Fun Fact of the Day

             Croissant. Baguette. Effiel Tower. Haugh haugh haugh! Congratulations you can read French!
 I'm kidding of course, that would all be horribly offensive to my French teacher, M. Greaux who inadvertently gave a lesson in culture whilst also teaching grammar. So, in French and English, there are adjectives and let's say, that an American person saw a really awesome movie (*cough cough* Les Mis *cough*) and that person might, when asked about the movie, use adjectives like: "Fantastic! Great! Super! So good! Awesome Possum! or I'm dying right now". A French person might see the exact same movie, feel the exact same way about it, but when asked they would say "C'est pas mal" which means "It's not bad." Sometimes people might think that Americans are too sunny or that the Europeans are too cloudy but honestly it's just a matter of how reserved our culture allows us to be when expressing feelings. Apparently, if a German saw that movie they might say "It's not to be despised" (according to M. Greaux). Anyway, I just though that was an interesting thing to think about for the day.

Grey of Thrones

            I don’t know if anyone has ever read or seen Game of Thrones, but I have. Just for the record, that means that the majority of this post will be around that topic so if you plan on getting into that fandom I suggest that you take a moment to think about whether or not you want to enter into my land of spoilers. I repeat: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

            Okay anyway, in class today we were talking about the biased language and connotations of words that were in an exert form a history textbook about American History, more specifically, Native American and settler issues. Our conclusion was that the author’s bias was clearly towards the Native Americans as the good guys and white people as the bad guys (Don’t get me wrong I know we were jerks back then) but it also made me think back to when we were studying the Cold War last year as well as Stalinist Russia and how everything in history seemed to be laid out so black and white: communist bad, capitalist good, or capitalist bad, communist good, Indian good, white person bad, and it all seemed so simple. But how, you might be asking, how does this relate to Game of Thrones?

            When I gobbled up the books and the television series like Nutella To-Go I knew that I loved the series but I couldn’t figure out why I loved it so much. I mean, it basically is about a war caused by two twins who couldn’t keep it in their pants and the author keeps killing off all the characters. But, when I really thought about it, the reason why I loved that series so much is because it is everything that we aren’t used to seeing. Instead of being a bad guy and a good guy, you don’t know who to root for. Do you believe in Tyrion, the awesome imp who ever lived who just happens to be on the side of the twins who do each other? Do you go with the Starks, who seem like your average good guys but who all are basically dead by the end of book 5? Or do you go with Danaerys and her dragons who will probably get to Westeros by the time they invent cell phones? I love those books and those episodes because they are what history is like. History is not just this guy did this, thus he is evil and the other dude is good. No, history and our perspective on it really depend on where we are and how our culture functions. 50 years ago, there probably wouldn’t even be a section about Native American culture in textbooks because how they felt wouldn’t have mattered. Anyway, I’m sorry if this was a bit long, but I really hope that when and if you read a history textbook or watch a movie, challenge yourself to think about how the other half lives.

American Dreamless?

So since I normally can't be bothered to actually find a newspaper or a TV show and surf through all the news, every day I try to go on yahoo which easily accessible through my crappy laptop and that is where I found an article which I will link below. Basically, it was talking about how the idea of what "the American dream" means has changed, that instead of wishing for a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and two straight children, people now simply long for basics like financial stability, being debt free, and having a well-stocked retirement fund. Then the article asked if we as a people were becoming more pessimistic about what we could achieve and if cynicism was on the rise.
    I am not a person who does well with change, I try and avoid it if I can, but, society is constantly changing in every country including America. Stuff happens, for us it was the whole economic downfall, before that, the sexual revolution. Women can vote! (I’m shocked too) and Colorado recently legalized marijuana. We may not be getting more "cynical" per say, but instead we are growing more "realistic" we are changing with our world. Is it a good change? Hard to say. Some people might say it's sad that we are wishing for what seems like so little. But honestly, that's what I think I've always wanted. And maybe, after all these years of war and job loss and protests, Americans feel like laying low for a while, watching some crappy TV, and not having to worry about whether they can pay for the iPhone 12345S.

The American Dream

American Studies: Photo Assignment 1

"I don't have to pick those up, they're not mine!"

This photo is one that I took a couples days ago after getting home from school, entering through the garage door, and laying my eyes upon a sight I was very accustomed to: A collection of shoes that belonged to me and my siblings, carelessly tossed off before we retired to our separate homework zones. But of course you might be wondering, how does a picture of lazy teenager's shoes reflect on America? that is a question that, I will be honest, I took some liberties with. because, here's the thing, really, all this is is a picture of some overpriced shoes that I took with my standard phone camera. This photograph, if you look at it, contains a variety of shoes, all facing in different directions, all different colors and styles, so different, yet smushed together. I think that America suffers a bit from this "water we live in syndrome" (If I may be so blatant in relating this to class). The groups like the Westboro baptist church, NRA, anti NRA people, vegans, non vegans, conservatives, and liberals, all of us sometimes seem to forget that the other half does live, and even though we are all genetically and emotionally human beings living in the same world, we don't always think about that. I was at work the other day, and the guy I work with, Manuel, was going to the sink to fill up the caramel heater, and he said "You know, we are really lucky to have running water" And I hadn't really thought about that before, but it is true that while me and my friends are trying to find the coldest fountain(in the music building apparently), there are other people sitting in the house or the senate, trying to decide whether or not we want to blow somebody else up. And, back in Syria, and Russia, and Iran, and Iraq, there are people too, people who just want to watch their favorite TV shows and get their morning coffee. And, at some point, all of the pairs of shoes in the world will have to face each other and the American flip flop will say to the Russian sneaker: how's it going down there?