Unlock The Secrets Of My Heart

The Court Room

This is the best section we have read so far because so much has happend. Here people are brought in for questioning.  John brings in Mary Warren to tell the truth about the doll and the girls lying about what they are blaming on innocent people.

The judge, Danforth, is a idiot and a jerk. He asks a question in a telling way. Like he says you did something and then says, “did you not.” He already has his opinion before he asks the question so no matter what that peron says his opinion doesn’t change. I think that by the end of the Act John just has given up. Jake had said that he didn’t understand why John was laughing and I think that is because he has given up. He is thinking to himself things like, can you hear yourselves? No matter what I say you twist and turn it to make your story seem to be the right one. What else can I do? He is just laughing at how stupid these people are acting. That they can’t see that these girls just don’t want to get into trouble. But what they don’t relize is that they are puttin innocent people in a life or death situation.

The highest point I think was when Danforth had Elizabeth testify against John and she lied to save him even though he addmitted to commiting adultry. He did this to prove that Abigail had a motive to lie about all this nonsense. But Elizabeth had no idea and lied to save her husband. What will happen next…..

So we learn in this act that Abigail is in love with John Proctor. And that his wife Elizabeth knows about it. You are really introduced to these two in this act. You can tell that John is a sensitive guy and that he is sorry for what he has done and you can tell that Elizabeth is a women who will forgive but not forget. In this scene as well the blame game starts. Every girl accused starts to blame everyone and anyone they can. Its just a whirl wind that I don’t think will end in the next scene. I think that alot of innocent people will die.

I have never liked the beginning of any stories because that is where they are introducing and leading up to others events. I think that the people in the story or psyco. Especially Abigail. She is only trying to save her own butt. She doesn”t care who she ends up hurting in the process. You can tell that she is going to be a big part of this story and that she is in controll of many of the event that are going to happen. I can’t wait to read more.

What is a Naturalist story? It’s a story using either man against nature, or man against man. It took me awhile to understand how to write a story like this but I started thinking of things that maybe I had really done and decided that I could turn my experiences into a naturalist story. Maybe adding a few untrue things here and there to make it a good story but my life can inspire many of my writings…

Are you listening children? Are you quit comfortable? Then I’ll begin…

          Some years ago there was a young women, a beautiful young women, that thought that you should always live life to the fullest. She never thought negative things and always tried to see the good in man. She was a person people could turn to in their time of need. She would just sit and listen…she’d nod occasionally and maybe give an opinion here or there but she mainly sat and let you spill your guts out. She wouldn’t judge you or even pretend like she knew exactly how you felt. She’d just give you a shoulder to cry on, even though by the end of the talk she was making you cry by making you laugh so hard at her silly jokes. Her friends thought maybe this was her way of learning. She never studied for anything yet she knew so much. She loved spending time with her friends and on this beautiful spring day they decided to hike Harney Peak. What they didn’t know was that this was going to be her last day alive.

It was a beautiful day out. There wasn’t much wind and the sun was shinning bright. They were almost to the base of Harney Peak when Rose screamed out, “Oh I forgot my phone!” Everyone laughed. She hadn’t forgotten it. It was sitting in the front seat where she had left it the night before. “Rose you really are blonde at heart!” “It’s not funny Ryan. What if we got lost?” He turned to her and laughed. “You get lost that’s like hell freezing over, it won’t happen. You’ve hiked up here to many times.” She nodded her head and sat back for the last of the ride.

They reached the mountain sooner then they had planned which was a good thing because they didn’t want to be caught up there in the dark. They grabbed there bags and started for it. “Hey since we have extra time do you want to take the other path up there?” Roses’ friends looked at each other thinking of the pros and cons of the situation. Ryan looked at her and said, “Why don’t you take that path and we’ll take the other and we’ll see who makes it up there first?” She laughed at the challenges but agreed to it and headed off.

After about an hour Rose called Ryan to make sure him and everyone were ok. “Yeah we’re great. Alice is a little wimp but we’re good you?” “Oh just peachy. Well see you at the top!” As the time past the group finally reached the top. As they climbed the stairs to the tower they didn’t see any sign of Rose. “Ha, we beat her to the top. Now she owes us dinner!” They all screamed and laughed.

Rose had been walking for hours and she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere near the top of Harney. The tempurature had dropped since the afternoon but that was normal for this area. She checked her phone to see if there was any service and saw that she had one bar. She stopped to call Ryan and the group. The phone rang and rang and as she started to give up hope Alice answered. “Alice are you at the top?” “Yeah where are you?” Rose tried to stay calm and didn’t want them to worry so she said, “Oh I’m about a mile away from the tower. I’ll be there soon.” She knew she needed to ask for help so she threw in as a joke, “If I’m not there in a half an hour come find me.” They laughed and hung up.

It began to get dark. It was too cold to be out in this weather and the group was beginning to panic because they hadn’t been able to get ahold of Rose. “Alice are you sure she sounded ok when you talked to her?” Ryan asked in a worried voice. “Yes! She was laughing and making jokes nothing seemed wrong. Why are you so worried about her? She’s probably just trying to scare us.” “Yes Alice, that’s it, she would scare us to death up here for a good laugh.”

Rose tried to call the group but they signal was to weak. She started to run up the path trying to find something familiar about where she was at. She’d been here sooo many times it was hard for her to believe she was lost. Her lost ha funny thought. She began to run out of air and decided to sit down. She looked at her phone and decided to listen to her ringtones to calm herself down. If she just stayed in one spot it would be easier to find her.

“It’s too cold for her to be lost out there. All her warm clothes are with us.” Ryan began to run down the steps of the tower. Alice tried to pull him back but he kept going. “What good is it going to do if you get yourself lost too!” She had a point but he couldn’t just let her sit out there scared and alone. He loved her too much. Not like he’d ever tell her that. “Well what do you suggest we do?” “I don’t know Ryan. We called search and rescue and that’s all we really can do.” They sat on the edge of the stairs listening to the sound of the nearing helicopter and the whisper of the trees.

Rose had fallen into an uneasy sleep. It was sleep nonetheless. But she was awaken by the sound of Ryan’s voice screaming her name. She jumped up and started to run toward the sound. She kept trying to call his phone to tell him she could hear him but the signal was still to weak. She could barley see where she was going and the path seemed to be getting smaller. “ROSE! ROSE! WHERE ARE YOU?” Rose heard this and tried to scream back but from being in this cold all night couldn’t get a sound from her throat. “I’m Here!” She whispered hoping maybe he was close enough to hear her. But he wasn’t.

Four days later they found Rose. She had fallen a great ways off the side of the path that she was running on. They found in her hand her phone still opened. As Ryan picked it up he saw that there was no signal and started to walk to where Alice was standing to show her that Rose had tried to call when all of a sudden the signal went up to it’s full power. “If only she hadn’t fallen. A few more steps and we’d have her in our arms right now.” Ryan put his head down as tears rolled down his face. “I shouldn’t have made that bet. If only.”

It was cold. That’s all she could think about. They had been driving forever and the person hadn’t spoken a word to her. She didn’t know how she had gotten here. All she remembered was falling asleep in her bed and then waking up to the sound of a car starting.

Her hands were tied behind her back and her mouth was taped shut. She didn’t know why this was happening to her. She was the girl who was nice to everyone. She didn’t really have any enemies and people loved to be around her.

As the car came to a stop she could see an old building in the distance. It looked familiar but she didn’t know why. As her kidnapper came around the car she could see that he was a very handsome man. He was tall with nice big eyes and strong arms; he also looked familiar but everytime she tried to figure out his name she got distracted by this handsome kidnapper.

This was probably why she wasn’t scared as much as she should be. As he took her out of the car he surprisingly handled her with great care. Her lifted her gently out of the car and carried her into the old building. To her it seemed as if she was being cared to her room on her wedding night. He set her down in a big red chair that looked like a barbers chair. He stood and looked at her for a few minuets and then left. As she looked around the room she started to relize why it seemed so familiar….it was the exact set up from her favorite movie Sweeney Todd! She then began to panic. Who knew her so well to know that Sweeney Todd was her favorite movie and that she was deathy affraid of being cut to death?

She tried to untie the rope that was holding her in place but they wouldn’t move. As she struggled the man in the shadows just watched with pleasure. He had loved this women once, but had lost her to a backstabbing friend who lied and told her that her love was cheating and lying to her every chance he got. And now he would have his revenge.

The lights suddenly turned on and there he was…”Benjamin?” She tried to scream through her taped mouth. “Why are you doing this?” He couldn’t understand her so he just ignored her.

He started to walk to the side table by the chair. As he reached the table he started to open a small red oak box. In it layed 6 silver barber knives. He grabbed one and opened it slowly. He turned to her and started to sing…”These are my friends. See how they glisten in the light. My friends….” It the song Johnny Depp had sung in Sweeeney Todd when he got his knives back. All she could do was sit and watch as Benjamin lost his mind and himself with his revenge seeking.

He stepped up close to her and said, “I loved you and he stole you. “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit and they all deserve to die!!” He rose his hand high and with one last cry from her he slit her throat.

He wipped the knife off and looked at her one last time. And as he stared he started to think of the times they had spent together and in that moment the real him came back. He fell to his knees and asked, “What have I done?” It was just a parody gone too far!

Unlocking The Secrets…Of A Book

            “What does it mean?” That was a question I use to ask all the time when I read books that I didn’t understand. But this year I have read a few stories, and discussed these stories with my class mates and realized that there is always more to the text then what you read, a hidden secret just waiting to be unlocked.

            One of the more funny books that we read was called “A Good Man Us Hard to Find” By. Flannery O’Connor. When I first read the title I thought that is was going to be another one of those love stories that I see old women reading in coffee shops. But I was wrong; after discussing the story with my class we came up with the conclusion that the story was about finding the good in man. How did we get that conclusion you ask?

The story is about a family that is going on vacation but can’t agree where to go. The grandmother wants to go somewhere different from where the rest of her family wants to go…so she brings up the fact that there is a criminal on the loss in the area where her family wants to vacation. So she is using any fact she can get to get her way. Another example is that she lies to the kids and tells them a story about a house with treasure in the walls. The kids get so excited that they want to go find it. The catch is, she can’t remember what state the house was located. So she guesses. The funniest part of the whole book was when they got in the car crash. Now sure car crashes aren’t funny but the funny part of it was the fact that the kids were laughing and running around scream happily that they had been in a car crash…now doesn’t that sound odd?

            I think that this book makes you realize that people don’t think of others as much as they should hence the title “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.

            We read another book that was quit similar to this called “The Life you Save May Be Your Own”. The reason I think it’s similar is because the people in this story all want certain things and will do anything to get it. The only difference is there is actually one innocent person in this story and it is the dumb daughter.

            A strange man shows up in town and happens upon an old women and her daughter. He sees that they have a truck in the yard and decides that maybe if he offered to help her around the house maybe she would give him the car. The woman decides that her daughter needs a husband but, the catch is that the daughter and the husband have to stay living in her house. Translation, she doesn’t want to have to do anything around the house. So the story unfolds…the mystery man finally decides to marry the girl as long as he gets the truck…he marries her and while they are “on the way to their honeymoon” he ditches her at a diner. How’s that for thinking of no one but yourself?

            The best book we read, and probably the most meaningful story was a story called “Minister’s Veil”. Now I have to make fun of my class because they didn’t understand the meaning even after we described it even though I was telling them and so was our teacher.

The story was about a minister, obviously, who one day decides to wear a black veil and never take it off. Now the towns’ people all respected and liked the minister prior to this but once the black veil was on they all started to get fearful around him and all of a sudden didn’t trust him. For years he lost people dear to him and lost the friends he once had. Many, many years passed and even on his death bed he wouldn’t let anyone take it off. They kept trying to tell him that if he took it off he would die an honorable death. But he explained that everyone in the world is wearing a veil. That the never show their true selves to anyone. Not even someone they trust and love.

My view of the story was that ALL people are judgmental. They judge someone before they get to know them. And even if they aren’t they hide the real them from the people who care about them the most.

            We do that with these stories. We judge them before we even read them. We have our own idea of what it’s going to be so when we open it and read it the idea sticks. If we opened the book with an un-judgmental mind maybe we could learn a little something, maybe even something about ourselves….

Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in New York City. Since he was born in the Great Depression he didn’t have alot of money for college so he had to work in low paying jobs to pay for his tuition. During this time he wrote something called No Villain and he won an award. At that time he had majored in journalism but switch after winning the award to an English major. He got a bachelor degree in Engish and after graduation joined a theatre

Okay so…we talked about the boring early life but now comes the interesting stuff!

He had married his College Sweetheart on August 5, 1940. In June of 1956 after only 15 years of marriage they divorced. On the 29 of that month Miller and the very lovely Marilyn Monroe got hitched! They had a brief affair in 1951 and had kept in contact for all those years. Before the preimere of his famous movie “The Misfits” he and Marilyn got divorced. Then just a year later she died of a drug overdose.

And get this…

That same year, in 1962, he remarried to another women by the name of, Inge Morath. He had his first children with Inge.

What inspired him?

Well in 1964 he wrote a play called “After The Fall” which was about his marriage to Monroe. His personal life played a big part in what he wrote about.

Why should we care about what this man has written?

I think it’s important to read works from people who lived in a different time because we can see what has changed, but also because we can see what hasn’t changed. Like feeling lose, or hatred toward something, the feeling of love or happiness….that never fades in time.

“Arthur Miller.” Wikipedia. 9 Apr. 2008 http://www.wikipedia.com.

“Books and Writers/Arthur Miller.” Kirjasto. 9 Apr. 2008 http://www.google.com.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find is something that girls say ohh 99.9% of the time but that’s not what this blog article is about. This article is another Flannery O’Connor classic. In this story she isn’t talking about finding a good man she’s talking about finding the “GOOD” in man.

“Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen!”

The story is about a family going on a vacation and while they are deciding  the very bossy, ignoing, and racist grandmother tries to convince this unconventional family to go to either Georgia or Tennessee because she heard of a criminal heading toward there destination, Florida.

“What would you do if the fellow, The Misfit, caught you?”

There are many characters in this story, which is different from the story “The Life You Save Could Be Your Own”. There is the as previously stated racist, self-centered, ignoing Grandmother, the dark and outspoken son Bailey, Bailey’s wife, The Misfit and his handy dandy side kicks, and the two bizarre and bratty children June Star and John Wesley.

“We’ve had an ACCIDENT! The Children screamed in a frenzy of delight”

This story made my whole class bust a gut through out most of the story but toward the end the mood became dark and mysterious and almost sad. What happend you ask? Well…I won’t tell you that, of course, but I will tell you that the comments made about the grandmother and the things that happend to her will leave you in stiches!

“But nobody’s killed, June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car”

The story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” written by Flannery O’Connor is a book that honestly makes alot of us look like great people. In the beginning we are introduced to three characters, an old women, her retarded daughter, and a man named Mr.Shiftley. When we first meet these characters they seem like great, kind, normal people but how wrong you are…

 We come to find out that all three of our characters have a problem. Mr.Shiftley is armless, and in my opinion too full of useless information, the old women is lazy, which comes from the fact that she wants to marry off her daughter to a man who will stay and take care of things, and her daughter, as previously stated, is metally challenged. 

Throught out this story Mr.Shiftley becomes more mysterious and Flannery helps us see this by making him seem like a great guy but adding in his obsession with this old car in the old women’s yard. The old women catches on to this and her true colors start to shine as well. The only innocent person in this book is the retarded daughter how is just going about her life not even relizing what is going on around her. What a story, showing us that anyone we meet can be nice at first but turn out to be something totally opposite.

The ending of the book is the best part. Again you get to hear useless information from Mr.Shiftley and…well I guess I can’t tell you the rest but if you read this story you will not regret it! 

We were standing outside, my boyfriend and I, and we were looking at the sky and that night we saw 7 shooting stars. I thought at that moment that life was perfect…how wrong I was.

Jeff, my boyfriend, and I have been together almost eight months and the only thing that bothers me about this great guy is that he always keeps his feelings inside. So through out the entire break I was with him thinking that everything was perfectly fine, oh how wrong.

The night before I came back from school he had gone to his grandmothers to eat supper because they again had no food in the house. This was around 3′o’clock. When 6:00 rolled around I started to get mad because I didn’t relize it took 3 hours to eat food. Then 7:00 hit and I was hurt. He wouldn’t answer his phone and he hadn’t called me to tell me what was going on. Around 7:30 he finally returned and he could tell there was something wrong. Now of course since we pretty much have lived together for about 3 months or so we have gotten pretty sick of each other and so all we do is fight. So here we were doing it again. I told him that it just made me feel un-important because he couldn’t just say oh we’ll be a while. And of course me being as emotional as I am I was crying and making him feel bad. As we kept talking I had brought up that maybe  we needed a break for awhile. The more we talked about this the more quiet he became. Then I relized that he was actually thinking of break our relationship off…I couldn’t believe it. I was upset and crying and really it was like a huge slap in the face because I hadn’t expected it.He told me that our fighting was putting alot of tension and stress on us, and that he had graduated and was hoping to forget about school and me still being in school made him angry cause he still felt like he was still stuck in school. He never told me any of this before and it suprised me. His eyes were filled with pain and sorrow…he felt bad that he had made me cry. And I was afraid of losing the one thing that gave meaning to my life. Someone who made me smile even on the worst of days. Who loved me for me. Who understood my weirdness and was equally as weird. We sat there a long while just staring at each other and decided that we’d try and fix our problems. We talked about maybe seeing less of each other, since we had been seeing each other EVERY day for 7 months, and to just take it slower.   

What I learned is that to have a relationship wheather it’s with a teacher, or a friend, family, or a boyfriend you need to say what’s on your mind wheather it hurts or not. If those people really care about you they won’t judge you or tell you you’re wrong about what you’re feeling, and they will respect your decisions even if it doesn’t include them. That’s the best advice that I think anyone can learn…