Nail Polish on a New Carpet

Author's Note- This is my scene analysis for the novel Speak.  I decided to analyze a scene that helps us discover some interesting things about Heather and Melinda.

One of the scenes that we can truly learn about Heather in is the nail polish scene.  A bottle of nail polish spills on her white carpet in her room.  Not that much of a big deal, you would think, right?  To a normal person it wouldn't be.  But Heather's not exactly something I'd call normal.  As soon as it's spilled, she throws herself on her bed and starts sobbing.  Not just crying- full on sobbing.  And when Melinda tries to help by cleaning it up and ends up making it worse, Heather becomes inconsolable.  Although it might seem like just your average teenage temper tantrum, it serves a greater purpose than that.  It's actually symbolism.  The clean, white carpet represents her reputation.  She's got a fresh start, a clean slate.  She's obviously very excited about this.  Nobody knows about her.  No one knows about the things she may or may not have done at her past school.  She can make a brand new fist impression on everybody.   When the nail polish stains the carpet, it symbolizes a stain on her reputation.  It reminds her of her past mistakes, and the mistakes she most likely will make at this school.  When Melinda tries to help fix it, the negative mark on her reputation only gets worse, kind of like when Melinda tries to help her with the Martha projects she was given, but only ruins centerpieces and pillows instead.  Melinda becomes the nail polish on Heather's brand new carpet.  She becomes the problem, rather than solution, in Heather's social life.

There's an Elephant in the Room

Author's Note- This is my Speak essay.   I wrote it about speaking up.  How Melinda won't because she's afraid of the consequences (both positive and negative) of speaking up.  I included a quote from a poem by Terry Kettering called "Elephant in the Room" to help explain my thoughts, and  compare it to Melinda's predicament.

Everything we say has a consequence.  For every cause, an effect.  Sometimes, those consequences are small.  When you get your food from the cafeteria, if you don't say "please" or "thank you", or at least smile politely, the chef might give you the soggy, floppy chicken nuggets from the bottom of the pile instead of the crispy, fresh ones sitting at the top.  But some things you say can have quite severe consequences.  Sometimes, when speaking up, the outcome will be either really fantastic or really destructive, depending on how your peers take it.  Fourteen-year old Melinda Sordino was afraid of the latter, which is one of the countless reasons why she wouldn't speak up about the traumatizing event that caused her to burrow into a hole and hide, practically mute.

Melinda was so traumatized that she wouldn't speak up -- she was afraid of the consequences, afraid of saying the wrong thing.  She's afraid of talking about That Night, wouldn't speak to anybody about it, because she didn't know how.  She thought no one would listen.  Because that would've made it seem even more real, she's afraid of even verbalizing it..  One of the main reasons she's so afraid of this is because she'd seen it happen.  Almost every time someone in this book spoke up, they were punished.  She had a huge issue, but she just wouldn't talk about it. So similar to Melinda's problem is Terry Kettering's in her poem An Elephant in the Room.

There’s an elephant in the room.

It is large and squatting,

so it is hard to get around it.

Yet we squeeze by with,

“How are you?” and, “I’m fine,”

and a thousand other forms of trivial chatter.

We talk about the weather;

we talk about work;

we talk about everything else—

except the elephant in the room.

There’s an elephant in the room.

We all know it is there.

We are thinking about the elephant

as we talk together.

It is constantly on our minds.

For, you see, it is a very big elephant.

It has hurt us all, but we do not talk about

the elephant in the room.

This related to Melinda because she had an elephant in her room, too.  Andy Evans.   Every girl who's ever dated him, or had been friends with someone who dated him, knew how much of a terrible, perverted person he really was.  In fact, on the walls of the stalls in the girl's bathroom of Melinda's school, there's a list of reasons why he's so horrible, what he's done, and who else just outright hates him.  Melinda thought she has no one, and that's almost true.  She didn't have Heather or her parents to confide in, that's for sure.  But she had these bathroom stall door people who know how disgusting Andy is all around her.  She had Mr. Freeman.  Ivy even tried to reach out to her a few times.  She wasn't alone.  If she started to realize this sooner, maybe she could've saved herself a ton of trouble in the end. 

But alas, she was still too afraid to speak up.

More Alike Than You'd Think...

 Author's Note- This is my Compare and Contrast essay for Fahrenheit 451.  I decided to compare Montag, the protagonist of the story, to Lev, one of the main characters of Unwind by Neal Shusterman.  I tried to work more on my analyzing skills and syntactical patterns.  Comments are appreciated!

What if everything you knew, everything you've ever believed, turned out to be untrue?  What if one day, you find out that you've been raised on lies?  What if everything you were ever taught, everything you ever did was wrong?  Would you be shocked?  Angry?  Horrified?  These and millions of other emotions coursed through the minds of Levi "Lev" Jedediah Calder and Guy Montag when they came to that mind-blowing realization.  Although you may think that a grown man who's occupation requires him to burn books and a 13-year-old kid who must sacrifice himself "for the church" would have nothing in common, Lev and Montag would be sure to prove you wrong.

In both of these popular and thought-provoking dystopian novels, the characters live in a horrible and barbaric society, but neither recognize how violent and terrible it really is until something or someone comes along and changes their mind.  In the novel Fahrenheit 451, the two main factors that open Montag's eyes to the vulgarity of his world are a teenage girl with stories from the past and an active mind full of dangerous thoughts, and a woman who chooses rather to die with her books than live without them.  In Unwind, the man that Lev has looked up to and had unwavering faith in his entire life tells him to run away from everything he's ever known, rather than willingly let himself be sacrificed, as he's been taught to do since the day he was born.

Another similarity between Lev and Montag is that in both books, they flee from a government trying to catch them.  The government was after Lev because he was scheduled to be unwound as a tithe, and he got away.  The reason they tried to pursue Montag was because he framed and killed two different coworkers, hid books, and overall, just started thinking, instead of mindlessly droning on.

The main commonality that unifies these two characters, though, is that they were both a part of something they thought to be the right thing, when in truth, they were unknowingly committing something terrible.  Montag, for example, was a fireman.  He burned books for a living.  He thought he was doing the people whose books he burned a favor.  He thought he was riding them of terrible, confusing things that deserved to be destroyed.  But after trying reading out for the first time himself, he finds himself drawn into a beautiful, horrible world he never even knew existed.  He discovers the magic of books, and why they're so important.  In Unwind, Lev is a tithe.  His family is a highly devoted Christian family, and they believe that 10% goes to the church.  Their beliefs go so far that they had exactly ten children, and they're going to sacrifice their tenth child to be unwound "for the church".  Lev was raised believing that this was a huge honor.  They threw huge parties for him, praising him, and acting so, unimaginably proud of him.  They showered him in gifts, they told him it was his destiny, and he believed it was the right thing.  It took his Pastor, along with the help of Connor and Risa, to show him how barbaric and disgusting it really was.

Although they have tons of similarities, the two characters also have their differences.  Religion is a huge part of Lev's life.  It’s the reason he was slated to become unwound.  It's the reason he begins to question everything he ever learned.  It's all he grew up with- he and his family worshipped God with all their heart and soul.  Meanwhile, religion seems to be an absent aspect in Montag's life, aside from a few bible quotes mentioned here and there throughout the book.

Another difference that sets the characters apart is their ignorance in the beginning of each novel.  They are both ignorant, but in different ways.  Montag is completely ignorant to how the government is controlling them.  He's unaware of the situation in any town but his own, and even unaware of the tragic mental state his wife is in.  He's ignorant because he doesn't understand life, nor does he want to, until a young girl comes and shows him how to live.  Lev's ignorance is shown more through the way he acts towards others.  In the beginning of the book, he genuinely believes that being a tithe makes him much more important than everyone else- his classmates, his siblings, even some of his teachers.  It gives him a sense of higher being.  He thinks his destiny is greater than theirs.  His ignorance is in the fact that he feels he's better than everyone else and doesn't need to know them to know he's superior.

A key divider between the two characters is their impulses and how they control them.  Lev's character is sort of clever, almost conniving, once placed in life or death situations.  He always thinks before speaking and is always plotting ahead.  He's very careful and calculating.  Meanwhile, Montag often times lets his impulse take control, and seldom has an idea of what the next step is.  He loses his temper easily- a prime example of this would be when he's talking with Mildred and her "friends".  The ones who cart their children of to boarding school and plop them in front of the TV for the three days a month they get back.  He really loses his composure when he reads that poem to them and snaps at that horrid lady.

These two characters are quite different.  One acts on his thoughts immediately, throwing caution to the wind, while one carefully plans everything out.  One's life was greatly influenced by God, while the other was barely introduced to the idea of Christianity.  But both show determination, curiosity, and both lived in a terrible place, but had no idea how violent things really were.  These characters are a lot more similar than you'd think, and each of them are able to transform into better people by the end of their separate novels.

Temptation

Author's Note- This is my essay for Life As We Knew It.  We were supposed to take a theme from our group novel and write an essay on that theme.  I kept rewriting this and going over it- I'm not quite sure if I like it or not, still.  I've never written anything like this, so it feels really weird, and I ended up changing my theme three times.  I tried to work on making my introduction more hook-like. 

Hunger. It gnaws at your stomach.  The pain is slow and sharp-- it eats at your insides, gradually, but definitively.  Isolation.  Even worse than hunger.  It eats at your brain, slowly sucking all the sanity from your mind.  Fear.  It starts as a seed, a rumor or superstition planted in your head.  It sneakily spreads throughout your body, racing through your blood and crawling down your spine, causing sweat to cover your brow and paranoia to fill your head, as if something could be lurking around the corner any second.  When you're trying to survive with little food or communication and no knowledge of what's lurking around the corner, all of these things course through your body and mind.  They affect your decisions-- they drive you to insanity.  Things like your beliefs, your friends, or even your family are no longer near as important to you as before.  You will be tempted to do things that hurt them to get what you need.  Sometimes, the temptation will be too strong.  When faced with the chance that our lives could end at any moment, and with others dropping like flies around us, we will be tempted to things to aid our survival without regard to others.

Temptation goes back all the way to the first story of the bible, with Adam and Eve.  The devil, disguised as a slithering snake, comes to Eve and crafts his conniving words, planting them in her head, telling her that eating that delicious-looking apple is totally fine, no matter what God says.  He tempts her to disobey God.  Even though this isn't a situation where lives are at stake, it's still an important lesson.

In the bible story "Tempted in the Wilderness", Satan brought Jesus out into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights with no food, water, or shelter.  Satan tempted Him with these necessities.  He whispers lies into Jesus' ears, trying to lead him away from God.  But Jesus will have none of it.  Jesus knew that worshiping the devil, or even entertaining the devil's thoughts, could only lead to harm.  But still, the devil tried to tempt Jesus.  He even quotes the bible to support his case!  If the devil can cite the Scriptures for his purpose, it can't be harmful, can it?  It's has to be right, doesn't it?  Of course it's not right!  He's just trying to convince Jesus by misusing God's words.  The Nazis quoted the bible to support their case while disposing of "filthy Jews".  That doesn't make them right for doing it.

The theme of temptation in dire situations can also easily be related to the bestselling series Gone by Michael Grant.  This series is about a small town in California called Perdido Beach.  One day, an unbreakable dome, later named The Barrier, forms around the entire town, twenty miles in diameter.  But that's not the only problem…anyone over the age of fifteen that was living in the area that The Barrier now surrounds has also disappeared, just like that, and the second anyone turns fifteen, they disappear as well.  And of course, since there's this unbreakable barrier around the town, there's no way to import food.  But nobody realizes this for the first couple weeks, and without moms and around to tell them what they can and can't eat, naturally, everybody pigs out.  All the frozen hot dogs and pizzas, along with cookies and chips, immediately run out at the grocery store.  And with people too focused on eating unhealthy and non-perishable items, all the healthy, perishable foods, like lean meats, fruits and veggies, go bad right away.  So before they  know it, they have a major food situation on their hands.  People step up and form a rationing system as soon as they realize that the barrier might never disappear and all they're stuck with is whatever food they have left inside of it, but not many of the kids like it, and soon, armed guards are required at the grocery store.  Instead of people caring about their neighbors and friends, they start to fend for themselves, doing whatever it takes for that extra can of soup or nibble or beef jerky.  Some even turn to cannibalism to satisfy their empty stomachs.

And of course, even with parents, kids and teenagers form cliques and groups, where they exclude others for what they wear, their weight or their race, or even their intelligence level.  Now, with the parents gone and no one to guide them, the cliques go to the extreme.  One clique in particular, though.  This clique gets involved in many evil things that could destroy the entire town.  But these people also have a lot of power and charisma.  They can easily tempt people into joining them with not only their amount of influence, but their indifference to death and the pleasure they find in violence. 

But that's not the only temptation going on at Perdido Beach.  Soon, everyone discovers that disappearing at the age of fifteen is not something that just happens.  It's a choice.   At the exact moment fifteen years after their birth, time freezes for everyone except that one person.  They're faced with someone-or something.  He (or it) tries to convince them to leave.  It tells them that their family is waiting on the other side, that they can see them only if they choose to leave.  It tempts them to leave this hell, where kids kill and eat pets and even other kids, where they run rampant and free with guns, where marijuana and scotch are traded to eight year-olds.  It is, of course, lying.  Their parents aren't waiting for them on the other side, and neither is that normal world they once knew.  And the children know this is true.  But they're so desperate to get away that they don't care.  They go anyway.

Another book where this theme is prominent is Life of Pi.  Piscine Patel is a vegetarian boy who has a deep connection with religion.  He's not only Hindu, but Christian and Muslim as well, and he follows the three religions with equal devotion.  But when he's thrust into a lifeboat with a tiger, where his survival is affected deeply by his beliefs, he has to chose between religion and survival.  He is tempted to kill the most sacred animal of his religion just to fill his empty stomach.  He lets temptation take over and abandons his beliefs on everything from turtles to vegetarianism to murder to survive.  He throws away  all that he believes in so he can live another day. 

This is also the case in the popular novel Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer.  Miranda must resist the temptation to gorge herself on all the food her family's saved up, even when she feels like she has no strength left in her entire body.  She has to resist the temptation to indulge so that her family has enough to eat, even though she's slowly dying from hunger.  Miranda has to resist the temptation of guzzling a bottle of water when her throat feels like sandpaper, when it's dry as a desert.  She has to resist the temptation of using more firewood than her mother permits so that she can have one night where she doesn't feel like her toes are on the verge of falling off.  The poor girl even has to resist the urge to kill her poor cat named Horton for food. 

Temptation is a very powerful thing, especially when your survival may depend on whether or not you indulge in that temptation.  Sometimes, you have to choose between your beliefs and survival.  Sometimes, you have to choose between family and survival.  Sometimes, you just have to put faith in whatever higher power you believe in that you can pull through, and let them guide you and help you resist the devil's temptation, no matter how magnificent his lies may sound.  Even though we are tempted to make decisions that will aid only ourselves and not our family and friends, we need to refrain from giving into it.

Books: Are They Worth It?

Author's Note- This is a piece I wrote based off a passage from Fahrenheit 451.  I had to find the purpose, meaning, and tone of the passage, and I tried to analyze it without over-thinking it, like I usually do.

Quote:

"Oh, you were scared silly," said Beatty.  "for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!  What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives." pg. 107

In this passage, Beatty is trying to frighten Montag, to disturb him and shock him.  He uses metaphors and personification to confuse him, and to chase away all of his dangerous curiosity and hazardous fascination with stories and books.  He tries to scare Montag back into conformity.  The meaning of this is that books, although mesmerizing and enchanting, can also turn on you.  They muddle your brain and mess with your head.  And other people can use books, too, by quoting them in such a way that frustrates you.  They make you question your thoughts and motives, or the way you analyzed a certain paragraph.  And when you over-think the passage, you get even more confused.  The tone of this passage is triumphant and a bit boastful, because Beatty knows that he's got Montag lost, trying to figure out what's going on and trying to find out how to respond without getting into deeper trouble than he's already in.  Beatty wants Montag to think that books aren't worth all the confusion.

A Christmas Carol Quote

Author's Note- This is a piece I wrote for the assignment for our reading book, A Christmas Carol.  We have to take a quote from the book and analyze its tone, purpose, and meaning in the book.  The quote I selected is below.

I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. (pg. 21)

The meaning of this quote is that for all the bad deeds Marley's done, all the selfishness and greed he's had built up.  A link was added to the chain he's now forced to wear for every time he ignored the beggars on the street, declined the charity workers and homeless children.  This quote is an essential piece of the book A Christmas Carol.  Not only does it tell us why Marley is so miserable (and chained), but it also gives Scrooge an idea of what his future is going to be unless he makes some serious changes in his life choices.  When Marley was alive, him and Scrooge were both bitter, bitter people.  Both horrid and alone, greedy and self-serving.  After Marley's passing, Scrooge becomes even more bitter.  Scrooge has exactly seven more years of bitterness and penny-pinching, seven more years saying "Bah, humbug!" than Marley did.  His future would be even worse than Marley's. 

Perspective

 

Author's Note- This is my response to the following assignment for my group reading book, Life As We Knew It. 

Assignment #2: Point of View

Identify the point of view in LAWKI and discuss how that point of view affects the reader's interpretation of the novel's events. Use specific scenes and examples to support your ideas. For an advanced score, determine how the story would be different if told from another point of view. Due December 7.

I struggled a lot with this assignment...it doesn't feel quite right to me.  Any advice/pointers?

In the apocalyptic, engaging novel Life As We Knew It, the point of view is written through the diary entries of 15 year-old Miranda, a normal teen thrust into a world full of death, destruction, hunger, and isolation.  The fact that a fifteen year old is narrating the story can easily be an advantage or disadvantage to the reader.   When reading this story from a teen's perspective, you get almost the whole picture, but not quite.  She is under no circumstances ever allowed to go into the pantry for most of the middle of the book.  Their mother always gets the cans out from the pantry, and she won't allow anyone in.  Reading in Miranda's point of view obstructs your knowledge of the food situation, as well as the condition of the outside world, as she's not allowed to waste batteries by listening to the radio like her mother does.  

Yet, her perspective still gives us an advantage.  At least we're not reading from ten year-old Johnny's point of view, who believes this horrid nightmare is some sort of game that he's playing that will all end soon.  It takes him weeks to realize that Miranda and Matt had stopped eating breakfast and lunch every other day to conserve food, or the fact that his mother had stopped eating almost entirely.  His young, naïve mind has yet to grasp the magnitude of this catastrophic disaster.

If, perhaps, the mother narrated this story, I have a feeling it would be much, much darker, the reason being that she sees what's happening a lot more clearly than a teen would, and she can assess the situation better.  She's slowly starving herself to death to save her kids.  She knows how low the food supply is, and learns about new disasters happening around the world daily from the radio.  She and Matt, the college-age brother, would understand how much more serious the situation is than Miranda and John, who are still on the drawn-out trek through adolescence.