Courtney Burke

Hi! As the title above states, my name is Courtney. I like the numbers 2, 4, and 8, but not 6. On any normal day I can be found reading, watching movies, or writing. I consider myself pretty introverted but I very much enjoy spending time with my friends. I also love to listen to music, and although my favorite song changes daily, my favorite band will always be Jack's Mannequin.

Basically, I geek out to anything and everything. I love being a nerd. My current things to geek out to are RENT, Batman, John Green (mainly his novel The Fault in Our Stars) , SNL (my favorite is Seth Meyers), and YouTube videos. I will constantly geek out to reading, psychology, or photography. My camera of choice is my Canon Rebel T3 that I've affectionately named Alaska to pay homage to Looking for Alaska by John Green, though one could say it was done so without a beautiful metaphor or allusion behind it. Which is true.

My childhood goal was to become a perfect mixture between Matilda Wormwood from Matilda and Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. But since I'm sixteen years old now, I must (reluctantly) choose new goals. I want the standard things such as straight-A's and 5s on my AP exams, but I also want to become less paralyzingly terrified of my future.

The most meaningful part of my summer vacation would probably be going to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It's something my family used to do every year when I was younger, but it became too tedious at one point and we stopped. My grandma got diagnosed with cancer again just before we left for Gatlinburg this year, so going there seemed to be therapeutic in a way, no matter how foggy and rainy it was the week I was there.

If I could pick any superpower, I would cheat a little bit and say bending of any form (as in from Avatar). My personal choice would be waterbending or firebending. Bending is an art form and it's so beautiful with so much force and power behind it.

As for my favorite website, I'm going to say StumbleUpon. My favorites to look at are Architecture, Literature, Ballet, and Philosophy. Finally, for my favorite video, I'm saying this one because it is John Green reading the first chapter of TFIOS, and to quote Hazel (the main character), "Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book." So there you go.