This piece is nothing but the contents of my brain. It is the regurgitation of the thoughts and philosophies that have gathered dust in my mind through the months I’ve been idle. This whole thought process was ignited by a “déjà vu” that occurred Saturday the 9th. Years ago I would attend parties and, instead of gargling down mass amounts of alcohol or dabbling in illegal substances, I observed and analyzed the people around me. Doing this gave me a deeper understanding of myself and I was a better person for it. Since then, I had succumbed to peer pressure and was right in the middle of the alcohol consumption at each party. But somehow, last Saturday, I found myself back in time:
I was at some random party the other day and for once I opted not to drink or be under the influence of some brain cell depleting drug. It seemed I was the only sober and fully functioning individual among these kids. I looked around me and I realized that everyone was running from something, from someone. And this lifestyle - the alcohol, the drugs, the partying, the gathering just to have some sort of human interaction, longing to show off just to feel better about oneself - all of this allowed them to get away. It’s almost sad. But almost like looking into a huge mirror. They were all broken in a sense, like me, but with different masks to cover their true selves. It was quite odd and I found myself staring at these drunken bastards, trying to figure out what it was they were running away from. It was sort of amusing. Everything was so plastic and fake – all the smiles, the hugs, the hellos and goodbyes. It was all meaningless.
I’m so sick of everything. I try to change my environment but it's the same. I feel helpless in my own downward spiral. I can't figure things out. I’m trying, I’m trying with every strength of my being, but every effort seems futile. It feels like my little world is caving, sorry to be cliché, but that’s what it feels like. I try to separate myself from that reckless lifestyle, but I end up alone and left with too much time alone with my thoughts. So I go back and I just feel so incompetent around all these kids. I know my actions and self-pity is inexcusable, yet I allow myself to fall prey to the adolescent curse, which is to fuck up immensely.
Throughout this novel the relationship between Huck and Jim differs in and out of society because of Huck's feelings towards Jim. These two adventurers had planned to leave the Mississippi and go North, but missed their chance. The river took them farther and farther South. If Jim was caught, he would be in big trouble. If Huck didn't turn Jim in, he would also be in big trouble. Huck found himself battling with his conscience, when he realized how close Jim was to his freedom, "...I begun to get it through my head that he was most free-and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn't get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way." (pg.85) Turning Jim in would be difficult, since he was a benevolent and amiable man. It was not righteous that he should be hurt, but if Huck helped Jim run away, he would have to turn his back on his own people. He would be saying slavery, and everyone who believed in it, was wrong. Huck came to the decision to tell someone about Jim that will force him back into slavery. Soon enough they encountered two white men on a skiff. During this incident Huck perceived that his feelings to protect Jim were stronger than his feelings to turn him in. He lied when the men asked if Jim was white or black.
Throughout the story Jim is characterized as a mature person and more of a moral catalyst. He is a loyal person and he does not hate anyone, even though the society ignores him (Brownell 1). Even when he was a slave, he did not do anything wrong or cheated Miss Watson; rather he was very loyal to her. In any point of the story, he did not hate anyone or complained to anyone even though the society was against him. When he heard Miss Watson he is going to sell him, he was afraid he will have to leave his family and in this situation he decided to run away. He always valued his family most in his life, which clearly shows how much he loved and cared for his family. Jim has very caring and loving nature, and for Huck he is more like a father figure rather than a friend. When he is with Huck, he always worried about him. He always teaches Huck something new and loved him. When Huck lost in the river, he worried about him, which clearly shows he is more than a friend to Huck. Huck sees in him the value of love and more over his dedication towards his responsibilities, that Huck’s fathers lacks. Their relationship between them is so deep that is beyond a friendship.
Daisy is currently married and has a daughter. Despite this, Gatsby still wants to make it like old times. After all, his beliefs drive him to do crazy things. Beliefs founded on different principles, "Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can...I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before. She'll see." (116-117) Gatsby's dreams drive him to do the impossible, change the past. Nick struggles to understand why a man would spend so much time and money for something that lasted so short and in no way in favor of Gatsby. "His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was" (117), the idea of a mutual love relationship with Daisy as it was in the past.
While in Russia, Nihilism became identified with a loosely organized revolutionary movement happened during the time period of 1860-1917, that rejected the authority of the state, church, and family.
The idea of “Outliving Oneself” depends on the concepts of trauma and most importantly the self, in a situation where said trauma obliterates the self for an indefinite amount of time. Brison presents the self in three interwoven parts: the embodied self, the self as narrative, and the autonomous self. Any of these parts of self depend largely on the individual’s society, culture, and interactions with other people. The embodied self represents the self in conjunction with the physical body, which our society separates from the self, to intimate a soul or personality, and also assigns genders to certain traits. Trauma dissolves this separation of body and mind because violence brings the traumatized to face their own mortality. They have to see their body as an object because their assailant treats it as an object. Trauma is so damaging because the self cannot exert any power whatsoever; the interaction between the assailant and the victim, essentially a social situation, robs the victim of a voice, because the assailant ignores it, a personality, because it is of no consequence to the assailant, and a self, because the assailant uses the body as an object, and the body plays a more central role in the interaction than the self does. Brison quotes Cathy Winkler in saying a rape is a “social murder,” because the rapist’s part in the interaction defines the victim through their actions that take away the victim’s sense of self. Any control that the victim felt over their body gets taken from them by the rapist. The consequences of this trauma include a loss of control over physiological functions, such as emotion and incapacitation from anxiety; the body and mind are out of balance, which leads the victim to be stigmatized by societ...
America’s Great Depression is believed as having begun in 1929 with the Stock Market crash, and ending in 1941 with America’s entry into World War II. In order to fully comprehend the repercussions and devastating effects of the Crash of 1929, it is important to examine the factors that contributed to the catastrophic event which led to The Great Depression. The Great Depression was the worst economic slump in U.S. history, and it spread to most of the industrialized world. Many factors played a role in bringing about the depression; however, the main cause for the Great Depression was the combination of the greatly unequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920s, and the extensive stock market speculation (which led to a lack of confidence) that took place during the latter part that same decade.
...king around me. But I don’t know if I will be participating in that. Sure a part of me wants to do the Tennessee Waltz with my friends, but I really like how things are going. I never drank because I felt peer pressured to srink or because I had to drink to have fun. I just drank because it is college and a lot of people do it. I’m sure when I turn twenty-one the novelty will wear off and I will probably hardly ever do it. I’m glad I didn’t get into more trouble then I could have. There are so many things that could happen if you have been drinking. It just seems that trouble and drinking go hand and hand . If I don’t drink or do drugs I can definitly keep my chances of getting in trouble again to a minimum. If I could change the situation I don’t think I would. I needed an incident like this to wake me up and make me figure things out. I have changed a lot of aspects in my life and I’m proud of that. The day after this happened I definitly didn’t feel like this was going to be a great learning experience. Now I’m convinced that it’s probably the best thing that could have happened to someone who had no clue on who they were. I’m very happy I had an open mind and changed my life.
Although not as big as the 1929 crash, the crash of 2008 still had a huge impact on Americans. Unlike the crash of 1929, the crash of 2008 was caused by activities outside of Wall Street, namely, the failure of congress to pass the bank bailout bill. The bank bailout bill was made to bailout companies like HSBC and Lehman Brothers, who went bankrupt as a result of poor and illegal business practices. Some of these business practices included money laundering. Money laundering is when someone makes illegally obtained money look like it was legally obtained, or in other words, making dirty money look like clean money. The rejection of the bank bailout bill by congress sent the Dow into a nosedive, dropping almost 800 points in one day, the largest point drop in any single day in history. Another cause of this crash was the subprime mortgage crisis. This crisis occurred when companies hired rating companies like Standard and Poor’s to give good ratings to the mortgages that these banks were giving out to people. These mortgages were sold to other places, such as investment banks and government agencies, as mortgage-backed securities. Mortgage-backed securities are paid like regular mortgages, except that interest and principle payments don’t go to the company that lent you the money. For example, if you get a mortgage from Chase bank, Chase can sell your mortgage to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac). Freddie Mac then
Ever since his staged murder, every decision he makes is a pull away from what he has known his whole life. Huck fled from society to be free from the pressure of his culture but is faced with confusion when Jim the slave appears. “...I begun to get it through my head he was most free-and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner…”. Here in chapter sixteen, Huck is being pulled in conflicting, emotional directions because the help he is lending Jim. He knows Miss Watson would ridicule him for helping a slave escape to freedom. This is one of the biggest decisions Huck faces that contradicts everything society has showed him. Turning Jim in would be the right thing to do because that's what everyone in his position would do. He does not, because it feels like the wrong thing to
Huck and Jim form a strong friendship and mutual respect for each other created from their joint experiences absconding from different forms of imprisonment and resulting from the innumerable adventures they encounter along their journeys down the Mississippi River. Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of Huck’s personal growth and maturation as he escapes from the oppressing environment of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, and soon after he is forced to care of himself while assisting an escaped slave, Jim, elude capture from the constabularies. Huck is characteristically ingenuous in his comprehension of his life in the novel’s beginning. Restrictive as his environment may be, he is too young
In the story The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn illustrated by Mark Twain confronts the theme of friendship through the characters Huck and Jim. The friendship between Huck and Jim was created due to several actions in the story that took place throughout the novel. The friendship that was created towards the end of the book had a relationship that once existed as a simple friendship grew to be a father and son relationship. Huck and Jim were shown in Twain's writing through the examples of a true theme of friendship.
From the information presented about Anders, it is clear that the author of the story is experienced. There are many stylistic devices that have been incorporated in the story. The stylistic devices such as symbolist play a primary roe of making the story lively. It makes the story outstanding and enjoyable to read. The characterization done by the author of the story is perfect and helps the reader to create a vivid image of the happenings of as the plot unfolds. According to the author, all the characters used in presenting the story have various traits that are unique to them. Anders has been presented as one of the primary characters in the story presented. From a close analysis of the story, it is found that Anders was a person who is double sided.
Before Miles went to his new school his father said, “No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.” (Green 10 pdf) Miles’ father warned him very heavily about not doing drugs, however, he did drugs in high school before. When Miles goes to high school, he gets lost in the world of peer pressure and he end up doing drugs, drinking alcohol and smoking. In the real world, many high school students tend to fall into the traps of peer pressure and they end up drinking and doing drugs illegally. This story captures the real life perspective of high school with peer pressure, stress and troubles, instead of the fake, “all smiles” perspective of high school that some movies, such as High School Musical, portrays. Additionally, the main character, Alaska, relates to the world because she is a girl that lives a hard life and is depressed on the inside, yet she still manages to have a smile on her face. Many people in the world are going through very hard times, however, they still manage to be happy or they try to give the appearance that they’re happy. Personally, I can relate to Alaska Young’s situation, after losing my grandma and uncle to illness a couple of months ago, I am faced with tremendous amounts of depression and deep sadness. However, on the outside, I tend to have a smile on my face and I don’t show others how I truly feel deep down on the inside. Alaska does this for a while and she slowly
There are many different techniques and approaches to group counseling. The approach that I found to be the most interesting is the existential approach. “The existential perspective holds that we define ourselves by our choices” (Corey & Corey, 2014, p.114). This approach can be successful in therapy because it allows one to oversee one’s future. In this paper, I’m going to generally discuss the existential approach to therapy and where it can be used.
A young, teenage girl sits with her friends, talking, laughing, and making jokes. She seems completely normal and happy, even. What people don’t know is that this is nothing but a mask covering the loneliness that seems to run through her veins, and the unexplainable sadness that never goes away. She fears speaking of it, of admitting the uncontrollable hatred she feels for everything about herself, so much that she contemplates ending it all. The fact is, suicide is the third leading cause for death in people under the age of twenty-five. Our country needs to stop seeing this as a casual thing. Depression, anxiety, and suicide in youth are real and serious issues that we need to be more aware of in today’s society.