Appearances Can Be Deceiving

I totally agree to the fact that "Appearance Can Be Deceiving". For example, every time there is a new student in school, people judge them by their looks before they really get to know them in person. A lot of people say that they don't care about what people look like to decide whether they should be friends with them or not, but to be honest, it's a lot easier for someone pretty to make friends with people than those that aren't as good looking. But then, of course, appearance doesn't mean everything about a person. Beautiful people can have a bad personality whereas not good looking people can have amazingly great personalities and be totally awesome. Beauty often makes people feel too proud of themselves, and may treat other people in a more rude manner because they think that the world might revolve around them, whereas those that aren't as good looking know more about how reality is and how it feels like to be mistreated. In order to find out that you've mistaken the people from their appearances, the only way is just realizing about it yourself. It'll be pretty obvious on how they treat others and other sorts of ways that they interact with others. 

Memorable Events

I've only lived for 15 years so far, but there are events that I will never ever forget. I remember when I was a kid, at only around the age of 2 years old, I came back to Taiwan for a brief visit for my grandparents since i was living in Canada at that time. It was 9/21 that night, when I was watching TV, wide awake, because of the jet lag. Then suddenly everything started to shake. At first, I thought I was just dizzy due to the lack of sleep I was getting, but when the paintings that were hanging on the wall started to fall off, I figured that it was an earthquake, and it was quite big. At that time, the building that we were living in weren't as stable as the modern ones, so when we tried to run out of the door, some of the doors have already changed their shape because of the earthquake and we couldn't open it. I was so scared and kept crying because things were falling everywhere but we couldn't get out of the building. Finally after my father kept throwing himself onto the door, the door fell off and we all ran out. I would never ever forget that. The other memory that I would never forget is when the most important person in my life at that time has left me and all the promises that person gave me was broken in only a short little week. I guess that it was because that person didn't put me as the most important person while I already did. Although that made me really sad for a long time, I then later on learned a lot of lessons like to not trust people's promises since anyone can say those promises and beautiful words to make you happy, but barely anyone can fulfill their promises. I will never forget this because it hurt me a lot, yet let me grow up a lot within a small time period. Another event that I'll never forget is how when our previous president got sent into jail because of stealing a lot of money from Taiwan citizens. So many of my family members were so angry that they went to go to Taipei for the protesting. My brother and I of course got dragged there too. There's actually nothing special about it but I won't forget about it since it was really annoying but I met many funny people that hated him a lot. Some people even make balloons that looked like him and others were hitting and popping them. These fun things made this even memorable. 

Favorite Food

My absolute favorite food would be spaghetti. It's the best meal that I could ever imagine. The best moment is when seeing the read sauce turn the white red and knowing that the next second, the noodles will be swallowed by me. The second best feeling is when the slippery noodles run down my throat. The well-cooked noodles flow inside my mouth and slip into my throat without being worried about having small objects that will get stuck inside my throat, choking me. The smell of the sauce is also absolutely mouth-watering. Whenever I smell the cooked meat being mixed with a smell of tomato, my mouth waters, being desperate to shove all the noodles inside my mouth. It’s been a tradition for my family already, to eat spaghetti for every Saturday dinner. We’ve had this tradition for around 13 years, and it’s surprising how we never get sick of eating spaghetti. I think that I already know to cook it myself too. It's impressive I'm someone that struggles with cracking eggs. I believe that when I go to the states for college in the future, I would think about my family and this tradition whenever I eat or see spaghetti. 

Billy Collin's Poem

After watching all five animated poems of Billy Collins, I think that actually making poems into animations is a really smart and cool idea. Nowadays, most teenagers don't like poetry and normally wouldn't want to "waste" the energy and time to try to understand a poem. When making an animation about the poem, watchers can have an easier way of understanding the poem and form the images more easier. But I think the con of making these animated poems is that even though it forms the images in the watchers/ readers mind more easily, it might not be a good thing because the purpose of reading a poem might sometimes be to form the image in the reader's own way, not by looking at the way other people interpret it. The favorite one of the five would be "The Dead". I think that this poem by itself isn't really that hard to understand, and with the animation, which was done in a really cute and simple way. The ending of the poem kind of scared me though, having dead spirits look at us when we're sleeping? That would totally freak me out if it were true and I found out about it. It's nice to have people caring about you, but having them stare at you when you sleep is kind of over the line. 

Narrative Poem Research

The poem I chose is "The Broken-Legg'd Man" by John Mackey Shaw. The length of this poem is relatively short compared to almost all other narrative poems. To be honest, that is one of the reasons why I chose this poem. This poem is organized into five stanzas with five lines in each. The last sentence of all the stanzas are the same, and the first two lines rhyme, while the third and fourth rhyme too. In the third stanza, the third and fourth lines used slant rhyme, while all others used end rhyme. I personally admire all the poets that can make perfect rhyming lines because I almost never can do it. I spend so much time going through all the vocabulary in my brain, but often still can't find the right vocabulary to use to make the poem rhyme. There wasn't a controlled meter used in this poem. And the style of this poem is more of a casual tone, like it was purposely designed for children, using easy diction. I don't think that it used good imagery nor figures of speech. The best imagery I could find would be in the last stanza when it talked about how he lost his foot. 

The Broken-Legg'd Man- John Mackey Shaw

I saw the other day when I went shopping in the store

A man I hadn't ever, ever seen in there before,

A man whose leg was broken and who leaned upon a crutch-

I asked him very kindly if it hurt him very much.

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.

I ran around behind him for I thought that I would see

The broken leg all bandaged up and bent back at the knee;

But I didn't see the leg at all, there wasn't any there,

So I asked him very kindly if he had it hid somewhere.

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.

"Then where," I asked him, "is it? Did a tiger bite it off?

Or did you get your foot wet when you had a nasty cough?

Did someone jump down on your leg when it was very new?

Or did you simply cut it off because you wanted to?"

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.  

"What was it then?" I asked him, and this is what he said:

"I crossed a busy crossing when the traffic light was red;

A big black car came whizzing by and knocked me off my feet."

"Of course you looked both ways," I said, "before you crossed the street."

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.  

"They rushed me to the hospital right quickly, "he went on,

"And when I woke in nice white sheets I saw my leg was gone;

That's why you see me walking now on nothing but a crutch."

"I'm glad," said I, "you told me, and I thank you very much!"

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.

Life

To most people, they must've compared life to things more optimistically. Normally, I am a optimistic person and believes that life is good no matter how bad things go. I didn't know that one incident of having someone important to you leaving would change the way I look at life this much. From being optimistic normally, I am actually comparing life to hell. I admit that hell is probably a little too exaggerated, since there are those times when you are happy, but I can't think of anything else to describe the feeling that I have towards life now. I think that life is hell because living is always a torture. Look at how hard people are trying to have themselves survive, no matter in their social status, academically, or economically...etc. And no matter how hard some people try, they won't be able to achieve the goal. And even when one does get to the level that they're satisfied with already, it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have the exact same goal as them, and would try to bring them down no matter what. Look at how many people there are on the world. Having similar goals means to have to fight among each other. Having people trying to drag each other down is like hell. Also, in life, there are those times when you think that you've found your real best friends. And of course, in those moments, you'd feel really happy. But afterwards, when they backstab you, the contrast of the happiness you've had and the pain of knowing that it was all fake would hurt so much, just like in hell. Another thing is how the earth is way too big, and when people leave, it would hurt so bad. Life is so cruel and violent, dragging two people away from each other for hundreds of thousands miles. So, I think that even though there are the happy moments in life, they might not last forever and may be fake. These miserable things of human nature makes me think that life should be compared to hell. 

Seven Ages of Man

Throughout life, people go through many stages. Life isn't long enough to considered as "long", yet normally isn't short enough to be considered "short". In normal people's lives, I think that it can be divided into the seven following stages: Birth, Student, Work, Marriage, Parenting, Retirement, and Death. The first and last one would be birth and death for sure. They mark the beginning and end of a person's life, from being given birth to earth till the day they leave the world, which is death. The second stage is being a student. This takes up a whole lot of a person's life. In life, people learn new things all the time, so this stage actually overlaps with all the other stages other than birth and death. The stage of working is after a student graduates and becomes an adult, having to learn to handle things themselves without having to have their parents backup everything for them. At this stage, they'll grow up and learn  how to earn money themselves and save themselves from being killed by the cruelty of reality. Marriage is the next stage. People in life will fall in love with someone and the majority of people get married. And of course, after marrying is to have a baby to have a feeling of a home. So, it then will be parenting. Retirement goes after parenting, even though it overlaps later on. When parenting a child, you would need income of course to raise the children. And later on, when the child went to the working stage of their lives too, the parents can retire and enjoy the rest of their life, waiting until the last stage, Death, comes.