Macbeth Hamartia

     I think that Macbeth's hamartia is his lack of patience. Right after the witches gave their prophecy, Macbeth himself said that maybe if he just waited it out he could become king. Why, then, did he kill all these people to expedite this process? It could be argued that this is because of his wife's pressure for him to take action, but I believe it is because Macbeth doesn't have any patience. It seems he had faith in the fact that the witches prophecies would come true, but yet he still couldn't just sit around and wait for people to crown him king. This tragic flaw makes sense looking at Macbeth's background. He is a warrior, and warriors don't tend to wait around during the heat of battle. They're supposed to take action immediately, without forethought. I believe that this kind of way of dealing with problems reflects on the way Shakespeare has Macbeth act during the play. He doesn't really spend much time to stop and think, he just goes for his goal. This unwillingness to wait, among other things, could be the reason that some people see Macbeth as dim-witted.

English- Macbeth

     I believe that Lady Macbeth uses a baby in her argument because she may have already had a husband. Perhaps Macbeth was not Lady Macbeth's first husband, and she had a baby with the original. I believe this because if she had had a baby with Macbeth (which they clearly no longer have), then it would not be a guilt trip for Macbeth for her to mention it. It almost seems to me like Macbeth somehow took the baby from his wife, as she seems to imply that it is his fault she no longer has one. It could either be this, or she is trying to say that she has been through just as much hardship as Macbeth has, perhaps more. This brings me back to the other husband theory. It could be that the child died before it could grow up (this happened often in those days), something Lady Macbeth would have had to deal with but Macbeth hadn't. This could be how Macbeth's wife is trying to guilt-trip him into killing Duncan. She's saying, "You think you're having a hard time with this decision? I lost a child!" This could be wrong, but overall I have a strong feeling that this baby (which is not even confirmed to have existed) is a tragedy that Lady Macbeth went through, but Macbeth did not, or was somehow the cause of.  

Excersises to Reduce Craving

This is the edited version of another paper written for religion class:

9-14- Exercises to Reduce Craving Tyler 
     I really love unhealthy foods. Specifically, foods with ridiculous amounts of butter, oil, or salt. I know that this is unhealthy, and even though I don’t think I have an addiction to it, I figured I’d probably be better off if I at least tried to stop eating it so much. So to eliminate craving for salt and butter, I decided to try out exercise number 5: Indulge your Craving.

      My breakfast started out with a nice and greasy ham and cheese omelet, with some melted butter brushed on top. While eating it, I examined what I felt. I thought it was delicious, and couldn’t see how I could ever get tired of the taste. Lunch arrived, and I had two nice slices of oily pizza. Again, I did not feel any displeasure as I rapidly took bite after bite. But then, dinner came. We were having chicken and mashed potatoes. I grabbed all of the fatty dark meat I could find, and poured salt on it. Then, I put some potatoes on my plate and put a large chunk of butter on top of it, along with some more salt. Again I ate happily, but perhaps, I thought, I had put on way too much butter. As soon as I finished eating the Grand Finale of my salt-and-butter pig-out day, I began to feel sick. I felt bloated and unhealthy, and had a headache similar to one you get when you stare at a computer screen too long. I realized that this uncomfortable feeling of nausea was a result of all of the junk I had eaten throughout the day. The total change in feeling from pleasure to pain was surprising.

      From this day of indulging my craving for fatty, oily foods, I learned firsthand that too much of anything is bad for you. I felt so unhealthy after the experiment, and even now I certainly don’t see myself ingesting anything salty soon. Even though this method of getting rid of cravings seems illogical, it certainly works for many kinds of attachments.

Science and Religion

This is a revised version of a paper written for my religion class:        

9-4 Religion Assignment: Science and Religion Tyler

     In short, I agree that spirituality and science can get along. While I am not a very religious person myself, I have heard of many scientists who dedicate themselves to spiritual as well as scientific knowledge. In my opinion, religion and spirituality can sometimes be very different. Spirituality is what helps us relate better to people and ourselves. It gives us peace of mind and body, calms us. Religion encompasses spirituality, but also involves other information that has sparked conflict over the centuries. What I mean is, I believe spirituality and science can co-exist, but I’m not sure about religion itself. As of now, most religions are teaching things that science wouldn’t agree with (such as the creation of the universe), and vice versa. However, like Walsh said, nothing spirituality is teaching goes up against what science says. In fact, the two agree about the benefits of meditation. Also, Walsh mentioned that both science and spirituality test their claims through experimentation.

     While I try and stay out of the whole Science vs. Religion debate, it can be clearly seen that neither is willing to budge on their methods of finding knowledge. Religion calls for leaps of faith, while science experiments and takes little steps toward answers. Both methods have stood up to the test of time, lasting through the thousands of years. Overall, though, I believe over time religion will evolve so that it is less in conflict with science. The belief of a spiritual world, of a supernatural realm, will be around for a while, but as for all of the stories in the bible and other religious texts, I’m not sure they will be taken so literally in the future. Even now, more and more people are becoming nonreligious or converting to the eastern religions that have less do with stories but more about finding inner peace.

     Overall, I do not think religion itself and science can get along. However, I do believe that the “spirituality” Walsh writes about in his book can be followed by religious people and scientists alike.  

 

Prompt 10- Week 7 Novel Prompt

     The ending of Skippy Dies is definitely not something you could have predicted 100 pages before it happened. Honestly, reading the book I never thought about it ending. It was a long book, that not so much told a story but told many stories, including all the normal days that happened in-between them. For me, reading this book (something I haven't done since last school year) reminded me why I like (or rather 'used to like') reading so much. Murray is an excellent, intelligent writer. But anyway about the ending!

     Carl, the degenerate, was driven mad by his guilt and was seeing the dead boy, Skippy, everywhere. Reuprecht, Skippy's overweight scientist roommate, stress-ate and desperately tried to communicate to Skippy with increasingly insane experiments. Lori, Skippy's girlfriend, was also feeling guilty as she cheated on Skippy. She started taking diet pills and eventually had to be sent to a clinic as she was too sick to even stand. Everybody at Seabrook thinks Skippy was molested by Father Green before he died (even though, while very tempted to, he didn't). Carl, while on Heroin, is told by Skippy that he has to kill the "final demon", which Carl interprets to be the priest. Carl goes to the school and sets fire to Father Green's office, killing him. Carl eventually realizes that the demon is himself, and so he lays down in the smoke to die. However, he is rescued by the history teacher Howard Fallon. Reuprecht, who had recently ruined a school concert by trying to send an extremely loud musical message to Skippy, visits Lori. Reuprecht is planning on running away to Stanford, and Lori is planning on committing suicide. They have a long conversation, Lori talking Reuprecht out of moving away, and in that convincing her not to take her own life. Reuprecht leaves his box of stress-eating donuts behind, and Lori starts eating them.

     The message that came out for me in the entire third part (called Ghostland, taking place after Skippy's death) is that you cannot run away from the past. All of the students and faculty at Seabrook experienced this after Skippy died. While everybody else tried to cover it up, Howard was the only one who would deal with it. And yet, Howard was dealing with another form of running away. His relationships would immediately get boring because he was always looking for someone who would take him somewhere better; he didn't want his girlfriends to be just as bored as he was. This kind of running away, I think, is the moral of the book. Life's not going to be as good as anybody hoped, and it'll get no better elsewhere (well, said in a less depressing way).

Prompt 9- Week 8 Novel Prompt

     An object of symbolism I noticed in the novel Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, is the first World War. For the entire book, Howard the history teacher has been dwelling on this subject. Before Skippy's death, it was to remember Auriele, the substitute geography teacher he was in love with before she went away on a cruise with her fiancé. Now, it's to hold on to Skippy's memory, as his great-grandfather fought in the war. Howard finds it hard to let go of the past, as illustrated in this passage:

     "But Guido did not live with it. Guido moved forward. He wasn't about to let one fleeting episode determine the whole trajectory of his life thereafter. For Guido the past, like a Third Word country, was merely another resource to be exploited and abandoned when the time comes; and that is why civilization is built by men like him and the Automator, and not men like Howard, who have never quite worked out which stories are disposable, and which, if any, you're actually supposed to believe." (Skippy Dies, p. 574-575)

     After Skippy's death, the school's students became despondent. The school's officials had tried to sweep his death under the mat (as it was uncovered that Skippy's swim coach gave him pain killers and molested him), and the students were all trying to forget in vain. Howard is sickened by the teachers encouraging forgetting Skippy, saying that the students would not be acting up if they could just take some time to remember him. Nobody listens to this. One day, Howard feels suffocated in his classroom, and takes his entire class on a spur of the moment field trip. The minute they are outside the grasp of the school, Howard detects a noticeable change in the students.

     "Still, as they hang there in the weak, cloud-filtered light, shuffling a little, waiting for him to tell them what to do, they appear different to their everyday school selves -- younger, less cynical, lighter even, as if Seabrook were a weight that they carried, and set free of it they might just float off into the air..." (Skippy Dies, p. 551)

     Their surprise field trip leads them into a memorial park, built to remember the Irish soldiers who went off to fight in WW1. However, because of the tragic nature of their deaths, they were, like Skippy, deliberately forgotten. Howard is aware of the dead soldiers being symbolic of Skippy, and gives his students a great speech about remembering, and how that even when the soldiers realized the grand and heroic stories of battle were all lies, their bond of friendship remained.

     "That they stayed friends, that they looked out for each other, most agreed, was what kept them from cracking up altogether. And in the end was the only thing, was the one true thing, that was genuinely worth fighting for.'
     He smiles summative at the boys; they gaze mutely back at him, in their grey uniforms for all the world like an incorporeal platoon, materialized out of the winter clouds to scour the bare park for someone who has not forgotten them." (Skippy Dies, p. 557)

    

Prompt 8- Week 8 Poetry Prompt

     The first theme that comes to my mind when reading this poem is the waiting. Throughout the entire poem, Levine is waiting hours for something that he will never get. Maybe he relates this to life, how sometimes it just seems like you're wasting time going after nothing. In the waiting, Levine begins to miss his brother, and thinks about how long it's been since the two have talked. In the last lines of the poem, he says that to show love to your brother is work. For me, work has a bit of a double-meaning in this poem. For one thing, to work is not to wait. To work is not to spend your days mindlessly shuffling around hoping things will get better. As for the second, to work is to not take your family, friends, and relationships for granted. When the rain falls, which I guess would mean when bad things happen, Levine realizes just how much he wants to see his brother, to tell him that he loves him. To express that affection, according to Levine, is work. Overall, the message I get from this poem is to take life into your own hands. Don't just go through your regular routine or wait around every day, just hoping things will get better. Keep your friends and families close, because you'll never know when tragic things happen, and you'll need them. Do work.