How Familiar, How Important

How Familiar, How Important

"Am I Blue?" by Bruce Coville

I grow up in an environment that is much more accepting of gays than say my mom who grew up in Santa Monica, California. Both neighbors on either side of myself are lesbian families. One of my best friends at sleep away camp is openly gay. The bar around the corner is what some people would say a “gay bar”, or others would just say it was a bar that attracted homosexuals. I can go into Central Park and see men kissing on a park bench.

When my mom grew up none of her neighbors were openly gay. The two people that she knew were gay were two girls at her school and they were teased. She also told me that it didn’t seem mean then and that after remembered this she cringed with guilt at the fact that she had been part of the name-calling.

I think this shows me that because my mom was sheltered from gays she only heard bad things about gays and therefore that’s all she knew.

In “Am I Blue” a story about a teenager named Vincent, who is, with the help of a fairy godfather named Melvin, is trying to decide his sexual identity. Melvin is actually killed because he was gay and the people who beat him to death tried to ”teach him a lesson” and never explain what that lesson is. Where as in Vincent’s case the guy who beat him up turns out to be gay. I think the authors message is that just because you are a certain sexuality your self doesn’t mean you should try to change other peoples sexualities.

I think this could show us what time period the story took place and also where. The farther back in time, the less gays are generally accepted. “Where” also matters because different places are more or less accepting of gays. I think it is fair to say this is around 2005 in an average American town where high school is everything. This would make sense because in the story Vincent is thinking about is it going to make the situation any worse by walking with Melvin “with Butch and his gang already calling me “faggot” and “fruit,” since they’re “sixteen” and therefore in high school, I think “Butch and his gang” is referring to the fact that butch has friends, and Vincent doesn’t.

I think the more familiar you are with gays the less you see the difference in the fact that they’re just like straight people most of the time except they like the same sex.  Sometimes they might talk differently or like different clothing or maybe they walk differently but that shouldn’t mean they have any less rights, to marry whom they want or do anything else they want to.

Even though the congressman who “happened to be a notorious republican homophobe,” acted negatively toward gays but was gay himself, I generally think: the less familiar you are with, and the more sheltered toward gays, the more you care and the more you believe that gays are crazy and queer.

But what I don’t get is why people who are not gay themselves and have a negative attitude toward homosexuality, because it doesn’t affect them. There not going to be forced into an incredibly different way of life, unless you count seeing gay couples as an incredibly different way of life.

how to show change

In the Glass Castle by Jannette Walls you can easily see that Jannette has changed by seeing her faith in her dad change. Although in most books you can see a change in the main character over the course in the story I think there are many ways that you can see change in different way by looking at a characters beliefs and how they interact with other characters.

I chose to show Jannette’s change with her relationship with her dad. I think this is the most interesting change because of the extremes at which the trust varied. In the beginning she trusted her dad more than anyone in the world. Her dad was her best friend and also her teacher. As she grew older her family started to have less faith in him, and how he always has these crazy ideas about glass castles and gold extracting robots, she still had faith in him.  Although it wasn’t the toddler “my daddy could do anything” faith, it was still a strong trust. The trust started to wane when he had stopped drinking for her as a birthday present and then became an alcoholic and this time more serious. I think that’s when she started not to trust him. He would ask for some of the family’s money to spend on liquor and he knew that Jannette couldn’t stand up to him. He would disappear for days at a time and come home drunk. But when she lost all trust for her dad when Jannette and her sister had saved up money for her sister to go to New York, and her dad stole the money. As you can see as she grows older she loses her trust for her dad.

I can relate to Jannette’s change in her relation ship with her father. I never fully had no trust for my dad but I think that most everyone when they were a toddler had a “my daddy could do anything” attitude. And as I grew older I always believed in all my dad’s thoughts on the world but now I’m starting to have more differing ideas on life.

I think that in every character you can see change. Some more than others, and some there are more interesting ways of looking at the change. 

How familiar, how important

How familiar, how important

"Am I Blue?" by Bruce Coville

I grow up in an environment that is much more accepting of gays than say my mom who grew up in Santa Monica, California. Both neighbors on either side of myself are lesbian families. One of my best friends at sleep away camp is openly gay. The bar around the corner is what some people would say a “gay bar”, or others would just say it was a bar that attracted homosexuals. I can go into central park and see men kissing on a park bench.

When my mom grew up none of her neighbors were openly gay. The two people that she knew were gay were to girls at her school and they were teased. She also told me that it didn’t seam mean then and that after remembered this she cringed with guilt at the fact that she had been part of the name-calling.

In “Am I Blue” Melvin is actually killed because he was gay and the people who beat him to death tried to ”teach him a lesson” and never explain what that lesson is. Where as in Vincent’s case the guy who beat him up turns out to be gay.

I think this could show us what time period the story took place and also where. The farther back in time, the less gays are generally accepted. “Where” also matters because different places are more or less accepting of gays. I think it is fair to say this is around 2000 in an average American town where high school is everything. This would make sense because in the story Vincent is thinking about is it going to make the situation any worse by walking with Melvin “with Butch and his gang already calling me “faggot” and “fruit,” since they’re “sixteen” and therefore in high school, I think “Butch and his gang” is referring to the fact that butch has friends and Vincent doesn’t.

I think the more familiar you are with gays the less you see the difference in the fact that they’re just like straight people most of the time except they like the same sex.  Sometimes they might talk differently or like different clothing or maybe they walk differently but that shouldn’t mean they have any less rights, to marry whom they want or do anything else they want to.

Even though the congressman who “happened to be a notorious republican homophobe,” acted negatively toward gays but was gay himself, I generally think: the less familiar you are with, and the more sheltered toward gays, the more you care and the more you believe that gays are crazy and queer.

But what I don’t get is why people who are not gay themselves and have a negative attitude toward homosexuality, because it doesn’t affect them. There not going to be forced into an incredibly different way of life, unless you count seeing gay couples as an incredibly different way of life.

what is maturity?

The Glass Castle by Jannette Walls

Even though I am not yet in the ending of my book I can see the main character, Jennette, changing. She is changing how she thinks of the world, how she see’s her family, how she see’s herself, and also what her interests are.

In the beginning of the book she was a toddler, mature for her age. She saw her world like a fun game with her family her closet friends and as any young kid she was interested in fire. Then as she turned eight she started to see the major problems, and as she grew older she would see more. She liked exploring, the dessert, and shooting her dads gun. Then when she turns thirteen she starts to take charge. She thinks that her teeth are crooked so she makes herself braces. She starts finding faults in her dad who she believed in most. She starts getting interested in boys.

Even though some one could argue that this is just what every child goes through growing up; I would say that not many children have the same life as Jannette so for every kid, except for a few, this would be mostly different. The other thing I think would be different would be he ages at which each event occurs. Jannette seems mature for her age. I wasn’t translating my 4^th grade homework into binary computer code. I think she experience everything in her “mostly isolated from society” life faster so that when she is in a city or school she seams older in comparison. 

This makes me think that it isn’t the number of years old that defines your maturity; it’s the intensity level of life that you have experienced

fighting frustration and life

Welch, West Virginia, is known to the Walls family as the “fightingist” town they have ever stayed in. in “the Glass Castle” by Janette Walls, Janette who is 10 in her book, is now staying in a little mining town in West Virginia. No one is all that content with his or her life and everyone is angry, so everyone fights but why

            My first thought was that it was just because they were in a small town and that because I live in the city not everyone fights. But then I realized that people get into fights in the city all the time. I thought that the other reason they might fight is because they are poor.

            In all the towns they have lived in they got into fights in most of them. Usually they would be with poor people. The Walls would live in the poor parts of towns and get into fights with poor people.

            If the dad got made he would take it out on the wife. The wife would take it out on the kids and the kids would take it out on other kids. Everyone would take it out on someone they thought they could beat up on.

            I think this is because when something or someone who they couldn’t beat up, beats them up, they would beat up something or someone that they could beat up on that wouldn’t be able to beat them back. I think this happens because of their frustration with life and the fact that they feel small but want to feel more improtant.

how familiar, how important

"Am I Blue?" by Bruce Coville

I grow up in an environment that is much more accepting of gays than say my mom who grew up in Santa Monica, California. Both neighbors on either side of myself are lesbian families. One of my best friends at sleep away camp is openly gay. The bar around the corner is what some people would say a “gay bar”, or others would just say it was a bar that attracted homosexuals. I can go into central park and see men kissing on a park bench.

When my mom grew up none of her neighbors were openly gay. The two people that she knew were gay were to girls at her school and they were teased. She also told me that it didn’t seam mean then and that after remembered this she cringed with guilt at the fact that she had been part of the name-calling.

In “Am I Blue” Marvin is actually killed because he was gay and the people who beat him to death tried to ”teach him a lesson” and never explain what that lesson is. Where as in the main characters case the guy who beat him up turns out to be gay.

I think the more familiar you are with gays the less you see the difference in the fact that they’re just like straight people most of the time except they like the same sex.  Sometimes they might talk differently or like different clothing or maybe they walk differently but that shouldn’t mean they have any less rights to marry who they want.

I think the less familiar you are with gays the more you care and the more you believe that gays are crazy and queer. But what I don’t get is why people who are not gay themselves and have a negative attitude toward homosexuality, because it doesn’t affect them. There not going to be forced into an incredibly different way of life, unless you count seeing gay couples as an incredibly different way of life.