One Winter

What is winter?
Is it when the brisk winds turn bitter?
The seasons transition with little signal,
Giving no time for us to change.
Change our clothes and our home
As the sun becomes scarce,
Scared, simply hiding from the night
And the clouds
Hidden behind the clouds that seem to thaw
To dots that strike the body raw.

Is that winter?
Is it the flecks and bits of white that spill
Upon the dirty streets, driven over and over
Til they are gray.
With the viscosity and stickiness
Of disgusting porridge.
With a cold that seeps into our souls
The soles of our shoes
Socks are soaked and the sense in our feet
Stupefied.

Could that be winter?
The feeling of bleakness
Of joy, the jolt of cold.
And the emotions that come with the
Holidays.
The times of lights brightening the nights
With colors that converge into a conglomeration
A combination of mesmerizing and monstrous
Hypnotizing and horrendous
Yet at the same time, absolutely stupendous.

Because that is winter.
From the sensations, the season and the snow
To the feeling of wonder and loathe.
The chilly air mixes with the warm glow of lights.
The sound of cool crisp snow crunching underneath.
While splash of the slick streets fades in the background.
An overdose to our senses, until we are confounded.
By everything coming and combining as one.
Into one piece, one feeling, one season.
One winter.

Globalization

Globalization. It’s been a large force since the 19th Century, but as time progresses, the gap between countries has been getting smaller and smaller. We’ve gone from week-long trips on boats to commercialized airplane flights that may take less than a day. The largest development to globalization would definitely be the Internet. The Internet has allowed the transfer of information instantaneously. News travels fast now. So fast that any small bit or comment is now counted as “news” and with a couple clicks, hosts articles on major news sites. We can contact people from around the world, from friends who’ve moved to strangers we would have not been able to talk to.
Some people would question whether or not globalization has been a positive force, but there should be no question. While globalization has brought some unnecessary changes to society, overall it has been. People are social creatures. Globalization has allowed connections to be made, including blogs like these that no one reads.

Sports in my life

I’m not sure what place sports have in my life. I remember playing soccer in a youth league when I was like 5, in Minnesota. Back then, I used to be a fan. I use to know all the names of the members of the Minnesota Vikings. But that all changed. Soon after I came to Chicago, I played baseball with my dad every so often. I also paid attention to the Chicago teams, going to games for the Sox and Bulls and Bears when I could. But even being a fan got old. I stopped paying attention to the scores and games. First went baseball, and then went basketball. The last one for me to lose a grip on was football. Today I can still watch a couple minutes of football games, but never an entire thing. Not anymore. The World Cup rolled around this year, and that was a breath of fresh air. I had fun watching the games online, and actually watched the entire 3 hour long games anytime I was awake enough to. At least, those for South Korea. And North Korea too, but that was because it was just funny to watch.
So it looks like sports has lost its place in my life. It just happens as one grows older and changes.

thanks broooo

So we are supposed to be thankful for a classmate this week? This is so cheesy, Mr. McCarthy. Yeah I guess it fits the theme of Thanksgiving, but still. I’m thankful for Rich Chung. Why? Because I have a class with him before this class, and I can ask him to make sure I didn’t miss anything we had to do for Philosophy, like a book reading or something. I can also easily comment on his blog all the time to knock one of the two weekly comments off. Although I’m not even sure you read them, Mr. McCarthy. Do you even check them? Anyway, it’s also nice that Rich is in the class because he’s one of the few people I knew before the class. And because we have so much group work in the class, Rich is there to team up and do the group work all the time. He sits nearby so that’s also really easy to ask questions, and do the aforementioned group work. So thanks Rich. Thanks for being such a bro. Bro.

Dear Cormac McCarthy,

Dear Cormac McCarthy,
You write a lot of books that become movies. No Country for Old Men and The Road are already movies. I heard Blood Meridian is going to be a movie soon too. You crazy old fool. So many movies. No Country for Old Men was apparently a really good film too. But at least you vary your setting and stories to keep them interesting, unlike Stephen King. Him and his love for Maine and alcoholics. You write about the west, the post-apocalyptic word, a lot of different things. Your storytelling is also compelling, especially the way you write. You know, the lack of quotations in The Road, and stuff.

But I'm not sure if The Road was supposed to be all philosophical. Was it? I can never tell with authors. It seems faked a lot of the times. Maybe not in your work, but in other works,for sure. I guess we'd have to ask if you ____ is what you meant when you wrote _________. Literary criticism can be a bunch of total nonsense a lot of the time, making analogies and connections up where they never existed. But then you could simply say that the book means whatever it means to the reader. And we couldn't say anything about that, could we? But I digress.

In the end, your book is pretty spiffy. It's dark, sad, and the writing style is captivating. The Road is a great book, no matter what you meant in the words while writing it.

From,
Dohyun

DEFEND THE POET

I am so confused right now. What am I supposed to do? Defend Charles Bukowski’s gross decayed corpse from grave robbers and zombies or his point of view in Dinosauria, We and his life from critics? I’m going to go ahead and assume the latter. Although I’m not really sure why I’d want to defend this alcoholic dead man whose corpse is probably fermenting in a stone cold coffin in California, or his extremist poem that sounds like some deranged man at train stops preaching to the masses about the end of the world, I’ll try. I’ll try.

Charles Bukowski’s Dinosauria, We criticizes the way we live now, and then develops a “could be” apocalypse in the future, because of these factors now. We would create our own destruction and own extinction. Critics call it blown out of proportion, but there is some truth in Charles Bukowski’s words. If we are apathetic to the way we live now, there is nothing stopping what we create for the future. He describes all the problems in our lives today early on, but all that revolves around one large problem, apathy. The real problem is allowing these misdeeds to continue on. He views that society is ruined and while we should change it, and could to avoid the catastrophe of an apocalypse, we don’t. He views that our lives are hanging by a thread in balance, and once we go over, all hell, worse than hell, breaks loose.

We should not look at his poem for direct words, but the ideas. The ideas that what we create and our apathy, will bite us back in the end, whether through an apocalypse or some other disaster. We need to take action now to control the future.

A direction

I think the first question should be if we even need a direction. The way the class is moving now is a form of asking questions and then discussing. And isn't that how we learn? From others? We make arguments and discussions with each other, getting viewpoints and sharing our own. If we simply read a textbook that preached about the different viewpoints others had, it wouldn't be the same. We could not talk to the book the way we talk to each other. If we did, we'd simply look crazy. If we simply read a book, we could not get feedback, or opinions. All we would get is solid facts of ideas from dead people long ago.

Learning straight from a book is never good. It's rigid and stiff, with no room for change. To be honest, the textbook you gave us is possibly the driest textbook to ever exist. That’s probably why all of them are falling apart. The discussions are much more active and much more memorable. Reading books such as Candide and the Road are great, because along with reading good books, we get to discuss and question each other about not only the plot points of the book, but the themes and ideas behind it. It’s indirectly learning philosophy I suppose, and that is much better than being beaten on the head with the old and parched tome that is the textbook.

So all in all, discussions are nice as we get to express our thoughts and receive others’. Isn’t that what these blogs are doing now?