April 28

The swine flu is the latest and biggest virus that is going around. I don’t know if I was out of the loop or not, but I just heard about it the other day and now it is all I hear about. I was listening to NPR today and they were saying the president of Mexico has shut down all of the schools in Mexico until at least next Wednesday.  That is huge in my opinion, but I also think that is a step in the right direction. Like most people, I don’t want this to become the epidemic that everyone is talking about. The virus has now spread to Indiana, which means that now we have an ever better chance of getting swine flu. I saw a political cartoon in the paper and it was giving ways to greet someone without shaking their hands. It brought a comical approach to a serious subject by giving “the bump” as an example of how to greet someone. I got a good laugh from that. 

April 27

I really enjoyed the morning meeting this morning. I thought that Marta’s experiment was awesome! It was like a mad scientist from the movies, so I thought it was very impressive. I felt like someone should have appeared out to the smoke, it was eerie but cool. I also really liked Daniel’s. Burning circus peanuts was a pretty brilliant idea and I especially liked it since I hate circus peanuts. The toothpaste experiment was also impressive. I was not expecting it to explode out of the test tube. Toothpaste is something I had never thought of making before since it is a product that is more widely bought at the store than made at home. I now know that if worst comes to worst, I could make my own toothpaste! Or on second thought maybe not, it probably wouldn’t taste as good as the modern mint toothpaste!

April 24

Yesterday night I babysat. The kids and I decided to go to the playground since it was so nice out. After a long walk there we finally made it! There was another little boy there who was about 3 named Max. For some reason he didn’t want to play with the kids, he only wanted to play with me. He chased me around and I caught him at the bottom of the slide. The funniest part though was when he tried to jump rope. His dad showed him how to do it, but he still couldn’t figure it out. But when it was time to leave he didn’t want to leave that pink Barbie jump rope behind. We played for a while longer and then we walked back to the house. I had to carry one of the kids on my shoulders the whole way back because he was SO tired. Needless to say I am pretty sore today!

April 23

After school today, I went to a track meet for Creekside since I help out with their track team. It took me a really long time to get to Clay, where the meet was taking place, because the traffic was very heavy. I got to the meet late, but I only missed two events. I got there in time for my favorite event, which is the 1600. It is so exciting because the race is short enough that they have to run quickly, but long enough that they can hang back and overtake the top runner on the final lap. There are two guys on the team that run the mile together. Both of them were pretty far behind the leader on the last lap. In the final 200 one of the guys sprinted and was able to pass the leading man, it was a brilliant race. Races like that remind me why I love running so much. It was very exciting and I can’t wait to see them continue to improve as the season progresses. 

April 20

I believe that as a female I have the ability to do anything that a male can. This may sound really “cheesy,” but I feel that if I don’t believe that, them I am only limiting my ability as a female and as a human being. My parents and my grandma have had the strongest influence on this idea. My parents raised me to believe that I could do anything if I set my mind to it and worked extremely hard. I understood it and have even taken that advice and used it. My grandma also gave me these ideas, but she was not there everyday to reinforce them. Instead, I heard her stories. She raised a family of seven kids and my grandpa is in a wheelchair and can’t do anything for himself. She has done so many things in her lifetime that people said that females couldn’t do. She was lucky that she had the encouragement of her father and she has been an excellent role model for me growing up.  

April 17

Media plays a huge role in Cofer’s story. She is constantly being judged by images that people have seen of other Puerto Rican people. Media also portrays athletic people as strong, muscular and tall, where she was automatically looked down upon because she was short and skinny. When Cofer was going to go out with Ted and Ted’s father said he didn’t want him to go with a Puerto Rican, other pictures of Puerto Rican’s were being used to judge Cofer. Although media may not have been directly involved in this, the idea that all over Puerto Rican’s were portrayed like this shows that someone was getting this idea from the media. Media also influenced people looking at Cofer and saying that she was beautiful but that she was too skinny. She did not fit the “perfect” stereotype of a female so she was automatically looked down up. She only fit part of the media standards for a female. 

April 16

I do support gay marriage rights. To me, it is extremely ridiculous and selfish of people to restrict the rights of other people, when many people enjoy the benefits of being married. Marriage to me is not about who is married, but what it means to the people that are married. Gay couples have the same ability to have a relationship as straight couples, so why are these rights restricted? If married couples who oppose gay marriage were to be in the shoes of a gay couple, wouldn’t they want to be with the person that they love and raise a family? Just because they may not be the type of couple that the religious people talk about, they are still good people who deserve the right to be with the person that they love and want to raise a family with. I fully support gay marriage and I think that people need to stop being so selfish and let everyone have the rights of marriage. 

April 14

Wolfson uses an anecdote to explain why the prisoners took their marriage dilemma to the Supreme Court. It was effective in the fact that it grabbed the attention of the readers. The most effective part of the passage was listing the main ideas behind marriage. Turner vs. Safley was relevant to the argument about same-sex marriage. It is ridiculous that people in prison would have marriage rights when a same-sex couple could not. There is absolutely no logic behind it at all. This case made the reader think about the reasons that marriage is important. In thinking about this, it doesn’t make any sense that people are exempt from freedoms of an American. America is a free country, however, when it gives marriage rights to someone who is in prison because they failed to obey the law, it is absurd that America denies a perfectly acceptable same-sex couple from those same privileges.  

April 13

The metaphor that Dr. Horn uses is very interesting when you really think about what it means. He compares a single parent household and a married household to planes arriving. The fact that he says that one plane usually gets someone most of the way but not the whole way shows that there is something missing in the childhood of a single parent household. Horn implies that they can have a good childhood and learn a lot, but they are still falling short of what a person from a married household would have. The married household’s plane arrives safely more times than not. By this, Horn shows that children growing up with married parents are more successful in life and have fewer struggles than those children from single parent households. The final interpretation of the metaphor is that there is something that a married couple can offer to a child that a single parent lacks. 

April 10

Vazquez waits to tell the reader that Mickey and Brian are straight because many people would not take the issue seriously. Many people would think “oh this isn’t an issue of homophobia since the person was actually straight.” It is in fact an issue because it was an act of hate; any act of hate is a problem. So, by disclosing this information later, it helped Vazquez prove her point. She finally discloses this information because it shows that anyone could experience the effects of homophobia not just gays and lesbians. No, I don’t believe the issue of antigay violence is any different when it includes heterosexuals. There is a problem with hate crimes no matter the person, so the issue is not getting any better because heterosexuals get hurt as well. The issue is going to be equally as horrific no matter whom it is targeted against. 

April 9

Yes, through the discussions that we had today I do believe that Eustace was a transcendentalist. Gilbert as well believes that Eustace is a transcendentalist. She uses many different examples that show that she believes this. One example was when Eustace said, “man, you guys have a lot of material possessions” (p69). This quote shows how Eustace was trying to simplify the American lifestyle, which goes with the definition of transcendentalism. Dictionary.com defines it as “any system of philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical and material.” The other examples that Gilbert uses also support this definition. I do agree with Gilbert that Eustace is a transcendentalist. He fit well into the definition of transcendentalism and he focused his life around living in nature. Even if he didn’t consider himself one, he displayed many of the characteristics of a transcendentalist, so I feel that he could be identified as one. 

April 7

“Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth.”

 

These two lines from “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson really caught my attention while I was reading. In this quote, Emerson is talking of the difference between being descriptive in a passage on nature versus being truly factual and straightforward. It is suggesting that the poet writes for people to enjoy his writing where the philosopher is writing for personal fulfillment. This line really caught my attention because I could relate it to my life in some ways. I took that the poet would use very flowery language to describe something in nature and that the philosopher would be very concrete and to the point. This really describes the relationship that my sister and I have with description and writing. She is very wordy and I very concrete. It was interesting to be able to relate something as famous as a passage by Emerson to my life. The passage not only connected to the rest of the passage on nature, but I was able to connect it to my everyday life. 

April 6

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this book to write of the independence that people can have. Eustace has a sense of independence that most of us don’t have. He has the ability to live off of the land and be completely free of the rest of the world. In a quote from Eustace, he says “I don’t want to talk about doing things, I want to be doing things, and I want to know the realities and limits of life by their measure! I don’t want my life to be nothing, to not make a difference. And people tell me all the time how I am doing so much but I feel I am not even scratching the surface. Hell no, I’m not! And life is so short, I could be gone tomorrow” (Gilbert 83). By using this passage, Gilbert is showing how Eustace has the ability to be completely independent, but with this he also wants to impart this wisdom on other people. He has a huge desire to have other people live the same way that he does and his free thinking and independence help push him in this direction. Gilbert uses a lot of the information from Eustace to explain his ability to be free, however, she doesn’t push his idea that people need to be like him. She discusses the idea, but she does not add any push from herself. This adds an interesting comparison between the life that Eustace lives and the life that most Americans live.