Slice of Life #12

 "You know, it's funny what a young man recollects," Forrest Gump said that and it's undeniably true. Like Forrest, I don't remember being born, or recall what I got for my first Christmas nor do I remember when I went on my first outdoor picnic. I do remember the little things, like when my uncle Shawn pushed me face first into cow manure and I had to sit in the cows' drinking trough. I also remember these little Hello Panda cookies I would eat when I lived in Japan. It's the small things that don't really place a dramatic impact on your life that you can remember, like having a pretend cooking show with your best friend or trying to get the attention of the boys who lived across the street from her by singing and dancing obnoxiously outside. I wonder, thirty years from now, what I'll be remembering from my days as a high school student, or if I'll remember any of it at all.

Slice of Life #11

Amanda Todd = The New Kony 2012?

  
   Although this is out of date now, over break I decided that as soon as we got back to school this was going to be my first slice topic. Only 7 months ago, the invisiblechildreninc came out with a video encouraging people to stand up for the children in Africa being taken into an army led by Joseph Kony and forced to murder their parents. This video told the world that it was their job to get involved and make a difference, however, when the date came when everyone was expected to cover their town in flyers announcing that Mr. Kony would soon be found and put to an end, everyone had already forgotten about it. That was the first thing I thought of when I logged onto Facebook to see a picture of a 15 year old, Amanda Todd.
   I would like to state that, while yes it's a sad story, I don't pity her. Amanda was a girl with very low self esteem. She was willing to show a multitude of men on the Internet herself nude. She was bullied because she had no respect for herself whatsoever and then she was only beaten up because of her promiscuous behavior with another girl's boyfriend. She later went on to drink bleach and claim she was subjected to cyberbullying when other children on Facebook would tag her in pictures of bleach. I would love to know why she simply didn't delete her account if it was getting to be that bad. And where were her parents? Don't you think you'd be watching her like a hawk if she was your daughter and attempted suicide and was being bullied at school? Her parents did nothing but feed the problem by moving her to a new school rather than addressing the the situation and seeking out the authorities.
   Everyone is saying how anyone who was thinking with their brain rather than their heart is nothing more than a bully and I have seen multiple instances where people standing up for Amanda were in fact bullying those who simply stated that if she would've had a little more respect for herself and not have shown multiple men her body then none of this would have ever happened. I was one of those instances. But now, only one week later, you rarely see anything showing up on social networking sites about the young Canadian girl. She faded away, just like Kony 2012.

Slice of Life #10

 I've never been one to cry because of a movie but there are just some that have the ability to make me burst into tears with little effort. For example, the movie Harold and Maude. It was a movie made in 1971 about a young man named Harold who has this obsession with death and always put himself in these fake suicide setups. Then one day he goes to a funeral of a man he doesn't know and ends up meeting a 79 year old woman by the name of Maude who's high on life. At first, Harold doesn't know what to think of the strange woman but begins seeing her on a regular basis after that day. Harold's mother knows that he's "special" and starts setting him up with various women on a dating base. After she sees that he shows no interest in any of them she begins to give up and ship him out with his uncle in the military. Neither Harold nor Maude want to see him go, so they work up a plan to keep him from being able to join. The movie follows them as they go through many adventures and find true love and how it knows no boundaries. Also, this movie showed me the amazing music artist Cat Stevens. The soundtrack actually is only made up of his songs which may seem strange, but I truly believe that only an artist such as he would've been able to pull off such a thing considering all the diverse stylings he does. And even though this is a movie talk and not a book talk, I would still give it a 10/10 on my scale.

                                                                      
                                                            Trouble by Cat Stevens