I wonder what stone soup tastes like.

At first, I was excited about reading “Stone Soup” because I thought it was the children’s story about a traveler who makes stone soup then shares it with the villagers who shared their vegetables. I was a bit disappointed when that wasn’t the case. Instead, it was about families and how we perceive the “best” or “perfect” family.

Kingsolver talks about how people strive for the “Family of Dolls” with Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior, and even though people have their own definition of what family is, the Family of Dolls is still in the back of their minds. When I read this, I automatically thought of the American Dream and how people try to achieve that dream. In the American Dream, the happy family consists of a breadwinner dad, a stay-at-home mom, two kids, and a dog named Spot. Not everyone has, or is fortunate enough to have, this exact replica of the “perfect family”; stuff happens.

I think that the definition of a “broken home” or the “perfect family” varies among people. People strictly following the Family of Dolls may consider a family with divorced parents as broken. Others may think otherwise. To me, as long as the members in the family are overall happy and get along with each other, that is all that really matters, no matter what the family consists of.

I have friends with divorced parents who have both remarried. Even though their parents were divorced, they seemed very happy. Growing up, I’m not going to lie, I was a little jealous that they had two homes and that they had multiple sets of grandparents. I would not consider their families as “broken”.

Another example is my family. When my family moved to Alaska from the Philippines, my dad was not able to come with us. For most of my childhood, my mom, with the help of my grandparents and other family members, was the one who raised my brothers and me. Even though my dad wasn’t physically with us, we were able to speak to him through phone calls and received letters for every single holiday. My family and I are really close and, for the majority of the time, happy. From the outside looking in, my family might seem like a broken family, but I beg to differ.

In the end, Kingsolver did compare families to the actually stone soup story. She states, “Any family is a big empty pot…Each stew turns out different.” I agree with this. There are different types of stews out there in the world; some taste amazing, others not so much. How good the stew is depends on the person eating the soup, similar to how the definition of family varies from person to person. Just because my stew isn’t the same as someone else’s, it doesn’t mean that mine does not taste as good as theirs.

Research Plan

1. My group’s has decided to do our research topic on Alaska Native oral storytelling. Some questions:

-When do storytellings occur? Are they told often or only on special occasions?

-Is there music playing during the storytellings?

-Do the animals in the stories represent the same thing in all the tribes?

-Are the stories told in their Native languages or in English?

2. Living in Sitka, the Tlingit tribe was prominent everywhere. When I was little in school, I remember going to the Naa Kahidi House (the Tlingit ceremonial house) and watch dances and listen to stories told by an Elder. I also learned about the Raven being the creator but also a trickster. The stories were pretty interesting/entertaining (from what I remember). From that, I want to learn more about storytelling in general throughout the different tribes and why storytelling is important to tribes.

I think the audience for the wiki would be anyone who wants to learn or is interested in Native oral storytelling.

3. During the beginning stages, we all decided to find as much information as we can about storytelling and then share it with one another. In our individual portions, I have been delegated to write the music sections of the wiki.

4. I think that by finding sources about the general information of storytelling, I could find more sources/links to the subject I am looking for.

5. Outline/Timeline

By April 2 – Have general information about oral storytelling

By April 9 – Have more information about specific subject

By April 14 – Bibliography due

By April 14 – Rough draft due

By April 26 – Final draft due

In high school, I was discouraged to cite Wikipedia as a source because it was unreliable. Though we weren’t allowed to cite Wikipedia, some teachers suggested using it to find sources that were listed on the bottom of the page. With the fact that my high school is banned from editing any Wikipedia pages for vandalism, I didn’t think of it as a very reliable source. But I still used it for homework. Knowing that Wikipedia is cracking down on vandalism and misinformation, I am becoming less skeptical of Wikipedia, but I still wouldn't use it for any research paper.

Reading Response #5

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell writes about how the written English language is becoming bad due to the lack of honesty and of its vagueness.

To me, this whole essay was a blur. What I really got out of it was that some people write long, complicated paragraphs that make no sense, politicians are “dumm[ies]” who are vague and dishonest, and that there are rules Orwell thinks everyone should follow so they can write well.

Most of Orwell’s examples of bad language were confusing to me. I did not understand what the writer was trying to say. It’s filled with long words that made the text sound smart but also made me feel a little dumb for not knowing the words. In the beginning, I wondered if people actually did that. Do people actually change simple understandable sentences/paragraphs and turned them into long, extensive, ambiguous ones? Do people just string along pointless phrases and call it good? Then I realized that I sometimes change words or add phrases to make my paragraphs longer and make my sentences more complex than it should be, so I can’t really judge.

 Orwell talks about how politics/political speeches are a good example of vagueness and dishonesty. Politicians use words that have different meanings to people, so when giving a speech, what he says can be interpreted in many ways depending on the person and that can be completely different to what he is really saying. Most of the time, it is unclear to what the politician is really trying to say. I think politicians are vague and use certain words is to try to please everybody. I think he relies on the audiences’ imagination to figure out what he means under their own terms. He lets the audience manipulate what he is saying to what the audience wants to hear.

I see why Orwell was perturbed with the written language. Instead of straightforward sentences, some people, especially politicians, weave through their ideas but do not actually make solid points. I would be really mad if I had to read a long, confusing passage that really had no point or meaning to it. It’s like watching a movie with no story; the movie may seem all exciting and thrilling and all that, but in the end, what was the whole point of the movie?

Orwell also appears like a jerk in this writing. It seems like he feels superior in writing because he is a renowned writer. He’s putting down writing styles of other people and saying its wrong and that people should write more like him. Even though I agree with some points he makes, I wouldn’t go and publicly write an essay about how bad people write and show/criticize their works.

The Cove Review

After watching The Cove, it made me very mad and angry towards Japan. Even though I knew it wasn’t Japan as a whole but certain people, I always found myself upset with the whole country. The style of the movie was very affected as showing how awful dolphin slaughter, especially in Japan.

A lot of the movie played on the audience’s emotions. They showed how dolphins were self-aware and were conscious with their surroundings. They had emotions too. They showed how dolphins are sensitive to sound, can have stress, and are aware of what is happening to them. They portray them as being able to feel like we do. Since we feel connected to the dolphins, it seems more wrong to kill the dolphins and we feel horrible and sad about the whole ordeal.

The word choices they used helped the movie. O’Barry used the word suicide when he described how Kathy the dolphin died. I do not know if dolphins are capable of committing suicide but the way he described Kathy’s death seemed like it was suicide. Using the word suicide helps the audience relate better with the dolphins.

The way the filmmakers portrayed the Japanese government and the people associated with the slaughters as malicious and having no remorse. In the film, the Japanese government was corrupt who recruited “bankrupt nations” to help them legalize whaling. They portrayed the fishermen as apathetic; in one of the hidden cameras, they were happy and laughing throughout the whole killing process.

The filmmakers left out a lot of statistics. Most of the statistics were about dolphin killings. The filmmakers did not include how many dolphins there were in the world, so we weren’t able to compare how many dolphins were killed to how many there were in the world. Without being able to compare, 23,000 dolphins a year is a really large number and one could assume that the dolphin population is depleting rapidly.

During the spy-ops scenes, the film felt like an action/suspense movie, with way it was in night vision mode and the music playing in the background. During those scenes, I felt nervous and anticipated what would happen next. It also made the activists seem like the good guys. They were doing this to save the dolphins no matter what laws were broken.

 Since most of Japanese did not know about the slaughters nor did they eat dolphin, I think they were first mad and upset that this was happening in their country. Then I thought afterwards that maybe they didn’t want to show the world that this was happening in their country, maybe feeling ashamed that it is happening there. I wouldn’t want the whole world knowing that there was something bad going on where I lived. It’s like the dirty secret I wouldn’t want anyone to know. It also portrays a bad image towards the Japanese people even though the filmmakers were targeting only the government and the fishermen/fisheries. If there was a movie that made me seem like a bad person, I wouldn’t want to shown worldwide.

I knew her when she was just Gaga

It was 11:30am on February 24, 2011, and I was eating lunch at the Tilly. While eating, there were these ladies, behind me, talking about weird dreams they have had in the past. One person dreamt that Lady Gaga was a close friend and once Gaga became famous, she started acting different and they had a fallout. This person kept screaming to her companions about how mad she was at Lady Gaga and kept reiterating how mad she was and how much she hated her throughout the rest of their conversation.

Possible context to the conversation:

Lady Gaga is a mean person, just ask Anna. Anna has lived in California for most of her life and because of where she has lived in California, she became really close friends with many famous celebrities including Justin Timberlake and Rihanna. She also had friends who later became famous, one of whom was Lady Gaga. Anna and Gaga had a special relationship. They did everything together; they shopped, had lunch or dinner together almost everyday, they were inseparable. Once Lady Gaga was famous, she started acting different. She became, what is known as, a diva. Gaga was very demanding to not only her assistants and manager, but also to those close to her, including Anna. Anna was upset. She was losing her best friend and was, in return, getting a high-maintenance star. 

Hoping for the best and for her friend back, Anna stuck by Gaga and did whatever was asked of her. But after a while, she felt that Gaga was taking advantage of her and treated her as another helper and not a friend. She was being treated like dirt and Anna couldn’t take it anymore. Anna was mad. She hated how Gaga, her once best friend, now treated her poorly and called her nasty names just because she became famous. Anna decided to cut ties with Lady Gaga and retreated to Alaska where she could get away for a while. To this day, Anna is sad that she lost her best friend but does not regret the unbearable person she left behind.

The conversation made sense to me because I knew what the ladies were talking about. I knew it was a dream and that everything the person had said was not real. It is very important to know the context of what this person is saying. Without the context, someone might conclude that “Anna” really did know Lady Gaga. They might also assume fictitious notions of Lady Gaga. For example, she treats people poorly and that she is a rude person. We should be concerned with context because without it, we do not know what people are talking about. What we think might be the farthest idea from what they were actually saying. It also gives us fake illusions of things. In this case, it might be the false portrayal of Lady Gaga.

Salvation

In Salvation, Hughes talks about his experience of being “saved” in church.

When Hughes’s aunt told him he would see a light and feel something inside him once he was saved, Hughes believed exactly what she said, word for word. I can understand why. As a kid, I believed everything and took things literally. When people said they were going to explode, I thought that they were going to blow up right in front of me. When they told me a watermelon would grow in my stomach if I ingested a seed, I believed them. As a kid, it was easy to believe things when you don’t know any better. Now, looking back, I laugh at all the things I use to believe, but I can see how I could have believed in those things.

I felt bad for Hughes when he was the last one the bench and everyone was around him screaming and crying, trying to get him saved. That’s a lot of pressure and I could feel how hard Langston was trying to be saved and how anxious I was for him. I do not like being under a lot of pressure nor do I like the feeling of letting people down, so I could somehow relate to how Hughes was feeling, especially when he was the last person.

If I were put into this position, I would have probably done the same thing as Hughes and would have pretended that I was saved to make everyone else happy and to release myself from the pressure and anxiety put upon me. I would have probably lied so I wouldn’t have to feel the uneasy feeling Hughes had gone through. Hughes wasn’t saved the way everyone thought he was. Hughes was saved from the pressure and the feelings he was feeling while sitting alone on the bench.

If I was on the bench and hadn’t seen or felt what I was supposed to be feeling, while thinking that everyone at the altar had, I would have felt betrayed and insecure. I would probably be asking myself why I wasn’t able to see or feel anything. It would feel unfair that all the other people were saved and not me. Why wasn’t I good enough?

The ending was surprising. I knew Hughes wasn’t going to see Jesus and I had predicted that he was going to say he was saved when he really wasn’t. But I did not predict the end. It was sad to read how he cried that night because he wasn’t saved and that he didn’t believe in Jesus anymore. I understand why he didn’t believe, but it was still surprising, yet not, that he no longer believes.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day is about Sedaris’s experience with his French teacher while he attended a school in Paris. He had a very rude teacher who hated her students and who  said mean things about them.

While reading this story, I kept thinking of how mean the teacher was and how I hated her. I didn’t like how she treated her students nor how she spoke ill of them. I don’t like the demeaning things she said about her students that lowered their self-esteem to the point where they “cry alone at night.”

I wouldn’t be able to go through what Sedaris had gone through. If a teacher was constantly humiliating me and saying that she hated me, I would feel less inclined to do work or stay in that class. I would try everything I could to get out of the class. If someone kept telling me that I sucked at French and there was no one to believe that I could excel in it, I would probably believe the teacher. I probably would not have the confidence to speak and eventually give up on the language. As I would have easily given up, Sedaris sticks with it. He stays and puts up with all the belittling comments. He is determined to get learn French and his determination pays off because in the end, he was able to understand every word the teacher was saying.

When everything the teacher said started making sense to Sedaris, it reminded me of the saying “tough love”. The teacher was putting up a mean front to help the students understand the language better. There was a part of me hoping that that this was the case and that in the end, she would turn out to be an awesome, kind teacher and I would start to like her. After reading the whole story, I came to the conclusion that she really was this wicked person who hated her students. Nonetheless, it could still be considered tough love since Sedaris got something out of it.

I like the way Sedaris wrote this piece. While I was reading this, I felt what he was feeling. When he was anxiously waiting for his turn to speak, I was nervous with him. When he was being ostracized by the teacher, I felt dumb too. When he realized he understood the teacher completely, I was shocked and ecstatic as he was. I like how I was able to feel what he was feeling and the emotions the story put me through.