family`

I believe that we learn the most from our family. This is because they are the ones that raise us from the day that we are born until the day that they die. We learn our first words by listening to parents talk and we learn how to feed ourselves, how to walk, and how to communicate with others. They nurture us until we are old enough to be on our own. As we read about, the kids that grew up in the orphanage were very isolated and didn't have good communicating skills with others. The more loved and cared for you are the better off in life you'll be. We are taught our beliefs and values from our parents from a very young age so that we follow and live by them as we grow older. They also teach us latent lessons, ones we don't even realize we're being taught until someone says something about them. That would be like the way Sal described his stance which he never realized was his father's smoking stance. I thought that was weird not to know that you stand the exact same way as your father, which is kind of uncomfortable, I tried it. I believe that our family is the most important thing that shapes us.

isolation

When we watched the video about the young girl who lived in isolation her entire life I was in shock. I couldn not believe that a mother could do that to her own daughter. How could one person grow up without any human contact? And also the conditions in which she was brought up in were terrible. She was found in an old diaper, dirty, with bugs in her hair. I just cannot believe how well the mom was able to hide her from the rest of the world for so long. EVerything that we know/do today is what we have grown up learning by watching others. She didn't know how to walk or to talk and brain was like that of a 6 month old when she was at age 9. HOw this little girl didn't go crazy being couped up in there, I do not know. I could never live in total isolation from everyone else. I need to be around other people that's just how I am. I need to go out and have fun with friends. Being locked in a room all day everyday would kill me and I'd probably go insane. The fact that the young girl from the video was rescued and given a new life with a new family is amazing. Slowly she'll learn how to interact better with people, eat better, and soak up some more knowledge in that tiny brain of hers.

Tuesdays With Morrie

I like the movie Tuesdays with Morrie. I thought it was great at showing how even as you get older, you should still be looking at the world with a beginners mind. When the main character saw Morrie on TV and found out he had ALS, it made him think about the promise he had made to Morrie that he hadn't followed through with becuase of work. When he went and visited Morrie it reminded him of all the good times that they had together. The main character didn't realize all that he was missing out on until he went and started visiting Morrie every Tuesday. Morrie helped him see the world from a different perspective, helped him relax and not be so busy with work. The main character lost the love of his life at one point because all he had cared about work, and everything he did was on a deadline, and you just can't live like that, which is what Morrie made him see. Even in Morrie's last few months he helped the main character see what he was doing with his life, and that it needed to change. He needed to take a break and focus on the important things/people otherwise he was going to lose them. This was what I thought was one of the most important lessons in this movie becuase if you don't take a second to look around at your life every once and a while you'll miss out on all the good things in life.

time

I chose to talk about time, and the way time affects our culture differently. In America we always are on a "time table." We need to be everywhere on time. In many other cultures this does not exist. Time effects us differently in different situations. My example that I am going use is when I went to ISU a couple weeks ago to visit a friend. She was on a very different "time table" than my friend Katie and I were on. She finished class around 4pm and then we went back to her dorm to hang. Then a couple hours late we decided to eat dinner. This is different than at home because when you're home your parents make dinner and you eat whenever it is ready. Since college students can eat whenever they want, whatever they want, this is probably where the freshman 15 comes from. Also when nighttime came along, we didn't start to get ready until 9. Usually at home we're out because we have to be home by curfew, but in college you don't have a curfew. That was definitely different for us. Also since we didn't leave til around 10 we didn't come back to the dorms til way late, which is something we could NEVER do if we were at home. Being at college is almost like being in another country becuase everything functions so differently.

(by the way sorry this was sooo late Sal!)