Petty Pyromaniac

We already talked about the plentiful advantages of when words and pictures are combined--basically how pictures support words in order to bring out a new meaning to them. Sure, having a lengthy amount of text and a picture is nice, as it allows your mind to relax on the whole having-to-imagine-a-picture shebang. For example, in Maus , we can grasp the meaning of the pictures "representing the unrepresentable" (Jim Powell), as the characters are portrayed by mice and cats. Pretty interesting, and it all allows us to understand the argument behind how comics can be for the intellectual. Taking it to a different level, out of literary context though...what happens when we choose to represent our own lives with photos, with only small captions to back up our "posts?" What a perfect time to bring this up, with homecoming season upon us...  We all post the same pictures. Us smiling, laughing, hugging our friends and significant other of the month, saying we had ...

Societal standards are just not my cup of tea.  My mom's side of the family is 100% Chinese, but my dad's side of the family is 100% European.  While my mother always subliminally felt as though she was the least favorite child of three, due to being the only daughter, my father was raised by feminists. Naturally, after experiencing the cultural difference between their two families, I can relate to Maxine Hong Kingston's negative experience surrounding Chinese culture. Whenever I visit my dad's mother, she'll spill to me about how men suck,  and how much she adores my independence. I'll come home from the visit only for my mother to yell at me, weeks later, for not being lady-like enough.  I hate it. As much as I'd want for the Chinese stereotypes to be wrong, they've always rang true in my experiences. Last night, even, my Chinese aunt yelled at me for not determining a major yet. To be a surgeon, she told me, I need to unofficially declare my m...

 (Is there any better way to kick off a blog post than with the famous words of Thomas Paine?) "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."  If you didn't pick up on Paine's message, the sunshine patriot is one who says they'd do anything for their country. Well, only if it's convenient for them to support such a statement. The summer soldier isn't actually willing to die for America, but would love to wear the uniform in hopes of communicating a sense of power. Although the sun has such a positive connotation, Paine uses it nearly synonymously with the word 'fake'. So, with this in mind, what is a sunshine friend? Admittedly, I have no clue where to even start on this subject. Over the past two years, so many different people have walked right in, then wal...

In my mere sixteen years of living, I can already personally confirm the fact that human memory is surprisingly fragile. According to neuroscience, information that our mind decides is "emotionally important" is sorted into our long-term memory. However, the hippocampus is also sensitive to adrenaline and cortisol, and long term exposures in these hormones can occasionally result in such memories becoming repressed. When we were told to think back to last year's Fourth of July in class, I realized I couldn't really remember the night of my Fourth. I only knew I got into a particularly horrible fight with my parents. Despite what little I remember, there's an undeniable amount of irony that can be found from the situation. What's truly missing has to be given some existence, in order to be classified as "gone," like Allyson Booth explains in Postcards from the Trenches .  In regards to missing soldiers, she states that "the commemoration of abs...