answers to Abstraction

1.description
2.cause and effect
3.narration
4.classification/division
5.example
6.comparison/contrast

Abstraction

1. When you are afraid, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Your heart beats faster, faster, faster. Every muscle in your body feels spring-loaded and ready to snap. Your mouth is dry and you cannot stare at one thing. Your glance shifts around the room relentlessly. Every sound is magnified, but the sound of your heartbeat against your eardrum is perhaps the loudest.
2. A grizzly bear stands on its hind legs not fifteen feet away, and you stop dead in your tracks, your heart pounding. Your little brother pops around the corner and yells "Rawr!", and you nearly wet your pants. Your pen stops working in the last 10 minutes of an FRQ, and you nearly fall out of your chair when reaching to snatch one off of the floor. You walk through a haunted house, and as you turn a corner a hand grabs you, so you punch the crap out of whatever creature is attached to the hand. You experience something frightening, and so you react based on fear.
3. I sat crouched near the deck, not daring to move as my enemy moved ever closer to becoming my victim. Capture the flag was played in the dead of night at my cabin, and it was a full moon. I feared that my brother, who was unwittingly crawling under the deck towards me, would see my silhouette near the overturned wheelbarrel and turn around before he crossed over onto my side. As he slowly army crawled nearer, my heart pulsed and I thought that surely he would spot me. He was well past the line now, and still I waited as the muscles in my neck tightened. He stopped, and quivered, "Kkkaitlin?". I sprung up, ran to the side of the deck, crouched down, and lauched myself underneath it. I army crawled through the dirt to my now scream-laughing brother who had curled up into a fetal position. I tagged him and he went to jail.
4. Fear is either rational or it is irrational. Rational fear can be logically explained, while irrational fear cannot. Rational fear is created when you believe that something will be dangerous, painful, or threatening. Irrational fear cannot be explained.
5. FDR once said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Fear has been feared as a sign of weakness, but it is not usually that simple. Even if David feared Goliath, he defeated the giant in the end. Surely David feared the Lord more than his mortal enemy. In this case, David's fear of the Lord was a sign of strength. Machiavelli argued that a ruler in the ideal situation would be feared and loved, but in the real world he said that it is better to be feared than loved.
6. Is it really better to be feared than to be loved? While being feared may be an advantage in some unfortunate political situations, being loved is clearly an advantage in normal day to day scenarios. Both fear and love can generate respect, but respect based on fear is much different than respect based on love. Respect based on fear can disintegrate into hatred, but respect based on love is capable of growing into loyalty.

Stories from the kids table...

Every Thanksgiving the adults in my extended family sit at the big dining room table while the kids sit at the smaller kitchen table. We don't mind. Because the adults can't see us we can pull off some awesome shenanigans. This year I asked my brother and cousins to think of a noteworthy story for this blog. We couldn't remember one that stood out from the others, so here is our list of memorable moments:

• When I was little (and evil) I would ask my brother "Hey David, wouldn't it be cool if_____?". He would then proceed to do _____, and I would get in just as much trouble as he did because I was a bad influence on him. These _____'s included my brother shooting a squirt gun up his nose and hitting a ketchup packet with a hammer.
• At my cabin, while out on a kids-only fishing trip, we were boating back home as the sun was setting, when... One of my cousins made a bet with his twin brother that he could hit a ski bouy with a sunfish as the boat was moving past it. He grabbed a little sunfish out of the live net, took aim, and sent the poor little fish flying towards its target. The fish hit the bouy, then to our surprise it bounced back towards us with alarming speed. It hit my cousin Stephanie, and she shrieked. We laughed our heads off as the fish flopped around in the bottom of the boat. We decided that it had earned its freedom, so we tossed it into the lake and it swam away very quickly.
• The night before April Fool's Day, my brother and I snuck around the house putting tape around sink faucets so that the water would spray out horizontally at an unsuspecting victim. In the morning we found out that that victim had been our mom, who had been sprayed several times at different sinks.
• My cousin's golden retriever, Sophie, was a fluffy cream colored runt when they bought her. She was so small that we dressed her up in Build-a-Bear outfits!
• At my house, hide-and-seek is a hard core game. My brother has hidden pressed against the cieling beams in the basement, I have sandwiched myself into a linnen closet, and my little cousins have found containers and cupboards that they can squeeze into. In my living room, there is a decorative chest that we keep blankets in. My brother took out the blankets, folded himself into the chest, and shut the lid, but as the lid closed the latch swung shut, trapping him inside of a ridiculously tiny space! He thought that I was sitting on top of the chest (really, David?), so he panicked and broke the latch in his escape. 

National Geographic photo

I am in love with National Geographic, and I have the entire Planet Earth series on DVD, and I have so much respect for the camera people and photographers who show perfect moments in nature to the world. This picture has a very obvious argument, but I chose it mainly because I can't get over the size of that thing's head compared to the size of the shell. The baby crocodile looks trapped and mass produced. When you see an incubation tray with eggs in it, you automatically think "chicken", but by putting a crocodile head in there instead of a fluffy yellow birdie, the photographer makes you think "That is sooo wrong! Run away and be free! Don't let the humans eat you!". The crocodile looks so wild with its teeth bared and stripes showing, but it has been put in an orderly grid. The grid itself looks dystopian, or communist, or something of that nature.
Agent: Sukree Sukplang/Reuters took the picture (I swear I'm not making up the name!)
Act: "Thou shalt not put cute reptiles into egg trays."
Agency: Photography is the medium.
Scene: The picture is on the National Geo website, for all nature lovers/people haters to see. The photo was taken at a crocodile hatching festival.
Purpose: The photo was taken to provide a visual argument against a shady zoo in Bangkok. The zoo is suspected of involvement in the illegal animal trade, and it is infamous for its treatment of animals. The zoo has over 100,000 crocodiles already.

X2 page 113... spellingz

I have a hard time remembering how many letters to add in some words, too. Words like psychotic make me crazy because why is there a P in there? Nobody pronounces the P. (Try it, I dare you.) It is like a stupid wad of gum stuck to the bottom of a desk because its user wanted to annoy whoever came across it. Sometimes I look at a word that I just spelled correctly and I think, "That can't be right....". Spell check is wonderful, unless you have a weird name like, I don't know, Kaitlin. I swear, some engineer took the soul out of a walking dictionary (remember that kid with buck teeth who corrected everyone in a nasally voice) and molded it into what we call spell check. Spell check acts like a kindergartener with a crayon whenever you try to write in another language. But even if spell check can be a pain in the popo, it is a lifesaver when you are absolutely clueless. What if everyone could spell words out like they sounded? This scenario reminds me of a restaurant called Zorbas where every S is replaced with a Z. Zpelling  like dat drivez peoplez up wallz. If evryone speld like thay spoek, no un wood bee aebel to tel tha difrence between "choose" and "shoes". When advertisers mix up spellings, or turn letters backwards, product names can be easily recognized. "Dubble Bubble", for example, takes advantage of a misspelling to make the double look like the bubble. "Froot Loops" does the same thing.

Would you like some random with this random?

Random thoughts regarding high school:

• I wish that WHS had a few "Paternoster" (old fashioned German elevators, not totally dangerous).
• It would be awesome if there was a randomness club at the high school, where members could try something new each week. (for example: sushi one week, then hang gliding the next)
• To eliminate traffic problems on the stairs, the right hand side of the stairs should be converted into a slide so that nobody attempts to move against downward traffic. Going down a slide would be so much faster, not to mention more entertaining.
• On late starts, none of the study rooms are quiet. On one late start I was caught studying in the peaceful hallway, and I was ordered to go to a forum room for "quiet study". Even the teachers in charge of the room were blabbering! Why not send all of the noisy kids and trouble makers into the gym or a forum room while quiet, responsible students can be allowed to go to the library or the hall?
• At lunch one time, every person at my table brought in a dish of something to share, and it was awesome! We saw another table doing the same thing a while later.
• I am so glad that there was an anti-tanning article in the school paper. Tanning is unnatural. Why do "hot" girls like to be orange? Even though orange is a hot color, a hot color on the color wheel does not translate to mean a "hot" person. It seems odd that tanning ads can be found in the school paper while students are told in health class that tanning hurts skin.
• If hallways were arteries and students were plaque, the school would have had a heart attack long ago. Masses of students seem to become immobilized at every inconvenient place in the hallway, and their presence causes other students to try and squeeze their way through.  
• Why do girls buy tiny, thin, expensive clothes? I know. Clothing companies save money by using thin material, or just less of it. Some girls believe that tiny and/or transparent clothes are stylish, so they buy them at ridiculous prices. In reality, dear "stylish" girls, this is Minnesota, which means it is cold outside during most of the school year. The girls that have good fashion sense are the ones that buy sweaters and cuddle duds, rather than investing in bare skin and shivers.