My Friends are my Inspiration

Blogger has given me the opportunity to experience a whole new perspective in writing. It has given me the freedom to write whatever I want, and this allowed me to explore endless possibilities of ideas. For once ,as assignments for English class, I'm able to write freely about whatever I want without any restriction whatsoever. Most of the blog topics that I have done so far in the first quarter are mainly involve around life in general. Blogger has improve me as a writer overall by improving my connection of my writing to life more and bringing inspiration to myself to write ideas that I would have never have thought of writing about before.

The first time when I started to write my very first official blog, I had no idea what to write about. My ideas in my head came out as blank, and I couldn't even formulate any specific structure to give myself an idea to start upon. The reason why this happened was that I just wasn't used to writing a topic of my own without any specific guidance from the teacher. Usually, my teachers would give me a prompt and I would start writing things for that specific prompt; this was a whole different story when it came to blogging. I had to think of a prompt myself and that was hard. In the end though, I managed to brought myself upon an idea that I should write about life. This might be a silly reason, but the idea of writing about life made me feel like I'm a famous philosopher. In one of my very first blog that I talked about life was “Right and Wrong”:

I came up with two theories on why people have different views on this. One of them is that the sense of what is right and wrong is shaped by a person's personal experiences in life such as the things that they learn from other people, the places they grew up in, and the good or bad experiences that they have to dealt with in their life. My second theory is that it is all shaped naturally accordingly to the individual specific mindset/personality which creates a certain regime for that specific individual.

This post was a great starting point for me because it allowed me to get experience of writing these kind of things on blogger. The following week, after writing this blog, thinking about what kind of idea to write and formulating structure became a lot easier. My second post about life was “Treasure”:

Treasure can come in all shapes and sizes; it can be anything. Different people treasure different things for certain reasons. Some of the reasons that I would treasure something are either that someone really important give it to me or it is something that I can't live my life without. One thing that I treasure is my friends because I don't think I can live life without them. They are my pillar of support that pushes me to move forward in life. Without them, my life would be really dull and would go absolutely nowhere at all.

On this blog, I manage to took my writing a step forward. I was able to connect my writing to my personal life more, and this allowed me to furthermore expand on the idea. Also, this tells me that as I continue to write post once every week on a certain subject, i'm able to get better at coming up with ideas and improving my brain to able to see more connections between a piece of writing to life.

To be honest, the things that inspire me to write are my friends. Their influences on me allow me to come up with ideas to write about. When I thought of the idea about writing my posts mainly about life, I thought about my friends. I consider my friends to be the main highlights to life, and this made me want to connect them to every post that I published on blogger. There are many examples from their blogs that inspired me to write. One of them is from David's blog:

Ever since I was a kid, I always acquired the trait stage fright when I was on stage. I disliked the feeling of everyone constantly staring at me. It makes me feel as if I was an important person and that I had to become perfect. I felt that if I made a mistake, everyone would laugh at me and tease me afterward.

This blog of his inspired me to write something that relates to my own life. Like how David talked about the experience that he had with stage fright, I wrote about my own experiences with stage fright in a response to his post. Another post from my friends that inspired me to write is from Jasiu's blog:

Time is precious and we should try to never waste it. Unfortunately many of us do waste it and large amounts of it. Whenever we have days off school or work, we usually want to sleep in and stay in bed for a few more hours. Some of us even remain in bed until noon time and even beyond.

Like before, these kind of posts inspired me to connect to my own post to my personal life more. Jasiu brought upon a general idea and was able to connect it to his own life. This intrigues me, and inspired me to do the same. Overall, without my friends I would have never thought of the ideas that I put into my own blog now. Their ideas inspire me to write more, and hopefully my ideas were able to inspire some of them too.

In conclusion, blogger has really helped me to improve on not only my writing skills but also my way of thinking. This sets forth two new goals for the second quarter of this semester. The first goal is to continue to write blogs the way I do now since its effective in the terms of getting better at connecting that particular idea to my own life which thus improve my writing skills as a writer since my ideas are getting more and more well structured. The second goal that I have is to continue to give my friends feedback on their writing since they are the ones that inspire to writes. Since they are the key inspiration to my writing, without their writing right next to mine means that my writing would go absolutely no where and would eventually fall entirely apart.

The Loss of Innocence

The Holocaust was a horrible time where many people died not only physically, but also mentally too. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the holocaust, wrote the book “Night” to describe the experiences that he had during the holocaust. Throughout the book, many conflicts were revealed over and over. Elie's conflict kept building up eventually leading to the total destruction of his belief in god and inner moral as a human being.

In the beginning of the book, Elie seems to have a strong faith in God. As the story progresses, this strong belief begins to die out. The turning point was when he witnesses the execution of a small child in the concentration camp. He watches the kid suffer, and this causes him to resolve the conflict within himself about if he should continue to believe in god or not: “Behind me I heard the same man asking: 'where is god now?' And I heard a voice within me answer him: 'where is he? There he is- He is hanging here this gallows.” (Page 62) This shows that he no longer have any faith in god because if there was a god, this event wouldn't happen. This event is a great contribution to his resolution for this conflict.

Another event that contributes a settlement in one of Elie's inner conflict was the time when his dad died. He mentions in his memoir that he would never abandon his father like the other sons did to their fathers. As the story progresses, this thought of mind begins to become distorted. The experiences that he had in the camp destroy his inner moral of what is right and wrong: “And in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have something like free at last.” (Page 106) His inner conflict of arguing himself about if he should continue to embrace his dad or not comes to an end. In reality, he still took care of his dad to the very end, but a inner demon lies within himself making him feel satisfy when his dad finally dies because he doesn't need to take care of his dad anymore.

At the end of the book, Elie's was hospitalized for weeks after getting out of the concentration camp. The whole mess was finally over, and interesting enough, the first thing that he does is look at a mirror: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes as they stared into mine, has never left me.” (Page 109) This last moment of the book made me realize the impact had on the people from the concentration camp is a big one. It made me realize that even the survivors of the holocaust are good as dead. Even though their body is still alive, their inner being as a person is no longer living. This was the same for Elie Weisel; his inner being, soul, humanity, all of these things has been stripped away from his living body.

In conclusion, the experiences that Elie shares in this memoir has a important meaning in life. It shows that the holocaust was filled with many horrible conflicts. Elie experiences all of these conflicts head on, and the outcomes that he get from these experiences were not good ones. He loses his faith in god, loses his sense of morals, and he loses all of these things within the inner nightmare of the camp. This goes to show that it is important for us to not let this kind of thing happen ever again.

Precious Moments Worth Fighting for...

What is a precious moment? It is a moment in our life that we can truly feel happy and warm inside of our heart. It can be more than one moment of your life that you feel is truly important and that you can never forget about it for the rest of your life. For me, most of my precious moments are consist of hanging out with my closest friends. Those moments are the time when I feel truly happy and just laugh freely without having to worry about anything at all. Precious moments are also times that you always want to experience again. It is a time in your life that makes you feel like life is truly worth living.

There are also many factors that can contribute as obstacles between people and their precious moments. These things can consist of moving away, complications that someone may have in their life, not enough time, etc... In a way, even though we can have these things blocking our way from our precious moments, we can still fight against all of those factors. If you truly consider a moment in your life to be precious then you have the responsibility to fight for those moments. If we don't fight for those moments, how are we suppose to experience those precious moments in our life ever again? Thinking about our past moments and treasuring them for what they are worth is one thing but to experience them again is better than any of those things combine.

Life can be unfair sometimes, but that shouldn't stop you from fighting against all the complications for all those precious moments that life have to offer. Creating new precious moments in your life is also important because the more precious moments that you create within yourself the more you are enjoying life. Although, this can also mean that you will have more moments to fight for, but if those moments are truly consider precious to you then they are well worth the amount of time you spent fighting to experience those moments again.

Childhood

Childhood is a period of time that I think is the most important moment of a person's entire life. The life of being a kid is such a wonderful and beautiful thing to have. I never really thought about it when I was young, but as I continue to grow older I started to realize about how just amazing being a kid really was. When we were little, we didn't really need to worry about anything in our life, and the only thing that we really care about is thinking about how we would spend our day playing around. It was time when we could just do almost anything we want and is most likely that we are able to get away with it simply because adults realizes that we don't know any better. It was time where our curiosity and imagination was at it's best and ran wild like a horse; a child's imagination knows no bound, and our curiosity multiplies every time we learn something new.

Childhood is the time where we experience many things for the first time. For example, it is a time where we first start to make "bonds" with the people around us. We make our first friends, and when that happens, those friends usually become the people that we never forget for the rest of our life. It is a time where we begin to form our inner moral and where we start to create a "identity" for ourselves. Our personality, our hobbies, likes and dislikes are all also things that begins to form within us during this period of time. You may ask why experiencing things for the first time is important? The answer to that question is that all of these things that we first experience in our life creates a bridge for our future, and help shape the person that we are today. It is where we first start to open that "book" of ours and start writing "stories" into it.

Without a beginning, how can there be a middle or an end? Everything has a beginning and have to start somewhere. For us, our Childhood is where it all begin.

Response to "Why Waking up Early is Best"

This is something that I found in one of Jasiu's blog that I thought was interesting to talk about:

Time is precious and we should try to never waste it. Unfortunately many of us do waste it and large amounts of it. Whenever we have days off school or work, we usually want to sleep in and stay in bed for a few more hours. Some of us even remain in bed until noon time and even beyond.

I agree with Jasiu about how time is precious and we should not waste it on sleep. Time is one of those things that we can't get back no matter what we do. As much as I hate to admit it, sleeping is not worth wasting our time away at all. I love to sleep, but I realize that it is important to manage the amount of sleep that we get in order to use our time to do something more effective and more productive.

Jasiu also mentioned about how waking up early has many benefits. One specific benefit that he mentioned was that waking up early helps you create a productive and successful life. Although this maybe true, waking up early is harder than it sounds. For me, I have a really hard time waking up early in the morning. People may say that setting a alarm or something can help solve this problem, but alarm doesn't always work. I even used three alarms once (my alarm clock, my cell phone, and my ipod) to wake me up, and it didn't work at all. All of the alarm went off, I just simply snooze right through them.

Whenever I wake up in the morning, I feel incredibly weak. My body have to struggle to get up, and my brain constantly keep telling me to go back to sleep. The only way for me to get up, and not struggle is when I realize i'm going to be late for school. I usually wake up around 7:50 a.m., and when that happens, my brain would suddenly click and I would start rushing to get dress, use the restroom, grab a piece of toast or something and quickly rush out of the door. It is lucky for me to live close to ASTI because if I didn't, I would practically be late for school every single day.

After reading Jasiu's blog, I realize that I need to start making my life more productive and not waste my time by sleeping. I feel that the benefits of waking early is something that I should really strive for in life. In order for me to succeed such a task, I have to create a stability of waking up earlier each morning.

Response to "Superman can't fly"

This is something that I found on Peter's blog that I thought was interesting to talk about:

What happen to a superman if he can't fly? Would he still try to help people out even though it is more dangerous than before? What is the definition of a "superman"

What interest me in a superhero is not their power, but their will to stand up for what is right. Peter asked if superman can't fly, would he still try to help people out even though it is more dangerous before? My answer to that question is of course superman will continue to help people. Danger is not a obstacle for standing up for what is right, the sense of justice is much greater than any danger. The reason why I think Superman started to help save people in the first place is that he is determine to bring justice to the world, and is willing to go against all odds to help save people.

In my opinion, "superheroes" doesn't just exist in comics and cartoons, but they also exist in real life. Anybody can become a "superhero", but they must have the will to stand up what for is right. There is a different between a "Superhero" compared to just a "hero". I think the difference is that a superhero is willing to help and save everybody around them while a hero is just a person that just help save a individual life. When a person is willing to save everybody around them and anybody that is in the need of saving is consider to be a "superman" in my eyes.

In conclusion, I don't think it really matter if superman can fly or not. His flame of justice would continue to lit on no matter if he loses his super powers or not. It might just make it harder for him to beat up bad guys and stuff, but it doesn't change the fact that he would always continue to help save people. Having super powers is not something that automatically entitles you as a "superhero"and it doesn't enable you to be able save people right away. You have to have the will to help save people,and the feeling of never giving up on the people around you in order to become a true hero.

Treasure

When people hear the term "treasure", the first thing that usually come to their head is gold coins and jewelries. I think the reason for this is probably because many people love money. Our modern sociality has imprinted a image of money to be our number one priority to have a happy and fulfilling life. For me, that is complete nonsense. Money is not everything, and I can definitely name many things that I rather have over money. When I hear the term "treasure", I think of something entirely different.

Treasure can come in all shapes and sizes; it can be anything. Different people treasure different things for certain reasons. Some of the reasons that I would treasure something are either that someone really important give it to me or it is something that I can't live my life without. One thing that I treasure is my friends because I don't think I can live life without them. They are my pillar of support that pushes me to move forward in life. Without them, my life would be really dull and would go absolutely nowhere at all.

What does it mean to "treasure" something? For me, if I choose something to treasure, it means i'm willing to protect that thing that i'm treasuring to the very end. It means i'm not going to let anything happen to it, and if I ever do lose it or break it, I would do anything to get it back. In my opinion, treasuring something means your heart is committed to do all of those things that I mentioned above. My family is also something that I treasure because they are the people that raised me to be the person that I am today. I'm grateful of them, and I can't imagine losing them. Something else that I treasure are the things that my friends give me. Anything that my friend give to me as gifts are consider "treasure" to me. I don't care if it is a just a normal piece of paper or if people call it trash, the things that my friend give to me are beyond what the real object is. Instead, the thing that I treasure is not the actual object itself but the thought of it coming from my friends is all I need to consider the object to be my "treasure".

The Road That I Have Chosen...

In life, there are many roads to choose from and each one of these roads can either lead to disaster or glory. But these rodes are not visible until you make a path for it yourself. When I was little, I always wanted to become a professional DJ. The idea of listening and remixing music for others to hear as a job seemed pretty awesome to me. That was a road that I have created for myself when I was young, but as I grew older, another rode soon begin to form. My dream of becoming a DJ slowly disappeared and something much more important appeared in front of me.

I hate lawyers and the last thing that I wanted to be when I'm older was to be one. The reason why I hate lawyers so much came from a personal experience that I had to go through when I was young. So why have I decided to choose this road? How was this road even appeared in front of me in the first place? It all started when someone that was really important to me passed away. He was a former lawyer that loved talking about politics and whenever we had the time, he would talk to me about the morality within the human society and it's system of law. He would always share his life story to me, and I would always listen to him intensely. One day, his time was up and he was sent to the hospital. Before he died, he told me a couple of things. He wanted me make a difference in the field of law, he wanted me to change the corrupted system that he failed to do. I didn't know what to say at the time, but I ended up making that promise to him anyway.

Our dreams can be shape in many ways, and there many things that can influence on the type of road that a person want to venture into. What I learned from that day was that a particular experience is able to change a person's life forever. That particular experience had already came for me, and it had forever marked me onto the rode of becoming a lawyer...