Journal Entry 53, Title: Holiday Plans

What would I like to do for my holiday? I would like to go to Taipei, Kaohsiung, and my room. I have to go to Taipei and Kaohsiung because my relatives live there. My dad’s relatives live in Kaohsiung, and my mother’s relatives live in Taipei. I don’t usually do anything except watch TV when I visit my relatives, there’s really nothing else to do. I don’t think I will go visit any countries during my spring break, the break is pretty short and we have a test on February 8, which is the last day of our break. The school cut short of our break to make us take a test. I want to go hang out with my friends during the break, either go to UMC to play sports or go watch some movies. Hanging out with friends is by far the most fun and interesting thing I can do in my life, so I hope I can do it during the break. Other than playing, I think I’ll have to study a lot, too. I have to prepare for the many tests that are coming my way. Chemistry, math, and many other tests. 

Journal Entry 52, Title: Justice?

Justice is something that people can either receive or have. When you receive justice, it’s when people judge you fairly, not based on feelings or their personal opinion, but on facts only. People have justice if they judge people fairly. I think the jury in To Kill A Mockingbird is not a jury that has justice, and I think Tom Robinson did not receive justice in that book. The jury decided Tom Robinson mostly by facts, but they also judged Tom Robinson by their personal opinions. They are very skeptical about what Tom Robinson said in the court. They kept thinking that Tom Robinson was lying just because Tom is a black man. I think Boo Radley also didn’t receive any justice in To Kill A Mockingbird. People think Boo Radley is a crazy and evil boy just because of the rumors that was spreading around. I think the name of this book “To Kill A Mockingbird” hints to what this book’s theme is. Atticus said his father told him “You can shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can get them. But you must not shoot mockingbirds, because it’s a sin to kill mockingbirds.” Mockingbirds don’t do anything bad to us; they only sing nice songs for us to hear, so we shouldn’t harm them. On the contrary, blue jays annoy the hell out of people. In the book, I think the “Mockingbirds” are Tom Robinson and Boo Radley. They didn’t do anything bad to the society, and yet people persecute them. I think the “blue jay” in this book is Bob Ewell; he did many bad things to the Finch family. I think the book To Kill A Mockingbird is trying to tell us not to harm people who don’t harm us.

Journal Entry 51, Title: Film vs. Print

Movies and books each have their good part and bad part. Books are usually better than movies, but movies are sometimes better than books, too. Movies can do many things that books can’t. Movies can convey a meaning in one picture, whereas it might take ten pages in a book to convey the same meaning. Movies are also clearer than books. For books that are very difficult and hard to understand like The Tale of Two Cities, or The Scarlet Letter, their movies are better. I couldn’t really picture the scenes in The Tale of Two Cities, but after I watched the movie, I understood the plot better. Books can do many things that movies can’t do, too. For plots that have characters with inner conflicts, books are better at carrying out the story. For example, in The Red Badge of Courage, the main character Henry Fleming had a lot of inner conflicts. Henry Fleming kept thinking whether he should stay and fight, or run away. He also made up a lot of excuses in his mind and assumed that things are the way he pictured them. If The Red Badge of Courage were a movie, than it would just show a young boy running around with a thoughtful face. It would be pretty hard to act out Henry Fleming’s inner conflicts. 

Journal Entry 50, Title: American Poetry Today

I think poetry is can be something other than sentences on paper. I think it can be sentences on the computer screen as well. Just kidding. I think poetry can exist in forms other than words and paper. I think some hidden forms of poetry that aren’t recognized by people are our feelings, even the everyday things we encounter are kind of like poetry. I think poetry is pretty important to people even until these days. Poetry is important to the people who read them, and also to the people who write them. For the people who read them, poems are considered an entertainment. For the people who write them, poems are a way to express their feelings, and also a way to make a living. I think poetry is not very important to me; I don’t really like to read poems, except the ones that are really good. Some of the really good ones that I’ve read are mostly the ones in our American Literature textbook. “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” by Henry Longfellow is one that I really like. The image on the text book really helped bring out the feeling of the poem. I think the “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe is a very good poem, too. It is very well written, but I didn’t like it because it was kind of disturbing to read. 

Journal Entry 49, Title: Letter to the World

“This is my letter to the World/that never wrote to me.” I think these words reveal that Emily Dickinson is a very lonely person. She is insignificant compared to the vast world outside her house. I think she believes that individual people are insignificant, so they shouldn’t try to become too famous. I think that’s why she never got her poems published, because she knows she will become very famous after she does so. She becomes like a hermit after some incident happened, and locked herself up to isolate herself from the outside world. Another interpretation that seems more reasonable is about her friends. She once said: "... some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep” She had a great fear that she will eventually lose all her friends, and the fear intensified as her friends died one by one. I think that is the reason why she locked herself up, all of her friends in the outside world are gone, and so she prefers to stay inside. She often writes letters to her friends, she wrote over 300 hundred letters to her dearest friend, Susan Gilbert. After seeing her biography, I think I can now understand the meaning of the phrase mentioned above. “This is my letter to the World/that never wrote to me.” She writes to her friends, but all her friends are gone, so no one replies to her anymore. I think by the World she meant the people she knows in the outside world. Now that the world is gone, she might as well stay in her house for the rest of her life. 

Journal Entry 48, Title: Boot Soles

When I see the words: “If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.”, I think of dirt. I think that when you look under your boot soles, you will find dirt, and I think Walt Whitman meant that he belongs to the earth, and he will go back to it when he dies, so the earth can represent him. If you look for him, his spirit will always be in the earth. I think Walt Whitman thought of himself as someone that is closely bounded with nature. He comes from the earth, and he will return to the earth after he dies. I think that he also meant that he will be with you where ever you go, he will be omnipresent. I think the writer is influenced by Romanticism, that’s why he favors the nature and woods. I think the poem is very good, it showed the traditional Romanticism qualities. 

Journal Entry 47, Title: Sound Effects in “The Raven”

Edgar Allen Poe used many different kinds of sound effects in his poem. Some techniques that he used are onomatopoeia, rhyme, and alliteration. Rhyme is the most frequently used technique in “The Raven”. Every stanza ends with “Nevermore”, and most sentences end with words that have the “ore” sound. Lenore and nevermore, more and many others. I think the sound effects in this poem are the things that made this poem successful. The sound effects not just made the poem interesting to read out loud, but they also created an atmosphere. The repetition of “Lenore” and “nevermore” let’s us feel the pain of Edgar Allen Poe far stronger. The rhymes not only made the poems look very good, it also made it sound very good. 

Journal entry 46, Title: Symbol of the Raven

I think the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” symbolizes something abstract, something that you can’t touch, instead of just a black bird. The Raven kept on saying “Nevermore” to Poe, thus reminding him of the fact that he will never see his wife again. Therefore, I think the raven represents the grief and sorrow that the writer feels. I think Edgar Allen Poe chose a raven to carry this symbolic meaning because a raven is black. A black bird is very suitable for representing dark thoughts. Using a chicken would totally ruin the effect. Ravens are birds that usually represent death in stories, because ravens eat the corpse of dead animals. Most stories that have ravens in it are often very creepy or scary; I remember one story about a family that lives in the woods. The family starts getting a dead raven on their front porch one day, and they find one every day. Sometimes the raven is pinned to their door by a nail, and the family was really scared. The father of the family eventually went crazy and died, but the son was very brave, and he found out that somebody was setting bird traps in the woods and purposely giving them to his family, hoping to drive them crazy. 

Journal Entry 45, Title: Ugly Reality

I think there are a good side and a bad side for the children to be in court, seeing the Tom Robinson case, and I think there is more bad side than good side. First of all, the children will receive too much information on the violence and rape. It gives a bad influence on the children. Second of all, the children will see and learn about the ugly side of human society too early. They will see how the some people try to put other people to death just because of their personal opinions about them. The Ewells have a strong hate against the black people, and call them the n-word. Bob Ewell mentioned the n-word several times in the court, which I think is a bad influence on Scout, since the word is considered to be a very harsh insult. I think the good side of letting the children see the case is that they will mature faster. Scout will learn more about the society she lives in earlier, and will understand more about the relationship between them and black people. I think the appropriate age for someone to see the court case should be at least 18, because people are more mature when they are 18.

Journal Entry 44, Title: Licked

Defending Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird Atticus says, “We were licked a hundred years before we started.” I think Atticus meant that defending black people is an impossible mission, and people in the past have already tried and failed. I think he believes that because the oldest people in town all believed that it is an outrage to defend a black person, and nobody thinks that it’s right to defend a black person. Only a few people are on Atticus’s side in this case. I think he didn’t agree to take the case, but was assigned it by other people, but I think Atticus tried to defend Tom Robinson because he thinks he is innocent. People are mad because Atticus actually works hard to defend Tom Robinson. I think if I was a lawyer, I would probably use the same information as Atticus. I think the prosecution would use the witnesses’ and the victim’s testimony to convict Tom Robinson. I think the accusation brought on Tom Robinson was unjust and ridiculous. Tom Robinson was clearly framed, but nobody believed him just because he was a black man. 

Journal Entry 43, Title: I Dare You

Personally, I think dares are kind of stupid. Some people think their fun, but their only fun when you’re not the one being dared. One of the times that I remember myself being dared was when I was in 6^th grade. My “friend” dared me to kick a hard looking pipe; I didn’t lose my wits at that time so I said NO. But then my friend said the most famous and deadly sentence (except it’s the Chinese version): “Are you a chicken?”, and so I tried kicking the pipe, and it exploded, spraying water everywhere. When I went back to the classroom, the teacher told me to stand in the corner till it’s time to go home. I stood for about 4 to 5 hours. Obviously, taking a dare does not give you anything good, if you don’t take a dare, you’re a chicken, but if you take a dare, it still doesn’t prove that you’re not a chicken, and you get many undesirable consequences. I never really dared anyone to do anything, but people nowadays are too smart to take a dare. They don’t even get affected when you say they are a chicken, they just shrug and walk away. 

Journal Entry 42, Title: Welcome Back

Nothing much happened during my Winter Break. I studied a lot, I studied SAT Chemistry, Physics, Art History, and many other subjects. I went to UMC and played basketball with Michael Liu and other people one time, and I went to a restaurant on the first floor of our school building. I went to the restaurant with 7 other people, and we ate So Shi Shao and had a great time. My sister came back on December 23^rd, and I went to the movies with my family. We went to see the Harry Potter movie, and after the movie, we went to a Japanese restaurant. On Thursday of the second week, we went to Jiou Fan, a town near Taipei. Jiou Fan is famous for its snacks that the street vendors sell. There are also many stores selling other different things. My sister brought a bag that has cat pictures on it. I ate a lot of things. The next day, we went to the Flora Expo, at that place, we saw many flowers, and also many people. We didn’t go to a lot of the exhibitions because there were too many people. After the Flora Expo, we went home to Hsinchu, which is different from everybody because everybody is coming to Taipei for the New Year count down. Many of my friends went to Taipei 101, but I didn’t go because I have too much homework. It was a pretty busy and fun winter break for me, although it was a pity that I missed the chance to celebrate the year 100 in Taipei with my friends. Anyways, Happy New Year!