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.

Lesson #8

Has anyone else ever wondered why the definition of love varies in different dictionaries. Although they are similar in each, they vary from, "an intense feeling of deep affection" (Oxford Dictionaries), to "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties" (Merriam-Webster). Although the differences are slight, an entire mountain of confusion can arise from the differences. The second definition seems to completely call out the idea of "love at first sight" as false. Yet the first definition leaves that up for interpretation. In Song of Solomon the idea of love was questioned. The idea of love being about consistently caring about someone was rarely reciprocated between lovers. "It is about love. What else but love? can't I love what I criticize?" (pg. 282). Isn't the idea of love to respect rather than criticize? Can someone ever feel so intensely about another to disregard any flaws that could lead to criticism? This makes me question how people view love in general. Can there really be a dictionary definition of love if the concept itself varies from person to person? Ruth and Macon were never in love in general, their marriage was full of spite and resentment. Milkman was never in love with Hagar, yet near the end of the book it seemed as if he was in love with the world around him. Yet in certain definitions of love it does not seem to include the idea of loving inanimate objects. Even between Pilate, Reba and Hagar, the idea of love is questioned. Hagar was handed everything she wanted on a silver platter, and Pilate and Reba delivered anything she desired without as much as a complaint. Although the idea of giving somebody everything they need seems like love, it also seems like the longing for affection. Through out the novel it seemed as if Pilate and Reba were searching for validation from Hagar; they seemed constantly obsessed with the idea of making Hagar happy, as if Hagar's happiness was directly proportional to their own. This need seemed like a validation that the two needed from Hagar, rather than love. In the end of the story there was never any conclusions drawn about love; we never once witnessed a happily ever after where anybody was in love for the rest of their lives. I think a lot of the reason love was viewed the way it was is because love is very hard to describe, and almost impossible to write on paper. Although myself feeling to naïve to sit here and dissect the true meaning of love, I can conclude that the dictionary should not include a definition of it. Emotions are one of those things that seem to delicate to define. A feeling is not something that can be passed on from person to person. Defining the idea of love limits the possibilities that such a delicate concept holds. Love is different for everyone, and I think it is only fair if we let everybody have their own definitions.
Lesson #8: Not everything can be defined. 

Lesson #7

Over the course of my sixteen years of life, I have began to realize that we never know what is going on in anyone else's head. Almost everybody lives their life self-absorbed in one way or another; its not that human beings are ultimately selfish, I genuinely believe that a lot of self-absorption comes from a fear of being rejected by society, not necessarily that we think we are the center of the universe. While reading Song of Solomon I noticed a common theme of everybody constantly worrying about themselves. They all seemed to push their own agendas with the idea that the world should adapt to that individuals way of thinking. But then I started to think about how our vanity really affects us. "Too much tail. All the jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit that weighs you down." It was my opinion that the "jewelry" that the bird was wearing, was alluding to the theme of vanity throughout the book. Although that didn't seem to necessarily be the theme, that was the idea that stuck with me. I think that we all wear jewelry in our lives, because I don't think anybody really knows how to live without it. I think our jewelry are the things that we constantly think about within ourselves, whether that is our insecurities, our desires, or our resentment. For me I am always obsessed with having things organized and stable, and I would consider that part of the jewelry I wear. Guitar said that we have to take off our jewelry in order to fly, but I don't know that we necessarily can. I think that some of what "weighs us down" is what makes us who we are. Without that I don't know how we could all be individuals. I also don't think that humans should be able to "fly". Although I recognize that was used as a metaphor for freedom, there is a reason that birds can fly and we cannot. Humans are different than birds; we are made with more complicated thoughts and emotion, and I think that is part of why people can't fly; very honestly I would choose to have the life that I have, full of consuming emotions and constant thoughts, than to be considered free and loose all that. This relates back to David Foster Wallace's idea that people should live life with a selfless attitude. I am truly not convinced that there is any such thing as selfless. Even when we are doing things for other people, we are doing those things because they make us feel good about ourselves. I think the only real way to embrace the human experience is to accept that we are not made to fly, because if we begin to fly, we are no longer human.

Lesson #7: There is a reason that humans are made the way they are.