End Times (The Road part I)

Cormac McCarthy does a brilliant job of describing nothing. The bleak sameness of the empty, burnt landscape is evident in his constant, almost tiresome use of the words "gray" and "ash": "gray light"(p.4) "days more gray each one than what had gone before" (p. 3), "ashen daylight" (p. 5), "shuffling through the ash" (p. 6), and that's just from the first few pages. But his use of these words is only rivaled by the use of the phrase "the road." It is very obvious how much he uses it because the title of a book or movie in context always jumps out at you. He could have used more creative ways to describe the actual road, like using synonyms to avoid repeating the same word and sound better. The road itself represents hope. It is a path with an unknown end, and the father and son keep hope that they will always find some food further along the road. "The road," peppered across the pages, is a constant reminder of the hopefulness that is the central, sometimes invisible mood of the book, a theme that I'm worried is lost to the casual reader. I am an optimist to a fault, so I don't think I would kill myself if I were a survivor in this barren wasteland. Not that I would be exactly happy, but I feel confident that I could find some grain of beauty in the empty, ashen beach of the world. That would be all I needed to carry on.

Dear parents,

The number one rule of good parenting: patience. It is trendy for kids to act like they hate their parents, but if you are patient enough to muscle through those years you will be thanked. The most important thing to remember is that they will always love you, and that they know you will always love them. Whether you tell them every day or once in their life, your kids understand this unconditionally.
Give them space, but don't let them walk all over you. Discipline is hard but necessary. Try to be as understanding as possible, but know that solid ground rules must be set. The main role of a parent is to keep their children safe, so safety must be at the forefront of any decisions you make. That being said, let kids be kids.
Whether you fit the description or not, you are being seen as the perfect example of an adult. The decisions you make and the actions you take have an effect on every moral trait of your offspring. You have a huge responsibility on your shoulders, so act responsibly.
You have been entrusted with this delicate, new soul encased in a tiny human, and you must love and nurture and mold it into a wonderful human being with its own stories and opinions and ideas. Though your job never ends, the day your child greets you as a friend is the day you have succeeded.
Love, a daughter

Civic Duty

I think that it should be a civic duty for all people to have empathy and withhold judgement, specifically in public. It is all too easy to get angry at other people for petty things like the way they dress or talk. And people are so paranoid about being judged negatively that they often restrict themselves and put on a facade in public. I know this is really cliché, but you can meet a lot of interesting people when you look past outward appearances.
Everyone has bad days, and some people are just always exceptionally grumpy. It is hard to be patient with these people, especially on YOUR bad days, but chances are you will never see that person again. If someone grimaces at you on the bus, flash them a smile. I challenge the world to make every human interaction positive. One has to remember that everybody has their own struggles, and that something as simple as a smile or even a compliment from a stranger can make somebody's day.
P.S. dear Mr. McCarthy I did my Integration blog, so you can check that while you're here cool thanks

Integration in America

Chicago is a famously segregated city. There are often sharp divides between neighborhoods. Devon feels like a completely different world than Wicker Park, which is the polar opposite of Pilsen. Every street in the city has its own culture and background. This is seen by many as a bad thing: when communities stay separate, there can be hostility between groups and the world views of members remain singular and biased. It is true that this country has a past riddled with oppressed groups that have had to struggle for their basic rights, and it is true that this discrimination still exists. But, having grown up in Logan Square, it was at first hard for me to believe that there are still such awful people because I see so little of them. I went to a diverse grammar school and go to a very diverse high school. One of the things that worries me the most about the future is that pretty much any college I decide to go to will have significantly bigger populations of only a few types of people. I have loved going to completely integrated schools. But by no means do I think that anything should change about the way Chicago neighborhoods work. You can go anywhere in the city and experience the culture and foods of every ethnicity. Though certain areas have residents of mostly one or two ethnicities, it isn't weird to see a white person in China Town or a black person in Greek Town. People can celebrate their own cultures and feel a sense of belonging in the places they live, while still being exposed to others. It's a win/win situation. The kids that get to go to schools other than their neighborhood school get to be exposed to this even earlier.
The only way to promote integration is to fight poverty. There are so many more white kids going to college and succeeding because there are more white families able to afford to live in nice neighborhoods and send their children to good schools. I may be biased, but Affirmative Action is unfair and counterproductive. If we really want to solve this problem, we need to go to its source, which is rooted in unbalanced racial class distributions.

Poverty As a Choice?

I think that poverty is a situation you are born into, just like any other financial class. It is definitely possible to move between classes, but it is harder than most people think. The reason that stories about poor people coming into money or rich people loosing it all are so popular is that it isn't very common. When I look back at my parents' childhood, I see a story of success. Both of their families had a lot of kids and not much money, but now everybody is doing pretty well. I am proud of this aspect of my family, and it gives me hope for the future. But I don't look forward to a future where I have bucketfuls of money and a private jet. I will spare you of my nasty stereotype of super rich people. I am more scared of becoming poor than ambitious to be rich. I would be content being in this same financial situation forever.
I believe that this way of thinking is what is keeping so many people in poverty. In All Souls, the author remembers how they looked at the black people in Roxbury and would do anything to not look as poor as them. As long as someone was worse off, it didn't matter how poor they were. They scoffed at the middle class liberals and marveled at their rich cousins and their strange habits. The people of Old Colony belonged there. Why venture into a strange place when you know and love the community of your current home?

1st Half of Malcolm X and The Harlem Renaissance

Having grown up on so many of the great musicians of the Harlem Renaissance, I've developed a quite romantic view of that time period. The smoky jazz clubs and swinging dance halls have always held a sort of magical allure for me. Though I've obviously never experienced them, I miss the days when all the young people would go out dancing all the time. Real, big band dancing.
Needless to say, I loved reading about Malcolm X's experiences in this era. I expected to be caught off guard by descriptions of the less-glamorous sides of Harlem, like the blatant racism, poverty, and drug trade, but even all of this failed to muddy my opinion. It may have been my own biased view, but it seemed to me that Malcolm described this part of his life as though he thoroughly enjoyed it as much as I imagine I would have, even though he is looking back on it through the eyes of a much wiser man.
I never really thought about the more controversial race aspects of Harlem much. I was always taught that the Harlem Renaissance was just that: a cultural rebirth of African American identity. But the acute observations of Malcolm X bring this idea back to Earth. He describes the constant struggle of the black American of the time, even in Harlem, and he makes some generalizations about white people that I find incredibly offensive, but may very well have held some truth back then, no matter how hard it is for me to imagine ever thinking in such a way.
This book makes me wonder, above all else, whether or not the thoughts of the young Malcolm X were unique to him. It seems he was an exceptionally race-conscious person, but that may just be because I think so little of race, having grown up in the 21st century. Did many if the blacks of Harlem think so poorly of the whites who found their way into the restaurants and clubs or Harlem every night in search of "that Negro feel"?

twenty | one | pilots

I discovered Twenty One Pilots when they signed with Fueled By Ramen a year ago and they instantly became one of my favorite bands. The band consists of Tyler Joseph, vocalist and pianist, and Josh Dun, drummer. They have a decent following in their hometown in Ohio, but I was sad to find that they are pretty much unheard of elsewhere. I think they deserve a lot more recognition for their music because it has such a fresh, new sound. They combine rap and rock and electronic in a genre that can only be described as alternative, for lack of a better term.
The first thing of theirs I saw was this video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5daYd91k4ws&list=FL8kZHBpLsPH-yw-ggYHd-Sw&index=41 I was blown away by the simplicity and raw emotion of it all. It is a good introduction to their unconventional style of rap and phenomenal lyrics. Every time I listen to any of their songs, I get a new meaning and connection to it. Their music is incredibly relatable, because it is about things like life and death and mortality and the human condition. It consequently gets pretty philosophical, as in March to the Sea (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suq35iak57U) which parallels a march in unison to living an unexamined life.
Their first album is rawer and has a lighter sound, while their second, Regional At Best(which,sadly, was taken off of iTunes for some stupid reason, though they do have a new one coming out next Tuesday)sounds more poppy. I'll let the music speak for itself, so here are some of my favorite songs from them. If you don't love them after hearing these.....
Glowing Eyes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47AtclpkF-o
Isle of Flightless Birds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMD141I5ERU
Car Radio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmTc0sx_E5g
Guns for Hands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu8s3ucBEL8
and, not my favorite song but their only music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktBMxkLUIwY