A smooth, accurate, precision-made machine.

            Personally, I do not believe that one could not accurately say that schools are run as Nurse Ratched runs her psych ward. It could be argued that in a school, like a psych ward, there is very little choice to be made in how your days are run. However, I think that the amount of influence you have over your life in school is exponentially more than you would have in a mental institution.

            Firstly, in a mental institution, everyday has the exact structure and monotony of the day before, the month before, or even the year before. In school, you have the ability to choose what classes you want to take semester to semester. If you don’t like a class, you can just switch into another. If you chose your classes correctly, you can create a sort of path for yourself and your life after high school. In a psych ward, you are forced to live as they tell you to, and every minute of your day is planned out for you. You have no choice about when to eat, sleep, bathe, or even relax. If they tell you to work, you have to do just that. Plus, in Nurse Ratched’s ward, there is very little criticism given which actually helps to pave a path for the patients’ futures. She only uses her power to gain more control.

            In school, you also have more representation and power to better the conditions in which you have to work. Your best representatives in school are your parents. They are the taxpayers whose money is spent to pay for the institution and the majority of the workers in it. Plus, they have your best interests in mind. If they go in and complain that they don’t like the way you are being treated, arrangements will be made to fix the situation. In a psych ward, however, the patients’ only representation is their family, who often don’t see them frequently enough to be familiar with their situation. For the most part, the doctors can run the hospital however they want to.

            Lastly, in school you have the choice of whether or not you want to be there. In a psych ward you don’t. You only get to leave once the doctors have clear you and marked you safe for society. At school, everyday you have the choice of whether or not you want to go in. There are of course consequences if you don’t go in enough, but the choice is still available to you, and at the end of the day, you can always go home again.

Top 10 Favorite Video Games

Top 10 Favorite Video Games

1.                Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Turnabout Trial)

            I love this game mainly because of its adorable characters. Phoenix Wright specifically is so easy to relate to because (even though he always wins) he's never completely certain of himself and relies on his friends a lot for support. He has a perfect sense of right and wrong, but sometimes his immense compassion leads him to take big risks. Also, the game play is better than that of most games because, despite the fact that it is pretty much an interactive anime, it provokes a lot of thought and analysis in order to build a good case to defend the client. It sound very nerdy, but I love it. It's a lot of fun.

2.            Final Fantasy VII

            This game is a common favorite among Final Fantasy players because it became a major turning point in the series. The graphics were greatly improved over those of Final Fantasy VI and the characters were well developed and very diverse. Plus, it has one of the most impressive antagonists (Sephiroth) of any of the video games I've played before. The story is interesting and keeps you wanting to see more. It was hinted that Square Soft was going to remake this game, but unfortunately they did not want to put the time and effort into it after the length it took them to make Final Fantasy XIII.

3.             Kingdom Hearts (All)

            I love the entire Kingdom Hearts series because it is such an interesting concept for a game and was so well pulled off. As it is a mix of Disney characters and Final Fantasy characters (two very different groups), at first I had some doubts that it would actually be any good, but as it turns out, the protagonist, Sora, was a perfect blend of the two and helped to give them a common ground on which to appear. In addition, the battle system, though there are slight variations from game to game, is my favorite of any I've played. It's very easy to get into and simple to alternate to prevent boredom when powering up.

4.          Final Fantasy VI

            Though I've never actually completed this game, I love it mainly because of its outrageous antagonist, Kefka, a completely messed up, cross dressing (not that I think there is anything wrong with that), psycho clown intent upon doing everything in the most sadistic way possible. Though effects were still rather poor when the game came out, Kefka was given a chilling laugh that just makes your skin crawl and makes him all the more creepy to encounter in battle. When the game begins, Kefka is an army general, who, though in a position of power, is rarely respected. As the story progresses, however, he starts to lose his sanity more and more, eventually becoming a flamboyant terrorist, devil-god... In comparison to those of the previous five games, this character was hugely abnormal, but highly entertaining. It was a good idea to put him in, if you ask me. It added more spice to a series that was beginning to get old.

5.          Halo (All)

            My favorite thing about Halo is it's amazing multiplayer experience. Almost everyone in my family is into video games in one way or another, but we usually come up with the issue that most of the games we like do not have cooperative modes. Halo, though, has many different ways to play with friends or family, including co-op story mode or various battle modes. You can team up or go all on one, and you can fight in number of different locations from world to world. Plus, the variety of weapons available makes it easy to choose your own strategy for taking down the enemy. My personal favorite is sniping.

6.            Final Fantasy I

            As the first of the Final Fantasy series, FFI obviously does not have the same character development, graphics, or multi-layered story that the rest of them do. That said, it is definitely a classic. It began the series on its pattern of four warriors of light setting out to restore the world's crystals and save it from a terrible darkness. It's cheesy to the point of being awesome. Plus, unlike other games from the time, it doesn't have too many points in which it hands you a pile of busy work in order to lengthen the story. The plot keeps moving as you go along, and despite its simplicity, has enough twists to keep you interested. It's a nice game to play on a long car ride.

7.             Xenosaga (Episode I)

            What I enjoy most about Xenosaga (Episode I) is probably the anime-style graphics and the characters. Starting off the series, Episode I showed the best sides of all its protagonists before Episode II could distort them. Plus, the introduction to KOS-MOS (the protagonist's android bodyguard) was epic and made you adore her instantly. The game has a lot of very long cut scenes, which, of course, I appreciated for the beauty of the animation. The story is interesting, but it lost me at a few points and it takes too much leveling up to actually be able to get anywhere fast, hence why the game is at such a low point on this list.

8.             Dynasty Warriors IV

            There isn't too much for me to say about this game because, to be honest, I haven't actually played through its whole story. What I like about it is that it is a lot of fun to do multiplayer and it really makes you feel like you're kicking butt as your K.O. count in the corner sores into the hundreds. Unfortunately, you are fighting as part of an army, and most of the time this army isn't very good at holding its own, so it's easy to lose quickly. Also, many of the characters you can play as (though there is a surprising amount) resemble each other in personality. Only a few stand out as very interesting or cool.

9.          Streets of Rage

            Streets of Rage is an old game for a now dead console, the Sega Genesis. A long time ago, when my brother got his very first set of video games for Christmas, this game came in a six-pack with the Genesis. Pretty much it is about three young cops who decide to team up and go out to bring down the ultimate crime boss in a corrupt city. Once again, this is a game to play two-player. It is incredibly difficult to complete otherwise. What I like about it is that it is sufficiently challenging, but short enough to finish in a night if you happen to be playing with friends. Also, the fighting is very satisfying, especially as you begin to pick up weapons.

10.             Pokémon (Any for Gameboy/DS)

            Pokémon is a very simple game, even as they come out with more and more of them. The originals on the Gameboy are by far the best. I enjoy it because it introduces you to the game with the adventure story, but even once you complete that, it's never quite over. There are so many Pokémon to collect, and once you have them all, you have to power them all up to max as well. Personally, I have never even come close to collecting all of the Pokémon available, despite how long I've had the games. There are so many different strategies you can use as you attempt to find them all too. It's a great game to carry around with you because you can play it anywhere and it doesn't take too much concentration.

Death Of A Salesman II

When a man spends all his time working to support his family, he actually ends up neglecting them. Just as Willy has been working decades as a salesman, he has missed decades of his family’s evolution. As the years have passed, Willy Loman has put no effort into his marriage with his wife, Linda. The two avoid talking to one another about important matters and seem as though they have very little to make conversation about anymore. Also, Willy’s relationship with his sons has stayed mostly the same since Biff caught him cheating. The anger between them could have been worked out a long time ago if Willy had been around to discuss it with. Willy believed that by working so hard, he was fighting to achieve the American Dream.

The American Dream has a clear component of building things up from nothing. This is displayed many times throughout the play of Willy’s life. For example, when Willy’s stoop was falling apart when Ben came to visit, Willy wanted to rebuild it with his sons. This is trying to show how, one, Willy wants to recreate the bond that should be tween him and Ben as brothers, and two, he is trying to rebuild his family since he came from a home where he lived with just his mom. Willy had nothing to base his family values on, but found some that worked for him and that was his way of building something from nothing.

A final theme of Death Of A Salesman is that people have always wanted more than what they have because they believe  that their life is never as perfect as they want it to be. Willy has a loving family and good friends, but he stays at a job he hates so that he can try to get more money to improve his family’s life. He does not like to see his wife mending her stockings because it makes him feel like he has not gotten that better life. He tries to pass on his desire to his sons as well because he wants them to find the success in business that he never had.

Death of a Salesman

            In Willy’s memory of a visit from his brother, Ben, he seems very serious about encouraging his sons to be tough and manly. Through the connection he is struggling to make with Ben, it is clear that he wants his sons to have good family values, and to stick together. Willy tries to teach Happy and Biff to be “rugged, well-liked, all around” (34). These are some of the attributes that he needs in order to be successful at his job. He wants his sons to be hard working so that they can be thriving and “coming out of the jungle” young like Ben did. These are important values for Willy to teach them because it will help them to lead happier and fuller lives. However, it is also important that Willy does not put too much emphasis on pursuing one’s career or else Happy or Biff may end up being a workaholic like him.

            Willy’s inconsistencies as he speaks with his wife, Linda, express his differing ideas on what he should be and what he thinks he is. Although he has been working diligently all his life to try and achieve the American dream, Willy is yet unsuccessful. Because of this, part of him believes that he is unlikable and lazy. Willy tends to project his flaws onto others in order to make them more bearable to himself. He says that Biff is lazy, when he really thinks the opposite. He is seeing his own failures in his son. The same goes for the Chevy. Linda reacts to Willy’s contradictions by agreeing with him no matter what he says. She does not point out that he has said two completely opposing opinions. Linda helps Willy by supporting and encouraging him as much as she can. As he already sees so many flaws in himself and he is in such a hopeless positions, were she to bring up each and every one of his mistakes it would only discourage him and cause him to draw inside himself further. Her criticism would not help matters any, but her support keeps Willy feeling like the fight is worth fighting.

Misery

I love to read old, classic books, like The Scarlet Letter or Jane Eyre, but I’ve noticed that so many of them build up such wonderful characters and then have something horrible happen to them or have completely unsatisfying endings. Why was it so popular in old times to kill your protagonist? Sometimes it makes the story that much more meaningful, like in Romeo and Juliet, but other times, like in The Scarlet Letter, it just leaves you feeling like the whole thing was pointless. I’m sure that authors did their best to try and teach a lesson with the conclusion to their story, but when it is weak, it kills the whole novel.

            At the end of The Scarlet Letter, I felt that Hawthorne was just trying to end things as fast as possible. Instead of going through with Hester and Dimmesdale’s escape back to England, he makes them stay and has Dimmesdale’s weakness come back and kill him. It especially made me feel like I was wasting my time when Hester asked Dimmesdale if they could be together in death. He responds:

 “The law we broke! – the sin here so awfully revealed! – let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God – when we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul – it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in everlasting and pure reunion” (252).

I don’t understand why, if someone was dying, they would further crush the heart of the one who loves them by saying that they will never see each other again.

One may say that they are trying to free their lover, but since Hester has loved Dimmesdale for over seven years without even speaking to him, it doesn’t appear that she is going to get over him anytime soon. Telling her that they will never be together in the afterlife is just going to make her more miserable after his death.

The Crucible

Hale is considered a venerable man by the people of Salem when he arrives to help them find their witches. He is a specialist in discovering who is heathenish in a village. Salem has many sumptuary laws in place to keep away witches, but they haven’t worked as planned. In order to save his wife from being executed for witchcraft, Proctor is forced to reveal his own sin and live in ignominy. Rather than using a guillotine to kill the condemned people, they use a noose. Danforth, who is a judge and a man of eminence, decides who will hang and who is innocent, but the horrified visages of the girls influence him when they say they see a witch.

Abigail is the leader of these girls, but though she seems to have some sagacity she is really capable of some lurid things. While Tituba played with the girls and showed them the power of alchemy, Abigail imbibed blood and wished for the death of Elizabeth Proctor, the women who threw her out after she became John Proctor’s paramour. When Elizabeth besmirches Abigail in town, the girl begins to concoct a plan to have her killed.

Abigail is gifted with ingenuity. When she sees the opportunity to keep her and her friends from getting in trouble for dancing in the woods, she decides that they can used their dexterity to make themselves faint. Betty and Ruth even fake a somniferous infirmity to make it more convincing. Ruth’s parents speak of her somnambulism too as they explain her sickness to Paris.

Many of the townspeople believe that there is something diabolical about the girls’ ailments and their game begins to have inimical effects. The accused women start proffering others’ names in order to save themselves. The calamity starts reaching its zenith as children are being orphaned and cows are abandoned on farms. Though the court originally believed it was unerring, they begin to comport more desperately to regain the townspeople’s faith after losing it for being so scurrilous to the accused.

Taking Turns

  Is there any  way that the thought of foreclosure on someone’s house can be a good one? I don’t think so, but apparently the government believes they have found one. A few days ago, my mother was talking to me in our car. She was going on about money and how bad the economy is – common topics for her – and then she mentioned an article she had read in the paper on a previous day. According to the article, the government plans on taking recently foreclosed homes, fixing them up, and giving them to needy families.

  Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds utterly pointless. Homes are taken from people who can’t afford their mortgages. When I hear that they want to use foreclosed homes to house needy families, its sounds to me like all they are doing is switching two families’ positions. You throw one into a house and the other out on the streets. How is that helping our community at all?

  I am not against letting people into our country or giving immigrants good jobs, good treatment, or nice places to live. I believe they deserve that just as much as anyone else in this country, but so often I see recently immigrated families getting special treatment while families that have been in this country for generations can barely afford to live. Many times, a family is considered “more needy” than another simply based on their race or how short a while they have lived here. If the government insists upon using these foreclosed homes to house needy families rather than assisting the poor families already living there, I simply hope that all people involved are treated the same and equally considered for the home, regardless of their background.

  However, I frankly think that there are plenty of houses in this community – empty houses that have been up for sale with no potential buyers for a while now. I believe the government should use those houses for needy families and instead of throwing more people out onto the streets, they should focus on assisting families who can no longer afford the cost of living. Shuffling people around won’t improve anything. We need to start supporting everyone who is suffering if we hope to make things better.

Are You A Good Witch Or A Bad Witch?

In many stories, movies, and books, the witch is always the evil character - the jealous old coot, the choas-loving manipulator. Quite frequently, she is portrayed as having poor traits like a selfish, destructive, or envious nature. Not to mention that her appearance isn't always of the highest quality either. We all know the green-skinned, wart-nosed old hag with the cackling laugh. We have all become quite comfortable using her to teach a lesson to our children, but what I'm wondering is, is this stereotype fair to modern day witches or could it be degrading?
Now, you may say, "Everone knows witches don't exist. No one has green skin and nobody can cast magic spells on the poeple around them." That sounds fair venough, but what about the young women who use their herbs and oils, preyers and statues to "cast magic spells?"
INCOMPLETE

The Puritan's Dream

The Puritans contributed to the American Dream because they believed in their own unique form of freedom and took a lot of criticism for it. They wanted the right, or freedom, to live in a world without tolerance for sinners. They had a very strict type of religion. They hated to see so many people around them living such careless lives, not respecting God or his will. When they came to America, they were hoping to have a better life for themselves where they didn't have to put up with their beliefs being ignored as Queen Elizabeth I did. To them, freedom was being able to live an obedient and structured life, which took a lot of discipline. Though this contrasts what most consider to be freedom, the Puritans did their part for the American Dream by coming here and fighting to establish a colony where they could live and practice their religion as they wanted to.
In my opinion, the Puritans don't deserve the reputation that they have gotten over the years. They lived their lives very6 strictly and expected a lot from those around them, but there are many people living their lives that way today as well and people do not look down on them as they did the Puritans. Their followers are not the only ones, far from it, who have fought and killed in the name of their dream. In a way, I think the Puritans could be admired. Not for all the damage they caused to innocent people, by any means, but because they were always so strongly disliked and outcast by their neighbors and persisted in living as they saw fit anyhow. They must have had very strong wills and beliefs to live the way that they did for so long. No matter what it is, one should always be willing to do whatever it takes to defend their ideas.

Our Life In The Dream

To me and my family, the American Dream is sort of something of the past. People these days just seem to use it for marketing (as mentioned in "The American Dream" handout) or to reassure themselves in hard economic times. America is supposed to be a land of opportunity and new beginnings, but with jobs so hard to find and the price of living so high, how can we still say that's true? My family and I have always worked very hard for our money and to support ourselves, but for as long as I can remember, we have always had trouble with our bills. Some may say that life is not all about money, but how can you live your life the way you want to when you have to spend most of your time worrying over costs?
We do enjoy our freedoms in the country - freedom of religion, freedom to own land, have pets, and, most of all, freedom of speech. Most of my family are atheists, while I really have no religion, but believe in God, and my sister is wiccan. None of us are too serious about practicing our religions, but we carry them with us and are happy for the fact that we are not forced to participate in something we don't believe in. We also consider ourselves very lucky to have our cats. They are a part of our family and bring us fun and laughter everyday.
I am certain that my family and I would all be strong believers in the American Dream if we were in this country during a better time economically. However, it seems nearly impossible for us to pursue happiness when every dollar we make is already spent. When it comes to the future, I try to keep an open and positive mind that things will get better, which perhaps has something to do with the dream's place in my mind. If America got through the Great Depression, it will get through this. But for the moment, opportunities are scarce and with so many people poor and losing their homes, the American Dream just feels like a fantasy, something that will never be achieved.

*My first few blogs are posted out of order.

Themes In Music

Many bands seem to have a common theme for their music, whether it's in the sound of it or the actual lyrics. The most common theme I notice is one about love. Song writers seem to enjoy writing music that tells you it is important to open your heart and not to be afraid of pain so that you can one day find the person who will be with you forever. Perhaps this is because it is an easy idea to relate to. Everyone experiences love in one way or another. Also common, not so much in pop music but in rock, is a theme of being true to yourself or others, even if it hurts you.
One band that frequently seems to deal with betrayal and deceit in their music is Linkin Park. Many of their songs, such as "Lying From You", speak of someone who has created a new persona for themselves in order to please someone else. Usually this person is unable to keep up a fake identity and they find everything around them is falling apart. "No More Sorrow" tells of sort of the opposite scenario, where the writer has been lied to and stolen from and has finally had enough. Though the mood of Linkin Park's music gives the impression that the writer is unsatisfied with who he is, he seems strangely determine to stay true to that person.
These themes from different song writers' music can really make you wonder how it all relates back to them. Why is the writer for Linkin Park so fascinated by truth? And why do so many people encourage others with their music to dive blindly into love rather than to be cautious? Is it really only because this is what comes easiest to them, or is it because they have become so overwhelm by an emotion that they feel they have to share it with others? It has been said that people write what they know. If that is true, I think there are many writers who I would love to speak to about their lives. They must have a wealth of experience and passion well worth celebrating.