"Why We Crave Horror Movies"

Horror movies are not my favorite thing in the world. But there is nothing like a sleepover where you purposely pick out the scariest movie so that you can get scared together with your friends. See, I like horror movies when I can watch them with my closest friends. There's something about being in the company of your closest friends that doesn't make the horror movies so scary. Other than sleepovers, though, I generally do not watch horror movies. Occasionally, I will watch one if it's on T.V. But it has to be in the middle of the day, with the sun shining and birds chirping. I have never seen a horror movie, except for Disturbia which really wasn't that scary of a movie, in the movie theaters. I just do not like the idea of the horrifying images being displayed on a massive screen and make the monsters larger than life when they are scary enough as it is on the tiny T.V. screen in my living room. I also don't like the idea that I cannot turn the lights on if I get too scared. No thank you, I will not be put through that torture.
But Stephen King has a point in this essay. Even though I do not really like horror movies, I still enjoy watching them and being scared. I think that he is totally correct in saying that we are all mentally insane. We are. What else explains the huge turnouts and profits from horror movies. These movies are sick and twisted and just generally messed up. Yet people flock to see the newest horror movie. And they are just getting worse and worse. I watched Nightmare on Elm Street one time and I didn't get scared even though I was only twelve at the time. That movie was made in the 80s and was scary then but things have changed since then. Horror is becoming more and more gruesome as years go on. I just want to know if the people who come up with these movies are seriously insane. How can they have these ideas about people torturing other people and of these frightening monsters and be normal? Not that i can define normal at all. But still, they are kind of messed up.
I see where King is going in this essay. Our human nature craves sick things, whether it be books, movies or jokes. We crave it because it is so far from the norm of a regular day. It is a way for us to step out of reality and relieve that desire for something mentally wrong.

"Los Pobres" by Richard Rodriguez

I do not really relate at all to Richard Rodriguez in his essay, "Los Pobres" so I have decided to answer some of the questions at the end of the selection. Rodriguez hopes to learn what it really feels like to do manuel labor like his ancestors from his summer of hard labor. He wants to sweat and hurt and feel like they did and really experience a hard life, even if it for just one summer. He wants some connection to his people, his heritage. I understand why he would want to do this. He goes to Stanford which is mostly populated by wealthy class white Americans and he probably got sucked into that lifestyle and lost most of his traditions and beliefs in doing so. He wanted to do as his people does. What he does in fact learn is that he is far from feeling how his people have felt. He does learn that he likes the labor, maybe just becasue he only has to do it for a summer and actually can see the end in sight. He also learns that he is working with a bunch of men who are middle-class average men and not the poor, or pobre, that he was expecting to work with. And he found that he related with them and when a Mexican group of workers come, he finds that he is uncomfortable with them and does not relate to them at all.At the end of paragraph 17, Rodriguez senses the distance he felt from los pobres : "I would not become like them. They were different from me." He can't become like them because he just never grew up like them or had to deal with the issues they had to deal with. He grew up and American and they grew up Mexican. And it has nothing to do with a geographical distance for they could have grown up in houses right next to each other on the same street and still not become like them. It is the hardship and suffering that they endured and he didn't that separates Rodriguez from los pobres. They are different because they grew up fully in Mexican culture and took part in Mexican traditions, whereas Rodriguez grew up in a mixed, Mexican and American culture. They will never understand each other completely but I think that Rodriguez can still appreciate what his ancestors had gone through and in some slight way have a sense of the hard labor and work they had to endure through his summer at the construction site. He just has to face the fact that he has a great history but that just isn't how he or his family lives now and that things have changed.

Class work blog - childhood memory

When I was five years old I caused my brother to get stitches. Me and my friend Devin were outside with my brother. It was winter and the snow was the crusty kind with a nice icy top layer. Devin and I wanted to go sledding down this hill in my front yard but we were scared that the snow was too icy and that we were going to sled right into the road. So we talked about it and came to the consensus that we needed to test the situation. So we talked my little brother into sledding down the hill first. Devin told him that if he was going too fast, he'd catch my brother. So we plop my brother into a flimsy, blown-up tube and push him down the hill. He flies down, straight through Devin's legs and right into the ditch before the road, smashing his head into the culvert pipe. I was horrified and shocked so I go screaming up the hill and into the house yelling, "Mom! Mom! Ethan's head is bleeding!" So my mom rushed my brother to the hospital and he had to have his first stitches put into his head.