About Me

ProjectBrynn

DeiningerPd. 1

9/4/15

Main MenuBackground

Future Plans

Personal Goals

Interests

The background slide will tell you about my family and places I have lived. The plans slide will tell you what I want to do as a job. The personal goals slide will tell you what plans I have for the future that do not involve a career. The interest slides tell you about what I enjoy doing now: reading, making music, photography, and writing. These are the things that make me different from everyone else.

The pictures on the first screen are all ones I have taken. The biggest one is of me dressing up as my favorite character, Cearo Hartman, from my story Forgotten for Halloween last year. The smaller one on the left is of a fig tree hanging over a courtyard wall in Spain, where I spent my summer with a team from my church. I love fig trees because they were all over where I lived in Morocco. I got a lot of pictures from Spain, including the smaller one on the right, which is one I took out the window when we were taking off from the airport in Madrid on our way home. I love the way the horizon looks perfectly straight in that picture.

The two pictures on this slide are the covers of two of my favorite Death Cab for Cutie albums. The one on the left is Transatlanticism. The right one is The Narrow Stairs, on which one of their most popular songs, Grapevine Fires, first appeared. I like how simple their songs sound, but I also love how challenging they really are to play. Playing music helps me to understand how much goes into making it and I admire my favorite bands that much more because of it.

Background

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From when I was three to when I was seven, I helped my parents in an orphanage in Morocco called the Village of Hope. This is the most recent picture of the kids there. The goal of VOH is to have ten families each helping to raise ten children. My parents took in two boys three months apart, Youseff and Ilyas, and a little girl named Sabah, who is one year younger than them. However, we could not legally adopt them, so when we had to leave when Youseff and Ilyas were 2 and Sabah was 1, they could not come with us. Now the boys are 12 and Sabah is 11.

I live in Redlands with my parents, my little sister Elena (9), my dog Zebda (Arabic for butter) and my cat Aicha (a common Moroccan name). To the right is a picture of my dog, a Wheaton terrier and yellow lab mix. My parents both skipped their senior year of high school and met at an early college orientation. My family has been going to RHS for four generations. My great grandmother graduated in 1944, my grandfather in 1966, my mom in 1990, and I will in 2016.

Future Plans

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I want to go into the music industry as a singer/songwriter. I already sing, write, and play piano for a local band called Sea of Sarcasm. We are going to record an album called Smooth Sailing soon, on which I have written and will be singing all of the music. My favorite song I have ever written is called Neverending Butterflies. It is about being so in love with someone that it is impossible to stop thinking about them. It is very challenging to sing, and I can not sing anything after we have played it because of the amount of breath it takes to sing. My sister says it is very catchy and hums it around the house all the time.

However, if that does not work out, I want to become a language teacher. I learn languages quickly and already know some Latin, French, German, Chinese, and Arabic. The top three colleges I am thinking about are Ohio Wesleyan, Augustana, and Concordia. I would most enjoy teaching Latin, and all three of these colleges offers a Latin major. No matter which I choose, I am going to take a gap year between high school and college to decide and learn to live on my own.

Personal Goals

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I was six when I first told my mom I wanted a black and white wedding. This has not changed. However, now I want a black and white wedding with homage to classic black and white movies such as Mrs. Parkington. I want to get married, and I want to adopt three children: Jasper Peregrine, after my friend Jasper and Peregrine Took from The Lord of the Rings; River Rose, for my friend River and Rose Tyler from Doctor Who; and Alexander Leo, after my friend Alex and Leo Valdez from the Percy Jackson series. I want to adopt them from Morocco because it is such a special place to me.

I want to record my own album, with heavy influence from the band Dear and the Headlights. They are my all-time favorite band. My band Sea of Sarcasm is trying to record an album called Smooth Sailing starting this October, though it is mostly influenced by the styles of Fall Out Boy, Switchfoot, and Paramore. My taste in music mostly comes from my dad, who gave me all his old CDs when he got an iPod six years ago. Dear and the Headlights is a great band, but they broke up four years ago and only made two albums. The other album is called Drunk Like Bible Times.

Interests MenuReading

Music

Photography

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This is the interests menu. I love to read books that make me think deeply. I enjoy listening to and making my own music. To the left is an album cover for the band The Mountain Goats, whom I enjoy because of their interesting lyricism. I also consider myself an amateur photographer. Underneath are some of my favorite pictures I have taken. I enjoy writing some of my own stories for other people to read as well. Some of my stories have gotten very popular online.

Writing

Reading

Interests Menu

I Am the Messenger: a book about the expectations placed on people by society. A 19-year-old cab driver accidentally stops a bank robbery and spends the next six months chasing down after addresses he receives written on cards in the mail, all while trying to find out who is sending the cards. I originally hated this book because of the twist at the end, but now I enjoy it, and I reread it all the time. It talks about expectations and stereotypes in a way that makes the reader question them. It is written by Markus Zusak.

Somebody Up There Hates You: this book follows a 17-year-old boy named Richard during a month in hospice. I like how blunt it is. It also talks about death in a way that makes a reader think differently about it. Richard meets a girl named Sylvie and they become close friends, trying to be normal teens in a hospice unit. The author is Hollis Seamon.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven: an old man named Eddie dies when an amusement park ride he was trying to make safe breaks down. He goes to the afterlife and meets five people whose lives he affected. A man who died of a heart attack when Eddie chased his ball in the street tells him that everything in the world is connected, for example. At the end, Eddie goes and waits to be one of the five people someone else meets in heaven. It is written by Mitch Albom.

Twisted: like I Am the Messenger, a story about expectations of others. A boy is labeled a troublemaker in school, and his parents start to believe it, even though there is no proof. He has to learn to live with those expectations. He accepts that he can not change what people think of him, only his own actions. The author is Laurie Halse Anderson.

Music

Interests Menu

My band, Sea of Sarcasm, is going to start recording an album next month called Smooth Sailing. I sing, play piano, and write songs for them, my friend Victoria plays guitar, Brooke plays bass, and Jabby plays the drums. We practice almost weekly, with some exceptions. We draw influence mostly from Linkin Park, Paramore, Fall Out Boy, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Panic! at the Disco. The logo to the left was originally drawn in the back of one of my notebooks three years ago. However, this version was drawn by Victoria, our guitarist, and is the official logo. We also might open for a local band called Hoity Toity soon.

These are some of the bands Sea of Sarcasm covers most of the time. The far left one is Paramore, from which we cover Ignorance. I enjoy their heavy guitar, and their songs are a challenge, but a lot of fun to sing. To the right of that is the Postal Service, with Such Great Heights. They have a more electronic sound, and I enjoy their descriptions of other, almost Seussical worlds in their lyrics. To the right of that is Death Cab for Cutie, with The Ice Was Getting Thinner, which is one of the bands my dad introduced me to when I was eleven. Their music is very alternative and simple sounding, but it is actually very challenging to play. The band on the far right is Dear and the Headlights, with Run in the Front. I enjoy their songs because their lyricism is simultaneously unconventional and perfectly descriptive. Others of our favorite bands include Fall Out Boy (Centuries), My Chemical Romance (I’m Not Okay), Panic! at the Disco, (The Ballad of Mona Lisa) 21 Pilots (Migraine), Imagine Dragons (Radioactive), and the Mountain Goats (This Year).

Photography

Interests Menu

This is one of the best photos I have ever taken. It is a high-contrast, low-lighting picture of a discarded piece of metal in an abandoned Spanish mining town near Sevilla, where I visited for two weeks this summer. The sun had set, but it was not quite dark out yet. My friend Morgan shone a bright phone flashlight on it and I took a black and white picture. I also take pictures of people, and some of my favorite people to take pictures of are Morgan and the Sea of Sarcasm bassist, Brooke. Morgan has made a photography website for me that she adds to whenever I take new pictures.

To me, photography is finding something and making it beautiful, even if it isn’t normally considered beautiful. I think the picture to the right represents that very well—a stack of chairs that caught the light in such a way that made me pause for a moment. I do not have my own photography style. I just take pictures of things I find interesting. I like the lines of the chairs in this picture, and how the light turns the metal turquoise. This was also taken in Spain, as were the ones below of a sunset, pink flowers that grew everywhere, and the stones in a little creek.

WritingAnother thing I do with my spare time is write. I belong to an online writing website, where I have a number of short stories, poems, and even a few longer stories. However, none of them are quite finished. One of my favorite characters I have ever written is Cearo Hartman, whom I dressed up as for Halloween last year. I very rarely plan my stories. Instead, I put my characters in a situation and they tend to write themselves. Cearo is the perfect example of this. She was originally written as a sweet, innocent, little-sister type of character. However, as soon as I put her in a sticky situation, she became sly and more sweet-talking than truly sweet. She has become one of my favorite characters to write because of it. She appears in my story Forgotten, which has its own website and a few short stories that have helped with writer’s block and characterization.

One of my most popular stories is called Never Forget. It started as a commission for one of my friends, who asked if I could write a death scene for a character based on him. I used a theater based on Redlands High School’s own Clock Auditorium as the setting, mostly because I met this friend in theater. The original short story was four pages long and mentioned no names because I wrote it almost like a letter—from a generic “me” to a generic “you.” Over time, because people have wanted to know more and more details about the characters, I have developed four of them: Rachel Stone, the main character who is the narrator of the original story; Jasper Roan (or Jasper Bane, depending on when the story was written), the character who dies; Cecy O’Neill, their friend who is in love with Jasper but is not as close to him as Rachel is; and Nick Cicerone, a smooth-talking classmate who acts as Jasper’s foil, or a character who is the exact opposite of him. Foils are extremely useful in character development, in the sense that everything one of them is, the other is not. There are so many versions of the original story that it’s hard to pick a favorite, though I do enjoy the idea behind Cecy’s Cycle, an epilogue from Cecy’s point of view.

Interests Menu