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Zo Tribley
Ashley Rea
ENC-2135
January 29 2016
The Imaginative Crier- A Personal Essay by Zo Tribley
There is no one genre that functions more significantly in my life than the other.
The magical realism of works ranging from Harry Potter to Beloved or 100 Years of
Solitude comes before the basic, yet comforting, romantic comedy movie starring Drew
Barrymore and Adam Sandler, which comes before heavy, meaningful lyrics of my
favorite alternative song which then goes back around to trump over magical realism.
Every genre is in an equal circle of how often I bring it into my life. However,
considering all movies, music, and literary genres I can at the very least describe how
theyve structured me to be who I am today and who exactly I represent. Breaking it
down from there, these three components of stimulation have impacted both my sense of
wonderment and my general sensitivity the most. Because of the many stories told within
the ink on pages, actors in scenes, and lyrics of a song, Im a library of stories that Ive
received and also ones that Ive made through imagination and the curious, pondering
thoughts. Through these equal things that give magic, laughter, and bewilderment, they
have also given me things such as tragedy and death that has refined a specific branch of
sensitivity within my personality.
With wonderment, I think that life is a series of adventures consisting of what we
see, what we cannot see, and what we feel. Growing up, the majority of what I read was
fiction and so I craved on the stories of magic and adventure lying within places such as
wizarding worlds, ancient forests and faery rings, and prep schools whose walls held
more secrets than students. On the long bus ride home I would imagine myself having
some kind of power or special ability, often times, the ability to fly or during the

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premieres of Avatar the Last Airbender, the ability to waterbend. I would imagine what
kind of quest I would go on and the creatures I would meet on my spectacular journey. I
would plan out karate moves that I could only execute in my head and they were such
moves that I would use to defeat my foe in combat. It was these fictional genres that gave
me the imagination for adventures, wild and internal, in both literature and movie works.
The genres of fantasy, action, and adventure built up entire worlds, societies, and
personalities in my head and then bringing in the genres of music, this was how I left my
large, yellow school bus and for thirty minutes, I was alone. I listened to the soundtrack
of a different story every day with new characters, new fighting scenes, and often new
situations that mirrored my own personal life. Every story had its own beginning and
ending and where one ended, another would begin, just like the start of a new day and a
new sunrise.
A visual example of how fiction genres played into my life can be brought back to
the bus ride home from my old middle school. There were always a lot of people riding
my bus so the ride was long and being in Florida, outside my seat window I was exposed
to many varying weathers, the perfect settings for all the different stories in my head.
Many times I would create families and different school buildings, enemies and best
friends, lovers and past lovers that had a story so tragic it could break hearts. I remember
listening to the chatter and the screaming of the young students around me, girls yelling
about girls and boys yelling about girls. Everything was always so loud but only when
there was that half second pause between each of my songs. Everything else was the
sound of cellos or voices or wind ensembles from different countries in different dialects
with different cultures. There was the soft strumming of a guitar and a sweet alto voice
singing about life and loss and people growing too fast. And there were songs that I cant

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even remember as I dreamed with eyes open-- always looking far away with lids a
quarter shut. Often times with the yellow bus racing down the road, the painted lines in
the middle of the road, broken and white, zooming by to become one single and
continuous line, all of the world outside blurred together. Pastures waved hello and
goodbye and in the forests creeping alongside the road I saw giant animals. Sometimes it
was dozens of horses, breathing heavy and ragged, others it was tribes of people who
lived in the trees with painted stripes across the bridges of their noses, but most of the
time what I saw was a large, golden lion. He was bigger and faster than the bus and he
had a ferocious snarl that he released every time he leaped over a fallen tree or ducked
beneath branches where murders of one-eyed crows squatted. The lion had black,
bottomless eyes and a nose always halfway curled like he was perpetually angry and even
though I wondered if maybe I should be afraid of him, I never was. Instead, I got the
feeling that he was running and leaping over giant trees in his path just to keep up with
the very bus that I was in, like some race between the physical and the mental. The
ferocious lion, the native people to the forests, the animals always sprinting like painted
brush stroked blurs, they were all my friends on my way from town and to the ends of the
city.
Its through the privacy of ear buds, thick book covers and a careful construction
of sequenced chapters, along with the connection between visual story-teller and the
television viewer that has taken part in how I act and live now. These movies, literary,
and musical genres have refined the way I believe in things such as music altering
memories of a bad day, battles between good and evil, the sweetness in just standing still
and looking upwards during the day and at night, and all the things I happily cannot
explain.

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When it comes to all of the different ways a movie, book, or song has made me
feel I can specifically remember lots of sad feelings. For example, in my high schools
symphonic band we played an array of memorable songs over the years but the one song
that I remember the most was Elegy For A Young American; a song dedicated to the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. During our first run-through my band director gave a
speech about how short and precious life is and about death and tragedy. His words
resonated throughout the large band room and within the song itselffrom the first time
we played it, to the last time under blinding auditorium lights and in front of a faceless
mass of a crowd. When I think about how largely music functions in my life, I always
think back to this moment and how this song stuck with me as being the song that gave
me shiversmaking me cry because it reminds me of how theres actual feelings in every
song. In any song whether it be a smooth, jazzy tune or a heart-pumping pop song, theres
soul and theres personality. During that night, playing Elegy and understanding the
meaning behind the deep scoops of the notes and the rumble of the tubas at the middle
section signifying trouble and death, its all accounting for the characteristics of music
and how those characteristics have formed me. With this particular song and being so
involved with it personally I created the sound and life within it and I remember feeling a
million things at once. These feelings and these ways that broaden my comprehension of
emotions, such as sorrow to a sad and meaningful song like this classical one, happiness
with a cheery, pop tune, and the chill vibes of an Iron & Wine song, these have all shaped
my personality over time.
In music and genres such as soft alternative or heavy blues, specifically, lyrics are
sung like what emotions sound like. As a musician there have been many pieces that
made me well up with different feelings bombarding all at the same time and these

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attuned feelings that bend and break at the climax of a musical piece with a resonant
chord major for triumphant and minor for painmusic has a huge impact to how
certain things make me feel, the same going for movies and books. For many people,
theyre completely unaffected by watching heart break on a screen or feeling death
throughout the pages of a novel, though my experience is that I feel sad. I take a fictional
characters emotions and I cry as if they would cry or I smile as they would do. I embrace
every tragic book, bluesy, touchy song, and depressing movie because the sad genres are
whats made me the very light-hearted person I am today. These sad genres have made
me a more genuine person and instead of feeling sad and down, I feel wholesome with
how stimulations such as books, movies, or songs, at such great heights, affect me. To cry
and accept sensitivity and to allow myself to be vulnerable and upset at a story gives me a
personality thats quick to laugh and full of faith because its all the process of simply
being human.

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