Moment of Truth

 The main character of a novel is usually written to be the good guy doing good things. But sometimes the author adds a little twist to the story. Although the protagonists act with their best intentions in mind, due to their ignorance, their otherwise good intentions ironically result in disastrous consequences. In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus ignores many telltale signs throughout the story that could have pointed him towards the truth a lot earlier. Before he comes to the realization, however, he has already cursed the murderer of King Laius and promised to exile him. Now, if the murderer wasn’t Oedipus himself, this would’ve been the right thing to do. However, as the audience knows, Oedipus just dug his own grave here. When Tiresias tells Oedipus that “You yourself are the pollution of this country,” Oedipus is too blinded by his rage to even consider that Tiresias could be right. When Oedipus realizes that all the prophecies were in fact true, and that he killed his own father Laius ...

The clock hit midnight and all the lights were off, except for a small lamp in the corner -- and the glow from my computer screen. Yawning, I browsed various forums across the Internet, trying to find a new video game to play. I had been through most of the popular ones, and I was getting into more underground video games that not a lot of people played because more times than not, these were hidden gems that were a LOT of fun to play. I was scrolling through, when something caught my eyes: Hotel Warden FREE DOWNLOAD. Now, I usually don't fall for these click-baity titles, but the comment section was ... interesting to say the least. Most of the users were praising the overall game, but a few of them said things like "don't play this!" or "stay away!!!" Intrigued, I went ahead and clicked the download button. Instantly, my computer screen went dark. Great, more malware, I thought. But in a few seconds, the game loaded up and displayed the home page with a si...

I learned in my psychology class that when you recall a memory, you are actually remembering the last time you remembered it. This was then used to point out that memories can often be skewed because they change over time. This was quite an intruiging concept to me, but something more interesting was the possibility of creating false memories. This is exactly what Tara Westover does in her memoir Educated.   She says, "My strongest memory is not a memory. It's something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened." Her father keeps her trapped in their small remote community because of his distrust of government officials and because he doesn't allow Tara to go to school. And so one day, her father tells her a story about how the Feds surrounded their house and were preparing to kill/apprehend them. This story was told so vividly and repeated so often that Tara ended up thinking that it actually happened -- even though it was just a story told by her dad t...