Black widow questions & Fear Paragraph

1. The widow will deliver a series of bites as the creature dies, injecting substances that liquefy the organs.
2. I hunt black widow.

I am afraid of spiders. Their grotesquely long, hairy, rapidly moving legs put the fear in my eyes. The thought of their diminutive little bodies crawling into my mouth while I sleep makes me cringe. I don't see the webs they weave as beautiful works of art but rather as soiled pieces of string that came out of an 8 eyed crawling nightmare. What I hate most about them is how in the blink of an eye they can move from the dark corner where the ceiling meets the wall to your shadow, cast right in front of you. Most spiders are harmless, or so I've heard, but it doesn't matter to me whether they can kill me with their venomous poison or if their intention is to just crawl around my house in search of food and shelter. They are, in my eyes, the worst thing out there.

Perception is everything

Imagine climbing to the top of a mountain and standing at the peak looking out at the view and your friend is with you looking out at the same scene. You look out and see a quiet, peaceful and beautiful world. Birds flying over the still entrancing water, mountainous terrain reflected in the water. Your friend looks out at the exact same view but they see a busy world, cars driving along the highway and people the size of ants moving about, playing outside. Both you and your friend are looking at the same thing but your perception of what you see is different. You may percieve the world as a serene and silent place but your friend sees it as loud and full of life. In Beau Otto's presentation on optical illusions he talks about how what we percieve may not be real. Beau Otto shows examples of his theory by holding up certain colours behind translucent paper and asking the audience what colour they see. Half of the audience will say one colour and the other half will say another. Our eyes have been trained to see colours in a certain way but when we look at colours in a different way, like through an optical illusion, they get confused and use the colour that is most often seen used on that object. So maybe my red isnt the same as your red, maybe what I see as red could be what you see as green. Who's to say which perception is right? Yours or mine? What Beau Otto means by "what we see may not be real" is that the way one person sees something to be isn't necessarily the same as way another person sees something to be. If everyones perception on something is different, then how can we be sure whats real?

Perils of Indifference

1. The danger of equality
2. During the 16th century in Mesoamerica the Aztec would sacrifice one human being every day as a way of helping the sun to rise. No one wondered how a human sacrifice pertained to the the natural phenomenon that is the sun. They just did what they had been doing for years because the Aztec people believed that the sacrifices were the reason the run was rising, and so it became tradition. In the same way that the Aztecs went with their tradition of human sacrifice the townspeople in "The Lottery" would sacrifice one person every year. The townspeople would all draw a piece of folded paper out of a box and the person who received the paper with the black dot would get stoned. In The Lottery no one questioned why a human sacrifice was required, it was simply tradition so everyone went along with it. Objections would only come from those who were to be stoned otherwise there was no questioning what they believed to be "the norm".  Both times practiced human sacrifice as a way of achieving what they wanted, and they believed that it was abnormal to stop doing it since it had been going on for so long.
3.Perils of Indifference and The Lottery both include the bystander affect. In Perils of Indifference by Elie Wiesel he talks about how people just stand by and watch as injustice takes place in the world because they are too lazy to do something about it. Hitlers reign went on for so long that Germany had turned into "Hilter's Germany". Why did it take so long for the Holocaust to end? People weren't willing to rebel against the disaster sooner, it didn't need to take so long for change to occur. In the Lottery the townspeople would gather in the town square and do roll call to make sure no one was left out of this event. When Tessie was pleading for her life no one stood up for her and asked for the stoning to stop, they just wanted to get it over with and continue on with their daily routines. People are lazy in the sense that they believe it is simply easier to be a bystander than to step in and make a difference and speak out against conformity.

Creative Pursuits

25. Write a story from the perspective of the parents who tried to sell their newborn baby on the Internet for $10,000.

My husband and I tried to sell our baby on Craigslist for $10000. People seem to have a problem with this for some unknown reason. If I can grow a flower and sell it on the internet than why cant I grow a baby and sell it as well? I dont see what the big deal is anyway that baby will obviously be in a nice home because the parents were willing to pay so much for this child. I mean its not like a pedophiles gonna buy our baby, what are the chances of that? Most people think we did it to make money but thats not the reason at all. We clearly did it for the interest of our baby. So what if we get a little bit of money out of it, our baby is the one who's really getting the good fortune. That child will get a wonderful home with a wonderful family and get to grow up knowing that they were sold for $10000, thats a lot of money. I can see it now, at 20 years of age, no longer a child, walking with their head held high because they know that they are worth a whopping $10000. We will gladly take full credit for that childs bragging rights. I'm sure my husband and I aren't the only couple trying to make a few dollars off our child anyway. We're simply just the most creative.

21st century education

I think the most important skills needed for post high school life are skills that can help us communicate with other people because we cant go very far in life if all we know is what we read about in books. I think the skills that we're learning in highschool revolve more around the intelectual part of who we are instead of trying to define who we are as individuals. Given that we do alot of group activities and partner projects but sometimes people are paired with others that they dont normally associate themselves with. Which I dont think helps us be more social but makes us more afraid of communicating with others because people are more likely to be social on their own rather than when they're pushed into it. The education system works in the beginnning while we're developing because it expands our mind so that we can understand more in the future but as we get older and we come to the final years of highschool we should be learning things that we want to to help us build our future. In highschool we should be able to take the courses that we want instead of the required courses with the optional woodwork or cooking class. Middle school should be the years for required courses because than we atleast have a foundation of education and it could give us an idea of what we might want to do in the future. People waste alot of money on university classes that they later realise wasn't what they wanted to do. If we could make those mistakes in highschool it would be easier to change our minds and explore other fields of work. This year I took a lot of different courses to see what I'm most interested in but I'm still unsure of what I want to do. So after highschool I plan on staying home and working for a year and trying to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Superpowers

If I could have any superppower in the world it would be the awesome super power of flying. No more traffic, no more pedestrians bumping into me, just me in the air with the birds. Occasionally the birds might get in my way but thats where it gets good because I can just change my elevation. When it comes to villians they dont stand a chance, the second they come running at me I'll simply fly up and away from them and come back when they least expect it. Flying gives me the element of surprise you see, for you can't see where I've flown too, if I've flown far enough away that is. Flying is better than super speed because when you're running you could hit a dead end and get blocked by a wall but when you're flying you just go into the open sky with tons of space to be free and super.