Just Two Words

Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?
The phrase is like a sudden shock throughout my body.
I do?
I don't?
Ding dong ding dong
The church bells build up the pressure

Waiting, waiting for the answer he hopes
Waiting for me to say
I do
But what does my heart say?

I love this man
And he loves me
He will soon put this ring on my finger
Excepting and confirming our feelings towards one another

Who would have ever thought
The answer to the hardest decision in my life
could be as simple as two words.
Two simple words that could change my life forever

I prepare myself to let out my final answer
Fear overwhelms me for a moment
The fear soon turns to a heart warming feeling
A burst of happiness
A burst of excitement
A burst of curiousness

My future is unfolding at this very moment
Of course I want to marry this man
Spend the rest of my life with him
I love him
And he loves me

I do is just two words
Two words that may change my life forever
Two words that mean the world
With that being said,
I do

Religious Beliefs

The novel, Life of Pi, starts off with an old man that states, "I have a story that will make you believe in God." Two closely linked ideas in the novel are storytelling and religious belief. Pi has three religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Each comes with its own tales, fables that are used to spread the teachings of beliefs of that faith. Pi enjoys the richness of these stories, but also gets the sense that each story might be aspects of a greater story about love, coming from Father Martin who assured that Pi was true of Christianity.

Life of Pi also has links to stories and religious beliefs because Pi declares that both require faith on other human beings as well. Surprisingly, Pi admires atheists, for him being such a religious young man. Pi is showing that you should be believing in something no matter what it is. It is better to have faith in something than nothing at all, and that something is what gives life a purpose. Although religion can be a taboo to most people, that doesn’t mean you can't have your different beliefs than others. Pi can appreciate the atheists and their ability to believe in the absence of God without knowing about the truth of absence. To Pi, people that can't make a leap of faith in any direction are like people who can't appreciate the truth inside a fictional story.

What Can You Find Behind the Story?

"Books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're nonfiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost." (62) Beatty is trying to put ideas into Montags head that he may not believe. Montag has not read a book and he doesn't know if Beatty is being truthful to him. Bradbury is trying to convey the thought that people think there are more important things to life than reading. Books put you into a world of unreal ideas and things that the writers want you to believe, but are not true. He said it would be better if people got out and run around and have fun. Montag doesn't believe this is true and is desperate to read the books he has hidden from his wife all along.

In this novel, people fear books, they are afraid that it will change them--the way they act, the way they think. Montag is seeing the other side of the fear he used to be in. He sees something brighter and deeper that may be living in books. "...for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." (page 51-52)

The man behind each book is important because they put their time and effort to use their imagination to create, after all, a not so horrible story. Stories cleanse us and make us see things differently than others. It makes you think of what the writer actually means behind the text itself rather than just reading the book and understanding the story. Books do say something, but you just have to dig deep to find it.

Warm summer days

Cold winter nights

Days go by

Life still passing on

Moving too quickly

My mind overwhelmed

A blur of movements passing me

Something so complex

Something so unbearable

Something so breath taking

Blending together to form

One body

One image

One creation

Colors fill my mind

Fear

Confusion

What do you compare it to

this world we live in

Fame?

Success?

Appearence?

Not one stands out

more than another

It is the flaws we see in ourselves

Yet these flaws make us unique

In life colors form us

what would life be without color?

Dull and boring

When surrounded with these colors

It makes you notice the things around you

And how they create

This picture of life itself

No Love in Return

"Heaven knows we would never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle." In the novel, Great Expectations, love is displayed in many different ways—love of power, love of money, love of pain, love of self, and love of fear. Pip’s love is not like the other types; he has love for others, but he doesn’t get any love in return. His love for Estella grew on him ever since the day he met her. In the beginning he seemed to be forced to love her when he really did not feel any love towards her, but as he got to know her he noticed his feelings for her had changed. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was infatuation. Pip is just a young boy, a young boy with a complicated life, a young boy still experiencing innocence, a young boy with a great expectation. Sometimes what you expect is like taking things for granted. Things are not just sent from the sky and dropped right into your hands; love is not an expectation. It takes effort and heart to love someone, and you can’t assume that they love you back. Pip knows what it is like to have his heart broken, and the best thing you can do is leave it behind you and get back up on your feet again and move on.

Opposite Personalities

After reading about Pip's visit with Wemmick, I suspected a keen sense of strange behavior on Wemmick's part. At work Wemmick is all about hard work and focus, whereas at home he becomes more loose and sympathetic to his surroundings. That being said, I am not very sure what to make of this. How come people act with two completely opposite personalities depending on the setting they are in and the faces around them? Even though Wemmick comes home from work each day like any other business man would, the world he enters is not what you would suspect; a fantasy filled world. His house supposedly represents a castle with a bridge that is at the entrance of this castle and a flagpole right outside. Wemmick is always talking about his flagpole, and how he pulls it up and down at a certain time each and every day. By him doing this action shows his true pride and love for his home life. He acts with innocence which is not something you appear to see very often. Labor, hard work, and the drive to do so is what makes a grown man a success. The only way to get his mind off of work was to enter his comfortable state of what we call "home". Kids our age can relate to what Wemmick is experiencing, but not for the same reasons that is. Rather than being exposed to the business world, we experience homework and drama. School--a place where you can have fun when necessary, but seriousness is key when you want to succeed and achieve. Once that bell rings at the end of every school day, do you get a sense of relief--all of the pressure and stress has been lifted from your shoulders and you feel the need to just take in your surroundings with a deep steady breath? When you step off the bus and open the door to your home what do you do? Do you go back to the mindset of school, or relax and enjoy your few moments of peace and freedom before the next day creeps up and your fantasy ends and reality hits once again? What you make of your fantasy world is up to you, but for Wemmick it means staying calm and collected while expressing love to his family. Do not judge a book by its cover, because what you see on the outside is definitely not everything. What matters the most is the inside. Wemmick may not look to be an innocent gentleman to the human eye, but his actions express what his mind is really imagining. Wemmick, not only has the love to be successful, be the love for his family as well.

Pip's Life At Home

Life at home for Joe is definitely not like the lives we live today. He is just an innocent young boy that doesn't know much about how life works yet; he doesn't know right from wrong. His sister and her husband are definitely very hard on him and get annoyed with every little thing he does, if Pip would ask a question his sister would just tell him to go away, or not speak of that, The time when his sister went out looking for him after he was out in the churchyard, she got very angry. I think this is because she is very protective of him since they are the only ones left of Pip's family. She feels she needs to fill the responsibilty that her mother left her with of caring for Pip. If I were to be gone from home for awhile my mom would definitely come looking for me, but not the way his sister did. She went with a tickler--an abusive tool--so that if she found him he would experience this device. It is against the law now to abuse children, but back then it wasn't. Life was a struggle for little Pip; not being able to have a mom or dad to care for you. All he wanted was a few questions answered, and all he got in return was ignorance and disrespect.