Family Interview

Family Interview:
Me: Sahara, do you think your cool?
Sahara: uh, yes. 
Why?
Because I dress really nicely, plus im interested in a variety of things. Also I keep an open mind and try to have a unique and unusual exsperiences. Also a nice personality, I'm funny, not to mention I'm modest.
Haha. What do you think makes a person cool?
What makes a person cool is their personality. If they are confident enough to be themslves and just iteract with people and enjoy life, that makes them cool.
You don't think it has anything to do with image?
I think Image has something to do with it, but an image is only cool if it's a true reflection of the persons personality. People try to adopt other images that everyone else thinks is cool, but thats just conforming. A persons image is part of the way they express themselves.
You have a unique style, is that how you exspress yourself?
Yea
Well personally I love your style a lot
Thank you!
who is the coolest person you know?
I really don't know.
what inspires your clothing?
All my interests, like music and art. Different cultures also help. Literature.


We kind of got off topic after this, plus I ran out of questions.

Street Interviews

Stranger Interviews (all strangers wished not to be photographed):

So for all the interviews, our group had a starter question to get people interested. Larche came up with a really good one that we used in our interviews.

First 2 people we interviewed were Kathy and India from radio shack

Who is cooler, Beyonce or Rihanna?

Kathy: Beyonce, she’s an African American woman who grew up with all racial groups! Rihanna...I don't know about her.

Where you cool in high school?

Kathy: Oh no, I was mainly into sports. I was even on the math team; I was cool when someone needed help with their homework.

India: I was kind of cool. I hung out with the "cool" kids.

Who is the coolest person you know?

Kathy: The coolest person I know is my mother. Who else could raise me and my siblings and still keep it cool and collective? No one.

Any last tips on being cool?

Kathy: Be down to earth; don't care about people’s opinions, and someone who is forward and honest.  Honesty is super cool.

India: Tips on being cool? Open mind to anything. I know your teachers going to turn that around on me, but I don't mean giving into peer pressure, I mean trying things you want to do. Always be opening minded to things you feel comfortable doing.

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Third Interview was with a woman in the park, I forgot her name.

Who is cooler, Beyonce or Rihanna? 

Well Beyonce is too superficial, right now I feel more sympathetic for Rihanna because of the whole Chris Brown thing

Where you cool in high school?

Oh I wasn't cool in high school! Well actually I was more in between cool and uncool

What do you consider being cool?

Originality. If you can pull of your own original style then your cool.

Who is the coolest person you know?

All of my friends! I can't choose one person they are all cool in their own ways.

Do you have tips on being cool?

I don't really have tips but I think it's cool that your class is like, challenging the medias definition of cool. Its like you guys are re-defining it.

Trends in the stories + Comments on 5 people

     Something most of the stories had in them where morals. All the main characters where put in line at the end of the story, thus learning a lesson. In Matt’s story, the psychiatrist tries to explain to his client that she is has so much more to offer then just her looks. She has more value then she is showing, which she begins to realize a bit in the end. Once he has explained this to her, her attitude seemed to change from angry to understanding. Conor’s story also has a message. His main character acts like a total jerk, constantly cracking jokes on others until one girl cant take it anymore. She puts him in his place by telling him the truth, his bad attitude has made everyone in the school dislike him. After hearing this, the main character can’t even come up with a snappy response, he just sits there quietly with a sad expression. In the end, he realizes his snappy comments will no longer get him cheep laughs. He had become the joke now and after seeing how it feels, he learns it doesn’t feel good to be picked on.

    Jessica’s story seemed to be strongly based on morals. All the other stories seemed to include an analysis on what cool looks like, like fashion and how their characters talk. Jessica’s story was more about what it is to act cool which she describes as skipping school and classes. But in the end, her main character gets into academic problems and she realizes that grades are more important then having fun. Morals can also be seen in Larche’s story. The “new” girl has everyones attention on her first day there. She is so use to everyone focusing on her and admiring her fashion sense, but then a newer kid arrives and she suddenly is old news. The “new” girl learns how fast the spot light can be taken off someone, and how bad it feels afterwords. 

    However, Sam’s story to me was really honest since it didn't have a moral. Her main character learned nothing, he just continued to conform to his friends ideas of dressing “cool”. Instead of thinking as an individual, he actually felt bad about looking different and immediately changed his style. Sam’s story shows the true reality of cool, no one learns a lesson about being their own individual, they just continue to conform. 

Dear Conor,

Your story was very interesting, but was the person you where describing yourself or was it just written in first person? I like how it describes the typical “cool” guy, always making jokes and being kind of an ass. I felt that this story was really real and true to life, one thing I didn’t like was that it was so short. I know you can write a longer story that’s even more interesting :)

Dear Matt,

I liked your story a lot. I found it was so creative, I didn’t see anyone else who wrote a play. You made the characters and setting so real, I feel it might have been the best cool’ story I have read when it comes to realism. I love how you get into details, the characters really have their own personalities. One thing to work on was proof reading, that was basically the only problem. You’re a great writer Matt, all your stuff makes me think. Keep up the good work!

Dear Jessica,

Your story had a great message! I like how it wasn’t just all about being cool, it was about living life in moderation. Shaquiqua wanted to be popular, but she started doing it through skipping school. But once she gets into academic problems, she  realizes that she doesn't need to skip school to be "cool" and that grades are more important then popularity.  In the end, she finds a way to balance the two and be cool and get good grades.  I would have liked to see some dialogue in it but other wise this was a good story! 

Dear Larche,

I really enjoyed your story! I really liked the quote  “She looked like she just stepped out of a magazine with her appealing looks. ", it reminded me of when we wrote what "cool" actually means . I wrote about how what we think is cool is heavily influenced through the media and I used magazines that shows what's "in" or "out" as an example, I can just picture your character looking through a magazine foe “cool” looks. I also like how you really explained what made her cool. Her clothing is "crazy" and unique, she has different hair and glasses, and she is exceedingly confidant because of all the attention she is drawing from her peers. There's not much I didn't like, it was a great story all around. Also your character sounds really interesting looking, very creative :)

Dear Sam, 

Your story was short but sweet, it gets the true message of looking "cool". Most people included morals and lessons in their stories but in real life that stuff doesn't happen, your story is something that could actually happen. When people are trying to act cool ,they don't usually learn a lesson that shows them being themselves is okay which is what I liked about your story. Thank you for being honest about "cool". I also like all the comics you post on your blogs,their cute and witty. :) Great story can't wait to see more of your work!

short story

It was a typical morning in Ms. Rune’s math class, everyone struggling to take notes due to lack of sleep. Trying to stay awake, I tune the teacher out as I stair blankly out the window. It’s a dreary morning, light rain and no sun at all. “Joseph.... Kyle.....Bert....” I hear Ms. Rune say until I hear my name. “Yasmin”. I respond, “here” still focusing on the window and without moving. She continues to announce names, her droning voice putting everyone to sleep, until she calls his name. “Adam”. I look around the room, no surprise he isn’t here. 

“Why bother even saying his name” says Demi. “He’s never here, your just wasting time” 

Everyone gives a light snicker, trying to fight off sleep. Ms Rune ignores Demi and continues to call Adam’s name. “Adam...does anyone see Adam.”. As soon as she is about to give up and call another name, everyone is awoken by a loud thud at the door. Everyone turns sharply at the door to see it has been flung open by none other then Adam. Everyone turns back around towards their desks groaning. 

“why the fuck does he even bother going to school” whispers someone in the back of the room. 

Adam can’t hear them over the ridiculously loud rock music coming from his large headphones, originally designed for DJ’s. I watch him walk towards me, my heart still pounding form the loud booming from the door. The rain outside had made the scent of the leather on his jacket more pungent then normal, but It didn’t really bother me. I move my feet off his chair as he take his set. He immediately puts his feet up on the empty chair infront of our table, his black sneakers drip onto the wooden chair and onto the bottom of his faded denim skinny jeans. 

“Are you just getting here Adam?” Says Ms. Rune looking angrily at him.

He doesn’t respond.

“Adam?” She repeats, her tone sharper then the last time.

He just sits there bobbing his head, headphones still blasting. By this time Ms. Rune has lost her patience and gets up to approach him.  By the time she gets to our table, he still hasn’t moved or noticed her. She reaches down and rips his headphones from his ears.

“Adam Garets, where have you been for the last hour!” 

“Can you mind your business and let go of my shit?” He slaps her hand off his headphones, Ms Rune  tries to contain her anger. 

“It is my business as a teacher to know why you are late for my class, now tell me where you've been or I’ll send you to the principles office!”

“Ohhhhhh I’m so scared. Go ahead the sooner you do, the sooner I go back home.”

“May I remind you the next time you get sent to the principles office gets you a 3 day suspension...again?”

Adam’s smug expression is immediately wiped off his face. He gives Ms. Rune a frown and can only respond her threat with “pshhhh”. He takes he takes his headphones off and says “Happy now?”. Ms. Rune continues to stare at him angrily until he removes his hat. His messy black curly hair falls over his face, blocking most of his eyes. He opens his bag and looks through a mess of papers and junk for a notebook. Out drops a pack of cigarettes from his bag, leaving it there until someone notices. 

“Uh hello?” I say “You obviously dropped those”

“Oh really? My bad” He pics them up and opens then, trying to show them off. I roll my eyes and he drops them back in his mess of a backpack. He finally finds a notebook and begins to take notes for a few moments. When the teacher turns her back, he rips a piece of paper out of his notebook and tosses a paper ball at Arin. The paper ball flys through the air, hitting Arin in the back of te head. Arin turns around, frowning at Adam who is pretending to write. His notebook is brand new, nothing ever written in it except a sentence on a few pages.

“Why don’t you actually use that paper for notes?” I say, looking blankly at his weak attempt at entertainment

“Why dont you mind your business?”

“Is that your only come back? Get some new material”

“Pshhhh” He says...again. “What a small vocabulary” I say in my mind “Watching the window is more entertaining then arguing with him”. Arin continues to be pummeled with paper balls, hitting her head and arms several times. She just ignores him. 

“Adam! Cut it out!” Says Mr. Rune “I won’t tell you again”.

“I wasn’t doing anything!” says Adam. Mr. Rune roles her eyes and ignores him.

“Pshhhh, stupid bitch” he whispers under his breath. Mr. Rune turns around immediately, her face is scrunching angrily at him.

“What did you say young man!” she screeched.

“I didn’t say anything”.

“Get up”

“What the hell I didn’t.....”

“GET UP”

He got up and yelled “WHAT!?”

“Pack up your things and go to the principles office, I wont’ let him go easy on you this time ether.”

“I’m not going” laughed Adam, dropping himself back into his chair. “You can’t make me”. The class was awake now, watching the show. Ms. Rune’s pale face was bright as a tomato now, she walked slowly towards his desk clenching her fists. She got to his desk and he looked up at her with a smug look on his face. She snatched up his bag from under his chair. 

“HEY!” he yelled. 

She opened the door, everyone got up from their chairs and ran to the door including Adam, as they watched Ms. Rune take the bag to the front of the downstairs stairs.  She looked down the stairs and dropped the bag, everyone gasping and shouting as the bag went tumbling from the eight floor to the first. 

She walked over to Adam, who was giving her the most disgusting face I had ever seem.

“Why don’t you stop trying to act tuff and actually do something with your life. How many years have you been in the 11th grade. Stop trying to be col and wake up!”

Adam tried to respond, but instead his face when from angry to saddened. So did hers after releasing what she had just done. Everyone watched silently at Adam expecting some outrageous response, but instead Adam slowly walked down the stairs after his bag, with the sound of tearful sniffling of his crushed ego echoing down the corridors. 

What is Cool?

    I feel we all have different ideas on what "cool" is for example,  I feel my views on being cool are totally different from most teenagers. To me, being cool is all about creativity. I'm really interested in art so I think cool is looking unique, which is mainly seen through fashion. I would find someone that was wearing something like a corset cooler then someone wearing a floral dress from Urban Outfitters because the corset is uncommon, as the dress is not. When people follow trends too much, I just see them as a poser because their only dressing like that because thats what's "in". I feel I can connect better to someone dressed unique because their clothing reflects a lot about what they like or what they are interested in.

     However we also have similar views on what is cool. For example, going to parties and getting intoxicated is considered cool to most people, at least it is as a teenager. Such acts are probably considered cool because they are the things we have been told not to do all our lives by authority figures like our parents or the police. Parents are always telling kids that alcohol and drugs are bad. There are also many laws prohibiting "minors" from drinking and prohibiting everyone from doing drugs. Breaking these rules makes us feel free and rebellious and it helps us break away from stuff like the work we get at school.

     Something else a lot of people also consider cool are celebrities, which I think is due to the media. A lot of magazines feature which clothes are “cool” by showing them on celebrities, they even conveniently tell you where to buy them and how much they cost. Its all just for advertising trying to make people buy their merchandise. A lot of trends are influenced from celebrities clothes, tattoos, piercing, etc... For example, lots of stores will label there products that have been worn by celebrities. For example:



      This is a picture of a pair of sunglasses being sold on fredflare.com. The website also includes a picture of Lindsay Lohan wearing the sunglasses. Even if customers don’t like the item, they might buy them because a celebrity is wearing them. Celebrities are heavily admired in our society and many people will buy the things they have to be like them. Even in the book Feed, which takes place in the future, teenagers are still influenced by the media. Through out the whole book, almost everyone is constantly on their feeds getting information on what's “hot” and what's “not”. One of the big things I noticed in the book that the girls are always going off to change their hair styles based on what their feeds say is popular. It just shows that our obsession with the media and looking “cool” is so obvious now, that it is predicted to take place in the future as well.

Homework 13 Feed B

Although the story focuses on Titus and his friends, the author still find ways to sneak secret messages into the book that show that even tough Titus and his friends are happy with the feed, not everyone is. During the beginning of the book, Titus and friends are on the moon in a car and they drive past people protesting the feed, they pay them no mind. "they were protesting all these things, some of them even were protesting the feed. They were shouting, "chip in my head? I'm better off dead!chip in my head? I'm better off dead! " Loga rolled her eyes and was like, "Omigod' page 32. After this they aren't mentioned again. I like how the author includes the other side of the story by including the people who aren't conforming to the feed in the story. However, he only gives undertones of this, I think it's a nice way of showing how most of the population has already gave in and became a part of the feed now.

Another part I enjoyed was when the author shows signs of how nature is dyeing off is during the hospital scene were Titus and Violet are looking out at the dead garden. "Outside the window there was a garden....a long time ago the glass celling over the terrarium had cracked, and so everything was dead, and there was moon dust all over everything out there. Everything is gray" page 62. Titus has no reaction to the dead garden other then its beautiful. What I think the author was trying to show was that nature had been dyeing off due to the excessive technology use.  No one had even cared to replace the flowers that had once been there, They have been dead for years. Nature seems to be losing importance in the feed world.

My last argument is when Titus is looking at an older persons feed post. He writes about a time when Eagles were around and there were forests. This implies that in the feed world, there are no forests. "I remember as the last forest fell...at about that time, we would see hawks and eagles in the cities. People walked outside more, back then. The temperate usually didn't get about a hundred. There were streets in the cities, and eagles flew over them, wobbling without moving their wings.." page 94. This quote indicates many economic problems the feed world has been going through. Obesity seems to be up since it is stated that people get less excursive, global warming rising because the temperate is rising, all the forests are gone and hawks and eagles are extinct. Of cause, Titus pays this no mind and says its just an old mans rants. They do not know how bad their situation is. I think the author slipped this piece in to just the message across that the over run of technology has ruined to economy of this city.

Homework 12 Feed A

     I think the teenagers of Feed take digital addiction to a new level. Today, technology takes over a lot of younger peoples lives in many ways like through T.V, computers, cellphones, I pods, Social networking and etc... but it doesn't make up our whole lives. The kids of Feed are very similar to us but I feel their whole lives are just focused on their feeds. There is a possibility that his book my be a grim glimpse of our future. The feed provides all the things most Americans are interested in today, just in one convenient package . Tidus and his friends literally use their feeds for EVERYTHING, IMing, calling people, watching popular T.V shows, finding out the latest rends and etc...There feeds update them on the latest celebrity gossip, hairstyles, music, basically all updates in recent pop culture.

     Somethings I thought were weird were the effects the feed was having on the characters in the book. One that I found VERY weird was the fact that when Titus's dad came to visit him in the hospital, he talked just like Titus. He was using all the popular slang, he sounded just like one of the teens. "(Titus) How's mom?" "(father) She's like, whoa, she's like so stressed out. This is...dude" he said "Dude, this is some way bad shit" (page 55) I don't see many adults doing this now, my parents do sometimes and they pick it up from me and my sister. I think the result of his fathers weird speech may be from two things. The feed is ether producing so much new slang that the kids are using and now his fathers using it, or his father can go straight to the feed and learn the new slang so he can be "hip". I don't know why but when adults try and say stuff like "mad", it freaks me out which is kind of mean. They should be aloud to say it too, its just that it sounds bad enough coming from a kids mouth it just sounds worse coming from an adults.

     Another thing I noticed is that they all were going into withdrawal when they couldn't use the feed. When Titus is in the hospital, he begins to think of life before the feed and compares the feed several times to vital organs. "I miss the feed. I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and eyes. Computers were all outside our bodies. They carried them around outside them, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breath" page 47. I think it's very disturbing how Titus is comparing technology to something you need to live. He doesn't need the feed, but because it provides everything for him and its in their brains I'm assuming their all getting addicted to it. He also sounds so lazy saying we had to use our eyes and hands for our todays technology. Why would you ever want to lose ability to use one of your body parts?

     I think both of these elements are elements of tragedy. Human's rely on technology that much were they limit the activity of their EYES? Sight is a gift, I have no idea why you would want to waste it. Also it just seems like all this dependancy on technology is making people dumber. The father talks like he is some 15 year old kid which just makes him look ridiculous. How can you take someone like that seriously when they sound so dumb. Also Titus is complaining about how people had to use their hands to operate things like cellphones and such which just makes him sound so sad because they have taken technology to the next level were its becoming dangerous towards their health. I'm  not saying modern technology now isn't damaging towards health but I'm sure if we had feeds now, the obesity rate would sky rocket. For me, the feed would be something I personally wouldn't want. The feed seems meaningless to me. All the things it provides would not help me in my daily life, it would just slow me down. I could careless about celebrities lives, hair styles or the latest American Music since they have ling lost my interest.