Legally Blonde

In Greek mythology, the goddess Helen was the most beautiful and most desirable woman. All the God’s wanted her to be theirs. She was the main reason for the Trojan war. Helen is a lot like Warner Huntington from the movie “Legally Blonde”. He thinks he is to good for his girlfriend Elle Woods, he breaks up with her and goes off to Harvard law school. He thinks she is dumb and doesn’t deserve to be with him. Like him Helen knew all the guy wanted her and her and a few other Greek Goddesses had a God choose who was the most beautiful.

In the Trojan war Helen was being fought over by Menelaus her husband and king of Sparta and the Trojan prince, Paris. They actually had a war over her, where as in the movie they just secretly fought over him knowing they both wanted him for themselves. Also in the movie Warner wanted to be with someone more serious and that had something going for them. But when Elle made it into Harvard Law school just like him he realized that he still wanted her because she was confident. But by then she realized she was better off without him. Yet in the Trojan war the two God’s kept fighting over Helen. 

Imperfections Are Perfection

You fall asleep at night unsatisfied with the way you look, constantly waking up through the night thinking about the next meal you have to push through until you can get away to throw it up. You want to sleep but you know that you will lose more calories by being awake and moving. You lay there thinking of the meals you have hid but not yet disposed of. Going through the day with your tummy rumbling and all you can think about is food, but you never give in. You will do anything until you see yourself the way you want to. you exercise until you are dizzy because you are so exhausted, but you know you can’t stop.

The people with eating disorders starve themselves in order to make themselves feel skinnier. This is a average day for a person that has a eating disorder, to them no matter how skinny they are they still want to be skinnier and skinnier until there is no more weight to lose. After forcing your body to lose that much weight you become much weaker, it takes a lot of energy to just get into the shower and stand there, you just feel weak. Whenever you see yourself you stare in disgust, and disappointment that you aren’t skinny enough. Just wanting to be the “skinny girl” a lot of the times means starving yourself. So many people put themselves through this torture every day. 

According to studies on a website found at the bottom of this essay, half of a million teens struggle with eating disorders. A eating disorder is not just a disorder, it is a illness. It is very serious and can be life threatening. It can mess up a lot of things inside and outside of your body. People might think they are just losing weight, but they are losing a lot more. Disorders like anorexia can lead to ministerial stop, muscle and bone loss, and lose of hair. Not everything that happens to your body is on the outside. It mainly causes stress on the heart, higher risk of heart attacks and sometimes even death.

Most people don’t understand how serious these disorders can get. It is stuck in peoples head that you need to be skinny to be happy. What many people with eating disorders don’t get that you don’t need to be skinny to be pretty to others. People with eating disorders don’t listen to the positive things they hear, only the negative comments. Most of the negativity comes from themselves, when they look in the mirror they don’t see what is really there. They see someone that can be skinnier, or lose some weight in certain areas. These people never stop finding more things that they want to change about themselves when it is already perfect.

You don’t need to change anything about yourself for anyone. You’re your own person, no one is perfect In any way. Everyone has flaws and things they would like to change about yourself . Some just go to more drastic measures to do so. The best thing you can do for yourself is to be happy with yourself and your appearance. As Jonathan Huie put it “Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections”. 

 http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_disorder

The Battles

There was a war between the Trojans and the Greek army, the war started because the Trojans leader Odysseus stole a pretty girl from the Greek’s so that started a war between them. After hundreds of men died the Greeks surrendered and they left a big wooden horse fir the Trojans as a present. It was sneaky because the Greeks didn’t actually leave. They were on a island spying on the Trojans.

Not this exact same thing could happen now and days, a lot of people fight over a boy or girl but they can’t start a war over something like this. It can happen almost everywhere you go. In school I’m sure it happens a lot. In a lot of work places it might happen but not as often because most people date people out of their work place. In books this happens a lot like in The Notebook, and Safe Haven, and Dear John all three by Nicholas Sparks. This happens a lot in reality TV shows and in movies. But the difference between when this happens in movies and in real life is that in the movies and books they almost always end up with the right person, but in real life they might not always choose the right people so be with. 

Friends For Life

Bruno was a young boy with a great life, never had a thing to worry about. In the book “The Boy In The Striped Pajamas” by John Boyne, Bruno always had a perfect world in mind, but one day Bruno got the

news that him and his mother, father, and older sister had to move away from their nice home. They had to move to a smaller home where he would have no one to play with and nothing to do. Bruno always kept out of trouble, but he always enjoyed exploring. He wanted to explore his new home. Not knowing what he would find, he made a great discovery.

In the beginning Bruno was very upset that he had to leave his best friends behind. Everything he had ever known, just left there to be forgotten about. That’s how Bruno saw it anyway. He had no clue what the new place would be like. He also had no clue why they had to leave in the first place, but throughout the book he gets more used to the new house, and now he has his new friend, Shmule.

As one day he was exploring through the woods behind his new house, he saw a little boy named Shmule sitting on the other side of a fence. It turned out to be a boy just like him, but lived a very different life. While Bruno had a great life, the other little boy was stuck in a concentration camp for Jewish people. Bruno didn’t understand what they meant, he just knew he found a friend.

Bruno would sit and look out his window and see a field with people working in their pajamas that all matched, they were striped. He knew that his new friend also wore those clothes, but he didn’t know why, and didn’t want to ask his new friend. He didn’t understand why everyone was over there, or  why they all had matching outfits. When Bruno asked his father, who was a German soldier about the people in their pajamas, his father just explained that they weren’t people at all, they were Jew’s. Bruno didn’t understand what his father meant by “not people” because he could very clearly see that they were in fact people.   

In the end of the book Bruno and Shmule were the best of friends, but Bruno realized it was a different friendship than he had ever had before. It was the best one he had ever had. The three boys who were once his best friends, he now doesn’t even remember their names. When he was with Shmule, he didn’t get to play games or anything. They both just sat there on either side of the fence and talked. That made the friendship stronger because they got to know each other.

Bruno learned a lot of different things throughout the book. There’s friendship, loyalty, determination, and discrimination towards people that are different. When everyone else was mean to the Jewish people, Bruno was nice to all of them because he didn’t see anything they did wrong. He thought of them as people just like everyone else. He didn’t see them any different from himself, they are just regular people with their own beliefs. Bruno saw this and didn’t judge the Jewish people at all. Instead he made one his best friend. Bruno was a very loyal friend and tried to help Shmule. Their friendship never ended, but both of their lives did. 

Ribbons

The grandmothers culture in China is very different from ours in America. They had different beliefs, they believed that by making their feet smaller by binding them would make the woman more beautiful and desirable. They would have to put up with this pain for their whole life just so other people would find them beautiful. In our culture we have other ways people change their appearance, but not something that big. We have things that can change your face and everything about your body by getting surgeries. Some girls don't feel that they are skinny enough, so in their mind in order to be pretty they had to be as skinny as possible. Even when they are almost just skin and bones they still starve themselves so they will feel better about themselves.

No matter what it is a bad thing because we shouldn’t have to change things about ourselves to make other people or ourselves think we are better than we are. We should be comfortable in our own body, not dislike it so much you feel the need to fix or change it. We all have insecurities but we need to accept ourselves for who we are. Everyone is beautiful, not everyone can see it in themselves but it’s always there. The significance of the title “Ribbons” reflects over the whole story on how for one person it relates to something they love in their life, but for someone else it relates to a tragedy in their life that they can’t let go of because it will stay with them forever. 

Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover

In this story the mother of Johnny, was making assumptions about her sons friend Boyd that he brought over for lunch. Mrs.Wilson was making these assumptions based on the color of his skin. Because Boyd was black she thought that he was very poor and needed as much of anything that she could offer him. When she would offer him things he was confused but didn't accept them because he didn't need them. She thought he had a life that was missing things, but he knew what he had. It wasn't any different than her life.

I think Shirley Jackson was trying to show how people act when people different from yourself don’t meet your expectation. In Colorado springs there are different parts and it is kind of separated. There are parts with neighborhoods and towns that aren't very nice and there are a lot of people of different races that live there, then there are other places where there are neighborhoods with huge houses that nowhere near there, there is old looking houses that aren't as nice. This kind of relates to this because people would assume rich people would live in the really nice place and people with not that much money would live anywhere else.  This story shows you that no matter what color someone’s skin is or where they live you can’t make assumptions about their life and how they live just by what they look like or where they are from.

Afterglow

                                                                     Afterglow

I’d like the memory of me
to be a happy one,
I’d like to leave an afterglow
of smiles when life is done.
I’d like to leave an echo
whispering softly down the ways,
of happy times and laughing times
and bright and sunny days.
I’d like the tears of those who grieve,
to dry before the sun of happy memories
that I leave behind when day is done.

Authors Note: I am doing a text analysis on the poem “Afterglow” by “Helen Lowrie Marshall”. I will be comparing it to the movie “My Sisters Keeper”.

In the first two lines of this poem already sets the scene of wanting people who care about you to carry all the good memories that they had with you, and not think about the bad ones. Whenever someone leaves in any sort of way you try to remember them by good things. By these lines you don’t know whether the good memories with them will continue or whether they are stopping for good, either way they just want the reader to remember the good times they spent with one another to make them happy.

Later on in the poem it is saying that they want to leave behind good thoughts and leave peacefully when their life is done. No matter what happened they want people to think of them and be happy that they had this person in their lives, even if it was only meant. They don’t want people to be sad that they are gone, they want them to be happy that they were once there. They don’t want to be thought of as gone they want the memories of them keep them alive.

Like in the Movie “My Sisters Keeper” Anna, the younger sister of Kate who has cancer. And through her cancer, Anna was always there through everything and they would have fun all the time even though she was sick. Anna was Kate’s donor, so if Kate needed something they would take it from Anna’s body and put it in Kate’s. This poem relates to this movie because in the end Kate is ready to die and she is okay with it. Her mother wants to keep fighting the cancer though. Kate has to convince her mother to let her go. So like how the poem says they don’t want the people they love to be sad about them leaving, Kate wants her mom to set her free.

This poem tells you to be happy even when they are gone, but obviously no one is going to be happy, they will always be sad. No one wants to see someone they love to leave forever, but sometimes it’s better to let go of them and hold on to the memories with them. They always want them to be there with them through everything. It might hurt at the thought of them being gone, but no matter what their memories will live on forever.