Perks of Being a Wallflower

I just started this book called Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky. Tis book is about a boy named Charlie who is just moving up into high school. He is used to blending into the crowd. Charlie is writing about high new high school experiences through letters to an unknown person, and is being brutally honest about everything.  Charlie also explains his brother and sister's lives as well. How his sister is dating a boy that Charlie saw hit her. How his brother is now a star football player and got on a full scholoar ship to collage. Charlie is social awkward and told everybody what he thought about everything that they were, being totally honest. During the first few weeks of high school he meets two friends, Sam and Patrick. These class skipping smokers were the closest thing that Charlie had to friends. They were also used to blending in, in school just as Charlie was. He starts to meet new people that you wouldn't notice if you just took a glance at people. He starts to realize that their are people that are in his school that could help him get through his high school days. 

I think that Charlie is a very interesting character. He is very honest about his opinion on everybody. I think that Charlie has a hard time connecting with people, and people have a hard time connecting with him. He tries so hard to blend in to his surrounding, but nobody in his family is like him, so it is extremely difficult. When he meets these seniors, he starts to realize that it's okay to stand out, because we everybody has their differences or their flaws. I think that this is a very important thing for Charlie to learn. I think that he needs to know how to deal with responding to other people an dhow to react to other people. I think that with him befriending these two other people that they will help him let himself open up to himself and open up to other people as well. I think this will help Charlie become more at peace with himself and the people around him. 

Martin Espada Essay

The three poems that we read and analyzed were New Bathroom Policy at New English High School, Revolutionary Spanish Lesson, and Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877. I think that the most important theme of the story was abuse of power. In each of these poems, there is a vibe set that somebody with power is taking control and using it unfairly.  I think that a very important lesson that our world needs to learn is to not use this power that is given to us like a privilege. You can lose it if you don’t use it wisely. I don’t think that people should use power to support their own needs.  I think that Martin Espada’s poems all point towards the facts that our society is filled with people who feel like they can dominate other using their strict power. I think that Martin Espada used his amazing talent and crafted poems that exemplified the meaning of what abuse of power is really doing to people and how it should be frowned upon.

            The first book that we read as a class was The New Bathroom Policy at New English High School. This poem illustrates two boys in a bathroom talking in fluent Spanish. The principal is in the stall and hears his name in context and is cryptic about the situation. He automatically bans a new policy that Spanish cannot be spoken in the bathroom. At the end of the poem it says that the principal is now relieved that nobody is gossiping about him. This poem I think shows that the principal was using an excessive amount of his power to makes frivolous rules. I think that by making this rule it shows that he doesn’t care about the two boys culture, ethnic race or language. It was disrespectful of him to cut off their 1^st language so now they feel like they cannot feel at hoe at school. I think that he could’ve used his power in a more positive way. He could’ve gone out of his way to figure out what they were saying instead of automatically assuming that it was something bad, and making a rule banning it.

            The second poem that we looked at was called Revolutionary Spanish Lesson. This is was more of an imaginative poem. In this Martin Espada was explaining when people mispronounce his name incorrectly, he felt very angry. He wanted to make other people feel like him. He felt like he wanted to shoot people and make Republicans chant in Spanish and make them feel his pain. I think that after an amount of times that tour name has been mispronounced you take it as an insult. The people who are mispronouncing their name are choosing the way that they are going to say it, and that is an abuse of power. They are taking the persons name and making it their own. It is disrespectful to the person because your name is part of who you are and when they are saying it incorrectly, it’s like they are making a choice for you about how it spelled and it makes you feel that you aren’t in control of your own name. This is a form of abuse of power because there are controlling part of who you are.

           

The last amazingly written poem that I experienced was Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877. This poem was a little bit more abstruse to read. It was based off a picture taken after a lynching in 1877 of two Latino men. It was about a crowd of people crowding around the two men hanging with broken necks, dead. This picture was trying to commemorate the day. Espada was explaining that people looked like they were crowding into the picture like they wanted to be a part of this tragic event. This poem illustrates abuse of power vividly. The people who lynched the two men, hanged them to show that they could. They were trying to make a point by killing innocent people, and showing the world that theyw ere in power of them and they had the power to kill them. I think that this amount of power that they use is horrible. I think that using their power to actually show there in charge of people is unimaginative. I think that this is a very disappointing memory to share in a poem because it reminds us that abuse of power comes in many forms.

Overall this very important theme is stressed throughout all of the poems. I think that this is a very important subject to talk about because it shows that this theme is very strong and can affect many different people in many different ways. I think that we have to be careful what we do with power and how we use it. We might be thinking that it would help people, but we could be doing it because of selfish reasons or even be doing cruel things.  Even if these poems were written a little while ago doesn’t mean that this problem isn’t still occurring. The government can still take advantage of the people and principals can still make careless errors in regulating policies at schools. I think that we all need to be aware of how and when we use power, and only then will people feel safe in their environments and happy with their rulers. 

The Uglies

SPOILER 

In this part of the book, Tally does end up going to the hidden camp. She does not go on her own will though. She really wants to go and meet her best friend on the other side of Pretty-Ville who was already a pretty. She wants to feel herself be beautiful. Shay had given her a series of very oblique directions to lead her to the hidden town, so the special circumstances wouldn't be able to find them. The special circumstances are people who keep their society in order, and also make sure that more little societies don't spring up as well. Tally is sent to go to the town and send a signal to the Special Circumstance that that is where the town is. When Tally gets there, she starts to realize that maybe everything isn't about being pretty. That there are more important things in the world than that like love, personality and characteristics. She doesn't want to expose this beautiful world that they have created.

I think that this a huge change in character. To have somebody who believed that looks were so much, and then have them realize that looks aren't everything. I think that physical looks in our world is also a big problem. People acre so much about how much they look, that they forget that what's on the inside is what's most important. People in our generation are becoming more and more oblivious and stupid because they concentrate on how they look for their whole lives. This problem of physical appearance also connects to three huge problem, that are bullying, body image, and peer pressure. People get bullied for what they look like. People feel self conscience because they are different from what everybody else is doing. Lastly people feel like they should change and look like everybody else, and change how they look. In the end they are just changing what makes them who they are just for everybody's approval.

The Uglies

I just started a book called The Uglies by, Scott Westerfield. This book is very carefully written. YOu can tell that the author spent a long time finding out what exactly would happen when. This book is about a girl named Tally Youngblood. In this extraterrestrial world, people strive to be "pretty" When you are born you are a youngling and then at a certain age you turn into an ugly. They call us now "ugly", because we are normal. When you are an ugly you can still think. At the age of 16 you go through a surgery that turns you pretty, and changes any of your imperfections so that you are perfect, but are stupid. In this book, tally is the last of her friends to be an ugly. She's all alone until she turns 16. That is until she meets Shay. Shay likes to go outside the boundaries of any trick that Tally has ever done. Shay is trying to do anything she can to persuade Tally to come and live with her in the wild in a mysterious village where everybody is ugly. Tally has the option of going against the current of society or going against it and put some adventure in her life, instead of turning pretty and being clueless forever.

19 Minutes

This is book is about the school shooting (book summary in the blog post before this one). As i said before. Bullying was a large contender to what made Peter do this school shooting. As I've read on, I have learned more about the characters who were killed in the shooting, and what their pasts were like. They all had very cryptic pasts. Josie boyfriend, Matt, had physically abused her when she did or didn't do something that was up to his standards. Peter had known this, when Josie came to school with a  broken ankle, and told Peter (when they were trapped in an elevator alone), that Matt had broken it. All of the people who had been shot at and killed, had all been you might say, were some bad people. Peter had known this and killed them on purpose.

I think that even though these people that Peter thought should be killed, should've not been killed. I think that our world is used violence more and more to solve our problems, when really violence isn't the answer to anything. There are more ways to solve universal problems besides using violence. What is really the bigger problem though, is that Peter felt so isolated in his world that he had to use the violence to get noticed and make all of the bad things stop. The most saddening part of all of it though, is that Peter didn't feel like he could turn to anybody. He no friends that would go out with him in public because he was so unpopular. His mom didn't understand, and his father was work occupied. I think that everybody should have somebody to turn to, no matter how you are. I think that if Peter had somebody to talk to, or even had somebody who get what he was going through, he wouldn't have turned to violence and none of this would've happened.