Varun's AP English Blog

"We're all trapped in Barbie's world".  What an interesting thing to say.  The person who designed missiles also designed the culture that we live in today.  His eccentric creativity led to the barbie like the expectation that was being described by Prager.  Even if you look to the song that was later put out by Universal Studios - Barbie Girl by Aqua - It reinforced the same idea that was created 40 years prior. "I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world Life in plastic, it's fantastic" The children who played with this toy imagined themselves as Barbie and put themselves in her world.  Later in the song, one of the lyrics sung by a male singer was "Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky" That about sums it up from my perspective of Barbie.  I never thought my perspective of a toy could shift so much in such little time.

"the unexamined quest for knowledge is hemmed with peril" is one of the statements we discussed this week which I thought was really interesting.  The way I interpreted it was that fear of discovery is what is holding science back.  According to Google, hemmed means to "surround and restrict the space or movement of."  So peril or fear is restricting the quest for knowledge because no one knows what will come.  I think it's interesting but I also think this mentality is dangerous.  As science continues, if there is no restriction by morality and general judgment, unintended consequences could occur.  There's this one video put out by Call of Duty that does an amazing job showing this. In this video, it shows how the rapidly improving technology is dangerous to humanity.  It's something to think about, let me know what you think! "This is happening. The only question that remains is how far will we allow it to go."

This week, we read about The Fearless Girl and how it appropriated what the Charging Bull meant.  I found it really interesting how a simple insertion of a statue of a girl standing completely appropriated Charging Bull's meaning from a forceful allegory of market optimism to "aggressive threat to women and girls - a symbol of patriarchal oppression."  This is the first real-world art piece that I have read about where the piece was challenged and in a sense, it lost.  After thinking about Arturo Di Modica's complaint to remove fearless girl, I would have to disagree with it because his art was challenged... and he lost!  After this week, as odd or cheesy as it sounds, I've found a new appreciation for artwork and the ingenious thinking that it requires. Quite an amazing combination of art that makes you think!

So talking about this in 4th hour got pretty intense as everyone had different stances on what was going on.  It was really interesting as I have never really considered all the different standpoints.  One thing that I really got from the conversation is how no matter what you call it, it doesn't change the situation directly.  I would have to disagree with that claim that PC culture "tends to distract attention from the real problems of prejudice and injustice that exist in society at large," I believe that PC culture isn't helpful to addressing the problems at hand but rather addressing the sensitivities that people have toward those issues.  That's why I think that PC culture is needed in order to avoid sensitive feelings to convey useful thoughts.  Thinking to the language I speak as well, Tamil, PC culture does exist.  There are words that have varying intensities when talking about things like, for example, a mental handicap.  I think it's really...

Have you ever texted someone and you feel like they're trying to send you a signal?  Like you're sensing this person throwing shade but you're not quite sure?  Although Pinker argued that he wanted "people [to] just say what they mean," I believe that the issue is also how people misinterpret other's words to their bias.  Take this sketch for example done by Key and Peele; Text Message Confusion.  In this skit, Key and Peele are texting back and forth, each misinterpreting what the other really means.  Key's initial frustration with Peele caused him to believe that Peele was being aggressive, while Peele's laid back nature made him overlook Key's aggression.  When asking to hang out, one of the phrases was "do you even want to hang out?"  While Peele understood it as Key being considerate, it was really frustration of the earlier conflict.  It's a great skit if you want to watch it, but it's fairly mature so naturally, I can...

     The first time I faced the concept of death was 4 years ago.  Obviously, I knew what death was but I never knew what it meant.       I had this cousin.  I had been to his house every time I went to India.  At younger ages, we were really close.  We always had fun together and he was almost like a brother to me.  But as time went on, we grew distant.  He started to be extremely rude to me, and the last time I saw him, he and I would get into physical fights.  At the time, I honestly disliked him.  I didn't want anything to do with him anymore, and I promised myself on the way back that I wouldn't try to sort things out unless he changed.        Almost 3 months later, I remember waking up on a Sunday morning to my grandparents crying downstairs.  As I went downstairs, I saw them on the phone with my parents beside them, all listening to the bereaved parents.  I went back up to my ...

Storytime.      Just like how Eighner has "learned much as a scavenger," I learned a lot from the time I myself went dumpster diving.  This took place in 6th grade.  It was the early middle school period when I was still in the Avondale School District .  I remember going with my two friends and an older sibling.  We all went to GameStop to go pick up some game which I can't remember off the top of my head because that's not what is important.  What's important is what we did.  Right before we were about to leave, we had seen a GameStop employee go around the back of the complex and dump a box of games into the dumpster.  Naturally, we were curious, so we parked right next to it and open the lid.  To our astonishment, there were so many games (among other not so appealing items) sitting in that tin waiting for discovery.  Sadly, the majority of them had the discs intentionally scraped so that they could not be used....

My entire family is vegetarian.  Well, almost.  My entire father's side is vegetarian and my mother's side is also fully vegetarian, but when it comes to my direct family, the only person who's a vegetarian is my mother.  I hadn't really thought of this much until this week where we talked about eating lobsters.  The part of this week that really stuck with me is the video that was shown of the conditions of these animals before they are killed.  Multiple chickens are kept in a single cage, many die of starvation, many have their beaks seared off by a hot rod.  It's "something like a Roman Circus or medieval torture-fest"  It made me so sad to see these animals getting treated like this.  So, I want to try to change my diet and buy "ethical meat items."  These items will be meats from animals that were treated right and properly.  Like the lobster being boiled alive, these animals are being kept in the most inhumane conditions possible....

      This week, when reading about how the trust of citizens was abused by the government, I kept thinking about how many kids today who use the internet are conned online.  Let's take one of the most basic examples of this.      The infamous Clash of Clans scam .  The way this scam works is the website lures in innocent kids through YouTube ads (which aren't monitored properly) into downloading offers that not only take their account information but also install malware:  Sub Seven , Beast Trojan , Bifrost , etc. The rhetoric in these websites is so convincing that some use chatboxes with bots where one will say "Is this legit" and another one will go "I just used, it works!" and will even respond to your questions that you ask in order to fool you so well that you might as well be seeing pink elephants.  It's  really sad to see kids get not only their account stolen, but their computer backdoored and used for all sor...

This entire week, when talking about boys against girls, all I could think of was my time in Avondale School District, mainly my 7th-grade year.  Avondale, unlike the Troy School District, isn't as fancy or have the same level of students.  Instead, students there (in my observation, at least) are more focused on more temporary circumstances, one of them is dating.  In middle school, everyone was convinced that you had to have a boyfriend/girlfriend in order to be socially acceptable.  The thing that really stood out to me about this concept was it was never the guys who tried to look good, it was always the girls.  The point of me writing this is that girls at Avondale Middle School followed the representation Tannen had said, wearing "tight or revealing" clothing while men's clothing selections were "incomparably narrower."  That's why moving to the Troy School District has made me really recognize what I have and be grateful for it.  In this distric...

When we read Staple's piece about a black man in a public space, we observed how people judged him based on his looks instead of who his true identity was.  People attributed "a lethality... to [him]."  I can't say that I've been in the exact position he has, but I have been in a similar situation where people immediately group you.  I go to India quite often, and in that time, I always have to speak with the locals in the city I'm visiting in Tamil (the local language), which is no problem because I'm fluent, but others are quick to judge that I'm not.  When I'm in India, I speak to my sister in English, so when overheard, it would lead someone to believe that I don't live in India.  The majority of the time I encounter someone, they will talk to me in English instead of Tamil, regardless of how fluent they can speak it, until I start talking in Tamil.  It's hard to explain, but whenever this happens, I feel like there's an unnecessary...

     Something I found to be really interesting in this weeks class discussion was the point when Mairs said that media was portraying people with disabilities as a minority.  I strongly disagree with this claim.  Although it's true I have no disability, I still feel like I'm able to give my self enough insight to make a claim here.  I could understand Mair's claim (to depict disabled people in the ordinary activities of daily life is to admit that there is something ordinary about disability itself") if the media was deliberately showing the disabled as a lesser population, but that wasn't the case.  Mair's was saying that the way the disabled were not shown in traditional media was almost outcasting them.  In my opinion, advertising should be relatable to the audience of the product.  Let's take an energy workout powder for example.  If I were to google image search "energy workout powder advertisement", the majority of all a...