About Me
Project
Brynn
Deininger
Pd. 1
9/4/15
Background
Main Menu
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
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.
Menu
Future Plans
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.
Menu
Personal Goals
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.
Menu
Interests Menu
Reading
Music
Photography
Writing
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.
Menu
I Am the Messenger: a book
about the expectations placed
on people by society. A 19year-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.
Reading
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.
Somebody Up There Hates
You: this book follows a 17year-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.
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.
Interests
Menu
Music
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).
Interests
Menu
Photography
This is one of the best photos I have ever taken. It is a high-contrast, lowlighting 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.
Interests
Menu
Writing
Another 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