thanksgiving

i spent this thanksgiving down in nebraska visiting my relatives. on friday there was a cornhuskers football game. my uncle is really into it and we went to their house to watch the game. i watched more football this weekend than i have in my whole entire life. i watched that game and then the oklahoma vs oklahoma state on saturday. i think i understand it better but i barely stayed awake the whole time. and on saturday i went to see harry potter and the deathly hallows. i thought they did a pretty good job. except the little dobby's grave issue. they definitely could have spent 5 more seconds having harry write on the stone.
on the way home from nebraska we were flipping through radio stations and the only thing there was, was commercials, talk shows and christmas songs for the most part. there were probably 3 stations devoted to christmas music 24/7 until christmas. i wonder what they'll do when christmas is over?

giving

it's black friday today. all those people who get up at 3 in the morning to get all the good deals must like giving. if they are willing to get up that early just to get the perfect present for each person on their list, giving must be pretty high on their list of priorities. a lot of people do get up for the sales, so a lot of people like to give and thats a good thing. so many people in this world need those people who like to give becuase poor people cant always get what they need.
when the holidays come around, people tend to think about giving more often. we have food drives at school and we ask people to give to the foodshelf. there are toy drives for kids who otherwise wouldnt get presents. there are coat drives for people who dont have proper winter clothing. if people who do have access to those things dont donate, then that would not be a good thing. but good news is that people do donate.

guys & dolls

why are musicals so bittersweet? thats the only word i can use to describe it becuase we have so much fun with the whole thing and then on saturday night, you have your last performance, you clean up and you're done. it seems like it went by so fast. i made so many friends that i hope i will still be friends with even though we dont spend 2 and a half hours backstage every day. we worked so hard and improved so much from our first run through where people forgot their lines, and their entrances, and their set changes.
24 hours ago i was waiting in the wings for the intro song to be played by the pit and to cross the stage as a tourist amazed at the sights of new york city with makeup caked to my face and my lungs full of hairspray from the dressing rooms. then we had the fastest costume change ever where we barely made it onstage with all our buttons buttoned and our shirts tucked in. then at the end of the night i go back across the stage as a tourist, we sing our last song, we run out, say hello to people adn proceed to the dressing rooms and change. then we have to tear down the set.
then we party!

hope

hope is a really big concept. i dont really know where to begin...
i think a person has to have hope or they wouldnt have anything to strive for. if i didnt have hope for anything, thne i wouldnt really care about what i did in life and i would just be going through the motions without being excited for something. or being sad about something. when something bad happens, people have hope and they know eventually it will get better. most of the jews in the holocaust knew that too, or there wouldnt be any survivors. they had to go through a lot of the bad stuff to get to the good stuff though. it started out with hoping to get out of the really hot cattle car, then to get more soup and bread, then to pass selection, and the whole time to be liberated. after going through all of that, some people just lost it. their family members and friends were seperated from them or were sent to the crematoriam and they didnt have anything to hope for anymore so they didnt strive to survive and then they died.

adaptation

people adapt to situations in all different ways. at the beginning of "night" elie thinks sitting on the hot sidewalk is about as bad as it gets. a few days later, he finds out it can get worse. and this just keeps repeating, and he keeps adapting to his situation. in the concentration camps, his life becomes a routine. wake up, roll call, breakfast, work, a little more food, another roll call and then go to sleep and do it all over again. after a while, he didnt really find anything wrong with it other than the occasional hanging of a poor little boy or when they got less bread than the day before. humans can adapt to a situation pretty easily. the holocaust is a horrible, horrible thing, yet the jews in the concentration camps found the good things, like the occasional bomb raid that allowed them some down time. many prisoners found the optimistic side of things.

animals

the difference between humans and animals is actually the first thing we talked about in biology this year. we spent a lot of time on it and im actually kind of sick of the topic but i guess i'll write about it anyway. the definition of an animal is a living, breathing organism. humans are, obviously, animals, so we're not all that different. yes, we have a more complex brain and more complex society and we can read and we have a written language. but so can chimps. they can talk to humans using sign language and its not all that different. we watched multiple videos on that. they were kind of cool cuz we got to see chimps actually talking and communicating and i still have a hard time wrapping my brain around that. i wonder who first came up with the idea to teach a chimp sign language....im sure i know the answer, but i cant remember it right now.