINATION in Calvin and Hobbes Henry Atmore The most acclaimed comic strip of its era, Calvin & Hobbes ran from 18 November 1985 to 31 December 1995. Calvin is a six-year-old boy, Hobbes a stuffed tiger who in Calvin's presence, and Calvin's presence only, comes to life and is capable of speech. (One of the strip's many ironies is that Hobbes - supposedly the product of Calvin's imagination - is not only more lucid than Calvin, he is on occasion more lucid than Calvin's parents.) Calvin is named after the sixteenth-century religious reformer John Calvin, famous for the doctrines of election and predestination. Calvin likewise exhibits a fatalistic attitude towards human striving - particularly homework - and an unshakeable belief in his own special destiny. Hobbes is named after the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who in Leviathan (1651) propounded the bleak view that life in the state of nature is a bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all) and consequently solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In the strip Hobbes casts a jaundiced eye over humanity's manifold failings, but without his namesake's faith in the redeeming power of consensus. Bill Watterson, the strip's creator, has written that his characters' emotional centers are very close to the way I think. Hobbes got all my better qualities (and a few quirks from our cats), and Calvin got my ranting, escapist side. Watterson has poked fun at academic excess (at one juncture Calvin submits an assignment entitled The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane ; regrettably, the minutiae of his engagement with this important text are not recorded), but his naming of the strip's two central characters does invite analysis of the kind that will be attempted here. One must tread carefully, however. Hobbes is in many ways no Hobbesian. His.
It's that time of year. Sam Bigelow, Associate Director of College Counselor at Middlesex School, joins us today to talk college essays. This is a piece about some things that are very important to me—music, Calvin and Hobbes and your college essays. Taking my dog for a post-lunch, afternoon walk through Estabrook Woods behind the Middlesex School campus recently, I was listening to the new Gary Clark Jr. live album and appreciating the wonderful authenticity of this young Texas blues hero’s singing and guitar playing. He’s taken on the mantle of today's “it” blues guy, and I think I know why. When he sings, you believe every word and note he let’s leave his body. When he rips into a guitar solo midway through a song, there’s intensity, there’s insistence, and there’s soul. He is, as we like to say, “the real deal.” There are plenty of guitarists out there that can play faster, plenty of singers that have more impressive vocal range, but if you can’t sing or play with real feeling like he does, you likely won’t resonate with an audience in the same way. I always tried with my own music to dial back the fireworks and play piano and sing more simply and more authentically in my own voice. I am certainly not saying I was successful in that venture, but I always tried to do that. My favorite cartoon strip growing up was Calvin & Hobbes. While Bill Watterson published the last comic for Calvin, the devilishly sweet little boy, and Hobbes, his stuffed pet tiger/best friend, on December 31st, 1995, I hope future generations will get to know this duo. Running around in the woods together on a wintery snow day, going on adventures, throwing water balloons at fabricated enemies, making snowmen, and talking about life, they were soul mates. My brother, sister, and I loved Calvin and Hobbes growing up, would stay up late reading the books of their comics, and just felt very.
My teacher accidentally called me “Calvin” once in the third grade. In fifth grade, my mom wouldn’t let me bleach my hair, so I dyed it orange-ish, spiked it up, put on a red shirt with black stripes, bought a stuffed tiger, and had the world’s least recognizable halloween costume. Once during high school, a young cousin of mine brought a Calvin and Hobbes book to the dinner table, held his hand over the last panel of every strip, and quizzed me on the punch lines. I got almost every one right. I wrote my college application essay on how Bill Watterson showed me the value of personal integrity. The longest single document I ever produced was a 5,000-word final paper for a 400-level English seminar that compared the iconography of Krazy Kat to that of Calvin and Hobbes. I have a bit of a thing for Bill Watterson. The intensity and endurance of my passion doesn’t surprise me much; Star Wars fandom gestates in the young mind and survives to adulthood, as can happen with Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. But the scale of those franchises breeds a different type of obsessive: the collector who accumulates books, figurines, computer games; the escapist who crafts elaborate costumes, fan-fictions, and artwork, surrounding himself (rarely, herself) with a community of like-minds. But those fanbases serve rich universes that invite ornamentation. Besides, an adult can’t draw much intellectual nurture from those works; if he wants his fandom to persist, he must focus his energy on creating supplements to the original text rather than investigating it more thoroughly. But Calvin and Hobbes grew up with me. My obsession with Watterson never expanded beyond an intense appreciation of his work (my brief, youthful foray into cosplay notwithstanding). As a small child, I loved Calvin and Hobbes because I loved tigers,and because Calvin’s mischevious-but-fertile imagination.