Okay. Let me be honest. I went to the concert because the teachers promised the students to give out extra credit. I went there to meet my friends. I went there to tell my mom I was involved in a school activity and use it as an excuse to come home late. It is just a concert, and how can a concert change the world? I thought. However, one man, Mr. Burell, did make a change. Yes, one concert inspired the entire school. Now I believe that this school and I are capable of changing the whole sphere.

PGC concert’s intention was to let people know how serious the problem of global warming is and to inspire the audience to participate in the approach to a change. The dark atmosphere of the club was fascinating. The bands were awesome, and the songs rocked. The concert was a great success, I would say. However, I modestly propose: the concert did not a good job in really emphasizing its intentional goal. Most of the audience, as they were high on music, gradually forgot about the main theme, global warming, and began to accept the event as a simple amusing, socializing opportunity.

Let’s focus. Let’s remember. Let’s realize. Let’s act. We were supposed to be there to be the part of the group that changes the world. Even though what first attracted me to the event was the charming luster of the extra credits, I soon realized how trivial they are. What good will 5 extra points for my English blog grades do? The planet where we all live on is slowly yet surely dying. Denying and forgetting about the issue will provide no solution.

We all tend to think one person is incapable of making an actual, noticeable change. However, you can save the earth, and so do I. We all can save the planet. Stand up, people. Take actions. Turn off your air conditioner. Walk. Stop wasting energy, and stop killing the earth. Let’s be part of this global cooling project.

i hear the clock ticking. i feel the night falling. i see smiling andrew in a photo. jeffrey is jumping in the scene. my i-movie. almost done. have a lot to show. ms. p, 10 minutes is too short. the selfish giant, quite adorable. 4 GB. that’s how big my movie is. editing is fun. i love it. should i become a movie editor? i guess it may work. well, no enough time to think about the far future. too busy handling the current issues. the near future? makes me crazy. i dearly hate mac. why does every teacher want an i-movie? i-movies are fun. but it just takes too long. too long. stacy and yura’s i-movie. i cannot wait to watch. they are the ones who began writing this type of post. i think it’s fun. this may seem pointless, yet, hey that’s how life is. meaningless and absurd, life is suffering. buddha said, according to college-board exam. life, oh life. cynicism, nihilism, epicurean-ism, romanticism–choose the one you like. series of choices, that is what life is. freedom of speech. natural rights. laissez faire. they all make adam smith happy. ap world history is over. but the history continues. ah, odd circle of life. i’m already sixteen. it is roger’s birthday today. i love roger. he’s so sweet. he said thanks for the gift. seventeen, he has become. wow he is old, and i’ll be old. we’ll all grow old. the old man and the sea. i read the book last saturday. i enjoy reading. but travesties. oh, travesties. that was a disaster. i love and hate dadaism. easy to create, hard to understand. let’s laugh at the audience. if you are reading this in a serious manner, i will laugh at you. don’t feel lost. although i am lost. lost. lost, my favorite tv show. the island is weird, but kate is gorgeous. sawyer is wildly sexy. i miss charlie, please bring him back to life. and i wonder why john locke has such name. i saw the name in my ap world history book, and now back to the painful school. finals are coming, assignments are waving, and i am drowning. i cry out. someone help me. someone save me. and now i know. no one’s coming. no one’s helping. let’s help myself, dabin. blogs are due, but i am ready. yes, i improved. a lot. let me fly. let me fly. ah, this was fun.

The movie impressed me. Our Happy Hours portrays a life of a prisoner who is adjudged to die.

“If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone a her” (John 8-1). No human being has a right or an authority upon life of others. A person putting another man to death is called a murder. A capital punishment is nothing yet a second naming of murder.

There is only one difference existing between a real murder (that is considered as crime) and a death penalty: one is done through a legal procedure. Yes, a legal procedure to kill a person exists. A role of true government is to protect each of its citizens and to show exemplary behavior as leaders of a nation. A capital punishment goes against human morality and dignity. Another additional homicide is the only result of such punishment.

No human being is perfect. There is no way to repair if misjudgment case occurs. All the humans, including judges, are imperfect beings which always leave possibility of error and blunder. Although rare, these cases resulted by mistrials do occur, and it is impossible to pay the price when such mistakes take place. An innocent man may leave for a false charge, yet absolutely no solution is prepared for his undeserved departure. Controlling rate of crime is considered as the most substantial reason for practicing the death penalty. However, this is not necessarily true. I once read in an article that a stoppage of the penalty actually did not bring noticeable impact to the crime rate. Instead, there are even some odd examples in which Canada and the United States experienced decreased statistics of crime rate after the abolishment. The abolishment and the crime rate have no relations. If there is no good, then why kill?

She cried. I saw her tears. She was yelling and crying out her daughter’s name. I did not know who she was and why she was crying. Later I found out that she was an old woman living in an apartment right in front of mine. Her daughter, 29-year-old girl, killed herself by throwing herself out of the window of 7^th floor. It was because of melancholia, people said. It was the mental sickness due to too much stress that killed her, they claimed. It was a tragic incident, but I felt sad and angry at the same time. No, it was not melancholia that killed her. She was the one who killed herself, placing her mother in deep sorrow, making all of her close ones dropping uncontrollable amount of tears, throwing away the given privilege, an opportunity to live.

To step out of a window or not—a single step forward can distance a young girl from opening her eyes in the next morning. Social oppression may drive a person to think about ending up one’s own life; but it is purely her or his choice to perform the dangerous plan into a physical action.

The universe granted all people including you and me the authority of possessing free-will. Affected by bitter reality, mortals occasionally cut off their own ropes of life using a sharp scissor called suicide. Despite all the outer influences pushing people to the fag end of their life, the granted right of free-will never stops providing unlimited opportunities that can continue their heartbeat. A final decision, determining whether to kill oneself or not, utterly depends on the person’s will.

Not being able to withstand severe pressure from the society may play an enormous role in providing reasons for a self-destruction; however it should not be forgotten that it was the person who fixed one’s mind to stop her own heartbeat. I never faced a difficulty in my life that will make me feel to kill myself; yet some of my friends told me that they had faced some. Is it really the matter of facing difficulties? Or is it the matter of “how” we take the difficulties?

The man adores the woman; the woman feels safe in his arms. The old lady has a small wish. The friends care for each other. Sunshine and blossoms. Everything seems alright. Life seems happy. However, their walk toward the ultimate crash begins as the movie starts. Harry, Marion, Ty, and Sarah—all they want to grab is happiness; yet their pursuit of ephemeral pleasure leads them into the eternal darkness.
Harry smiles a lot. Unfortunately, his biggest smile comes on his face when he injects drugs inside his vein. Marion is confident and beautiful. Sadly, her skin loses its luster as she cannot control herself from snorting cocaine. Ty, the young and healthy man has a lot of wishes that he wants to accomplish. Yet he experiences the loss of hope as he becomes a drug addict. Sarah desires to be on television. However, the obsession for gorgeous appearance makes her undetachable from the diet pills. All the main characters of the movie suffer due to their drug-addiction problem; however drug-addiction is not the biggest problem. They are lost–they fail to realize their initial goals of life, and we often tend to forget about them as well.

Harry, Marion, Ty, and Sarah are searching for bliss, the reason of their existence on the sphere, and the goal of life. We, humans, always chase behind such things. We all wish to be happy, and that’s the nature of mankind. Nevertheless, the characters of the movie are searching the goal and the reason in a wrong place through a wrong way. The film itself demonstrates little variety of colors through the screen. Such colorless ambiance attempts to symbolize the dark atmosphere of life of the drug users. A series of short scenes in which the camera captures the bright and showy screen of the old lady’s television demonstrate the pretentious elements of life and human society. We sometimes let ourselves to be gullible and be deceived by the world and what it shows. We sometimes fall for the meaningless surface values such as outer beauty which is only skin-deep and temporal excitement that lasts extremely short.

The movie continues to expose its audience to a single, strong melody. Whenever the music flows, intensity and tension grow. The music with its powerful beat and pathetic tone pulls the audience into the movie. The power of music in this film is astonishing. The ultimate message of the movie is simple and strong. Don’t do drugs. Yes, drugs do kill you.

1. There are no words in the English dictionary that rhyme with orange or silver.

2. In Washington, it is illegal to pretend one’s parents are rich.

3. Apocolocynposis: the fear of turning into a pumpkin

4. Arachilbutyrophobia: the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one’s mouth

5. In Canton, Ohio, you have one hour to report your missing tiger to authorities.

6. In Denmark, it is illegal to wear a mask.

7. The Roman Emperor Domitain liked to spend hours catching flies.

8. Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, was afraid of the dark.

9. An earthquake on December 16, 1811, caused parts of the Mississippi River to flow backwards.

10. A lump of pure gold the size of your thumbnail can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.

11. In 2002 the Greek government passed a flawed law that accidentally banned all electronic games.

12. The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet.

During homeroom period, I had nothing to do so I looked through my agenda book. Information given in the above list is all true—some of them are stupid, but they are hilarious. I found them quite interesting and felt like sharing them with people!

        I panicked. How can I not panic? It is four weeks before final exams; and I have 3 projects that must be done using i-movie. Let me get this straight. It was not me the one who killed my macbook. I will not mention the name (because blaming the person will not bring my computer back to life), but it wasn’t me. All the assignments and files that I have saved are still in there. Fortunately, the IT office safely rescued my hard-drive and all the data.

There are two types of people in this planet: people who create back-up drives and people who do not. I was a type of person who never bothered to create back-ups. Now, I sincerely warn you all–especially the ones who attend my high school where we use one-to-one laptop system. Buy a hard drive. Create an online account in which you can save your works. This computer crisis almost made me pass out. I thank God for my rescued files. However, this type of accident may take place again (although it should not). I have no room to freak out every time this happen. Additionally, I do not hope my friends to realize the importance of back-up files when computers are already destroyed. It is just too late.

Stream of Consciousness. It depicts a character’s mind flow. Everyone including you and I constantly think about things. Let’s suppose you are going to Greece. A thick volume of novel can be written covering less than 10 hours of your flight. The physical process of reaching Greece itself, in the case, is not the main focus of the novel. What’s important is what kind of thoughts hit your boundless brain. You may think about your grandmother who always has wanted to go to Greece. You may think about your previous trip to somewhere else. Writers who use the tactic of stream of consciousness include and write about the things that are sometimes somewhat random.

Everything begins in the brain: this literary technique starts inside a head of the main character or a narrator. Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jane Eyre possess long plots full of happenings that become main composition of the novels. However, Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, only covers a single day of a woman. The book, although it is based on a normal day of a woman named Mrs. Dalloway, does not tell its audience about her day. It is all about what she thinks about during the day.

Some argues that stream of consciousness is illogical because it often leads to abrupt and random flow of writings. It does not emphasize the practical world as well. However, famous writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Earnest Hemingway considered such randomness and ignorance of the physical world represent the true realism, because people do have their own world revolving inside their head that is separated from the outside world.

Gothic novel, merciless vendetta, and tragic romance—these are often used to describe the book Wuthering Heights. A man with absence of expression on his face was staring at me in the black-and-white photograph on the book cover. Its cover and title (even the thickness of book itself with more than 400 pages) depressed me in the first encounter before I even get to know the main character. However, when I closed the book after reading the very last sentence, not even a strap of melancholy stayed with me. A book of ultimate hope, I would call it. Despite all the tragic deaths and ugliness of humans portrayed in the novel, the author, Emily Bronte, lets a beam of light to shine across the dark room of life.

Heathcliff, the central character, was once a weak orphan adored by Mr. Earnshaw. Unfortunately, the world showed no compassion toward the sullen boy, but constantly tortured him with Hindley’s hatred and anxiety of losing his love. The betrayal of his Catherine rubbed salt in his wounds leaving no room for him to breathe calmly. It was his environment that forced Heathcliff to freeze his humanity yet to boil vindictive spirit.

Nature plays an enormous role in this novel. Bronte often uses weathers and the hills itself to develop the story. A wind roars when Mr. Earnshaw leaves his journey with no way back. It is, again, the wind that wraps Catherine’s house when her death starts to press upon her. Catherine starts aligning herself to the moors by claiming “[her] soul will be on [the] hill-top,” (159) not with Edgar, her husband. I could find an interesting connection here; throughout the plot, I began to realize that Heathcliff and the hills overlap each other. Bleak, windswept moors actually symbolize Heathcliff’s life. Winds of hardship never led Heathcliff in peace, and so as the winds of hills did to the Wuthering Heights. Thus, Catherine declaring her soul to be with the hill indicates that her heart belongs to Heathcliff. How could this powerful, unbreakable fusion of Catherine and Heathcliff be limited under a single word, love? Love is not enough to describe their linkage. “I am Heathcliff,” (102) Catherine states. They are each other.

Wuthering Heights is neither a love story nor a tragedy of a man. It handles life of Heathcliff, Catherine, and of us. Bronte provides us with a hope after all the despairs. Heathcliff’s soul departs his body, leaving a serene smile on the face. A man who barely displayed happy expression on his face smiles when death holds him. I found death of Heathcliff not tragic. It seems rather as a peaceful repose compared to his stormy unrestful life. After buying Heathcliff next to Catherine’s tomb, Cathy, the daughter of Catherine, and Hareton promising their future with love and continuing their lives. By showing the younger generation’s life, I thought that the true message that Bronte wanted to suggest through Heathcliff’s death is that life on this planet never ends yet continues.

What I loved the most about this novel was its passionate lines of characters. Emily Bronte certainly touches her readers by using vivid yet precise vocabularies. The lines that penetrated into my mind were those of Heathcliff: “Kiss me again, but don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?” (201) He cries these lines out to Catherine when she asks for his forgiveness. Heathcliff does not directly mention that he cannot bear Catherine’s change, but spits out his emotion by using highly appropriate metaphor which makes his words more sorrowful and beautiful.

Her choice of narrative styles is clever as well. By using the character Mr. Lockwood to introduce Heathcliff in the first place with Wuthering Hills, Bronte has done a great job in arousing curiosity of readers. As the story moves on, Nelly, another character, retells what she has seen; and I considered this method quite effective. If the story was narrated from Heathcliff’s point of view, it might not have been as interesting as it is now. Knowing too much either about Heathcliff or Catherine by viewing events from his or her eyes would have removed the excitement of mystery.

Wuthering Heights is the one and only book of Emily Bronte. I have no question about the fact. After dealing with all we humans have—love, hatred, revenge, pardon, life, and finally death—in a single novel, how could she possibly find more to explore?

Walking down the hallway, laughing out loud with my friends, I suddenly stopped my steps after a glance at an object hanging down from the ceiling: a candid camera. With its one eye, it was facing directly at me and my friends. Perceiving my actions, reading my lips–these were what the camera was doing. With a strong, abrupt uncomfortable feeling, I refused to act as myself. Yes, I stopped being Dabin, yet started to act as a machine that performs restricted actions forced by school.

In one science fiction movie (with a title that I cannot remember), one of the main characters reveals top government secret: the satellites will be soon used by the government to observe actions of each citizen. When I heard it, I gave a snort of laughter. Invasion of privacy, I would call it. Yet with candid cameras watching over me, my friends, everyone in school, I started to think of it as a quite reasonable theory. If international schools where the authorities claim to respect their students start to invade their privacy, it only proves that the authorities suppose human nature as evil and unworthy of trust.

Although the original purpose and intention of the cameras are to prevent certain misbehaviors of students, it still feels like being a prisoner in panopticon–a specially designed prison where everything can be seen by observers.