Happiness.

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not as bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.  The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.”  Henry David Thoreau

Life is full of ups and downs. Every time that you experience something that is good or bad, it will make you feel differently. Happiness therefore, is a weird and mysterious emotion. It is a thought that people get when they like something. Happiness is not singular though. It comes differently to other people. Society changes peoples perception of  happiness. Perfection, drugs, and advertisements, try to convince you that you need a product or need to be a certain way to feel happy.

People constantly strive to be perfect. Beauty now a days, has reached a point where you need to be perfect to be beautiful. The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne tells a story about a man and his wife. His wife has a small scar on her cheek. The husband thinks that this needs to be removed whereas the young lady Georgiana, disagrees with him. She is happy and at peace even though she has a scar on her cheek. The husband named Alymer, created this solution to remove the scar; he discovers a plant that could remove it. He had finally convinced his wife to get the procedure. When she wakes up, the scar is gone but Georgiana ends up dying. If  beauty comes with such a high cost, can it really be perfection? Is this kind of perfection really happiness?

Young girls look up to people that are popular, or what they believe is beautiful. They set high expectations for their selves. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show just recently aired on television. The aftermath of events like this, for children and even some adults, is horrible. All of the women who model the clothes, are caked in make-up. They are touched up to the point that they are, with out a doubt, fake. It makes people believe that they need to look like the models to be beautiful and happy.

Drugs are an escape for people to find happiness for a short period of time. They forget about everything that is around them. The Euphio Question, is just another example of a way that a few men had tried to create fake happiness. Fake happiness is not real happiness. If it forces your mind to think a certain way, it is not truly what you feel. Fake happiness is something that makes you feel something totally different than the reality.

Advertisements are similar to drug use; they take advantage of people by making them believe that they will be happy if they buy what they are advertising. Advertisers target “The American Dream”. People want success, happiness, beauty, and friendship. When people buy things, they believe that they will be happy with what they are buying but, the happiness soon wears off. You always want something bigger, better, and newer. Therefore, you will buy the latest version of the product that you already have.

Society makes people feel differently. It changes the way that people think that they should look, feel, and act. Society convinces you that you need something in order to experience happiness. It makes you feel below everyone who is made to look perfect. Society portrays a different realm of happiness that is unreachable as a human being.

The Stranger

Based on the book The Stranger  written by Albert Camus.

My Commemoration of Meursault

Many people knew Meursault somewhat, but not quite fully. He was a quiet man who rarely showed his emotions. Very much less than what men his age would share with other people. When he cared about something, it was big, nothing little. He would say that you shouldn't waste your time caring about random things when you could enjoy what is really important around you. Now that I think about it, I think that this decision that he made to live this way may have helped him appreciate things better.

Meursault was one of the best men that I knew, I loved him so much!  We had a short relationship but we were planning on getting married when he was found guilty for killing someone. Personally, I don't think that he was guilty because the Arabs were there trying to attack and Meursault, after seeing the two men attack his friend, felt that it was only necessary for his safety to shoot the man.

When his mother had died, no one had known. He didn't know for himself until a day or two after she died becaue he decided that it was better for her to live with someone who could pour their hearts into her. He knew that she deserved better than what he had to offer. I applaud him for that. But this is just another example about how little he would share his emotions with other people. Maybe he just bottled them up, or maybe he did not think that they were important enough to share with people. I loved everything about him including this and I think that he loved me too.

I wish that he could still be on Earth where I could see him. He absolutely loved the nature of things and I'm sure that he misses that. Meursault could look at someone and know exactly what they were going to do and how they felt. He noticed all of the little things that no one else would. I loved that about him.

I fell in love with Meursault in the short time that I knew him. He was one of the most genuine and true people that I will ever meet. People would try to influence him into believing certain things and living certain ways but he would never listen to them. He knew what he wanted and would never let things get in his way. This is why I love Meursault.

 

Marie

 

Autobiography of Myself as a Reader

Everyone has a past of themselves as a reader. Some people have never liked to read, where as other people have read just about every book that there is. Over the past few weeks, I've learned more about myself as a reader and what I liked and absolutely hated. I've talked to the people who know me best including my parents and have personally considered every book I've read that I remember ever being important for me to grow as a reader.

I think that because of the fact that I read so much as a child, I became more imaginative and thoughtful. I learned about other people and how they lived and how things impacted them. Not only did I learn about people and their lives, I learned empathy for other people. Because of this, I now know that everybody is different and that it's okay to be yourself. Personally, I believe that because I learned these things, I was taught to think outside of the box.

When you compare positive and negatives through many peoples reading experiences, you find that when you are forced to read something, you tend not to enjoy it quite as much. I make this assumption because when I was younger, I read almost everything. As I grew as a reader, throughout my upper levels in elementary, I tended not to like as much of what I was reading. Since I never could find books that I truly loved, I stopped reading and looking for books. Personally, I believe that people fall out of reading as they are forced to read more and more as they grow up.

I think that many peoples experiences of falling out of reading suggests that it may be impossible to create the "perfect" reading program. As a more advanced learner at my elementary school and middle school, I always hated a lot of the things that they made me read. They were never anything that I would choose for myself. This is another reason why you cannot make the "perfect" reading program. Everyone has different interests and tastes. No one is the same.

After doing this research about myself as a reader, I conclude that I loved reading as a young child but as I became older, I fell out of reading. I started disliking books and I had a very hard time finding books that I truly enjoyed. I realized that I need to start looking for books again and that I need to change my reading habits and look at reading from a different perspective. Overall, I think that learning about myself as a reader is going to benefit me in the future in finding books that I like and things that I should stay away from.

What is the Truth?

The most common perception of truth is something that is real, known, or something that can be backed up with evidence. Of course we all know that this definition is often what we think of when we hear the word truth, but what if there is more to it than just that?

I believe that truth can be relative to yourself. One way to look at this concept is by favorite colors. For example, "green is John's favorite color" which is true to John personally but it may not be for everyone else around him. Religion is also personal because there are so many forms of it. Every person has a right to take part in any religion and they accept certain beliefs as true. Therefore, everyone has a different perspective and each way is true to them.

One very distinct idea of truth is that 1+1=3. Ken Burns suggests this and my interpretation is that you can have two things that when brought together equal more than the amount of both individually. Tim O'Brien contradicts the truth by writing about his life in the Vietnam war where he states that in a true war story "Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true". I believe that this means that although not everything may not be true to somebody else, it is true to you and that is what really counts.

I consider truth to be form of belief. It represents what you think is true and how you feel when you believe in it. I feel as though the definition of truth will change many times in my lifetime because new perspectives are being argued by other people. Truth is different to everyone and I believe that is the way that it should stay.

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