This Blessed House

This story was mainly about a couple with a statue. To me I think this is really like a situations that happens every day in the real world. I mean everyone is going to have issues and certain problems that you are going to go through. Basically no one is going to agree with each other because you are always going to have different opinions on different circumstances. The real problem is really how you handle the problem I believe. You are going to have to give in take in anything you do. You are always going to have many things that you disagree with in life, but the real problem is how you are going to handle the situation. Many people chose to handle these situations in a negative way which will affect many relationships. People have to learn how to compromise and fix their problems. This is not just in this story as a relationship with two married people, but with people in general as friends or anything. In the story I think both people have to be understanding to each other. If you know your husband is completely trying to be Hindu and not have Christian things around because it would be bad for his religion they need to talk about that. At the same time he has to be understanding to her feelings as well. I mean she is balling her eyes about the statue. She obviously really wants that statue to be there and is affected by it if it is gone. Therefore, they both have their own individual side that they need to sort out together. By him going and throwing out the statue though is only going to make things worse with their relationship. All it is going to do is upset her and not only that but cause more problems. This should not be the solution to their problems. I think this story really taught me how communication is a huge step just with everything. I didn’t realize how the things you do in your everyday life can really affect people. Not only that but the way you communicate with each other as well.

Reading for Transformation

            I am choosing to do my blog about “Reading for Transformation.” The first step it says is to begin prayer with silence. I think this is a good start because it really allows you to have a chance to be able to clear your mind. I think this is a good start to start a lot of your days off with. Just before doing most things or opening your mouth and you were just silent might change a lot of decisions that you are about to make. You would defiantly have more time to think about things and not regret a lot of decisions that are going to take place. The next few steps I believe can really help you. It says that you are supposed to slow read and then read out loud. I know when doing the onion experiment in class this really helped me better understand the text in more details. Plus it really gave me a better over view of the text. Just reading things one time can really affect the way you see the whole story. I think by taking some of these steps that you will really be able to grow for literature because most of it to my understanding is just your thoughts and opinions about text. You are never clearly wrong on certain things or ideas that come to your head. I believe knowing this will help people like literature as well. This quote I really liked that stood out to me the most was, “The encounter described here goes beyond the accumulation of new data or the enjoyment of aesthetic experience, to focus attention upon the reader’s reappropriation of self.” Basically what I got out of this was that you are always going to have your own opinion. I think this is a really good thing because it allows people to really be able to focus on what they think without getting criticized and be told they are doing something wrong.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

In the beginning of the book, Mel talks about how he thought real love was nothing more than spiritual love. I think there of course is a such thing as spiritual love, but I think there is other types of love as well, not just spiritual. I believe there is a friend love, passionate love, sexual love, romantic love, committed love, and infatuated love. I think Terri had a pretty rough situation with love. A person trying to kill you because they love you so much is not love. A couple can fall in love, but when you want to kill someone over it that is not love anymore your actions are speaking more now. Love might have caused you to do something crazy because you care about someone a lot, but I think that it is more your thoughts and emotions that determine what you do about it and that is not love. Terri getting beat up while they are saying I love you means there is something wrong with that person and they need help. Honestly, once you put your hand on someone in a relationship to harm them you truly do not love them anymore. Your actions are speaking more than your words. By loving someone you need your actions to meet up with your words. First, you are putting someone in danger. Second, if you truly loved someone you would want what is best for them and harming them is never a good answer. When Terri argues that he still thinks it was love, I one hundred percent agree with Mel that it is not love. I do agree however with Terri when he says that people are different because he is right. Everyone is going to have a different meaning of love. However, when things are taken out of love such as violence and abuse or anything else in that matter I do not think you can compare that to love.

What You Get Out Of What You Read

I one hundred percent agree with the statement. I believe you really can determine what you can get out of reading anything by how much you put into it. I think this because if you just skim through something you are only going to do the bare minimum which means you are only going to get the bare minimum out of whatever it is you read. By reading something one time there is going to be a majority of it that you are going to forget. Of course it would be more information you remember then just skimming it though. I think by reading your material several times you will remember more of the information because you are going to review it a couple times. As for me this is how I think it works. Whenever I read something a couple times I can always comprehend it at a better level. This tends to work for me whenever reading a story because majority of the time I think I understand it which I do, but I get more detail and a better understanding of what the author is trying to say. Therefore, the more you really focus on what you read and the more time you take reading something is going to affect how you understand the material. Focus is really important in reading as well. If you are day dreaming it is going to be really hard to understand what it is you read. You are really going to need a clear mind so you can take information in at any given point. I think reading really relates to writing in a way because the more you redo your work the better it is going to be in the end. As I was always taught practice makes perfect. Anytime I think of this I always relate it back to basketball. I am not going to make a shot the first time, but with practice I am guarantee to have a better chance the second time if I take the shot again.

Literature

            I would not really consider myself a reader. In fact I do not read much of anything unless I have to for a class. Majority of the time it is hard for me to just stay focused in reading just because it is not interesting. I would not consider myself as a strong reader. As for classes I remember reading “The Odyssey” which I thought was the most significant text that I have ever read, but I took certain ways to understand the text. As a class we read most of the texts and broke them down so we could understand what exactly was going on. This was easier for me to understand. One book I read that I enjoyed was “The Outsiders”. We read this book as a class. I was interested in it because it really related to everyday situations. Another book that stood out to me was “Torch Red”. This book I was forced to read when picking any book that I wanted and then was assigned a paper to write about it for one of my classes. This book really stood out to me the most because it related to situations that every girl would end up going through. It taught me a lot while reading this just about every day things. Out of all the literature that I read I must say each text really taught me something new and brought me through a learning experience. As for growing the only thing I can really remember as for nursery rhymes is “Twinkle Twinking Little Star”. This one was my favorite growing up! One thing about the essay that really stood out to me was when Professor Corrigan wrote “literature is a thing you do as part of your life”. This stood out to me because I normally would just look at is as something I would have to read and I am going to learn something. Literature is actually something that I do every day which is hard for me to realize. With reading this essay I feel like have a better understanding for literature.