Letters were written for many thousands of years, to talk with other people, without them having to be there, to communicate. Now that the modern day is full of new technology, that writing communication system is expended to not only letters, but emails, chats, and notes. In the book Love, Rosie, Cecelia Ahern uses those modern ways people communicate by to make the story more exciting and mysterious. This formatting of the story made it a little challenging to read, but that challenge was worth it, because the reader can feel like he or she is a part of the story.
The main two characters, Rosie and Alex, were always write letters to each other since they were little. They write notes like:
“To Alex
You are invited to my 7th birthday party on Tuesday the 8th of April in
my house. We are having a magician and you can come to my house at 2
o’clock. It is over at 5 o’clock. I hope you will come,
From your best friend Rosie”
Their whole world was almost always ink on a piece of paper or letters on a screen. They were memories that could be kept, and to the reader it seems that they are using those written pieces of memories to find out about peoples lives. It is easy to relate because people always had to express their deepest feelings on paper, at some point in their lives. There was happiness and sadness, fear and bravery, love and hate. “I’m writing you this letter because I know that if I say what I have to say to your face I will probably punch you. I don’t know you anymore. I don’t see you anymore. All I get is a quick text or a rushed e-mail from you every few days. I know you are busy and I know you have Bethany, but hello? I’m supposed to be your best friend.” When Rosie wrought this to Alex, she told him something a lot of people feel. That was both sadness and jealousy. She was feeling normal feelings a friend would. These things make the book seem a lot more like real life. Their lives are never perfect.
The book shows characteristics of each person in their actions and the way they write and also based on whom they are writing to. They all have many problems, in each word they express themselves, just like we do and all of us wright. “I haven’t heard or seen you in a while. I’m sending you this e-mail because every time I call by your house, you’re either in the bath or not there! Should I begin to take this personally??! But knowing you, if you had a problem with me you wouldn’t be too shy to let me know all about it! This was something Alex sent Rosie after he moved to America. They could not see each other so he hoped that they would at least hear each other. There is always a time where people eat here send this kind of message or receive it. It is when you are fighting or one is mad at the other.
Each reader gets a different experience out of a book, but not all are completely different, because a book is meant to inspire emotions. Each emotion is strong enough to stay a stamp in the reader's mind. Looking on others for their thoughts, I stumbled upon this quote from Ellis Henrika, a writer for “Finding Bliss in Books” said: “Except for the epilogue, Love, Rosie is a collection of letters, IMs, notes, emails, text conversations, etc. but the formatting was so horrendous that sometimes two completely different conversations were grouped together, which confused my already unorganised brain.” I agreed, and was also confused at times. The book is funny and interesting, but they always have some problems in them. Without the uniqueness of each book, books would be boring. The author has to make it special by writing uniquely, kind of like special effect in a movie to make it more realistic and more fun.
If the book had been written in a different format, it would be a story that was not that realistic and it would have been more boring and ordinary. It would also less connected to the emotions of the reader. Each of the emotions was not just picked, but more like hand crafted by the author to make sure every detail is perfect. For those reasons the emotions are strong and so realistic. Emotions are the key to unlock our hearts.
For my project I looked at the various leaders of Reconstruction and the part they played in the difficult time after the Civil War. The website contains information about the president's and congress's role in shaping the years after the Civil War explaining there successes and failures as leader and how they as seen today. In addition it looks at what was achieved during the Reconstruction period and how it's influence was seen later on.
Website:
Ingredients:
- Chicken
- Roman
- Lettuce
- Grated cheese
Instructions:
- Season the chicken and grill it
- Rinse off the lettuce & put it into a bowl
- When chicken is fully cooked, add it to the bowl with salad
- Add grated cheese onto the chicken and lettuce
- Add the dressing
- Add croutons on top
- Lightly stir everything together
- Serve
Analysis:
Caesar salad is know internationally. People often eat in on the side of their main course meals and sometimes even on the side of their meals. People can make caesar salad any way they want to. This salad does not really have one specific way it has to be made in order to have that title. Chicken caesar salad is both tasty and healthy. It really only takes a few simple ingredients to create the salad.
First, the chicken has to be cooked on a stove top and seasoned. After cooked, the chicken has to be sliced or chopped up in order to be proportioned right with everything else that goes into the salad. After the chicken is finished, the lettuce has to be rinsed off and chopped as well. Add the chicken into the salad bowl after the lettuce is chopped. Then add the grated cheese into the bowl along with the fresh squeezed lemon juice. After, stir lightly then start to pour the salad dressing into the bowl while still stirring. Then after that, add the croutons in the bowl and continue to stir lightly.
I chose my topic by first looking through the suggested topics that were posted to my history classes online webpage. I saw that each category had a topic of interest and I’m interested in sports. This led me to topic of Ben Chapman and the Philadelphia Phillies. I’m from Philadelphia, PA and an avid sports fan so, this topic was high on my list. I saw “42” which is a movie about Jackie Robinson and in that movie Chapman is mentioned in the movie. Chapman is not portrayed as the good guy in the movie but he was a prominent character in the story of Jackie Robinson.
2 cups grain rice (rinsed)
4 to 5 cups of hot water,
3 tablespoons of sofrito
16 ounce can of gandules
1 packet of Sazon with achiote
3 tablespoons of oil
Salt and adobo
Process
1. Add the oil into a big pot and let it heat up.
2. Add the sofrito into the pot and stir it until it starts to bubble up.
3. Add the gandules (beans) into the mixture and add the sazon.
4.Add the salt to give it more taste
5. Add a little bit of adobo to give it more taste.
6. Add water and let it boil
7. Then add the rice and lower the heat to low.
8. DO NOT STIR right away. Wait 10 minutes and stir rice.
9.Sir rice every 10 minutes for 30-40 minutes until the rice is tender.
Analysis: (this part you will be explaining how this meal is healthy, sofrito, guandules sazon and the ingredients basically)
Arroz con gandules is a combination of rice, pigeon peas and pork, cooked in the same pot with Puerto Rican-style sofrito. This is the signature dish of Puerto Rican culture and also has become very popular throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Arroz con gandules is part of Puerto Rico's national dish.
Arroz con gandules is a pretty healthy meal if you look at the ingredients. One of the major components that displays its healthiness is the fact that you have to make it from scratch. Since you are making it entirely from scratch, the excess chemicals that are contained in processed foods isn’t a problem.
Sofrito offers a lot of healthy nutrition for the body because it is a mixture of all natural vegetables blended. These vegetables such as peppers, greens, onions, garlic, etc. contain nutrients that the body need on the daily basis such as Vitamin D, E, and C.
This quarter I feel that my artwork has improved since the first quarter. For example for one of the projects I had to take a photo and use this app called pixlr. It was tricky to use at first but then the finalization of the picture look wonderful! Like I said in the first quarter, anything you make can be art. Art can be powerful to anyone! For this Second quarter I had to make a collage by using pictures from magazines. Then make a fabric drawing by using pencil and charcoal. After that, I had to take a photo and use pixlr. Last but not least, pick a piece of writing and illustrate a passage. I'm happy how my art turned out to be this quarter, so please don't judge. Enjoy checking out my work.
Collage: For this project, I was allowed to make a collage of anything I wanted. I made my collage spell out the word art because why not? Its art class for crying out loud. So what I used in the collage was pictures from home/design magazines. I used those type of pictures from those magazines because most of them had patterns. Basically how I see art, I see a lot of patterns!
Fabric drawing: Now at first I was suppose to draw fabric on top of a stool, but I really wanted to do something else. So I used my sleeve on one of my SLA hoodies as an advantage to do something else. Now this was my first time using charcoal. I feel I did great using it for the first time. My favorite part of the drawing is the hand leading into the sleeve of the arm because to me it looks realistic.
Photo: On this project, I was aloud to take a photo of anything I wanted in the world. After taking that photo I had to use this app called pixlr. I chose to take a picture of food because food is amazing haha. Especially burgers because its my favorite food in the entire world. After experiencing pixlr and clearly showing one burger while the other was blurry, I seriously wanted to jump into that photo. It basically looks delicious!
Illustration: Finally, for this project, I had to pick any piece of writing and illustrate a passage. I picked "The Cat in the Hat" because that was children's book I grew up with when I was little. The book used to make me laugh a lot. On this day I'm not sure why it made me laugh, but I don't care now because its cool to draw something that was from your childhood.
Hope you enjoyed my artwork for quarter #2!
God I hate uniforms. School, sports, work, all of them. No matter what kind they are, they always make you feel like shit. And I’m wearing the worst kind right now; Military. Ugh, I don’t what’s worse, the skin tight under suit riding up your ass or the heaving armor weighing you down, but in the end I always feel so… confined. Anyways right now I’m stuck in vertical line formation between Tomoko and Ares, both half asleep just like me. I think every soldier is right now but I can’t tell because, again, i’m half asleep. We’re all waiting for our commander who thinks making us get up at the crack of dawn and standing in line waiting for him is good for us. And y’know what maybe it is. Maybe it will help us become better soldiers in the long run. Or better people in general. But I don’t care because Getting up in the morning is the worst thing ever.
All the 3 other soldier walk through our line formation and what do ya know it’s Commander Osamu. Or a just some big blobs that decide to walk around. Again i can’t tell because I’M HALF ASLEEP. Commander Osamu walks toward us to check if we’re all in position. Everyone is dead silent, because our Commander is basically godzilla reincarnated. I’m not even kidding he scares the shit out of me.
I see Tomoko falling asleep on my arm, so I nudge her.
“Bean buns… “ She says softly. She’s in the middle of a dream. I’m guessing it’s about bean buns. And food. And eating. Mmm… Bean buns.
Out of no where I feel a hard slap across my head.
“ Private Mizuki, and Tomoko! Wake up!” A male voice says. I open my eyes to find an angry looking Commander Osamu staring at us. Dammit I feel asleep. Both Tomoko and scrambled into position, with our backs straight and our arms behind us locked together. I look around, and see the other soldiers with their red snickering faces. Then I looked at Commander Osamu, who is staring at us with big dead eyes of distrust. When he does this, and he does it a lot, it’s like he’s trying to you figure out. The worst part is I think he does. It’s super creepy.
“Everyone Shut up!” He barks. Everyone then shut up. “How many times do I have to get you people to wake the hell up! I don’t care what excuse you have, I don’t care if it’s hard. Just stay awake and do what you’re told!” He then turns over to use so quickly, we don’t even have time to blink. “I want you two on patrol right now.” He said softly.
“ But, but...Bean Buns sir!” We blurt out. The struggle of hunger is real right now.
“Oh my god, just do it!” He says annoyed.
“Yessir” So Tomoko and I run off to patrol, wearing uncomfortable clothing, half asleep, and dreaming of bean buns.
To be continued...As an artist, I want to show people my feelings and what matters to me a lot. I want them to reflect on their life as well because when people reflect on their life they think more about what is important to life. For art collage I made a rose out of a lot of newspapers because rose represents my grandparents. After my grandpa passed away I realized that they matter to me a lot, and now I’m making sure my grandma is in my life as much as she can. Drawing a fabric was something harder because I never drew a fabric as an assignment.
Photo editing was an assignment I liked because it was fun to take pictures when I was away for winter break. Illustration assignment was a part when I went back to memories when I lived in Poland and watched cartoons with my grandparents that represented friendship.
In the novel entitled “Everyday” written by David Levithan, the author uses specific strategies to keep the readers attention. The main character is not fully introduced, but the reader meets them in every chapter as they go through the different identities. This setup affects how the reader understands the main character because there is never a proper introduction. In Everyday, the narrator who goes by the name of A is in a different body after 12am. Other than finding out that the narrator goes by the name of A and that they’re 16 years old, we never find out any deeper personal traits. Although we never find out personal traits, the reader does get a chance to experience A’s thoughts. Personally, I believe the reasoning behind the reader never having the ability to get to know the protagonist is because it does not know who it is either. This way of writing keeps the reader engaged throughout the book. It makes you keep an eye open and be on your toes to see if you’ll ever find out A’s identity. Is it a male or female? What’s its ethnicity? Where was it born? Is it even human? While we never get to know these things by the end of the novel, David Levithan’s characterization skills allow us to get to know A more and more each and everyday.
Along with the author not fully introducing the main character, he also uses another technique that was very appealing, unique, and interesting. The second technique was that David Levithan chose to make every chapter a different day of the protagonist’s life. This writing style put emphasis on the authors decision of A having to start over everyday living a different life.
As stated before, the author utilizes the technique of making each chapter be a different day of the protagonist's life. Along with this technique, the author has the main character A state things that allows the reader to get a better understanding and interpretation of how he deals with it. “I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.”, stated by A. To some people, this quote could represent how they know that everyday is a different day and you could have the memories from it, but you’ll never live that day again. Yet to A, it means that and so much more. Regarding the main character’s situation, this quote means that it can think of yesterday as much as it wants, but it will always be a different yesterday. A different yesterday meaning a different lifestyle to live. A will never have a life where it can go and talk with its friends about what it did yesterday because A will always have to focus on the current day and the persons body who it’s in.
When researching outside opinions regarding the novel Everyday, there were many things stated about what people personally favored most about the book. There are reviews all over in many different forms where people have shared their thoughts on the book. Everyday is a book for people of all ages, but its content is mainly targeted for teenagers and young adults. To get a different persons interpretation of the book, I took to a place that is appealing to teenagers and young adults; YouTube. YouTube lead the researcher to hear many thoughts on the book. One that stood out was a 6 minute interview by a teenage girl whose name is Kat. Kat highly enjoyed reading the novel and stated that one of her favorite aspects pertaining to the book was its characterization. She stated “A does not have a body. A does not hair, or eyes, or skin that can be described. Even without a body, I could still feel A’s presence and just thought that A was such a well developed character.” From another point of view, Kat also feels as though A is a great character in the novel. She’s saying that the things that we can physically see are not the things make a well developed person, let alone character. It is the things that are invisible to the eye and as cliche as it may seem, it'll allow you to get to know a person for what’s on the inside rather than outside.
