Jhumpa Lahiri my idol

Jhumpa Lahiri is probably one of my favorite authors. From her short stories to her novels to her collection of short stories have been peices that I ahve alwyas been able to identify with. I feel she truly captures being an outsider and how it is sometimes extremley difficult to fit in. I attended one of her lectures when I was in highschool and she trully preaches what she writes as well. She spoke a great deal about being a child of an immigrant family and difficulty of balancing both an indian culture and an american naitonality. Her stories always touched me because they deal with everyday issues that people do not realize are truly significant and are issues that need to be brought up and discussed. Hence the part A Choice of Accommodations effected me the same way as well. Being a child of indian parents has created a lot of issues when it comes connecting to them and having them understand the life I live especially when it came to high school. There was an enormous disconnect between what they understood high school to be and what high school in America truly is like. I feel Amit suffered from that same disconnect as well and him marrying a person that was not indian created another chasm between him and his parents. I feel that would be the same for me as well if i chose to marry someone outside my culture. It would create an enormous disconnect and it would definitely cause problems throughout the rest of my life not having my parents there for me which seems apparent in Amits life as well. Yet the most apparent disconnect is between the husband and wife and how their upbringings are creating issues in their marriage now. I feel that would be the same for me because I already see the different views I have on children, school, relationships, family from my boyfriend because of the different cultural upbringings.

Reactions to the Postsecret Lecture

We actually had a representative from Postsecret come speak at our highschool and it was probably one of the most memorable expereinces I have from that chapter in my life. Our school had invited this representative because our school was having issues with being too catty and not respecting other people's privacy. So when she came we had to participate in an activity where we all wrote a secret on a peice of paper place it in a box and then one by one we would choose a secret fromt he box and say it out loud in front of the entire school. This excerise truly changed the perespective any of us had about our highschool and the people who attended. I honestly had never expected any girl to have have any of the secrets that were spoken about to be possible. some girls had secrets about being abused or coming to the high school on scholarship and I guess a lot of these possibilities never crossed my mind that people could have been going through. By having our school call someone like this to our school to hold an activity like this where we did not know whose secret we were listneing to but knew it was one of hte girls in our school created a bond that was unable to be broken. It created a kind of sisterhood that brought all of us so close to each other that breaking that bond would be impossible. The effects of this guest elcture could be seen withing minutes when girls began to cry over a few of the secrets being said even though they had no idea whose secret they were listneing too. They felt a bond with that girl and same goes for that girl as well as she saw everyone around her feel her pain when her secret was read out. This happened during my junior year of highschool and after that my experience at highschool changed completley. It went from attending any sort of school to attending a sisterhood and now I am tied to these girls forever and its a bond that will never be broken.

Reactions to A Choice of Accommodations

Ugh, I hate thinking about stuff like this. Call me an intentional naïveté, but at the moment it feels like my college friends are going to be around for a long time. And let's be real, thirty years from now, I'm probably not going to be great friends with everyone I'm good friends with at this exact moment, but can't I keep a few? This story seems to present the idea that once college is over you will slowly but surely embark on your own life without your college friends. Which is probably true to a certain extent, but man, oh man, does that suck.
I'm sick of stories about miserable adults. Being a real grown-up is scary enough with literature constantly reminding me of all the really bad stuff. I'm not in denial, and I'm sure by the time I'm a senior I'll be read to move on, just like in high school, but after reading this story, my first reaction was just like, jeez, can't I just stay in school forever?
Now, now, as I said, I'm sure the time to move on will come. But it did get me thinking about and appreciating the glorious time of life that is being college student. When else will I be beholden to pretty much no one but myself? My work, my school work, is important but I'm not changing anyone's life but my own. I eat what I want when I want (possibly a poor choice, hello, bathing suit season). I'm not denying for a second that life is perfect, or that anyone here does absolutely work their tail off or have real problems. And the time will come for real jobs (I mean, I serve waffles now, and I love it, I eat a chocolate chip waffle with strawberries every Saturday, but it isn't a career exactly), and maybe getting married and/or having children, and that stuff is great, but isn't it a little awesome to be able to walk down to Oakland and get ice cream whenever you please and to go to parties in people's basements and try new things and laugh about stupid things and have off in the summertime?

Postsecret Lecture.

Tonight, Frank Warren, the man who created Postsecret, spoke at school. Basically, Postsecret is this ongoing art project that he created where people from all over the world design postcards expressing secrets that they want to share anonymously, and every Sunday, he posts certain ones. There have also been books released with these secrets, and he has received over 500,000 secrets. I remember being an angsty freshman and thought it was amazing that all of these people had the same angsty, lonely thought s that I did, and even though I’ve grown up a little from the perspective, I still continue to read them every Sunday; I feel like they have grown up with me and made me grow up in the long run.
Anyway, I was extremely excited for the lecture, because I have never gotten a chance to attend one at home. It was exactly what I thought it would be; he shared some secrets that he has received that mean something to him, and how the process of this collection began and then people were invited to go up to the microphone and share their secrets. This was the part that I was most interested in; some of the parts he spoke about were things I had already read about or seen in some videos of his lectures, but this part of the talks he gives is strictly unique to each lecture. I was curious to see whether people actually were able to strike up the nerve and share their deepest secrets to a roomful of strangers, which is scary enough, and their classmates, which I feel would be even scarier. But people lined up at the microphones and shared funny secrets about things that happened in their childhood, like mistaking condom wrappers for candy wrappers, or awful things like not being able to tell their father that their son was a result of rape.
As heartbreaking as some of these secrets were, they created a strangely beautiful moment in the very crowded gym. There was a deafening momentary silence as the audience processed the secret for themselves, and then immediately followed by the applause, like a thank-you to the person for being so brave as to be so vulnerable and willing to open themselves up to a room of strangers. As much as it was painful to hear these secrets and as painful as it probably was for them to share, I was disappointed when the last person told their secret.
I wrote my final paper on how beautiful experiences are far more valuable than material possessions, and it is nights like this that emphasize this fact for me. As cheesy as I guess it could have been considered, there is something remarkable about the fact that such trust can be generated by a room full of strangers that have bonded over nothing except a common knowledge of how it feels to hide something. There was something very beautiful about this sense of just general compassion and support and humanity that was spreading through the room, and it is something that I cannot really sum up in words. To the discussion on beauty, I think this also emphasizes Smith’s idea of abstract beauty being much greater than concrete beauty in that the lecture has shown me how beauty can exist in even the darkest places; it is almost like there is some extent of beauty in everything, that little light that continues to flicker amidst the shadow of something awful.

Interesting Fact

So I was reading more about Zadie Smith online when I came across an interesting fact that I did not know before and that was that Zadie Smith actually used an idea from a poem to start her novel, On Beauty. It is said that On Beauty is a modern version with a twist of the poem Howard's End by E. M. Forster. Thinking about this I started to actually not appreciate the book as much as I did before. When I first read the book I was shocked at how an author under the age of thirty is able to write a novel with such in depth chracters and ideas from scratch. How does an author wiht not that much expereince create a novel with so many layers and ideas to discuss that a person probablly could write a book just discussing this book, but now I'm not sure I feel that way. Evn though I understand that a poem is compeltley differnt than a book and a book requires more in depth analysis of each chracter and may require more substance and ideas, but still it did not stem from Zadie Smith's mind. Zadie Smith used another person's idea and created a novel based off that and became known as a true artist and writer. Yet does she really deserve the credit? She updated the poem to modern times and added race and geneder as issues in the novel but plot was taken from the poem so i just wanted to see what others felt about this and if they feel that Zadie Smith is still the author she is made out to be or should not be considered as great of a writer becuase the plot of her novel did not stem from her own mind and her own creativity but from someone else.

Going to Phipps on Thursday made me begin to consider, as we have been considering in class, what beauty really means. I thought it was interesting/funny that Hong immediately assumed that one of the stranger looking plants was fake. In our society, do we actually appreciate natural and real beauty? Is it too hard for us to assume that beauty can develop on its own, untouched by anyone else, with all of the pressures and procedures and manipulation that we have today? While Phipps is beautiful and full of natural beauty, in reality, it is placed and molded by the landscapers in such a way that makes it unnatural and almost too ideal, creating an environment of such standards that make it hard to look at the flowers around campus without comparing them to those in the conservatory.

Throughout the book, we are constantly bombarded with images of beauty, whether they be music, art, or people. However, beauty never seems to be clearly defined in absolute terms. I think Smith is making a point on how the extent to which we value unnatural beauty has made this become the natural way to think about beauty. She tries to emphasize the beauty of Kiki and the art in Carlene's home and other aspects of life that are naturally beautiful, and should evoke a sense of awe, but she cannot hide the fact that other aspects like Victoria seem to comment that the forced kind of beauty is still considered beautiful in a more obvious way. This beauty is very in-your-face throughout the novel, where the natural beauty is more subtle. This is also seen in Katie's painting, where the woman is considered ugly by societal standards yet Katie still considers her beautiful. I think that as much as the book attempts to define beauty as something natural and a little flawed and precious, it is something that will never be able to have a true, single applicable definition.

cheating in the 21st century

Most people don't find it surprising that the divorce rate in the United States is a whopping 50%. So basically, one in two people you see in the street most likely have been divorced in the past. Many times, divorces stem from financial problems, abuse, and of course, the infamous cheating machine.

In Zadie's Smith novel, Kiki and Howard both cheat on each other, yet in the end, Howard and Kiki realize all they want is each other. WHAT?! I'm sorry, but I feel like this scenario would never appear anywhere other than a novel or romance movie. I feel like a lot of people cheat because they are unsatisfied or disgruntled with their current partner, and therefore, have to find other outlets. The fact that BOTH Kiki and Howard cheated, it shows that they were both unsatisfied with their marriage in some way. I've had friends who are divorce children because on of their parents, or even both of their parents, where cheating. Usually, when both of their parents are cheating, a divorce quickly ensues, but I don't think I've seen a case when both parents fall back in love with each other.

It's not that I have a cynical or pessimistic view on marriage or love or whatever, I just think that the way Zadie Smith portrays it in the end is just not very realistic. I personally could not forgive a cheater, so I just can't imagine how both Howard and Kiki just fell back in love with each other.