Daw Aung San Suu Kyi/ Chp 5/Oryx and Crake

Well the reading, ‘Oryx and Crake’, by Margaret Atwood, was very strange. The beginning was sort of scrambled, then I started to understand what was going on in the middle, and by the end, I was confused again. I felt uncomfortable reading about what these kids did. I don’t find much to pull from this story. Chapter 5 of ‘The Shape of Reason’ brings up some good points about your audience as a writer. There have been situations when I’ve been about to start a paper, and I have to think about what my audience is going to be, and base my writing on that. For example, if you wrote an essay on how much you loved the San Francisco Giants and sent it to the Los Angeles Times, you’d get no readers. Or you’d get a lot of hate-mail. Certain topics fit with only certain types of audiences. Right from the beginning of the reading “Beijing Forum on Women”, the author is so kind, humble, and thankful. Is this because she’s so blessed to be able to write this letter? Or is from her upbringings? She brings up a point I’ve never really thought of. ‘No war was ever started by women’. Is this because it is within every male to have that type of toughness? Or is it because females choose not to have this aggression? After reading through page 251 of the reading, I wonder if there are more men than women that feel they don’t get the mutual respect they deserve from the other sex? We always talk about how women aren’t given as many opportunities as men, but sometimes that translates to women looking down at men because they feel they need to in order to get ‘ahead’ of them.

First Group of Readings….

The first assigned reading was from the book, ‘Shape of Reason’, and the first chapter was titled, ‘Writing and the College Community’. One of the first lines that caught my attention was, ‘Although we share some characteristics with the other members of each community we belong to, as individuals we are also unlike those members in other ways.’ Now, I believe that if everyone in a certain community were totally alike, it wouldn’t create a community. Part of a community is the uniqueness that each person brings, along with the items they have in common. There’d be something missing if every person was the same race, the same age, had the same job, and did the same thing everyday. When they continue to mention language, are they referring to a certain language, or is being used in a more figurative way? The author says that Diversity of opinion in a community (particularly the college community) should be valued, and I totally agree. I have a liberal political view, but though I most always disagree with a conservative’s opinions on politics, being able to listen to their view just strengthens my feelings towards being a democratic liberal. From this reading, I must ask. How do you know if your opinion is the best one? When do you realize if you’re opinion makes most sense?

Onto the second reading. George Orwell’s, “Shooting an Elephant”. I really liked this little story. Just how the story starts grabs your attention, and makes you read the rest. “I was hated by large numbers of people,”. The over-arching lesson in this story to me was that even if you don’t want to, you must prove to others your position in life. This guy was an officer for the British Empire, and though he didn’t want to shoot the crazy elephant, he had to because if he didn’t, all the villagers would look at him differently. So would the higher ranked officials of the British Empire. With a certain title, you carry certain responsibilities. You can tell he doesn’t feel good about shooting the elephant. He keeps re–assuring himself he did the right thing. That what he did was what he had to do, because he was an officer, and he had already committed to doing it when he got the gun. His mind was fighting itself in this one.

Third reading: Thomas Hardy’s, “The Man He Killed”. I didn’t really get the whole concept of this little poem. I mean, there are two soldiers, and they have to shoot at each other because they are in war. Otherwise, they’d probably be friends, because they are pretty much the same person outside of war. But since they are in war, they must shoot. I’m wondering when this was written and where these men were from? It must’ve been a time of struggle wherever it was, because it says they were out of work and had no choice on whether to join the army or not.

Fourth reading: Robert Brannon’s, “Why Men Become Men, and Other Theories,”. So, according to this reading, if I didn’t start playing with toy trucks, I’d be considered homosexual?  Also, I really like paragraphs 16-19. I believe that a true man should cry. You hear a lot of people say that nowadays. If a man can’t display emotion, that, to me, shows that they are weak. I mean, I believe in having ‘thick skin’, but that doesn’t just have to apply to men. If something tragic happens to you, as a man, and you don’t show any emotion? That shows that you are in denial of that particular situation. In life, you need to accept those things and move forward. Letting your emotions out is healthier, and let’s you be able to move ahead in life. Not being able to display emotion shows that a man is thin, and one dimensional to me. It’s almost like there’s no soul in you, that you’re just a robot, if you can’t display all your emotions.

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