So facebook is used for many things. Connecting with people you haven't seen in a while, sharing funny pictures, posting statuses about your mundane daily life, and sometimes, sharing really fascinating, powerful videos. About a week ago I was mindlessly scrolling through my facebook newsfeed when I stumbled upon this amazingly powerful one minute video.
#firstworldproblems is something that has been trending on twitter for a long time (excuse me if that sentence isn't accurate I honestly don't have a twitter and I am absolutely clueless about twitter lingo). Anyway, a few example of these tweets are "When I go to my friends houses, I can't charge my iPhone because I have the 5 and they have the 4" or "There's pulp in my pulp free orange juice" or "I just put lotion on my hands and now I can't open my gatorade". Although most tweets of this nature are meant to be jokes and are admittedly sometimes funny, they also sometimes ring true in an embarrassing way. People will tweet things such as "when my finger gets tired from holding up my iPhone and completely mean it. This video puts these so called 'problems' into perspective. Seeing a man standing in front of a building that is broken and could hardly qualify as a shack saying "I hate it when my house is so big, I need two wireless routers" really makes me think about my 'problems' and things that I complain about on a daily basis that really, I should be lucky to have at all. Well, this has been my sappy post about people who have it a lot worse than us. I hope that if anything, people now think a little about what other people's lives are like before complaining about when they ask for no pickles but still get pickles.
For this week's post I thought I would share my english project that I did a few weeks ago about the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. We read the book and then had to make a multi media presentation about a theme that we picked up from the book. Not knowing that we would be reading the book this year, I watched the movie over the summer with my family. At the time I had both liked and disliked the movie. I enjoyed the general idea and the acting, but found it overly dramatic and pretty depressing. When I found out we had to read the book, I was excited to see how they would compare.
The movie and the book are very similar, but also quite different. At first I was upset I had seen the movie first since it spoiled the ending for me. But, as I was reading I was glad I could think back to how the movie portrayed certain events and have an image to go with what I was reading. Already knowing the plot made the small details that might seem insignificant to one who was reading the book for the first time even more interesting. I picked up on a lot more of the clues about the key and the grandfather than those who were not aware of the full plot until the end.
The book also offers more perspective than the movie because it tells the story from the grandmother and grandfathers points of view as well. Because of my appreciation for the story, I was excited when Ms. Fillman told us about the project. I immediately knew that my theme would be something to do with "love and loss," which is exactly what it ended up being. I also wanted to connect it to the Simon and Garfunkel song "Sounds of Silence," because I love the song and think that it relates really well to the book.
So, I began choosing pieces of the song that related to quotes I had chosen from the book, and getting them to correspond to pictures that matched both. After I had done that for six quotes, I finished my presentation by relating it to the passing of my dog and how loss comes in all different ways, but eventually we all have to move on. Below is my project. Although it is not exactly how I envisioned it, I'm proud of my work and I think it came out pretty well.
