Sunday, April 24, 2011

A BEAUTIFUL MIND REFLECTION

The movie opens with John having a delusion of a room-mate; Charles. We don’t even know it’s a delusion at first and we really see Charles bring John out of his shell. John needed someone to help him be a normal grad student and no one “real” was around, plus john was not really willing to put himself out there. So Charles represents John unwillingness to venture out which greatly contributed to his madness. Its ironic how until we find out that Charles is a dillusion, his role seems quite the opposite. He drinks with Charles to “drown the ice” between them. So are we to understand, after knowing that Charles was in fact a delusion, that John took up drinking on his own at least often? Did that contribute to his “Degenerative” state? Why don’t we know anything about before his schitzophrenia started? It leaves me with a lot of questions. It started around 1954 and so the fact that his delusions have to do with mcharthy and the red scare and the atomic bomb makes sense within the period but why did that specific delusion somehow get a hold of John? Or was he just conceited about his own genius? If that is the case, it says something about ego and genius. John could not handle being that brilliant and having no social life but he also could not handle having a social life. Something about him was missing and when people exist with great parts of themselves missing, this is when they are open to all sorts of toxins. Dillusions can be considered toxins and they were making john very sick but he was able to fight them and become the boss which on some level he must have been all along. He either let these dilusions in or created them. He did this all to himself. And that is a funny thing about madness. I like that this movie depicts a case of madness that is overcome. Because so often it is like a death sentence to life as you know it just like we see with what the doctor characters in the movie had to say with their hopeless attitudes. I think This movie shows that faith is more powerful than any diagnosis. 


^i dunooo

Break HW Questions; on Reading of Dorien Gray pgs 12-58

Reading Questions - Chapter 2
Write 3-4 sentences answering each question

Some people feel that the first scenes in The Picture of Dorian Gray rely on themes from Genesis 2-3 of the Hebrew Bible (Christian bibles refer to this as the Old Testament).  

Read the following section from the Hebrew Bible

1) Which character is most like the snake/ha’Satan?  Explain your ideas.
I Would say Harry. He is angry with society it
seems but he is such a hypocrit. And it’s a sin to be a hypocrit. He will say something and controdict himself in the next sentence. He is always saying how no man has right to judge and he is ALWAYS judging. He’s very into how nothing can be predetermined, how you must find out through experimentation but he has soo many theories rooted in who knows what. He also is using Dorian for an experiment to amuse himself. He sees that Dorian is (or was I guess) pure and had a beautiful energy and his interest are sucking that energy and corrupting the purity. He exposes Dorian to a lot of fascinating things that test Dorian’s goodness and this is so much like the nature of the devil.
2) Which character is most like Adam?  Explain your ideas.
Dorian. Dorian is most like Adam because he gives into temptation. He is so new like Adam and Naïve that he has no caution. He eats up what Harry tells him. He basically believes everything Harry says and really seems to be under some sort of spell cast by Harry. He had no thoughts or cares about his own beauty and that changed almost with a snap of the fingers. Then he became sick at the thought that he would not be beautiful forever and wished the painting would age instead of him. When he realized this wish came true, first, before knowing that Sybil had killed herself, he decided to be good, he did not want any more ugliness on his painting or on him. Then once he learned that Sybil killed herself, and then Harry gave him a big head by talking about the beauty of this trajedy and how it said something grand about Dorian that Sybil had killed herself for her love for him, now he liked the idea of being able to commit sins and not having them show on his body or face but being able to hide them away in the painting. So he decided he would take advantage of this phenomenon much like Adam decided he would eat the forbidden fruit.
 3) Which character is most like Eve?  Explain
your ideas.
Dorian, for a similar reason that he is like Adam. He gives into temptation. Another way he is like eve is that he lets people push him around.
 4) Which character is most like God of these two
sections?  Explain your ideas.
I would say the person who is most divine is Dorian but I would not say he is like god. I don’t think any human is like god. But some of us are very powerful/ have special powers. I do think Dorian is an angel of some sort or some sort of incarnated divine creature. I think this because he was able to do magic with his wish and because of the way he is physically is very angel like. Also, in the beginning, his naïve nature was like someone who is not used to the planet earth.
 5) How does Lord Henry’s conversation on pages
13-14 affect Dorian Grey?  What “Fresh impulses” does the boy have?
First Dorian made a whole new expression. Lord Henry got him thinking about things that had never crossed his mind. He has to ask Henry to stop talking so he could ponder this upsetting information. It stirred him “like music”. Henry’s theories were the start of Dorian losing his ignorance which lead to him losing his innocence because the more he knew the more he wanted to experience and feel.
 6)  Why does Basil want to destroy the
painting and what stops him?
Because Dorian gets mad after realizing that beauty does not last forever and the painting will always look the same (or so he thinks at that time) while he will slowly decay. He feels the painting will mock him. He says he will kill himself whens he finds hes growing old. He is jealous of the picture and everything whos beauty will not die. Basil blames this behavior on Henry (whos fault it is)They are all starting to bicker and Basil is hurt and offended that this is going on after all he put into the painting. So in order to stop the bickering and to stop Dorian’s nonsense and maybe also out of some spite, he threatens to slash the painting and he is about to but Dorian jumps up and stops him saying “it would be murder”. I think on some level Dorian already knew all about the spell he had just cast with his wish.

7) Why does Dorian tell Lord Henry he has fallen in
love with Sybil Vane in Chapter III?
Because he discovered her sort of randomly one night at a low grade theater. She acted a different role every night of the week and she was a brilliant actress. He thinks her virtues are good enough to be seen by the world and he is determined to love her and make her a star. He becomes obsessed and goes every night. Henry has some sort of power of Dorian and so Dorian is just drawn to tell him everything.
8) What happens when Basil and Lord Henry go to see
Sybil perform in Chapter V?
Sybil’s acting is terrible and Basil, Henry and most of the audience leave long before the play is over. Dorian stays and then goes to find out what is wrong with Sybil.
9) Describe causes and effects of the supernatural
event(s) in Chapter VI
Dragons were mentioned for the second time. This time it was a blue dragon bowl filled with yellow roses. Dragons are supernatural and they are also known to be the spirit guids of wizards. That’s just something small though. After Dorian sees the way the picture has changed then then feels bad for the way he treated Sybil and wants to make amends and marry her after all. So he pours his hear out in a letter. A little later, Henry comes by and tells Dorian that Sybil killed herself and he is barely upset. More relieved. Henry explains to Dorian how miserable he would have been if he had gotten married and goes on one of his rants about how it’s a beautiful trajedy and how Dorian is special to have had someone kill themselves for love of him. Dorian totally buys this all and his head gets even bigger. Dorian decides that the portrait will bare the burden of his shame. He decides to take advantage of this and he turns away from his insistance on having a pure soul.
 10) What do you predict will happen next in the story?
I think Dorian is going to get more and more conceited do more and more bad, harmful and wrong things. I think Henry is going to ride on Dorian’s fame and continue to gas him up with all those theories and confuse him with all those contradictions and Basil is going to be sick with sadness. I think ish is gona go downnnnn. the waters r gona get rough!

Thursday, April 14, 2011

John & Alicia


click the picture to see it bigger

OOOH I HAD THE FEELING THE STORY WAS EDITEDDD FOR HOLLYWOOD STANDARDS SAKE;; (wikipedia info))

EARLY LIFE 


Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia. His father, after whom he is named, was an electrical engineer for the Appalachian Electric Power Company. His mother, Margaret, had been a school teacher prior to marriage. Nash's parents pursued opportunities to supplement their son's education with encyclopedias and even allowed him to take advanced mathematics courses at a local college while still in high school. Nash accepted a scholarship to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and graduated with a Master's Degree in only three years.[3]




Personal life

Per Nash's biography, from 1951 onwards, he had a liaison with a nurse, Eleanor Stier. She bore a child named John David Stier. Though Nash had thought of marrying her, he later decided against it and left them.
In 1951, Nash went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a C. L. E. Moore Instructor in the mathematics faculty. There, he met Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé (born January 1, 1933), a physics student from El Salvador, whom he married in February 1957. She admitted Nash to a mental hospital in 1959 for schizophrenia; their son, John Charles Martin Nash, was born soon afterward, but remained nameless for a year because his mother felt that her husband should have a say in the name.
Nash and de Lardé divorced in 1963, though after his final hospital discharge in 1970 Nash lived in de Lardé's house. In 1994, Nash won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, following which he and de Lardé resumed their romantic relationship. They were remarried in 2001.
Nash has been a longtime resident of West Windsor Township, New Jersey.[7]

Schizophrenia

Nash began to show signs of extreme paranoia and his wife later described his behavior as erratic, as he began speaking of characters like Charles Herman and William Parcher who were putting him in danger. Nash seemed to believe that all men who wore red ties were part of a communist conspiracy against him. Nash mailed letters to embassies inWashington, D.C., declaring that they were establishing a government.[8][9]
He was admitted to the McLean Hospital, April–May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The clinical picture is dominated by relatively stable, often paranoid, fixed beliefs that are either false, over-imaginative or unrealistic, usually accompanied by experiences of seemingly real perception of something not actually present — particularly auditory and perceptional disturbances, a lack of motivation for life, and mild clinical depression.[10] Upon his release, Nash resigned from MIT, withdrew his pension, and went to Europe, unsuccessfully seeking political asylum in France and East Germany. He tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship. After a problematic stay in Paris and Geneva, he was arrested by the French police and deported back to the United States at the request of the U.S. government.
-------> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.



I wonder what really went down with the whole hospitalization and medication and schizophrenia thing. I wonder because the US requested him back!? My questions are a lot about where those delusions came from? If he was so brilliant maybe someone would be using him for some secret government something. Who ever that person was definitely would not be the one everrr coming clean to any piece of the public let alone Hollywood. But if they were really just delusions, he was just unjustly conceited? haha. ohhh hollywood making everything look soo cute *EYE ROLL. He was was so paranoid specifically about the red scare and the Russians and all those Mcarthy era paranoias. It was 1954 so it makes sense but I wonder why how those delusions stuck with him somehow, where did they come from? It wasn't even that he was paranoid at first. He "imagined" being employed by a secret sect of the government. For all we know this movie was total propaganda and they paid him off. Maybe they didn't even have to pay him off. Because he won the nobel peace prize. That was his pay off. After the government abused him they decided to confuse him more. So now he has to smile and be nice for the lying hollywood lenses right? Plus they made him so much more dreamy than he really is in the depiction. He was paranoid about all guys with red ties (in real life)!? They totally didn't depict him the way he really was in the movie. And in the movie his wife stayed by his side. She almost sold him out then she came back up the stairs and we were like ohh yes she is a ride-or-die. But in real life, not that their love isn't amazing and real (cause they're back together to this day since 2001) but it was not such a "perfect love story" like it reallllllly seemed like. It really was to the point where it was unrealistic. As i watched i was like wow thats amazing.....and it wasn't even really like that... and she did have him committed and they got divorced and all that. They also neglected to mention that his wife, who's real name is Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé (She's Alisha in the movie...) is Latina, Lopez! *shaking my head...By the way, there is not one single non-white person in the whole movie. And if that was back in the 50's at Princeton and she was a student, thats definitely not irrelevant that she is a person of color. I mean granted she is very light but still. WOW. So much more to the story! The Angles reeeeek like propaganda. I bet he was way more abusive than they showed too. Like how did that baby stay the same age for two years? I bet that boy was around to see way more insanity than they allowed us to see. And he (John) was in jail! He seeked political freedom in Europe! hmmm! There was something real to his "delusions" at someee point! I'm convinced. They cut out soo much... <-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------just some tid-bits & thoughts/rantings. Assignment on its way



Thursday, April 7, 2011

HEY GUYSSSSS

look what me and Joelvis.........Joelvis and I**** ran into TODAYYY! ;D

never ignore clear signs :):):)

ANYTHINGS POSSIBLE :)

it saidddd

i dont believe this quiz actually determines anything for sure

<table border=1><tr><td> <table> <tr> <td colspan=2 align=center><b>Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz</b></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan=2 align=left>The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others.</td> </tr> <tr nowrap><td valign=top align=right>Left Brain Dominance: </td><td align=left><img src="http://www.intelliscript.net/test_area/questionnaire/bar_graph.gif" width=36 height=12 alt="6">(6)</td></tr><tr nowrap><td valign=top align=right>Right Brain Dominance: </td><td align=left><img src="http://www.intelliscript.net/test_area/questionnaire/bar_graph.gif" width=66 height=12 alt="11">(11)</td></tr> <tr> <td colspan=2 align=center><font size=1><a href="http://www.intelliscript.net/test_area/questionnaire/questionnaire.cgi?q=questionnaire_ini">Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz</a></font></td> </tr> </table> </td></tr></table>

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

i've been poked and jolted way too many times today. deadass. no more. keep ur damn hands to ur self in all seriousness. i dont find it cute.
I DONT WANA READ ABOUT DEAD BODIES =O

Monday, April 4, 2011

"How Wandered Alice Beacme Warrior Alice and Why" Summary

This Article by Kristina Aikens addresses Alice's strong and fearless personality. We see this all throughout the story; Alice is on a bold exploration mission. Aikens talks about how Alice, all through the century and counting since she was introduced to us in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has become a mascot for those of us who consider ourselves outside of the norm. Aikens also delves into Alice’s extremely paradoxical manner. Alice in some ways is very feminine in a traditional sense when it comes to her appearance. At the same time, she is nothing like what a “young girl should” be like because of the way she addresses authority and just her manners in general; “Alice is rash, impetuous, highly argumentative and often rude…” says Aikens. Not only all this but Alice has no trouble declaring herself the heroine when she realizes she is in the middle of something like a fairy tale and a book should be written about her. So she decides she will one day be the one to write it, taking charge. And Then she ends up way to big for the Rabbit’s domestic home which Aikens suggests is a symbol that Alice does not fit into the traditional role she is expected to fill as a woman as keeper of the home. Aikens talks about how “curiosity is a tricky trait”; one must be active at the rights times and passive at the right times. A questioner and an observer. Alice has it in her, all of it. “her willingness to go anywhere or try anything, no matter how stranger or absurd or even potentially dangerous is the character’s most appealing and beloved attribute”, says Aikens. There is some dispute that Alice’s lack of control does not lend itself to the concept of feminism but the author concludes that all the paradoxes within Alice make her a complex female character that is a true depiction of the potential within a woman’s power. Then Aikens goes into how Alice and her story have become mascots also for those who experiment with drugs. This is because Alice’s adventure definitely has a lot to do with questioning reality and traveling to alternate realities which are themes that also saturate the drug culture. Also, all Alice’s substance intake is often compared to drugs. The author likes Tim Burton’s remake of Alice in Wonderland because there is no question that Alice is “The Alice”, the only one who can do what she can do. In the end she partners with her father in business and real steps her foot into the “male world” with force.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

roughhh first Alice draft :)

Alice must have had the need to venture to the subsurface layers of herself. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and having nothing to do” (1) Alice finds a way to get to the underground layers of herself, beyond the tip of the iceberg or down the rabbit hole, we could say, through dreaming. The fact that Alice was dreaming however, does not mean that Wonderland is not a real place. It is just that in Alice’s specific mortal condition at the point in time when her first journey to Wonderland occurred, perhaps dreaming was the only way for Alice to fulfill her wishes and/or needs to explore. Alice is on her way to self actualization and Wonderland symbolizes something much greater than just a dream. A dream is rarely just a dream you know. Wonderland symbolizes the opportunity for Alice to question what she is told is reality and to experiment with all sorts  of “impossibilities” and nonsense so that she can better understand her own potential and the potential of the world around her.
Alice’s dream fits into something that the psychology world calls wish fulfilment. It goes farther than where Freud (the coiner of the phrase...what a surprise) took it though. According to Freud, dreaming of your wishes coming true is a way to overcome that wish in your awakened life and perhaps move past it. But maybe it is really a way to get clues, training and practice as to how to really fulfill your wishes. Making your dreams come true is something we hear all the time. In our society though there are lots of things that just “are the way they are”. So if we live by the rules that makes things “the way they are”, they will stay this way. But if we explore beyond we may start to see how many options there truly are. It may be a fantasy but not all fantasies remain fiction forever. Alice was not content with her life the way it was and she was not going to take a boring mundane lot in life sitting down. So she created Wonderland.
Right from the very beginning she was grappling with possible vs. impossible. Can Rabbits talk!? The laws of logic are broken right  from the start. “For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” (9) Alice finds herself in a land where the only stability is that nothing is ever stable. The only form or government we meet, the Queen is out of her mind because she cannot possibly have any control over a land that is just stubbornly wild (wild meaning; some natural order that appears to be chaos because we do not know how the order works) The Queen cannot possibly rule through law because that would require too much sense of which wonderland has almost none.
In Wonderland, it is some natural order of chaos that rules. Though we (back in “the real world”) try to classify, group, label and predetermine all sorts of situations in every-day life, chaos seems to be what rules the here as well when you really get down to it. Wonderland is just more blatantly so because it is a rebellion (on the part of Alice, fullfilling her wishes through a dream, rebelling against oppressive ideas) against all the feeble attempts our society makes to know all and control all. Well, what we do all know is that you must always expect the unexpected, now isn’t that right? In Wonderland, even when the Queen tries to punish for disobedience sake, magic often gets characters like the chescher cat out of “legal troubles”, AKA decapitation (The only punishment the Queen seems to know of). Perhaps this OCD of the Queen’s is rooted in the fact that everyone seems to be out of their mind anyway. Rather ironic; one of Lewis Caroll’s little clever bits. The Queen cannot control Wonderland though because it is organically an anarchist state seeing as the only stability is instability. Alice’s whole intention in creating Wonderland was to rebel against society. So why would the Queen have any real power or respect? Strong will and clear intentions can make anything happen no matter how many people say it is wrong or impossible.  This is what Alice learns through her dream rebellion. This is what Alice fulfilled for herself, taught to herself. Alice is not very much intimidated by the Queen. But she does realize that perhaps the Queen has some sort of decapitation OCD so Alice does not stay around the Queens castle for long. Alice always does what she needs to do for self preservation. Just more proof that Alice really has her wits about her and is only getting stronger as she learns more and more.
Dreams may come in the form of symbols and or metaphors for the dreamer to understand. “Why We Dream: ...To satisfy our own wishes. In 1900, in his landmark book The interpretation od Dreams, Freud offered what he thought was “the most valuable of all discoveries it has been my good fortune to make”: Dreams provide a psychic safety valve that discharges otherwise unacceptable feelings. According to Freud, a dream’s manifest (apparent) content is a censored, symbolic version of its latent content, which consists of unconscious drives and wishes that would be threatening if expressed directly” (104 txtbook) Aha! Rebellions often are threatening aren’t they? The way Freud put it is all good and well but we could also say that the dream world is a place where oppressive norms do not exist and so this is why people are able to fulfill things in their dreams that they are restricted from in awake life. A lot of Freud theories like this one are based on the context of an oppressive society. All the things that Alice learns are very threatening to what her concept of reality was before she ever ventured to Wonderland. Alice fulfilled a wish to rebel through dreaming just like many of us do. But dreams mean a lot because we are able to see real things that have walls put up around them in awake life. So the lessons our dreams teach us can be very useful when we are awake and this is why dreams should never be poo pooed.
Though dreams are often very murky when it comes to sense, this does not mean that the symbols in dreams are masks attempting to hide things. Dreams just function on a whole different plane that, us awake people may describe it as a little tricky and clever. Lewis Caroll conveys this through all the riddles and poetry we find through out the text. Some of the riddles like; “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” (97) even have no answers. So why Alice wonders, would anyone waste time to even ask? Maybe that was Alice’s way of realizing that sometimes, you just cannot know the answer. Maybe it was a manifestation of her frustrations with all the things society has no clue about that we are always trying to draw conclusions on like that boring book her sister was reading that Alice could not interest herself in. Because often times, connections that are tried in the attempts at creating “facts” really are as rediculouse as comparing a raven and a writing desk (and sometimes they are even straight up cover-up lies). But then again, If one tried, one could come up with something to compare a raven and a writing desk that does make some sort of sense. That’s the thing about sense! It can be made of almost anything if you really try or even sometimes with little to no effort at all. This is why sense doesn’t always mean much. Weather or not something makes sense has nothing to do with weather or not it is true. Alice realizes this through her dream. This is what Wonderland is all about. Wonderland does not give too much importance to sense like we do in “the real world”. Hopefully Alice will take this realization with her to “the real world” because that is a truth actually worth learning and never forgetting. So many projections and preconceived notions could be avoided if people would sometimes think beyond sense rather than within it all the time.
Where do you land once you’ve gone beyond sense? You wont know until you put your best foot forth and find out! This is what Alice does through out the story. She is very curious and very determined to see as much of all this nonsense as she can. She takes pleasure in this bold exploration and begins to learn lessons that help her along the way. Alice often has to take risks in order to move forward and though sometimes she is fearful, she never stops. It seems that Alice is a very mentally healthy young girl well on her way to self actualization. “Maslow proposed that we are motivated by a hierchy of needs. If our physiological needs are met, we become concerned with personal safety; if we acheive a sense of security, we then seek love, to be loved, and to love ourselves; with our love needs satisfied, we seek self esteem, we ultimately seek self actualization (the process of fulfilling our potential) and self transcendance (meaning, purpose and communion beyond the self). Alice is definitely not there yet but she is certainly on her way. Her dreams are not trivial. They are a part of her growing up process.

Friday, March 25, 2011

i can never make my thesis just one sentance.....

I'm finally getting somewhere with this paper though! excited!!

hey guys, write on the blog more even when we don't have to :):)

and don't forget we have the psych paper due monday tooo!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Drawing in class :)

That was fun!

Alice essay propsal

As I read Alice in Wonderland, I'm starting to think Wonderland, whatever it really is, is Alice's way of questioning reason. Alice is always arguing with the beings of wonderland and she gets very easily offended but at the same time they continue to stump her. She also seems to be having a lot of fun with and taking full advanatage of all the "nonsense". So i want to argue that Alice is rebelling against all the things she has been taught to know are true by exploring the depths if true reality. I want to look into what Lewis Caroll thought about eastern religions because i feel that lots of the ideas that everything is everything are explored in Alice in Wonderland and that is a very eastern type way to think. So I know Alice is on some sort of spiritual journey of self discovery and discovery of the world around her. I want to explore that in greater deatil. I'm already seeing lots of great supporting evidence! And i will use the text book along with my other sources just so you know i can! :)

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Alice in Wonderland

Alice is a bored girl. The things in her every day life are starting to seem tiresome to her. She is searching for answers like; do cats eat bats? how can she know? When you travel on shamanistic journey you usually go with a question in mind. I want to explore more about Lewis Carrol's facination with and knowladge about eastern religion and philosophy...

Monday, March 14, 2011

about meeeeeee

I'm a Jewyorican born and raised in queens. I dropped out of high school in 11th grade because I was done with that nonsense and i got my GED before my class graduated. I then Got my 200 hour yoga teaching certificate and now I'm here. I am here in college because I want all the talking heads to respect me so that I will be able to flip their game on them. I want the school system and the food industry to become something run by we the people rather than the government who is faceless. I think these are the two main things that are holding us all back from freedom. I have no faith in Obama. he is actor. If Hilary had won, we would all have universal health care right now which is why they scooped up Obama to distract us. Malcolm and Martin are rolling over in their graves. Obama was "elected" because people thought he would act differently than all the other presidents BECAUSE HES BLACK (i'll say it since he can't). But hes a scared UT (Uncle Tom) so he acts the same. Besides the fact that he's less respected. Because anything he says even close to radical people jump on him calling him a muslim because we have a black president but racism is still that prevelant. proof that having a black president means nothing for progress (maybe a different black president would but this is just an illusion), especially since it was rigged. He's treated like a celebrity and its sick. yup this is all what i think. Nothing real for education reform is being done. What needs to be done is change of ciriculum. I learned about Native Americans more than five times and I never once learned about Tainos or any other native caribbean people when all of us have very very similar histories. All masacered by Colombus. I havent gone to school with any Native Americans that I know of. I have gone to school with countless people from the caribbean including myself. I was never taught of all the evil Colombus did, i had to research on my own. They are really still telling children that He "disocovered" America and did many other great things! They are really still saying this about a life and culture murdering rapist. This is the first history lesson 5 year olds ever learn in school. The truth needs to be taught (thats just one example)! I am tired of this miseducation. When these facts are missing from our knowledge, it is not just a random lacking of information. This squews our entire perspective of who we are and what runs through our veins. As if we were nothing before America. Implanting this persepction in us makes us much easier to control because the extent of who we really are and all its wonders is not in us to give us that pride and power that is ours. It has been stolen. We must steal it back. We were so much! I also want an education and that is why im here but i hate having to sift through the bs. I want my children to learn about what really happened, all of what really happened without having to face the pain that it is being hidedn from them by those who are suppose to be looking out for them. I am detirmined to make that happen. Within 30 years tops, I want our world to be a very different place. Everyone is getting all bent outa shape about the 2012 threat. The world is ending! oh no! I think the whole epocalipse thing is bs. I think all these natural disasters are warnings that we must start treating the earth right or it will destroy us before we get a chance to destroy it, rather than signs that the world is ending no matter what we do because that is whats meant to be. Yea right. The Earth is very good at healing itself. That angle thats its all over is just propoganda trying to discourage us. But all these disasters are not a cause to give up, they are a call to RISE UP!! ok. my slightly incohesive rant is done now :)