Response to Tiffany's Post about Love, and Vinh. (Wow... that sounds kinda wrong....)

This is something interesting that I found on Tiffany's Blog.

How is love an illusion? First of all, do you know what love is? What is love? When is it love? How is it love? IF you said it's an illusion that we want, then why do we want it? Love is not an illusion. Love is trust. I hope you believe that trust is NOT in anyway an illusion. Love has so many characteristics that there is no way it can be an illusion! Anywho, a dream is a visual of what your mind is thinking. Well, to me it is. What is the pressure you are talking about? When you learn the anatomy and physiology of the brain, you will understand. Do you think reality will be a dream since you said "only nothing but illusion is remain."

 This was something interesting that I found. It was interesting to be looking through Google Docs and to find something like this. Now, I do not really know what to respond to in this post and what part of the content, the part on love and emotions, or the part where it seems like an argument is taking place.

Now, for the section on love, I have many mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it seems that love is supposed to be this awesome thing that will make all of your anger and hatred go away, and when I look at some couples, I can see that taking place. When someone is really angry and they meet up with their loved one, it is noticeable that they seem to get less angry and get happier. That seems to be a very positive effect of love.

Now on the argument part, that was something that seems interesting and funny to me. I thought that it was uncommon to fin people arguing over what would seem to be sort of an online forum. However, now that it has actually happened, I am curious to see what would happen. Would the argument escalate? Or would it be resolved without more harm? What could be the “repercussion's” of this?

Response to Speak 3

The last part of the book speak was enlightening. In the beginning of the book, there was a lot of talk about why Melinda was such a weirdo, why no one liked her, why she seemed so creepy and why she was such a loner. Throughout the book, her personality is explored and we learn more about what happend to her and why she became the person that she is.

In the 3rd part of the book, they talk about her experience with her "party" and how she got raped in the party. It seemed messed up and really wrong that she got raped and she did not even know what was going on. Even worse is that she knows who the person who raped her is and tries to tell people, but because she called the cops on the party, she is shunned and hated at her new high school. In the last part of the book, it is revealed that the person that raped her is Andy Evans, the person that she has been calling the beast and IT throughout the entire book. Before it was explained, I always wondered why she called him IT, and what he could have possibly done to her to make her hate him so much.

The really messed up part in the book was when Melinda tried to explain to Rachel why Andy Evans was such a bad person, and why she should stay away from him. She tried to start a conversation up with Rachel and help her, even though Rachel abandoned her in high school and treated her like she did not even exist for the whole freshman year of high school. When Rachel heard that Melinda was raped by Andy Evans, all Rachel said was that Melinda was a liar, that she was jealous of what Rachel had, and that Melinda was a horrible horrible person for lying about being raped.

One of the funny and satisfying parts of the book was when Heather came back to Melinda. Heather had come back begging for Melinda’s help because she had been given an impossible assignment by the other girls in her group. Melinda felt that Heather was rude, selfish, and self centered, so she finally did something about it and told Heather to go away and refused to help her. That was a very satisfactory part of the book, because it was so nice to see that Melinda actually got revenge on someone that self-centered and selfish.

Response to Technology

This is something interesting that I found on Crystal's Blog:

This made me rethink my question and led me to agree with what my group members were saying. In the modern society were technology is commonplace and accessible, many of our decisions are based off of what computers tell us. Even our identities are controlled through computers through our social security numbers or ID numbers. These numbers are assigned by society in order for computers to easily keep track of information about each citizen that resides in a particular state or country. On a more personal scale, whenever a person creates a social networking account, they identify themselves on the net by what they choose to reveal or say about themselves. Then people around the world will solely identify that person by what they see on their computer and not take the effort to know more about the person other than what is written on their screen.

This is an interesting thing to think about. Many people think that technology has overrun the lives of human beings. I feel that this is true in some ways. For example, for jobs, you did not need to use much technology. All you had to do was you job manually and you were done. Nowadays, you have to use technology a LOT in the world of business. You probably cannot go a single day without going on the computer.

On another note, many people are addicted to games. So many video game consoles and games are coming out these days, and more and more people are getting addicted to them. One man has even gone so far as to marry the girl in his game. This is kinda of a scary fact. We even watched a video in Sutherland’s class talking about the video games usage in the human race, and how that number is increasing and increasing. At the rate this is going, the whole human species may become addicted to games. Also, as Crystal said, right now, even if there are people not addicted to playing video games, there are a LOT of people addicted to social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Response to Speak 2

We discussed a lot of interesting this about the book Speak in our discussion. This part of the book was longer than the other one, so we had more to discuss this time. One thing at the very end of our section really stood out though. There was more to the party that she broke up than just her breaking a random party up. Apparently, she got raped in the party that she went to. She was dancing with this senior and they went into a secluded area. He pushed her down and raped her. The next thing she knew, she was on the phone and the police were saying “Don’t worry, we will be there soon.” This is probably the cause of all of her problems, mentally and socially.

For example, when David was asking her to go to his house to celebrate the team winning. She rejected him because she was too scared of something happening because he was a guy. At that time, it was not clear what was wrong, but the last part of the book makes it clear. She does not want to go to David’s house because she is scared of him doing something to her. She is distrustful even when she knows that his parents will be there. The revelation that she was raped makes her relationship with her friends even more messed up.

Her friends did not even understand or try to understand that she was raped at the party, and just abandoned her because she broke it up. If they were her real friends, why would they not try to listen to her side of the story? Why would they just try abandon her and never try to help her again? That does not seem like something  real friend would do. Especially Rachel, her “best” friend. She did not act like a best friend. She does not even act like real friend at all.

The most messed up part of the book was when Heather abandoned her. Heather abandoned her because she felt that Melinda was too depressing and because she had a better group of “friends” This makes Heather one of the most messed up people in the book, because all Melinda did was help her out, and Heather repaid her by abandoning her.

Response to Sleep by Carly Cheung response post

This is something interesting that I found on David's Blog.

I can relate to her in so many ways. Typically on a school night, I would work until I finish the homework that is due the next day. Typically, my max amount of time that I usually end at is at 12 midnight. If I past that time, then I would not get the minimum requirements of sleep of 7 hours. If I do past that time limit if doing homework, I would feel sleepy all morning long. I don't really pay attention in class and always find myself daydreaming, but I never sleep.

I find that some of what David says is very true. If I do my homework and it takes until 12 midnight, then I find that I do not get enough sleep. When I wake up to go to school in the morning, I feel dead and I feel like a zombie, I just do not want to get up. When I get to school, all i think about is going to sleep, and it makes it really hard to concentrate when the teachers are talking. For example, when I am in Mrs.McCoy’s room for math, I get drowsy. In her class, she talks almost all of the time, and all we do is sit there and listen to her and take notes. Also, she turns off all of the ceiling lights and turns on these tiny lamps that do not produce much light so I feel extremely drowsy. Because of this I cannot concentrate in her class and all I want to do is to go to sleep and to forget about everything that has happened. This is not something that I want happening, because concentrating in her class is hard enough, and I do not need anything else to distract me from concentrating. Also, sometimes, I not only feel drowsy in math class, but I start to feel more drowsy in History, Writing class, and maybe even in Science class. This is a big concern for me too because I need to improve in those classes, and since I have no concentration, I cannot improve and will probably do worse.

Response to Speak

I learned a lot from my table mates. They taught me that there were a lot of things in the book that I did not catch and that there were a lot of things that may have been hidden in the book that I did not even realize were there, However, this part of the book was so short that I do not think there was enough things to discuss with my table mates. Our reading only had 40 pages to read, so there were not that many interesting things to discuss about.

One of the interesting things that we discussed about was how isolated she seemed in her life. (Melinda) We thought that she seemed isolated because she had no friends at all, except for the new girl that she had a one-sided friendship with. Also, in her family life, she was very isolated at home. She did not have much contact with her parents, and when her parents came home, all she would do would be to go upstairs into her room while her parents left her alone and watched t.v in their living room. She did not even see them that much because they were working when she came home, she lived alone from after school until they came home from work.

We felt that this was kind of sad and that this may be one of the reasons that Melinda does not talk a lot in the story, because she does not have that much experience relating to other people, whether they are her own age or if they are adults. Another example of this may be her school teacher, Mr. Neck. when she angers him and he asks what she is doing, all she does is stand there and not say anything. She may not answer to him because she does not know how to talk to teachers. She might not also be able to relate to angry people, because she does not relate to people most of the time.

Another thing that we discussed was the mirror in her room and why she took it down and made it face the wall. We said that this might have happened because she was afraid to see what she had become, and she did not want to see how she changed from last year to this year.