Flawless**

I have many different flaws and made many mistakes , as most people would say, but I don’t want this to be an absurdly long post so here goes a little list.

1. The first mistake I’d ever made that was big enough for me to notice something about myself, was freshmen year in high school. I had spent most of my time trying to find a boyfriend and less time on my grades. I was so desperate that I cringe just thinking about some of the stuff I did to get noticed by a boy. Everyone around me seemed to have one and it made me hopelessly jealous and so I though if I acted differently I would get a boyfriend like everyone else. my grades had started to drop from my normal all A’s to mainly B’s and I was annoying everyone, including myself. It had taken one of my friends to get pregnant for me to realize that I didn’t want to turn out like a typical “follower” girl. I started to not worry about the people around me and I got my grades up again before spring finals that year. I had closed out that year on a more confident note because I realized that I didn’t need to go chasing anything but good grades in high school.

2. I am short. I know not many people see this as a flaw but it frustrates me that people have to look down on me all the time. I know I’m not that short- I am 5’1″- but in my mind I am. My mother is tall and father is short and that doesn’t bother them but I kind of wish I was a little taller. It frustrates me because in certain closes I get mistaken for a kid sometimes. It does feel good to get hugs though. As weird as that sounds, when people come up to me to hug me it doesn’t take them much to give me a good old bear hug sometimes.

3. I have a fear of being misunderstood. This is more of a flaw because I always have this feeling that people could be offended by what I say and not take it the way that I mean for it to. Because of this I have a constant need to talk sometimes because I feel like someone does not see something the way I do until I tell them exactly what I know or what I do not know. Some people might think that because I have this fear I think a lot about the things I say, but they are actually far from the truth. I say the first thing out of my mouth most of the time because it is the honest truth at the time and it comes out sounding too harsh or too weird and I have to jump up and explain what I mean to say. Sometimes I just don’t talk because I am trying to make an effort to not let my fear take over, but when I am quiet people ask what is wrong with me and that sets me off to having to explain myself again and it is just a never ending cycle.

There are many more things but there are some things that the internet should not know about a person. I guess the point of me writing this was to say that everyone is imperfect and because of that we are all unique in our own quirky way. Flawless**

The Scarlet Letter: Adultery

Oh Hawthorn, you were cool until I found out you were the kind of author who decides to have a 42 PAGE INTRODUCTION TO A BOOK BEFORE THE 1ST CHAPTER.
But that’s not the point of today’s message.
Assuming you have read The Scarlet Letter (or at least have a small view of what the A means from Easy A the movie) then you would come to the conclusion that many would see Hester, the main chick, as a common whore.
Gasp and rant about the word all you want, but that’s what everyone basically thought that she was and I’m not about to beat around the bush trying to find a “fluffier” word to describe it so there.
Anyway.
Hester committed adultery, with a man named Dimmesdale and had a child, named Pearl, as the result. Now, the husband, Roger, is basically a crazy jealous guy who sees the opportunity to harass Dimmesdale because his wife cheated with him.
Seems pretty cut and dry: woman married old dude, old dude is crazy, woman has affair with younger dude, older dude finds out and gets mad, and thus- chaos occurs.
Hawthorne himself, however, never really clarified if he supported Hester or not.
Sure he states that she did commit adultery, but the relationship between Hester and Dimmesdale is romantic and tragic. Like at the end when Dimmesdale is overtaken by his conflict with his sin and his love for God, he says, ” He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast!” (The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter).
I honestly can’t think of an obvious moment when Hawthorne didn’t support Hester other then the strong feelings of the people who didn’t accept her.
Nothing much to be said other than I can see how this because such a diverse and interesting book. Good job Hawthorne.
–A

Childhood

Ahhhh… Childhood. The old days when the Three Little Pigs lost all their houses to the Big Bad Wolf, or when Glodie Locks broke into a house to care to her own needs with the Three Bears’ stuff.

Despite my knowledge of children’s stories, I’ve never really had a favorite, because my parents never read them to me and my brother’s are childhood ruiners. I grew up thinking they were all so unreasonable and stupid.

Random chick: “Well then you really didn’t have a childhood did you, because my parents read me all of those when I was little, and as a child I lived life with happiness all the time.”

Well good for you, because when I was little I looked at everything skeptically- not so much now, but hear me out. My brothers are all older than me, by at least 14 years, and so by the time my parents got around to reading me “kiddie” things, my brothers had already told me everything from their points of view so I never really went into a story blindly, because  I always had someone to spoil it with reality for me. I loved my brothers so everything they said to me at the time was correct. I have sense grown out of that love because they are all total jerks for doing that to me.

Humpty Dumpty wasn’t necessarily an egg, Cinderella only got noticed because she was the only one in white, and was blonde, and Little Red Ridinghood was dumb enough to go alone to her grandmother’s house in the woods and deserved to be eaten…

Can you see where I’m going with this?

My brother’s ruined all of my impractical happiness’s as a child, so, as Forest Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Happiness?

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxcQgjnJhCFGbzJEN1E3NDFxcU0/preview

When I was first reading this I jumped to all sorts of conclusions.
He’s basically saying that we are buying happiness and therefore that’s not right. Wait no… he’s saying that the media is giving us an artificial image of perfection. Or maybe that happiness is not all that it’s cracked up to be?
As you can tell, I was just trying to sum up everything as I read it and didn’t really read it fully. And it took me a while to find why he was even writing this. Didn’t everyone know what happiness was? Didn’t it depend on the individual?
But as I have myself time to really think about it, he was talking about how people want to cheat their way to happiness. Everyone wants to be happy and content but not many people are willing to actually work for it. People are forgetting the adventure to finding joy. With the words of Ciardi himself

What the Founding Fathers declared for us as an inherit right, we should do well to remember, was not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness

and I couldn’t agree more.
He’s trying to remind people that things don’t just fall in our laps, and that if we want something as important as happiness, that we need to go out and achieve it.
Now hold on, just because his point makes sense does not mean that I agree with his ideas. For example when he spoke of the women’s magazines he was kind of leaning on the fact that that is false happiness. If a women wants to look like the girls in the magazines, she still has to work to get it.

Perfect figure bodies

don’t just suddenly happen, there is dedication to want to look better, or they assume to be better, and if that’s their happiness then they are indeed in the pursuit.
I use this because I am a girl. I know the feeling of when you see an

ideal woman

on the front cover of a magazine and want to look like them. In that, I found happiness. Not from a false feeling that I can look like her, no, but from the feeling that I got to my personal image of what I wanted to be inspired by the girl in the pictures.

Happiness is not something ready made.

It comes from your own actions. ~Dalai Lama