A "Good" Job

What does it mean to have a "good" job in America today? Is it the amount of money you make? How happy it makes you? How prestigious the field is? Especially in the shaky economy of today, more and more parents are worrying about sending their kids to pricey colleges without the promise of decent work afterwords.
It is difficult to justify spending thousands of dollars a year to send your child to a place of higher learning, and the earlier justification had been so that they can get a "good" job. Yet, more and more students are moving back in with their parents or are unemployed and crippled by debt from student loans. This makes me wonder? Why is the American education system like this?
The idea is that anyone who wants to pay can go to school, which is great, in theory. But the cost of college is almost un-payable at this point for a lot of Americans. There was a swedish exchange student in one of my class(he later dropped out but that's beside the point) who was made if he was planning on going to college in the states, to which he replied, "Well, in Sweden, they lay for your college so...". Sweden isn't the only country who's government is funding higher education. In Germany, the only way to get into a Univeristy is to take and pass an extremely rigorous test. If you fail, fine, you can go to technical school or just straight up work. But, if you pass, the state will pay for all of your education. My question now is, if you don't pass the test, are you ashamed? Will the jobs you get with that education be "better" than those without it? And if you do lass, is it guaranteed that your sought-out college experience will mean higher income?
I don't know, I just thought that was kind of an interesting way to look at education and its purpose.

Is Higher Education Necessary?

       Living on the North Shore of Chicago, a wealthy area, it is expected that every student will go to college. I tried to talk to my mother on the subject of whether or not college is worth it in this economy but I hardly got a word in. She wouldn't even hear me talk about the possibility of not going. But is it just this area that puts so much pressure on students to go to college?
     The whole point of college is so that you can be educated in a field in which you will find a "good" job. But, numerically speaking, there are only so many doctors in the world. While it's true that a society cannot function without doctors and nurses and business people and government officials, we also could not have a society without the supposedly "low class" jobs like postal workers, garbage men, food service employees, and cleaning people. That's what makes me wonder: Is it just the North Shore that's so obsessed with college? Are other areas like this too? If not, is it a class thing? And if so, are finances the only thing stopping people from higher education?

It's Gonna Be May

     This school year is almost over and I have to say, there's a lot to cram into these next two weeks. Nearly every junior in my high school is going to be frantically studying for finals and and desperately trying to push their grades over the line.

     I feel like there's a lot of pressure in the North Shore to get a near-perfect ACT score, a glowing teacher recommendation, load up on APs, and apply to as many "good" colleges as humanly possible. But I was thinking last night and I guess one way to not get overwhelmed by everything is to just remember that high school and college aren't the be-all end -all in your life. everything always seems like it's such a big deal. I used to freak out whenever I lost a library book when honestly, I never think about that  book now.

    I don't know, I didn't really feel like writing an information heavy post after the junior theme, so that's just my spiel for this week.

      I hope your lives are going okay!

Junior Theme Part 6: The Final Countdown

    This is it. This is hopefully the last post I'll ever make on junior theme. I am now in the home stretch of the paper, and I am still tweaking my conclusion a little bit.
     I have read through that 8-page monstrosity several times at this point and I can't think of anyway to make it better than it is right now. I think that my paper is perfectly adequate and at this point, i can live with that.

     I am now in the process of coming up with titles for my aper. My original two option were "Of Money and Men" or "Catch 77", but I'm now thinking of other options. Should I make it "The Devil Wears Pay Gap"? Or what about "A Tale of Two Genders"? I can go on for hours.

     Anyway, I just wanted to say how happy I am that this thing is finally over. Unless I totally screw it up and have to revise. In that case…. f*************

Junior Theme Part 5: The Writemare

As you can probably tell from the super creative title, I have now begun the process of compiling all of this info into comprehensible paragraphs. This has proven to be difficult, to say the least.

    My first section, on discrimination, is probably my best so far. This is mainly excuse I was young and full of hope. That hope has dwindled the further I have gotten into this paper. Now, I'm at the stage where I've gone "Screw it, I'll just type up whatever comes to mind and edit it later."

       And that is why I now have 10 pages of a train wreck to edit this week. I have to search for all my sources(which I haven't properly cited yet), write a conclusion, and also make my paper not look like crap. It's a tall order, but hopefully desperation will be my motivation.

Junior Theme Part 4: The Gathering

        So, I finally did manage to secure an interview with a woman that my mom had worked with on a woman's leadership seminar and she responded to my questions with not the best answers, but I did get a link to one of her powerpoints which was pretty helpful.
        Now, I have to start actually writing the paper. I'd categorized my information by cause, but as I began to write the intro, I realized that the answers to my "why" question were going to be a lot more complicated than I'd thought.
        I have now redone my intro a total of three times, and after I met with a teacher I decided to also change up the order of my paragraphs. I was originally going to focus on historical context first and then go to how that history related to the issues today, but I have now decided to talk about issue today first and then focus on history.
          I have so many piles of notes and articles that sometimes I get overwhelmed in trying to make a coherent paragraph out of them. I worry that I may be so overwhelmed with this draft that I won't get to do any others. I do type very quickly, which seems like it would be great for a paper like this, but really the speed of my fingers means that I make a crap ton of typos. One of my teachers was walking by today whilst I was typing and asked "Is that parseltongue?"
         Tune in next week to hear more complaints about writing this paper!

Junior Theme-Part 3: In Limbo and My Nemesis

        We are now entering the midpoint of my junior theme process. Just as a reminder, I have spent the last week or so researching the causes of the gender pay gap. I am currently in limbo, stuck between finding information and making that information into a paper. Honestly, this is a very overwhelming part of the process.

        First off, I now have to organize my numerous pages of notes and absurd amount of articles into a coherent thesis. I spent over an hour today just dividing up my research into topics, and I am now worried that I may actually have too much information.
       Furthermore, everyone in my class is also required to secure at least one interview with an expert on their subject. The interview can be done in any form possible. I have emailed five people at this point, and only one person has responded. Her answer was no.

      I am also feeling a bit pressured because I recently found out that another student in the class is doing, word for word, the same topic I am. And me, being a standard, insecure, high school girl, I feel the pressing need to do better than her. I will try not to flip a switch if my paper sucks, but I make no promises.

       Anyway, tune in next week for the exciting (read: anxiety inducing) process of writing the paper.

Junior Theme- Part Two: The Highlighting

I never really understood the point of highlighting when you could just write stuff down until I started this junior theme assignment. I always thought that highlighters were obnoxiously bright and totally pointless when it came to note taking and annotating. I thought that, until I ended up printing out several 20 plus page articles that were packed with full paragraphs in single spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman.

I realized that, in the context of the monstrous paper I would eventually create, it would be in my best interest to highlight all the necessary information and just come back to it later.
So, my last week has been full of neon pink ink and fine print, and I've actually gotten pretty far in finishing  most of my articles. They've got some good stuff in them, but sometimes I have to remember what my topic actually is, especially so that I don't end up highlighting everything and giving my future self an aneurysm.

I think I've run through these articles pretty fast, at least until I print out more. But, this is far from over. My next task? Taking notes on an entire book, which is probably what my next post will be about. Get excited!

Junior Theme- Part 1: The Search

    I don't know if any other high schools do this, but NTHS has this thing called the "junior theme" which is, essentially, a big research paper that every single junior in the entire school has to write.

    Now, there are different ways to go about doing said paper. Some teachers assign specific topics to children, some just have set boundaries, and some just make it a free for all. My teachers, for whose class I am writing this blog, decide to come up with their own criteria as well. 

   They said that we had to pick a current issue, relate it to a historical event, and come up with a proposal in the form of a "why" question. We also have to read an entire book and interview an expert in the area of our reproach.

   It's a lot, and so this week, before our spring break, my entire class is in the library researching potential topics, which will be due Wednesday. 

   I was checking out some online databases that the librarians provided and I found a couple of cool topics. I looked at the page on minimum wage, but I wasn’t able to come up with a "why" question for that. I also checked out the page on marijuana, which was cool, but again, it was hard to come up with a "why” question since the facts were already so laid out for me. 

    I then clicked onto two pages about mental disorders/illness, which intrigued me, for personal reasons. I also found a page about the Obama Administration and I looked up the wage gap in terms of gender, which I thought could make an interesting paper.

    After I had found these topics, I had to come up with potential "why" questions.

       The wage gap was pretty easy. I have tentatively deiced on asking "why do women in the U.S. still make 18% less than men when we are supposed to be the epitome of independence and equality?” The Obama administration intrigued me because it mentioned how Obama had been accused of of being socialist after he instated Obama care and the stimulus package. So, after I mentioned it to one of the teachers, he gave me some suggestions, and I decided on maybe asking "Why is it such an insult to call Obama a socialist when, in fact, countries that follow socialist economic policies tend to have better welfare and education?” 

      The mental health question stumped me am little because I find the subject so fascinating, but it’s also so broad and complex. I am still debating, but I think, for now, that my question is, "why do some kinds of mental heath treatments get covered by insurance and not others, why do insurance companies have the standards they do?"

  Sorry for this monster of a post, there’s going to be a lot more about these, but hopefully none this long. Also I apologize for any typos I may have missed.

To Speak or Not To Speak

   I don't know how many of you have ever gone out of the U.S. and visited a country where English is not spoken natively, and of course vice versa, but I've noticed a sort of pattern that appears between English speakers and non-English speakers.

   Laissez-moi expliquer: it seems, at least to me, that whenever someone from another country vistas America, we elect them to speak English, and they expect to speak it as well. And yet, when we English speaking Americans visit another non-English speaking country, we speak English to the people there and expect them to understand at least a little bit.

    I have two examples to support these claims; the first is that over the summer, when I was working at the Botanic Gardens, we had a lot of tourists from all over the world. There were tourists from Southeast Asia and India and Japan and Eastern Europe and Western Europe and no matter where they were from, we always spoke English to them and they spoke not back. But, when my mom travel dot Italy on business last year, she came back and complained to me about how hard to was to get around because "nobody spoke any English."

   I wonder then if these sorts of assumptions are the reasons why America has the reputation that it does. I’m not saying everybody is like this, but the overwhelming majority of Americans seem to think that English is so important that it's nearly impossible for there ego be a place where no one speaks even a little of it. And again, what does that say about us as people?

Unknowing

      It's been all over the news these past couple days that Flight 370 from Malaysia Airlines went missing. And they mean missing. It's been days and there's been absolutely no sign of the plane or nay parts of it despite a huge rescue initiative.
      CNN posted an article titled "Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: What we know and don't know". The things that they did know were mostly basic: how many people were on the plane, who the crew was, and where the plane was headed. But, after it vanished in southeast Asia, people are growing suspicious. Family members are terrified, and there is nothing but speculation to give them.

Family members of passengers are hounded by the press

   I think what makes this event especially difficult for the passenger's families and frightening for others is because of the uncertainty. The unknown is scary sometimes, and fear can induce many different reactions in people. Take a very trivial example: I used to be terrified of bees. When I was little, I was in Arizona in 80 degree weather in a yellow sundress. But, when we came near some flowers, I panicked thinking the bees would see my dress and I put on a fleece and didn't take it off all day. Then, in 4th grade, a bee stung me. After that, I wasn't so afraid.
   That example is a mere scruple compared to what's happening with Flight 370, but I think that in any sense, fear of the unknown is one of the most difficult fears.

Steven Moffat Makes Me Mad

    The title of this post pretty sums it up but basically I'm going to go on a tiny little rant. Just a tiny one.
 Lots of people I know have issues with Steven Moffat's views and how they are shown in his writing.
  There are two complaints I hear about Moffat the most consistently: the first is that he writes terrible female characters, which even before the new season of Sherlock I could vouch for. The second was that he was a bit of a homophobe.
    Now this I wasn't so sure about. After all, he wrote Doctor Who and whilst there weren't anything but heterosexual relationships on that show it wasn't really a show based on relationships anyway. However, there is the whole partnership between John and Sherlock in the series Sherlock that had many fans wanting the two of them to get together in a more, how do I put this, intimate way.

Can You Feel the Gay Tonight?

  I completely understand if Moffat and his writers did not envision John Watson and Sherlock Holmes as a couple, that is their choice. However, in season 3, when the fan excitement began rising, Moffat went to extreme lengths to display both John and Sherlock's heterosexuality, even going to such lengths as to change their character's behaviors which I find appalling.
   There is a way to show that your two characters are not romantically interested in each other without randomly changing one of their behaviors and tossing both characters randomly and without much background into relationships with other people.
   I don't know precisely why it bugs me so much but I hate to see well-written characters ruined simply for the sake of one man's prejudices.

Why Books Are Better Than The Movie (Most of the time)

  I remember one plane ride last year. My mother sat next to me with her newly bought iPad primed and ready to watch a movie she bought on iTunes. We each took an earbud and pressed play. 30 minutes in, I gave up.
   That movie was "Anna Karenina" based off of the classic novel by Leo Tolstoy. It was supposed to be a pretty good book, but I had never read it. However, the movie was just a piece of crap. I couldn't figure why it was so bad, I just really despised it.

The Pile of Cowpies That I'm Referring To

   This year I saw that Anna Karenina was free on the iBook store on my iPad so I bought it and am currently now reading it in all of it's 900 page glory. It's actually pretty interesting. It's a bit like Downton Abbey, but set in imperialist Russia. And, the further I get into it, the more I realize why the movie sucked so badly.

Tolstoy's Baby

   It was because they writers who had turned the book into a screenplay had completely ignored the nuances of the story. They focused on the book's title characters too much. Sure her illicit affair is a single plot line but the movie focused too much on that one aspect.
   Anna Karenina is not just about Anna Karenina. It's about her brother and her brother's friend and his sister and his wife and Anna's lover. It's not just about the frick-frack. The book actually sets up the background for the characters, it shows who they are as people and how they react to situations. In fact, Anna doesn't even show up until you get about 10 chapters in.

   Lots of movies based off of books suffer from a lack of attention to detail. It's great if a book has an awesome or intriguing idea behind it but you can't just make a film based off of one thing. You have to use that idea as the spider at the center of a web, and from that web weave the characters and ups and downs and everything that makes any piece of art compelling and beautiful.
   

How to make a statement

  If you have been anywhere near a news source in the last week you've probably heard all about the stuff going down in the Ukraine. It started off with just a bunch of riots, then the police came in, and it seemed like a fire ridden protest until about 2 days ago when the square in Kiev turned into the center of a quasi-war. People were shocked and horrified by what was going on, President Obama said  that "The United States condemns in the strongest terms the violence that’s taking place". 



    I too am shocked by how everything escalated  but I also started thinking about revolutions and what makes them "work". It's hard to define "sucess" within the context of a revolution because somebody always gets the wrong end of the stick. Also, "sucess" depends on what you define as "sucessful". Some Americans might  say that our revolution was awesome because we got to govern ourselves on our terms, whilst others might say that we should have just let Britian rule us for a while because look at all the issues we've had and are still having. Regardless, I noticed that the Ukrainian protest and revolution are similar to our own and also those of others in the past.
   Revolutions seem to start with hatred of the current state of things, that is virtually indisputable, but how it all plays out is murky. For us in America at least, we followed what I am calling the "default revolution"
    By that I mean the formula of starting out with actions, simple acts of defiance. Once those don't seem to get much done, we move on to the next thing: violence. The thing about violence is that it definitely, always, makes a statement.
   The Ukrainian rebels seem to know that as well. Violence seems to be the last straw for most revolutions because it is illegal and it causes visible harm, two things that make a very big statement to everybody. 
    We began with dumping tea into the water, when that didn't work, we signed a document, and when that didn't work, we resorted to violence. You can't deny it, revolutions with body counts and smoke in the air certainly make a statement.

We Are Catch-22

"What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for." - Catch-22

   Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is possibly the awesomest book ever. It is a satire meant to explore the absurdity of authority that takes place in WWII, a time when different kinds of leaders were battling each other under their different kinds of authority. It is also hilarious.

  However, the more I think about Catch-22, and remember that it was written by an American author,  I also think more about how it seems to represent America and often times humanity as a whole.

  In the book, each chapter is devoted to a different character, all shown from the perspective of the main protagonist (and occasional antagonist), Yossarian. 

  To me at least, each character seems to represent a different aspect of American society in their actions, words, and personalities.

   Yossarian is the average guy, nothing too special, maybe a little weird, who is always confused by the decisions the government is making and doesn't understand why he can't just live his life.

   Milo Minderbinder is the ultimate capitalist businessman who will do anything for a profit and is good at getting others to hop on with him.

McWatt is the risk taker who lives in the moment and feels untouchable until he isn't.

Major Major Major Major is that next door neighbor who doesn't everything so normally that it's weird. 

Nately is the typical patriot, the idealistic dreamer who thinks he can better the world with a few words and a smile.

Chaplain Tappman is the epitome of the phrase "nice guys(or girls) finish last", he always tries to please people but keeps getting walked on.

Colonel Cathcart and his fellow officers reforest corruption and how absurd out leaders can sometimes be, they twist words and facts and use their positions to make situations better for themselves.

Aarfy is that obnoxious guy who wears tanks tops with the words "YOLO" written on them and thinks that Obamacare is a euphemism,

And lastly, Orr is that one person who seems so clumsy and misunderstood that you never understand how smart they were until they're gone.   

Really?

     I don't know if it's just where I live or what, but I though people were more open minded than this. I really did. I'm not expecting everyone to be super liberal by any means, but I'm shocked at the reactions to what was on TV last night.

    You may be confused; you may be wondering what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad that, according to an article on Buzzfeed, shocked the Twitterverse.
   This was an ad that featured the song "America The Beautiful" sung in many different languages, each verse a different tongue. It was a little dramatic for a soda commercial but I though it was a really beautiful idea.
   Buzzfeed's article, titled "Coca-Cola's Multilingual Super Bowl Ad Inspired A Racist Meltdown Online". Underneath there were m many different tweets describing people's reactions. I thought, "How bad can it be?". Yeah, here are some examples of what people said (and these are the ones without swearing involved)

That Carta Guy@1WiseAlienFollow

@CocaCola Whats with the Superbowl commercial? Do you all support Terrorists or what, bad choice in taste. I love America personally.

Angelina Sclone@AngelinaScloneFollow

@CocaCola You're done. Pepsi all the way. Go to the Middle East and sell your product.

YA BOY TUCKER@tuckerdavis72Follow

The commercial with America the Beautiful being sung in so many different languages??? #speakAmerican

So let me get this straight: America, the country that is supposed to mecca of democracy, equality, and capitalism, is against a stinking soda commercial because it featured people of different cultures and languages singing a stinking song? Really? Are we that closed minded that we're willing to send our troops to get all up in another nation's business but as soon as different ethnicities and languages sing one of our anthems we throw a hissy fit? Is that the kind of people we are as Americans? I hope not. I sure hope not. 

And I Think It's Gonna Be a Long, Long Time

(you are supposed to sing the title in the voice of a closeted Elton John)
      I was on Buzzfeed yesterday (because that's where i get my news do not judge me it could be Fox) and I saw an article titled "Illinois Lawmaker Introduces Bill To Repeal State Marriage Equality Law" and I was shocked. I has been so proud to live in a state where anybody could marry whomever. But, this isn't the only place where people's rights are coming into question. There is of course all the drama going on in Utah, the most conservative state. And it makes me mad, honestly, last night I was fuming about why people couldn't just get over the fact that a guy's gonna marry another guy or a woman's gonna marry another woman. What's the big deal? Is the world going to end? Will the sun explode? 

No, no, not Melissa Etheridge, save me!

      As I was laying in my bed, grumbling, I realized that maybe this shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, if I really thought about it, America does not have the best history of social justice.Granted, we are better than some places (ahem North Korea cough cough) but we still are a long way behind a lot of the western European countries like Finland and Sweden. Using my limited skills of addition and subtraction, I'm going to tell you why, and together, we all can do third grade math.

Look it's even culturally sensitive clip art

    Let's say that the U.S. became a country in 1776. Technically, we weren't called the U.S.A yet, but we had officially told Britain that we were going out to go live on our own and cook ramen every night, so I'm counting that as us becoming our own nation. Now, we had slavery up until 1865 which was oh, about 100 years after the U.S. was founded. Then, fast forward to the civil rights movement. If you wan to be picky, this hasn't ever really "ended", but officially we could say around 1970. That is about 200 YEARS after this country was founded that we finally decided "Oh, I guess skin color doesn't mean much except that it's a different skin color because that's all it is." And women's suffrage? Yeah, it also took us nearly 150 YEARS to get the vote and I could go on a feminist rant but I know someone who does that and it annoys the cannoli out of me
     So yeah, judging by all that, In guess it make sense that the LGBTQ rights movement is taking so long.
    

Million Dollar Bills

     Who's representing you? who's representing us? Surely it must be people who have our best interests in mind and know how to relate the middle and lower class. Right?

     Wrong. apparently, as of an analysis of a study conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics(CRP) more than half the people in congress are millionaires. In the House there were more millionaire Democrats and in the Senate, more Republicans. The CRP said that the median net worth for all the lawmakers in congress was $1,008,767-an increase for last year.

Courtesy of: NJNewsroom

     So now, honestly 'm not surprised the trouble we're in sometimes. I could go on a rant about House of Cards (which is fantastic and melodramatic and I do not care) but laws and bills are, in the end, put on this earth by American people- people with brains and hearts and lives. I have to wonder though: what would happen, if one person were to make a promise that they could keep, if one person could be realistic and honest, if one lobbyist could do something right, what would happen then?