Perspectives

Documenting struggle is easy to do. It is easy to sit down in front of a computer, write down all the things that make your blood boil, and walk away satisfied. There are countless trials and tribulations and everyone wants to get them down on paper, or vent to their best friend, in the smartest, most emotional way possible. But in the end, Man was born, Man lives, Man dies, and its all Vanity.

There once was a guy named Joe, and Joe was a 14 year old. He lived with his mother and baby sister, and there was a war raging in Joe's country. Joe was part of the militia, and was called out of his neighborhood to hide in a town away from the advancing troops. While Joe was away, the enemy came into his community, and without warning, burned all the playgrounds, destroyed all the power and water systems, killed everyone in his family, and everyone related to Joe in the general area. When Joe returned he found his life was no longer the same. These enemies of his country brutallu murdered his family, and Joe was going to get revenge. So he became a ruthless hunter of the enemy. He would have his revenge, and eventually he won the war. His family never found redemption except for his own personal revenge during the war.

Change the ethnicity, change the battlefeild, change the winners, and you are still left with the same atrocities. Murder on each side of the situation, and wrongdoing and grief from death at every turn. The horrors in My Lai couldnt be any worse to fathom is I wasn't surrounded by it every single week day in and day out. In order to look into an inquiry like this, I think the more troubling thing is, that we have had to look into what it is like to think like a murderer. It is true that in a war it is required to kill, but to know how to inquire into these things properly, I feel ive had to dive into the mind of a killer., which has been not so much an enjoyable experience.

In passing

I feel like the last few weeks have been a really huge dissapointment. Not only had I lost faith in my own abilities to move forward and keep learning, but I also lost faith in the idea that Truth In Society was relevant at all to my university experience. With that being said, we stopped reading and doing reports on what we read, and it was apparent to me why we were doing what we were doing. We simply dug deep into reading in order to have a choice in what we wanted to tackle for feasability studies.

Now, I have just one thing to say, and I will do it openly, and try to keep it constructive. Our abilities in this class, to understand its goals, to get the work done on time and done well, and our overall capabilities to learn are just as good as any other person in this university. I feel like the professors treat us with disrespect, and perhaps we deserve it for losing faith in the process, but the violent reactions, and consistant cursing tends to wear on me. I have been in some very akward, frustrating, on the brink of losing my mind kind of stressful situations at work, but I never resort to cursing at my coworkers, and I especailly dont do it to my pupils. I use to teach people how to swim as a lifegaurd, and also to do first aid, if I swore at my students for not putting in the effort, I would get fired, that is the bottom line. I do not suggest that anything like that should happen here, and we are not 14 year olds learning CPR, but the idea is still there. It is unproffessional and we are not in any way professionals in the area of learning. We all struggle, and we all get frustrated, and being crude and using foul language is never the way to handle a situation, no matter how frustrating it might seem.
I realize I asked a stupid question I should have never asked, but honestly, I dont do bibliographies well, I put a lot of work into the report I did, and there is knowone that can take that away from me. I truely feel that the work I have been doing on my feasability report, has taught me more about the Vietnam war than I ever knew before. I have found faith in the process again, and no matter what stupid questions I ask, or how dissapointing it might seem that I have not put the same effort into this symester as i did in the last, I am proud of the work I am producing.

Death is tricky. It really is. It comes when you need it the least. It is always complicated, it is always difficult to accept, and it is always easier when its someone else going through it. Those families in My Lai are gone. They are voiceless. They are a group of people taken from this earth in the midst of conflict that was going on around them. I feel like as a human being, death is a regular part of life itself. With life there is always death, and no matter how wrong this massacre was, it still happened and can never be taken back. So we can only look to the ones who are still alive. The ones who pulled the trigger. So the question is, should death bring death? Should the killers be killed. Should the world just forget and move on? I believe such questions are never really answered, you simply just accept the decision made at the end of the trial. Move on with your life. Take a picture of the graves, if there are any, leave some flowers, and make your popcorn and watch Survivor.

Opinion vs Belief

Through Learning this week, I have come to the conclusion that I must face facts, and act in order to learn. So I will be drinking a Grape Soda at the start of Aquinas and observing my bodies reaction.

Perspectives

I am thriving in this setting. I feel like I am doing things that matter. I know I am learning significant things. Taking trips to the Library, up and down the isles, looking for books. Searching through Indexes and Footnotes, I can not help but appreciate the quality of learning I am getting. Not required but definitly needed to continue on here. It is the type of learning I need to have before I take any steps further. The idea that I will not be able to present anything to the class by the end of the symester, is an idea I am not very pleased by, but from the looks of it, we would not have much to present.
I guess I will just need to sit back and take it all in. Learning Reflections are on the horizon. Christmas Ho!

Taking the Time

Ok, so I suppose I have been thinking quite hard about Aquinas in a whole. The philosophy, the system of intrigue it seems to have, and rather than dive into what happened in class between the professors and I, or expressing my opinions on how I effected others, I will simply just tell a story.

It was the first day of grade 11, and the two English teachers at the time, Miss Blanchette, and Miss Watson, were a pair of old hippies who obviously had a nack for pointing out how bad every one of their students were at English. Grade 11 was the grade everyone was afraid of going into, basically for the reason that they would be taking English with one of these two. They were a scary pair of woman with their moth filled clothing, and ugly hair.
The first english class was with both of them standing at the front of the classroom with a stack of paper as high as the desk, almost literally. They were exams. They were 100 question, 8 page, peices of hell, with simply one sentance as each question, which u would need to pick out what was wrong (or not wrong) and write it on the side. I literally almost shit myself looking at it, and trying to go through it knowing I would surely fail.
And I did....with flying colors.
15 out of 100 was my final score on the test, and when I looked at it, I hung my head low, put my head on the desk, and nearly cried. I was also not the only one. 85 percent of the class failed that exam. The teachers simply gave it to us, and let us leave the class for the day. As I left the room, I could feel this overwhelming sense of doom. I did not feel like learning where I made my mistakes, I did not feel like correcting anything, I did not feel like learning more about punctuation or spelling or anything to improve if I were ever presented with a similar situation. I did not want to learn. Simply because I felt like I was already a fool.

so uh...pirates?

Sinse my last journal I have learned that pirates use eye patches to keep one eye focused in the dark when they decent into the lower decks to slay enemy cannon crews, while the other eye is focused to the light. I have also learned that pirates kept parrots as pets because it was the closest thing to a personal lasting relationship with another living thing than they could get.

Faithbook

Aside from my learning within my own life, school has been quite insightful, and I will share both sides of things in my post.

School

Debating can be fun, and learning journals, and crazy pink shirted lecturers who write books. It's about those moments when learning is not just remembering, but growing. I feel as though I have been going through some changes in the way I think of learning. I feel like as I sit in class with my fellow students and take in things I couldn't imagine me getting anything out of years ago. For one, I have learned that popularity can often be a bad thing, but popular people often know they are bringing attention to themselves, which often turns negative. Paparazzi are bastards. However, did they hire their own paparazzi to watch themselves? The man with the many haircuts, and parez hilton, just seem to be people who want attention and fame like the people they watch and follow. It is an odd cycle.
Turning points proved to be a fruitful experience. However, it seems that most of the turning points for the people in our class, were traumatic and often quite sad stories. Maybe there is music in the misery? Connection through tragedy.

On the socail front

I have noticed an improvement in my socail life. I care a little less and with that I am able to move past my insecuries and speak my mind. Besides a few harsh exceptions, I am making friends, and working towards a pretty decent future.
I find however, that my faith is something I have learned to be more interested in lately. Some woman in my life have been challanging me with ideas I havent thought about for some time, and it is with that, I have personally become curious once again. Can my faith be salvaged? Is there hope for every fallen man? Is it ok to care?

Short and pretty unsatisfactory entry for me today, but it has to be done.
JB out