When I Grow Up, I Want to Be...

(Warning: This blog post contains occasional rambling and a few off topic paragraphs)

I am still reading Scarlet Fever by Maureen Johnson. The book is about a girl named Scarlet whose family owns a small, and failing, hotel in New York City. The main character’s older sister, Lola, is out of high school but “taking a break” before college to help out at the hotel. This is what she is saying anyway. In reality, their family doesn’t have the money to send Lola to college right now, and Lola didn’t even apply. On top of this, Lola has absolutely no idea what she wants to do with her life. She doesn’t see her self as good at anything and there is nothing she is passionate about. Mean while Scarlet’s older brother, Spencer, knows exactly what he is doing. Spencer wants to be an actor and *****SPOILER ALERT******thanks to his new recurring role in the TV show “Crime and Punishment” he is actually making money doing this. Scarlet is in high school and the family’s youngest child, Marlene, is only ten. This leaves Lola feeling lost and alone.

            The situation Lola is in made me think a lot about what I want to do with my life.  In all honesty, I have almost no idea, but I don’t see why I should need to know right now. I’m thirteen and my interests are still changing and evolving. Lola shouldn’t have to make a decision like that as an eighteen year old either. If I were to walk up to a person and ask them if I need to know what I want to be when I grow up right now, they would probably say no. At the same time however, we are expected to make these choices. Just this year we had to decide if we wanted to go to a performing arts school or one of the science schools or the school for fashion design ect. We had to choose whether to go to the performing arts middle school or the math and science one.

Once we were in this school, we had to pick a talent and stick with only that one for three years. I love being in photography. At the same time, I do participate in other things outside of school, because while I love photography, I have other interests. I had to go and search out ways to do these things, but that is not something everyone is able to do. It would have been nice to be able to participate in things like drama in school. I admit that being in photography for three years really helped me develop my skills in a way otherwise impossible. But if we had had the opportunity to try other talents in school, then I could pursue the ones I liked further, and reach the same level I am at in photography, while also finding out what I like and don’t like.

As I keep thinking about this, I am starting to wonder what the purpose of making kids make all of these choices is. I don’t really understand. If we make decisions too early, then they are more likely to be decisions we regret. I don’t see any use in that. I started to think about dancers, who often train from when they are as little as three. They do it because if you start young, then you have an advantage over people who started when they were older. The same principle applies to this. In theory, if you start focusing on something earlier, then you have an advantage over people who started later. Then soon, everyone is starting earlier and earlier and earlier, always trying to get an edge. At what point do we stop and say, “How the heck do we know if a four year old is ‘Gifted and Talented’?” Because in all honesty, the average fifth grader doesn’t know what they want to be when they grow up, and they shouldn’t have to.

Scarlett Fever: Justice

            I am currently reading Scarlett Fever by Maureen Johnson. The book is about a girl named Scarlett whose family owns a struggling hotel in New York. Scarlett’s family is on a very tight budget right now because the hotel is having serious financial problems. Many of Scarlett’s friends are very well off, as is the former boyfriend of her older sister Lola, Chip. Spencer, Scarlett’s older brother, hates Chip. Scarlett mildly dislikes his lack of personality and amazement at the life of an average person (Chip is very well off), but Spencer simply hates him because he was born into money. Chip doesn’t have to worry about not being able to afford college, or what he wants to do with his life, and Spencer despises him for it.

            This is something I have noticed in another book. In Looking for Alaska by John Green, one of the characters hates all of the characters that have money, just because his family doesn’t. On one hand, I understand why characters like Spencer were upset. They hated the fact that other kids with more money were living care free, while they have to struggle to pay for college. Characters like Spencer are taking out their frustration with their own life, on someone else just because they don’t have the same problems. My first reaction to this is not fair. They don’t control who their parents are. But then I started thinking, what is justice in this situation? Because while Spencer shouldn’t take his anger out on Chip, it is certainly not right that Spencer should have to work his butt off for a chance at a decent life, while Chip just has to get good grades, go to college and inherit his family’s money. I guess in an ideal world, everyone would have the same amount of money, and the same chance at a good life, but that isn’t how the world works right now.

            It isn’t fair for Spencer to hate Chip. It isn’t fair for Chip to have so many more opportunities then Spencer. Maybe they sort of cancel each other out. Spencer does have some sort of right to be upset. And it is hard to be upset with the universe for putting you where you are. But projecting your anger onto someone else is not all right either. So Spencer can hate the system, or the world or whatever he wants, but in the end, I don’t think it is right for Spencer to hate Chip.

Racist Against Wizards

In the book Magyk by Angie Sage, wizards, who were once prosperous, are treated as scum who are worthless and must be punished for who they are. They are kicked around and Magyk is treated as if it is a disease that must be exterminated. This reminds me of discrimination that is going on in the world today as well as discrimination that happened in the past.

            In the beginning of the book, most wizards lead fairly normal, productive lives. One of the gatekeepers even talks about how the ExtaOrdinary, wizard, the most powerful wizard, has class. Then the Custodians take over and everything changes. Suddenly, highly respected wizards are “wizard scum” and having the telltale, green wizard eyes automatically marks you for scrutiny. The Custodians even tried to beat this idea of hating wizards into their children creating mean and hateful rhymes about the ExtraOrdinary wizard. The rhyme mentioned in the book talks about the ExtraOrdinary wizard being crazy. One of the characters, Boy 412, realizes something important when he finally meets actual wizards. The wizards are not the crazy ones, the people who write the rhyme are. This part in particular made me think of the holocaust. In the holocaust Jews were portrayed as greedy thieving evil people. Some people knew that the stereotype was untrue and risked their lives to save people. Those who knew that this stereotype wasn’t true knew the truth. They knew that the Jews were not the evil ones, the Nazis were.

            The holocaust was an extreme example of discrimination. I cannot even begin to understand the amount of hate and insanity it must take for one group to hate another so much that they no longer want to live on the same planet as them. There is nothing that one group can do to provoke enough hate to make that response excusable.

About a year ago, in Arizona there was an immigration law passed that said that Police Officers could stop and ask for the papers of anyone who looks like they might be here illegally. This law is basically legalizing discrimination because there is no way to look at someone and determine whether they are here illegally. There are illegal immigrants in this country from all over. However, only people that look Hispanic are going to be stopped. There are ways to stop illegal immigration without harassing people because of their skin color.

Of course, wizards aren’t real, but the problems in this book are serious. Unfortunately, there will always be people out there who will insist on discriminating against someone so they can feel better about themselves or blame someone else for their problems. What we can do, however, is keep these people from controlling the media, or passing laws like the one in Arizona. If we can do that, then we are on the right track.

Popularity

I am currently right in the middle of a book called Looking for Alaska by John Green. The book is about a boy who decides to leave his boring school in Florida behind and go to a boarding school. Lots of interesting things happen to him, and many of them are as a result of the rivalry between the “in” crowd and the “out” crowd. The in crowd is the segment of the school that is rich kids. The kids in the out crowd all hang out with each other (this boarding school is small) and, for the most part, avoid the in crowd kids. Still, they consider themselves less popular because… well there isn’t really a reason. This got me thinking. The kids in the “out crowd don’t want to hang out with the in crowd and vice versa. Why should one group be considered more popular? What is this popularity based on? The in crowd kids don’t have more friends or better grades, or nicer faces. I guess it could be because they have more money.

This got me thinking about our school. We have popular people. I started thinking about why they are popular. I couldn’t find a reason that made sense. Some people are popular because they know people that are popular. But then why was that first person popular? I am entirely confused by this.

When I was in 6^th grade, I first started to discover that there were popular people in our school. I think my friends pointed the people who were popular out to me. Then I knew they were popular, and I started to realize that everyone else did to. That was my first real life encounter with the idea of popular people. What I think is weird is that I never stopped to wonder why these people were popular.

            After a lot of thinking on the issue I believe I have a theory. We expect there to be popular people, so we start to look for who is going to be popular. Then people start to subconsciously decide who they think is popular, then they tell other people, who tell other people ect. All of the sudden, we have a group of popular people. Unfortunately this is just a theory, and while it makes sense in our school, it doesn’t really make sense in Looking for Alaska. I usually like to end my blog posts with some sort of answer to whatever question I posed in the beginning of the post, but this time I really don’t have an answer. If you want to tell me your thoughts in a comment that is great because right now, my only answer for why people are popular is, they just are.

Response to a Response

I just read a post by Eamon Callahan called Story Endings (click title for Eamon’s post). The post isn’t really about one book, It is about Eamon often rereads books that have sad endings. He then gives a few examples of these books and the tragic endings they have. He writes about how he might be always rereading them because he keeps hoping the ending will change even though he knows it wont. He writes that that is the difference between books and reality, we can change reality, but we can’t change the book.

The first reason I chose this was that I relate to it. I was recently rereading one of my favorite books, Nobody’s Princess (features in this blog). Unfortunately, I hate the ending. I never want the bad things to happen even though I know they will. This post has made me think more about why I keep rereading even though it annoys me. The thoughts in Eamon’s post also make me think about how in that particular book it is not that the ending sucks but that I would not make the same choice the main character did at the end of the book. I had no power over the ending and that bothered me. I kept hoping that if I read it one more time I would influence the main character’s choices.

            Another thing Eamon writes about briefly in his post is how part of the reason people love TV shows and books is because you never know what will happen and it leaves you on the edge of your seat. I think that Eamon could have expanded on this because it is a very interesting idea. However, he did not, so I will do it for him. I do agree with the initial idea Eamon has here, but there is more to it. I do not think it is just the fact that it leaves people on the edge of their seats that makes people like movies and books. There is, of course, the fact that they transport you to another world. I also think it is partly that they relieve you of responsibility for anything that happens in the book. You did not make the choice, the writer did, so you are not responsible for anything bad that happens. It allows for gilt free experiences. If the book of TV show is written well, we will be sad if something bad happens, but not guilty.

On the other side of why we like things, Eamon wrote about how people like video games because they give you complete control while still feeling safe. I again agree and will again expand on this interesting idea. This also relates to gilt. In video game you can go around shooting people and blowing things up without a pang of gilt because you know it is fake and no one has given the characters a personality, which would make them seem more real. Video games also allow us to do things otherwise impossible and try out things we know would be terrible ideas in real life.

Over all this was a great post. I think that a lot of the ideas he brought up were really interesting. After reading this post, I looked though some of Eamon’s older posts. This one was the best. It was also the longest. I think this is because in many of his other posts, Eamon touches on ideas then drops them. He even does some of that in this post. If Eamon were to elaborate a little more, all of his posts would be incredible.

Google in your Brain

I am currently reading Feed by M.T. Anderson. The book is about a futuristic world where people have tiny computers called Feeds in their brains. In this world the corporations control everything, including the schools. Students no longer learn about English or History. Instead they have classes about how to use your Feed and cool ways to decorate your room. The main character, a teen named Titus, thinks this is great and the old subjects are unnecessary because everyone is super smart thanks to the Feed. Anything someone wants to know can be looked up in his or her head. There is no need for personal thought or opinion. The Feed does it for you.

My first reaction to this was that the people in this book aren’t smart because these people don’t know things. The Feed knows things, and people who want to sell stuff control the feed. But then I started thinking, well even if someone did know all of the information the Feed could provide, would that really make them intelligent? I started thinking about this in terms of the search engines that we have today, such as Google. If someone searches something on Google, they will get a lot of information about it. They will get different opinions and thoughts and ideas about the topic with special interest groups lobbying for certain opinions. If someone were to have Google in their head with all the information on medieval times available to them on command, someone might think they were smart, until they asked the person what their opinion was on the condition that serfs lived in. They could look it up, but reciting the opinion of another person doesn’t make you personally more intelligent.

There is a certain aspect of being a smart person that is knowing facts, but if you can’t do anything with those facts then what is the point of knowing them. When we wrote our picture book forwards we had to do research, but we also included our own opinions about the subject, which is what got whatever our point was across. If we had simply written a list of random facts on the topic no one would have know what we were talking about.

Being able to memorize a bunch of facts doesn’t really make you smart.  The ability to interpret, decipher and form opinions about information makes you smart. If someone has information without understanding it or thinking about what it means, then they don’t really know about it. They know a few pieces of it but they don’t fully understand it. This is not intelligence. If a world anything like the one in Feed is the one we are headed to, then that is not a future I want to live in

We Perceive What We Want To Be Reality

            I am currently reading The Lighting Thief by Rick Riordan. The book is about a boy named Percy Jackson and his two friends, Anabeth and Grover. In the book, the Greek Myths are real. Monsters, Gods and Titans really exist to this day. Percy and his friends are on a quest to retrieve Zeus’s master bolt. During their quest they stop and a casino called the Lotus Casino. They are given free rooms, free unlimited game cards and find clothing in their rooms that are just their sizes. It occurs to Percy that something weird may be going on, but he continues to dismiss it until he comes to the realization that time moves more quickly in the casino. When he and his friends exit the casino after being inside for a few hours, they realize five days had past. Percy had noticed odd things from the very beginning but he didn’t act on them because what was happening to him appeared to be good to be true. He wanted it to be true so badly that he was willing to ignore the inconsistencies.  This is something I have noticed that humans do a lot. When we want something to be true badly enough, we cant trick ourselves into believing it is true. We perceive what we want to be reality.

            During the Holocaust people wanted to believe that the concentration camps that Jews were being sent to were safe. Germans watched as their neighbors and friends were carted away and many did nothing to stop it. Even some of the Jews who were taken told themselves that the concentrations camps were okay places. The Red Cross even inspected one of the concentration camps and said that they were safe and okay. This is a terrifying example of how people can ignore the parts of their reality that don’t fit the picture they wanted to believe. The Red Cross is supposed to provide relief to people in need. The fact that they visited a concentration camp and declared it safe shows how powerful this can be.

            People often walk through life with blinders on. We hear information and then pick and choose which parts to listen to. This is an important part of what is wrong with our political climate as well. People edit clips to support their statement and only pay attention to the things that go with what they believe. This makes for a nation of ill-informed people who make bad decisions. People need to stop picking and choosing what they hear. Just because you want to believe something is true doesn’t make it okay to ignore the facts. If you want to make informed decisions in you life, you have to look at all aspects of it. Not just what you want to see.