2 Voice Poem American child and Iraqi child.

          People lied to me:
They said my dad wasn't dead
They said my father would send a gift.


          I'm so sad:
My family got killed in front of my house.
I didn't get the new Call of Duty.


          I got beaten:
Because I stood up to the soldiers.
By the other team in basketball.


          I have a dream:
To leave this place and go live in the US.
To play for the New York Jets.


          I am just a boy: 
I fight for my life everyday.
I go to school everyday.


          

The Catcher In The Rye

          I am close to finishing the book The Catcher In The Rye and it is a great classic. Holden is one of my favorite book characters. He's really grown on me and I'm starting to get who he is. I like how he handles other people even though he gets his ass kicked in between most of the chapters. He mouths off to pretty much everyone he knows. He doesn't deal with "morons. Even though he's dropped out of three colleges he seems to have more knowledge about the world then anyone else. He knows who's a phony and who's real and who's a moron and who's a genius, so I guess you could say he knows what  he's talking about when he mouths off to you. But he's a pacifist so if he starts to fight with someone he doesn't fight back. They usually punch him once and he goes down. But he has dreams of putting everything down and just moving away and living in the mountains or someplace away from society. I'm too used to living in the city so if I were to move away and live in solitude I'd probably go insane. 

2 articles response

          The articles I found really made me start to think "how did we get to this point?" I found two articles that made me think "that's unbelievable!"
          The first one was an article about cheating husbands in Hong Kong. A new law was passed saying that if a husband cheats on his spouse, she is legally allowed to kill her cheating husband but MUST use her bare hands. She can also send the cheating husband to a work camp for up to two years, and the original spouse is allowed to take half the possessions of the secret women, regardless of the original owner. This law is crazy and in my opinion unnecessary. If you make the bad decision and cheat on someone it shouldn't be the business of others. The two should work it out amongst themselves without murder.
          The second article I found was a law passed in the US. Apparently pizza is now considered a vegetable. This is due to the percentage of tomato sauce the product contains. It was a new law passed by congress when it was brought up to vote. This is how fat America has gotten. We have to resort to saying that pizza is now part of a required part of a 3-5 servings a day. The Obama administration tried to lower the amount of pizza children consume by declassifying it as a vegetable but their proposition was declined. 

The Holden of My Life

          In the book The Catcher In The Rye Holden is a very peculiar character that I've grown quite fond of. He's a very depressed college dropout that finds no value in people. He has very little friends  and none of his friendships ever last long. There's one thing that bugs me about him though, it's that just about everything depresses him. Sometimes things as little as people having crappy suitcases. I do like that he isn't afraid to speak his mind though. Like when he has an opinion he doesn't choke up and let people push him around he'll try to stick up for himself and be his own person. The good thing about that is he always has new ideas. He was talking to this girl that was an old friend of his who is a phony sophisticated person. He was talking about them putting everything down and just going up to the mountains and living in a log cabin. She kept telling him he was being unreasonable and that they couldn't do this, but he just kept pouring out ideas on why they must do this. The problem with this is that his nature of being a mouth off usually gets him in lots of fights through his life. He's a pacifist so when he mouths off to people he's basically pouring gasoline in the fire, rousing the other guy up until he snaps. The guy will throw a punch and Holden won't defend himself, or fight back. I know this kid who is like Holden, he would talk back to anything you'd say. He wasn't a necessarily a pacifist but a bad fighter. He threw punches like he was knocking on a door. Me and my friends would always say that on e day someone was gonna teach him a lesson. Now I'm not gonna lie this kid was one of my good friends that I've known for a while and he was just being really annoying to be around with. He'd always say obnoxious things and just all around piss you off. So one day in 6th grade on the playground in the park this kid started picking on this one of my friends who was like ten times smaller than him. He started pushing him and shoving him down the slide and I guess I thought it was my duty to take action. so I told him to knock it off. We started pushing each other around and then I started punching, He'd pull my hair and I guess he didn't realize what was going on. Then it just stopped, I stopped punching and just walked away, adrenaline pumping through my body made me walk kinda funny. So yeah that was the day I taught one of my good friends a "lesson", we are still friends today and I guess you could say he cleaned up his act. But It's different with Holden. He's been beat up countless times and the lesson just won't stick. From all the stuff that has happened to him I hope he learns it soon. But I also don't. I like the character who Holden is. He has become my favorite book character. If he were to change so would the entire book. If he started acting like everyone else he'd become another phony. That's why i like Holden, he's different.

Social Awareness

          Some social issues in my book, The Catcher In The Rye, is that Holden is very depressed. He finds no real great qualities in people or anything for that matter. He doesn't really have friendships that stick. Friends come and go and it doesn't seem to bother him. But that doesn't exclude the fact that he is longing for some type of companionship. He's only had some sort of relationship as a kid with his neighbor, her name was Jane. They would hang out all the time and not give a care in the world. But when he went to college he lost contact with her. Since then he has gotten the "axe" from three separate colleges.

          Some people who change the world everyday are high profile criminals. All the crimes they commit have a huge impact on the media. They feed them money by committing these outrageous crimes. Like the man who shot the congresswoman, that story is still being talked about on the news almost one year later. That's how a lot of the media makes money. Newspapers, online news, news television channels all thrive on these stories.

          Looking around my school I can identify multiple groups of people. From the loners to the popular crowd. They all sort of stick together. Some are part of multiple groups. Often most people as the years progress lose some friends and are no longer apart of that group. I have friends that hang out in multiple groups. There are more groups the people who play basketball everyday, the "gamers", and the kids who hang out in the lunchroom everyday. 

          

The Catcher In The Rye

In the book The Catcher In The Rye the main character Holden has been one of my favorite book characters in a while. Holden is more of a laid back i don't really care about it guy. He has dropped out of three or four colleges now and most likely won't be going to a fifth. His parents don't know that he recently failed Pencey college so before they got the news he decided to got to New York to get away from everyone. He was supposed to be sent home on Wednesday to go home but decided that he   didn't want to wait until Wednesday so he left. But as he's leaving the only thing that has been on his mind is one person, a girl named Jane Gallagher. She's one of his childhood friends who was very close. They would hang out daily and play games, go to movies and were basically best friends. But now he's sorta in a rut so to speak. He's going around New York to the local bars trying to fix his depression. He's trying to find people to dance or hang out with, but also seeing these "morons" from his past. He's paying for prostitutes to talk to him instead of having sex with him. Holden is a very cool and peculiar character. I can't wait to read the rest of this book.

Nice blogs

After reading my groups blog posts on the books to reading the two best posts would have to be Roy's and Nawreen's. I especially liked Roy's because he had a lot to say about the characters in his book. He gave loads of examples about them. I specifically liked how he gave multiple examples about how his characters are changing through the book. You can tell he's getting a lot out of it.


I liked Nawreen's post because she used a poem she wrote by herself. I like to see different things instead of the original paragraph blog post and that's why Nawreen's stood out to me. For starters I really liked the writing she used in it. And I really enjoyed reading it because I could relate to it. 


Nice job you two :)

Freak the Mighty reflection

In Freak the Mighty Max feels like an outcast through most of the beginning. He has no friends and his grandparents are afraid of him. Everyone thinks he's going to end up like his criminal father. when Freak moves to town it sort of gives him a new confidence. He starts to think for himself and he starts lining out his own future. when i started middle school not many of my friend from elementary school came with me to MS51 so i didn't know so many people. I sort of felt like an outcast. I guess you can say I knew how Max felt but I started socializing with more people by the end of the first week, I cant imagine how boring life must have been for him for all those years. Another one of Max's issues was his father (Kenny Kane). Max lives in a small town so most of the people that live there know each other. That means almost everyone in his town knows about how Max's father killed Max's mother. Because of Kenny Kane's choices it give others the impression that Max is going to end up just like him. A criminal. After meeting Freak for the second time it gives Max a new hope that he defines how he's going to end up in the future. Because of Freaks disability his brain is very developed. He's an 8th grade genius. He's supposed to go through an operation were he gets bionic parts. The chances of him surviving through it are very small and it's very ignorant that he thinks he'll survive through it. Maybe he's  trying to be more hopeful than practical so that he can become "normal". I highly recommend this to book to someone who hasn't yet read it. It's very inspirational and a very good read.