Speak blog

If I had to define myself, I would just tell you one word. Goofy, I love to make people laugh. If I can get you to laugh it brightens up my day. I enjoy seeing the smiles they get, because I don’t enjoy being around people who are upset or mad, because if one person is mad then it creates a chain reaction and gets everyone mad! I don’t really know who I am though, because all of these things I have either been told or is the way I act to the majority of my peers. I know when it is the right time to be serious and I know the right time to be crazy, and when those to mix together I lose sight of who I really am. I’m rather athletic, but I don’t like the term jock. Many people just stereotype athletic people as jocks. But really there is much more to someone who is athletic. For examples your school is very athletic and we still demand a rigorous school schedule and course selections. Soccer is my passion; I love to be on the field. When I’m on the field that all I can think about, and when I’m not on the field, all I can think about is being on the field. I enjoyed playing for Mr. Morrison last season because I took it as an opportunity to learn more about the game and to “take leadership”. I really enjoy helping out many of the younger guys on the team and showing them ways to do new stuff that can help them build their game. We went undefeated that season. I had the time of my life. We played together, we bonded together and we won together. If I set my mind to something I like to think of myself as a hard worker. I’m very persistent in academics and athletics. Melinda from the novel looks at herself as if she could do more in her life, but she doesn’t know how to get there. She could tell someone, and that would take off the pain of the secret, but she doesn’t know how people will respond to it. She is trapped in a life where she can either get rid of pressures and just keep living with everyone hating her and also knowing what actually happened. Or she could live in a world that the pain from the secret swallows her whole and she falls into an even deeper depression, which is a very painful experience. However, as the reader we can never fully understand the pain she is feeling because we haven’t experienced what she went through. The whole tree metaphor is great, because it shows the fall of dead leaves and the development of new healthy growth. The relationship in her family was such as a tree as well. At the beginning of the novel, it was like a stump, no growth nothing, just flat and barren. Towards the end we don’t find out much but in my opinion it grows just a little bit more, since she had told her secret about Andy Evans to the school.

Connections in class! Blog #1 second semester

In our class discussions we reflect on privacy and security. I believe that privacy overshadows security, I would rather have privacy than security, because the way I see it is that in me not letting others see my stuff and information then I’m providing my own means of security because the things that I demand privacy combined make me up as a whole. My possessions make me who I am, with out them I am nothing, and someone else has the ability to get in and see that then basically they can either hurt me or leave me alone. I like privacy mainly because I don’t like the fact that other people know my business, it gets on my nerves when other people start talking about me and don’t even have the courage to tell me, I mean its my life, if I don’t know it how do they. So it just makes me go into a stage of paranoia and I just try and lock everything up so no one without my permission can see anything. In “Little Brother” Marcus is always trying to cover his trails and putting codes and encrypting things. He likes his privacy more than most people I know. He is the same as me, he has nothing to hide but he has everything to hide. Because to me some things are inside jokes or other things that can be miss construed into thinking I’m being a little deviant criminal (which I am not). I don’t download or rip movies off their discs or the Internet and I don’t download music from places such as frostwire or limewire. I enjoy my privacy but if I’m faced with obstacles such as Marcus was then I would fold as well, because really I have nothing to hide. I don’t lock my phone mainly because there is nothing on it. Maybe a few text messages but that’s it and I don’t care who reads those because they truly mean nothing. My call history isn’t very exciting mainly my mom calling me to ask me how I’m doing and what my plan is for the day. I think we should be responsible fore our actions and that we should secure ourselves, as we feel necessary.

Dont be Dumb

As I was reading this article I kept thinking to myself how that is a very bad thing, I believe it has come to the point when foreign counties students know more about our country than we do. I mean who doesn’t know Dick Chaney he was the Vice President of the United States of America! If you asked anyone who Barack Obama is they could probably get it right 95% of the time. For another example, Sarah Palin, they just don’t pay attention until a drastic change is occurring, such as the first black president or the first woman president for the year 2012. We don’t know much I guess about our own history or politics. We are most defiantly the best academic system in the world, even though we are the most advanced and powerful. However, we have the most potential to be a great country and a well-educated country. Asia and India have us beaten in mostly everything academics wise, but if we showed the love they have for knowledge we could really be something. This comes back to Ortega y Gassets point of desire and need for knowledge. Americans have a need for an education, so they can go get a job and start a family. We just need to change that into a desire for knowledge and we could really blossom as a country and as a community.

Why Americans Are Restless Questions 2 & 5

2.) A society that is set devoted to equality is practically unachievable. There will always be someone that is faster than you or smarter than you. Equality cannot be achieved if their is someone that is better than the others. Alexis de Tocqueville states, "No matter how a people strive for it, all conditions of life can never be perfectly equal. Even if, by misfortune, such and absolute dead level were attained, there would still be inequalities of intelligence which, coming directly from God, will never escape the laws of man." (pg. 167) This just states how even if people were not around you, someone is smarter than you, and that will never go away because intelligence is a gift by God and cannot be removed. So the people that try and get total equality end up failing and get hurt in the end because they put all of their time and money into but in the end nothing will come out for the long run.

5.) Tocqueville wrote "It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it."(pg. 164 -165) This quote demonstrates how Americans often try to find short cuts and that we are restless because we can't always find the shortcut sometimes. We spend so long to find the shortcut in life that we waste most of our time looking, when we could be doing the job by ourselves and having that feeling of accomplishment. In the time that you were looking for the shortcut you could have just done the job already. Tocqueville's whole essay is about how Americans have the opportunity to do anything with their lives. As long as they work hard and don't give up. We often try as hard as possible to get to that ideal spot in the world. However sometimes people beat you their and all the work you just did is all gone and you have to try over and over again to succeed. This to Tocqueville is the main reason Americans are often restless.

Blog #4 Analysis of Dickens word choice.

I believe that Dickens used this form of righting to keep you tuned in to the writing. He made you believe that you didn't know what was going to happen next. Dickens had the ghost not wanting to see her just yet, he told Lorry how it would kill him if he saw her too soon. (18) The spirit was talking about how he was buried alive. Lorry was shocked to hear that he had abandoned all hope in being found or of freeing himself from the grave. Lorry asked how long he was in the grave and he replied, "A long time" (18). YOu then find out the ghost was in the grave for eighteen years. I think Dickens put this in the novel because of how it would make people think and connect to the ghost, by thinking to themselves what if that was me in that guys position, that would be terrible. Which now he has a reputation with all the readers that he went through a great trauma. Dickens wrote "Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears" (18). When I read this sentence I thought it was a pretty deep sentence and i really liked, this passage was so deep and sentimental and I greatly enjoyed how he described how he was feeling. Towards the end of the passage, The ghost stated, "I don't know her, i don't understand." (18). I think that the ghost saying this is to foreshadow the meeting of Lucy and Dr. Monette, and how at first he doesn't recognize her the first time he meets her.

Why is it difficult not to care about what others think of you? Do we control the way other people see and think about us?

Many people may say bad things about you in your life. But really that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what you think about yourself. We care what they say because we always want to be liked by others. If you know you are liked by someone it allows you to open up to that person and possible create a great friendship with that person. If you know they don't like you then a sense of paranoia is going to creep in because you try to stay away from the person and you make sure you don't say anything that can be taken as offensive. It will add to stress levels because you are always thinking about that person and if they are talking badly about you to someone or if they are spreading rumors, and is not a good feeling to have. We don't really have control of what people think about us because it is their choice to not like something about you as a person or as a friend. They have every right to not like me, if i did something to make them think bad of me then i deserve what ever they think, but I will try and talk to them about it and see if i can clarify why I did what I did and see if i can show that I'm not such a bad guy after all. If some one were to come and tell me that they don't like me straight to my face, i wouldn't care, if they don't like me thats their problem they probably weren't that important anyway so I end up losing nothing. For me it is very easy not to care about what others think about me, because I have more important things to worry about.

My favorite character

My favorite character is a hard question. I would have to say it would be Slim. I like Slim because of how he is in charge and everyone listens to him. Slim is not one of those guys that is against everyone else and how he doesn't look for things that can get in trouble so they can get more work or be liked by the boss more. Slim is one of those guys that goes out of his way to help you and he is there for everyone. When Lennie is dead Slim comforts George and he helps him with all of the other guys. Slim is the one guy that Curley actually listen to what he says, even though he doesn't do it he still listens. Slim is the head rancher which is a important job, you have to be really good at your job to get that promotion. If Slim were my friend I think we would get along because of how we are so alike, in almost every way. When Lennie dies I think that Slim was not as close to him as George was and he was still depressed that Lennie still had to die, death is never a good thing.