Extra Credit: A Very Glee-ful Christmas

Tuesday on Glee, they celebrated Christmas. They sang "Island of Misfit Toys" from Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. I thought it was a great song for the group to sing because in the song, they are singing about being misfits, and that is how they feel at their school. I also loved "Baby, It's Cold Outside" sung by Kurt and Blaine.
There were also so many funny moments and quotes. Part of the plot line that made the episode was Brittany still believing in Santa Clause. Her best quotes were:

1. “Last year I left my stocking up and an entire of family of mice lived in it. Their Christmas gift to each other was rabies.”
2. to an "elf": "Can I be honest? I don’t understand the difference between an elf and slave.”
3. “I’m bringing a gift for the homeless kids. It’s a dollhouse. At least their dolls won’t be homeless.”
4. Brittany to Santa – “You’ve gotten really tan.” Santa - “Because at the North Pole there is a hole in the ozone.”

During the episode, Artie forced Quinn, Sam, Mercedes, Santana, Tina, Mike, and Lauren to go with him and Brittany to see Santa. While they were there, he also made them sit on Santa's lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas:

Lauren: "I want Puckerman to love me because he’s a fox. Oh and some sweet potato fries."

Quinn: "Do you have anything for stretch marks?"
-behind it: she had a baby last season
Sam: "I want Chapstick. Lots of Chapstick."
-behind it: he's dating Quinn. and they make out a lot!
Mike: "I want Channing Tatum to stop being in stuff."
-behind it: not sure. who knows.
Santana: "Bling. I can't be anymore specific."
-behind it: again, who knows. it's santana.
And my favorite one of all:
Brittany: I want Artie to be able to walk.

In the end, the boys convince Coach Beiste to dress up as Santa and tell Brittany that Santa can't give her what she wants. Beiste sees how much she wants Artie to be able to walk though, so she buys Artie a device that he puts around his legs and on his arms to help him walk.

Another part that I loved was how they incorporated "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" into the story. Sue plays the Grinch and Becky is Max. They tear up everything in the choir room and take all of the presents. Then Brittany shows up as Cindy Loo Who. In the end The glee club sings "Welcome Christmas" from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". It made me smile, because just like in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", they sing even though the presents are gone.

Arsenic and Old Lace

On Saturday I went to Morton High School’s fall play Arsenic and Old Lace. I went because my brother was in it, but also because I was in theater all through high school and had promised friends that were in it that I would go see it.

Arsenic and Old Lace is a comedy about the Brewster Family. Mortimer Brewster and his brothers, Jonathan and Teddy, were raised by their aunts, Abby and Martha, and the play begins when Mortimer proposes to his girlfriend, who is Abby and Martha’s neighbor and a pastor’s daughter, Elaine Harper. Shortly after, while looking for a book, Mortimer discovers a body in the window seat. His aunts confess to poisoning him and tell Mortimer that he is there until Teddy can bury him in the cellar.

You see, Teddy thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. To him, the cellar is Panama and he is digging the Panama canal.

Abby then tells Mortimer that it started with an old, homeless man looking for a room to sleep and dying in their living room five minutes later. Teddy then buried him in the cellar after being told that he was a yellow fever victim.

While Mortimer tries to process everything, his aunts confess to poisoning ten other men, who were also buried in the cellar by Teddy due to “yellow fever.” So when Mortimer has to leave to write a review for a play, he tells his aunts not to let anyone else into the house. They promise, only to find that Jonathan, who had left home years ago and hasn’t been heard from, has come home. He brings with him Dr. Helga Einstein, who has done plastic surgery on Jonathan many times and is the reason for his disfiguration at the time, and Mr. Spenalzo, who Jonathan killed.

Later in the night, Jonathan and Helga decide to stay the night after Teddy brings Helga into the cellar, thinking that she is a general. Helga finds the hole that has been made for Mr. Hoskins, the man Abby and Martha poisoned but is still in the window seat, and tells Jonathan that they should put Mr. Spenalzo in the hole.

So after everyone is in bed, Teddy takes Mr. Hoskins down to the cellar and shortly after Jonathan and Helga bring Mr. Spenalzo into the house through the window. When Elaine Harper knocks at the door, Helga puts the body in the window seat and hides when Elaine comes in. Jonathan then sneaks around to the front door and follows Elaine in, who came to see Abby and Martha thinking that someone was trying to break into the house. She actually saw Jonathan and Helga, but she didn’t know that. So Jonathan thinks she’s lying and gags her and makes Helga take her to the cellar. The noise wakes Martha and Abby up, who are dress all in black and had planned on having a funeral for Mr. Hoskins in the cellar.

Mortimer then comes home from the play just as Elaine comes running from the cellar. Mortimer sends her home after realizing who Jonathan is and tells him to leave. After hearing that Martha and Abby said they could stay, Mortimer makes Jonathan and Helga sleep in the living room, but changes his mind when Helga says she’ll sleep on the window seat. Mortimer still thinks that Mr. Hoskins is still in the seat and learns minutes later, after looking in the seat, that someone else is in there. He gets mad at his aunts for letting someone into the house and shows Abby Mr. Spenalzo, who she refuses to bury in the basement because he’s a foreigner. When they try to show him to Martha, Jonathan yells, “NO!” and Mortimer becomes very happy. He tries to use the dead body to get Jonathan out of the house, saying that he’ll call the cops. But Jonathan threatens to tell the cops about the other body they found in the basement, so Jonathan and Helga stay.

Martha and Abby then later tell Jonathan and Helga about the twelve bodies in the cellar and we learn that Jonathan has also killed twelve men. Jonathan then plans to kill Mortimer, who is tied up by Helga and Jonathan and almost drinks the wine Abby and Martha use to poison their victims. They are then interrupted by Teddy, who blows his bugle, and then by Officer O’Hara, who comes looking for Mortimer to talk about the play she’s writing.

O’Hara spends many hours talking about the plot and is joined later by Officer Brophy and Officer Klein, who were called because Teddy blew his bugle again. They find Jonathan asleep on the couch and when he wakes up, he thinks he was turned in by Mortimer so he tells them about the thirteen bodies in the cellar. They don’t believe him and tell him he’s insane.

In the end, Teddy is put into a home for the insane and Martha and Abby go with him, leaving the house to Mortimer. We also find out that Jonathan had escaped from a prison in Indiana and was wanted. But Martha and Abby are not happy to have poisoned the same number of people that Jonathan had killed, so they poison the old man who came from the home Teddy was going to.

The Stupidest Rules

In The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams, the main character, Kyra, and her family live in a compound. They are polygamists. In the compound, they have many “rules” which they talk about throughout the book.
1. “The unwhole won’t meet God. They do not qualify for the kingdom.” Kyra talked about Sister Janie Abbott who had two baby boys, one who did an hour after birth and the other who lived awhile. He was unwhole (meaning those who have disabilities) and they “did away with him.”
-God loves all. It says so in the bible. Prophet Childs is full of crap.
2. “If I were a boy, I’d get to do more stuff, like the boys do here.” Like choose who to marry.
- Women obey the men. That’s how it is there. When men and women are married, it’s mostly and arranged marriage. Except now I just think that the men choose who they want because they are selfish. The boys get nothing. The old men who work for the Prophet are the ones who have lots of wives, which is apparently important to get into heaven.
3. “’Bring the demon’s world here. Burn it all.’ And everyone did. They brought picture books and teen books. Magazines and newspapers. Novels and even the Reader’s Digest. ‘Bring word from the Infidel. And I will bring you truth. I will lead you to Heaven.”
-I don’t want someone telling me what I can and cannot read. I talked about that last week. Nowhere in the bible does it say that the Bible is the only thing you can read. Kyra talks about how her younger sister wanted to keep a Dr.Seuss book, but wasn’t allowed, because “the devil is in the books.” Really? Because I just thought the books were to help kids read and for their enjoyment?
4. “Don’t speak, Sister Sarah, unless I’ve spoken to you first.”
-And again, women have no rights in the compound.
5. “Discipline is God’s way to raising righteous children. It’s a way you can move up in leadership.”
-What happened here was Kyra’s Uncle, who she’s supposed to marry, comes to their house because the youngest, a baby, was very noisy when he was over to dinner and he did not appreciate it. Kyra’s mother is forced to hold her under water three times and they almost lose her.
6. Sister Ellen has to marry Brother Mathias, who was at least seventy years old. She fell in love with someone else, Bill Trophy. He was sent away and she was killed.
-Where do I even begin? Well, for one, sleeping with another man when you are married is wrong, but killing someone does not make God any more happy.
7. “Once, two years after Prophet Childs took over and close us into our community, people started peering in. ‘They are Satan. When you see them, with their all-seeing eyes, with those cameras, you run. They are Satan, here to try and steal you from us. To take babies from their mothers’ breasts. To teach you the ways of the world. To lead you all to hell.’”
-Oh, so I’m going to lead them to hell? I do not follow the ways of the world, which include drugs and alcohol and sex. I follow the bible, just like they apparently do. Except I’m not trying to play God, like Prophet Childs’ is.
8. Brother Alex Delango lost everything because he dared to contradict Prophet Childs. “They took his children and wives and give them to two other of the brethren. They made him leave, along with brother Olsen and Brother Adamson. The three of them were run off, all of them losing their families because they crossed the Prophet.”
-Wow. That’s intense. And that is what Kyra’s father is warning her about. If she doesn’t marry her uncle, her father will lose everything!

Should Harry Potter be banned from schools?

Did you know that more than 50 books are challenged to get banned from school libraries? Books like Goosebumps by R.L. Stine, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle are on many banned books lists. Since 2006, one of the most commonly challenged books is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. According to MSNBC, mother Laura Mallory of Georgia said that the books were “an ‘evil’ attempt to indoctrinate children in the Wicca religion.” When she took it to the Board of Education, Victoria Sweeny said, “If schools were to remove all books containing reference to witches, they would have to ban Macbeth and Cinderella.”
Many Christians have stood with Mallory, quoting from the Bible Deuteronomy 18:9-12:

"There shall not be found among you anyone who... practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord…”

Since 2006, Harry Potter has been put on many banned books lists, but fans of the books continue to fight against it.
I bring this up because I am writing a paper about “Should Harry Potter be banned from schools?”. It really got to me last year when, in my Novels class, we looked at the most commonly banned books and most of the books we were reading were on that list. We also noticed Harry Potter and spent a lot of time discussing it.
As a fan of Harry Potter, obviously I do not think the books should be banned. I am a Christian and I follow the Bible. But the books are fiction, make-believe stories and some religious scholars are now arguing that the books actually follow the plot of the Gospel and use Christian imagery. There are tons of people from my church that are fans of Harry Potter, and one thing we talked about in youth groups was that most of the time the adults that are for banning a certain book are parents of younger children. They don’t want their child to be influence by the books, when, in reality, books like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby won’t be read by students until Jr. High or High School.

The Chosen One, by Carol Lynch Williams

The Chosen One is about a girl named Kyra who lives in an isolated community with her father, his three wives, and twenty-one children. She is then chosen by the Prophet, who is said to be ‘God’s Anointed’ or
‘God’s Chosen’, to marry her sixty-year-old uncle who already has six wives. As you can see, the title is very significant to the story. She is ‘the chosen one’ in her family; though she is not the oldest, her older sister, Emily, is not right in the head, so she is chosen to marry her uncle. She knows it is wrong, so she plots to run away. But no one disobeys the Prophet. She worries that her family would be punished, along with Joshua, a boy she has fallen in love with and would chose to marry her if he had the choice. Before she is chosen though, she worries that she had already defied the Prophet by reading books from a bookmobile, which is forbidden. Kyra also worries that her thoughts are not her own. She secretly plots to kill the Prophet and worries that people have heard her whispers and her secrets.
When I first saw the title for the book, I thought that it was anything but this. In Harry Potter, he is the chosen one; Luke in Star Wars is kind of the chosen one. But a thirteen-year-old girl marrying her uncle because a person from God says to? That is not something God would make you do.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper. - Alistair Cooke

Last night I went to my brother’s choir concert and it felt so weird not being up on stage singing with the group. I was in choir all four years and LOVED it! So I told my brother that he had to be in choir also and do all of the extra activities that he could, like Madrigals, Chorale, Fall Play, and the spring musical. It helped that he was in choir in junior high and that he wanted to be in it.

But the choirs sounded awesome last night! The first group that sang was Madrigals, an auditioned, accapella group. Watching Madrigals was the weirdest because I sang in that group for two years and know everyone in it. It was nice to hear two songs that we had sang my first year though.

Treble Choir, the all-girls choir, sounded wonderful. I’m normally distracted by the ugly dresses they wear, but I wasn’t! Seriously though, you don’t understand the dresses. I had to wear them for two years and they are horrifying! Chorale, an extracurricular jazz choir, sounded amazing as well. They sang “Eleanor Rigby”, “Seasons of Love” from Rent, and “One Day More” from Les Miserables. My brother had a solo for “One Day More” and I thought he sounded great.

The newest group at the high school is the Bum Bums, an all-guys, accapella group. They sang “Jesse’s Girl” and “That’ll Be the Day”.A few of guys’ girlfriends recently started a group called the Bumbettes, which is mostly a fan club for the Bum Bums. It’s really just a joke that they started, but a few of us made t-shirts and wore them to the concert last night.

The last group was Chamber Choir, the mixed group, and, as they always do, they sounded fantastic! I was really impresses that they sang three pieces in different languages, because there were a lot of newcomers and singing in another language is difficult.

I had a great time getting to see everyone and I can’t wait until the Madrigal Dinner in December!

The Hunger Games....More Like the Cruel Games

A couple of years ago, two of my friends fell in love with the book The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Ever since then, they have been hounding me to read it. Well, I needed a book to read last week when I had nothing else to do, so I went to my Reading class's Novel list to find a book. I saw The Hunger Games on there and thought What the Heck! It also happened to in the back right on the top shelf at the library. I fell in love with it! I just finished part 1, and found so many funny, yet weird parts.
I love how Katniss, the main character, had never been in a car or a train, and had never had hot chocolate. I absolutely love how she volunteered herself so that her sister wouldn't have to be in the games.
If you haven't read the book, it is about the Hunger Games, a televised event where the participants, or "tributes", must fight to the death in a dangerous outdoor arena until only one remains as punishment for a previous rebellion against the Capitol. The participates, or "tributes", are one girl and one boy from ages 12 to 18. On the day the tributes are selected, Primrose, Katniss's 12 year old sister, is chosen and she volunteers herself to save her sister. The boy who is chosen, Peeta, we find out, had earlier saved Katniss and her family from starvation, and Katniss feels like she owes Peeta.
Another character that we meet is Haymitch, a winner of the games and a drunk. He makes many side remarks that I think are occasionally funny, but mostly just hurt Katniss. One thing I find weird is that when the participates arrive at the Capitol for the games, they are given "make overs" and are in a parade to show off all of the participates. Each pair wears a, i like to call it, costume that represents their District. Then, they are sent off to training, where they meet all of the other participates. The last thing they do is and interview, where they are dressed very nice and try to gain audience support, because they are permitted to send gifts to favored tributes during the Games, which can be crucial for survival.

People are stupid. Life isn't fair. Find a way to move on one way or another.

1.Such an idiot, Tyler. In middle school, some people thought you were mentally challenged. But you weren’t. You were just an idiot. –pg. 80

I like this quote because later in the book, Tyler shows up and shows that he really is an idiot. He does stupid things for his own pleasure and hurts Hannah while doing them.

2.Posed. What an interesting word to sum up Courtney’s tale. Because when you’re posed, you know someone’s watching. You put on your very best smile. You let your sweetest personality shine.
Unlike Courtney’s photo in the scribble book.
And in high school, people are always watching so there’s always a reason to pose. –pg. 94

I actually chose this quote because I don’t particularly agree with the last line. I never really cared in high school what people thought. I mean everyone cares, but my friends and I didn’t care that much. People are always watching, but unless you want to impress them, there’s no reason to pretend.

3.I don’t think you do this intentionally, Courtney. And that’s why I put you on these tapes. To let you know that what you do affects other. More specifically, it affected me.
Courtney does come off as genuinely sweet. Hearing her story here, on these taps, must have killed her.
A shiver crawls up my back. “Killed her.” A phrase I will now drop from my vocabulary. –pg. 94-95

I don’t really know how to put into words why I like this phrase. I guess it’s just one of those phrases that got to me and got stuck in my head.

4.So that’s where I give you credit. You could have taken the bitch route and still had all the friends and boyfriends you could handle. But instead you took the sweet route, everyone would like you and not a soul would hate you. –pg. 95

I think she kind of took the bitch route. People do hate her, Hannah for example. She has all the friends she wants, but when she’s done being nice, people get hurt. I knew a girl like that that I thought I was friends with. We’ve gone to church together since we were five years old. We talked at church and bonded at church camp, but at school, I was lucky if she said a word to me after she smiled and walked away. But I don’t think Courtney did everything on purpose. Before the party, she knew what she was doing, ignoring Hannah. But when they got to the party, she honestly thought she wasn’t doing anything wrong.

5.I have one of those car stereos that continues playing even after I shut off the engine. It won’t stop until someone opens a door. But that night, when I opened the door, the music didn’t stop . . . it just sounded distant.
“Oh my God,” you said. “I think that music’s coming from the party!”
Did I mention we were two and a half blocks away? That’s how loud it was. That party was absolutely begging for a police visit. –pg. 102

This quote made me laugh. I never went to big parties like the ones in the book. Well, I actually didn’t know about any parties. There probably were, I just wasn’t invited. I probably wouldn’t have gone to a party like this, because, one, I don’t drink. I would have gotten there and then left right away. And being a singer, loud music hurts my ears. Unless you are a singer, that phrase may seem weird to you, but it does hurt my ears.

6.I guess that’s the point of it all. No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same. –pg 156
I think this quote could be a slogan for the book. That’s why I like it. It talks about the impact that others have on other people’s lives but they don’t realize it. And that is why Hannah made the tapes.

7.If you hear a song that makes you cry and you don’t want to cry anymore, you don’t listen to that song anymore.
But you can’t get away from yourself. You can’t decide not to see yourself anymore. You can’t decide to turn off the noise in your head. – pg. 178
So true. You can’t turn anything off. Life doesn’t stop, it just keeps going whether you like it or not. And what Hannah did, killing herself, didn’t stop life. It didn’t stop for everyone. It stopped for her, like she wanted.

8.Imagine ten or twelve orange chairs arranged in a circle, with the happy women from the flyer sitting at opposite ends. Only problem was, from day one, they weren’t happy. Someone, whoever made that flyer, must have digitally turned their frowns upside down.
They wrote about death. About the evilness of men. About the destruction of – and I quote – “the greenish, bluish orb with wisps of white.”
Seriously, that’s how they described it. They went on to call Earth a knocked-up gaseous alien needing an abortion. – pg. 182

Now this one just made me laugh really hard. Mostly, the advertisement for the poetry club/meeting thing was made so that people would come. If they had made the flyer with what Hannah talks about in the quote, who would have really shown up?

9.I pull the headphones out of my ears and hang them around my neck.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” the man says from across the counter, but I’m not taking your money.” He blows into a straw and pinches both ends shut.
I shake my head and reach back for my wallet. “No, I’ll pay.”
He winds the straw tighter and tighter. I’m serious. It was only a milkshake. And like I said, I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know how I can help, but something’s clearly gone wrong in your life, so I want you to keep your money.” His eyes search mine, and I know he means it.-pg. 192-193

This makes me smile. = D
People do care. Not everyone is a jerk. You just have to look hard enough to see those people. And they pop up at the most unexpected, most random times in life.

10.When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. –pg. 201

This quote, I think, sums up the book. When you meet a new person and they become apart of it, even if it is just a small part, they can impact your life beyond belief. People are stupid and make mistakes. Hannah didn’t understand that. Like it says in quote one: you were just an idiot. That’s everyone. Everyone has their moment of stupidity. For some people, it haunts them forever. And for Hannah, the stupid things that her classmates did haunted her every day until she took her life.

People thought I went on vacation, but I actually spent the summer lost in the sewers.

I love Glee. I own all the CDs, a t-shirt, and the first half of season 1. I started watching it last winter when I went over to a friend’s house for Madrigals so that we could finish making our director’s gift. Glee was on later that night and everyone else wanted to watch it. I fell in love with it, but forgot about it the following Wednesday, considering I was at church. So I caught up with season 1 online and waited anxiously for the second half to come on. As I waited, I got my mom hooked on the show and we started watching Glee when it came back on in the spring.
One thing I never understood was why the slushie-ing went on. I know that if that would have happened at my school, they would not have allowed it. I also never understood why the Cheerios (that’s what they call their cheerleaders) wore their uniforms everyday to school. I love the show though. One of my favorite characters is Brittany, because she’s the classic dumb blonde cheerleader. Some of my favorite Brittany quotes include:
“Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?”
“I'm pretty sure my cat's been reading my diary.”
“I've been here since first period. I had a cold and I took all my antibiotics at the same time, and now I can't remember how to leave.”
Kurt, another favorite character of mine, also points out that she thinks the square root of four equal’s rainbows. She doesn’t make sense half the time, but it’s funny. My all time, favorite Glee quote is from Kurt:


Last night was the premiere of season 2 and I had Cagney and Megan over. We watched the season 1 finale then watched clips for the new season on youtube.com. One thing I love about the show if the music. They’re bringing back classics that I grew up listening to because my parents listened to them growing up. Some of my favorites include Dream On, Somebody to Love, Bust a Move, Defying Gravity, Don’t Rain on my Parade, Gives You Hell, and, of course, Don’t Stop Believin’.
I have also read part of the book that has come out, which talks about the characters before Glee started. If you don’t watch this show, I highly recommend it!

Thirteen People Why

The title of Thirteen Reasons Why is relevant to thirteen reasons for why a girl, Hannah, killed herself. Before she died, she recorded tapes talking about thirteen people that unintentionally pushed her toward her death. After she dies, she sends the tapes to all thirteen people on the tapes and shows one boy getting the tapes, not realizing what he did to her. To me, the title is thirteen reasons why she killed herself and, even though she says at the beginning that she doesn’t blame everyone on the tapes for what she did, I think she was blaming them. I have only gotten to the fourth person on the tapes, but I think she was showing how they started pushing her to her edge, but that they could have prevented it.

There have only been small things that the first couple of people did, but they were small enough. One small thing can drive a person mad, even to their death. Hannah was hurt by the things they did, but thought that everything wrong that was happening was her fault. She wanted to die; she didn’t feel like she was wanted. So she came up with thirteen reasons why, or thirteen people why, she killed herself.

451: The temperature at which books burn

Fahrenheit 451 is my favorite book. It’s a futuristic-type book where all books are banned and firefighters don’t stop fires. They start them to homes of people who have books. One of the most intense parts is when the main character, Montag, is affected by his job after they set fire to a woman’s house and she stays in the house and dies. That part really affected me too, because when I read this in my Novels class, we had to bring in our favorite book and I brought in my bible. After we read our favorite quote from the book, we then had to put our book in the middle of the circle. In the middle, though, was a picture of a camp fire. I had a hard time putting my bible in the middle, and so one of the guys took it and put it in the middle on the other side of the fire so that I couldn’t read it. That was when I felt a connection to the woman that died in the house. She stayed because she wanted to read. I feel that if I was in her place, I would have stayed to protect my bible. My faith is important to me.

Blog Test

I loved reading when I was younger, but then I had a bad experience with a teacher in third grade and after that, I hated reading. But my freshman year my friends got me back into reading. My favorite kinds of books are romance books, but I love fantasy and mystery books, especially series. I can’t say how many different series of books I have read, because I love seeing how the characters develop and change after a situation. I really love the Harry Potter series, and then watching it get turned into a movie is even more exciting, even though they don’t stick to the book through and through.