I can't read today, So Instead, I may talk about Christmas...

So yea, blah blah blah, I've been super busy and havn't gotten a chance to get to my dad's house to get my book. So, today I cannot read my book in class, and yesterday I blogged about my book... extensivly... So instead I'll blog about something... obscure.
Maybe not too obscure, as Christmas is only 4 days away.
My birthday is on Christmas, and Christmas is my favorite holliday. It's not my favorite because it's my birthday. It's my favorite because everything changes at Christmas. People get nicer, there's snow on the ground (well... not this year, but I'll get to that), and there is a feeling in the air that no other time of year has. I love the decorations on and in houses, heck, my dad's dining room and living room look like Santa's own home, theres lights and garland and wreathes, and snowmen, and wisemen, pictures of family, stocking and of course the Christmas tree.
I don't know why Christmas has a special feel to it, but there really is just... something in the air. December roles around, Chamber Singers starts doing concerts for people every weekend, I have my anual birthday blowout and snow starts to fall, and all the peices of Christmas start to fall into place and it becomes such a magical time of year.
On the subject of snow: People who want a green Christmas, or want to spend it in California or Hawaii or Florida... Get out. I cannot imagine a green Christmas. I hate when in my home town of Snowsville, New York, there's no snow.It's only happend a few times, but let me tell you, my 18th birthday is not the time. I hope we get hit with a blizzard soon or I'm gonna be upset. The snow really adds to the magic of Christmas and without it there... It's just a day to be with the family and exchange gifts for one another.
I've become a bit of a birthday snob this year, cause it's my 18th and I'm excited and I've been looking forward to this since I was 8. I don't know if I rushed through my high school and middle school years. I spent them enjoying the good times and trying to get through the bad ones, but always waiting untill my Senior year so I could do the fun highschool stuff then get out and move on to better things. I've been over this whole small town thing for years. ANYWAY. I made a huge deal out of my last big birthday party (it really was big, i don't know how many people showed up it was so big), and I've been making a big deal out of Christmas for my actual birthday too. But hey, I figure, it's my 18th, its a big deal, it's my last one before I go to college. To me it's a big deal. But I digress... Birthday Snob.
Last but not least I'm happy to say I will be spending my Christmas doing a very... Christmasy thing. I wont say names but me and a few of my very special friends are going to visit another very special, very important person in all of our lives on Christmas who will be alone. We hope to make said persons Christmas. It warms my heart to know that on Christmas I will be doing more than celebrating my birthday and getting/giving gifts. I'll be... hopefully... truely making someones day.

Merry Christmas

A Million Little Peices

I've been reading A Million Little Peices by James Fry for a while, at least over the summer. I havn't finished it yet because of my inability to read fast, and my lack of free time. I read it by the pool practically my entire summer vacation, and I've made it about half way through, a little farther I guess... it's been since summer that I have picked it up. I found out about this book last year when I did an independant reading project for my junior year (last year) english class. I was already reading a book, Impulse, but when my teacher did a slide show of books worth reading, A million Little Peices jumped out to me, and I went out and bought it so I could read it in my free time. The reason it jumped out to me is because it's about drug and alchohol addiction, and for my carrer I want to help people with those problems, I want to me a psychologist for addicts. A ways into reading this book my parents told me that this book was famous for being a fraud. James Fry titled this book as a biography, but it wasn't... well... not really. Instead it was a compilation of his own recovery stories, and recovery stories of people he met. I guess that makes sence when you read the book. There are so many times in the book where you can't help but think "He is so messed up, how can he possibly get better? How can he possibly be well enough to write a book. His rock bottom was so low, and he hit it so many times that how does a person recover completley from that." So when I found out that it wasn't really a biography but a compilation of a bunch of real experiences all jumbled up into James Fry's fictional self, I wasn't too bothered by the fact. When I think about it I really don't see how he could have titled it any other way, because in a way it is a biography, but it's also an autobiography because it tells of other peoples stories, but it's also a fiction because James Fry didn't do everything he said he did in the book because some of his actions were those of people that he met in real life. How do you write that on a book cover? "A Million Little Peices- a biography, autobiography, fiction, and everything in between" No one would read that. I guess he could have just left the "A Biography" off the cover page and just let it sit in a fiction or biography section of the library and wait for a curious soul like Oprah to pick it up and make it famous.
So, like I said I havn't looked at this book in a while, about 3 months, so the details of the book are kind of fuzzy. After reading two english books that are total mind ... messer-upers, like The Stranger, and The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nightime, the details of a book like A Million Little Peices  seem to fade away. I do remember the great underlying love story that James dips into detail ever so often. Without any spoilers, he slowly reveals to the reader that he met the girl of his dreams in college, and that his drinking and drug use messed it all up. She tried to get him sober, and for a while it worked. But... once and addict y'know?  I remember thinking, as the love tragedy slowly unfolded, "I can't blame her", but thinking too, "How horrible must he have felt". The story is enough to make you cry.
Along with the love story, There is a 2, maybe 3, possibly 4 page long description of James' experience of 2 root canals, all done with no anesthesia. This is DETAILED, let me tell you. I read it and it was like a car crash, or like watching the Jersey shore, You just can't look away, but while you're looking at it you're thinking "dear god make it stop, this is so horrible and awful". And it can't be any other way, He couldn't have writen this description like, "and they sawed some nerves in half and had to hold me down with straps and it hurt a lot" No. There was about 4 pages of him repeating the F word and I think he used the terms "red hot pain" and "white hot pain" about 50 times per page. How else can you convey a root canal with no medication.
The book is really amazing and I can't wait to finish it.

Sherlock Homes Reaction

I've seen this movie before, and I have to say, the second time around, I still really like it. It has some connections to the Curious Case of the Dog in the Nightime, but not a lot. Christopher and Sherlock Homes have some similarities, but I don't think that there are enough similarities to make a cohesive argument. Yes, Christopher and Sherlock both have amazing deductive skills, however, Sherlock can have, and can recognize feelings. Just because he has good deductive skills (Shelock) does not mean he cannot recognize or feel feelings. Sherlock feels a great deal for Irene Adler, and Christopher doesn't outwardly feel anything for anyone. Because we, as readers, are reading his thoughts, because he puts them on the page, we know that he really doesn't feel love, and that he doesn't recognize any emotion. I don't like the idea of comparing the two characters, it's not that I don't like Christopher, but I really love Sherlock Homes, and I think it is insulting to his character to compare hiim to someone with aspergers, and it's not that I don't like Christopher or that I have something against people with disabilities because I don't. But I think, even on a deductive scale, which is what they can be compared on, I think Sherlock is leaps and bounds better than Christopher. I liked the Curious Case, and I liked Christopher, he is a brilliant boy and I can't comprehend half the things he says and he's younger than me (his character). Sherlock is smarter than me too, and I marvel at the two of their deductive, logical capabilites, but I think Sherlock is a better character, he is a good role model for Christopher. They are similar in their deductive and logical capabilities but Sherlock does things Christopher cannot comprehend, and I like that Christopher's idol is someone who is similar to him, but is someone he can aspire to be, someone who can understand, acknowlage, and feel emotion.

Henry David Thereaue believed that in order to live well, we must reduce the number of material goods we have. Otherwise, these things begin to dominate us. Thake a position on this and explain.

I disagree with this. The key to a good life, in my opinion, is moderation and appriciation. You shouldn't let your posessions own you, they only will if you let them. If you appreciate the things you have, and work hard to get them, materials can't own you. Also, you shouldn't have a lot alot of stuff. Take what you need and be thankful for the stuff you have that is extra. Theoreau doesn't explain what "reduce the number of material goods we have" means. This could mean, what I said, just to not have a boat load of stuff, or it could mean something more budhist, give all your materials up. So I guess I should say I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with the "quote", but I do have the opinion that I already stated.

The Curious case of the Dog in the Night Time Reaction

In finishing the Curious Case I have to say I really enjoyed the book. I thought it moved really quickly, there was never a spot in the book where I thought "Oh my Gosh can we just move on?" like in many other novels I've read in school. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the narrator is autistic.  His sentances are really simple, but they are packed with information because they are usually quite long. He (Christopher, the narrator) is very percise in his writing, he's not detailed, but he tells the reader information and makes sure that he conveys what the information is telling the reader, and that it is understood in a proper way so it cannot be mis-read or misinterpreted.
   I like the fact that there are busts of more conventional, or detailed, I guess, writing in the book. When Christopher goes to school and talks to his teacher Sioban, she reads his book and critiques it and often she tells him to make sure he uses details, descriptions, because that is what regular authors do. So he goes home and he writes about a paragraph of detailed writing, or a description of something, because Sioban had just told him to do so. He never stays writing that way though. He incorperates some aspects of description and details in his writing but not up to the degree that most non autistic writers do. For example he will  say "the man had a big nose" and then refer to that character as "the man with the big nose" or another person who had diamonds on their socks, so he will then refer to that person as the "man with diamonds on his socks", and that is Christopher being descriptive.
I really liked that about this book. Everything was so simple, the discriptions of characters were so vague that given only one or two characterstics of a character (boy or girl, and maybe something else, like socks) you could get your own idea of who the character was, what they looked like, but your visual was still linked to Chrisopher's world because of the breif description. I liked the freedom I felt when I was reading the book, and the pace was, like I said before, very fast, it never dragged. One thing I really like about this book was being able to look inside the mind of an autistic kid, to see how they work. I know not all autistic kids are alike and I know that the real author of this book (because Christopher is only a character who is "writing" the book) is not autistic., but despite that it was really interesting to see what an autistic kid could be thinking when they are doing something non autistic people would not do, like scream when being touched, or basing their days "mood" on the colour and amount of cars outside.
Anyway, I think this is a really good book, and that it is an important book to read because of the insight it gives students, and people for that matter, on the life of an autistic kid. Something as simple as traveling, which is easy for us, is incredibly difficult for Christopher, and because the book is writen as if he is writing it, the reader can really understand why something so simple can be so difficult. I think the sheer insight this book offers makes this book a valuable read.

No spoilers here

So I just finished reading The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nightime. Maybe it's because I'm dumb and I can't understand any math besides basic algebra, but I hated the end of the book.  "I got a puppy, I basically ignore my dad, now here's 4 pages of explaining my favorite math problem". The puppy part was cute, I liked the fact that  the story started with a dog and ended with a new dog.  However, I don't quite understand the significance  of have a four page explanation of a math problem as the end of a book. I understand that Christopher loved math, but why end with  an explanation of a math problem? Why not stop at, well, the end, just cut out the appendix (which is the 4 page explanation of Christopher's favorite math problem). Unless, to a trained, "math-savy" brain, the problem makes sence and the answer has some sort of significance and is a symbolic representation of the story. I read the last paragraph of the appendix and it made the answer sound like maybe the two sides of the triangle could represent his parents and the other side was him, because he could not be represented in the proper form. I'm not quite sure because I am awful at math, but if I had to take an educated guess at  why the end of the book was the way it was, I guess that would be why. Who would have known math could have symbolism.

"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all of the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them" (Haddon 12)

So, first, before I respond to this quote I want to say that I'm not going to write anything "formally" unless I have to, because I think I'll get my point across better in an "informal" matter. So, anyway- I don't really know how to respond to this quote, the actual information about prime numbers and life is, I don't know, obvious. I don't want to write about that. I find it interesting, however, that the "author" uses the term "I think" a lot. He states a fact or an opinion and tells the reader why he has that opinion or what he thinks about said fact. Its almost like he doesn't want the reader to mistake any of the information he gives us, he wants us to know why he does everything. Everything the "author" does is explained in detail, its other people who are left a mystery. Maybe other people are like prime numbers...

First post, I swear, they won't all be like this

First post. My friend is freaking out because Some guy jumped in the river and he disapeared under a wave when the ambulance showed up. When I tried to look for Information on the news, I found out that, instead of talking about some actual news, they talked about how some government who-ever is trying to get these new, ANTI CONCUSSION football helmets to all the schools in New York. I'm gonna switch my focus here to me angry about the fact that they want to give MORE money to sports. I swear if Music and Art get cut cause this bull passes I'm gonna throw a fit.