The Truly Important Things in Life

Thanksgiving, the one day a year you can pretend to be thankful for what should be thankful for, the important things in your life. Only 24 hours you have to pretend that you’re thankful for what and who you have. Then at the start of the next day you can go back to being thankful for what you are truly thankful for… yourself and inanimate objects. People wait in lines on the evening of Thanksgiving still filled with the joy of family and loved ones but once the clock strikes midnight and it is no longer the last Thursday in November people get to be their real selves. Running, shoving and trampling others to hopefully get an HD television, sure there are people who are buying things for others for the upcoming holiday but let’s be real. You aren’t going out to buy little Jimmy a 60” HD television; you’re doing it for yourself.

In recent years however you can’t even get a whole 24 hours to be thankful for family because now stores open even earlier. Some stores opening at 9pm on Thanksgiving, now giving families only 21 hours to be thankful for each other and leaving the other 8,739 hours of the year to care about yourself and worthless items. Let’s just eliminate the whole day of Thanksgiving and make it all about material things, the truly important things in life.

Ebola

There definitely needs to be something done about Ebola. I feel like the United States made mistakes with this whole situation. I don't think they should be bringing people over to the States who have it. If people are willing to go over to Africa where Ebola is, they should have to stay there. Then there's the doctors who go over there and a lot of them end up contracting the disease and are sent back to possibly infect more of us.

I think that flights from the places in Africa where Ebola is shouldn't be allowed to fly to the United States. Some people think that everyone is overreacting to the whole Ebola thing but I think it is very serious. It sounds like a horrible disease and I don't think it is something to mess around with.

Compare and Contrast Essay Summary

Childhood and adulthood are the topics of my compare and contrast essay. So it took me a while to think of the topic, really a kind of simple topic but complex in it's ways I'm figuring out. In this essay readers should be able to see the similarities and differences between the two, it shouldn't be extremely difficult to do that before reading this but hopefully I'll offer some more than readers may already know.

Some stuff that will be talked about are things like stress, responsibility, the way people live as children and adults, a lot of stuff along those lines. Some very vague examples from my essay would be adults have more stress and responsibility. Children generally live a care free life.

My ideas are still very unorganized, outlines aren't really helping. This is good and how most essays go for me, by the time the final draft is completed it will be a quality essay. The ROUGH draft will be very rough, that is why it is capitalized. I'm currently at the point where ideas are starting to flow pretty good and words are starting to come from them, it won't be so apparent in the draft I turn in tomorrow. Still changing a lot of things, so expect a solid final copy.

TED Talk Summary

TED Talk Summary and Response

The TED Talk I watched was entitled "Ken Robinson: How Schools Kill Creativity." I feel like he spent way too much time messing around and could have got to the point a lot quicker. The point he was trying to make was that schools don't really promote their "creative" classes like music, art, etc. because they aren't "real" jobs. He was saying that schools just try to get kids to learn math, sciences, languages. and other subjects that are considered "important" and those are the subjects that will get these kids jobs in the future.

I kind of agree with this and I kind of don't. The reason I don't agree is because at my high school they always promoted the artistic programs like band because they always wanted kids to join. Also it was required for us to take PAVA credit classes which are Performing and Visual Arts classes. Now the reason I do agree with Mr. Robinson is because although I was required to take a course like that, teachers at school always told us to try and get into the mathematical field or science field or health. I don't think I ever heard any teacher in my high school say that we should try to go into a field dealing with art. Even in the PAVA classes I took I don't believe any of them said anything about making it our career. It goes further than teachers, adults in general I feel don't see something creative as a "practical" job. For example, I love music and the more I think about it I want to do something with music as my career, I have been told by a lot of people including adults who are close to me that it isn't "practical" and that I should go into where the money is. Now that I think of it, I don't care if I don't make any money at all, as long as I can enjoy life and be around music that's really all I can ask for.