The Decisions That Define Our Lives

Just like Clarrissa, Peter, and Septimus, we all make choices that affect our lives as well as affect others lives that are around us. Virginia Woolfe does a great job of showing how these characters decisions affect the other characters in the story. She shows how one characters choice can make or break another character. Clarrissa makes the choice to continue life and to be all she can be after learning of Septimus's choice to commit suicide. Clarissa makes the choice to choose Richard over Peter, this choice plays on both Peter and Clarissa. Clarissa struggles with "did she make the right choice" but Peter struggles with his loss of her at the same time. In reality we see this type of relationship every day, the choices of one effecting another and sometime effecting others more than themselves.

Love: Now or Later

Two main writings that came up in this weeks assignments were about love. One writing told of a man who wanted love now, he had no patience to let love grow into true love, and he ended up with nothing. The second writing was about a man that waited too long for love. He did not feel that he expressed his full love for his wife and that he held back some of that love in the process. So he decided that he could not love her as much as he felt she needed to be loved and he leaves her and also has nothing at the end.

These two stories are really the type of stories that make me not enjoy fictional literature. People in real life are always having problems about is this too much or is this not enough, do they or don't they, will they or won't they. Personally, I see these two stories as unnecessary for the benefit of society, if anything I think they bring us down by consuming unnecessary time. Here is my explanation, people are aware of there surroundings and when they make a mistake they can either fix it or walk away. It is that simply and there are millions of degrees in between that are also choices. It all boils down to individual choice.

We need the influence of real life stories in our society today. Too much fiction is floating around and messing with peoples emotions, everything from idealistic television icons to fake reality television. Do we really need to consume ourselves with other peoples love issues. Don't get me wrong people need to talk to each other and learn from each other, but in an authentic manner and not in a scripted, unrealistic manner. I say why continue wasting our time worrying about other peoples fictional issues, why not educate ourselves on pertinent, non-fiction information like history and science and try to progress our selves as a society in a manner that actually makes a difference in the standard of living that we have. I have tried to always tie in real world issues with the fictional writings in my blogs and I know that many authors do that in their writings as well. Thanks for letting me rant about this, I think I may have drifted away from the English love story topic a bit, but I do feel it is important to see reality for what it is and not to fictionalize it. I also see the rants pertinence because education curriculums around the nation are what shapes the minds of the youth. The content in it is very influential to people's lives and the way they process and deal with reality in their own lives.

Modern Day Influence

The day to day interactions and reactions of humans are becoming more and more influential. The influencing ability given to us through both the exponential human population growth and modernization of communication has man-kind on a level of worldwide influence as never before seen. The globalization effect allows people around the globe to share their ideals with everyone else on a scale that is larger than ever and it is growing. Charles Dickens talked of the influence that one human can have over another in Great Expectations. He used Miss Havisham to show the influence that people can have on each other. Miss Havisham had an unfortunate situation happen to her, basically her fiance left her on their wedding day, and she felt so hurt by this that she raised another girl teaching her to hate men in order to one day have revenge on men. In the end she realizes what she did and apologizes for it. The bottom line is that humans have the capability to influence each other, especially the always influential youth, and we need to treat this power with respect. The influences that a person can have through modern technology are becoming more prominent and rapid. The world is at our finger tips now. Anyone can establish a blog, website, email account, etc. and network with people all over the globe that feel like you do. This is an amazing power that we have and it needs to be realized that we have the capability to influence so many others. The modern day influence of man will become more and more a topic in the press as our ability to network influencing each other, as well as our ecological environment, continues to increase.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was a visionaire that the world could one day be controlled by democracy. This post will help you to understand who Thomas Paine was and what he went through during his life. He expressed that the power was in the people and not in the kings, parliaments, and governments that claimed to have the power. He told in The Rights of Man that man was allowing, he used the word "consent", themselves to be controlled by the powers that be, or at least by the rules that they left. He was an advocate for the common man. His true commitment to reach the common man was one of the things that gave him the edge against his elitist competition. This showed by him selling his writing cheaply so more people read his works and his ideas became rapidly widespread. This newly acquired audience drew much attention to man's rights, but it also limited Paine's rights in doing so. Paine risked imprisonment throughout much of his later life due to his writings. His writings were, as stated above, for the common man and they did not speak well of the elite and their alike. At the end of his life he could not return to England or he would be imprisoned, so he sailed to America to live out the rest of his life in 1792.

Frankenstein vs. Consumer idealism

In today's market place our minds are constantly filled with what we are supposed to like or how we are supposed to look. Frankenstein plays into this by Victor creating his creature to be his "ideal" friend. In the story Victor thinks that by creating a friend he will satisfy his own loneliness or maybe let him feel like he is in control. Which is exactly what modern day marketing makes the consumer believe. If you drive this car ...you will get chicks, If you drink this drink...you will be refreshed and relaxed. TV and magazines, no matter what age, genre, or business you are in, are bombarding you with attractive adds that promise you a falsified happiness. This overpowering effect has many Americans by the credit card and people just can't stop spending. Many people fall victim to over buying on homes and cars, which has a trickle down effect to them maxing out their credit cards with outrageous interest rates. If society would look less at the objects and more at the people we would all have different objectives and goals to achieve.

nature vs. civilization

In John Keats poem "Ode to a Nightingale" he describes nature as an over bearing unstoppable force that constantly is growing and consuming all that gets in its path. He describes how an old abandoned car in the middle of the woods becomes part of nature. It creates new homes for wildlife, etc. I believe that Keats is writing in this manner because of the times that he lived through. He was alive at the very beginning of the industrial revolution. So at that time it took all the man power in the world to make a dent in the over powering lands that were raw nature. However i believe Keats would be noting a different pattern if he was still alive 200 years later. The industrial revolution was the first time in history that something was stronger than animal or man, before this period it was all sweat and bone. After advances in steam and steel technologies were made country side was being cleared like never before seen. Americans were settling and clearing property by the section, distributing many of Europe's finest technologies (Guns, steel, steam engines, etc.) throughout the America's. I believe if Keats were alive today, he would be writing a different story. Now i see a story of civilization expanding faster than nature ability to contain it. Just think of all the effect (not to mention time, labor, and gas) of mowing our yards, not to mention highways and roads, across the United States alone. This is the same battle of keeping nature and civilization separate that civilization was trying to accomplish with way less "cargo" 200 years ago. We need to watch this balance of nature carefully i believe. We need to realize that we have a large effect on many areas that can drastically change our lives. Many of those areas, such as water, agriculture, and wildlife, are areas that we depend on for sustainability as an industrial civilization.

first blog ever

There goes the first blog who knows what will happen after this.