marlz. daughter. sister. friend. cousin. girl. 1988. born to die.
lauantaina, maaliskuuta 18, 2006
block tests are coming
i am done with dorian gray, and i realize how sad a book it is. for someone to fall so swiftly from grace, and to have such a great fear of something so natural and inevitable as ageing is quite tragic, in my opinion. especially when it was mostly because of an external influence. shows there are dangers in being afraid of imperfection.
in case you don't know the story of dorian gray, it is really the story of a modern sort of adonis. pure in looks, heart and mind, he is "awakened" (more like corrupted) by a man named Lord Henry, and he impulsively makes a wish that his portrait that was painted in his prime, would bear all the markings of age and of time, preserving his looks in real life. somehow, this wish comes true and his looks belie his demise and steady spiral into vice. eventually, he becomes the indirect cause for the demise of other people (read : ladies) and kills the man who painted the very picture. somehow, he feels terrible for what he did, and is confused by Lord Henry further, that he hates the portrait and attacks it with a knife. what happens next is the exact same thing that happened in the e.a. poe book i read before. the picture is found in its original state and he dies, old and blemished.
seems simple i know, but as i read it and got deeper and deeper into the story, i felt increasingly disturbed. at first i thought it was just an innocent story about the loss of innocence but now that i look at it, i feel it is more about influence. i wonder if someone needs to be willing to be open to influence before being influenced. i know that dorian gray was willing to listen. he was curious. but really, if someone tried to influence you and you weren't exactly open to it, maybe a bit hesitant, then would you be influenced at all?
i feel that dorian gray's downfall was being young and curious. he wanted to listen to the corruptor, and then when he did, he got pulled into a whole web of problems which he could not escape. maybe it was also partly because of him being so naive, so trusting, so open.
if one is so tender in mind, is it his responsibility to be wary of things to come? how would one know that something is bad, before experiencing it and realizing that it is so? or must there be someone who has the responsibility to protect him, and slowly edge him into the world, such that he learns, without being corrupted. i find it so disturbing that some people are totally unaware to what is happening about them. they live so sheltered lives that they are oblivious to the vice, crime and corruption around them that when they do realize that such things exist, it hits them so badly that they end up crippled, or even with a bitter outlook on life. so is curiousity a good thing or is it bad?
thank gdness this isn't a gp essay, or i'll have to answer my own questions. i truly really need to ponder on this for awhile before i get my answer to the whole thing. i keep on coming up with questions with no straightforward answer these days, or redundant statements like,
one wonders what a person is thinking when he/she is sitting calmly doing something repetitive and seemingly monotonous like knitting. they could be thinking of murder or how to cheat on their spouse. its scary.
i've also come to notice that so many of the books i read are about demise. they're so painfully tragic and melancholy. its a great transition from the silly enid blyton books i read in the years past. everything was so cheery and nice, and everything had a perfectly happy ending, with a moral thrown in for good measure. now the books i read have sad sad contents, and even if they end with a nice definite pretty picture of the union of man and wife, they mask a sad future of domestic trapping that lies ahead for both the male and female. maybe thats the difference between them and childrens books. maybe the books for the more mature readers depict more accurately the shortcomings of our world, and what we fear may come to pass. maybe the adults books (if you'd like to call them that) probe our mind deeper and further than some people would like, and show us that our souls are far from perfect. that the world is not all sunshine and rainbows. that everything is depressing and that love doesn't save us from everything, contrary to popular notion. that man can be worse than what we see now, and that man is easily corrupted and opportunistic in nature.
even those innocent faerietales that i've read before become twisted, and just plain weird. i don't know what it is. it could be me, or that the people feel that the world and the human race has degenerated into something that reeks of vice and evil. perhaps it does. i couldn't say anything about it until i see more, hear more and feel more.
block test are coming up and i can say that i am royally SCREWED for econs. i just don't understand the macro concepts, nor can i get any thing into my head, save for the AD = C + I + G + (X - M) nonsense. and MV = PT. aside from that and most of the mkt structure and inflation stuff i can't recall anything else, try as i might to fit all the concepts into my head. i believe i can muster a pass, not a good one though, for lit and geog. at least a C for both. maybe for lit i'll try to aim for a B, but if i do get a C i think i'm lucky. econs i'm gonna fail. its confirmed, and i'm not going to do the "i can do it" crap. i know i can't and i can't.
my resolution for this year would be that the block test would be the last time i will fail ANYTHING. ESPECIALLY ECONS. i want at least a B/C for econs for the real thing, and geog and lit will have to do better than that. 1 week was definitely not productive for studying econs at all. at least, for geog and lit i understand what is happening and can recall most of the facts that i've studied.
oh phooey. if only i could make the block test disappear with a puff into nothingness. but as my books have told me, such things can't happen. life isn't all a faerietale you know.
marlz
3/18/2006 12:42:00 ip.