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.