Blogging Around

This is a response to Zoe's entry about Salem, Massachusetts:

Hey Zo!

I thought you made some very good points with this article. First, bringing up the fact that a person's background can greatly affect how they look at the same situation is a main concept to understand about us as humans. It is so often that we judge other people because of how they react in certain circumstances, but we need to realize our background is not necessarily the same as theirs, and they could probably judge us right back for what we are doing.

You also raised an important question at the end about if a town should be marked forever based on their past. I think another good example of this would be Germany. Many of the people who live their now were not even alive, or were too young to remember when the Halocaust happened, yet their country will carry that label around for what seems like forever. Frau Fraser also told us that in Germany it is seen as offensive to have a strong pride in your country, because many of them are still ashamed of the horrendous crimes that their predecessors committed. I do not believe that countries/towns/cities etc. should be held permanently responsible for the actions that occurred there, I believe that the only people to blame are the ones that actually committed those crimes.

This is a response to Josh's entry about the bullying of homosexual teenagers:

Hi Josh!

I think it was very important of you to focus on this incredibly controversial and real problem. It is sad that it only got attention because of these boys chose the extreme route of suicide, but the reality is that there are thousands, maybe millions, of teenagers that face this problem everyday that are going unnoticed. It took six deaths in one month to finally make people listen, but we should not be only listening to the people once they are dead, but hear them when they are alive. That is why i think it was so great of you, Josh, to point out that it is never too late to begin showing our support for these people and let them know that they are accepted.

I also think it was great that you took the time to see what might be going on in the bully's heads as they are doing this, many of them could be doing this as a way to get acceptance themselves, and as you point out, some of them may simply just be bigoted people. Most of the bullies and the victims are teenage boys, and I believe its very important to know that not all teenage boys have the same viewpoint as those few bullies, and that there are people like you that believe in standing up for what is right.

Getting Organized: My Nightstand

I have never been the most organized person, and by that I mean most of the time my floor is nothing more than a fond memory that has been taken over by my clothes, magazines, and any other objects that I got bored with. So, when I started this organization adventure, it seemed like a refreshing opportunity to do something i normally wouldn't. The hardest part was choosing which daunting task to decide tackle. In the end I chose my nightstand because I have been meaning to get rid of most of the junk sitting on it anyways and I would like to use it as a place to put my laptop.

My first step to organizing my nightstand was to discard anything that I did not need anymore. This included many past months' issues of Seventeen magazine as well as old worksheets that had happened to find their way over to my nightstand. I have a habit of holding onto things out of fear that the minute they're gone I am suddenly going to need them. However, surprisingly, it felt good to finally throw out all the things that had just been sitting there for months that I had yet to use.

Once I had gotten rid of everything i no longer needed (about 85% of what was on my nightstand) it was time to organize the remainder of what i had. My nightstand has a shelf underneath, which i used to put all of the books that I decided to keep. Then i had a shoe box that i used to put the rest of my magazines and put that under the nightstand. Finally, i put my scrapbook in the drawer of my nightstand and everything else back to where it belonged (i.e. DVDs in the basement, jewelry in my jewelry box).

At last, I had a place to put my laptop when I am not using it, where it can can charge. To my surprise this was a rather pleasant experience for me. Somehow having less clutter in my room created a sense of less clutter in my mind and left me feeling a little relaxed. I played music while I was cleaning and after a while, it stopped feeling so much like work. Overall I'm very pleased with myself and I am going to work hard to try to keep it as organized as it is now.

iMedia: Funny the Way It Is

"Funny the Way It Is" is a song mainly about irony. The song in itself is ironic because it is talking about sad things but it has an upbeat tune. In the song dave says, "Funny the way it is if you think about it, somebody's growing hungry someone else is eating out." However, when he says that this is funny, he is really trying to point out what a confused world we live in, where great things can be happening to people somewhere, and terrible things can be happening to other people at the same time.

The main question that this song makes me wonder is if this is really just the way things are in the world and we should accept it. Should we accept that some children are dying from constant violence and warfare, while other children are smiling and running around pointing their imaginary guns at their friends? Personally, I think this song is meant to open peoples eyes and say that it is not okay to have this attitude of: well, that's just the way things are.

Another thing that struck me about this song was the ending when Dave says: "Standing on a bridge, watch the water pass from underneath, it must have been much harder when there was no bridge just water. Now the world is small compared to how it used to be.." I am not sure why but this has always been my favorite part of the song. Maybe its because it just shows how now we are all connected to each other, so there is no reason that we should not care about what is going on somewhere on the other side of the world.

I believe that this song can affect our culture because it says a lot about how we are as human beings. Most of us do not take the time to really think about what is going on somewhere else at the same time as we are living our normal lives. It talks about the irony in the world, and how bad things are happening at the same time as good things, and it should make people wonder what can be done about this.

Connection: King Lear and the Aging of Populations

Today we learned about a very important concept in King Lear: Incrementalism. Incrementalism is defined as a process of making gradual changes to make a big change. Often the subjects of incrementalism do not realize what has happened until it is too late and the big change has been made, because they were oblivious to the little changes.

The example we are dealing with in class was in King Lear how Lear gradually loses his power to his daughters and does not comprehend it until they are giving him commands and taking away his knights. Once Lear realizes how unaware he was that his kingdom was slipping through his fingers and into the hands of his power hungry daughters, he goes mad because by this point, it was too late for him to do anything about it.

There is incrementalism in our world right now, and the most important thing is to notice it before it becomes too late. One example where it is too late is the aging of population in Japan. It used to be that only 4.9% of Japanese were over the age of 65 in the 1950s, with the majority, about 60% being between the ages of 14 and 64 and about 35% under the age of 14. In 2009, however, the number of people age 65 and over had increased to 23% while the number of people under 14 dropped to 13%. When these numbers are put next to each other, they seem like such an obvious change, but considering that they happened over a 59 year period, it went by almost unnoticed.

Japan's aging population has had many effects on their country. It has forced a higher dependancy ratio among their citizens and changed government spending so that much more has to be spent on nursing homes and providing welfare. It is projected that by 2025, 27% of all national income will be spent on social welfare.

Japan did not notice their problem until it finally hit them, but there is hope for other aging countries such as China, Korea, and even the United States. The first step is to recognize what is about to happen when the large population of adults in our countries become seniors and start to plan now what can be done about it. The most important thing to realize about incrementalism is that small changes can lead to big disasters, just as King Lear taught us.

360 Degrees: Should the US Continue to Fund NASA?

Today in social studies class, we discussed how NASA is requesting that the

united states spend more money on new innovations, stating that continuing to fund

them the same amount would produce no real outcomes. They promise reasonable

gains from space if the amount they request is met. Can this funding be justified?

There are many different factors to consider when trying to form an opinion

about this. One is, whether or not the outcomes of exploring space are beneficial

enough to justify spending $10 trillion over the next thirty years on space exploration.

Some of the advocates are claiming that we will need to be able to colonize other

planets when Earth is finally destroyed, and we need to be prepared.

However, why should we spend money to fix problems that do not exist yet instead

of taking care of the ones we have now? Some argue that this money would be

better spent on our military or paying our debts owed to other countries. Although,

I have to wonder that even if this money is not being spent on NASA, what can

guarantee that our government will not waste it on something else instead of

spending it on fixing our problems.

Another factor to consider is the jobs that will be lost if NASA is not continued.

NASA employs around 18,000 Americans, and many more work for them as

government contractors. If the government decides to stop spending on them,

many of those people will be without a job. It can also be argued however, that

the money saved from not funding NASA can be used to create more jobs, but once

again, there is no guarantee of where the money will be spent.

Perhaps if the government decides to stop funding NASA at the moment and

focus our money on more immediate issues, then after our country gets back up on

its feet, it will be able to afford the luxury of space exploration. Maybe at that

point, America would be able to fund NASA fully and get the complete benefits from

what it has to offer for our nation, and possibly the whole world.

There are many different ways to view this NASA dilemma, and all of them

are points that must be taken into consideration when deciding whether or not it

would be beneficial for our country to continue funding NASA at the same rate it

has been for the past 20 years, fully allow all the funding that NASA is asking for,

or to stop funding NASA completely.

Metacognition: Kite Runner Essay

My Kite Runner essay had a bit of a rocky start. At first I could not choose a thesis statement that I thought would be sufficient enough to support with evidence throughout the book, and that would not be so obvious that the reader would already know it without me having to explain it.

I knew that I wanted to deal with Amir and Hassan's relationship, because the complexity of it really intrigued me. At first all of the thesis statements i came up with were too unoriginal. After my conversation with Mr. Allen about them, he told me to use the kites to look at Amir and Hassan's friendship. He said that if I took down an inventory of all the places in the book that kites were talked about, I would find a consistency between all of them.

So, I went home and did just that, but after I still was not sure of this great insight that I was supposed to be realizing. I knew that the kites reminded Amir of Hassan and his childhood, and so I attempted to base a thesis around that. However, I was still not completely convinced that my thesis was anything special.

I had another meeting with Mr. Allen, in which he gave me another hint: I should look at the actual kite fighting, and the fact that the strings are covered in glass and they are used to cut each other.

Even after all of this, i STILL was not sure about what exactly my paper was going to be about, so decided to just put fingers to keys and start writing. Then, all of the sudden, it came to me! Mr. Allen was trying to tell me that the kites, which are usually thought of as leisurely, are contradictory just as Amir and Hassan's friendship is. Childhood friendships should bring warmness to the heart, not pain, but that was all that Amir could think of when looking back on it.

It took a lot to get the idea for my paper to be perfect, but in the end it was worth it. If i could change one thing about my process, I would have tried to think deeper into the story first, instead of looking on the surface for ideas. All in all I think my thinking process turned out very well, and i was happy with the outcome.

Blogging Around

First i decided to take a look at Jenkins' blog about the connection between Kite Runner and Hot Rod.

Dear Jenks,

I thought your analysis of father-son relationships was very insightful and it made me think about other father-son relationships i have seen in literature, entertainment, or real life. They all seem to have one thing in common, the father and the son each have a similar trait that they share, whether they want to admit it or not, and the son is trying to do anything he can to gain his father's approval.

Another thing i noticed was that all three of your examples used the winning of some kind of competition to prove that the son was "good" enough or "manly" enough in the eyes of his father. I found this to be very interesting and it made me wonder if maybe the relationship between a father and a son becomes oversimplified in fictional stories to be only about how talented the son is. After all, there has to be a deeper relationship lying beneath the superficial acceptance of the son due to his ability to throw a ball or fly a kite.

Then I read Jordan's post about Post-modernism and Stephen Colbert

Dear JoJo,

After reading your blog and watching the video attached to it, I must say that I agree with you in this case. Combining the many different tasks that Colbert was performing seemed to have worked in his favor this time. His speech was informative, yet easy to watch and understand, which let's face it is a pretty necessary thing when dealing with Americans.

I think that this just goes to show that there are many ways post-modernism can be viewed and there is so much more of that philosophy that we have yet to discover. The fact that it is a philosophy means that it can be interpreted in different ways, and even denied in some ways as well, and after watching this video i believe that i have a much more clear knowledge of some examples of post-modernism. As always though, there is more to learn.

It Matters: Closure to Cold Cases

If we lived in a perfect world, there would always be happy endings where the main character finds exactly what they are looking for and discovered a way to solve all of their problems. In a perfect world, there would always be full closure. Sadly this is not the case for many people, and that is why one element that separates nonfiction stories from fairy-tales is having the character find only partial closure.

In Kite Runner Amir searches his whole life to find closure for an incident that happened when he was merely twelve years old. So, he goes back to his homeland and tries to find a way to somehow right all of his past wrongs. Then, he writes a whole memoir about his life in four days, reliving some of his most painful experiences, and still after all of that, Amir does not even seem to obtain the full closure that he was looking for.

Similarly, there was a recent article published about a girl named Kimberly Norwood from Texas who had disappeared over twenty years ago without a trace. Her family is still holding out hope that she will turn up even though there have been no legitimate suspects charged. The mother even says that Kimberly "will be" 34, and not "would be" because she refuses to believe that her daughter is dead.

This case of the missing girl says a lot about closure in real life. This is an instance where it is very likely that the mother will never have closure for her missing daughter, in any form. In fact, the mother believing that her daughter is still alive after over twenty years of being missing would be seen as downright wishful thinking. Why then, in stories is it so disappointing when the characters are left without closure? After all, in life there are many times where closure will never be found, shouldn't stories reflect that?

I believe that why people so often look for closure in their literature is because they want to find hope. People want to know that if they make a mistake or something terrible happens in their life, they will find some way to deal with it and move on. And sometimes this does occur, but many times either no closure or partial closure is the only option. In Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini may not have left the reader with the satisfying ending they were looking for, but if he had then the story would have been much less believable, because as we see in the story of Kimberly Norwood, we do not live in a perfect world.

Best of Week: Emotion trumps Grammar

I can remember it clearly, sitting in my fifth grade classroom, learning where to put commas and end marks, "And remember children, every sentence needs a subject and a verb, and no run-ons!" These simple rules were the basis of what I was taught and re-taught throughout middle school. Without basic grammar, I was told, my writing would be sloppy and give away my age. However, I believe the most important thing I learned this week is that in certain cases, it is okay to break these sacred rules in order to convey emotions to readers.

I had always wondered why fragments and technically "misplaced" commas were not accepted by my English teachers when clearly I had put them there for a purpose. I had always believed that if my writing sounded good when i read it aloud that that was enough, but my teachers never seemed to agree.

I felt like Beat by Beat was referring directly to me when it said that a mixture of long and short sentences, maybe even a few fragments, all contributed to the rhythm of writing. This rhythm is what gives writing voice and personality. And yes, while it is important to know the rules of grammar, if the author knows the rules, but consciously chooses to break them in order to convey a certain emotion, then they can be used to his or her advantage.

I will keep this idea of rhythm in my mind now when I am writing stories, and try to be aware of what the length of my sentences are saying to the reader. The biggest lesson i learned was that basic grammar can create a story, but rhythm is what gives it life.

Change of Mind: Healing of America

Prior to reading the book The Healing of America by T.R. Reid, I thought that I was somewhat educated about our nations healthcare situation, at least educated enough to form an opinion. My opinion about our healthcare was the one of a typical uneducated conservative, I believed that there was no way to change our healthcare system without turning to "socialized" medicine, which, of course, would be the worst thing in the world because "socialism is bad." However, after reading Reid's book, I realized how dense I was being in my thinking, and that there are many different types of governmental healthcare that exist. I now see that there is a way to provide healthcare to all Americans without compromising quality. Now I believe that there does need to be a change in the way our healthcare system is set up, and change is not as difficult implement as we have been led to believe. This book educated me about how the rest of the world handles their systems and what the benefits and drawbacks are of each one. I think this is the first step in helping Americans see what different choices we have and that our current system has much room for improvement.