Clan Sullivan

March 4, 2015

A Short Essay on World War II

     World War II was the second of the great world wars, both of which consisted of Germany seeking world dominance.

      World War II was primed for beginning by multiple events: Germany accepted Hitler as their leader, and they started silently raking over the smaller countries. The first shot was fired when the Germans tried to invade Poland. After this, England, France, and a few micro-countries joined to fight Germany.                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

     The fighting raged on for a long while, and it looked as if the Allies might just lose the war, but then the Japanese, (allies to the Germans), attacked the Americans. This brought the Americans into the fight, and they turned the tide of the war.                                                                        

     After the Allies pushed through Germany and started getting close to Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Shortly after, the Germans surrendered. After a bit more fighting the Japanese, (and the use of the newly developed atom bomb), the Japanese surrendered and the war was won.  

Remote Control Air Crashes    

   The best and most spectacular remote control plane crash I have ever done was around a year ago, in April 2014, at about 80 mph.

   My brother, Abe, received the plane in the mail one sunny afternoon, and we were both excited to fly it, but it came disassembled so we had to put it together first. Right about the time Thomas, my older brother, came by for a visit, we had it assembled properly and ready to fly. We were going to wait till we could go to a bigger area to fly it, but Thomas egged us on to fly it at our property.

    The first flight we did was piloted by Abe, because it was his plane, and it was traditional to fly your own plane first. But he was nervous and made a minor crash landing as soon as I launched it. This made us want to wait for a better place even more, but just then my brother Joey came over, and with so much peer pressure we caved. This time I flew the plane.

    As soon as Abe launched it, I knew I'd made a mistake. The plane shot forward at 80 mph, and I knew that with the slightest twitch of my finger it would plummet to its death.

    The biggest problem for me now was not keeping it flying, but making it stop flying, or landing it without reducing it to a pile of foam and wires. This was more of a challenge than it would seem, because I had about 30 yards of runway and a plane that was going 80 mph over my head. I decided that there was no use putting off the inevitable, and swung the thing around for a landing approach. I tried to make it glide in as slow as possible to land it, hoping that every thing would work out and it would all go just fine. But that is when it went bad. With little experience with high speed planes, I didn't know, (or didn't remember), about the stalling tendency of them. I brought it in too slow, and it stalled, which turned into a spin. This was the first time I'd ever encountered a spin, and it felt like I didn't have enough airspeed, (because I couldn't control the plane), so I hit full throttle. This didn't help at all, and it soon hit the ground.

    The plane was pretty messed up, but after a few hours we got it running again. The flight was great, and a learned a lot about stalling an aircraft. Over all I had fun with it. So much fun, in fact, that I might just buy me another!

Lincoln

   I was there the day our president got assassinated. I had a front row seat. I saw it all.

    One beautiful afternoon, as I was thinking about how the war was over and enjoying life, my sister got this weird and crazy idea to go to the theater. I had to go along, of course, because you can't talk a woman out of an idea without starting a war, and I didn't want to go through that again.

    As soon as we got seated, I started rethinking my decision to go with the peaceful yet ever-so painful option of going to the theater for the night. As the fellow on the stage with the strange dress started speaking in a theatrical tone, my brain started saying, “Oh great, what have I got myself into.” I tried to keep it from interrupting my ability to concentrate on the “show”, but it was just too loud. Next, my brain  started looking for an escape plan to enact, and before I knew it, I was thinking of the possibility of discreetly whacking the nearest guy on the head and waiting for him to chase me out of the building “for no good reason”. This idea was immediately shot down by the issue that the guy might actually catch me.

    As I was pondering this, all thoughts in my head were suddenly replaced with what I saw. A man holding something that looked like a hotdog, sneaking quietly up on another guy up on the balcony. “Oh, how cute,” I thought, “ somebody is about to have an April Fools prank played on them."

   As I was thinking this, it all seemed very logical that this would occur, but it wasn't till later that I remembered that it was April 15, and not April 1^st .

    There was then a loud bang, and the other guy up front seemed to slump down in laughter. I thought this was strange, because the guy with the “hot dog” seemed to be the fellow playing the prank, but the victim seemed to be getting the enjoyment out of it. Then it all became clear.

    I knew then what had happened. The guy up front was expecting a prank, and had somehow booby trapped the area around his chair in case of a hot dog attack. The prankster seemed so surprised by this trap that he actually jumped off the balcony, onto the stage, and ran out the door, all the time yelling something that I couldn't make out. Jumpy fellow, I thought.

    After that everybody got all chaotic, jumping up and down and yelling, and the like, and we all ran out the door yelling all the time. It was quite the evening.

How Piano Changed My Life

   Piano changed my life by giving me something to perform in front of people and by sharpening my desire for the love of music. I really enjoy playing, and seeing what I can accomplish.

    When I first started learning piano, I hated it. My older sister, Siobhan, was teaching me when I was about eight, as a mandatory practice. I tried everything I could to get out of it. I hid in my room when the time came, complained about it, groaned, and did about everything imaginable to to miss practice. Finally when Siobhan gave up, I was overjoyed.

     About two or three years later, I sat down at the piano one evening, and started playing. I wasn't very good, but it felt amazing to just play what I wanted to play. A few months later, I started playing a few songs for our small church and goofing off on the piano on my free time. After that I kinda lost interest in it for a while until a friend, Josh, got me back into Ii by playing Blues with me on the piano.

    I started learning some more blues scales and major scales and the like and new songs as well, until I could basically play anything I wanted by ear.

    After this I decided that I needed to learn how to read sheet music, as most of the songs I wanted to know were most easily accessed by sheet music. I started learning it by a music theory book, and got far enough to figure out how to read the dots in sheet music, and how to figure out what keys they went to, but then something happened and I didn't end up finishing the book.

    It wasn't till recently that I started on another music theory book, and learned what all the rest of the stuff on the page meant. The first song that I learned from sheet music was “The Easter Song” by Keith Green.

    I am now learning multiple songs and enjoying them all thoroughly. The piano is truly a wonderful instrument, and I am looking forward to getting better at it to the best of my ability, as far into the future as I can imagine.