2. It was a little strange to have a survivor’s story of the Holocaust be told through characters that were mice, cats, and pigs. It almost would seem like the author / artist wasn’t really serious about the topic he was discussing in his work but as the story goes on through the narrative and images of him talking with his father about it, the tone becomes more serious. I wasn’t exactly put off but it was a little hard to take it seriously at first. What was interesting to me was the choice of animals used to represent the different characters / types of people. I liked how the Jewish characters were mice and the Nazis that were out to get them were the cats, much like the real animal world. The Polish people who were represented by pigs was a little less clear to me but the only reason I could think of was that the pigs were pretty neutral animal and don’t really have enemies or animals that they prey on.

3. The portion of the story that I think was the most powerful was the except which included the previous graphic novel/story that the writer had created that was based on the story of his mother’s suicide and himself and his father discovering her dead. To me it really made the whole story much more serious and showed how large of an effect the whole experience had on the family. The drawings and the fact that everything was much darker was really powerful also and allowed the mood to be much more serious and depressing.

I have always wanted to go to Australia; for some reason the place has always fascinated me. I feel like so much of it is unknown and I want to know more about it. All costs aside, if I could just drop everything and start a life somewhere it would be there.

I wouldn’t need much money to support myself. I’d get a job working at a local restaurant or small shop and find a little place to call my own. I don’t know anyone who lives there or has ever been there really so I would have alot to learn. They basically have their own language also so I would have to try to pick that up in order to fit in.

The cliché saying that the country is best known for, “No Worries”, is excatly the attitude I would be going there to adopt. I feel like this country is soaking in stress and the reason I would be leaving is to put it all behind me.  Naturally I’m sure there are plenty of ways to get stressed out where ever anyone goes, but going to a place where everything is unknown and new seems like stress is almost impossible.

I was thinking that Sydney would be my ultimate destination. It’s a thriving city with much more opprotunity than say, the outback? Like I said I would want to go to a place where I wouldn’t have to totally live off the land. As for my name, I’d say I’d keep it. I don’t really have a reason to change it and things would get very confusing.

The title of this blog isn’t really related to my post at all as it is just the title of a song by Everclear about money and happiness, it’s just a good song.

Krakauer seems to understand Chris and his intentions. With his realation to his own personal experience, he says that he doesn’t think Chris was suicidal, just that he didn’t believe he could die. Kakauer seems to only think of Chris as a dreamer and a kid who just took on too much for him to handle. His opinion is’t really apparant until he begins to describe his own experience.

It is just as easy to argue Chris suicidal as it is an innocent child and there are many examples from the book to support each argument. I think the biggest challenge I’m going to face is making all the examples from the paper flow together in a sensable manner.

For some reason I grew to hate it. I thought I knew what I was talking about and that I knew all the right workouts and didn’t want to do what my coach told me. I always followed the rules everywhere else and I didn’t want to disobey anyone though and get introuble when I was still a new memeber to the team. However when I was told I had to run 3 miles in my school’s track while people who were running 4 or more could go run along the path that ran along the Erie Canal (located a half mile from my school),  I got a little upset. I always had a mental sort of block against running long distances on my track so I badly wanted to go out to the canal but was told multiple times that I had to stay at the track.

One practice however I decided to not listen. The people doing the longer distances left to do their workouts and while my coach wasn’t watchingI left with them. it was a beautiful day and I had a great run but no one was very happy with me when I came back. The head coach was now involved along with all others.

The next day at practice I was called up with all the captains and coaches and teh problem was adressed. I had a chance to say that I didn’t know it would really even be that big of a deal and that I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble or myself and I apologized to everyone. I felt rather stupid after that for having everything be such a big deal.

I disobeyed my same distance coach a few more times for he was a hard man to get along with, anyone on the team knew it. By teh time I was a senior though I loved the man. I started listening to him and following his guidelines and I had a couple really great races and seasons. Imagine that?

1. The Wedding Singer

 2. Jumper

3. Every Indiana Jones Movie

4. The Lion King

5. Transformers

  I think The Wedding Singer has always been entertaining for me mainly because it takes place in the eighties. For some reason I’ve always like that era and to have a movie with Adam Sandler in it based in that time is just fantastic. The love story is perfect.  It begins and ends happy and beautiful with a mess in the middle that plays with your emotions just enough. Plus Adam Sandler sings and you really can’t go wrong with that.

I love every second of Jumper. It’s set in Ann Arbor Michigan in the middle of winter, something I could relate to when I first saw it in theatres living in Buffalo New York. I like that it’s not set in some exotic location with people who seem far from ordinary. All the characters in it seem like they could be real people you meet walking down the street, and they’re all very attractive. Although the movie is based on teleporting so it kinda pulls away from the ordinary every day aspect of it. What i love most about the movie though is what the main character David did with his ability to ‘jump’. He first off moves out of his house by stealing money from a bank and buys everything his heart desires. Personallyif I had the ability to teleport I would probably do the exact same thing, as horrible and illegal as that is. He also travels the world which is something I have always wanted to do. I just love everything about this movie.

I think my whole family has always been fans of the Indiana Jones movies so I think I was kinda brought up on them in a way. I remember watching them when I  was young and getting grossed out and some parts and always avoiding watching the Temple of Doom because it was just too much for me. I love all the mystery, suspense, and action that is apart of these films. I love how Dr. Jones goes from teaching a college class one day and an hour later he is on the search for some hidden artifact. The movies really make you fall in love with him too as he is portrayed as a hero and trying to find all the artifacts and put them in museums while the ‘bad guys’ are simply trying to find them for the purpose of getting rich off of them. I saw the 12:01am showing of the newest movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with one of my best friends whose family is also big on the movies. The movie was very good and it was good to see the characters on the big screen again but the artifact in which they were chasing was a bit ridiculous.

I think I made my mom and dad take me to see The Lion King four times when it was in theatres. That’s what I was told anyway and I have no doubt that it is true. I loved that movie when I was little and I still love it now but I’m not totally sure why. I think it sparked an interest in lions for me and talking animals is always fun. I love all the songs in it and was always singing them when I was little. I think this will always be a movie that I can just watch over and over and never get sick of. It’s a very feel good movie with a very happy ending.

Transformers is kinda a ridiculous movie you have to love seeing as it’s about robot aliens and all. Again, it’s got attractice characters and some pretty decent lines and jokes along the way. I saw it in theatres with a few of my good friends and we kinda adopted the movie as one of our favorites and started quoting it alot and we all grew to love it. It’s a little hard to explain why this movie is one of my favorites but again I could watch it over and over without getting sick of it and like many of my favorite movies, it has a special meaning to me that makes it so much better.

Around the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, fashion really seems to dawn on youngsters and becomes much more critical. When I think about my style and the clothes I wore, it’s pretty embarrassing. I went through many phases including an Old Navy phase and a tomboy phase. Although this sounds rather normal for a ten or so year old girl, I was still growing and hadn’t fully matured of course so nothing really seemed to make me look nice. Looking back at pictures anyway that’s how I feel.

I remember wearing a lot of Nike and Adidas sweatpants with sneakers and big shirts that had been handed down from my two older brothers. I was comfortable and it was easy for me to change for gym class but I can’t understand what was going though my mind at the time. I do remember being critical about what I wore though and being jealous of my other friends who had a certain shirt I wanted from a certain store or who I thought looked better than me on a given day.

It’s pretty sad to think that all these opinions and thoughts started coming into my head at that early of an age but I’m a girl and it just came naturally I guess. I suppose it isn’t really fair to think this way now because I’m sure in a few years I’ll look back on what I’m wearing these days and think the same things to myself. I don’t really think anyone can avoid that but I now that I’m older I believe it’s important to be thankful for what you have and are given at anytime and to make the best of it by all means possible; and I try my best to do so everyday when I get dressed in the morning.

Example paraphrase: Roger Sipher makes his first outcome in getting rid of mandatory attendance policies though believing that school will be looked at as a serious place for learning. Those who attend simply  because they are required to will be no longer around to contaminate the learning environment.

Example Quotation: According to Roger Sipher, private schools have no problems with kicking students our because “They can fail or dismiss students, knowing such students can attend public school” (Page #).

At first glance, http://www.straightedgelifestyle.moonfruit.com/# appears to be the same kind of website. It has a much greater aesthetic value as you are instantly greeted with pictures from punk rock / hardcore shows and large lettering that truely reflect the aspects of the scene (if you like the color red also, this is the site for you).  

If you are fortunate enough to have your speakers turned on, your ears will be filled with a BBC Radio broadcast all about straight edge that features many of its founders and active participants speaking on the bascis of the system and the reasons why it even exists. This is something no other site had. It really helps to emphasize the passsion that the people involved with these beliefs feel. They realized that they were outcats in society and accepted it and grew into the punk rock scene. But they didn’t have the same views on things that others in the scene had. They didn’t want to hate life and hang their heads in depression while sniffing glue. They wanted to enjoy life and the music that they loved.

This website helped me to form the impression of how real this subculture is. The straight edge crowd takes what they believe in very serioulsy and don’t back down. They believe in being rebels and see the straight edge lifestyle as being even more rebelious in a society that seems to be focused around alcohol, drugs, and casual sex.

It’s very interesting to me how they look at things. They don’t believe in drinking, drugs, and sleeping around not olnly because it is rather unhealthy, but because it’s just plain dumb and you lose all control of your life. They want to be able to live their lives the way the want and don’t want to be controlled by anything or anyone, whether it be society or a substance. I think it’s very interesting to see people saying that they live their lives to the fullest and blah blah blah and go out and drink and do drugs and they stop living their lives. It’s almost as if they stop living all together…

Straight edge has some very appealing morals to it that make you wonder about your own life. However I did stumble across a few websites making fun of straight edge. My favorite was http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/SXe where it defines straight edge as “is a Mormon cult for 13 year old boys created by Ian MacKaye of the band Minor Threat as a means of rebelling against the concepts of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Usually because the cool kids, who do things like drink and have sex, won’t associate with these faggot mama’s boys. In other words, their mission is to uphold the status-quo. If you’re under 18/21 don’t fucking brag about it. You’re only following the law, you pretentious shit.”

Sorry for the language.

  I fell in love with the sport of running for miles and miles and the only reason I seem to have is because I was so awful at everything else. Running was so simple.  The only rules you had to remember were no jewelry, red flags mean left, yellow flags me right, and blue means straight. There wasn’t any proper technique to it or anything special you had to own or buy really if you didn’t want to. We almost never had enough girls to make an actual team so most of the years I was only running for myself.

I don’t really think runners have much of a sterotype because there are so many people who do it in so many different forms. Sprinters are much different than those who run marathons, and it takes different skills to run an eight hundred than it does a mile. Being a competitive runner for the last six years, I began to form my own sterotypes. After being at so many different events and meets, I noticed alot of trends in the different types of people who do different events.  Sprinters tend to be more built and muscular than most other runners, and I’m not meaning to be racist, but a majority of them are black. Middle distance and long distance runners from what I’ve seen have been primarily white usually with a very lean body, depending on how serious they are about their sport. It’s usually pretty easy for me to spot a runner out of a crowd by “checking them out” if you will. If I begina conversation with what I believe to be a runner and they act a little weird or anything along those lines, it’s almost a dead giveaway that they are a distance runner.

  The sport of distance running makes you a little bit strange if you aren’t already when you start. You have to be to be willing to go out and run for miles and miles for no real reason. You have to be enthusiastic about what you’re doing because if your’e not, it won’t be any fun. Of course that rule applies to all walks of life but it’s very easy to get discouraged about yourself when a work out doesn’t go correctly.

I love being a runner and I probably woudl have gotten cut from any other sport I attempted to play. I love runners because I understand them and if any runners are reading this, I’m sorry I formed my own sterotypes but you probably have thought the same things at one point or another I’m sure.