Lesson #15

    If you think about the concept of the American dream, it sounds extremely far-fetched. It is the idea that this country allows someone to have the freedoms it requires to flourish and create a life for themselves. Although this idealist mindset appears unblemished, the reality is that the United States withholds it’s freedoms in other ways. This nation may be physically free, yet we are also the 3rd most depressed country in the world, and have leading levels in alcohol and drug abuse. So I would like to pose this question; do we glorify the United States?   

    I tend to believe that we have so many mental health issues because people focus on their external appearance and economic status more than we focus on our personal connections, and overall well-being. The lack of time that we spend simply enjoying the beauty of life is something that is pitied by those who spend minimal time obsessing over external values. The United States has a foundation that is based on the idea that “the human body is ugly.” Naturally many people would not admit to this-- yet we spend much of our lives going to the gym so we look in shape, looking at ourselves in the mirror, comparing ourselves to others, judging those around us, judging ourselves, buying beauty products, researching the ways we can change our imperfections, aspiring to be others, and wishing that we could make ourselves perfect. This country may look wonderful on the exterior, but those inside know no such freedom. There is a reason that we look so alluring to outsiders; and that is because all the outsiders see are the billionaires, and the fancy award shows, and the supermodels, and the lavish lifestyle that we all crave. What they miss is all of the people who already live in the US, who are striving to be someone that we can be proud enough to show the rest of the world. In our nation fame and riches are the only way to be well-recognized.

    When I went to Germany this summer, I came back feeling like I had seen the world in a whole new perspective. I have never met people who were as kind or as patient as them. I did not stay in a tourist city, so I am well aware that they were not simply nice to my family because they had to be. I felt more at home there for two weeks, then I ever have here. The people there say hello to each other on the streets, and pay for the meals of those at the table next to them; they walk places rather than speeding in cars; they sit in the park and talk to their neighbors rather than rushing to their phones. They stress the importance of those around them, and their community had the familiar comfort of what a home should feel like. Here I don’t even know the names of my neighbors, and our community has a very “cold comfort.” I find it reassuring that there are others there, but very few of them are involved in my life. We treat our neighbors and our society as purely others who are also trying to survive, rather than being genuinely interested in knowing who they are.

    To outsiders this is what the American Dream is. They simply see economically stable people living in a free country, and they automatically assume that it is a well-rounded place. This is how america is glorified, or might I say simplified. Freedom and wealth do not make up a country-- it is core values that shape it. We may be economically thriving, but the people within are suffering from the mental confinement that has been placed in us. We are all striving for recognition from our society. The American Dream is a very isolating experience. We all hope that one day the people in our lives may “raise a monument” for us, but the only monument most of us receive is the one we are buried underneath.

Lesson #15: It takes a full perspective to fully understand.

Lesson #14

    I find it utterly embarrassing that in society today we would choose to add another car to our collection or buy another pair of diamond earrings, rather than cherish the millions of wonders that surround us on a daily basis. It is as if society can never be satisfied with the provisions that many of us were born with. My fear is that society is already beyond repair, and we will relinquish this world to our future with nothing more than the craving to fill our souls with material possessions. It is sad to say that most of us still want the new iphone, or a shiny new car— when there are people in this world that don’t even have the luxury of a steady income. We tend to forget the importance of mental well-being, and those suffering from poverty. This greedy nature we express is something that will haunt those who fail to realize that a shallow life will never lead to true joy. We think that we can just throw away our problems and replace them with mass-produced items.

    It is not just materials that we discard. Humans seem to have a limited threshold for anything of sentiment. We live in a world where much more than just milk is labeled with an expiration date. Even friendships are often set with a time-limit. I think most of us have those friends that we spend time with purely when we see them fit to our necessity. These would be the school friends, and the workplace acquaintances of the world. We choose to not form these relations further, because we do not rely on emotional connections to fulfill ourselves; we instead are captivated by what we see on store shelves. Just as Eighner said in “On Dumpster Diving,” “Even if I had a home with extensive storage space I could not save everything that might be valuable in some contingency.” The problem is that we seem to mistake the word “valuable” as something purely materialistic. No price tag can be placed on most of the wonders of the world, yet we seem to limit ourselves to be enslaved by objects that can be easily replaced. This is the reason why our country is so wasteful; people have refused themselves to think of the smiles we see on the faces of others as something to treasure. We would not be so careless if we started filling ourselves with mental reassurance, rather than the items that can be held in our grasp. I think it is crucial to understand that a flat screen tv cannot fix a broken heart, and a faster car cannot drive us away from our problems. We instead need to focus on building ourselves as people, not building the mountain of overproduced plastic that we will leave to our families once we are gone. I regret to inform us all that we seem to cherish possessions over physical relationships. The bond of hearts that we make with the real people in our lives should be what fills our homes, not the most expensive china, or the newest surround sound speakers. If we are really limited to the things of value we should keep, then we need to stop buying what will make us temporarily satisfied, and then throwing it away in next week's load of trash. We should all take a minute to remind ourselves that having the most in style clothes will not make us more loved, and maybe then we will stop pining to look presentable on the exterior. I urge us all to stop recognizing ourselves based on how much we own, and begin to see each other based on the quality of our characters.

Lesson #14: Life is about the emotional connections.

Lesson #13

The truth about sexism is that it does exist. It may be diminishing with time, but it still finds ways to creep into our lives. Now I don't want to think of this as starting an argument, but as many problems as men may understand— this is not one of them. Even I cannot begin to understand what it must be like to have society waive my right to vote because they do not believe that I am equipped for such a task.

When this country was born, men were given the birthright to vote— this was something that women had to fight for. Women were rarely given the opportunity to work, until WWII when there were not enough men home to work. It is important to acknowledge that these rights are not something that were handed to a women, they were not something that she could call her own. This is why I believe that it is hard for men to understand. They were never given the oppressive message that they were undeserving to have such liberties. Men have never once had to give a reason as to why they would prefer to find a job rather than clean up after the children. I believe that instead of becoming defensive about such a topic, it is important to understand that the message behind it is not malevolent, but rather explanatory.

When reading "Letters" between John and Abigail Adams, it is sad to say that Abigail was forced to argue with her own husband that she should have rights. Women were not given the right to vote, as they preached for equality, and protested the hypocrisy. She requested that men "give up the harsh title of master" so that the minds of capable women could finally be heard. It was those who were born with their rights handed to them on a silver platter that were reluctant to extend the same liberties to others. Abigail was required to prove to her husband that she was deserving, because a women's wit and intelligence is something that society questions.

I personally can't think of many times where men had to prove to women that they were deserving of the rights we were deprived of. I think this is one of the instances where you really cannot understand unless you were to walk a mile in the shoes of a women.; because in that case, I would like to go back in time and ask a man why he would deserve the right to vote over his wife. I would like to ask the employers that pay women less why a males work is more valued than a females?

There are some choices that really baffle me, but the one that feels most present at this moment is why no man stood up for his wife. Why did no brother stand up for his sister? Why did no father stand up for his daughter? Was there some type of disease that made women look comparingly less worthy? I cannot seem to fathom why the role of a women was cast the way it was. I look around me today and I see a world of women who are doing amazing things, and women who are changing this planet for the better; and this just makes me ask: how much better would this world be if society had realized the importance of equality?

Lesson #13: The rights of one should be the rights of all.

Lesson #12

The date today is February 10th, 2019; I marked today with this date because it is different from any other day that will ever happen again. I think that is the part that we forget about labels, because we often tend to focus on only the negative ones— yet there are so many that can be positive. Our tendency to feel judged by people’s comments, doesn’t allow us to see the beauty that comes from these marks.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know what it feels like to be negatively judged. It is incredibly insulting for people to assume that I am in regular classes, or that I may not care about my grades. I once had a math teacher tell me that I should not be in honors math, before he had even seen me take a test. But as much as I wish that this judgement could be minimized, I don’t think I would choose to take away the labels that surround us. One of the comments Deborah Tannen makes in “There is No Unmarked Woman” is “there is no women’s hairstyle that can be called standard” (554). Take the word “standard”, how does being standard sound more desirable than being different? I believe that women are blessed with our inability to be like everyone else. Yet Tannen chooses to make standard sound like a wonderful thing. I label everybody around me, but those labels are not inherently negative. Take my best friend as an example, I would label her as incredibly smart, charismatic, and compassionate; this is what makes her who she is— yet because I am describing her, I am marking her. These are the marks that Tannen was forgetting. We are all characters, and our life is us writing our storybook; and in my story I am perfectly happy to be labeled, even if I don’t always appreciate the labels I receive. I personally don’t believe that being marked is a bad thing. My math teacher may not have been right to label me as incapable of taking an honors class, but he did make me want to work harder to prove him wrong. The people who assumed I don’t care about school may have underestimated me, but that didn’t suddenly make me deem myself to dim-witted. The beauty with labels is that they are not permanent nor are they limiting. I am marked differently by different people. I am marked as a daughter, a girlfriend, a best friend— which are markings I am blessed to carry. We can choose to look at these labels as scars or beauty marks. No two people carry the same markings, and for that I conclude by saying that I would rather carry marks for everything, rather than losing all of the meaning that they carry. So next time you wish you could rid yourself of marks, I urge you to think about who you would be without a single marking.

Lesson #12: Who would we be without the markings we have?

Lesson #11

Sometimes it can be hard to tell where my life ends, and my imagination begins. Its like the dreams my brain creates can feel just as real as reality itself. It's like the comparison of diamonds to rhinestones; they both look very similar, but in the end one is priceless, and the other is barely worth a price. Its not to say that I feel like life is barely worth a price, but dreams are diamonds. The reality in our heads is flawless-- packed with fame, fortune, and love. Then life comes back into play... I wake up every morning from a world where I was the queen, to go to school with 2000 other people who have just as much say in the world as I do. I always wondered why no amount of sleep ever seems to be enough, and I have come to the conclusion that I just prefer to live in my dreams. Being asleep means that I only have to view diamonds, and I can forget for a minute about the existence of rhinestones.

"There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gifts of disillusion."

Life to me feels like I was handed the gift of disillusion. Life is nothing like what I pictured it would be. With life comes pain, loss, heart break, fear, exhaustion, and failure. As a kid I entered this world like I had the ability to rule it, but life has taught me that I can't.  When I was little, I wanted to be a professional soccer player. But the world soon taught me that even when you work as hard as you can, it is not always enough. Practicing for hours a day isn't enough; cutting out junk food and only eating healthy isn't enough; running until I can barely walk isn't enough; kicking a soccer ball until the calluses on my feet begin to bleed isn't enough. For the work I put in, I do not receive awards-- instead I receive sprained ankles and countless bruises, followed by the doctors orders to take months off of the thing that I love the most. So the dreams I had turn to dust, and I find out the diamonds I thought I had are just rhinestones. I don't know that diamonds are really worth hoping for, because in the end maybe some of us just aren't meant to have diamonds. Maybe for some people rhinestones are more fitting. Though it is the hope to find diamonds that wakes me from my dream state every morning. So all I really have to hope is that I just haven't found my diamond yet.


Lesson #11: When life gives you a diamond, make sure it is real first.

Lesson #10

There was something about The Great Gatsby that made me feel inherently nauseous from reading it. The apparent infidelity and the idea of love was completely shaken, leaving the ending with the message that the love the characters expressed for each other in this book was normal, healthy and actually real love. I personally don't think I could disagree more.

"I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove."

The fact of the matter is that this quote shows the ignorance and immaturity of ideals from the characters in this book. First of all the idea that you can walk into someone else's life without changing anything is completely inaccurate. This was disproved multiple times throughout the novel. You can essentially only enter someone's life if you make an impact on it. If you meet someone, then the change you make may only be slight, but I promise you there is one. This is especially true when people seem to think that they can have a really casual relationship with little commitment, (which was really the only type of relationship seen in The Great Gatsby) and nobody will get hurt in the end. I want to emphasize the fact that you can not enter anybody's life emotionally and expect there to be no strings attached. We as human beings want to form connections, and connections come with all of the good and the bad. The only reason Nick said that he "imagined" this is because it cannot be real. Yet so many people not only in this book, but in our lives try to make this fabricated concept a reality. It's like people are so completely absorbed in what they want that they can't for even a second imagine hurting the other person. We are all people who have pasts, and those pasts come with pain, loss, love, fears, desires, and HUMAN EMOTIONS. If you haven't figured it out yet, these emotions are physically inescapable. Coming into relationships with the idea that you can be indifferent to who the other person is, is absurd. Everybody's relationship in this book was messy, and that is where I would like to address the problem; if you feel anything for another person, whether it be friendship or hate, or any kind of love, you cannot expect there to be no strings attached. If you make even the slightest impact on that person then you have entered into their lives. People are complicated, and I am sure that will never change. We feel things like love and hate, and with that comes a certain responsibility that I feel The Great Gatsby chose to ignore. Fitzgerald tried to scrape by with the deepest concept of love being obsession. The simple fact of the matter is that is not love, and I hope dearly that people know that. If Gatsby had really loved Daisy he would have wanted what was best for her, but all Gatsby wanted was what was best for himself. The reason I cannot be in support of this book is because I think they chose to glorify things like infidelity and the representation of lust as love. It is sad to say that things like this aren't viewed as wrong or incorrect. I hope this idea of human relationships is one that started and ended with this book. Because people are not surface level.

Lesson #10: Entering someone's life always makes an impact.

Lesson #9

I think that living in Troy a lot of people (including myself) tend to forget how lucky we are. Living in a place that has low crime rates, minimal poverty, and a good school system is something we tend to over look on a day to day basis. I think a lot of us at Troy high focus on the negatives instead of the positives; we think about how much homework we get, or how difficult our classes are, rather than how prepared we will be for college, or how well known our school is for its education.

I think in life as much as we don't want to admit it, we all tend to think of ourselves as the victims, or the disadvantaged. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had" (Fitzgerald 5). I think this quote should make us look at our view of not only ourselves, but the rest of the world. The way I think of it is on a worldly scale. In Troy High we tend to complain about how hard our education is; yet I have friends at Athens that complain that their teachers don't even bother teaching them the material. What they don't realize is that their are kids in Detroit who barely have classrooms for schools and have minimal education; the kids in Detroit don't realized that there are people in impoverished countries who don't even have the option to go to school. I think we only tend to compare the things we see as negatives or disadvantages, instead of all the things we are blessed to have. 

I like to think that the best possible example would be the government. As we all know, people in the US love to complain about our government. We talk only about the corruption or what we feel the injustices are. Yet we fail to see how blessed we all are for living in a country that is free and gives us the ability to do things such as criticize the government. In China the government runs the country, they do not have the freedoms that we have to speak our minds. I personally could never imagine living without the freedoms that I have and I think that is something that many Americans overlook. In other countries people are killed for opposing the government and are given no freedoms at all. I think this is a problem with criticism. We not only criticize others for their disadvantages, but we overlook our own advantages. We look at everybody like they come from the same situation as us, because we don't know any situation other than our own. I think that criticism comes naturally to humans because it is hard to be open minded about situations we know nothing about. But I think that if we look harder at what we are judging people for, we might judge others a little less.

Lesson #9: Judgments are based on limited thinking.