Hello my fellow classmates, well here I am posted online at last, and it feels so wonderful to be here with you on my first digital portfolio. Of all the portfolios I have digitized, this one is the first, and in foresight I am hopeful this website can give you some insight into my pursuit of intellectual inquiry and academic excellence. I feel the bold and majestic works of Aaron Douglas’s piece shown above encapsulate my feelings of accomplishment in defining and expressing my identity and legacy as a student, just as Douglas expresses in his depictions of the African American during the Harlem Renaissance. In reflection I really was actually not really trying to achieve some sort of excellence, not only because perfection is an illusion, but also because I mostly just wanted to have fun with my writings, pushing my limits and expressing my thought was always my main goal. These essays are in no way perfect, there are probably still grammatical errors hiding somewhere in them, and while this might not be the best thing to say in a graded assignment. I think it is important to note that the following essays are symbols of simply my willingness to learn, which in a flawed world might be the only thing we can call excellence. Before I finish I would like to mention some inspirations, my biggest inspiration of course comes from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. My portfolio icon picture is a drawing of the main character sitting in a forgotten basement underneath Harlem with his many lights; reflecting on his picaresque journey throughout America and the undeniable racism that makes him invisible in society. I employ similar themes of identity in my Written L&L essay. I would also like to thank jazz musician Louie Armstrong for inspiring me in his instrumentals, particularly the song Black and Blue, which I hope you will listen to while grading this portfolio. Finally, I would like to thank Martin Scorsese and his 1970’s film Taxi Driver for inspiring me to skip sleeping to obsessively find meaning in life, which sometimes meant writing English papers. If you read all that then I hope you will enjoy my three revised essays and a final reflection on my work.

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