Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild was one of the best movies I've seen in a while. I enjoyed the movie in general but there were a few lines that I loved. One of my favorites was "The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted." I suppose I enjoyed the movie so much because of how wise and fearless Hushpuppy was. It was amazing that at 6 years old she was able to see the world in one big picture. She knew there was so much more to the universe then her. She was able to comprehend so many things. A few lines that got to me were "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces. I see that I'm a little piece of a big, big universe", and"All the time, everywhere, everything's hearts are beating and squirting and talking to each other in ways I can't understand. Most of the time they probably be saying, 'I'm hungry or I gotta poop' or sometimes they be talking in codes." Hushpuppy was also fearless due to the way her father raised her. I found their relationship to be very interesting. Wink, her father, wanted her to grow up to be strong so she could take care of her self and handle anything that came in her way. He's always rough with her but there is a touch of gentleness because he does love her. My favorite quote from wink was "My only purpose in life is to teach her how to make it," because it sums up all his intentions with the things he does, like when he tells her not to cry or when he has her open up the crab by "beasting" it (opening it up with her hands and eating it like a beast would). In the movie we see Hushpuppy act the way her father told her to. She refuses to leave the Bathtub and when she'd forced to she comes back anyway. She knows what people say about the Bathtub but she doesn't care. She then says "They think we're all gonna drown down here. But we ain't going nowhere", "One day, the storm's gonna blow, the ground's gonna sink and the water's gonna rise up so high ain't gonna be no Bathtub, just a whole bunch of water… But me and my daddy, we stay right here. We is who the earth is for."  and "Everybody loses the thing that made them. It's even how it's supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don't run." Hushpuppy is one of those brave men. When the aurochs approached her she wasn't scared, she looked them straight in the eye because she knew that " Strong animals know when your hearts are weak," and she wasn't weak. Another reason I loved Hushpuppy was because she had such big dreams and aspirations and plans of making a name for herself. She says a few times in the movie that "In a million years when kids go to school, they're gonna know, there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." Overall, I loved the movie and it's ability to make the way of life in the bathtub seem normal, at one point I found myself not wanted to see them leave either.
I think this movie fits into our humanity unit because it shows some important traits we have as humans. The movie shows that we are able to solve problems. When the Bathtub floods, they find a way to survive despite the challenges. It also shows we have empathy.It shows a free way of living. They didn't have modern technology, they didn't live in a big city,they had to find their own food not buy it and basically they lived a simple life. They couldn't buy food from a grocery store they had to fish for it themselves. Lastly, it showed us that there are different ways of living and thinking but even with these differences we still have the same characteristics that make us human.

Passion Project Update & Reflection

We are now halfway through our passion projects and I can honestly say I haven't gotten much done. I had lost track of how little time I have. My progress is small. I have read "Half of the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide" by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn and I have taken notes on what I want to include in my presentation. I also started my second book two  weeks ago called The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedman. It has taken me 6 passion days along with multiple 30 minute reading sessions before bed to finish Half the Sky. I started my second book on the 7th passion day but haven't gotten far in it.I've been too busy with school work to try to read but my laziness/ procrastination has paid its dues as well. I spent the last passion day finishing my Myers-Brigg blog post so I lost some time there too. With only 8 passion days left and I still need to finish The Feminine Mystique and my third book on women's history. My plan for the rest of the project is to read more at home. I will try to dedicate more of my free time to reading so I can finish both books. In addition, I will keep my reading at home now instead of during class time. During these next 8 passion days, starting tomorrow, I will begin the research part of my project like where feminism first began and how it's grown. Also, during these days I will construct a poll to give to the class and to others. Lastly, I will begin to start/build my prezi and add information on as I go. I might have to do some work at home but if I stay on schedule I think I'll be able to include everything I want into my project.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

After taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), I uncovered that I was an INFJ. 

The "I" stands for Introversion meaning that " I often prefer doing things alone or with one or two people I feel comfortable with. I take time to reflect so that I have a clear idea of what I’ll be doing when I decide to act. Ideas are almost solid things for me. Sometimes I like the idea of something better than the real thing." 

The "N" stands for Intuition meaning that "I would rather learn by thinking a problem through than by hands-on experience. I’m interested in new things and what might be possible, so that I think more about the future than the past", "I am interested in doing things that are new and different", and I like to see the big picture, then to find out the facts."

The "F" stands for Feeling meaning that "I believe I can make the best decisions by weighing what people care about and the points-of-view of persons involved in a situation. I am concerned with values and what is the best for the people involved. I like to do whatever will establish or maintain harmony. In my relationships, I appear caring, warm, and tactful."

The "J" stands for Judging meaning that I use my decision-making (Judging) preference (whether it is Thinking or Feeling) in my outer life. To others, I seem to prefer a planned or orderly way of life, like to have things settled and organized, feel more comfortable when decisions are made, and like to bring life under control as much as possible.Since this pair only describes what I prefer in the outer world, I may, inside, feel flexible and open to new information (which I am).Do not confuse Judging with judgmental, in its negative sense about people and events. They are not related."

After this test I became more aware of certain things I do. Sometimes you don't realize the kinds of things you do until it's pointed out. If I was asked to describe my personality the first thing I would think to say wouldn't be that I prefer to look at the big picture then find out the facts, but if asked I would agree. I realized that those certain things I do lead me to think differently than others. The most important thing I learned after taking this test was that there is no one set way of thinking. Everyone sees things differently and most will probably think differently than me. 

According to this test, there are at least 16 different personalities. But that's just a rounding. There are always going to be people who break the mold, even if its just a little bit. What makes us human could be our differences in the way we think. There are at least 16 ways of thinking, 16 different curiosities, and billions of ways of fulfilling our curiosity. We are human because we ask questions, we find answers, we go on journeys, we make discoveries, we are always solving problems, we are always improving all because we all think differently and we are all curious. 

Joyas Voladras

Our hearts are probably our most important muscle/organ. They're only about the size of a fist but they pump blood through our bodies 24/7, 365 days of every year only ever stopping when we die. That's a lot of work. In the essay Joyas Voladras we learn about many hearts including the engine of a heart trapped inside the hummingbird. The hummingbird is a magnificent creature. Their hearts beat 10 times a second (while normal human hearts beat a mere 1-3 per second). Not only does the hummingbirds heart beat almost 10 times faster than ours but "a hummingbird's heart is only the size of a pencil eraser." With a heart like that it's no surprise that hummingbird's don't live to be a 100 years old. Hummingbirds live a fast ambitious life and "The price of their ambition is a life closer to death." It is said that "Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old." This was one of my favorite quotes in the essay because it makes you think. I believe that Brian Doyle was trying to get the readers to think about is how they spend their 2 billion beats. The tortoise and the hummingbird are obviously two different extremes and I don't think that we are meant to be like either one. We as humans are given the happy medium in this situation. Although we don't live to be as old as a tortoise we are given more time than just 2 lousy years. Hummingbirds may live a fast life but it's a bit of a meaningless life. When reading and re-reading this quote I initially thought of a video we saw last week in class. In the video, Neil Pasricha discusses his 3 A's of Awesome: Attitude, Awareness, and Authenticity. Basically, he talks about how it's important that we live the little time we have here on Earth with a positive attitude, that we are aware of all the awesome things, especially during dark times, and that more importantly we have authenticity, and no matter what we stay true to ourselves. I believe Brian left us with a similar message. He gets you thinking about those 2 billion heart beats. In the last paragraph of his essay, Doyle talks about how "all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can “but even though we are torn, and even though we build walls we can't stop being aware of things good or bad. Our walls topple " in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children." With this in mind, the answer to our question “What does it mean to be human " becomes clear; we are not humans because we have hearts and organs, we are human because of how we live. "So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment." As humans we are aware of many things. We know when to build our walls up, we remember the pain but at the same time we remember the good. We can't help being aware, and we can't help that our walls fall down. We are curious beings with the need to share with others. We have empathy. All these qualities effect how we live, and all these qualities are what make us human.

What does it mean to be human?

I believe that every person is a human. We all have skin and organs and ears and arms and legs, etc. And although some people are missing a few pieces we are still the same. We all have a heart beat and a brain even though some work better than others.  We all eat, drink and sleep to survive. Humans are people who are created by a mother and father. The main factor, I believe, that makes us human is that we have consciousness. Humans are aware of their surroundings and their actions, they know right from wrong, they experience life, and they can communicate with one another.

My Second Google 20% Project

For my second Google 20% project I plan on working around the topic of travel. I've always been mesmerized by the world’s beauty (well maybe not always I’m pretty sure as a child all I wanted was food and toys). I plan on finding and researching some the most remarkable places on Earth there is to visit. An obstacle I know I will face from the start is the three places I want to research. I know I could go the easy way and say places like London and Fiji but I've been thinking a lot about risks. When asked to pick a topic for this Google 20% project, we were told to take risks. I’m not quite sure how to make this risky but for now all I know is that I want to find hidden places, the kind of places that don’t show up on your world travel calendar. I want to make this project great and different. I’m just not so sure on how to do that yet.

Terri Schiavo Case Study Conclusion

For information on background, legal cases, etc. about Terri Schaivo click here.

To wrap-up our bioethics unit, we've been given the question: Do you believe that the decision to disconnect Terri Schiavo from life-support was justified? 

I had to think about this question a lot and I've changed my mind a few times. There's a lot to consider when having to decide on whether someone lives or not. If I were asked this question say last week, I probably would have answered straight away, NO. I believed, at the time, that Terri had just as much of a right to live as I did, and I still do, but I don't think it was completely wrong for them to pull the plug. There are many articles out there on this case where you can find information on how active Terri was all those years. (look here) At one point in time she was doing okay, she could react, open her eyes, and she still had a personality(check out this article by Attorney Barbara Weller). Because of this, I believed that Terri should stay on life-support. I thought through the perspective of "she could still get better." But, the truth is that Terri was said to be in a persistent vegetative state(PVS) and she would most likely not improve. I had to take a step back from my initial beliefs and look at the big picture. I thought of all the people that were being negatively effected by Terri staying alive. A lot of people, especially her family, were suffering. So, yes, I believe it was justified to pull the plug on Terri Schiavo. It had been 15 years and she hadn't had any major break-troughs. Terri herself probably wasn't all that happy either. Of course she had her family but her family had lives too, they had things to do and couldn't be with her 24/7. So Terri for the majority of the day was stuck in a hospitable bed with nothing to do but look forward to a possible visit from her parents. I think it was best for everyone that Terri be disconnected from life-support. My only wish would have been to do it in a more humane way. For 14 days Terri starved to death. That could have clearly been avoided.

QUALITY OF LIFE: What is in Terri Schiavo’s best interest? Is her life still worth living? What makes life meaningful?

I thought a lot about these specific questions when making my final decision. I believe it was in Terri's best interest to disconnect the life support. Life is always worth living, there is always hope and love and good things to look forward to in any kind of situation. But in Terri's case, there's no much hope left. Life is worth living if you can make it meaningful. There wasn't much Terri could do and its painful to think she was stuck in a tiny room  in her bed for so long. Yes, it was good that they tried therapy but they didn't accomplish anything. She was still in the same state. After 15 years of agonizing boredom  it seems almost just as inhumane to have kept her alive as it was to let her starve to death for 14 days  Terri didn't have much of a life for those 15 years. She was more stuck in a moment than alive. And she wouldn't have been able to escape that moment. Everyday was pretty much the same. The routine soon became meaningless. I believe what makes life meaningful is the ability to live it. To be able to do what you want and to think on your own. To be able to express yourself and accept the ways others express themselves too. IN this case, Terri would have been able to do much with her life but sleep and eat and even to do that she needed help. Overall, it was in her best interest to be disconnected from life support because there wasn't much of her life left to be worth living for. She wasn't able to make her life meaningful and if you can bring meaning into your life, then what is there for you to do?

The DNA Dilemma: A Test That Could Change Your Life

"The problem with genome sequencing is that everyone could have incidental findings."

Recently in class we read the Time's article "The DNA Dilemma: A Test That Could Change Your Life."  It's very interesting to read articles like these and to hear about new technologies. Most people probably don't know about genome sequencing and how much we can tell from  them. In case your one of those people, genome sequencing gives doctors the ability to read your genes and see "down to every last typo on a chromosome". The article describes the procedure as : "...lab technicians need less than a teaspoon of blood, which is chemically treated to burst open the cells so the DNA inside them can be collected. Those microscopic strands are then fed into sophisticated machines that read each of the 3 million bits of information, called base pairs, that make up a persons genetic alphabet. Computers scan the data for the equivalent of spelling mistakes. Some mistakes cause disease; others don't."  Along with the technology to discover these things comes the tricky questions like : Should doctors tell patients everything they learn, even about the risk of diseases for which there are not yet cures? and Should parents tell their children what might await them as adults?
The article brings up the results of a study where parents were asked if they would want to know everything that's wrong with their child and shockingly, "nearly all the parents said they would want to know about every disease risk, even if there's no treatment available." Unlike the parents, the group of bioethicists, lab directors, geneticists,  pediatricians and genetic counselors felt the opposite. The majority of them believed only results that could be immediately acted on should be shared with families; personally, I would have to agree. If I was a doctor, I wouldn't tell my patient or the parents anything that doesn't affect them now. Part of my beliefs is that I believe in living in the present and worrying about what matters now. The future is a big issue in genome sequencing. Its the doctors actions of whether to tell or not that affect the child's future. For example, the results could show that a child has the possibility of getting a disease as an adult. Most people right away would want to know what disease it is, but its only a possibility. The disease hasn't formed yet and they don't know for sure that it will. Accidental findings like things aren't 100% correct. Tom Murray has an interesting opinion on this, he said : "Great, we can sequence the genome of a fetus. What the hell does it tell us? Much less than most people probably believe. Probabilities are not the same as guarantees." I wouldn't want to know about anything I might get in the future and even as a parent I wouldn't want to know if it was my child. The times article features a story about a woman named Laurie Hunter who had her children sequenced. She talks about waiting for the results of her own genome sequencing when she says "Sometimes what you don't know is easier. I feel completely overwhelmed with information. Now it just feels like a waiting game." The problem with finding out everything is that once you know there's not much you can do, not every disease has clear instructions on how to prevent it. People argue that knowing is overall beneficial because later in life there may be a cure to the disease but you have to keep in mind that things change. The typo may not affect you/your child after all, anything could happen, and if you're told you might loose all your memory at age 50 you'll live your whole life with that in the back of your mind. Imagine telling a child they could develop cancer as a young adult, that child will have that weighing them down. 
In conclusion, we may have more technology than what is good for us. Its great that you could stop a child from getting diabetes but there's always uncharted territory " and patients entering this territory with imperfect maps need to reckon with the odds of getting lost."

Reflections and Resolution 2012

Reflect: I hadn't really thought about the past year and resolutions when New Year's came around. I guess I'm not huge on the thought of having to write 13 instead of 12 on all my papers(that's going to take some getting used to). I started to think back to the beginning of 2012, and it crossed my mind that the year started way before the first day of high school(which for me is my own personal New Years). I realized the start of 2012 was when I was halfway through 8th grade. It seems like ages since I've walked those halls and attended Rogate. Since then, I supposed I've learned more about myself. I've discovered that I'm a huge procrastinator and that I spent (still do) too much time on the computer rather than outside. I also have seen a change in what I like. For instance, for a good chunk of the last half of 2012 I began to get into books again. I've made some new friends, lost some old. Most importantly, I've started to look at the world through different perspectives. Realizing there's more to life than just the small town of Mansfield. I've spent hours thinking about my future and others and the little things in life that make it so much better. Right now your reading my post but somewhere across the world, great things are happening. I've learned this year that bad things happen(obviously) but we should always focus on the good. Like I may be regretting procrastinating right now because its like 10:30 and I still have tons of homework to do but somewhere out there a newborn is crying and at the same time a couple is breaking up  while another is confessing their love. Its important not to get to caught up in the bad because there's always good . 

Rebuff: I'm not one that believes in New Years resolutions. I'm glad for the people who do accomplish there goals but most people just leave empty promises. I think that if you have a goal you want to accomplish you should start right away. I feel as though people wait until the New Year to start and then don't follow through. This reminded me of a quote I read from Looking for Alaska "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth  thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present." I feel like people hope for changes in their lives because they want to be happier, but they never take the first step. They don't act on it so its just stuck as a daydream rather than an actual resolution. But today, like everyday, is the perfect day to do something great. So, Happy New Years! Now go do something to make this year better than the last.