#aplang17book

 Emily Colas is quite the character, and I find it interesting, and painstakingly clear how the idea of hope is not for everyone, but some version of hope is necessary for moving forward, whether that be optimism, action, or just trying to make it through to tomorrow.

after darin gets in the accident, his life trudges on. he goes home. thinks about the girl constantly and doesnt know how to feel. he feels empty inside. his parents suggest a movie to take his mind off it. he feels guilty. in everything he does he feels guilty for not being more sad. he wishes hed had a more typical reaction. he stays as far away from the accident in his mind as possible. when he finds out the girl died, he doesnt know what to think. he still feels numb. he doesnt toss restlessly, he doesnt cry, he doesnt go to the spot of the accident and weep for her. he just exists and stays out of the way from the world, afraid for his own future and afraid for everyone who will be affected by her death. hes being selfish, but he needs to take care of himself. he tries therapy, staying home. avoiding school. nothing helped remove the weight he felt. he didnt expect anything to, but it still hurt. he couldnt understand why it was him. he was tired. tired of talking about it and being stared at and carrying the weight. he wanted it though, he felt like he needed to be punished. he was a dead man walking.

�

AWOD starts to talk about some of the cultural aspects of death relatively early in the book. At the same conference that I referenced in my last post, Mitford explains how the funeral industry has established a “Keeping Up with the Joneses” effect where high standard of living = high standard of death. Before the 20th century, the average funeral simply consisted of a few friends and family lowering a simple pine casket into a hole in the ground. The funeral industry has slowly turned this basic activity into one of transportation (movement of the dead body and relatives from location to location), presentation (expensive coffins, corpse embalming and makeup), and regeneration (morticians sell therapy sessions for close ones of the deceased). This turn in cost and procedure is very apparent, and has been undertaken by the likewise change in American culture.

All of these quotes I have chosen here all represent death that the author, Sherwin B. Nuland has experienced. Although he is a physician and has to deal with death on a daily basis, I don’t think it was known that he has had to deal with death within his own family. Not only him but his other relatives as well. I think this gives him a well informed view on how to accept and deal with the death of loved ones. Since Nuland himself has experienced such deaths, I think he brings an interesting point of view to the table.

In The Glass Castle Jeanette Walls also brings up a controversial topic of the kids parenting the parents instead of the other way around. Growing up Jeanette was put into numerous situations where she was needed to step it up and be more parent like than her parents. For example, her dad got fired from his jobs quite frequently so in this case when he got fired all the kids got together to brainstorm what they could do to scrap up some money for their family as they had in the past, in addition to finding metal and bottles and things like that Jeanette and her older sister Lori had this conversation, “ ‘I guess we could eat less,’ I said. ‘We have before,’ Lori said.” in this case the very young kids actually had to have a conversation about making money for their family and sacrificing eating to do so. In another instance the parents had been in a bad fight and once Jeanette’s older brother Brian came to the rescue the parents were yelling whose fault it was to Brian, just like how kids do when their mom snarls at them for fighting. All of the kids also had to take responsibility for their mom and getting her ready for school (because she was a teacher), this is incredibly ironic, because as a kid your mom generally gets you up and ready for school. There are so many places in these kids’ lives where they had to take on the roll of the parent even if they were under 10 years old. The real question becomes... Is that bad? Is it wrong that kids had to be more mature at an earlier age? It seems so terrible to me at first because that’s just not what we’re used to, but in the long run couldn’t you argue that it actually helps mature the kid at an earlier age and prepare them for life early on? I don’t know I guess I’ll have to wait and find out how she turned out.  

Greg talks in his book, The Joy of Hate, about tolerance and how it is a bad thing for society. Greg claims that tolerance really means not pissing anyone or anything off. Greg says that our society is filled with people he dubs the “tolerati” who are in Greg’s words, “a group of people who claim to be tolerant, except when they run into someone who disagrees with them. Then the joyous hate comes out and it’s directed almost always at you, but never at anybody else on their side. And the book is designed to kind of expose the phony outrage, make fun of it, and also try to teach you how not to fall into the same trap.” So the limitation on society is that people feel obliged to be politically correct about everything and to not hurt anyone’s feelings for fear of having your own feelings hurt via a hailstorm of hate from the tolerati.

The next step to becoming the best also revolves around practice. The quantity is key, but what takes someone to the next step is quality. The energy put into your work is what will shape you from great to the greatest. A former center basketball player for the Cleveland Cavaliers named John Amaechi use to play at Penn State University. His expertise was so beyond everyone else's on the team that practice came easy, so easy that the quality was lost. So the coach decided to bring a 6'8 walk on to push him. To go the next step the coach every time the play went to offense they would put two people on him. This just goes to show how in times of working for your passion to be the best you must be responsible and challenge your self. I wonder if all this could be graphed. Quantity x & Quality y? It might be hard but you could find other stats to support this claim. In the book Matthew said he averaged around 120,000 miles a year since passing his test. But even after years of us driving we are still not world class drivers, we actually grow lazy the more we drive and pick up bad habits along the way. Which would've disproven all of his research, but because of the fact that people are driven to learn new skills in time such as one day. Like a girl he talks about who learns how to do almost a triple salchow in one day. She pushes he self starting at 7am and begins with warmup and by the end of the day. In one day! Completes a double& 2/3 of a salchow. It's amazing!